Materialism and evil choices
The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.
When I was growing up, I was a materialist. That is to say, I did not believe in anything beyond the material plane. The world started with the Big Bang,* a bunch of atoms bumped into each other, they caused reactions here and there, and we end up with humans. Humans are material beings, simply a conglomeration of atoms, and our actions are determined by atoms bumping into each other and causing chemical reactions in the brain.
One day, a Christian teacher of mine asked whether it was an evil choice to murder an innocent child. Well, I thought, of course. He then asked what it meant for something to be evil. Well, I thought, it was a choice that we shouldn’t make. Then, he asked what it meant to say “shouldn’t?” Well, I thought, and then realised I didn’t really have an answer.
If my choices are made by chemical reactions in my brain, then it meant nothing to say that they were “my choices.” They were not “mine” because the term “I” was a meaningless boundary around a bunch of atoms simply because they conglomerated for some 80 years starting in AD 1999. They were not “choices” because there was no alternative. With a sufficiently detailed model that could account for entropy, somebody could calculate exactly what these atoms would do. For “my choices” to be meaningful, I needed to exist as a subject on a non-material plane of existence.**
Furthermore, if all that existed was the material, then the terms “good” and “evil” didn’t really make any sense. After all, they are external descriptors about some material state. To say that one conglomeration of atoms (a child) is “good” and the other one (a murdered) is “evil” means nothing in a material worldview. Both conglomerations of atoms have material existence, right? If all that exists is the material, then what does it mean to differentiate between the two? To be able to describe something material as a “good” state of being, I needed an external ideal of goodness.**
Craig’s speech convinced me almost immediately that my material worldview wasn’t sufficient. I believed much more deeply in moral choices than I did in my material worldview. So I needed a new worldview. Of course, I eventually became a Christian, a professing member of the Catholic Church. But the first step to getting there was this realisation. Materialism simply isn’t satisfactory.
Without existing as a subject on a non-material plane, your material existence is arbitrary. If “John” simply consists of an arbitrary grouping of a bunch of atoms, which are together from 6/8/1983 to 9/2/2064, why is “John” significant? In a material worldview, no lives matter. If it was all chemical reactions arbitrarily occurring in my brain, there was no “meaning” behind my actions, even behind my being. My choices and even my life were meaningless. And, frankly, I didn’t want to accept that - I wanted to matter. I realised that I had to believe in something.
*I was, of course, unaware that Georges Lemaitre, the man who developed the Big Bang theory, was a Catholic priest who saw it as a proof of God’s existence. If the universe was brought into existence, something must already have existed to bring it into existence. After all, something cannot come from nothing.
**I understand the non-material world in the Christian manner, and find its language to be both accurate and useful. Therefore, I typically refer to my non-material existence as my soul. I also refer to the non-material ideal as God. However, I won’t assume the Christian language in this post.