Reductionism
is a major methodological aspect of science; it also lends itself to atheist thought
as a major world view, and to atheist apologetics as a rhetorical ploy. Reduction
is a valid scientific methodology, but like all science it is also infused with
notions of an ideological nature. When atheists use reductionism as a tool of
ideology it has the fervor of scientific dedication and is cast with the aura
of the sacred. It is both a valid methodological tool and an ideological
propaganda device at the same time.
Definition of REDUCTIONISM
1
:
explanation of complex life-science processes and phenomena in terms of the
laws of physics and chemistry; also : a theory or doctrine that complete reductionism is possible
2
Philosophical roots of reductionism
“Methodological reductionism” is the process
of reducing phenomena to its smallest constituent parts to understand what
makes it function as a method for dealing with complexities that need to broken
down.[2]
Then there is “philosophical reductionism” which maintains as its goal a
philosophical and/or ideological tenet that science can explain everything:
One form of scientific reductionism follows the belief that every single
process in nature can be broken down into its constituent parts and can be
described scientifically. The broadest sense of the term upholds the idea that
science can be used to explain everything, and that nothing is unknowable. By
looking at the individual constituent processes, scientists can gain an
understanding of the whole process. For example, a reductionist believes that
the complexity of the human brain is a result of complex and interacting
physical processes. If scientists research and understand these underlying
chemical reactions, then they can explain intelligence, emotion and all of the
other human conditions. The only way to comprehend fully the sheer complexity
of the human brain is to look at the individual pieces.[3]
Here we can definitely see the ideological aspects of science at work. These advocates of this certain type of reductionism believe that “everything can be explained through science.” Obviously for this to be true science has to be the most valid from of knowledge if not the only form of knowledge. Materialists, who tend to philosophical reductionists, and this includes phyisicalists, go step further and just refuse to accept as knowledge anything that can’t be quantified and pinned down by their methods. God can’t be apprehended by their methods so there must not be a God. This notion of science as the most or only valid form of knowledge is clearly ideological and stems form philosophical concerns. In the issue of reductionism we can see one of the most obvious junctures at which philosophy has clung to scientific development and is still being infused with science. Reductionism is inherently infused with philosophy.
Reductionism
encompasses a set of ontological, epistemological, and methodological claims
about the relation of different scientific domains. The basic question of
reduction is whether the properties, concepts, explanations, or methods from
one scientific domain (typically at higher levels of organization) can be
deduced from or explained by the properties, concepts, explanations, or methods
from another domain of science (typically one about lower levels of
organization). Reduction is germane to a variety of issues in philosophy of
science, including the structure of scientific theories, the relations between
different scientific disciplines, the nature of explanation, the diversity of
methodology, and the very idea of theoretical progress, as well as to numerous
topics in metaphysics and philosophy of mind, such as emergence, mereology, and
supervenience.[4]
Reductionism goes back to the Greeks
and tied to philosophy up to the development of early modern science and
beyond. The Greek atomists were reductionists. They wanted to cut up reality in
order to get at the basic elements. The idea of positing basic building blocks
doesn’t require that one abolish other aspects of reality. Yet certain of the
pre-Socratics, such as Leucpp and Democritus, began doing this.[5]
The term “reductiosm” is not very old. The modern issues enter science from
philosophy. Ontological reductionism was part of the dispute between
nominalists and realists in the middles.[6] The major alternative to reductionism is
holism. Holism also goes back to the Greeks with Aristotle. The Atomists had
atoms in the void as the final explanation and Aristotle had final cause of an
unmoved mover as the final cause and explanation of all harmony and unity in
the world.[7]
Modern science abhors teleology, the idea that everything is directed toward a
goal or an end point. The teleological is the hall mark of Aristotle’s’ unmoved
mover. Atoms in the void don’t require a goal; they are the end of the process.
Thus science has had this atheistic bias literally since the Greeks. Likewise,
theistic thinking takes on a holistic bias form the Greeks as well. Science was
slow to completely turn over to the atomists and did so in stages. The bias
against teleology was not adopted into biology until the middle of the
nineteenth century (with Darwin and Wallace). Natural mutation and random
selection have come to dominate in biology and replace any idea of
purposefulness.[8] The distinction between appearance and
reality is a carry over from Democritus’ claim that binary oppositions in
experience, such cold and hot, sweet and sour, are really just atoms moving in
void.[9]
We take this as empirically proved because we dismiss experience as subjective
and go with the ‘objective measurement,’ never really considering how we are
conditioned by philosophical hold over to think this way.
