There is a great review of Roger Penrose's book, "Shadows of the Mind" in the
November FIRST THINGS, written by Stephen M. Barr, a physics prof at the U. of
Delaware. Basically, Penrose denies that the human mind can be reduced to a
giant, material computer program. But his materialist assumptions don't allow
him to escape from a very tight corner.
****Begin quote:
"Something very significant is going on here. Many atheists imagine religion
is based on ignorance. Religion supplies irrational explanations where
rational ones are lacking; as lightning, for example, is still thought by
primitive people to be the raging of the gods. In this view, religion has been
fighting a long rear-guard action against the advance of knowledge, taking
refuge in the unknown and the obscure by positing a 'God of the gaps,' and, as
the gaps in our rational explanation of the universe disappear, God will be
driven out. This is indeed one of the main motivations for a certain kind of
scientist who supposes that when the job of Science is done there will be no
room left for the 'superstition' of religious belief.
"Penrose shows that materialism itself is now the faith of the 'gaps.' It is
in the gaps of undiscovered and unprecedented 'non-computational' laws of
physics and of uninvented and so-far unimaginable non-computational thinking
machines that the 'missing science of consciousness' is forced to lurk. But
what will happen if the gaps in our knowledge of physics are closed? What will
happen if the laws of physics are known in their entirety and turn out not to
have the characteristics that Penrose shows they must if they are to explain
the mind of man? Then indeed will superstition be overthrown, the superstition
of materialism...
"There are many misconceptions here. Materialism does not follow from
accepting the scientific method; that something can be studied using the
scientific method implies nothing a priori about how it is constituted. We can
study by whales and neutrinos using the scientific method, but this imiplies
neither that whales are made up of neutrinos nor neutrinos of whales. That we
can study both matter and mind by scientific methods does not imiply that the
mind is entirely material."
****end of quote.
This is precisely the same sort of "materialist gap" I see in the evolutionary
field. Some of the top evolutionary minds--e.g., Tattersall, G. R. Taylor,
etc.--admit that the sudden emergence of man cannot currently be explained
through pure materialism. They hold out for an eventual "something (natural)"
that WILL explain it.
That looks just like faith to me.
Jim