The Problem With Materialism

All Brawn and No Brain

Sometimes the West seems to resemble a plane flying into the Twin Towers.  Western civilisation is crumbling, tearing apart, falling down.  Its centre cannot hold.  It leads many to panic.  Questions like What is going on?  or Why is this happening? are increasingly commonplace.

In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis began by making a commonplace enough observation about society in his day.  He writes:

Everyone has heard people quarrelling.  Sometimes it sounds funny and sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but, however it sounds, I believe we can learn something very important  from listening to the kinds of things they say.  They say things like this: "How'd you like it if anyone did the same to you?"-- "That's my seat, I was there first"--"Leave him alone, he isn't doing you any harm"--"Why should you shove in first?"--"Give me a piece of your orange, I gave you a bit of mine"--"Come on, you promised."  People say things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and children as well as grown ups.  [C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (London: Fontana Books, 1956), p. 15.]

Despite a radical change in the dominant world-and-life view from what held fast in Lewis's day to our own, we can all identify with the kind of discourse Lewis describes above.  People still think and speak in these kinds of categories.  What are we to make of this?  Lewis continues:

The Parlous State of Particle Physics

"I Know Nothing"

We came across a hilarious piece by David Berlinski the other day, lampooning the current state of particle physics.

But some background is in order.  Back in the day, Christians and Jesus Christ used to be lampooned by secularists and atheists for the "God of the gaps" reflex.  This was when secularist and materialist science was in its heyday.  The science v. religion paradigm was portrayed as knowledge versus ignorance.  Before the rise--and dominance--of the secularist paradigm, the ignorant explained what they did not know or understand with reference to a Deity.  "Why do rainbows exist?"  Answer: "I don't know.  God knows and He makes them."  But as more and more knowledge came into existence about the natural world of matter and how it works, the gaps in our knowledge shrank.  Consequently, the "God of the gaps" got smaller and smaller.

We don't need God any more to explain things, said the secularists and materialists.  They happily retired Him to the House of Lords, whilst everyone got on with genuine reality.

Dumb and Dumber

How the West Was Lost

The dominant--indeed, established--religion of our day is materialistic atheism.  Put into doctrinal form, its profession of faith is as follows:

All that exists is matter: there is nothing else.
Matter exists by chance.

Naturally, these two proposition result in a rather barren, empty existence.  It is impossible to make any  meaning of one's life, let alone the cosmos.  It is hard to believe anything when everything is supposedly irrational.

In order to cope with the resultant crisis, folk just invent things.  Consequently, most in the West live in a make-believe world--one made up to impart the appearance of sense, meaning, significance and rationality.  It can be described as living in a make-believe world viewed through Alice's looking glass.

One pop manifestation of this make-believe world is a near universal belief in luck, or the "stars".  From the Christian perspective it comes as no surprise at all that our popular culture is deeply wedded to astrology--the belief that astral bodies providentially govern some, if not all, things in the world.

An Ancient Greek Myth

A Real-Life Indiana Jones Movie

Many of the ancient Greek philosophers were animists.  The basic idea is that the rock is "alive".  Or, to flip it around, when one is confronted with life, we really have a peculiar arrangement of dead matter.  So, take the thrush songbird and its beautiful morning chorus.  Clearly the thrush is quickened with life itself (whatever that might be), but the ancient Greek animist said, not really.  It is just inanimate matter in a peculiar configuration.  

This idea rules amongst the materialistic scientists (who control the Academy in our generation).  To account for life out of dead, inanimate, and impersonal matter the Academy coined a fancy word--which the credulous found a compelling argument in and by itself.  That word was "abiogenesis".  The theory of the origins of life represented by that word was:  a) that the earliest life forms on earth developed from non-living matter; and, b) living organisms arose spontaneously from inanimate matter, by spontaneous generation.  Abiogenesis is now thoroughly debunked, except for the invincibly ignorant animists.

No matter how many verbal smoke screens are puffed out, stupid is as stupid does.  And secularist science is pretty stupid at this point.

The Rise of Superstitions and the Demonic

East Meets West, and West Meets East

The Christian faith drives out demons.  It also drives out superstition.  During the public ministry of Jesus, demonic possession was commonplace.  Modern secularist scholars have asserted that what passes for demonic possession in the Gospels was actually mental illness.  Thus, they interpret the testimonies concerning the demonic in Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Acts to be superstitious ignorance.

