Against Materialism
I not talking here about shopping, but a philosophy that the only things that exist are physical matter. Nothing immaterial exists – such as God, heaven or hell. It also means that our consciousness does not exist, neither does our soul.
If there is evidence that the human soul exists, then this would be strong evidence for the existence of God. Atheists seem to realize this. They are very adamant that all that exists is what we can see, and since we cannot see the soul then it cannot exist. But there are several arguments that prove the existence of the soul. These are the argument based on the existence of the Mind.
What I mean here is the mind as opposed to the physical brain. It is our Consciousness. It is our being conscious of being conscious. It is my ability to freely think. Atheists try to argue that this does not exist. Atheists believe in materialism – the belief that all that exists is physical matter. God, heaven, our souls, and even our minds apart from our physical brains do not exist. You cannot see Consciousness. You cannot hold a Thought in your hand. These are immaterial objects, and in a material world anything that is immaterial does not exist.
Atheist Francis Crick has said in his book The Astonishing Hypothesis "You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Astonishing_Hypothesis). This is an amazing and totally absurd statement! Intuitively
we know this is not true, and no one can live as if this is true, including Francis Crick. If Crick’s thoughts are nothing but the random effect of non-intelligent nerve cells clicking away in his brain, then why should we listen to him? Francis Crick is admitting that all of our sense of personal identity and our choices are really determined by how it goes with our nerve cells. If this is true then no one is capable of a free, rational thought. So if that is the case, then that would include Crick’s thought. It may sound rational, but according his hypothesis, this is an illusion. There is no reason to believe it anymore than if he literally wrote gibberish. Actually, according to Crick, we are all biologically determined by the mechanisms in our brain to either reject or accept his thesis. So why should Crick try to persuade us? That makes as much sense as trying to persuade your car not to break down on the road! A car has no control over itself. It cannot be persuaded to do something. You cannot argue or appeal to logic with your car. It does what it does based totally by forces that it has no control. If materialists reduce us to being a mere machine, then all debate and arguing is fruitless.
This is not to deny that there is a relationship between our consciousness and our physical brain. After all, if someone hits you in the head, you may become unconscious. But that does not mean that brains impulses causes your thoughts. Instead, our thought causes our brain impulses. For instance, you freely choose to have a thought to ask me “Please pass the salt”. This thought creates brain impulses, and these impulses flow down your nerves to your mouth for that it says ‘Please pass the salt”. I can then come up freely with a thought to pass the salt, to ignore you, or tell you “Get it yourself!” Whatever thought I have, that thought creates impulses and they are carried to different parts of my body to carry out my intentions. Now if my thoughts are merely the product of the random clicking of nerve cells in my brain, then there would be an infinite number of possibilities of how I would respond, and most of them would not relate to anything at all to your request. I may respond by dancing the Irish Jig on the table, or by reciting the Gettysburg Address. It would be unlikely that any of my random responses would at relate at all to your request to pass the salt.
If our thoughts are nothing but the product of random biological processes in the brain then we would observe our interactions with each other to be totally chaotic. A simple “Hello” may be answered with a punch in the nose, with no reason whatsoever for that response. Some people would walk forward, and some would walk backward, and some sideways. And only a minority of times would achieve our destination. A person may originally intend to drive to work, but then the random clicking of nerve cells changes his direction and he winds up in Pittsburgh. A world where thought is caused randomly by inanimate, biological activities in the brain is a world where nothing would ever be accomplished
Materialists have reduced us to being mere machines and have elevated machines to be like us. Materialistic scientists actually think that one day a computer will be able to think and behave exactly the way we do. This has been popularized in many science fiction movies, showing our inventions rebelling against man and taking over the world. You see it in 2001 Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, and the Terminator movies. But I strongly believe this is a lot of bunk. I am a computer programmer. I know that computers are just very dumb machines that just follow what it is told to do. It is not able to think on its own or consciously decide to rebel against me. If my computer behaves in a way I do not like, it is either my fault or some other human’s fault – such as the people who designed the operating system or a virus introduced by some very evil person. It is not because the computer just decided to give me a hard time. It would be fruitless for me to try to persuade the computer to behave. All the threats and promises I could think of would not change the computer’s behavior. It simply behaves the way it has been programmed. If a bug is found in one of my programs, I cannot blame the computer. It is assumed to be some person’s fault. The very first computer was an abacus, which is a bunch of balls through strings. It was able to count very large numbers, just by you sliding the balls from one end of the string to another. For all its sophistication, it is just a super-duper abacus. It thinks with binary logic, which means that only uses 1’s and 0’s. We, however, are able to think conceptually. This is something that a computer will never do. Now, do not get me wrong. More and more, they are designing computers to simulate our thinking, but it still only thinks in 1’s and 0’s. So imagine in the Terminator movie, when Arnold Schwarzenegger’s skin is pulled away, that underneath is an abacus instead of a robot with a face. Then we will see how absurd it is to think that this machine could ever rival us in our ability to think and feel.
