Musical Therapy

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Musical Therapy

It is well known that listening to and performing music has cognitive benefits. It is not known, however, what explains these benefits—in virtue of what is music good exercise for the brain? I conjecture that three factors are at work: mathematics, memory, and emotion. Music is mathematical, because of scales and keys, as well as rhythm. It also involves memory, as themes are recalled and lyrics learned (or tunes whistled and hummed). And it is emotionally charged. Your mathematical sense is activated, your memory is exercised, and your emotions are stirred; your brain is abuzz with activity—and in an enjoyable way. Nor are these components separable; it isn’t all bleakly cognitive, drily scholastic. We have here the mathematics-memory-emotion complex. I don’t think it’s surprising that adolescence is a peak cognitive learning period as well as a musical period: music helps in the growth and management of these faculties. I advocate singing in the later years as well as listening to music. Voice lessons are a good idea in retirement.

I also advocate learning games and sports at all stages of life, from childhood onwards. Nothing novel in that suggestion—we have P.E. in schools. Doctors recommend exercise in one’s advanced years, but I suggest learning serious skills, especially those involving rapid movement. Tennis and table tennis are good, as are other racquet sports. The gym isn’t enough. These sports require good sensorimotor coordination and stamina but also mental agility—motor intelligence. Learn the technical aspects of the strokes. Also, hit hard. It should be something you love, or at least like, not a chore you do because the doctor says so. You should also do it with pride.

What about the intellect as such? Here I am a staunch believer in writing—not just reading and playing chess and watching CNN. This can take many forms: writing a diary, writing songs, writing stories, writing poetry, writing philosophy. Expand your vocabulary, work on your punctuation, read with a view to improving your own writing. Don’t just scan the newspaper. Write competitively, as if for money. Develop your own style and voice. Correct other people. Be a writing bore. There’s nothing more embarrassing than being unable to put together a decent sentence. The dictionary is your friend; grammar is your support system. Eloquence is your goal.

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Moral Knowledge

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Moral Knowledge

I am going to defend a view of which I am morally certain: moral knowledge is the best kind of knowledge we have—intellectually, epistemologically. It is knowledge at its finest, purest, least qualified. It is the shining star in the epistemological firmament. Needless to say, this goes against the grain of the entire age in which we live, perhaps of all ages. But it’s true and known to be true (though not admitted). When you know something ethical, you really know it. No other type of knowledge outperforms it. Take any piece of common ethical knowledge: you should keep your promises, you shouldn’t tell malicious lies, you shouldn’t kill innocent people, you shouldn’t betray your friends; I say these are the pinnacle of human knowledge qua knowledge. They have the best epistemic credentials. Why? Because such knowledge is subject to no sensory illusions or deceptions, is of things with no hidden essence or nature, is not of things distant in space and time, requires no specialized technical skills or advanced intelligence, and does not tax or transcend our natural innate cognitive abilities. It is easy to possess this knowledge, and no obstacles stand in its way. There is nothing hidden or difficult or obscure or speculative about it. There are no brain-in-a-vat problems or incomplete-evidence problems. You need no special training to possess it; no course of study is necessary. It is proof against skepticism. No dubious inferences are involved. Thus, it is superior to our knowledge of the external world, our scientific knowledge, our knowledge of the past and future, our knowledge of other minds, even our knowledge of logic and mathematics, and arguably our knowledge of our own minds. There are no hidden truths of ethics, no esoteric profundities, no sophisticated doctrines. And no visual moral illusions leading us down the garden path, or inaccessible layers of moral reality. No guesswork and induction, no elaborate deductions, and no falsifiable hypotheses. Any fool can know his or her ethics. It is certain, transparent, and incapable of deceptiveness. It just is.

