It's a Mad Materialist World

Superstition and Avatar II

Is the world ultimately personal or impersonal?  The Christian position is clear, without ambiguity.  If a hair falls from one's head or a sparrow dies, such apparently random events are indeed ultimately personal in the sense that they are at the will, command, and direction of a person--the Living God.  When a hair falls from one's head it is from the Lord.  When the sparrow dies, it is by the Lord's will and command.  Even what appears to us to be the most random act is actually not; it is infinitely personal. 

The lot is cast into the lap,
But its every decision is from the Lord.
Proverbs 16:33

Modern man has a diametrically opposed view.  His confession of faith is that the world is ultimately random and impersonal.  Since there is no person behind it all, the universe is thoroughly and ultimately impersonal.  What is just is.  And what exists is just matter, or more precisely, matter, energy and motion.  That's it.
  Everything, literally everything, can be reduced to a trinity of these three, and ultimately to inanimate energy.  We call this view materialism.  Here is Vern Poythress's description of the West's official, established religion:

According to materialism, the world consists in matter and energy and motion.  The world is physical in its most basic and deepest structure.  Everything else is built up from complex combinations and interactions of matter and energy and motion.  Elementary particles form into atoms; atoms form into molecules; molecules form into larger structures like crystals and living cells; cells form organs and organisms; and each one of us is such and organism.  The structure of our brains leads to complex humans actions and thoughts, and these lead to human meaning.  [Vern Poythress, Inerrancy and Worldview: Answering Modern Challenges to the Bible (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2012), p. 28.]

And here are some of the implications of this established religion:

According to materialism, the universe as we know it originated in the big bang.  Human beings are random products of biological evolution, so we have no particular distinct significance except what we create for ourselves  The goal of living is whatever each of us as an individual chooses.  But the cosmos as a whole has no goal, no purpose.  And it looks as though life itself is only temporary, because the winding down of the amount of free energy in the universe will eventually make it impossible for life to exist.  The universe will end up cold and inert.  

According to this view, there is nothing wrong with the world--the world simply is.  There is no afterlife.  Morality is a by-product of the human brain in its biological structure and human social interaction. (Ibid.)

Imagine we were watching a fierce debate over the meaning of life.  Imagine in the heat of debate one of the protagonists pulled out a gun and shot his opponent dead.  Materialism requires us to acknowledge that the shooter won the debate.  There was no retort after the shot, no counterpoint was made.  Silence represents defeat.  There was no true moral significance or portent to one shooting the other.  There is nothing actually wrong with the one shooting the other. Any suggestions of morality reflect only social conventions, which are really nothing more than prejudices--and stupid at that, because they are merely superstitions.

Few people really believe such dogma--although every so often you meet people who claim that they do.  The vast majority of ordinary folk are only nominal believers in the materialist religion.  They confess it to be true when it is convenient.  But they spend most of their lives adding superstition upon superstition to give themselves a modicum of comfort. 

They long for human significance.  They find ways of adding more comfortable extra stories onto the materialist substructure of matter and energy and motion.  Some people may add a religious dimension of a pantheistic sort.  They may postulate a kind of spiritual "energy" in the cosmos, with which they can commune.  Nature becomes "Mother Nature."  As a society, we become pluralistic in our views of human significance, just as we are pluralistic in many other respects.  We autonomously choose which ideas we wish to embrace, even when those ideas are at odds with reality. (Ibid, p. 28,29.)

Doubtless if we just took a superficial sounding of everyday human actions and beliefs we might conclude that materialism is not the established and accepted religion of our culture.  People do not act as if it were.  But the reality remains: materialism rules in the kitchen.  Everything else is superstitious comfort food. 

This ultimate impersonalism often goes together with some kind of acknowledgement of personal significances.  In fact, it is no so hard for some people to desire to reanimate dead matter by ascribing semi-personal characteristics to phenomena of nature.  We already mentioned the expression "Mother Nature".  Such an expression gives to nature semi-personal characteristics. 

If matter is at the bottom of everything, there is continuity between human beings and trees. . . . A hard-nosed scientific materialism in one part of the mind can actually be combined with a soft yearning for communion with spirits; people can travel toward new forms of animism, spiritism, polytheism, and pantheism  Everyday, people within advanced industrial societies are looking into astrology and fortune-telling and spirits and meditation.  That direction might seem paradoxical.  But actually it is not surprising.  In principle a thoroughgoing materialism breaks down all hard-and-fast distinctions within the world.  If a materialist viewpoint is correct all is one.  And the many--the diversity of phenomena--all flow into this one.  (Ibid., p. 30,31.)

Cosmic impersonalism produces rampant superstition where personality and personalism is ascribed to physical matter, whether living or inert.  A new animism emerges--just as debilitating  and silly as the old animism.  Meanwhile, the hard nosed materialists breathlessly await Avatar II.