120 cosmos
theologians. However, some theologians created a problem. Assuming first that
the Bible is without error and second that it must be read in an overt way
whenever possible, they maintained that the account of creation in Genesis
was supposed to be a scientific and historical account of the beginning of the
world over a short period of time.
Such a position provokes not only scientists and historians but also most
theologians, who know that there is no such thing as reading the Bible or any
other text without preformed conceptions. A number of evolutionists created
a problem too. By assuming that lengthy development through time indicated
that the universe was without purpose or intelligent direction, they essentially
declared cosmos impossible. When religion and science are each taken overtly
and without a sense of the limitations of human understanding, the two ex-
clude one another by definition.
But there is no need for such either/or positions. One of the greatest
obstacles to the formation of a coherent new worldview in the twenty-first
century is physicalism, materialist reductionism. The origins of the idea are
as old as the Greek atomists, but the first English instance of the word “ma-
terialism” in the sense of the belief that all actions, thoughts, and feelings can
be reduced to physical explanation, first appeared in 1748. “Materialist reduc-
tionism” does not mean the “reducing” of scientific questions to their funda-
mentals, but rather a philosophical assertion that we live in a universe where
all phenomena can be reduced to the merely physical. It is reasonable to say
that the study of natural phenomena may be reduced to the construction of
physical regularities, but it is not reasonable to assume that all truth can be
reduced to physical regularities. Physicalism is identifiable by certain key words
and phrases such as “just,” “merely,” “only,” and “nothing but.” Consciousness
is nothing but neural reactions in the brain that will someday be entirely pre-
dictable and controllable.
From E. O. Wilson’sConsilience:
Everything can be reduced to simple universal laws of physics. Ideas
and feelings are merely linkage among the neural networks. It can
all eventually be explained as brain circuitry. Everything that is
knowable but not yet known to science is open to being explained by
science.^19Richard Lewontin wrote:We take the side of science...because we have a prior commit-
ment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and
institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material ex-
planation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are
forced by oura prioriadherence to materialist causes to create an
apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce mate-