The analogy between moral knowledge and mathematical (and logical) knowledge, though illuminating in some respects, doesn’t quite give us the measure of moral knowledge. For mathematical and logical knowledge quickly turn technical and difficult, but this is not so for moral knowledge. You must learn mathematics laboriously at school, but you have no classes in ethics; there is no tricky symbolism to master or clever techniques of reasoning. Both logic and mathematics contain advanced technical branches and developments, but not so ethics; there is nothing like calculus or Godel’s theorem. There is no moral Euclid or Principia Mathematica. All of morality is intellectually elementary, even when real-life situations become complex. In the case of first-person knowledge, we can make the point that much of the mind is submerged and inaccessible to knowledge; and consciousness is eminently fleeting and forgettable—but who forgets that lying is wrong? Nor is first-person knowledge clearly knowledge—true justified belief or the like; but ethical knowledge clearly is. I am aware of my own mind, but do I have beliefs about it? What about infants and animals? But I have moral beliefs, convictions, commitments. Moral knowledge is genuine propositional knowledge, but so-called introspective knowledge is more like a background hum, similar to proprioceptive awareness. We debate ethical propositions, but we don’t debate our state of mind; it isn’t a discursive matter, as ethics is. There is no such subject as “my current state of mind”. So, it looks as if ethical knowledge comes out on top; you can take it to the bank. Secure, pellucid, solid, certain—everything knowledge should be. It lives up to its name.

I hear murmurings of protest: if moral knowledge is so epistemologically impeccable, why are people morally fallible? Why does morality vary from one community to another or one person to another? Excellent question; this is something of a puzzle, given moral knowledge’s ease and obviousness. But that’s what it is—a puzzle. It doesn’t imply that moral knowledge is epistemically lacking, any more than mathematical or logical incompetence implies that mathematics and logic are epistemically wanting. The answer to the puzzle is staring us in the face: the problem is extrinsic to morality itself and concerns its psychological and social context. Moral knowledge conflicts psychologically with self-interest, outright selfishness, greed, hatred of others, etc. People have powerful motives to avoid knowing the moral truth—very powerful. Also, their external circumstances of life get in the way of cool moral reflection. None of this is true of other kinds of knowledge: you have no reason stemming from self-interest to reject or ignore the truths of logic and mathematics. Moral knowledge therefore produces cognitive dissonance, because morality conflicts with egoism; the result is classic dissonance reduction in which moral truths are denied or avoided. I know I should really help my neighbor, but it would conflict with my plans to play tennis, so I shuffle guiltily off telling myself that she will probably be all right. Plus, people are brainwashed in all sorts of ways to avoid what they otherwise would know perfectly well. Everyone really knows that breaking promises is bad (unless they are mentally defective), but they don’t always act on this knowledge. So, moral fallibility is no proof that moral knowledge isn’t the best kind of knowledge there is—not just morally but intellectually. Types of knowledge can be ranked according to their quality, and the moral type comes out top of the list. Don’t let the relativists and nihilists tell you otherwise: moral knowledge is fine and dandy, sweet as a nut, radiant epistemic perfection. Physics is nothing compared to it, let alone neuroscience.[1]

[1] It is only when you have been steeped in contemporary opinion for fifty years or more that you see how threadbare it really is. Opinion can be swayed by all manner of things, often irrationally. It’s as bad as the opinions of previous ages, seen objectively; it may even be worse. We have been schooled to believe that moral knowledge is no such thing, being mere emotion or the will to power, but it is really quite evident that we have a ton of moral knowledge. It’s wrong to torture animals, and you know that perfectly well—how could you not? This is stating the obvious. You would have to be mad not to see this (and “see” is the right verb).