There is nothing new in this: it is precisely what one would expect secularists to claim.  Demons, according to the secularists and atheists, don't exist because we can't see, touch, taste, or empirically put them in a lab to experiment upon them.  The Bible, however, is emphatically clear on these matters: the Serpent in Genesis is the liar from the beginning.  Those who don't believe in the existence of the Satan are those most enthralled under his deceit.

The Great Petard

Try Harder

It turns out that Clint Eastwood is a profound cosmologist.  The best of the best, one may say.

The real question of the ages for the materialists and secularists is, Why does the universe exist at all?  For the Unbelieving cosmolgist it is a question inside a riddle, wrapped in an enigma.

David Berlinski rings the changes:

Oxford's Peter Atkins has attempted to address this issue.  "If we are to be honest," he argues, "then we have to accept that science will be able to claim success only if it achieves what many might think impossible: accounting for the emergence of everything from absolutely nothing."  Atkins does not seem to recognize that when the human mind encounters the thesis that something has emerged from nothing, it is not encountering a question to which any coherent answer exists.  [The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009), p.95f.]  

How have the materialist cosmologists fared?  About as expected.  The problem is sufficiently complex that the problem itself defies a simple description.  But we will put our materialist hat on and advance one anyway.  Since we know that all being is some sort of combination of time and space and matter and energy and since we know there is nothing else, how did these come into existence out of nothing?

Berlinski points out that physicist Victor Stenger has had a crack at the problem.

A Canard Atop a Mirage

If It Can Be Described, It Cannot Possibly Be True

Darwin and evolutionism are increasingly under fire from secular scientists.  In 1981, a senior paleontologist of the British Natural History Museum was delivering a lecture to his trans-Atlantic colleagues at the American Museum of Natural History.

He acknowledged that Darwinism was being surrounded by an increasing number of doubting-Thomas scientists.  He argued that,

Darwin's theory of natural selection is under fire and scientists are no longer sure of its general validity.  Evolutionists increasingly talk like creationists in that they point to a fact but cannot provide an explanation of the means.  [Phillip Johnson, Darwin on Trial (Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity Press, 2nd ed., 1993), p. 9f.; quoted by Douglas F. Kelly, Creation and Change: Genesis 1:1 -- 2:4 in the light of Changing Scientific Paradigms (Fearn, Ross-shire: Mentor/Christian Focus Publications, 1997), p.24.]

Others are more blunt.  Take, for example, Lynn Margulis, Professor of Biology at the University of Massachusetts:

She shows that molecular biology has as yet been unable to demonstrate the formation of a single new species by mutations, and concludes that neo-Darwinism is "a minor twentieth-century religious sect within the sprawling religious persuasion of Anglo-Saxon biology." [Kelly, ibid.]

Ouch.  A "minor twentieth-century religious sect"!  Could you put the matter in a less equivocal manner, Professor?

Myths Which Dominate Our Culture

Living the Good Life

Scientism is the belief that the only existing reality is matter, time, space, and waves.  One can learn truths and make discoveries about matter by means of physical sciences.  There is no other way to truth and knowledge.  

All materialists are expositors of the philosophy of scientism, or when inconsistent with the hard, brute realities of scientism, they become mere sentimentalists.  Imagine the materialist scientist professing his devotion and love to a female who has caught his eye.  "Why do you want to shack up with me?", she inquires.  "Will your love be exclusive, permanent--the love of lifelong fidelity--or will it be the passing moment of a biological urge?"

"Ah, my dearest, I love you," he breaths fervently.  But as materialists both the breather and the one breathed upon know that he is lying and his words are mere vanity.

Good Friday

Cosmic Personalism At Work

Many people in the West have adopted what we may call the Buddhist view of the death of Christ.  The crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth has meaning, even great significance, in the Buddhist world-view.  For the Buddhist, life is pain and suffering.  The goal is to escape existence and achieve nothingness.  For the Buddhist, the Cross of Christ signifies the essence of life, which is suffering.

 This view of life equates roughly to the materialist, secularist view, prominent in the West.  Existence and self-consciousness is a random consequence of the collision of sub-atomic particles.  The great goal--the only true goal of this life--is to escape the existence of self-conscious being which is a mirage and reach the state of impersonal non-being which is the truth and the future of all.

Both the Buddhist and the Western materialist have the same view of Jesus dying at Calvary.  The Cross witnesses to the vale of tears that is existence in this life.  It supposedly makes humans long for the state of nothingness when all consciousness will cease and personhood will dissipate like a cloud of vapour.  Both the Buddhist and the Western materialist recognise the Cross as a siren call teaching us to yearn for our future of non being and nothingness.

