Materialism

By 'materialism' I mean the view that all that exists exists within space and time (or if we adopt an Einstienian idiom, 'space-time'.) Thus materialism denies the God of orthodox Christianity, Judaism and Islam. It perhaps leaves room for a heterodox God. For all that I know, Spinoza's pantheistic God was simply space-time and its inhabitants. But of course most materialists deny even this heterodox God, and it is to them that I wish to speak. This atheistic materialism I will call 'modern materialism', or 'mm' for short.

mm relies upon a certain assumption that is not often remarked upon. The assumption is this: space and time, and the matter within it, have within themselves the power to maintain themselves in existence, i.e. they have what we might call 'existential interia'. It should be clear that mm does make this assumption. Matter, and the space and time that contain it, are all contigent beings. (By 'contingent' is meant 'able both to exist and not to exist'.) To this even the defender of mm must assent, for modern cosmological theory tells us that matter and space-time came into existence, and a thing that comes into existence is of course able not to exist.

Is this assumption of existential inertia reasonable for a defender of mm to make? I for one can think of no reason why it is. (As a matter of fact, I think that it is false. But the reason that I think it is false derives from my theism, and since I wish to undermine a variety of materialism that denies God's existence I am not free to simply introduce any theistic assmuptions.) When I think myself into the materialist point of view (a feat that I sometimes can carry out), I can think of no reason to hold that space-time and its contents could not easily 'wink' out of existence at any point in time.

Thus mm is not simply beset by its inability to explain the origins of the cosmos. It is beset as well by its inability to explain why it is that the cosmos continues to exist.

At one time I thought it not implausible for a materialist to deny that the principle of sufficient reason fails to hold at the origin of the cosmos but holds for all time thereafter. (This principle says that for every fact there is a sufficient reason or cause for its being as it is and not some other way.) But now I think that the situation is much worse for mm than this. For it seems to me now that the materialist has no reason to deny that the principle of sufficient reason fails at every moment the cosmos exists. This would be a continually ongoing violation of the principle of sufficient reason. That hardly seems reasonable to me.