God and Matter

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.