'Nothing-Buttery'

In Reflection #1, I introduced the Christian worldview, which is largely the way science has been approached, historically. This means acknowledging God as creator and sustainer of all things. This worldview makes sense of reality. One example of this would be the existence of mathematics and the laws of nature. Today I want to touch on a slightly different topic, and introduce you to the dangers of “nothing-buttery”. Some people get influenced with “nothing-but” thinking without even knowing it, and it is a terrible hazard indeed! So what is this problem? What is “nothing-buttery”? It’s sort of a funny way to say something else, which we’ll get to really shortly. I think an illustration might explain it best. Imagine that you want to make a cup of hot chocolate. You put a kettle on the stove, turn up the heat, and wait for the water to come to a boil. Now ask yourself the question, “Why is the water boiling?” It would be true if you said, “The kettle is boiling because the stove increases the kinetic energy of the water molecules, causing the vapour pressure of the liquid to overcome the atmospheric pressure.” But it would also be true if you said, “The kettle is boiling because I want to make some hot chocolate.” There is no conflict between those two answers. They are in fact complementary. They explain different aspects of the same event. The first answer explains the physical mechanism of how the water boils. The second answer explains why the water boils. “Nothing-buttery” is the problem of people only accepting the first sort of impersonal, mechanistic answer, and rejecting anything else beside that out-of-hand. The fancier name for this is “ontological reductionism”. Below are some examples of reductionism. You may have heard these said before. • Beethoven's 5th Symphony is nothing but vibrations in the air. • Love is nothing but biochemistry. • A photograph is just pixels on a screen. • Planet Earth is just a pale blue dot in space. • You are enough water to fill a ten-gallon barrel; enough fat for seven bars of soap; enough carbon for 9,000 lead pencils; enough phosphorus for 2,200 match heads; enough iron for one medium-sized nail... and that's it. Ontological reductionism considers only the physical composition of something, and then claims that it’s the full description of the thing itself. It’s a narrow way to look at things, to say the least. Words like ‘nothing but’, ‘simply’, ‘only’, and ‘just’ should flash warning signs for you to be on guard for nothing-buttery. Science, by and large, has been successful because it has had a humble goal, restricting itself to impersonal phenomena (like chemistry experiments in a laboratory) and seeking to answer the ‘how’ questions concerning process, mechanism, and physical makeup. The fact is that science trawls reality with a coarse-grained net. That’s not to put science down at all, but just to recognize where it fits in the whole scheme of things. But with reductionism, people think that these sorts of explanations are the only explanations that count! But this is non-sense. Let’s consider two different books: a travel guide and a collection of poems. At the atomic and molecular level they both consist of the same assortment of atoms. These atoms are even grouped together in the same way, forming cellulose molecules, on which carbon (in the form of printer’s ink), is placed on. The books may even have the same mass, volume, and shape. In fact, both of them will even be full of the same sorts of 26 distinct shapes, such as ‘a’, ‘r’, ‘j’, ‘e’, grouped together in similar ways. But what is different is the way the words are organized to give meaning. And this meaningful information is the most important part of a book. Let’s consider music again. The “nothing-but” account of music is that it’s just a pattern of air pressure on the eardrum producing auditory stimuli in your nervous system. This is true far as it goes, but it is clearly not a full description, and it’s inadequate to pretend that it is a full description. An explanation of the deep mystery of music – how a temporal sequence of sounds can speak of beauty and invoke thought and emotion – is in a completely different category than air pressure and eardrums. An important reason I warn you about reductionism, aside from it being intellectually unsatisfactory, is that it is mind-shriveling. Consider the famous scientist Charles Darwin. It was a reductionist mindset that led him to say that "a scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, -- a mere heart of stone". I think that’s completely false. A truly scientific person should be full of wonder, awe, curiosity, and delight in discovering new things. That’s the exact opposite of a ‘heart of stone’. Later in his life Charles Darwin wrote an autobiography for his children where he expressed one regret. Consider his words carefully, “Up to the age of 30 or beyond it, poetry of many kinds gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare… Formerly, pictures gave me considerable, and music very great, delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost any taste for pictures or music… I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did… My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive… The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.” That is a tragedy, because we’re not machines for grinding out general laws from facts. We’re persons made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). Reductionism narrows your view of the world to only the impersonal, and your mind shrivels to match that worldview. Over time, you become cold, impersonal, and unable to enjoy beauty and wonder. And that is a terrible state to be in. Personally, I don’t feel threatened or aggravated by people who assert only “nothing-but” explanations. I’m saddened. They’re missing out on so much in the world. The universe, as God’s creation, rings deeply with beauty, glory, and purpose. And we are part of that creation. The ancient King David, in the 19th chapter of the book of Psalms, wrote, The heavens proclaim the glory of God. The skies display his craftsmanship. Day after day they continue to speak; night after night they make him known. They speak without a sound or word; their voice is never heard. Yet their message has gone throughout the earth, and their words to all the world. God has made a home in the heavens for the sun. It bursts forth like a radiant bridegroom after his wedding. It rejoices like a great athlete eager to run the race. (Psalm 19:1-5) So my encouragement to you is that in all your educational endeavours, whether they be scientific or not, don’t fall down the slippery slope of “nothing-buttery”. Respond to the following questions. 1. What is “nothing-buttery”? Give an example. 2. Now, imagine a crime scene where someone has been poisoned. State of a few different types of explanations the police detectives may be interested in.