Parable of the Circular Train

A reader asks:

“What, then, is the distinction between ‘universe’ as used by radical materialists and God understood in the sense of Unmoved Mover, Being Itself, etc?”

A fascinating question, and an easy one to answer, but the answer requires some explanation.

Materialism is the proposition that all things have no properties aside from material properties.

If this it true, then everything which might seem to be a non-material property is actually a side effect of a material property and ultimately can be reduced to it. For example, ‘red’ seems to be a quality rather than a material property, but modern science shows redness is a wavelength of light, which has wavelike properties akin to soundwaves, and these wavelengths have pure material properties such as mass, length, duration and temperature.

But if materialism is true, then not just ‘red’ but all things, such as a pure Platonic ideal, human free will, truth or love or justice or any quality involving a valuation or purpose, an abstract law of logic, and on and on, can be ultimate reduced to waves and particles or some other physical property.

This leads to an immediate and obvious difficulty: physical things have no known final causes, that is, they react to outside pressure, they do not act because of a desire to achieve an envisioned goal or escape a feared outcome.

If materialism is true, all final causes can be reduced to mechanical causes.

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.