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earlier scientists to view God s creation from God s own perspective has been replaced
by the ideal of viewing a mindless, meaningless universe from a nonhuman, purely
objective perspective.
There are many scientists and philosophers, of course, who deny that physicalism
is simply a metaphysical principle. Philosopher Patricia Church-land, for instance, claims
that the rejection of consciousness (or any other spooky stuff such as a soul or spirit)
existing apart from the brain is a highly probable hypothesis, based on the evidence
currently available from physics, chemistry, neuroscience and evolutionary biology. 21
She declares that the assertion of physicalism is an empirical matter, not a question of
conceptual analysis, a priori insight, or religious faith. Philosopher Giiven Giizeldere
asserts in a similar vein that . . . contemporary science tells us that the world is made up
of nothing over and above physical elements, whatever their nature (waves, particles,
etc.). 22
Let us assume for the moment that these physicalists are right in asserting that
scientists have empirically demonstrated that only physical things and events exist. This
would imply that this assertion belongs together with a wide range of other scientific
facts such as the convertibility of mass and energy, the atomic weight of hydrogen, and
the nature of photosynthesis about which there is a very high degree of consensus
among the scientific community. Churchland acknowledges that not all philosophers
agree with her physicalist belief, but it must also be acknowledged that a very sizable
proportion of the scientific community doesn t either. Given that 40 percent of American
scientists today believe in a personal God to whom they can pray and that this figure has
not changed significantly over the past century, it would seem that if the physicalist
hypothesis has been proven empirically during the twentieth century, virtually half of the
scientific community in the United States still refuses to acknowledge it. If this is the
case, are they prevented from seeing this empirical truth as a result of their commitment
to a theistic ideology? If so, this raises a profound qualm about the reliability of the
scientific community as a whole to distinguish empirical facts from ideological
commitments. One might just as well ask the same question of those scientists who
believe that the empirical evidence does confirm the hypothesis of physicalism: Are they
overinterpreting scientific evidence to make it conform to their metaphysical beliefs? If
we are to trust the scientific community to give unbiased reports of its research, then
physicalism must be regarded as a matter of conceptual analysis, a priori insight, or
religious faith. For there is clearly no scientific consensus on this matter, or even a
historical convergence toward such a consensus among scientists.
The Marginalization of the Mind
While the nineteenth-century adoption of the closure principle denied causal
efficacy to anything that is nonphysical, the twentieth-century version of physicalism
denies that anything nonphysical even exists in reality. This shift has major implications
for the relation between the mind and the physical universe. It is noteworthy that, while
physical science was well established by the late seventeenth century, a science of the
mind was not initiated until a full two centuries later. And even then, particularly in the
Anglo-American world, the focus of academic psychology swiftly shifted away from the
mind and toward behavior, and then to neuroscience. Only in the latter half of the
twentieth century did cognitive psychology, for example, begin to reconsider the
functions of the mind as it is experienced firsthand. In the historical development of
modern science, the study of the mind occurs only as an afterthought, subsequent to the
elaborate development of physics, chemistry, and biology; so it is no coincidence that in
the world as conceived by science, the role of the mind in nature has been marginalized.
According to this view, the universe is conceived as a giant computer, and the emergence
of consciousness during the course of cosmic evolution is attributed solely to the laws of
physics, which over the immensity of time give rise to a nearly infinite complexity that is
purportedly sufficient to give rise to consciousness. This explanation places an
enormously heavy explanatory burden on the term complexity, which in fact explains
nothing.
Since the Scientific Revolution, subjectively experienced mental events have
gradually lost their status as real entities. Advocates of scientific materialism now
variously regard them as mere epiphenomena, as propensities for behavior, as being
equivalent to brain activity, or as bearing no existence whatsoever. As one indicator of
this phenomenon, it is worth noting the types of discoveries for which Nobel awards have
been granted in the fields of physiology and medicine. While it is well known that many
mental phenomena including hope and fear, happiness and depression, trust and
suspicion, and belief and disbelief have profound influences on the human body and
state of health, since Nobel awards were first granted in 1901 for discoveries in
physiology or medicine, not a single one has been given for discoveries about the nature
of the mind. One could rationalize this fact by claiming that research into the nature of the
mind and its possible influences on the body is not included in the domain of hard
science and is therefore unworthy of such a distinguished award. But hard science in
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