THE ISMS BY WHICH WE LIVE - part II

Consider the “ism” of materialism.

Materialism is very popular today and very much in vogue. But it has an ancient history. For example, the word “atom” in Greek means “unsplitable!” So over time the atom came to be seen as the basic particle of all matter or material. It was the building block of the universe.

In the fifth century B.C., the Greek philosopher, Democritus, said that all matter, all material is made up of atoms. Atoms were unchanging. They could be rearranged to account for the experience of permanence and flux in the universe. In fact, Democritus made famous the phrase, “everything is a chance collocation of atoms,” which British philosopher, Bertrand Russell popularized in the 20th century A.D.

Nonetheless, in this view, all reality, including living reality, is composed of matter or material and is a chance collocation of atoms. Thus, we have the basis of the doctrine of materialism.

Issac Newton, that brilliant scientist of the 17th century, to whom we owe the discovery of the laws of gravitation, the three laws of motion and revolutionary insights on the nature and behavior of light – this brilliant Newton continued Democritus’ view. He thought matter consisted of solid, massy, impenetrable, movable particles.

Newton conceived the universe to be like a giant machine, running like a clock. The English deists borrowed that concept saying God had created the universe but had gone off to let humans run the world on their own using their God-given reason. But the machine-like universe was materialistic.

Then, of course, we had the revolutionary book of Charles Darwin in 1859, his Origin of Species. Based on his studies of natural life in the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador, Darwin devised his now famous theory of evolution. Instead of a six day creation of the world and life in 4004 B.C. by a Divine Creator, Darwin proposed that the world and life itself evolved over long periods of time by means of natural selection and survival of the fittest.

At its base, Darwin’s theory came to be materialistic. That is, all living organisms were regarded as nothing more than complicated collections of particles, each being “blindly pulled and pushed by it’s neighbors.” (Paul Davies and John Gribben, The Matter Myth, P. 12) All life and all reality was thus reducible to matter, to material, to atoms. And all life and all reality was thus in Democritus’ and Bertrand Russell’s words, “a chance collocation of atoms.”

But Bertrand Russell put it even more starkly when he wrote: “The visible world, the Milky Way, is a tiny fragment. Within this fragment the solar system is an infinitesimal speck, and within the speck our planet is a microscopic dot. On this dot, tiny lumps of carbon and water crawl about for a few years until they are dissolved again into the elements of matter of which they are compounded.” (Quoted in Faith and Doubt, by John Ortberg, P 33)

The materialistic vision has hardly been summarized more succinctly. It was the vision to which Russell subscribed. But one time when he was asked if he was willing to die for his beliefs, he replied surprisingly, “No, I might be wrong!”

But present-day popular atheists and materialists such as Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Daniel Dennett (Breaking The Spell), and Sam Harris (The End of Faith) exhibit no such modesty. They are extremely confident the universe and all life are a chance collocation of atoms. The ultimate reality is matter or material and no more. So give up your grand delusions of God, they say.