Against Physicalist Reductionism (Aquinas 101)

What about the position that the ultimate explanation of everything is not the Divine Mind, but simply material things, space, time, various forces, and brute factual laws? Is that a reasonable explanation of everything?

Against Physicalist Reductionism (Aquinas 101) - Fr. James Brent, O.P.

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This video was made possible through the support of grant #61944 from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.

[JorgeSauceda]

As a Catholic Ph.D. physics student, I love these videos. Thanks for posting amazing content.

[vidaplenaorlando]

Exactly what I needed! I am appalled at material that my kids get assigned at school mocking religion and tradition so blatantly. I don’t know how we can fight back. For example, a book by Marvin Harris that starts out discussing cultural traditions and ends as an attack on our Christian faith. The kids who don’t know the truth can easily be confused and led away from the Church. This video is a great tool for anyone who wants to get the facts straight. Thank you for creating these wonderful lessons. May God bless your work.

[xavier.abraham]

This is so beautiful ! As truth indeed is ! I want to educate my children in Thomistic philosophy.

[causalaetitiae]

I really LOVE your videos. Thank you so much! I'm a Religious Education teacher and your work helps me to keep a thomistic, real, orthodox, integral focus in my classes - despite of the secularistic, anthropocentric and fragmentary curriculum. I truly benefit from your work. Thank you very much and may Our Lord reward you! With gratitude, a sister in Christ from Germany. <3

[realdealreds]

After I lost my faith, due in part to the cynical rejection of science by right wing evangelicals, I dove hard into New Atheism.

Coming back to the Church was a long road, starting with the study social sciences, and it including studying Marx's dialectical materialism, which criticized the mechanical materialism, or physicalism and empiricism, specifically for the reasons outlined here.

[rogeliobingiljr.]

a relevant, realistic, and intuitive explanation for real causes of problems in society today.

[prajnaseek]

Thank you sincerely, and profoundly. This was one of the best and most important talks I have ever encountered - and I have been studying philosophy and world religions for four decades now. I am thrilled. I cannot thank you enough. God bless you, and please keep up this extremely important work. Ironically, or by synchronicity, as Jung called it, which to me means providence, or grace, I have been writing an essay for the past two days, specifically critiquing the physicalist reductionist world view, or what I referred to as materialist reductionism, when I just now came across your brilliant video, completely unexpectedly. I entirely agree, materialist or physicalist reductionism is a world view that leads to mental illness, loss of meaning and purpose, and spiritual death. I argued in my essay that it also leads to social decay, and ultimately to social collapse, because it erodes all bonds of love, mutual aid and community, along with empathy, compassion, and all values, with the result being a slow drift into nihilism; which, as Nietzsche recognized, leaves only one value remaining, and that is the ego, and its egocentrism, also known as narcissism. ("The ego, our last article of faith." Probably the only sane thing that Nietzsche had to say.) Any society, I argued, that is steeped in a dissociation from reality, and is therefore steeped in delusion, which is what materialist reductionism entails, is a society that is in decay, and headed for collapse. We are seeing all of these dark trends manifest now, as a result of many causes, but the root cause, in my view, is the dark delusion which is materialist reductionism, and the egocentric nihilism and narcissism, which it inevitably gives rise to. In any case, thank you again, and if anyone at the Thomistic Institute or the broader spiritual community feels like reading it, it will soon appear on my blog, on Substack. The working title is, The New Renaissance: Saving Our World, Saving Ourselves. I realize my phraseology may not seem Catholic, but I think you would likely find it is in accord with the teachings of Jesus, St. Thomas, and Catholicism. (I furthermore heartily agree with Thomas Merton, when he said that he saw no contradiction between Buddhism and Catholicism whatsoever. The age of sectarian narrowness, hubris and false pride, must now die along with the materialist reductionist delusion, in my view. Thomas Merton and Joseph Campbell can help us immeasurably with that.) And by the way, the essay is virtually begging the Catholic and other Christian churches to bring their mystics out from the attic and the cellar, because the world desperately needs them now. St. Thomas, Hildegard of Bingen, St. Francis and Meister Eckhart, are some of the figures I had in mind. Peace to you, and to all of your community, and to all people and beings everywhere. And I am thrilled to have discovered the Thomistic Institute, I have to say. Bravo! - J. Todd Ring

[JohnR.T.B.]

From this video, I realized that I was a kind of "physicalistic reductionist", and in certain ways still is on some topics. I confess I was an atheist although baptized as a child and received Catholic education. But now I believe in God truly in the Catholic Church.

I take the view that (or my previous view?) everything physical in the universe can be broken down into the fundamental particles or the smallest entities that can exist in the universe; the electrons, photons, neutrons, all those things that can be listed in particle models. And thinking about it, everything that happens must be in one way or the other, the interactions between those particles in their dynamics and energy states, forming atoms, molecules, or moving across space-time as wave-particle, etc. What I mean is, for example talking about "feeling of love", the action of this "love" will change the dynamics of certain types and amounts of elementary particles in whatever states they are in within the brain, in the body, and the outside within the whole system of the universe to translate or carry the action of this "love". Can it be measured? Maybe with an equipment that can detect everything, but only we of course who can translate the "data" as love.

Physics / this physicalist reductionism still have some unresolved issues, I think most well known is in the quantum physics, still without satisfactory explanations of wave-particle dualistic behaviors of particles, and the issues in connecting current physical explanation of gravity in Einstein's theory with gravity existing as quantum particles. This approach of course does not attempt, in my opinion, to explain how each particle type has its properties in the first place and how the rules of the game, the law of physics, came into being. I find the idea of "form" compelling to explain the other layer not observed, the layer of the fabrics of the natural law existing by the power and intellect of God, the supernatural "memory" of God that governs and gives birth to the physical phenomenon beyond what can be constructed and explained by simply explaining and breaking down everything that can only be observed physically.

