Question 1  

Is any segment of society immune from espousing silly ideas?

"Tell me about yourself," the young pediatrician said.

Wearing a starched white coat over his Army uniform, the doctor sat behind his desk regarding me gravely through horn-rimmed glasses. I stared back, baffled. It sounded like something a psychiatrist might say, not a pediatrician! The silence became uncomfortable. The partitions of the Army clinic were flimsy, and I could hear a buzz of activity out in the crowded waiting room.

I always dreaded talking to doctors, those intimidating authority figures with mysterious powers to cure obscure, life-threatening illnesses. Army clinics were busy, and in those days we didn't consult a doctor for colds and minor problems. I often felt the obligation to convince them my problem was sufficiently grave. However on this particular occasion no one was sick, and I hadn't arrived at the pediatrician's office in my usual state of anxiety. I'd brought my three-year-old son to the clinic, not because I thought something was wrong with him, but because a neighbor had suggested it. I would have felt foolish admitting I'd brought my child to a doctor simply because of a neighbor, so I explained Tony didn't talk much, was still in diapers, and maybe he should have a checkup. But instead of examining Tony, the doctor kept trying to initiate personal conversation.

"How do you like the new administration in Washington?" he asked.

"It's exciting, isn't it?"

"Society will be in trouble unless people start taking responsibility for their own lives," the doctor said disapprovingly. "People expect the government to do everything for them."

I admired Kennedy, our new young president, but apparently this doctor and I would disagree on politics. I sat silently waiting for him to begin examining Tony.

"So, tell me about yourself," he said again.

Tony was busy examining the contents of the wastebasket. "Tony sometimes has a pretty violent temper,” I finally said, hoping to return the doctor's attention to his patient. Maybe one of Tony's glands needed adjusting or something.

"Does he understand what you say to him?" the doctor asked.

"I'm never sure. He rarely does what I tell him, but he's very independent and stubborn."

Tony was on his knees, his little blue-jean-clad rear end up in the air and his head on the floor, trying to see under a partition into the next office. If anyone were on the other side of that partition, they'd probably feel uncomfortable to see his bright, inquisitive little face peeking up at them. I picked him up and held him on my lap.

"How does he get along with other children?"

I thought a moment. "I don't think I've noticed him play with other children."

"Does he have opportunities to be around them?"

"Off and on, I guess. Actually, he doesn't play with his brother and sister very much." I admitted.

"Where do you live?"

"In a big old house on a hill behind San Rafael."

"You own your home?" I nodded. "You are lucky to own property in such a valuable area."

He seemed to expect a response, so I tried to think of one. "The house is a hundred years old and has termites," I said. "In the coming depression, it probably won't be worth what we paid for it."

"We don't have depressions any more," the doctor scoffed.

Many of us who grew up during the thirties, sometimes accused of having depression mentalities, didn't really trust prosperity, but the doctor's comment seemed condescending. "You are probably too young to know what a depression is," I said.

The doctor frowned. I was startled by my own impertinence. Suffering from shyness, I was rarely rude or impudent. Perhaps the doctor was making an effort to be friendly. Army doctors were not known for a bedside manner, but I'd never before encountered one with either time or inclination for such personal conversation.

"Tell me about your husband," he said after a moment.

Tony slid off my lap to examine the scales. Again, I was baffled. I couldn't imagine why our personal lives might be of concern to this pediatrician. Surely he wasn't interested in Ike's vital statistics, such as height, weight or eye-color. "He's stationed in Greenland at the moment," I said.

"Uh-oh! That's bad." Another strange comment for an Army doctor to make. There was nothing unusual about overseas duty in military families. I eyed the doctor silently, and he continued. "How do you feel about your husband's absence?"

"Well he'll be home in a couple of months."

The doctor glanced at Tony. After trying to turn the valves under the sink, Tony had crawled onto a bookcase. With a self-satisfied smile, he crouched on the bottom shelf like a life-sized bookend.

"Ever since you came, your little boy has been running around the office examining the equipment. He's paid no attention to me. Why he's hardly aware I'm in the room!"

You haven't done anything but talk, I thought, and Tony doesn't understand much of that. However I wasn't accustomed to arguing with doctors, and I nodded.

"Your child is not normal," he said.

"You really think so?"

