The old tabus are dead or dying... whereas the one I shall be infringing is very much alive; and a wise man thinks twice before laying sacrilegious hands on the Lord's anointed.

From Speaker's Meaning  by Owen Barfield

In achieving the current theoretical expulsion of Mind from nature, science had the help of a very useful principle drawn from scholastic philosophy—the dictum known as Occam’s Razor[1]. In the ongoing search for scientific veracity this principle argues strongly for theoretical simplicity or parsimony. It tells us not to resort to complicated explanations when a simple one will suffice. However, in an article in the London ‘Economist’ (October 5, 1996) entitled ‘Occam’s Disposable Razor,’ science and modern thought in general were taken to task for the widespread irresponsible misuse of Occam’s argument, describing it as “a sorry case of intellectual cruelty”. The article argues that Occam’s principle does have a relevance in science, for example in allowing the Copernican heliocentric model of the solar system as represented by Galileo, to be chosen over the Ptolemaic model then supported by the Catholic church—and by naïve (non-critical) sense perception—because the tortured mental gymnastics required to mathematically prove the latter strongly suggested that it was not true. In a recently televised talk,[2] the Canadian Nobel Laureate John Polanyi, son of  the great philosopher of science Michael Polanyi, described this as a fully valid use of Occam’s principle. Michael Polanyi himself, who discusses that great conflict at length in his book Personal Knowledge, also mentions Galileo’s conviction that “the Copernican system was true and not merely an economical hypothesis” (p.146), which suggests that economy was not to be our sole concern in the establishment of truth. So we may reasonably ask what is the legitimate role of Occam’s razor in the conduct of science? and what, specifically, can be pointed to as a very serious example of it being used to wrongly support and establish claims that are widely accepted today, especially in materialistic thought?

With these important questions in mind, I would like here to investigate an aspect of the work of Michael Polanyi that has of late become extremely contentious among students of his work, namely: was he correct in his support of the non-Darwinian evolutionary thought of Henri Bergson, and of the proposition that something similar to an ‘elan vital’ underlies evolution in the natural world? The dominant view is that he was not correct,[3] whereas I will argue that he was, and that his judgement on this matter is of the utmost importance for the future of human understanding, and further that Polanyi’s idea of evolutionary ‘emergence’ takes on very a different character when it is no longer seen as a ‘supervenient’ addition to an otherwise materialistic approach to science, but instead becomes analogous to the ‘evolution’ of a spiritual Consciousness that is everywhere present on the ‘inside’ of nature.

Occam definitely did not claim that the simplest (most economic) explanation was necessarily true. For example, he would not have supported the argument that the watch Dr. Paley had found lying on the ground was the creation of chance and natural law alone. To be sure this would have been by far the simplest answer, because adding the agency of a watchmaker and all that his existence entailed made the explanation far more complicated, but in this case the simplest answer would not have fit the available facts and so would not be true—watchmakers really are responsible for the design and construction of watches. On these same grounds, to use the principle of parsimony to justify the claim that the existence of organisms vastly more complicated than watches are the result merely of chance and natural law, as Darwinism has historically attempted, is a highly dubious proposition that cannot be logically sustained,[4]  i.e. if one argues that nature has no intentions, but then finds that one cannot sustain this argument or make it appear in the least bit credible without using the language of human intentionality to replace the intentions supposedly absent in nature—e.g. as with Richard Dawkins’ blatantly contradictory and deceptive use of the phrases ”Blind Watchmaker” and “Selfish Gene,” which attribute to nature precisely that conscious intentionality that Darwin himself had sought unsuccessfully to deny—and persist in doing so, then one is engaged in a profound act of unconscious self deception; one which allows one to claim that Occam’s dictum supports what is in fact a totally false argument. For example, as with Paley’s watch, the word ‘design’ in normal usage implies a purposeful human mental activity, whereas the claim of “Designer-less design” so often used to support Darwinian argument is an oxymoronic concept that translates directly into a claim of “purposeless purpose.” Occam would doubtless have strenuously objected to the use of his principle to sustain so irrational a knowledge claim?

