Category Archives: Philosophy

Much discussion recently amongst the usual suspects (including both BioLogos and Uncommon Descent) on a Wall Street Journal article by Eric Metaxas, suggesting an increasing support for theism from modern science. Unfortunately it’s behind a pay-wall, but seems to have majored on cosmic fine-tuning, together with support for the “rare earth” hypothesis.

Carrying on the trajectory of previous posts we’ve reached the idea that although there is a “physical reality out there” (what Owen Barfield calls “the particles” or “the unrepresented”) there is no way we can encounter it directly. All our perception comes through sense and mind representations, which to the extent that we share what we perceive with others are public representations. That applies as much, we found, to the application of mathematical symbolism, as to more analogical symbols like “atoms are particles” or “genes are units of heredity”. Both can tell truth, but are inevitably incomplete and distorted representations of total reality.

According to materialism, the appearances of the world around us – its colours, sounds, forms and so on – are illusions produced only by our senses and our minds. All is really particles, waves or whatever inconceivable things those models actually are, to be represented best by mathematical equations. According to reductive materialism that illusion, in the end, extends even to our minds themselves. The scientific project, then, is to get behind these “illusions” to the “reality” behind it.