The Christian doctrine of Jesus on Calvary's cross could not be more diametrically opposed to these interpretations.

Sparrow Excrescence

Fish Or Cut Bait

Poor Alan Duff.  He's pretty angry about religion--any religion.  Readers not from New Zealand may not know that Alan Duff is the author of the celebrated book (later a movie) Once Were Warriors.  It exposes the degradation of gang violence in New Zealand.  Alan doesn't like gang violence.  He does not like crime.  He also does not like child illiteracy.  He has spent a good deal of effort trying to encourage children to read.

It turns out that he does not like Jesus Christ, either.  Having announced that he is a devotee of Big Bang evolutionism, aka atheism, and a devoted disciple of Richard Dawkins, he derides the Christ.  He says of a visit to a cathedral in Bayonne:

I can't wait to get out of there as I feel such a hypocrite with thoughts of wondering how on earth Jesus Christ not only got away with his preposterous ideas but that they went on to become one of the great religions of the world.

If someone like Jesus turned up now, declaring himself the son of God, he'd be declared mentally unwell and given help. Except in America where they'd be hostile and the guy would be homeless. In a Muslim country he wouldn't last two minutes.  [NZ Herald]

He also cannot stand alleged hypocrites.

How did white Christian church-goers in America attend church every Sunday and the same - or any other - day dish out corporal punishment to their Negro slaves?  Why is the death penalty in the USA carried out by the most religiously minded states? Why did the Church of England approve capital punishment for children as late as Victorian times?

Alan is a man bristling with morality, condemnation, outrage.  Not that he does not have his heroes and his prophets.

Bang, Bang. You're Dead.

False Allegiances and Irrelevance

We have often observed that the materialistic atheists amongst us are often the most strident moralisers in the market place.  They are always telling us what they deem to be right and wrong, moral and immoral, evil and good.  Islam, insists Richard Dawkins, is a perverse, wicked thing.  Christianity is so morally bankrupt that any parent who attempts to teach its basic doctrines to her or her child, should suffer their children to be removed from their care.  Morally bankrupt?

Christopher Hitchens, whilst alive, thundered like a Titan against totalitarianism, communism, and any authoritarian standard within his line of sight. He thought abortion was OK, but grabbing someone off the street and torturing them was very bad form.  All of which was and is entertaining but hardly relevant to materialism or atheism, let alone their conjoint.

There is an instructive video entitled Collision in which Christopher Hitchens debates Douglas Wilson.

Professing Wisdom, Manifesting Childishness

The Absurdity of Materialistic Atheism

David Berlinski writes:

Ever since the great scientific revolution was set in motion by Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton, it has been a commonplace of commentary that the more that science teaches us about the natural world, the less important a role human beings play in the grand scheme of things.  "Astronomical observations continue to demonstrate," Victor Stenger affirms, "that the earth is no more significant than a single grain of sand on a vast beach."  What astronomical observations may, in fact, have demonstrated is that the earth is no more numerous than a single grain of sand on a vast beach. Significance is, of course, otherwise.   Nonetheless, the inference is plain: What holds for the earth holds as well for human beings.  They hardly count, and scientists like Stenger are not disposed to count them at all.  It is, as science writer Tom Bethell notes, "an article of our secular faith that thee is nothing exceptional about human life." . . . .

Neither scientific credibility nor sound good sense is at issue in any of these declarations.  They are absurd; they are understood to  be absurd; and what is more, assent is demanded just because they are absurd.  "We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs,"  the geneticists Richard Lewontin remarked equably in The New York Review of Books, "in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories." [Author's emphasis. David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009), p. 8f.]

It is truly baffling how those secularists who, by profession scientists, can proceed in such a confused, irrational, illogical, and absurd manner.

It's All Relative, Said the Rabbit

The Madding Crowd

In his book, A Hobbit Journey, author Matthew Dickerson reflects upon why aspects of the writings of J R R Tolkien jar so gratingly upon the ear of the modern Westerner.  The world view of the Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion reflects a cosmos with moral absolutes and true moral guilt.  It portrays evil as a personal hatred and malice towards others.  Increasingly in the West, this simply "does not compute". 

