Now we agree
That those trees outside the window,
which probably exist,
Only pretend to greenness and treeness
And that the language loses
when it tries to cope
With clusters of molecules. And yet, this here:
A jar, a tin plate, a half-peeled lemon,
Walnuts, a loaf of bread, last—and so strongly
It is hard not to believe in their lastingness.—Czesław Miłosz
When we look back on history, we find in almost every culture some belief or other that commanded near-universal respect—that even acquired a kind of intellectual invulnerability—despite now seeming to us absurd. When future historians look back at our age, I think they will count reductive materialism among such beliefs.
Reductive materialism is the view that all of reality can be explained by, and ultimately reduced to, the purely physical. Whatever cannot be accounted for in this way—consciousness, morality, free will, feelings—must be illusory. As the biologist Francis Crick likes to point out, this includes even you: “‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”11xFrancis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (New York, NY: Touchstone, 1994), 3.
The basic rationale is well rehearsed: that physics, having been remarkably successful at toppling superstitions up to now, must naturally go on to conquer every last corner of reality. The problem with this argument—that it means eliminating not just angels and ghosts but also the very things on which scientific knowledge itself depends, such as reason, free will, and abstract thought—appears not to have occurred to the reductive materialists until too late.
For this reason, to call reductive materialism a “belief” is perhaps a bit misleading. Plenty of people—the biologist Richard Dawkins, the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, and the physicist Lawrence Krauss among them—piously recite its creed: I do not exist, life is meaningless, morality is an illusion.22xRichard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London, England: Penguin, 2006); Robert Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (London, England: Penguin, 2024); Lawrence Krauss, A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (New York, NY: Free Press, 2012). But do any of them really believe it