Yesterday's Dogma

Are materialists now on the wrong side of history?

I’m dashing rapidly through the history of philosophy this month, in pursuit of a big-picture thesis that I want to frame. This inevitably leaves a lot underexplored, but if you want to dig deeper into the Rise and Fall of Materialism, my friend Spencer Klavan has you covered with his Light of the Mind, Light of the World. Spencer is a wonderful writer, as well as a trained classicist, and he covers a lot of science and metaphysics in this book without ever letting the story drag. I laughed a little to see this book described as “a daring new story about how we got here.” It didn’t seem all that new to me, but hey, I’m a huge fan of “books that make old things feel daring and new to publishers.”

The book covers the transition I discussed yesterday, from the sweeping synthesis of the medievals to the “small gods” of modern materialism, and I appreciate Spencer’s ability to explain this shift in a way that illuminates long-term consequences without treating the men themselves as villains. We can understand why the moderns made certain mistakes without looking for malevolent motives. Given its incredible successes, it’s not at all surprising that empirical science, and Newtonian physics more specifically, blinded the world with its dazzling brightness.

That hour is rapidly passing though, or perhaps is already gone. Spencer gets into that too. We still have thoroughgoing materialists (“physicalism” is the preferred term in contemporary philosophy departments), but they’re dated. Science has moved beyond those Newtonian horizons, opening new realities that materialism just can’t handle. The quantum revolution is especially relevant here; relativity poses hard questions too. Metaphysical materialists are dinosaurs nowadays. They can’t make sense of faith, transcendence, human experience, mind… or the science they claim to worship! Small gods can be very fickle.

We can find new hope in that. Spencer Klavan certainly does! Here are the opening paragraphs of the final segment of the book, titled simply “An Invitation”:

We have a choice to face. It is a choice between two visions of the world. The first is well established and even canonical, a kind of dogma. Gradually, what began as a convenient fiction has become a hidebound absolutism: for the messianic prophets of our dangerous age, the world is an object to be dominated and humanity a primitive stain to be wiped from the face of a perfectly mechanized universe.

But cutting-edge science and inherited wisdom alike are revealing a totally different picture–a picture of a world that cannot be what it is without us, that is endowed with all its meaning and structure by our presence in it. A world spoken into being by the eternal Word and made complete by the words of his creatures, who bear his image on Earth.

That story–ancient but forever new–now stands as the indispensable, the desperately needed alternative to a savage and ultimately irrational new faith, a grim and monstrous new tower of Babel whose silhouette is already rising against the skyline. There has only ever been one proclamation that can bring such towers crashing to the ground and leave their builders in confusion: the proclamation that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Good book. I reviewed it here.