Such notions of true moral good and evil are being washed out of the modern mind.  Or the attempt is being made to wash them out.  Firstly, take materialism--the dominant worldview in the West, along with its kissing cousins of atheism, secularism, and progressivism.  In all these variants, there is no such thing as absolute, objective good or evil, right or wrong.  So-called evils are merely the result of particular or societal programming.  Morality and immorality is akin to--in fact, can be identified with--programming the machine.  We are what we are because of the alignment of electrons and quarks.  "We are what we are because we're not what we used to  be."

Anthropologist Ruth Benedict, writing in 1934, described this Brave New World: 

The Reason Many Despise Tolkien's Work

Faux Protests and Outrage

We have been recently working through Matthew Dickerson's A Hobbit Journey (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press/Baker Publishing, 2012).  Dickerson has a PhD from Cornell and teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont.  In A Hobbit Journey, he attempts an exposition of Tolkien's world-and-life view as it emerges in The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.

At one point he takes up the issue of why Tolkien is loathed by many of the high priests and prophets of our secularist age. He argues that it is due in significant part to Tolkien's notions of objective morality and moral responsibility.  He explains:

Objective morality--or what some people call "moral absolutes"--is a definition of good and evil that is real and true for every person (and every culture), regardless of whether that person (or culture) happens to believe it to be true. [Dickerson, op cit., p. 127.]

Tolkien's mindset believes in objective morality and moral absolutes.  The modern world does not.  Therefore, for many amongst the chattering classes and the Commentariat, much of his corpus appears odd, at best, childish,simplistic, and superstitious at worst.  His is the shawl of the Grand Anachronism.

Dickerson employs an illustration to explain the contrast between Tolkien's philosophic and religious principles and those of the modern age.

Consider a computer virus.  No matter how inconvenient or destructive it is, a computer virus is just an impersonal collection of computer code composed of bits (zeros and ones) on a computer.  A virus has no will of its own and cannot be considered evil or immoral. . . .

Now suppose that a person who commits a heinous crime is only acting as he or she is programmed to do, as a materialist world view states is the case. . . . Then by no means can that person be evil; only the programmer of that person can be evil.  In this case, however, the programmer is believed to be a blind, impersonal force.  In short, where there is no choice at all, there can be no moral (or immoral) choice.  In a merely material world, we may at worst consider another person's actions as inconvenient to us; we cannot call them "evil" or "immoral."  Or, if we do, then we are really only calling "immoral" the universe itself . . . . I any case, the word immoral has no meaning in this context. [Ibid., p. 128.]

Does this sound familiar?  It is everywhere around us.

Having Cake and Eating It Too

The Self Deceit of the Modern Mind

Chesterton writes the following on the indifference of nature.  As you read this passage, keep David Attenborough in mind, an evolutionist whose breathless reverent descriptions of the natural world and its inhabitants represents the stupidest sentimentality since stupidity first emerged (from the primordial slime, naturally.)

There is no equality in nature; also there is no inequality in nature.  Inequality, as much as equality, implies a standard of value.  To read aristocracy into the anarchy of animals is just as sentimental as to read democracy into it.  Both aristocracy and democracy and are human ideals: the one saying that all men are valuable, the other that some men are more valuable.  But nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice; nature makes no remark on the subject.  She does not even say that the cat is enviable or the mouse pitiable.

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World

It's The Way the Electrons Are Configured

It's a mad, mad, mad world.  Every so often the inanity and madness of Western ideology strikes one afresh.  Yes, it really is that mad.  For most of the time, we cope.  We make our compromises.  We come to terms with the way the world is structured and ruled.  We shrug our shoulders and move on.  In many ways, for day-to-day existence this is the appropriate and best response. Ignore the idiots and the idiocy.  Get on with doing our duties and fulfilling our responsibilities to our Lord. 

The madness of the modern world is due to the "big ideas" that dominate, and, therefore, govern our culture and society.  One is materialism: the belief that matter is all there is; there ain't nothing else.  One application of this quasi-religious ideology is that property and possessions are part of the essence of life itself--since matter is all and everything.  Therefore, it is inevitable that social policies, government, and politics degenerate into endless debates about who has what and how much is it worth.  The most important role of the state (in a materialistic world) is to ensure "fair" distribution of stuff, or matter.

Materialism is a thoroughly Big Idea, which is a true world-and-life view.  It affects everything.  Take just one prosaic example: crime.