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Ignorance and Other Minds

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Ignorance and Other Minds

What do we know better—material objects or other minds? In the ordinary course of things, there is a lot about material objects of which we are ignorant: their insides, their chemical composition, their unseen side, their atomic structure, the nature of matter itself. They are often too distant to see well, indistinct, occluded, seen through a haze, seen with poor eyesight. We are largely ignorant of them; we tend to know only their superficial properties and their existence (a black cat on a white mat). You would never say you had complete knowledge of them; we could say we have “incomplete knowledge”—partial, superficial. But in the case of knowledge of other minds none of that is true: we are not ignorant of their insides, their chemistry, their unseen side, their intrinsic nature. We think we know them as they are, more or less completely (I am putting aside the mind-body problem). We don’t think of them as having an unknown nature; we think we know all about them. In fact, we think we know their nature as well as we know our own mental states: we think of them as being the same kind of thing as what we know from our own case. We don’t think of them as having a different nature when possessed by other people—as if they grow an inside or a reverse face or an atomic structure. We don’t think they differ ontologically from our own mental states; they are the same but elsewhere. So, we have a kind of privileged knowledge of these objects—a comprehensive knowledge. If material objects are opaque objects, then mental objects are transparent objects—limpid not cloudy, given not hidden. If we are blind to much of what constitutes a material object, we are clear-sighted about the nature of a mental object: we know what a pain is quite thoroughly, while we have only incomplete knowledge of a cat.

This means that we have superior knowledge of other minds compared to our knowledge of material objects. We already know that there are no visual illusions concerning other minds[1], so that this source of skepticism does not apply to them; now we see that there is a deep asymmetry with respect to the extent of our knowledge of the two. I know the nature of someone else’s mind better than I know their body: I have superficial knowledge of their body and deep knowledge of their mind—as I do of my own mind. I have perspectival knowledge of physical things, but non-perspectival knowledge of mental things. The nature of other minds is more open to me than the nature of material objects, less confined. I may not know what it’s like to be a bat, but I do know what it’s like to be another human—e.g., what it’s like to see red. I know minds better than I know bodies—in the ordinary course of events. If I’m having an ordinary conversation with you, I know what kind of thing is passing through your mind, fully and transparently; it isn’t like trying to see a distant cat in the mist with invisible insides. I am not faced with acres of ignorance; I know the mental lie of the land. It’s easier to know the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about other minds than it is to have that kind of comprehensive knowledge of the physical world. And if I am uncertain, I can simply ask you for a self-report and you can tell me. I’m not dealing with some sort of alien subject matter that resists full disclosure. The mind is really an open book to me not a locked safe. Just think how long it took for human beings to find out the internal anatomy of the human body, let alone is chemical composition. We didn’t have to do any dissection at all to find out the anatomy of the mind—it was right there on the surface. The mind isn’t a sort of buried treasure, like the internal organs, but more like the play of light on water—a known not an unknown. It is good to remember these truisms when pondering the classic problem of other minds; we don’t usually worry that we know nothing about what other people think and feel. We take it for granted that our knowledge is in good shape; we are not languishing in the dark. I know what’s on your mind as well as I know anything (so long as you are not trying to deceive me). My mind is in tune with yours. It isn’t trying to step outside of itself into an epistemic abyss. There is no need to get all hysterical about other minds.  Does this solve the other minds problem? Not exactly, but it does take the sting out of it, the sense of panic. We are not epistemically bereft. [2]

[1] See my “Illusions of Mind”.

[2] There is a commonsense problem of other minds that arises from the possibility of deception, but the philosophical problem is greatly exaggerated: other minds don’t pose a uniquely serious skeptical problem. The absence of other mind illusions and the identity of mental items across knower and known make the problem less severe than in the external-world case. In that case, we have the prevalence of visual illusions and the ontological gap between the knowing mind and the thing known. In the other minds case, there is a tendency to focus on the body and its behavior and ask how we can construct the mind on this exiguous basis; but that is not the situation, since we have our own minds to provide the conceptual materials and we can be said to see the minds of others not just infer them. It really does seem to me that you have a mind; I see you as minded. Other minds are not like the deep sea or remote galaxies. They aren’t complete mysteries. Of course, the whole problem of other minds is tangled and difficult, but we are not wallowing in total ignorance. I actually know my cat’s mind better than I know its body.