It is now a well known fact that the Darwinian theory cannot explain the wonders of macro-evolution (the transitions between species), and we often hear it said today that applying Darwinian assumptions to the realm of machinery would be like expecting a Boeing 747 to have been the chance outcome of a tornado blowing through a junkyard. The late Norman Macbeth, in his seminal work Darwin Retried, a book praised as “fair though unsympathetic” by the late Sir Karl Popper, explains to his readers that the neo-Darwinian approach to all such questions of extreme improbability—primarily those concerning macro-evolution—is not to provide an answer but to ignore the diffculty and instead praise the theory for having accomplished these remarkable feats, i.e. “the more difficult the task the greater the glory of the theory for having accomplished it.” This absurdity is further developed by Dawkins with his use of the phrase “climbing mount improbable”. In this way the need to accept the total failure of the theory is avoided, first by uncritically assuming its truth and then by praising it for having accomplished the impossible. Apart from being a totally irrational thought process, this amounts to a disguised claim of irrefutability, which as we all know must be anathema in all genuine science. And, as I have here suggested, an even deeper level of irrationality, permeating the entire theory, arises from the historic misuse of Occam’s razor whereby the expulsion of Mind from nature is first claimed to be necessary, and then with hardly the blink of an eye the theory, in order to appear plausible, unconsciously makes extensive and uncritical use of the language of human intentionality in order to replace the divine intentionality that it is seeking to expel from nature; all of which makes the theory appear to work when in fact it is entirely incapable of performing in any legitimate manner the task that is asked of it. This is why the late Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist at the British Museum of Natural History, put on record in 1981 his agreement with the American historian Gillespie’s far-sighted observation that Darwinism is “not a research governing theory, since its power to explain is only verbal, but an anti-theory, a void that has the function of knowledge but conveys none.” In fact we may state as an axiom that no experiment can ever be conducted to ‘prove’ the truth of Natural Selection, the results of which cannot be better explained in terms of an indwelling Intelligence. .Scientifically speaking the theory has been a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old mistake, but at the same time it represents, as I will now attempt to show, a necessary and hugely important step in the evolution of human consciousness, a vital milestone on the path away from authoritarian theology and towards individual freedom and responsibility.

Occam and Barfield

Why then has the principle of parsimony been so misused? This has to do with the workings of what the late Owen Barfield (1899 -1998)[5] termed “the great tabu.” He tells us that this irrational tabu is still very much alive though beginning to weaken just a little, and that it has influenced science by making it mandatory that all scientists to avoid professional ostracism undertake to deny the reality of non-physical causes in nature. It operates he tells us with the aid of the two usually undeclared presuppositions: first, that “‘inwardness’ subjectivity of any sort... is always the product of a stimulated organism” and second, that “in the history of the universe... ‘matter’ preceded ‘mind’”.[6] The latter, of course, is materialism plain and simple; the former, however, is much more subtle, in that it can be and is widely accepted by those who in the name of religion reject the second presupposition. Thereby bringing even religious thinkers unconsciously to the aid of scientific materialism.

This tabu, was established and maintained, as I have sought to demonstrate above, by the critical misuse of Occam’s razor. It strictly applies only to science, but indirectly to religion also in the manner described above in which science will allow religious thinkers to disregard the second presupposition without serious opposition (after all it is only religion), but not the first. This means that religion, at least in the West and in academia, is expected to accept the central dogmatic core of scientific materialism, but is permitted to attempt to add a more or less spiritual dimension to it as long as it stays within the context of a Cartesian philosophical dualism in which spirit is everywhere separated from matter.

Monism versus Dualism

By far the simplest explanation of natural origins is a monist one in which everything is seen to derive from one and the same source. This is why materialistic science has chosen to theoretically ground itself upon a so-called monism of matter otherwise termed ‘reductionism,’ in which the causal direction as required by the dictates of the “great tabu” is always from the bottom-up. A problem arises for this view, however, when one takes human creativity into account, because here the essential causal element appears to originate in consciousness and from there work downwards onto matter. Science overcomes this difficulty, and retains its monist status, by claiming that human consciousness is in any case merely a by-product of matter, so that any modifications to the natural world that result from the workings of the human mind are just a kind of ‘feedback’—a mechanistic concept that on the surface appears to save materialism, but that is really just another example of the misuse of human intentionality referred to earlier, and can also be shown to be logically invalid.[7] Nevertheless, this view has held sway now for several centuries, and where religion is concerned the only alternative actively considered during this period has been dualism, in which a top-down causal element is seen to be added (supervened upon) the strictly bottom-up causality of science. Traditionally the addition of this top-down element has involved a process of miraculous divine intervention, however, the concept of ‘emergence’ that is so strongly connected with the work of Michael Polanyi may be thought of as an ostensibly non-miraculous form of supervenience, wherein God is seen to have concealed a hidden top-down element in nature from the very beginning, before the ‘big bang’—perhaps in the ur-atom—so that it will later ‘emerge’ from an otherwise bottom-up universe when the time is right for it to do so. This idea has been the subject of a great deal of metaphysical speculation, usually tied together with the so-called ‘anthropic’ principle in which the prevailing bottom-up causality of science is seen to favour the eventual emergence of life and of humankind upon earth. Such a dualistic metaphysical explanation requires the rejection of the second presupposition of the ‘great tabu’, but stays well within the limits set by the first presupposition. As a scientist, Michael Polanyi would, I am sure, have preferred a non-metaphysical experience-based treatment of this subject, one in which ‘emergence’ is another term for nature’s evolving ‘inwardness’ seen to lie within reach of human knowledge—a possibility completely disallowed by the tabu’s first presupposition, but very much in the spirit of his own deeper strivings, and in keeping with the ideas of Henri Bergson.