Again, I think of course everything material can be broken down and explained regarding its physical properties, dynamics, etc; but the only thing that can give _meaning_ or _value_ to its existence and functioning is the mind, the intellect. I read the essay linked, and indeed the "materialists" will call the mind's perception as an "illusion" or a purely subjective matter of the individual, meaningless in its objective reality in the "blind eyes" of the lifeless universe, because the brain is functioned the way natural selection has produced it over time for survival. But I suppose also that natural selection works according to the natural environment we were, are, confined in; and so we see visible light and not x-rays, or that cave fishes are blind, or that I find the smell of charcoal chicken irresistible but not smell of ammonia. How then we see the grand immensity and diversity of the universe as "beautiful", the scenery and thrill of exploring new places, new planets, as "wonderful", "desirable", or simply what is mysterious is curiously inviting, when it is hardly contributing to the survival of the species; instead of being baffled and ignorant to these "intellectual aliens", we are naturally drawn into answering these mysteries of the ordered universe, drawn into their answers as _fulfilling_ and _beautiful_ .

Another thing that I think cannot be answered is the existence of unique individual consciousness, like as though each of us was assigned mysteriously into becoming each of us, born at different places and different times, to play this role of human individual until death; no sleep, no rest, no buttons can hijack or hack this unique consciousness. Never people got mixed up in their consciousness, sleeping as one person, waking up a different person, etc. We can't even find exactly where in the brains we can say that's where we are; that is why there is the _soul_, the unique identity that is immaterial and an inseparable part of each person. Our brains are composed of the same basic materials, just wired differently with slight DNA variations between each human person, and the brain changes and functions in its physical and chemical properties, and yet we are still constantly as each one of us, I still find it a mystery and a miracle.

[simiamens]

Just in case anyone else had qualms about the stuff about intuitions -- it's definitely controversial whether intuitions count as 'properly philosophical evidence.' Intuitions are troubling as a basis for belief, partly because _similarly thoughtful people can have different intuitions_ -- often _especially_ about big, important things like the ones discussed here. Much less controversial is the idea that *conceptual* intuitions -- roughly intuitions about what we _mean_ by a word or concept -- are properly philosophical evidence, and that kind of evidence can still get us quite far. At least until we have dug as deeply and analytically into what we mean by words like "love, " "value, " "God, " and so one, we can hold out hope that we can arrive at justifications for important truths related to them without appealing to intuitions that other reasonable and thoughtful people could easily disagree about.

[diegoandres]

Dear brothers, could you add some spanish subtitles in order to share this videos here in my country?? This is so necessary this days. Keep on going with this great work!

[shashikamanoj]

Thanks for mentioning Viktor Frankle. He wrote "Man in search for meaning" - a must read

[Cpripri]

Probably explains why atheistic communities minds think they can do what they want, with whom they want, how they want. matters as a collective whole.

As always, thank you Fr.

[kristindreko]

Thank you Aquinas 101, i found this video very helpful and edifying.
May God bless you!

[ieatburgersalot]

One of the best videos of all time, all categories.

[jceepf]

Obviously the full domain of science seems too complex to be reduced to physics. However, our attempts to do so have been successful at producing a deeper understanding. Take chemistry: it was once upon a time totally impossible to understand via physics. Then quantum mechanics came along and we now have a deeper understanding pf chemistry via physics. We still study physics independently because it is too hard to derive precise chemical properties from physics. But pretty much the relation between physics and chemistry is similar to that between chemistry and cooking. We need cook books because we cannot deduce the taste of food via a chemistry book but most cooks would say that chemistry "explains" cooking.

This scientific reductionism will never achieve everything. So I am sympathetic to religious arguments against reductionism. But science especially the hard sciences are ultimately reductionist in nature and so far so good.

As for the psychological consequences of reductionism in the minds of humans, father Brent is most likely correct as his sources demonstrate. But this does not negate reductionism of chemistry to physics.

Physics is ultimately the study of the simplest things in nature but as we go along, we can use its laws to understand more complex things. It just happens whether you truly believe in full reductionism or not. Personally, I live my life as if free will exist and love exist but I would not put my head on the log in the defence of this intuition. (A bit of a contradiction !!!)

[messiahshepherd]

You could engage- for the agnostic in your life, or if you still doubt in today's lesson. In a sort of "methodological dualism" A view of matter AND mind: You cannot doubt that the physical world may be one of mechanicalist moving parts
- and that the mind is of organic matter and not of something else.
But even then Intuition stands true because you cannot deny in any way without entering performative contradictions that the mind is a place of intuition, logic, thinking, predictions and soforth and the material world simply isn't. Infact to describe and understand it we need logic, thinking, language ect...

This is not a view of my own creation so I don't know if I'm butchering this or not. I derive this concept from a field of study called Praxeology- a study of the logic of action. If I have made any mistakes in my explanation I will come back and repair what I have written.

[TH-czuz]

These videos are so helpful to me and my family. God bless you.

[mikekeathley]

Did you mean to create a second "Science and Faith" playlist? Love the videos, keep up the good work!

[mauriciocomesana]

God bless the Order of Preachers! I am so grateful for your work!

[A-servant-of-the-Lord]

Thank you very much. Excellent! May God bless you abundantly