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Productivity

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Productivity

I am perplexed by my own productivity. I don’t understand it. It seems like a bottomless well. As a psychologist, I’d like to have a theory about it. It’s something of a burden, truth be told, though not an annoyance. It seems out of my control. I wish I could bottle and sell it (I would make a million). The best I can say is that it is a combination of life-long persistence and a certain lightness of being (whatever that means). I observe that it is accompanied by other sorts of productivity, if that is the word; it isn’t just philosophy and matters of the intellect. My impression (corroborated by others) is that my tennis game improves whenever I step on the court—not by a lot, but perceptibly. This comes from simple repetition but also from an openness to trying new techniques and close observation of other players (there is no magic potion or “inspiration”). It’s not an accident. I find the same thing with my singing and guitar-playing: a steady, predictable improvement—though always surprising. Even my drumming, which I’ve been doing for 62 years. Knife throwing too. It feels like my brain and body are willing to keep developing. No doubt this will grind to a sickening halt one day—maybe next week, who knows? But not yet; not yet. My memory is not as good as it was, and the same for my hearing (vision is okay except for reading). I’m planning an athletic romance in the near future, and intellectual romances are still on the cards. Perhaps that’s what it is: different kinds of romance.

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Illusions of Mind

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Illusions of Mind

Is it possible to maintain that we know other minds better than we know other bodies—or even our own body?  Can we be more skeptical about our knowledge of bodies than our knowledge of other minds? That sounds unlikely, given that we infer other minds from other bodies: we see other bodies and then conjecture what lies behind them mentally. We know external bodies better than we know external minds, don’t we? Isn’t that an axiom of epistemology? But there is a difference between the two sorts of knowledge that undermines this confidence: knowledge of other minds is not subject to visual illusion. There are no optical illusions of other people’s mental states, as there are no optical illusions of one’s own mental states. Our eyes never deceive us in this way. There are many optical illusions regarding physical objects, often quite striking: the visual brain is prone to these sorts of errors; there are glitches in the system. I needn’t give examples; they are a commonplace of psychology textbooks (the Muller-Lyer illusion will suffice to fix ideas). In addition, we have visual hallucinations in which whole scenes appear to us that don’t exist. You can’t believe your own eyes; they lie to your face. The visual system is inherently given to these illusions. The skeptic, then, can exploit them to undermine our knowledge of the external world—we might be under a giant sensory delusion. Perhaps my experience is not veridical but illusory; we can’t be certain this is not so, given the prevalence of illusion. It can even be argued that our impressions of color are visual illusions, since color does not really belong to objects. The visual system is set up for error, intrinsically fallible, a potent source of false belief. Knowledge based on it is shaky at best and non-existent at worst. It is an unreliable informant.

But the psychology textbooks record no examples of visual illusions of other minds. We don’t have visual impressions of other minds that mimic standard visual illusions: we don’t look at a bodily stimulus and seem to see a mental state that isn’t there. We may think a mental state is there that isn’t, but we don’t see such a state—we don’t have a visual experience as of a non-existent mental state. Our eyes don’t deceive us in this way. There is no Muller-Lyer illusion of the mind, or duck-rabbit drawing, or any other of the many illusions our eyes are prone to. Our perception doesn’t work this way. In fact, our perception of other minds is in this respect like our perception of our own mind: neither do we have illusions of non-existent mental states in ourselves. You never perceive a belief as a desire, say, or a belief that p as a belief that q, or an emotion as a thought. You are not capable of this kind of error: introspection is not prone to error through an analogue of optical illusion. There are no such glitches in the system; so, such error does not undermine claims to introspective knowledge. Skepticism cannot gain a foothold from this source. But nor can it gain a foothold from such a source in the case of knowledge of other minds. There is thus no argument from illusion in the case of knowledge of other minds: we never have a visual impression as of a non-existent mental state in someone else that is qualitatively just like a veridical visual impression of a real mental state—because we have no such visual impression to start with. We don’t seem to see a mental state as we can seem to see a physical state. You might see a body in an illusory way if (say) it had a Muller-Lyer figure etched on it, but you don’t (can’t) see a mind in such an illusory fashion; you can’t say “It really looked to me exactly as if he believes the sky is green, but I know he doesn’t actually believe that”. You don’t and can’t hallucinate another mind—as it might be a zombie that strikes you visually as replete with consciousness. You might believe a zombie has a mind, but you don’t see it that way: for what would a visual impression of a mind be like? There are no optical illusions of the mind, as there are no optical illusions of number (seeing 2 as 3, say). Your knowledge of other minds cannot therefore be undermined by their possibility or frequency; skepticism cannot be advanced on this basis. So, in this respect, knowledge of other minds is better off than knowledge of other bodies. I know your mind better than I know your body (or my own), as a matter of principle.

