Science and Spirit

The other day I was talking to a scientific enthusiast who flatly denied that science is materialistic. He said that it simply saw things as they were and was always willing to revise its position in the light of new evidence. There was no evidence for a spiritual background to the observable world and life could be explained quite well according to the current consensus so any attempt to bring in a collectively unverifiable theory to explain what didn't need explaining was superfluous. All spiritual beliefs were arrived at personally, he said, and there was no way to transfer these to other people who could then confirm them for themselves. Therefore this evidence was inadmissible. The very words spiritual and material made no sense to him because there was empirically perceived reality and nothing else. Material only exists in opposition to spiritual and if there was no spiritual there just was what was. No need to call it material.

I said that the evidence he was demanding was evidence that satisfied the scientific method but that since the scientific method was restricted to the physical world this was clearly impossible. It was like trying to explain the sensation of love to someone who understood life only in terms of chemical reactions or trying to prove things had meaning that existed independently of the words which described them to someone who thought the words were the primary thing. His attitude, I said, was similar to saying that meaning could not exist outside of the letters that made the word. But he was adamant. No evidence meant no scientific evidence. That was what evidence was and there was none other.

I asked him what his idea of root reality was, whether matter or spirit, but the question made, so he claimed, no sense to him. It just was. So I asked whether he thought mind or matter came first. Did consciousness arise from material causes or was consciousness the ground reality and all else derived from that. Again, he affected not to be concerned by that. So I tried again. Was reality something or nothing? If just matter or energy then nothing would really matter (no pun intended), but if it was something then getting it right really would be important. But none of this meant anything to him either. He couldn't or wouldn't see that if matter rather than mind was the basis of anything then nothing had any value or meaning or even truth. His ideas certainly didn't, but he is actually a radical environmentalist who thinks that meat eating should be outlawed as it is an inefficient use of resources, and private transport should also be banned for similar reasons. He has very clear ideas about how an ideal society should be run and is uncompromising in his attitude, freely admitting that, if he had the power, he would enforce his ideology on the rest of the world.

To me such a person has severed his links with any natural instinctual understanding of life and replaced that with a purely intellectual attitude which brooks no input from any other source. In effect, he has spiritually castrated himself and made himself a spiritual eunuch. The analogy is apt because there is a desiccated inhumanity about him (and people like him), and a sterility because for him nothing is spontaneous and free. Everything is the outcome of careful analysis and planning.  He studies classical music but only a few composers interest him and what fascinates him about them is mostly the way they construct their music. He does not deny the emotional charge that music has but seems to regard it as a mechanical thing that simply exploits patterns in the brain.

I don't know what to do with such a person! I gave up talking to him and he to me as we were so far apart there could be no meeting of minds. In a way I admire his uncompromising, almost ruthless, dedication to an idea but since it is a false idea I feel he has done himself real spiritual harm. He has simply denied and cut out what threatens his controllable worldview and I wonder if that is the root of this type of atheism. God threatens. His reality turns your safe world upside down. You lose control. For a person who wants to control his world completely the idea of God is not acceptable. So this person has control, or thinks he does, but at the cost of killing something vital within himself.