Spinoza's critics were quick to point out that in this view man is no longer responsible if he commits a crime nor deserving of praise in recompense for his good deeds, and that God is the author of sin. Spinoza's only answer was that rewards and punishments still have their use as motives, that evil is merely limitation and therefore not real, and that whatever is real is good. Vice, however, he holds, is as objectionable as pain or physical corruption. The same fatalistic consequences to morality are logically involved in the various forms of recent pantheistic monism. Modern Materialistic Fatalism Modern materialism, starting from the notion of matter as the sole original cause of all things, endeavours to elaborate a purely mechanical theory of the universe, in which its contents and the course of its evolution are all the necessary outcome of the original collocation of the material particles together with their chemical and physical properties and the laws of their action.
Mental states are merely by-products of material changes, but in no way modify the latter.
They are also described as subjective aspects of nervous processes, and as epiphenomena, but however conceived they are necessarily held by the disciples of the materialistic school to be incapable of interfering with the movements of matter or of entering in any way as efficient causes into the chain of events which constitute the physical history of the world. The position is in some ways more extreme than the ancient pagan fatalism. For, while the earlier writers taught that the incidents of man's life and fortune were inexorably regulated by an overwhelming power against which it was useless as well as impossible to strive, they generally held the common-sense view that our volitions do direct our immediate actions, though our destiny would in any case be realized. But the materialistic scientist is logically committed to the conclusion that while the whole series of our mental states are rigidly bound up with the nervous changes of the organism, which were all inexorably predetermined in the original collocation of the material particles of the universe, these mental states themselves can in no way alter the course of events or affect the movements of a single molecule of matter. The Refutation of Fatalism of all types lies in the absurd and incredible consequences which they all entail.