I will not go into a lengthy discussion of the many dualistic (metaphysical) alternatives here, except to observe that the combination of bottom-up and top-down causality within the same universe, which sometimes cancel each other out and at other times apparently do not, and the incredible and purely speculative levels of complexity to which this inevitably leads, do not in the least recommend themselves to Occam’s principle, and that one also cannot help wondering what kind of God would choose to work creatively in so awkward a manner? In assessing the significance of this question, however, we must not lose sight of the fact that dualism is made necessary only if materialism is true, and if it is true then we may justifiably ask why it needs the help of an irrational tabu to maintain itself? What if materialism is untrue, is indeed logically false,[8] and as Owen Barfield suggests is only an historically necessary phase in the overall evolution of human consciousness? A phase intended to dramatically shift our attention from religious concerns to the realm of matter, and thereby allow us to discover the complex truths about matter with which religion did not wish to concern itself, before we once again come to contemplate, but from a newly gained critical and post-critical perspective, the deeper and equally complex truths of the spirit which underlie those of matter?

Cognition

As we all know, materialism has been singularly unsuccessful in explaining consciousness from the viewpoint of the claimed primacy of matter. What very few people know, however, is that for the past one hundred years or more a very strong critical case has existed, based upon the primacy of consciousness, for the proposition that ALL of primary causation in nature is in fact non-physical. This argument has, however, especially in academia, for obvious reasons, fallen foul of the ‘great tabu.’ I refer to the scientific and epistemological works of Johann .Wolfgang. von Goethe (1749 -1832) and of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925).

To replace science’s current monism of matter with a critical monism of Mind would make dualism unnecessary and even impossible. Indeed this puts religion in the unenviable position of having to support scientific materialism just in order to make a dualism possible—and with it a purely faith-based theology. A critical monism of Mind will provide a much simpler solution, at the theoretical level exactly what Occam would have wished for, although in practise it is as complex and demanding as one would expect of anything that belongs to the real world. Steiner’s epistemology supports a monism of Mind and is itself based upon a ‘monism of  thought,’ premised upon the argument that for the past several centuries, indeed since the age of science began and made worse by the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, we have greatly undervalued the importance of thinking, for the most part dismissing it as a totally subjective activity—even though it is the sole source of all our knowledge. Nor has religion, itself firmly in the grasp of Kantian philosophy, tried to take significant issue with science’s views on this crucial question, except by appealing to an unexplained and seemingly undisciplined cognitive activity called ‘revelation’.

One of the chief failures of materialistic science and philosophy has been its inability to explain consciousness—because a true solution to this problem will require that thought be given a status that is not subservient to matter. Michael Polanyi’s epistemology went a long way towards accomplishing this, in that for him knowledge is firmly rooted not in matter but in the individuality of the thinker. As a scientist he did not want a dualist solution and his support of Henri Bergson’s top-down vitalism was, I am convinced, as great a step in the direction of a monism of Mind as he could then take, given the working in science and academia of the ‘great tabu’. The necessary further step, had he been able to take it, would have lent cognitive support to a vitalist account by giving it a more concrete content,[9] and by showing that thinking in and of itself is primarily not a physical but a “spiritual activity,” and that it is through the act of cognition that we each participate directly in the spiritual world from whence those vital forces originate. This is perhaps a good time to mention the paradox that Rudolf Steiner tells us underlies all of human experience, which he described with the words “I think, yet the world also thinks in me.” The full development of this idea is to be found in his Philosophy of Freedom—which was first published in English with the title The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.

Religion, on the other hand, tends to be literal and stationary,[10] and so will not easily let go of the biblically-based image of God as an omnipotent omniscient being eternally unchanging and existing somehow ‘outside’ of the created universe, and in order to maintain this status-quo it would prefer to (is content to) co-exist with materialism in a dualist setting, rather than deeply challenging it as our time now requires. It is unwilling, for example, to consider the possibility raised by Steiner that the act of creating the universe was for God one of supreme self-sacrifice, meaning that the Godhead now exists only as the evolutionary ‘inside’ of all of nature, the same reality in which we ourselves directly participate in all of our conscious activity, but which nevertheless allows us the possibility of freedom.[11] Seen in this way the unchanging God of theology that individuals try to talk to and nations call upon to favour their causes, does not exist, at least not in the sense that they believe it to. To be sure a vast and evolving intelligence stands behind the entire created universe, but working from within in a law-abiding (non-miraculous) manner, following higher laws than those at present acknowledged by science, and not just in the distant past but in the immediate present. And that where the earth is concerned it is now almost entirely focussed upon the development of human freedom; not the kind of freedom that can simply be granted, but a developing creative freedom intimately connected with love, and with the sum of human knowledge and experience; so that it needs to be earned and cannot be attained within the span of a single lifetime.

