A Short History of Materialism

Materialism involves the claim that all observed phenomena can be explained by material or physical causes.  There is no real difference between materialism and physicalism, the terms meaning essentially the same thing. 

The first major group to advance a theory of materialism seems to have been the Epicureans, followers of Epicurus (341—271).  Epicurus taught that everything was formed from chance combinations of atoms. No book of Epicurus survives, but one of his disciples (Lucretius, who died about 50 BC) did leave a work of philosophy entitled De Rerum Natura.  Epicureans such as Lucretius  tried to explain how humans exist on a planet with such enormous biological order.  The explanation was simply that order had arisen from incredibly lucky combinations of atoms,  combinations that we would never expect to occur in, say, a trillion years of time, but which we might expect to occur if the universe had existed for an infinite length of time.  Lucretius stated the doctrine on this page of his De Rerum Natura:

"So much can letters by mere change of order

Accomplish; but these elements which are atoms

Can effect more combinations, out of which 

All different kinds of things may be created."

The idea of a universe that had existed forever was long a pillar of materialist thought. Early in the work De Rerum Natura by Lucretius,  he states this about changeless simple particles that were called "atoms" before the modern atom was discovered:

"The various bodies of which things are made

Must have continued from eternal time"

The idea advanced by Epicureans such as Lucretius was that any state of order, no matter how improbable, would be expected to arise given a universe that had existed forever, in which atomic combinations had occurred eternally. The "infinite atomic combinations" idea of the Epicureans was never a credible explanation for the order humans observe, because it never explained human reproduction and morphogenesis: the marvel of how a speck-sized zygote is able to progress to become the trillion-times more organized state of the human body. With an infinity of atomic combinations, you might end up (maybe once in a near-infinite number of eons) with a planet full of human bodies arising from random combinations of atoms. But such combination luck in the past could never explain why there constantly occurs in the present and the future throughout the human species an enormous organizational effect in which speck-size zygotes lacking any specification for making a human body gradually progress to become the vast hierarchical organization of a human body. You can never explain such a thing through any theory of cosmic luck in the past. You need something gigantically more: a theory of why there occurs vast organizational effects in the present, over a time scale of only nine  months.  The atomic combinations theory of the Epicureans was no such theory.  Theories of luck in the past cannot explain gigantic organizational effects occurring so abundantly in the present. 

We now know a very large reason for rejecting such reasoning: the scientists who study the evolution of the universe tell us that the universe has not existed forever, and that the universe had a hot dense beginning about 13 billion years ago in the event called the Big Bang.  This did not occur by some change from a pre-existing state.  The Big Bang theory describes a cosmic beginning from an infinitely dense mathematical point.  There could not have been any "cosmic egg" that preceded such a beginning, because the gravity of such a thing would have caused its instant collapse.  

After Lucretius, materialism fell into disfavor and decline for more than 1500 years.  It wasn't until the eighteenth century that a major materialist writer (Holbach) appeared.  The eighteenth century was one in which major writers such as Thomas Paine and Voltaire challenged the teachings of Christianity, but such writers argued not for materialism but for a form of theism called deism. 

This idea of an eternal universe was a bedrock tenet of materialists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the eighteenth century the principle atheist writer was Holbach, who asked in his main book, "Is  is  not  evident  that  the  whole  universe  has  not been,  in  its  anterior  eternal  duration,  rigorously  the same  that  it  now  is?"  Holbach wrote this: "Motion,  then,  is  co-eternal  with  matter :  from  all eternity  the  particles  of  the  universe  have  acted  and reacted  upon  each  other,  by  virtue  of  their  respective energies  ;  of  their  peculiar  essences ;  of  their  primitive elements ;  of  their  various  combinations." Later he wrote this: "Matter  has  existed  from  all  eternity, seeing  that  we  cannot  conceive  it  to  have  been  capable of  beginning."  Holbach and  atheists of the nineteenth century believed that the universe had existed forever, an idea that conveniently allowed them to dispose of any idea of a divine creation. 

