The more scientists learn about life, consciousness, the earth, and the universe the harder it is becoming to cling to the old Darwinian materialism so fashionable in the last century. Indeed, twentieth century materialism is beginning to look something like a philosophical anachronism, a contemporary version of alchemy.
Alchemy seemed right during the medieval period but couldn't be sustained once our knowledge of chemistry began to blossom in the 18th and 19th centuries. So it is with philosophical materialism today.
Materialism, the view that everything that exists is reducible to matter or explicable in terms of material stuff, has serious problems. As Stephen Meyer points out in his new book Return of the God Hypothesis, there are no good material explanations for the origin of the universe, the fine-tuning of the universe or the origin of the information packed into the first life.
The origin of the universe could not have been produced by matter because matter came into being when the universe did. Matter, unguided by any intelligence, could not have fine-tuned the initial conditions of the universe or the constants, ratios of nuclear particles and strengths of the forces. Nor could mindless matter generate the enormous amount of information that allows a cell to function.
Only mind is causally adequate to explain these things. We have experience only of minds fine-tuning and generating the kind of information that allows the kinesin protein to perform its astonishing task.
How does the protein "know" what to do and where to go? Where is the information that choreographs this incredible phenomenon stored? How was the information, especially in the earliest cells, created?
Materialism has no good answers to questions like these, but the alternative explanation leads to God so many modern metaphysical alchemists cling to materialism in hopes that some discovery will someday vindicate their faith. Medieval alchemists clung to the same hope.
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