Does this mean there is no sense in which you can see another mind? That doesn’t follow, given the elasticity of the concept of seeing. And it sounds perfectly reasonable to describe our knowledge of other minds in this way: I can see that you are upset or happy or confused. Seeing is not restricted to a certain subsystem of our visual sense—the subsystem that produces visual illusions. So, there is a type of seeing that is not prone to visual illusions. Knowledge of another mind can be seeing it (or involve this), only not the kind of basic seeing that is subject to optical illusion. The case is not like theoretical inference in which no one would say seeing is involved (atoms and the like). This, too, provides a bulwark against skepticism about other minds; now we have knowledge backed by seeing that is not vulnerable to perceptual illusion. Things are looking up for our knowledge of other minds; it seems better off than many kinds of human knowledge traditionally thought superior to it. Might it be one of our best types of knowledge? That is certainly a pleasant thought (“You really know me!”) and it is not far from phenomenological reality: for it really does seem that I am (sometimes) perfectly well aware of what is going on in your mind—I can know, for example, that you are enjoying yourself while playing tennis or boiling an egg. I can see that it is so, and I know that no visual illusion can be getting in the way. What more could you ask for as a situation conducive to knowledge?[1] It isn’t like being surrounded by constant optical illusions or actual blindness: I am in the (or a) seeing relation to your mind, and I don’t have to worry about any malfunctioning in my visual system producing illusions. I am home free, epistemically. I can be quite smug about my knowledge of your inner life, not racked with epistemic anxiety. For I am using an illusion-proof visual faculty–unimprovable. Not so for physical objects; here I must contend with the vagaries of error-prone vision, the perpetual possibility of illusion and hallucination. I erroneously see objects as colored. LSD does a number on my sense of sight. I can’t even see when two short lines are the same length. No wonder the skeptic can attack my knowledge of physical reality, but he doesn’t have this resource in the case of my knowledge of other minds. I can therefore relax about this knowledge, secure in the knowledge that I will not be caught out by a processing error in my visual system. Nice![2]

[1] I am not ruling out other sources of skepticism such as lack of logical entailment—they are another story. But I do think the argument from illusions is one of the most potent and influential sources of skeptical doubt about our knowledge of the external world.

[2] Perceptual constancies provide a good illustration of the asymmetry I am drawing attention to. The brain must do a lot of work to cancel the effects of different sized retinal images in the perception of objects at varying distances, using various cues without which visual illusion would set in. But no such problem afflicts the perception of other minds: we don’t nurse a tendency to see minds as different sizes depending on their distance from our eyes, as we do in the case of heads. Nothing in the visual system is tugging us in the direction of falsely assigning different sizes to minds according to their distance. One might think that the human visual system is always on the brink of delivering false perceptions when it comes to physical objects, but not so for other minds.