In this way, a conception of the world
and our place in it evolved in the scientific revolution and the latter
Enlightenment in Europe that was conducive to the
development of the idea of reducing reality to only what scientists analyze out
of the “buzzing, blooming confusion” we experience. Reductionist tendencies
remained central to the epistemologies and metaphysics that developed in light
of reflections on the modern natural scientific search for simplicity and
unity. Such philosophies set the stage for explicit reductionist disputes in
twentieth-century philosophy. But, contrary to many scholars’ perspective, the
scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment were not the only sources of modern
reductionist thinking. Another source can also be traced back to ancient
thought—the quest for a viable monism.[10]
It may seem that monism is the child of mystical concerns, a
refugee from a religious past, something more akin to Hinduism or Buddhism than
modern science. In fact materialism/phyiscalism is heir to Greek monism.
In terms of
ontology three major approaches. Pluralists, of which Leibniz is an example)
accept either plurality of fundamentally irreducible realities or plurality of
real material objects. Dualists typified by Descartes two basic realities that
can’t be reduced to one. Monists reduce it all to one fundamental type of
reality or apparent multiplicity as a manifestation of one fundamental type of
reality. Positing one reality in place of apparent multiplicity is reductive.
Jones thus argues that the first type of monist is a weaker version of the
second.[11] He
sees Thales and the pre-Socratics and their attempt to understand the world in
terms of one basic element as the orign of the reductive impulse in Western
thought..[12] One might wonder,
however, if that’s not just an appearance that results from following the
atomists. There is a link to modern through that’s a lot more direct than a
secret winding path through 2000 years of history. The skeptics and dissenters
of the English enlightenment were influenced by the Greek atomists. In the
restoration period the English churchmen, the Latitudinarians began arguing
against a philosophical bugbear. At that time Greek thinking, especially that
of the atomists, was being rediscovered. The Latitudinarians put up an
apologetical front against the Greeks even though skepticism was virtually
invisible to the public. Dissenters, Socinians (Latter to become Unitarians)
and skeptics picked up these ideas.
Jones
understands materialism as the only form of monism produced in modern times. He
does discuss Berkeley’s form of
idealism known as “immaterialism”
which postulates that that “all reality is reduced to a collection of mental substances…merely perceptions in the mind of God.”[13] We tend to think of monism as either eastern or atheist but not Christian. Yet Berkeley was a Christian Bishop. The Bible never pronounces upon the truth of philosophical schools. That wasn’t part of the conceptual universe of the people who write the bible. It’s left up to theologians to argue for one version or another. Hume argued for a monism that was neither mental nor physical.[14] Modern materialists are not strong monists as they allow for plurality of material objects.
which postulates that that “all reality is reduced to a collection of mental substances…merely perceptions in the mind of God.”[13] We tend to think of monism as either eastern or atheist but not Christian. Yet Berkeley was a Christian Bishop. The Bible never pronounces upon the truth of philosophical schools. That wasn’t part of the conceptual universe of the people who write the bible. It’s left up to theologians to argue for one version or another. Hume argued for a monism that was neither mental nor physical.[14] Modern materialists are not strong monists as they allow for plurality of material objects.
Types of Reductionism.
It seems
that there is no set list of types. Each author has his/her own version of the
different types. John Polkinghorne, formerly professor of mathematical physics
as University of Cambridge,
lists constituent, conceptual (or epistemological) and causal. “Constituent”
means that when a complex system is reduced or taken apart what remains is a
set of fragments that correspond to the expected constituents and nothing more.
The example he gives is that of a living organism, when decomposed, doesn’t
leave behind any part pertaining to a “spark of life” as was once claimed by
the philosophy of “vitalism.” [15]
Of course that seems self defeating because the organism is dead so one would
not expect to find a spark of life. Nevertheless, Polkinghorne denies that this
form of reductionism implies that living beings are nothing but collections of
molecules. “This kind is closely related to methodological reductionism,
the widely practiced scientific strategy of studying wholes through breaking
them up into their constituent parts. Again, the success of the strategy does
not imply that everything relevant to the whole can be studied in this way.”[16]
“Conceptual” refers to means that concepts applying to the whole can be totally
expressed in terms of concepts applying to the parts. “An example of a
successful reduction of this kind is afforded by the use of the kinetic theory
of gases to reduce the concept of temperature (originating in the
thermodynamics of bulk matter) to exact equivalence to the average kinetic
energy of the molecules of the gas.”[17]
Polkinghorne also sites counter examples to this second kind of reduction.
Individual water molecules are not wet, for example. The third type, “causal”
will probably be more important for our purposes.
