The gleeful nihilists

Christianity is the most materialist of all religions. Read the Hebrew bible and you will find that the quest for land is a key aspect of the history of Israel. Read the New Testament and you will find that the body is central to its concerns. However, this kind of materialism may not be confused with that fostered by atheists who would reduce all things to interactions in matter.

There are two kinds of materialism, the methodological and the ontological.

Methodological materialism is the rightful domain of the physical sciences. Objects under investigation cannot be imbued with mind; they cannot contain spirit. If they did then scientists would not be able to replicate experimental results because the mind inhabiting objects could change its mind and throw everything into disarray.

While this kind of materialism appears to be contradicted by Biblical miracles, a closer inspection reveals that such accounts are narrative devices that point beyond themselves to theological realities formulated in a prescientific culture.

In Christian theology the creator is separated from the creation. Without this separation natural science could not exist. It is notable that natural science could not and did not arise from pantheistic cultures. The Romans could formulate fine legal systems, control a vast empire, build magnificent cities, write histories but they could not examine the world in a methodical way because gods were everywhere.

The problem is that methodological materialism has led to ontological materialism, the belief that our material being governs all that we are.

We may think we have free will, hope, dreams, obsessions but it is only the flux of neural impulses, a billion synapses flickering away in our brain. Human existence may be explained in terms of mechanism. The next step is to conclude that humanity does not really exist as we had thought. All things are reduced to the material. There is no origin of anything but in the material; that is what ontological materialism means.

The problem of human consciousness cannot be solved by the assertion of body/mind-soul dualism because, theologically, this has to assume the existence of spirit in matter. If we postulate a ghost in the machine our problem is transferred to how spirit interacts with matter and we are, conceptually, no better off.

So, we must agree that everything is material, including human consciousness, but does that lead to the conclusion that empties humanity of all meaning to produce nihilism?

A close cousin of ontological materialism is radical Darwinism that asserts that we are nothing but machines for carrying our genes into the future. This, again reduced the human to mechanism and is used to argue that there is really no such thing as the human as we understand and experience it.

Other similar arguments are used to empty life of all meaning. Humanity has been reduced to insignificance by the discovery of deep time and space in which human history is reduced to the last few seconds of the age of the universe and the earth is relegated to a spec of matter in a minor galaxy among billions of galaxies. We are not the centre of the universe but merely a very small sideshow. This reduction of humanity is used to establish nihilism. The reduction of the human leads to the reduction of all that humanity stands for.

But let us get to the nitty gritty of the argument. Why does the discovery that we are all material arrive at the emptying of humanity; the discovery that humanity is just material? Why does that lead to the conclusion of nihilism, nothingness, in spite of our experience of the world and of culture that is infinitely rich? Is this not a perverse conclusion that flies in the face of our everyday experience?

Mind you, these assertions are made by people who say they cling to rationality as the only way to truth. But what could be more irrational than the conclusion they arrive at?

It is obvious that rationality has nothing to do with this argument, there is something quite irrational going on here. Doubtless there is present all kinds of resentment, some justified, about the authority of the Church and quite a bit of anticlericalism. Nihilism does away with all of the theological guff, all the arguments about the existence or non-existence of God, all ethical systems that we had to worry ourselves with. Surely it sets us free! What a relief to be done with all of that superstitious rubbish! Cunningham puts it well:"Those that celebrate scientism and ontological (restrictive) naturalism do so because they have set out to achieve the banishment of the divine, no matter what the cost."

The cost is that we can no longer understand the difference between lovemaking and rape or see the holocaust for what it was or distinguish between a good and a bad work of art. The cost is that the humanities are done away with and all is reduced to the utilitarian.

As is usual, the Greeks have gotten there before us, particularly the Pyrrhonians, named after Pyrrho (365/60-275/70BCE) who developed a radical scepticism that left him completely immune to feeling. He arrived at this by asserting that it is within our nature to know nothing and hence there is no need to think about anything. His object was to achieve a state of tranquillity in which nothing mattered. The suspension of judgment brings peace of mind. One can walk past a person drowning in a river and not act. One can be untouched by the death of millions. This comes about because we believe that we cannot decide between good or evil or about anything at all.

Nihilism lets us off the hook of human existence. While it looks like ultimate freedom it is actually spiritual death.

Why would one want to pursue such a course and do so gleefully with wonky rationality about the consequences of materiality? I have detected a perverse superiority in people who hold this view, mostly fellow scientists. There is arrogance here, the thought that it is brave and true to rise above the masses and exist in the upper regions of rationality. There is a certain chutzpah in reducing everything to dust, like a magician making the rabbit of Being disappear.

I can see how we needed the turn to phenomenology because the philosophy of the Enlightenment, so much in suspicion of personal experience, so beholden to scepticism and the use of reason, disallowed the experience of everyday life. The view of such philosophy is that the primary human relationship to the world is theoretical or cognitive.

This is how Heidegger can famously pronounce that Being "today has been forgotten." We of course still experience all the richness of being human but a question mark has been placed upon it by radical scepticism even though we interact with the world in very precise ways.

This has produced the emptying out of the human who can only see herself as the product of accidental mutations, a species among the species, living in the heat of a dying star. It has been thought that the great religious tradition that produced the West cannot stand against the universal solvent of scepticism.

But, of course, it is impossible to live thus. Those who would reduce everything to the material do not live out their faith. If they had actually internalised their denial of the existence of the human then the only question that remains is about why suicide is not the obvious concluding act. But no, these people go home to their husbands, wives and children and act in ways that show their ideas to be mere brave window dressing.

Nihilism is the end result of our total trust in reason alone, of Cartesian and Kantian philosophy that seeks ultimate foundations for knowledge. While it looked like they were freeing us from religious delusions it has actually released us into a vacuum in which life is impossible.

To be involved in the human, and what person is not so involved, is to be involved in a journey into God that is also a journey into the human. When the human is denied, as it is in ontological materialism, this journey is abolished, the danger being, that we become inhuman.