Although a very zealous advocate of materialism, Holbach had little influence.  In the early nineteenth century, materialists eagerly awaited some work by a scientist that could be claimed to be a scientific explanation for the origin of man.  By this time academia had arisen as a gigantic social structure largely independent of churches.  Professors of science had gradually started to set themselves up as a priesthood in all but name. Within the halls of academia there existed a large group of people extremely eager to popularize some theory of natural biological origins as soon as it appeared. We may call these people the yearning-to-say-we-know-this guys.  The yearning-to-say-we-know-this guys included people in academia who hungered for some theory of natural biological origins which would feather their caps and enhance their prestige: a set of professors yearning to crown themselves with glory by positioning themselves as sages who understood the great secret of biological origins. 

Of course, if you are a professor of biology or a professor of natural history, you will seem like a vastly more impressive person if you can convince people that you understand the deep mystery of the origin of species and the origin of humanity. Some professor saying "I understand how mankind originated" sounds like a far more impressive figure than some professor humbly saying, "Such a mystery is a hundred miles over my head." The yearning-to-say-we-know-this guys also included many inside and outside of academia who desired some theory of accidental origins that would fit in with their belief in the nonexistence of any power greater than man.  An atheist wants a theory of natural biological origins more than a young boy wants a Playstation or Xbox machine under his Christmas tree. 

For such people to propel some theory of natural biological origins, all they needed was to start endlessly repeating some statement with the following form:

"The scientist ____ explained that the origin of man and other species occurred because of ____ _____."

What was needed at the end of this statement was some kind of slogan or catchphrase that could be offered to the public as some simple explanation for the natural origin of species such as mankind.  To launch a legend that biological origins had been explained, all that the yearning-to-say-we-know-this guys needed was a scientist and a slogan. It would have worked just fine if some chemist named Walter Jones had written a poorly reasoned book advancing a theory that enormously complex organisms had arisen because of "advantageous adhesion."  Then all the  yearning-to-say-we-know-this guys could have started endlessly chanting in unison:  "The scientist Walter Jones explained that the origin of man and other species occurred simply because of advantageous adhesion." It would have worked just fine if some physicist  named David Smith had written a poorly reasoned book advancing a theory that complex organisms had arisen because of "constructive connections."  Then all the  yearning-to-say-we-know-this guys could have started endlessly chanting in unison:  "The scientist David Smith explained that the origin of man and other species occurred merely because of constructive connections." 

But the man who became the darling of the yearning-to-say-we-know-this guys was not a Jones or a Smith, but a British naturalist named Charles Darwin.  Filled with tangential digressions of very little relevance to its main claim, Darwin's main book was very poorly reasoned, and offered virtually no evidence in support of its claims.  But it didn't matter. Darwin had taken the all-important step of using a catchy catchphrase in the title of his main book, the catchphrase of "natural selection." It wasn't even a literally accurate phrase, and his theory was not actually a theory of nature performing an act of selection (since selection means choice by a conscious agent). But it made no difference. The yearning-to-say-we-know-this guys had all they needed to launch their legend that biological origins had been naturally explained: they had a scientist, and they had a slogan. Gradually in the halls of academia a vast chorus of voices began to chant the same achievement legend: the claim that Darwin had explained the origin of species by his theory of natural selection.  As long as there was a sufficient number of voices to keep chanting this boast, it made no difference how weak Darwin's reasoning was. 

