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While I agree materialism was rare in the past, there are still groups like the ancient Greek Atomists (such as the school of Epicurus) and the Charvaka school in India that believed in it. I'm more familiar with the Epicurean philosophy, but they are remarkably similar to contemporary materialists in their beliefs (except with a strange insistence on a "swerve" in atoms that is supposedly the foundation of a form of free will.) That said, Epicurus didn't deny the existence of the gods - he just asserted that they were made of atoms and didn't intervene in human affairs.
That aside, I'm actually curious what makes you think "mind" or "soul" or whatever it is you think explains and unifies ESP, free will and supernatural beings wouldn't be "material" in some relevant sense? Like, the material world already has radio waves and magnetism and many other forces that we can't see, but which we see the effects of in our everyday lives. What makes you so sure that ESP, if it exists, wouldn't just be one more invisible force that operates in our material world?
And if you believe in angels or demons or spiritual beings of that kind, why do you think that they wouldn't work in fundamentally similar ways to how we do? Maybe they wouldn't have bodies and brains exactly like ours, but if angels can "see", then surely their sight would rely on "spiritual atoms" bouncing off of their "spiritual eyes"? Otherwise, I'm curious what you think would be happening when an angel sees something? How do they come to a knowledge of what is happening in their surroundings, if not in a fundamentally pseudo-materialist way?
I mean... kind of, but they also lived steeped in a highly symbolic world. Even if they had beliefs that kind of rhyme with modern materialism, I'm highly skeptical that it would resemble our actual worldview. I tend to see these thinkers as proto-Enlightenment thinkers, the beginnings of the demythologization of the world that started with the Enlightenment and led to the modern materialist malaise.
For the ancients, everything was symbolic. Divinity and non-human agentic beings were everywhere and in everything. Even if there was a 'materialist' in those societies who professed to believe the gods were fake through logical reasoning, it would be like the masses of modern Christians who profess to believe in God and yet don't act as if he exists. They may have arrived at that stance, but we can't always choose our beliefs, especially our deepest ones.
I don't pretend to know what exactly was going on in the heart or mind of Epicurus. I can only speak of the writings of him and his school that come down to us in the modern day, and I would say Epicurus' letter to Herodotus and Lucretius' De Rerum Natura seem to prefigure a lot of modern materialism. While there are a few things a modern reader might scoff at (such as Lucretius' insistence on a flat Earth, at least a century after Aristotle collected the best arguments for a spherical Earth in one place), their basic conclusions about the afterlife, divine intervention and the supernatural are remarkably similar to a modern materialist.
I actually think you underestimate the degree to which the educated elites of Greek and Roman society might have already cast off the highly symbolic world they lived in. Look at Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, where at a meeting of several philosophers of different schools, they just offhandedly reject the traditional concept of Hades as the afterlife, and even call the idea foolish. Most ancient philosophers believed in gods of some sort, but that doesn't mean that their concepts weren't far removed from what the masses believed. Even as early as Socrates and Plato, most philosophers seemed to reject Homeric conceptions of gods as impious and immoral.
If you want to believe that the Greek Atomists couldn't "really" believe in materialism in their heart of hearts because of the culture they found themselves in, then I'm not sure how I could argue you out of that idea. Yes, hypocrites exist in every era, but surely you believe sincere people exist in every era as well, however rare they may be?
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Cartesian Dualism separates mind from matter and attempts to study matter separate from qualia or mental properties. The difference between ESP and Magnetism is that Magnets exist outside of an independent observer. There could have been a universe without life, but still had an electro-magnetic field. A universe without life wouldn't have psychokinesis, ESP, etc, because these are all things that require a mind.
That isn't to say that they couldn't be observed in a scientific and methodological way, nor that the laws governing them couldn't be discovered. But that is why they are typically withheld from the Materialist worldview.
I'm not sure I buy this explanation. Even if our minds are somehow made of soulstuff and not reducible to purely physical processes, I don't know why ESP would need to be explained using soulstuff?
Our eyes somehow get information to our minds/souls, and yet we can explain the basics of sight in purely physical terms. Light bounces off of objects, and hits our eyes. So a physical process gets information into our minds/souls.
