Why Materialism Will Probably Drift Into Panpsychism
I predict that “Nothing is conscious” will be superseded, among fashionable thinkers, by “Everything is conscious.”We’ve been covering the buzz around that new French book, forthcoming in English translation, God, the Science, the Evidence.
Yesterday, the Spectator published an article by the book’s first author, Michel-Yves Bolloré, arguing that belief in God is a “rationally sound conviction.” Indeed, he argues, it is getting harder for scientists not to believe in God:
While the findings of Copernicus, Galileo, and Darwin created the impression that the workings of the universe could be explained without a creator God, the last century has seen what I call ‘The Great Reversal of Science’. With a number of break-through scientific discoveries – including thermodynamics, the theory of relativity, and quantum mechanics, plus the Big Bang and theories of expansion, heat death, and fine-tuning of the universe – the pendulum of science has swung back in the opposite direction.
More and more convincingly, and perhaps in spite of itself, science today is pointing to the fact that, to be explained, our universe needs a creator. In the words of Robert Wilson, Nobel Prize winner for the discovery of the echo of the Big Bang in 1978, and an agnostic: ‘If all this is true [the Big Bang theory] we cannot avoid the question of creation.’
“It’s getting harder for scientists not to believe in God,” October 12, 2025 (open access)
It’s worth noting, just for the record, that Copernicus (1473-1543) and Galileo (1564–1642) were devout Christians (Galileo’s troubles with the Church hierarchy notwithstanding). Darwin (1809–1882) is the only one of the three who clearly paved the way for materialist atheism.
Back to the main point, Bolloré notes that younger people are generally not buying materialist atheism any more.
Why aren’t younger people buying what materialist atheism is selling?
Image Credit: Abeselom Zerit - Just look at what they are asked to believe: When the Smithsonian gravely insists that humans are 99% identical with chimpanzees, you can either believe the Smithsonian or you can believe the evidence of your mind and senses.
Same with the claim that the fine-tuning of the universe for life proves nothing because there might be countless flopped universes out there. Does anyone use this type of reasoning when making decisions? Don’t we usually select the more probable explanation — in this case, that the system is designed — instead?
The benefit of believing materialist atheism is that you get to belong to a select group of intellectuals who believe that, as Richard Dawkins put it in River out of Eden (1995), “The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
If that is true, you get nothing and if it is not true, you still get nothing. Materialist atheism is not an attractive proposition, really, and — quite apart from its unattractiveness — there are many good reasons for believing that it is false.
So, does religion win?
Some of us are cautious about how to understand what happens next…
I’ve long argued that materialist atheists can — and probably will — convert to panpsychism. That’s the belief that all living things are conscious or perhaps that everything in the universe, is.
Hold on, you say. That doesn’t make sense.
Well, why doesn’t it? The human mind is obviously immaterial; efforts to identify it as merely the workings of the brain confute themselves. But one way the human mind could still be naturalized is this: Suppose consciousness is considered a fundamental part of nature, like matter and energy. Then everything is conscious (Scientific American 2023). Or maybe all living things are conscious (Big Think 2024). In that case, the workings of the brain are one aspect of a consciousness that is a natural part of the material universe.
I am suggesting that materialists may choose to end the war on the reality of consciousness by claiming it as real, not an illusion. But they will then say that it is an aspect of the material universe. The details will be filled in as the popularity of the viewpoint progresses.
Materialism — left to itself — is a snake that eats its own tail. But it need not be left to itself.
The snake eating its tail is philosopher Edward Feser’s verdict on popular eliminative materialism — the idea that the mind is an illusion:
Since science is as laden with intentionality as anything else, you will have to eliminate the very science in the name of which you are carrying out the elimination; and since philosophy (including eliminative materialist philosophy) is also as laden with intentionality as anything else, you will also have to eliminate eliminativism.
Image Credit: toricheks - Here is a graphic way of understanding the materialist’s problem (and solution):
Head, meet tail. Head, do you see the problem now?
At length, Head does see the problem. So it decides to resolve it by assuming that everything else in nature is a Head too.
All Heads are all part of a vast consciousness. There is no tail to eat.
There is no tail.
As Kevin Berger & Brian Gallagher explained at Nautilus in 2020, “The main attraction of panpsychism is not its ability to account for the data of observation, but its ability to account for the reality of consciousness.” Materialism still has this card, at least, to play.
Editor’s note: This article is sponsored by Palomar Editions, publisher of God, the Science, the Evidence. However, Discovery Institute staff were responsible for the editorial content of this posting.