So Darwinism went viral, which was a huge boost for materialism.  The coronation of the literally inaccurate phrase 

"natural selection" to refer to an imagined thing that was not actually selection (involving no real choice) was a kind of "original sin" of modern materialism.  People got the message: you can make all kinds of sweeping claims to try to bolster materialism, and the claims don't have to be literally accurate.  160 years of often-misleading speech followed this cue, which often amounted to lies built upon other lies.  Paraphrasing an old saying, you can summarize it like this:

Oh, what a tangled web we weave

When first we "nature picks" deceive

Oddly in the same Victorian Era this was happening, in the second half of the nineteenth century, there was occurring all over the place in Europe and America the most dramatic manifestations acting to defy the claims of materialists.  It seemed that endless thousands of witnesses (including very many reliable people such as doctors, scientists and a leading court judge) were reporting mysterious manifestations such as levitating tables,  mysterious raps,  automatic writing, the playing of musical instruments when no one touched their keys, and even mysterious materializations of human forms and the levitation of a human being (Daniel Dunglas Home), as reported by the leading scientist William Crookes and many other witnesses.  On this blog I am telling the history of such observations in my intermittently appearing "Spookiest Years" series,  and you can read some of its installments  here, here, here, here, here, here,  here and here.

During the 19th century the materialists responded by trying their best to ignore or belittle all of the people making reports observing such things.  So, for example, when "Darwin's bulldog" Thomas Huxley was asked to join a committee investigating the most dramatic paranormal occurrences being reported around London,  Huxley refused to join the investigation. Without his help a large committee issued a long report resoundingly in favor of the reality of such paranormal manifestations. 

Materialism started to flourish in Germany largely because of the propaganda efforts of the ardent Darwin fan Ernst Haeckel, who taught a doctrine combining materialism, "might makes right" ideas and German nationalism, thereby helping to pave the way for the rise of Nazism. A tremendous boon for materialism occurred with the Russian Revolution of 1917. There was now a major world state dedicated to the propagation of a doctrine called "dialectical materialism."  The Soviets did not hesitate to use bloodshed and imprisonment to advance their atheist ideological ends. For example, in the wikipedia.org article “Persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union,” we read, “The total number of Christian victims under the Soviet regime has been estimated to range between 12-20 million.” We read details such as these:

•  “In the years 1917–1935, 130,000 Russian Orthodox priests were arrested; 95,000 were put to death, executed by firing squad.” 
• "During the purges of 1937 and 1938, church documents record that 168,300 Russian Orthodox clergy were arrested. Of these, over 100,000 were shot."

The very long work The Black Book of Communism details some of the persecutions, telling us this as just a small part of the narrative:

"The antireligious offensive of 1929-30 occurred in two stages.  ... On 26 August 1929 the government instituted the new five-day work week—five days of work, and one day of rest—which made it impossible to observe Sunday as a day of rest. This measure was deliberately introduced 'to facilitate the struggle to eliminate religion.' These decrees were no more than a prelude to a second, much larger phase of the antireligious campaign. In October 1929 the seizure of all church bells was ordered because 'the sound of bells disturbs the right to peace of the vast majority of atheists in the towns and the countryside.' Anyone closely associated with the church was treated like a kulak and forced to pay special taxes. The taxes paid by religious leaders increased tenfold from 1928 to 1930, and the leaders were stripped of their civil rights, which meant that they lost their ration cards and their right to medical care. Many were arrested, exiled, or deported. According to the incomplete records, more than 13,000 priests were 'dekulakized' [killed] in 1930."  In many villages and towns, collectivization began symbolically with the closure of the church, and dekulakization began with the removal of the local religious leaders. ... The antireligious campaign reached its height in the winter of 1929-30; by 1 March 1930, 6,715 churches had been closed or destroyed."

Something similar happened after 1945 in China. China became a communist state that was fully ready to imprison and shed blood to advance its ideology. A CIA document refers to attacks by the Red Guard in Maoist China,  and says that they "spared no religious group in China." Brutal repression and Darwinism meshed together very easily, partially because Darwinism was centered around a "struggle for life" ideology in which brutality and oppressive domination were  justified under the banner of "survival of the fittest," and also because Darwinism tended to discourage belief in transcendent moral principles and encourage dehumanizing views of humans in which humans were regarded as animals or mere accumulations of mutations that could be wiped out when necessary by some person told not to worry about afterlife consequences.  

