We do need to pass by those limitations of scientific materialism and to do it without falling into the temptation of dualisms which invoke hand-waving to explain immaterial phenomena. My very working method, as well as my respect for the totality of human experience and human knowledge, rejects any possibility of scientific materialism or reductionistic materialism as I’ve sometimes referred to that attitude. Dualism of created being fragments Creation while scientific materialism or reductionistic materialism denies meaning, and even ulimate reality, to our experiences.
I’ve started reading Alfred North Whiteheads Science and the Modern World, a copy of which I bought 20 years ago or so in a used-book store. I’m nearly a century late in seeing the need to pass beyond scientific materialism. Whitehead seems to have taught that the greatest philosophical need of our era is a metaphysics to replace the irrational metaphysics of scientific materialism. He considered the irrationality of this mostly implicit metaphysics of the modern era to be tied to the belief that matter has a permanence and simple location, largely the view defended by Einstein in his debate with Niels Bohr — see Einstein and Bohr: Don’t Tell God what to do. for a short discussion of Bohrs insightful (but possibly apocryphal) response to Einstein’s claim: “God does not play dice”. The prior article on Acts of Being, The Metaphysics of Position, Momentum, and Missed Field-goals is a short discussion more directly in line with Whitehead’s criticism of a physics based upon the permanence and simple location of matter. The interested reader can also read A Christian’s view of Einstein’s and Bohr’s Debate on the meaning of reality for my discussion, and acceptance, of the understanding of that debate reached by the German philosopher Kurt Hubner.
I don’t claim to fully understand Whitehead’s proposal but it’s similar in some ways to my metaphysics, Thomistic existentialism which recognizes explicitly the primacy of relationships over matter and which is updated to consider modern empirical knowledge. To the extent I understand Whitehead’s tentative sketch of a more rational metaphysics than scientific materialism, I can say he was proposing an organistic view of all physical reality, proposing that evolution is a real and fundamental part of reality. Its not just a process occurring in life-forms which are just an accident occurring in a scientifically materialistic world. Whitehead proposed a metaphysics which was not only organistic but also event-based, resulting in what I would call a “smearing over time and space.” It seems to be a proposal that our world is something like a narrative, as I’ve proposed, but my metaphysics is multi-layered, allowing for the contingency of space-time itself. This world is a narrative but is shaped from the abstract being of what I call the Primordial Universe, allowing for a great freedom in the sorts of universes which could have come into being and also somewhat forcing the need for decisions in such matters. That is, my metaphysics works best when we admit the existence of a personal God and also gives Him the absolute freedom which only the Almighty could possess or use.
Whitehead strongly desired to protect the independence of metaphysics from theology:
What is the status of the enduring stability of the order of nature? There is the summary answer, which refers nature to some greater reality standing behind it. This reality occurs in the history of thought under many names, The Absolute, Brahma, The Order of Heaven, God. The delineation of final metaphysical inputs is no part of this lecture. My point is that any summary conclusion jumping from our conviction of the existence of such an order of nature to the easy assumption that there is an ultimate reality which, in some unexplained way, is to be appealed to for the removal of perplexity, constitutes the great refusal of rationality to assert its rights. We have to search whether nature does not in its very being show itself as self-explanatory. [page 92 of Science and the Modern World, Alfred North Whitehead, The Free Press, 1967.]
I have more than a little sympathy for a program to explore and try to understand the world accessible to human perceptions or human thought before invoking a faith in a transcendent Being, but even the most rational of atheists must honestly confront a very difficult question: How do we explain the aspects of our world which can be described as contingent, particular, or random? That is, how do we explain the factual nature of created being, at least of concrete being? See Randomness as a Sign of God’s Presence for my take on the meaning of randomness and the reasons I can claim:
There’s a simple summary of the situation:
Only God can make a truly random number.
Only God can act in a truly random way.
Whitehead doesn’t seem so concerned with dualisms as I am, perhaps because of his desire to keep theology and metaphysics apart — though I don’t know if he even considered theology to be a legitimate field of study. He certainly had respect for the Medieval Scholastics who didn’t always differentiate so clearly between theology and metaphysics. I share that respect, as well as his belief that those Medieval thinkers were overly rationalistic. Whitehead also gave the Lowell Lectures which are the matter of Science and the Modern World in 1925 before Godel and Kolmogorov and Chaitin and others, such as Stephen Toulmin, anticipated the factual nature of randomness. In a critique of evolutionary theory, early 1960s, the philosopher Toulmin noted that whenever an evolutionary thinker speaks of randomness you could substitute some complicated phrase about the interaction of 2 or more fully deterministic and independent systems, such as the genes of a family line and the environment(s) of that line. I think that modern science, mathematics and the evolutionary work in various physical sciences, forces us to deal with the factual nature of the universe, the particularistic or random nature. And it leads me to speculate that a proper metaphysical analysis of modern empirical knowledge, including abstract mathematics, forces us to conjecture that “ultimate reality” which Whitehead preferred to avoid in his program for a new metaphysics.
Still, Whitehead seems to have had the same general program in mind as I have, with that major difference about the relationship between theology and metaphysics and, in fact, I would put all human knowledge into a single worldview in which metaphysics plays the role of glue, along with abstract mathematics. He shared my concerns about scientific materialism but also shares my respect for science. I find it interesting that, nearly a century ago, he saw a need to move beyond scientific materialism and, so far as I can see, little has been done to carry out such a program.