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Romances

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Romances

A romance is a love affair between two people. But this doesn’t specify what kind of love affair: it could be sexual love, but it need not be. It could be an intellectual romance; then it connotes shared passions and interests of an intellectual nature. The idea is of a cooperative, committed, passionate relationship between two people. I want to extend this idea to include what I will call athletic romance: two people sharing their common interest in athletic activity. This too should be cooperative, committed, and passionate—like a sexual romance. It is also bodily and may involve touching. It should be intense and consuming. It should form a higher unity consisting of the two persons—a kind of team or companionship. It may involve problems of infidelity, insecurity, jealousy, illness, separation, time, and rivalry. It is intimate and emotional, involving a type of love. It may not last forever. Learning will be a big part of it, as will respect. I see it as having a therapeutic component, as producing feelings of well-being and transcendence of the ordinary. It has a religious dimension. Overcoming obstacles is part of it. An athletic romance must be romantic.

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Mathematical Philosophy

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Mathematical Philosophy

In 1919 Bertrand Russell published a book titled Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, written while he was in jail; but the title is somewhat misleading, because the book isn’t about doing philosophy mathematically but about the philosophy of mathematics. Still, Russell did do a fair amount of mathematical philosophy: the theory of descriptions, existence as a propositional function, mathematical constructions of the external world, etc. So did Frege, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Quine, Tarski, Montague, Kripke, Davidson, and others. It was a movement, a meta-philosophy. We might call it formal philosophy or symbolic logic philosophy or technical philosophy or scientific philosophy—as opposed to informal philosophy or phenomenological philosophy or commonsense philosophy or ordinary language philosophy or humanistic philosophy. Its model is mathematical science not vernacular literature—arithmetic not art. It aligns itself with the mathematical member of the two cultures. I think we can add that analytic philosophy is by nature mathematical in that it employs conceptual analysis, which is a breakdown of the whole into its parts, isolated and enumerated. Concepts are composites of added parts. Such analysis results in equations—e.g., knowledge = true justified belief; it seeks conceptual equations. It also employs rigorous deduction like mathematics, hence the emphasis on logic: syllogisms, axioms and theorems, formalized arguments with premises and conclusions, logical variables. Thus, we have today formal epistemology, formal politics, formal ethics, formal semantics. The subject is steeped in formal methods and conceits. Twentieth century philosophy was awash in mathematics, for good or ill. The dispute between analytical philosophy and so-called continental philosophy might well be seen as a disagreement about the role of mathematical methods in philosophy—what do you prefer, aesthetics or arithmetic?

But I think this story has history skewed: philosophy has been mathematical for much longer—indeed, it has never really been non-mathematical. I think philosophy is, and always at heart has been, a mathematical science, more or less successfully. That is what it aspires to be, though we must be liberal about the meaning of “mathematical” and “science”. It is about abstract and abstruse questions, aiming for precision and exactitude, obsessed with number, methodologically a priori, in love with logic, proudly technical and symbolic. It is a kind of geometry or geography of concepts or facts or realities. One of its most fundamental questions is numerical: is the world One or Many—and if many, how many? Hence, monism, dualism, and pluralism. Is the world finite or infinite, continuous or discrete, qualitative or quantitative? What kind of mathematics best captures its nature? Philosophy is all about distinctions, divisions, differences, relations. Identity is always a central concept. For example, Plato’s problem of the one universal and the many particulars: this is a quintessentially philosophical problem, and it is overtly numerical. We have the abstract form and the concrete particulars instantiating it: the form is a unity, but the particulars are a plurality. These are essentially different kinds of entity, yet they are intimately connected: many things are white, say. How can the One be Many, and how can Many be One? What is the relationship between them? It seems puzzling. More generally, is the whole world a unity or is it a plurality? How many types of entity are there? Is a person two things in one (mind plus body)? Are there values and facts or just facts? Is appearance the same as reality? How many kinds of good are there?  Are pleasures all of one kind? How many types of truth are there? Is necessity unitary? Are all words names? Polytheism or monism?  And so on. We want to know how many; we want to count our ontological commitments. We want to mathematically analyze the world. There are odd numbers and even numbers—are there universals and particulars, minds and bodies, values and facts? We look for unity but accept multiplicity. In arithmetic it all comes down to addition (subtraction is just the opposite of addition)—is that the way it is with the world generally? Metaphysics is a kind of mathematics of reality in its broadest outlines. We are applying mathematical conceptions, albeit elementary ones (but are any mathematical conceptions truly elementary?). This is not all we are doing, to be sure, but it is a large part of it; we are employing a diverse range of knowledge in conjunction with our mathematical knowledge.