But while bloodshed and imprisonment in the East was helping to spread materialism, around the same time some findings in biology seemed to raise great difficulties for the materialist cause. They included the following:

(1) It was discovered that even the most simple cell was a structure of the most enormous complexity and organization, consisting of a special arrangement of very many thousands of structures called organelles, which themselves each required thousands of well-arranged protein molecules, each of which required thousands of well-arranged atoms. 

(2) It was discovered that every form of life is extremely rich in functional information stored in DNA, with even the simplest one-cell organism containing hundreds of genes that each had its own functional information, with the average gene having as much functional information as a paragraph of text.

(3) It was discovered that humans require more than 20,000 different types of proteins, and that most such proteins require special arrangements of hundreds or thousands of amino acids. 

Such discoveries should have spelled the end of all boasts that scientists had explained biological origins, because such discoveries revealed biological organisms to be exponentially and gigantically more organized and complex and information-rich than Darwin had ever dreamed.  But materialists responded by devising a protective myth to try to prevent their explanatory boasts from crumbling.  This was the lie that DNA was a body blueprint.   

The lie worked like this: materialists began claiming that stored inside DNA was a blueprint for constructing an organism. They claimed that this helped to explain how Darwinian evolution could work.  They claimed that Darwinian evolution occurred because random mutations made random changes in a blueprint for making an organism stored in DNA, and that when such changes were helpful, they were preserved. We were told that macroevolution (a progression from one type of organism to a vastly different type of organism) could be explained by simply imagining changes over time in a DNA blueprint specifying how to make an organism. 

It was all a gigantic lie.  No such blueprint or recipe or program for making an organism exists in DNA or genes or genomes.  Neither DNA nor genes nor genomes specify the structure of an organism, and they don't even specify how to make a cell. DNA and its genes merely specify very low-level chemical information such as which amino acids make up a protein. 

But the gigantic lie of the "DNA is a body blueprint" myth worked to help keep materialism afloat. By the year 2003 the Human Genome Project was completed, and the contents of human DNA had been thoroughly mapped. Nothing like any blueprint or recipe or program for building a human body or any of its organs or cells had been discovered. But there was little change in the way scientists and materialists described DNA.  The "DNA is a body blueprint" lie was too useful for materialists to discard merely because DNA had been exhaustively searched and no such blueprint had been found.   But here and there many scientists did confess that there was no truth to the claim that DNA is a specification for building a human body. Dozens of such confessions can be read here. 

The period around 1945 to 1995 was a kind of high water mark for materialism, as I explain in my post "Information Centralization and Knowledge Constriction Helped Materialism Flourish Between 1945 and 1995."  During most of this period the thought control of the Soviet Union and China were in full force.  Spellbound by the invention of the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb, people regarded scientists with awe, failing to see that great skill in the area of using physics to make weapons was not the same as explanatory success in understanding biology and psychology. In the United States most libraries contained almost no mention of all the evidence for psychical phenomena and spiritual manifestations.  The newspapers and magazines and books documenting such things so thoroughly were largely buried away where it was very hard to read them, and almost all of the recently written books on library shelves contained no mention of such things. It was kind of a phenomenological amnesia.  The Internet had not yet been invented, and people tended to get their information from a very limited number of sources, which tended to parrot materialist dogmas. 

Long before 1964 it had been discovered that the universe was expanding, a discovery implying that the universe had a sudden origin billions of years ago. Around 1964 materialism suffered a major blow with the discovery of the cosmic background radiation, which appeared to clinch the Big Bang theory of the universe's sudden origin.  Now one of the long-time pillars of materialism (a claim that the universe had existed forever) had seemingly been removed.  But materialists seemed to show no humility in the face of such findings. 

Many materialists began to engage in free-will denialism,  based on their groundless dogmas of the brain being the cause of human actions.  The advocates of the malignant nonsense of free-will denialism were not deterred by the complete failure of neuroscientists to explain any neural basis for such things as will and decision-making and thinking.  The peddlers of the morally corrosive poison of free-will denialism tried to justify their claims by finding tiny little things here or there in the findings of neuroscientists.  Anyone scanning the vast data collected by neuroscientists can always find some little bit of data here or there that can be claimed to support almost any nonsensical idea he can imagine. 

