I was talking to an atheist
friend of mine a while ago, and I asked him how he could account for reason if
the only reality is physical reality.
This is a problem I have
written about before: if matter
is the only thing that exists then every single thought and action is the
result of physical reactions over which we have absolutely no control. It would
mean we think and act the way we do because that’s the way the chemicals within
us have reacted. We would be, as one atheist physicist said, “collections of
elementary particles interacting according to the laws of physics, and if I was
able to write down every single particle in my body, and if I had [sufficient]
computational ability, I could predict what I would do.” (Notice, he assumes he
would have the freedom to direct his mind to do the calculations! If his
materialism were correct, he would just have to wait and see how the matter in
his head reacted and what it made him do.)
My friend didn’t want to
admit this was what his worldview entailed, so he retreated to ignorance and
said, “I don’t know how we have rationality, and that’s one of the things about
atheists that makes them different from Christians, we aren’t afraid to say we
don’t know.”
Well, I’m not sure where he
got the idea that Christians are afraid to say we don’t know. Throughout the
conversation he was asking me all kinds of questions about God that I was very
willing to admit I didn’t know – he was asking me why God allowed so many
species of animals to go extinct and why God allowed certain events to happen.
I told him I could have a guess, but I didn’t know, and what’s more, the Bible
repeatedly states (and common sense would agree) we can’t know all the reasons
God has for what he does.
So I have no problem with
saying I don’t know, or with someone else saying it…if it’s genuine. But I
wanted to push a bit with my friend. If his materialistic view of the world is
true then there just is no rationality – your thoughts and actions are the
results of mindless processes over which you have no control. It’s a cop-out to
say, “I don’t know how we have rationality.” If someone is a materialist,
there’s no new information that is going to account for genuine rationality and
be consistent with materialism. There’s no point proclaiming ignorance as a
virtue here. The materialistic worldview cannot, and never will, account for
rationality, and yet we know that we are rational.
A collection of chemicals
fizzing and reacting in someone’s skull is not going to result in calculations
that allow a man to go to the moon or a rover to land on Mars. It will not
produce works of prose and poetry, art and music. It will not result in
arguments about rationality, materialism and God!
So rather than bury his head
in the sand, my friend should face the facts – materialism is bankrupt to
explain reality, and he knows it.
