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experiences or discoveries that are found to be incompatible with that ideology are
presumed to be unscientific. This is the scientific materialists new word for heretical,
and they often go even further in claiming that experience and ideas that contradict their
doctrine are a priori false and illogical. Thus, students and the general public are
informed, with the full authority of science, that if they refuse to accept the validity of the
worldview just described, they are either ignorant or irrational. Such has been the strategy
of ideologues throughout history.
Scientists have not proved the hypothesis that no truths lie beyond the domain of
science, nor have they confirmed the hypothesis that no methodologies other than those
of science can expand the horizons of human knowledge. But, with a leap of faith,
scientific materialism accepts both those hypotheses as if they were established facts.
William Clifford, one of the more prominent nineteenth-century scientific materialists,
attacked religious faith on the grounds that it is wrong always, everywhere, and for
everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. 6 If so, all scientific
materialists should immediately renounce their allegiance to their dogma.
Scientific materialism essentially reduces human existence to our physical
existence, and science and technology are presented as the chief (or sole) resources for
providing us with physical comfort and mental well-being. When people nowadays
respond to their indoctrination into scientific materialism with despair, as did William
James, they can treat this affliction with an ever-growing arsenal of drugs that affect the
neurophysiological basis of depression. These drugs do not cure the depression, but they
do suppress its symptoms. In addition, people suffering from chronic depression may be
counseled not to dwell on the dismal aspects of existence, which, as the preceding
description shows, are the personal implications of scientific materialism. Thus, such
modern remedies for James s despair consist of chemical suppression of the symptoms
and psychological denial of their underlying source.
In recent years, proponents of eliminative materialism, including Patricia and Paul
Churchland, have argued that subjectively experienced mental states do not exist, for no
account of such states can be given in terms of neuroscience. Moreover, they present this
theory as a fresh, astonishing hypothesis that should startle modern thinkers much as the
heliocentric theory unsettled the Scholastic contemporaries of Galileo. Two things are
indeed astonishing about this materialistic account of our existence: (1) that its advocates
so enthusiastically embrace an unconfirmed, speculative theory that utterly denies the
validity, and even the very existence, of their personal, inner life; and (2) that anyone
believes there is anything fundamentally new in this updated version of materialistic
reductionism. If one accepts the closure principle and the principles of reductionism and
physicalism and logically follows out their implications with reference to the human
mind, eliminative materialism is the inevitable conclusion, without invoking any
empirical, scientific evidence at all.
I have already noted how many of these principles can be traced back to the
metaphysical speculations of Greek antiquity. But comparable theories were also
developed in India beginning in the seventh century BCE or even earlier by the Indian
thinker Carvaka.7 According to his naturalistic (lo-^ayata) philosophy, everything that
happens in the universe is due solely to natural processes, and there is no such thing as
supernatural causation. Only the physical universe exists, and everything consists of
nothing more than configurations of the basic physical elements of nature. Thus, a human
being is merely a physical organism, and consciousness is nothing more than an emergent
property of specific configurations of the physical elements of the body. When those
configurations vanish, so does consciousness. Thus, both the closure principle and the
principles of reductionism and physicalism were already conceived in India before they
occurred to the thinkers of Greek antiquity.
Carvaka presented pleasure as the ideal of life and taught that it is to be gained by
the accumulation of wealth and the pursuit of sensual and intellectual enjoyments. The
fine arts, he suggested, such as music, dance, and poetry, are what make life pleasant and
worth living. In his view there can be only a humanistic basis of ethics, for there is
nothing that is objectively right or wrong. Indian followers of this materialistic view
denied the existence of any type of divinity, and they acknowledged that their doctrine
accommodated only the ideals of hedonism and sensualism ideals that they did, in fact,
espouse.
Eventually, Carvaka and his doctrine feel into disrepute in India, for he provided
no viable basis for ethics in the field of human relationships; and some of his followers
took this creed as license for extravagant sexual indulgence and social chaos. The
doctrine s fundamental practical flaw was that instead of encouraging humans to rise to
higher ethical and spiritual levels of experience, it denied the very existence of spiritual
realities and encouraged people to regard themselves as mere automatons for whom so-
called ethical behavior and unethical behavior consist of merely mechanistic responses to
physical stimuli. Its cognitive flaw was that it provided no genuine insight into the nature
or origins of consciousness and its relation to the rest of reality. Thus, as the great
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