In the last third of the twentieth century, there were some  major setbacks for materialism. The first was the collapse of communism. In 1991 the Soviet Union was disbanded.  About the same time China started to move from being a zealous communist state to being a state that was communist in name only, becoming capitalist in practice.  Now there were no longer giant world states that would force hundreds of millions to parrot a materialist ideology.  But materialism still kept going strong because it was so firmly rooted in academia, with universities acting like churches of materialism, and science professors acting like priests of a materialist ideology.

Another great problem that arose for materialism in the third half of the twentieth century was the discovery of cosmic fine-tuning.  Physicists and cosmologists discovered that the universe had fundamental constants that had to be just right to allow the existence of intelligent creatures such as humans.  To give one of very many examples, it was discovered that the electrical charge on every proton is the very precise opposite of the electrical charge on every electron, with the equality of their absolute values being equal to more than 18 decimal places. Scientists began to realize reasons why such a state of affairs was necessary for the existence of creatures like us existing on stable planets. 

Materialists responded to this crisis in a very clumsy way.  From a defensive standpoint, the most effective strategy would have been to simply deny all claims that our universe has life-enabling characteristics enormously unlikely to exist by chance in any universe.  This would have been a form of denialism, the denying of very clear observational realities. But denialism has been practiced massively by materialists for centuries.  For centuries there has been a mountain of observational evidence for the reality for phenomena such as clairvoyance and ESP, but for centuries materialists have been claiming that no such evidence exists, even after countless university experiments verified the reality of ESP.  In the second half of the nineteenth century there arose mountainous levels of observational evidence for spiritual manifestations inexplicable under the claims of materialism. But materialists just kept claiming that no such evidence existed. So if materialists had simply denied all evidence that our universe is fit for the existence of life in a way that would be enormously unlikely to occur by chance, that would just be more of the denialism that materialists had practiced for so long. 

But instead of such denialism about our universe's accidentally improbable fitness for life, materialists generally chose a different strategy. The strategy was to concede that a universe such as ours is incredibly unlikely to occur by chance, but that we can explain this by postulating that there is some infinity or near-infinity of universes.  The strategy was a very stupid one.  By imagining some infinity or near infinity of universes, you do not increase the likelihood of any one universe (such as our universe) being accidentally compatible with life.  Speculations about a multiverse do nothing to explain away our universe's very precise fine-tuning which allows the existence of intelligent life and civilizations, for reasons I discuss here and here. 

A major problem for materialism in the twenty-first century was the rise of the Internet.  By the year 2000 it had become very easy for people to discover all of the extremely detailed accounts that had been written of witnesses observing things that are utterly incompatible with the claims of materialism.  It also became very easy for people to discover many facts about the brain that are inconsistent with materialist claims that the brain is the source of the human mind and the storage place of human memories.  Luckily for materialists, most people have not made any study of the brain physical shortfalls that exclude materialist claims that the brain is the source of the human mind and a storage place for memories.  The existence of many such shortfalls is one of several time-bombs ticking at the foundation of materialism, others including the mounting evidence for out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences and other forms of dramatic spiritual experiences and psychic phenomena, the ever-growing evidence for very precise fine-tuning in the fundamental constants and laws of nature, and the ever-growing evidence for vast levels of purposeful molecular machinery within organisms, constituting extremely strong and precise engineering effects more impressive than any works of human engineers.  

Despite the existence of a mountain of facts and observations contradicting or clashing with its claims, materialism will probably long survive with a large presence, because it is now basically a stealth religion with a very large base in academia. Having a very large body of priests-in-all-but name or ministers-in-all-but-name with titles of science professors, and having a very large physical foundation of churches-in-all-but name in buildings with official names of science department buildings,  modern materialism is like a very well-entrenched religion. It is a definite lesson of history that once a religion becomes well-entrenched, it usually stays around for a very long time.