Causal
reductionism:
…implies that the causes acting on the
whole are simply the sum of the effects of the individual causalities of the
parts. In the case of wetness such a reduction appears successful, on the
reasonable supposition that surface tension is generated entirely by the action
of inter-molecular forces. Since at both levels one is concerned with purely
energetic properties, a translation between the two seems plausible. On the
other hand, it is not at all clear that sums of firings of neural synapses can
add up to produce mental qualia (feels), as there appears to be a clear
qualitative difference between the two ( MIND-BODY RELATIONSHIP). Causal
reductionism is closely allied to ontological reductionism, the
assertion that the whole is the sum of its parts. It is quite possible to hold
to constituent reductionism and to deny causal reductionism as, in fact, many
do. One strategy for this is to embrace contextualism, the belief that
the behaviour of constituents depends upon the nature of the whole that they
constitute.[18]
This type of reduction seems to correspond to what was said
above about philosophical reductionism, where the concept is not so much used
as only a method in science but the basis of a philosophy.
As we saw
above there is a kind of reductionist who believes that science can explain
everything, and nothing is “unknowable.”
Reductionism in Action
Reductionism
is a tool of atheist apologetics. It’s used as a major tactic because it
support the materialist assumption of the world as only matter, or the
physicalist assumption as the world as only physical objects. Thus any
alternative to these ideologies can be ignored, and the mystique of a
scientific procedure can be applied. The Reductionist is merely ignoring the
possibility of spirit or of some alternative but doing it under the assumption
that there can only be physical things anyway. Certain “tricks’ are employed to
pull off this connection, spreading the aura of science over a purely
ideological move. Before look at those
moves, however it’s important to note some of the major issues where these
moves are used. Although reductionism is a standard procedure for atheist thinking
so almost any issue is vulnerable, yet there are certain issues that draw more
fire in the reductionist camp. The major issue on which the ploys of
reductionism are used is the brain/mind issue. The idea that consciousness is
not reducible to brain chemistry is a major challenge for materialists. The
counter position is that of the reductionists who believe that the qualities of
consciousness must be reduced to the basic physical complement that they feel
produce brain function. Of course they are almost certainly arbitrarily
refusing to accept a possibly of something more than brain function as the
nature of consciousness. To hold their position at all is to do some form of
reductionism as a founding assumption. Any issue involving free will, which includes
the problem of pain and attempts to disprove god based upon Theodicy, employs a
reductions approach to ignore the basis of free will as rooted in something
other than brain chemistry. Thus reductionism sort of mandates determinism.
I will look
at three issues, as stated; almost any issue can include a reductionst
approach. These issues are: (1) Religious experience (2) Brain/mind, (3) Free
will/determinism. By “religious experience” I mean primarily of the “mystical
kind.” This includes both exterrvertive and interovertive, as well as esoteric
and exoteric. In other words, this includes both mystics as well as
charismatics. This includes the sense of the numinous, which the feeling of
prescience or meaning of overwhelming love that mystics try describe. It is not
about visions and voices it is about a form of consciousness where one seems to
see through he world illusion and recognizes the undifferentiated unity of all
things. It can also be experienced in terms of the sense of the numinous, love
and presence of divine. On a popular level atheist apologists have learned some
tricks form reductionism. They meet claims of empirical studies demonstrating
the transfoarmtive power of religious experience by reducing transformation to
“getting happy.” They reduce the effects to brain chemistry and ideologically
ignore the possibly of any form of consciousness not a side effect of brain
chemistry.
Long-Term Effects
Wuthnow study:
Wuthnow study:
*Say their lives are more meaningful,
*think about meaning and purpose
*Know what purpose of life is
Meditate more
*Score higher on self-rated personal talents and capabilities
*Less likely to value material possessions, high pay, job security, fame, and having lots of friends
*Greater value on work for social change, solving social problems, helping needy
*Reflective, inner-directed, self-aware, self-confident life style
Noble study:
*Experience more productive of psychological health than illness
*Less authoritarian and dogmatic
*More assertive, imaginative, self-sufficient
*intelligent, relaxed
*High ego strength,
*relationships, symbolization, values,
*integration, allocentrism,
*psychological maturity,
*self-acceptance, self-worth,
*autonomy, authenticity, need for solitude,
*increased love and compassion
*think about meaning and purpose
*Know what purpose of life is
Meditate more
*Score higher on self-rated personal talents and capabilities
*Less likely to value material possessions, high pay, job security, fame, and having lots of friends
*Greater value on work for social change, solving social problems, helping needy
*Reflective, inner-directed, self-aware, self-confident life style
Noble study:
*Experience more productive of psychological health than illness
*Less authoritarian and dogmatic
*More assertive, imaginative, self-sufficient
*intelligent, relaxed
*High ego strength,
*relationships, symbolization, values,
*integration, allocentrism,
*psychological maturity,
*self-acceptance, self-worth,
*autonomy, authenticity, need for solitude,
*increased love and compassion
These are long term characteristics that the mystical
experiencing subject exhibited.[19]
So then to say that all just amounts to “getting happy” is losing the actual
aspects that make the experience what it is and totally changes the outcome.