Why would ESP need to be a non-physical, non-material process? I could easily see an explanation along the lines of:
Even if the specifics could be a little different from the above, I think it's a good starting point for thinking about what ESP even means in practice. Why do you think that is not what Western science will discover to be the case?
I'm not a Cartesian Dualist, so I don't have a horse in the race. But to test your hypothesis we would need to see if a non-mental physical substance can interact with ESP particles or if only living minds interact with ESP particles. If you lobotomize someone and remove the ESP sensory organ, do ESP particles still hit it? Or do ESP particles only hit sensory organs attached to a thinking mind?
There are some ways that Quantum Mechanics gets phrased that I wonder if it is touching on this mental issue, but sometimes it just seems to be sloppy phrasing by researchers.
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I believe that our entire scientific, logical system and much of our physics is based on binary or black and white thinking, and that ultimate Truths which religions claim to purvey are somehow above this sort of binary distinction.
Quantum fluctuations and other edge problems in physics are a good example of what I mean, but even here I think the framing of the problem is sorely lacking.
Basically I think we are deeply limited in our understanding of the world, and that we need to be far more humble than we have been when trying to learn more. Especially when it comes to complex systems such as people.
So angels and spiritual beings exist in essentially higher dimensions than ours…. But again I don’t think we have any concepts that can accurately explain. This is why mysticism and experiential understanding is so crucial for most religious practices.
Okay, but you didn't answer my question. Do you believe angels see? Or are angels blind in any meaningful sense of the word? (Perhaps they have other, completely non-analogous, ineffable senses of their own?)
I understand if you think my question is coming from an overly binary way of thinking, but I just think this is part of what unravels your entire project here. If angels have "senses" in the way we do, then those senses require an explanation of some kind. When a human being sees something, we can say it happens because light particles bounce off of objects and hit the human's eyes. You are asserting that angels can interact with the human sphere of experience, and are potentially the source of ESP. I'm open to the idea that both of those claims could be true.
However, when you remove angels and ESP from the realm of matter, I have difficulty understanding what exactly you are claiming. If angels are completely "immaterial" how do they interact with the world at all? How does a being that doesn't see, smell, hear, taste, or touch (since all of those rely on material processes as far as we know) interact with the material world at all? You say that angels might be the source of ESP, but how could an angel acquire information about, say, a squiggle on a card 50 miles away, if the card and the squiggle are all material objects that the angel should have no way of perceiving or interacting with?
If you're asserting that all material objects actually also exist and interact with the "spiritual" realm, and that there are spiritual analogues to all the traditional senses (spirit-sight, spirit-hearing, etc.) and that angels communicate with our astral bodies or whatever, then I would say that seems like an overly complicated theory. Why not just believe that angels are material beings made out of something like neutrinos or literal light that interact and communicate with us in the physical world?
Don't make me tap the Summa 😀
Ah, yes, I take as an axiom in my metaphysical beliefs, Psalm 103:4 "Who makes His angels spirits." Who could argue against that.
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I read through your excerpt from the Summa, and I don't feel like it properly dealt with my main objection.
The passage from the Summa that most directly touches my line of inquiry is:
However, I don't accept the "fact that intellect is above sense", and so I can't agree with Aquinas' conclusion that this proves there are some incorporeal things comprehensible by the intellect alone.
I also can't help but think that most of the angels of the Bible seem fairly corporeal. Did Jacob/Israel wrestle with a non-corporeal spirit that somehow broke his hip?
Aquinas supposedly deals with the objection that angels must be both spiritual and physical later, but I'm not actually convinced he's on good exegetical grounds here.
Aquinas seems to believe that angels can perform psychokinesis to produce physical effects. They can use psychokinesis to make sound waves, alter light, apply force, etc.
He lived in a world where everyone agreed that the mental and spiritual affected the physical on a daily basis.
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Hey man, I have difficulty understanding what I’m claiming too! We have that much in common.
To try and come at it another way, I think the word we use for ‘material’ or ‘physical’ causes traps is in a framework or mindset that causes us to lose quite a bit of understanding. While a materialist/scientific framework is useful, I believe we need a more wholistic framework to understand things like consciousness, morality, free will, time, and other high level concepts.
Hence why we’ve made little to no progress with these fields despite incredible investments of resources and energy.
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