# Does quantum mechanics debunk materialism? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [April 4, 2018, 4:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-quantum-mechanics-debunk-materialism/811782 "2018-04-04T04:58:45Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/half_man_half_wit/32/21766_2.png) [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Half_Man_Half_Wit)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2018, 4:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-quantum-mechanics-debunk-materialism/811782/61 "2018-04-08T16:10:59Z")
> [@GreenWyvern](#): > > This is exactly where you are not ‘getting’ what Hart is saying. In fact, Hart himself says something very similar to what you’ve said above. His own argument is quite different. I’m not parsing this. He says something similar to me, yet his argument is quite different? Why don’t you tell me, in your words, what argument you think he’s making, and how it gets around the fact that the notion of God he intends to defend is simply superfluous fat to be trimmed off one’s ontology without loss? > [@](#): > > It’s similar to the major gap between pop-science and hard science. There’s pop-religion and there’s ‘hard’ religion and philosophy. The flaw in this sort of argument, however, is that the hoi polloi doesn’t practice science or philosophy, but is by far the largest group that actually practices religion—that actually believes in some notion of god or God, actually worships, actually kills one another because the other happened to cook the wrong meat or work on the wrong day or make the wrong drawing. I’ve little issue with the sort of rarefied notion of religion advocated by Hart et al., it’s just that it doesn’t have anything to do with religion as people actually live and practice it. Characterizing all of this practice, belief and worship as ‘no true religion’ strikes me as almost devious—it’s like washing one’s hands after the fact. That sort of belief isn’t due to ‘real’ religion, and the atrocities committed by Stalin aren’t due to ‘real’ communism, and so on. No, religion is not defined by the navel-gazing of a small minority of philosophers—not that I begrudge them this navel-gazing; at worst, it’s a few hours time wasted, not really any more harmful than spending a weekend binging the new season of your favorite Netflix series, although, it has to be said, not terribly more productive either. Religion is what people actually believe in, it’s the beliefs actually held by people worshiping and going to church, the temple or the synagogue. If you end up, in your defense of religion, having to postulate entities nobody ever has genuinely worshiped, or even really believed in (and there is a question of just how much one can believe in something one can’t even imagine), then I suggest maybe you’re not really doing what you think you’re doing, but instead, inventing some new philosophical system out of the whole cloth. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but if that’s what you’re doing, be honest about it, and don’t try to grab some form of authoritative legitimization from a few millennia of religious tradition. > [@](#): > > Hart on why the materialist view is not sufficient: That’s a collection of assertions that ultimately are neither substantiated, nor really argued for (other than giving a spurious ‘definition’ of ‘the physical’ that I’d be surprised to see any physicalist accepting). Similar assertions can easily be made about religion, or idealism, but this wouldn’t be debate, it would merely be shouting. > [@](#): > > I’m quoting David Bentley Hart because his book is the best I’ve come across in answer to the ‘new atheists’ such as Dawkins, etc. I have little love for the new atheists, but Hart isn’t actually answering their arguments—which target the sort of religions people actually follow, rather than Hart’s abstraction. So to claim that they fail with respect to that abstraction is simply to say that one hasn’t understood their main concerns. Putting it bluntly, Dawkins et al. target the sort of religion that makes people blow up one another; nobody would blow up anybody based on belief in Hart’s ill-defined ‘oneness as such’, whatever he thinks that may be. So these arguments may indeed not have much to do with (Hart’s notion of) God, but the problem here is that this notion of God doesn’t have much to do with religion as practiced. ---
**Author:** ![CurtC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ce73a5/32.png) [@CurtC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CurtC)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2018, 4:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-quantum-mechanics-debunk-materialism/811782/62 "2018-04-08T16:45:42Z")
> [@GreenWyvern](#): > > Hart on why the materialist view is not sufficient: > > > [@](#): > > > > The question of existence is real, comprehensible, and unavoidable, and yet it lies beyond the power of naturalism to answer it, or even to ask it. An old and particularly sound metaphysical maxim says that between existence and nonexistence there is an infinite qualitative difference. It is a difference that no merely quantitative calculation of processes or forces or laws can ever overcome. Physical reality cannot account for its own existence for the simple reason that nature—the physical—is that which by definition already exists; existence, even taken as a simple brute fact to which no metaphysical theory is attached, lies logically beyond the system of causes that nature comprises; it is, quite literally, “hyperphysical,” or, shifting into Latin, super naturam. Is he the guy who wrote “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”? It sounds similar. ---
**Author:** ![QuickSilver](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quicksilver/32/7832_2.png) [@QuickSilver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/QuickSilver)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2018, 4:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-quantum-mechanics-debunk-materialism/811782/63 "2018-04-08T16:51:43Z")
> [@Half\_Man\_Half\_Wit](#): > > So these arguments may indeed not have much to do with (Hart’s notion of) God, but the problem here is that this notion of God doesn’t have much to do with religion as practiced. To the extent that there are “new” atheists, there are also new deists who use scientific concepts they don’t understand to explain a non traditional New Age God. So it’s fine that they want to strike out on their own, leaving behind traditional religions as practiced. Trouble is, they seem to think that shedding that baggage is all it takes to lend their new age ideology credibility. They think science will do their heavy lifting for them because the concept of QM are sufficiently abstract to the point where very few people are able to really understand it, thus new age pseudo-science is good enough to fool most people most of the time. But the fact is, New Age Deists have all their work still ahead of them, i.e. Hart et al. ---
**Author:** ![Stately\_Greek\_Automaton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/aca169/32.png) [@Stately\_Greek\_Automaton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stately_Greek_Automaton)\ **Post date:** [April 8, 2018, 7:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-quantum-mechanics-debunk-materialism/811782/64 "2018-04-08T19:43:36Z")
Given that there are a few different interpretations of quantum mechanics (Copenhagen, Pilot Wave) I’m going to go with no, until we can actually nail down specifically what it is. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-quantum-mechanics-debunk-materialism/811782.md?page=3)