The standard tricks of the reductionist can be understood as follows:
Lose the Phenomena
All the complexity of relationships to self and others, self
image, autonomy, social responsibility and so on are reduced to one simplistic
undefined feeling of “happy.” It’s counted in such a country cornpone way that
it’s clear derogatory.
Re-label
The as aspect of changing “self actualization” to “happy”
not only loses a lot in translation but it is also changing the label from one
that connotes a complex psychological theory of personality to one that connotes
little thought and simplistic motives (“gett’n happy”).
Re-Describe
This will be illustrated in forthcoming material. It
involves a way of losing phenomena by leaving out curcial aspect in
re-describing what is to be recued.
Bait and Switch
This is seen in a major way on the brain/mind issue. One of
the major proponents of mind (David Chalmers) argues that the reductionsits are
pulling a bait and switch. They are not examining consciousness but bran
function put over as consciousness. Bait “we are going to examine
consciousness,” the switch, it’s really brain function they examine. This biat
and switch tactic is one of the chief ways that reductionists lose the
phenomena, by diverting our attention to other phenomena.
These same tricks
are used by professionals. One of the major practitioners is philosopher Wayne
Proudfoot who teaches at Columbia University.
Proudfoot’s Religious Experience, is a practically a blue print to the
use of use of reductionism as a rhetorical device to blunt the effects of
empirical research.[20]
The issue comes in where skeptics try to offer counter causal explanations for
the experience. Mainly the materialist/physicalist tries to explain it in term
of brain chemistry since this is the order of the day, all consciousness must
be reduced to brain chemistry. William James, The Varieties of Religious
Experience (The Gilford Lectures):
Medical materialism seems indeed a good
appellation for the too simple-minded system of thought which we are
considering. Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul
by calling his vision on the road to Damascus
a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs
out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi
as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox's discontent with the shams of his age,
and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered
colon. Carlyle's organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal
catarrh. All such mental over-tensions, it says, are, when you come to the
bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto-intoxications most
probably), due to the perverted action of various glands which physiology will
yet discover. And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority
of all such personages is successfully undermined.[21]
[1 Merriam-Webser’s Dicitonary online version URL: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/reductionism visited 3/16/2012
[2] “Scientific Recutionsm,”
website: Experiment-Resources.com. URL: http://www.experiment-resources.com/scientific-reductionism.html visited 3/13/2012
Experiemnt-reserouces.com is a site ran for educational
purposes by a psychologist and other unnamed authors who work in the seicnes.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Brigandt, Ingo and Love,
Alan, "Reductionism in Biology", The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
.
[5] Richard H. Jones, Reductionism:
Analysis and the Fullness of Reality. Danvers, Massachusetts: Associated
University Press.2000, 37.online copy, Google books, URL: http://books.google.com/books?id=sUgnio874NUC&pg=PA39&lpg=PA39&dq=revolution+against+reductionism&source=bl&ots=RfQNUal7yQ&sig=Wputdv-lWVTdRJ0lJem2hrXHKZI&hl=en&ei=rWusTp3zG4risQLZzKXdDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCQQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=true visited 3/13/2012
[6] ibid.
[7] ibid.
[8] ibid, 38
[9] ibid.
[10] ibid.
[11] ibid, 40
[12] ibid
[13] ibid
[14] ibid
[15] John Polkinghorne,
“Reductionism.” Inters Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Religion and
Science. p.zza sant'Apollinare, 49 -
00186 Rome: Centro di
Documentazione Interdisciplinare di Scienza e Fede operating at the Pontifical
University of the Holy Cross. Edited
by Giuseppe
Tanzella-Nitti, Philip Larrey and Alberto Strumìa
On line resource, URL http://www.disf.org/en/voci/104.asp visited 3/16/2012
[16] ibid
[17] ibid
[18] ibid
[19] Council on Spiritual
Practices listsBoth of these lists are distilled by another writer from the two
different studies by Wuthnow and Nobel. This list is found on a webstie hosted
by the Council on Spiritual Pracices. “State of Unitive Consciousness Research
Summary.” URL: http://csp.org/experience/docs/unitive_consciousness.html
visitied 4/5/2012.
About Council on Spiritual Pracitices: (from the site) “The Council on Spiritual Practices is a collaboration
among spiritual guides, experts in the behavioral and biomedical sciences, and
scholars of religion, dedicated to making direct experience of the sacred more
available to more people. There is evidence that such encounters can have
profound benefits for those who experience them, for their neighbors, and for
the world.” http://csp.org/about.html
[20] Wayne Proudfoot, Religious
Experince. Berkeley: University
of California Press,
[21] William James, Varieties
of Religious Experience. New York:
Modern Library, 1994, 16.
2 comments:
Don't get me wrong, I liked the line of reasoning and thought it was well laid out. But can I mention: love the graphic! That's hilarious.
Take care & God bless
Anne / WF
yea me too. It's great.
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