Arnold Lunn - Critique of Scientific Materialism

Critique of Scientific Materialism

At the same time, Lunn, who was, in Evelyn Waugh's words, "restlessly reasonable", was becoming increasingly disconcerted by the intense subjectivism of his age, and in particular by what he saw as the abandonment of reason in the realm of popular science (though not of science itself). He saw this as deriving from the philosophy of scientific materialism — the (extra-scientific) assumption that science points inevitably to materialism and that everything can be explained solely in terms of material processes. (Today the philosophical stance he critiqued would be called metaphysical naturalism.) In 1930 Lunn published The Flight from Reason, in which he argued that scientific materialism is finally a philosophy of nihilism: it ends by questioning the very basis of its own existence. If materialism be true, Lunn argued, our thoughts are the mere product of material processes uninfluenced by reason. They are, therefore, determined by irrational processes, and the thoughts which lead to the conclusion that materialism is true have no basis in reason.