Because we have a mind, or a Soul, we have a sense of right and wrong. We have a sense of morality. It is been in vogue lately to embrace relativism – that there is no object, absolute right or wrong. But I have not really seen anyone actually live this way. No matter how much a relativist says there is no right and wrong, there is still one absolute truth that he still holds. He still holds for the virtue of honesty and holds against the vice of hypocrisy. I have never met a relativist who would treats phoniness as a virtue. Tell a man that he is a hypocrite, and he will try to defend himself. It is a universal given that hypocrisy is wrong. But where did we get this, if there is no God? Atheists have no satisfactory explanation. They try to say that our morals are based on evolution. It is the survival of fittest that motivates us to do “right” and avoid the “wrong”. We instinctively choose the “right” because the “right” would advance our survival and the survival of our offspring, which would cause us to continually evolve. The atheists would argue that our “family values” is really this animal instinct. But this does not explain why we see honesty as a virtue and hypocrisy as a vice. Phoniness or hypocrisy could cause us to get ahead in the world. A person who cheats on his taxes would be better able to provide for himself and his family. So from a purely evolutionary standpoint, we stand up and cheer when we heard that someone cheated on his taxes.
From a purely evolutionary standpoint, murder would be a virtue. Look at the animal kingdom. A lion munches down on a deer without any semblance of guilt. It’s the survival of the fittest. In the animal kingdom, it is good to be the predator and bad to the prey. So if are morals were based on evolution then murder would be justified if it was to the betterment of yourself and your offspring.
I am not writing about the way we behave, but the way we ought to behave. It is the different between the “is” and the “ought”. Many times we fall short in going what we ought to do. But we still hold onto what we ought to do. Where does this come from? Evolution does not have the answer. But Christianity does; Christianity teaches that God has planted in each one of us a sense of right and wrong, even though because of our sinfulness we do not always live up to that. And it may be due to our sinfulness that we do not always admit what is right and wrong, especially when it is to our inconvenience. But how quickly do we realize what is wrong when it is directed against us. I recall an evangelical friend in college discussing morality with an atheist. The atheist said “There is no such thing as right and wrong. It is all relative”. My friend responded by throwing his textbooks across the room. The atheist yelled “What the &*# did you do that for?!?!” My friend responded “What are you mad about? You said there is no such thing as right or wrong! I did nothing wrong, did I?” I would not recommend to do this, but this shows that we all have a sense of right and
wrong even though not all of us will admit it.
All this shows that there is more to the world that material things. I cannot hold in my hand Morality. I cannot see and touch my free will, or hold my Consciousness. But it is irrefutable that they exist. We cannot measure these things, or perform scientific experiments on them. But they still exist, even though scientifically they cannot be proven. Actually, even science now tells that there are things that exist that cannot be scientifically verified. Scientists now say that that is “dark” matter in the universe. It is called dark matter because it is matter completely invisible to us. But scientist say that is must exist, even though they have never seen through a telescope or have done any experiments that it exists. But they say that this must exist because that is not enough mass in the stars to cause a gravitational pull that cause them to cluster into galaxies. So they theorize that there must be this undetectable dark matter that pulls these stars into galaxies. In order to pull these stars together, this dark matter must take up over 90% of the universe. So we are talking about a huge chunk of the universe being something totally undetectable.
Scientists also now say that there is “dark energy” in the universe. Again, this dark energy is undetected, but scientists are sure that this exists. They know this because they have now found out that the universe is expanding at an increasing rate. The Big Bang theory is that once the universe was just a tiny speck, and the BANG! The speck exploded into the universe we have today, and the expansion is still expanding. Scientists have recently discovered that this expansion is actually getting faster than beforehand. This goes against the laws of physics, unless there was some extra energy that is giving the universe its extra boost.
Scientists say that dark (invisible) matter must exist to explain how clusters of stars exist and that dark (invisible) energy must exist to explain how the universe expands. Is this not what we Christians say about God? We say that God must exist in order to explain how anything exists at all. Atheists reject this because they argue that we cannot see God, or perform scientific experiments to prove that He exists; we should only believe that something material exists. But to say that only what is detectable exists is to go against modern science. So he sees a world without God, without our conscious selves, without our free will, and without morality.
The atheist is stuck with this world because he needs to cling to materialism. Once he admits that something can exist that is immaterial, he has lost the battle. The Mind exists apart from the physical brain then another word for this Mind is the Soul. This Mind or Soul, since it is apart from the brain, could then even exist when the brain is dead. So this makes the possibility of the life after death. This Mind, our Consciousness poses another problem to atheist. Where did this Consciousness? If we evolved from a single-cell organism, which had no Consciousness, no awareness of itself, no freedom to think and act then where did we get our Consciousness or our free will? Could it not be the Ultimate Consciousness – God, which has the ultimate freedom to do as He pleases?
