Materialists Made Out of Straw

On a critical account of materialists that doesn’t quote any.

Photo by the author. Source here.

*“It is vital that […] we face up to the challenge of materialism. We need to understand what materialists actually say.” *David Cook, in [Blind Alley Beliefs](https://www.abebooks.co.uk/9780851111735/Blind-Alley-Beliefs-Post-modernism-Existentialism-0851111734/plp)*.***

Humans Are Great

The prime motivation for the writer and academic David Cook’s attack on materialism is to elevate human beings, whom materialists have supposedly demoted. This means that he’s not too happy with (his own version of) Buddhism either.

But why focus on a book published in 1996? I do so because all his arguments, points, and references can be found very many times in today’s anti-materialist literature. Basically, there is a stock of stuff that most anti-materialists rely upon. This includes quotes from Schrodinger, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, plus the statements (or arguments) expressed by Cook.

To get back to Buddhism.

According to Cook, “there is a move towards pantheism.” He takes this to be “a Buddhistic view of the world.” More relevantly:

“Part of that is a reduction of humankind to the same level as grass. This view states that there is no difference between human beings and things.”

Even a holist of some kind needn’t believe that humankind is the same as grass. But it depends on the weasel words “the same level.” In addition, human beings are things. All things are things. However, being a thing doesn’t make you identical to every other thing. A blade of grass is a thing. David Cook is a thing. But they’re very different things. They share thinghood.

Of course, Cook believes that human persons are subjects, not things (or objects). Human subjects are things, too. Cook believes that human beings have souls. Who knows, perhaps he even believes that materialists have (corrupted) souls too.

Cook then conflates pantheism with panpsychism, and gets the latter wrong. (This was written in 1979/1996. Before the recent interest in panpsychism.) He writes:

“It seems obvious to most that there is a difference between grass thinking that humankind is grass, and humankind thinking that humankind is grass. In other words, there is a fundamental distinction between humanity and non-human life.”

Is this meant to be a joke? Spinoza didn’t believe that grass had thoughts. Most(?) panpsychists don’t believe that either. There’s a big difference between a blade of grass and David Cook. There’s a big difference between a lion and a termite. Etc.

Apart from the fact that David Cook only mentions a single materialist in the chapter ‘Scientific Materialism’ (in his book Blind Alley Beliefs), his words are extremely simple, even crude. Perhaps he knows that. His book is aimed at anti-materialists, not at everyone. This is despite the fact that he stresses that anti-materialists must know the arguments of materialists. For example, he writes:

“It is vital that, as Christians, we face up to the challenge of materialism. We need to understand what materialists actually say. […]

“[…] many people have picked up the ideas and beliefs of materialism without really thinking them through, and certainly without understanding their implications for life.”

Yet those arguments of materialists are offered up by Cook himself. Thus, his readers get materialism via Cook.

Here is a problem which Cook exemplifies. In his chapter on scientific materialism, he only quotes a single materialist. I’ve noted this many times. Many anti-materialist texts don’t quote or even paraphrase materialists. On the rare occasions they do, it’s only well-known quotes from Big Names saying well-known controversial stuff. Basically, meme material.

And, guess what, Cook gets the quote wrong. He quotes the Australian philosopher J.J.C. Smart, stating the following:

“The brain secretes sensations as the liver secretes bile.”

The only problem here is that he didn’t say that! This quote goes back to the 19th century. Oddly enough, anti-materialists, as well as others, have attributed this quote to John Searle too. Searle did use the words “secrete bile,” but his point was that consciousness is a natural phenomenon, not that there are literal secretions going on.

Human Beings Are Just Numbers?

David Cook states that materialists believe “people are just numbers.” He explains himself by saying that materialists believe that “[w]e are just machines, and numbers serve us better than names.” Human persons are “simply cogs in the great wheel of society and life.”

Is Cooke conflating physicalism and materialism here? There’s no reason that a materialist should ever say “people are just numbers” because he needn’t be beholden to mathematical physics. (The philosopher E.J. Lowe, although not a materialist, believed that physics should be beholden to metaphysics.) Perhaps a physicalist may say such a thing, but that’s highly unlikely, too.

But let’s backtrack here. What does “people are just numbers” even mean? What does it mean to the anti-materialist? And what does it mean to the materialist? Cook never explains any of this.

Similarly, even if a materialist believed that human persons are machines, why would that automatically mean that he should never use names? Machines can be very different from each other. So names may be very useful.

Materialists Explain Everything?

Do materialists attempt to “explain everything,” as Cook suggests? Do they attempt to explain more than Christians? Christians, Marxists, Nazis, Freudians, etc., often claim to explain everything. Indeed, Cooke himself comes close to that in his own book. But it depends on what both words in “explain everything” mean.

In more concrete terms, Cook asks materialists:

“Can you explain creativity in music, art, drama, scientific understanding or experiments? Can you explain it purely in terms of materialism?

Can Cook explain all these things? Can Christian theology?

More concretely, what does Cook mean by “explain it purely in terms of materialism”? Well, that will depend on what he takes materialism to be.

Conclusion

It’s very odd that Cook says that materialism is a “view which is true but does not make any difference at all.” He continues:

“What kind of view is it that is true, but doesn’t affect anything that we do?”

This clashes with almost all my other interactions with anti-materialists when they stress the concrete political and moral danger of materialism. Oddly enough, Cook himself, elsewhere in the very same book, stresses the concrete political and moral danger of materialism.