So, the mathematical paradigm did not suddenly emerge in the twentieth century; it was alive and well for two thousand years or more. But it is so natural to us that we don’t notice it; we mathematize instinctively. Philosophy could hardly exist without it—or any science. It’s how we think scientifically, rigorously, systematically. The only question is how much we insist on it or extend it. I am not myself enamored of a sharp distinction between science and literature (I think literature is a type of science, mainly psychological). I think the human mind is essentially mathematical, here as elsewhere. It’s just a matter of admitting it, making it explicit as part of one’s meta-philosophy. We don’t have to mathematize philosophy because it is already mathematical. Even Sartre’s existentialism is mathematical, because it insists on the duality of the in-itself and the for-itself: Sartre is an ontological dualist—two things not one. The philosophy of language as it now exists is clearly a branch of mathematics—what with model theory and computational linguistics. Mathematical thinking is so entrenched in philosophy that we risk accusations of triviality just by drawing attention to it. It is an interesting question in the pre-history of ideas whether philosophy evolved in the human mind as an offshoot of an antecedent mathematical faculty. We are natural accountants, calculators, and bean counters; we brought these talents to bear on the most general questions of the cosmos. Mathematicians often have philosophical predilections. Mathematics and philosophy belong to the same intellectual natural kind.[1]

[1] Pretty much all science is mathematical to one degree or another; it would be strange if philosophical science were the exception. Inside each philosopher is a little mathematician struggling to strut his stuff.

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God and Matter

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God and Matter

Berkeley was convinced that matter and God are incompatible. If matter exists, God doesn’t; and if God exists, matter doesn’t.[1] I want to spell this out a bit, because Berkeley is onto something important here. His basic point is that if you postulate matter, you open the way for skepticism, mystery, and atheism; but this is theologically unsound, so matter must be rejected. Suppose God wants to create a world in which a certain moral drama is played out, leading to reward for the virtuous and punishment for the vicious (heaven and hell). One way to do that is to create immaterial spirits and present them with moral choices; to do this you need to create an experiential world in which things happen (or seem to). Moral choice certainly doesn’t depend on the existence of a material world; it just requires agents capable of moral decisions. The agents can be disembodied beings to whom things appear a certain way. To create such a world God can use his own mind to conjure up ideas of objects and then plant these ideas in the minds of his immaterial agents. Reality is thus constituted by God’s mind, which finite spirits perceive (God arranges things this way). In other words, God creates an idealist ontology. Then he sets to work to confront these finite spirits with objects as so constituted. He wants his creatures to know these objects exist and that he exists, and they can know these things given their mental nature. The objects are right there in the mind, and it is evident that God is behind their existence because he put them there; now he just waits to see how virtuously they handle the world thus constituted. God could easily have made the world this way, given his omnipotence; and there would be no reason to doubt his purposes and existence. He made an intelligible world in which we finite beings play our ordained part—no worries about the metaphysics or epistemology of the situation. And yet, according to materialist metaphysics, he did none of these sensible things; instead, he created a world of mysterious unintelligible matter that naturally leads to a general skepticism that takes in God himself. He creates a world in which the moral purpose is obscured by the wacky metaphysics and problematic epistemology. Absurd! Away with matter!