Fearful Astonishment

Like a Wolf on the Fold

A CNN reporter/researcher, Juergen Todenhoefer has travelled in ISIS territory and a report has been published of his findings and experiences.  The CNN report is here.  There is nothing particularly surprising in the report, but what is evident is that the reporter, his crew, and CNN hierarchy are the one's who are surprised.

The inability of the secular liberal Western mind to understand and take seriously Islamism in general and ISIS in particular never fails to amuse, in a grim sort of way.  The first thing which surprised Todenhoefer was the "glow in their eyes". 

Todenhoefer told CNN the enthusiasm the ISIS militants showed was one thing that stood out.  "When we stayed at their recruitment house, there were 50 new fighters who came every day," Todenhoefer said. "And I just could not believe the glow in their eyes. They felt like they were coming to a promised land, like they were fighting for the right thing.

Just why that should be surprising is puzzling, to say the least.  Have we not seen the glow in the eyes of febrile mobs protesting in the streets, demanding the right to kill unborn children on an industrial scale?  Have we not seen true believers in the West passionately committed to "noble" bloody causes.  It's normal.  The media and the Commentariat support and laud them as cultural warriors.  What supercilious condescension to be surprised when Islamic acolytes show similar passion and commitment.

Religious Establishment

Secularist Hypocrisy

One of our parochial secularist bloggers has opined on the subject of parliamentary prayers.  His "personal" view is that there should not be any official prayers in the parliament.  He writes:

I personally don’t think Parliament as an institution should have a prayer. Religious belief is a personal decision, not an institutional one. MPs who wish to offer a prayer should be able to do so as they see fit, but my preference would be that there be no official prayer led off by the Speaker as this jars with being a secular country. [Kiwiblog]

This statement is unremarkable insofar as it is typical of the hypocrisy found in almost every place in our day.  Let's see if we can de-construct the statement  to illustrate.  We are given the following justification for not having parliamentary prayers: "Religious belief is a personal decision, not an institutional one".  The question is immediately begged, "Who says so?" Or, by what standard, or rule, or principle can the assertion that religion is a "personal decision" stand? It is, after all, a claim of universal dimensions.

"Ridicule Them and Show Contempt"

Twenty Questions Atheists Struggle to Answer

Pete Saunders
 
For my answers to the questions below see the following links:
Questions 1-6
Questions 7-11

For others' answers see here

Earlier this week I was involved, on and off, in a wide-ranging 24 hour twitter conversation which has been storified by Dr John Cosgrove under the title ‘Creation, Evolution and Gosse’.

It covered such matters as the origin of man, the evolution of language, the dating of early civilisations and the historicity of the genealogies and the flood narrative in the book of Genesis.

As is usual most of those involved were atheists who follow me on twitter and regularly mock and ridicule my commitment to Christian faith and values.  Again, as is usual in these discussions, it was primarily atheists asking the questions and me giving answers whilst they tweeted my responses with great delight to their followers with accompanying comments such as ‘facepalm extravanganza’.

On Friday night and Saturday morning I asked in return two questions (2 & 7 in the following list) which thus far none of them has attempted to answer despite posting around sixty responses to me in the intervening period whilst I was off-line.

Welcome to Alice's World

Obama's Looking Glass

President Obama is a deeply religious man in his own way.  He has grounded his life in the spurious religious faith of materialism and its attendant doctrine of soft-Marxism.  It is how the President sees the world. Of course, in this he is not alone.  Most of the liberal elites in the West would agree with Obama on these matters.

If there is evil in the world--and the President clearly believes there is--its cause is a material one.  Evil is the product of the "have's" oppressing the "have-nots".  This is classic Marxism 101.  In the end, however, the "have-nots" will rise in revolutionary outrage against those who have oppressed them.  The Hegelian dialectic is the overarching providential conditioner of human history.

President Obama has revealed that this is the lens through which he views the rise of Islamism--political Islam--in the Middle East.  The willing soldiers of ISIS and Al-Qaeda offshoots have legitimate "have-not" grievances; they have suffered oppression at the hands of dictators and exploiters which have been facilitated and funded by the West.  Therefore, they understandably hate the West and are willing to side with anyone who will enable them to express their rage against the Western machine.  The Islamist soldiers who have joined with ISIS are not true believers in Islam; they are an exploited underclass cynically used by their tyrant overlords--amongst whom are the Western powers.

Obama's world is an imaginative fiction.  It is little more than a supercilious, condescending arrogance which refuses to take Islamists seriously, on their own terms.  President Obama, you see, knows these Islamists better than they know themselves.