Materialism - A True Opium

Every now and then I have a burst of optimism and think that just maybe the materialist philosophy that has dominated science and culture throughout much of the 20th century and into the 21st is on the wane. It seems that more and more people, intelligent, well-educated people, are realizing that materialism is a bankrupt idea, offering no hope or meaning to those who embrace it. But what is materialism?

The co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule, Francis Crick, was a classic example of a materialist. He once expressed it like this:

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... You're nothing but a pack of neurons.

On materialism we're nothing more than the atoms that make us up. A prominent lawyer named Barry Arrington once teased out the implications of this view in this passage:

Materialism posits that the physical is all there is. Its central premise is this: In the beginning, there were particles, and the particles were in motion, and in the entire universe there is and never has been and never will be anything other than particles in motion.

This means that human beings are not special. You and your family and your friends are also merely particles in motion, reducible to the chemicals that make up your bodies. Humans are clever hairless apes with no more ultimate significance than rocks.

Yes, they have come up with this thing called “morality.” But morality is an illusion foisted on us by material evolutionary forces because it gives us a reproductive advantage. Morality in any objective transcendent sense of the word not only does not exist, it cannot exist. There are no moral or immoral rocks. And humans — in their essence — are in the same category as rocks. Both rocks and humans are mere amalgamations of burnt out star dust.

Arrington didn't believe that materialism was true, and neither did the theologian R.C. Sproul who once had this to say about it:

Modern man believes we came from nothing and are going to nothing, but in the meanwhile we're somehow significant. But if we came from nothing and we're going to nothing then we need to face the fact that we really are nothing.

Karl Marx was an extremely influential 19th century materialist who believed that "religion was the opium of the people." It anesthetized people to their suffering and oppression, but, Marx believed, there was certainly no truth in the superstitions of religious dogma. Rather, he was certain that everything could be explained in terms of science and economics.

The distinguished Polish Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz said of Marx's "opium" remark that,

A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death – the huge solace of thinking that for all our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged.

That sums up perfectly the philosophy of materialism. It's a true opium that anesthetizes the materialist's soul and quells his guilt and doubts. And hopefully, it will soon be consigned to the dustbin of discredited philosophical ideas.