Either Materialism or Logic

Michael Egnor at Mind Matters makes the incisive point that to reject free will is to implicitly reject the laws of logic as well. The rejection of free will is part of the creed of materialism so Egnor extends his argument to show, in essence, that one can have materialism or one can have logic, but one can't have both. Materialism entails a denial of the laws of logic.

This goes a long way, no doubt, toward explaining the irrationality that has beset us in this postmodern era. In any case, Egnor prefaces his argument with this:

Free will is a devilish problem — for materialists. Dualists have no similar difficulty; they assume that some aspects of the mind, such as intellect and will, are immaterial and thus not determined by matter. This belief in libertarian free will is common across cultures and is correct.

But for materialists, free will is the Great White Whale that has, metaphorically, bitten off their legs at the knee — and, like Captain Ahab, they are incessantly stalking it for revenge. After all, we all (even materialists) have an almost undeniable sense that we make real choices. If our intuition is correct, then the materialist superstition that we are machines made of meat falls apart.

If we can genuinely make choices — if we genuinely have free will — then we are more than collections of atoms. But materialists cannot accept the immateriality of the human soul. They propose to hunt and harpoon it, once and for all.

The materialist denial of free will is generally based on physical determinism. Physical determinism is the belief that the laws of physics fully account for all that we do. We are mere bodies governed by physics and if the laws of physics are deterministic, then we cannot have free will in any meaningful sense.

Egnor goes on to consider an argument for determinism made by physicist Sean Carroll and stresses that materialist scientists assume dualism in the very science that they spend their lives doing. This is itself interesting, but the argument that forms the topic of this post comes next:

In order to make the argument that man is determined by physics and lacks free will, Carroll must use logic. All propositions in the form of arguments are predicated on logic, deductive or inductive. Logic entails many different rules, analogous to (but not identical with) the mathematical laws that describe physical processes.

But the problem for the materialist is that physics and logic don't overlap in any way. Physics uses logic, but logic is not derived from physics. The laws of logic, such as the law that states that no proposition can be both true and false at the same time (the law of non-contradiction), cannot be derived from the laws of physics. So,

If Carroll is right that man is governed entirely by the laws of physics, without remainder, then where do the laws of logic come from?

Carroll falls prey to the materialists’ Achilles’ heel: if the materialist argument is taken seriously, it is merely a physical event, not a proposition based on logic. If materialists are right, they cannot rationally claim to be right. If we are just meat, we can’t argue that we are just meat because meat isn’t the kind of thing that can make actual arguments.

So here is the surprising result: Materialists implicitly demand that, at least when they argue, we suspend belief in materialism.

Carroll’s argument that man is wholly governed by physics is self-refuting. Because physics and logic share no commonality, materialists like Carroll implicitly assert that their own arguments lack logic. One might say that the only thing materialists get right is that their ideas are nonsense. If man is all physics, he can have no logic.

It's not just logic that materialism cannot account for, however. As we've often argued here on VP, materialism cannot plausibly account for logic's offspring - human reason - nor can it account for the existence of objective moral values, nor the origin of life, nor the fine-tuning of the cosmos.

Indeed, for human beings thirsting for the soul-satisfying waters of the Good, the Beautiful and the True, materialism is like a bottle of sand offered to the parched seeker. There's nothing about it that can satisfy the deepest yearnings of the human soul. It's embraced only because of a perverse psychological necessity to avoid the alternative - the belief that the universe is created and governed by a God.