For consider: this supposed matter stuff is completely alien in its nature to the nature of God its creator; you cannot infer God from this stuff. It could in principle exist without God because there is nothing Godly in it. Moreover, we don’t know what it really is, unlike our own ideas and ideas in general: people say matter is extension, but extension of what? It is a complete mystery, an epistemological black hole. How can it even have causal powers, as spirits, finite and infinite, have causal powers? It is just an inert soulless enigma. Why would God create a world unknowable to the creatures that populate it? Wouldn’t that lead them to a generally skeptical cast of mind that includes God’s own existence—and this would undermine their commitment to the moral project that is the point of the whole exercise. How indeed could God create such a thing from his own nature, since he is immaterial himself—and why? It makes no sense given his overall intentions. What would be the point of creating matter that coexists with God in the absence of human souls, as the materialists suppose? First matter, then minds: but matter itself has no moral status without minds. And how could matter create minds? The whole idea makes God redundant: once you have got matter, nature can be left alone (allegedly) to produce life, mind, and morality. Matter usurps the role of God in the management of his creation. But God wants to keep his hand on the wheel, his foot on the gas; and this is no trouble given his omnipotence. Why would God create a rival to his own dominion—a kind of second material God (not that the idea makes any sense when you think about it). If God wants to alter the course of history, he must intervene in the actions of matter, producing what mortals call miracles. Better to create a world in which everything already obeys his will—no need to puzzle the mortals by having two conflicting sources of causation in the world. There are no miracles in God’s preferred world, only his continual beneficent presence. And there is an even more sinister implication of the matter theory: people will derive their concept of existence from the supposed material substance, and this will make God’s existence seem unintelligible to them. For God does not exist in that way—by being extended in space, or solid in substance, or perceptible by the senses. This will certainly give rise to atheism. Why put such an obstacle in the way of sound religious belief? To exist is to be a spiritual substance not this inert unintelligible something that only promotes skepticism and atheism. Religion (the Christian kind) cannot therefore coexist with materialist metaphysics; the two are in deep tension with each other. So, God doesn’t create a world made according to this plan; he creates an idealist world. If the external world of ordinary objects were material, we would be rightly skeptical of its existence; but that would be to be skeptical about God’s own creation and would inevitably lead to skepticism about God himself (his own creation, meant for us, becomes inaccessible and senseless). Instead, we should accept the idealist theory, in which objects are ideas in our mind and God’s mind—perfectly accessible intelligible items. It’s common sense: go for what you know not what you don’t know—mind, not matter. Materialism about the external world is clearly an anti-religious doctrine; it is inherently skepticism-producing and atheism-encouraging. If you try to combine materialism with religion, you get an insidious form of cognitive dissonance, which can only undermine religious belief. This, at any rate, is Berkeley’s credo.

I think he is right: the two are incompatible. God has no time for matter. But if so, the real existence of matter as a non-mental substance would undermine God. It’s one or the other; there’s no halfway house. A materialist account of creation, such as that produced by the mechanists of the seventeenth century, is incompatible with traditional Christian theology: rocks must be in the mind if Christianity is to be believed (and likeminded religions). We can prove metaphysical idealism from the claims of religion: if God exists, then this desk must be an idea in his mind, not a lump of matter. If matter were the root of all evil, then it would be clearly incompatible with a good God creating it—surely a beneficent God would not create such a world (though the devil would)! But even if it isn’t, it still violates sound theology. So, contraposing, if we remain wedded to matter, we cannot also believe in God. If you are looking for a disproof of God’s existence, you need look no further than the existence of matter. The bishop of Coyne was right about that. If God had accidentally created matter, he would be highly displeased with his creation and scrap it and start again.[2]

  [1] See my “Matter and God”.

[2] It was the devout Descartes who laid the groundwork for atheism, contrary to his intentions. He wasn’t mistaken (Berkeley would say) in postulating an immaterial mind; his mistake was to postulate a material body. For that is not consistent with a belief in God as the creator of the universe. Nor does it help to follow Hobbes and postulate a material God, since this still leaves us with a theology inconsistent with materialism about anything. There is a further question here about whether an ontology of immaterial substances is also incompatible with traditional theology, given how little we know about them (how do we even know they exist?); I have not discussed this question here, but the question is real. We might be forced into an even more extreme idealism of free-floating ideas.

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