His words seemed to have no impact upon me. After all, he hadn't examined Tony. He acted as though he thought his purpose was to examine me, Tony's mother. I listened to the doctor make another appointment for us, but I was puzzling over what on earth this peculiar pediatrician had been up to for the past half-hour.

In 1961, many of us had only a vague understanding of psychiatry, the new technology for repairing malfunctioning psyches. If we laymen didn’t understand the scientific details -- well, we didn’t understand how the atom bomb or penicillin worked either. The pediatrician’s questions didn’t alarm me. Whatever a psyche, an Id or a superego consisted of, I was confident there was nothing wrong with mine.

At that time, psychiatry claimed that virtually all mental illness was caused by
bad parenting. That included schizophrenia, alcoholism, and even homosexuality. Bruno Bettelheim, a well-known psychologist, had convinced the medical profession that autism, a childhood disorder few of us had heard of, was caused by "maternal rejection". Treatment consisted of therapists (usually men) conducting an investigation to determine why mother was rejecting her child -- but trying to speak in terms that disguised the offensive nature of their accusation.

My ignorance of psychiatry would soon be remedied. I was about to receive “counseling”, the standard treatment at that time for the mother of an autistic child. The psychologists and psychiatrists involved were well-intentioned. We were all victims of faulty science. My “therapy” would change me, all right, but not in ways the therapists anticipated. I learned more about Freud, including his assertion that “masturbation, condoms and suppressed sexual fantasies cause impotence, consumption, paralysis, seizures and insanity.”  Instead of persuading me that I rejected my child, the psychologists would convince me that there is nothing infallible about science.  Scientists are as susceptible to silly ideas as the rest of us.

Fifty years ago the absurdities of Freudianism psychology were accepted as scientific truth.  Just fifty years ago!  Does anyone doubt that some of what we now call scientific truth will appear absurd fifty years from now?

                                   ***  

Freud, Marx and Darwin have often been named as the three materialists of the 20th Century. Marxism is in decline. Darwinism is being hotly debated. Freud suggested that our thoughts were a mechanical process, over which we have little control. Few people still accept the Freudian notion that faulty parenting cause autism, mental illness or homosexuality. However some people still argue the materialist notion that ‘thinking’ is nothing more than mechanical brain interactions and chemical reactions. 

                      Questions about Materialism

Many materialists are atheists, and many non materialists are religious, attributing everything to God. However theism is not the only alternative to materialism. Panpsychism, for instance, proposes that free-will, subjective choice, has always been an intrinsic ingredient of reality. The “laws” of nature are merely entrenched habits of actions by a spontaneous, volitional, creative reality. “Laws” concerning inanimate matter are habits so entrenched that deviations cannot be detected by existing measuring methods (except perhaps at the quantum level). Living organisms, on the other hand, all retain some limited ability to respond creatively and purposefully. They can be easily observed overriding habits and instincts. The universe is an intelligent democracy in the process of designing itself. The “design” of inanimate matter may be pretty entrenched by this time, but living organisms are still to some extent a design in process.

At the moment the materialists seem to be in control of academia, and they are not shy about wielding their power to silence non materialistic views.  Some materialists go so far as to claim materialism is the only permissible “scientific” view of reality, and they have persuaded a court to prohibit theories involving free will and intelligent causation from being considered in biology classrooms.   Has science become so intolerant as to condone banning conflicting views from consideration?  As a religious agnostic, I don't speculate about the origin of mass, energy, gravity,  electromagnitism, creative intellignce -- or anything else.  However I have no objection to those who attribute the creative intelligence of nature to a deity.  Only evalgelical atheists feel obligated to fight any concept that might be consistent with theism.

                                                ****

The book on this web site, Questions about Materialism, will not be published. IUniverse feels someone might sue them. They weren’t specific about who they fear might take them to court. Surely they don’t fear that Freud might show up from beyond the grave with a lawyer!  I offered to remove anything iUniverse feared might be potentially libelous, but they still refused.  The only difference between the book iUniverse has already published and the book they now refuse to publish are the questions I asked at the beginning of each chapter. “What is intelligence?” “Does free will exist?” “Does belief in an immaterial soul require belief in a personal god?” Apparently some employee at iUniverse fears the very asking of such questions threatens their personal religion, the religion of materialism.

Ben Stein  has a movie coming out called "Expelled, no intelligence allowed", an account of how academics have been harassed, lost their jobs and denied tenure for questioning  materialist concepts.