The same limitation, Steiner demonstrates, affects religion’s view of the spiritual world. He tells us it is not just a realm inhabited by an unchanging all-knowing and all-powerful God, accompanied perhaps by some auxiliary angels. Rather it is an all-pervasive continuously evolving reality that is at least as complex if not far more so than the physical world that it creates, and moreover it lies within the reach of direct human experience.[12] This is so because thinking at the disciplined imaginative level is able to directly access that world, as in ancient times it did for humanity as a whole—through a non-critical monism of Mind that was tied closely to the spiritual origin of language.[13] Owen Barfield called this ‘original participation.’[14] This primal clairvoyance—the Old Gnosis—was an intense form of animism[15] which historically monotheism was instrumental in extinguishing—and that faded away completely as individualism and critical thought grew progressively stronger; but we have now reached the stage in our development at which we can begin to critically re-develop it (O.B’s ‘final participation’) and so with the help of a New Gnosis begin to recover the spiritual wealth that has been lost in an age of materialism. This is so because truth comes to us not from sense perception alone, but from our developed powers of thinking. Stephen Hawkin does nothing but think, as did Einstein before him, and Enistein’s famous question—why does thinking map so well onto the world’s reality?—is answered in a moment if one contemplates the long-ignored significance of Steiner’s words “intuition is for thinking what observation is for seeing.” and “in thinking we have hold of a corner of the world’s reality”[16] He tells us that to develop individuality, which was an essential aspect of materialism’s task, we needed to become estranged from our spiritual roots—the umbilical cord cut—and temporarily lose sight of the fact that ultimately ALL of primary causation in nature is spiritual. This means that Darwinism, and with it our belief in materialism, has constituted merely a transitional stage in our evolutionary development towards spiritual freedom, for, as Goethe states in Faust, “Alles vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis” (everything transient is only an appearance) and we must now learn to see beyond the realm of appearances, be it physical (materialistic science) or spiritual (dogmatic religion).

Evolution and Religion

Biblically-based religion has no evolutionary content of its own and so must borrow it from science. Materialistic science tells us that evolution is only a series of accidental changes that have taken place on the ‘outside’ of living nature (because the tabu insists that nature has no spiritual ‘inside’). In contrast the emergence theory of Henri Bergson suggests that evolution is the result of changes that have occurred in the spiritual ‘inside’ of nature, as is the case with the scientific work of Goethe, with Rudolf Steiner’s ‘science of the spirit’ with its profound insights into the cosmic background of Christianity and of other world religions, and with the evolution of human consciousness as presented in the penetrating thought of Owen Barfield.

Religion is now left with a choice between two opposite and contradictory scientific monisms, of matter and of Mind respectively. If it borrows its evolutionary content from materialism, by adopting a dualist theory of emergence that continues to pay homage to the first presupposition of the ‘great tabu,’ it will have allied itself to what is increasingly seen to be a false world view, and so could well share its eventual fate. Whereas if it follows the lead offered by Bergson’s emergent evolution, and all that must eventually flow from this opposite monism, it will come to play an important role in the overcoming of scientific materialism and its replacement by a genuine science of the spirit. I believe that without making it explicit Michael Polanyi understood that sooner or later this choice would need to be made, which is why he supported the work of Henri Bergson. I also believe that the unified approach to knowledge—the theory of everything—that so many able minds are searching for today, will never be found while the first premise of the ‘great tabu’ remains in effect, and that to overcome it will require profound changes in the status-quo both in science and religion that few at present are willing to contemplate. Superficially materialism already appears to be weakening, but while Darwinism remains a revered belief system materialism will be also.

Sooner or later religion must learn to gradually supplement faith with knowledge,[17] otherwise when materialism is finally shown to be false the religion that has dualistically allied itself to it will, to rational minds, also be discredited. Instead serious spiritual thinkers must become even more self-critical than were those great minds who blazed humanity’s necessary trail into scientific materialism. Whether it concern the physical or the spiritual world, science’s unswerving ideal is still Truth, which is often incompatible with dogma or belief in any kind of authority, be it revealed or otherwise.  I welcome any and all critical response to my argument.

by Don Cruse