CHAPTER 6: MIND, MEANING, AND THE MATERIALISTS
ONE OF THE GREAT PRIVILEGES of hosting the Unbelievable? podcast has been hearing from a wide range of listeners who share their spiritual journeys and explain how the conversations from the show have helped to illuminate their path.
Many have a story of “deconstructing” as adults from the straitjacket of an oppressive form of faith they once inhabited but then failing to find satisfaction in an atheistic account of reality. Many of these are tentatively reexploring Christianity. Others have lived in a skeptical mindset for their whole lives but have begun to find a new appreciation for Christianity in more recent years.
There are a wide variety of reasons for this change of mind.
There’s Nico, who, having been raised in a nominally Catholic home, grew up believing that Christianity was a made-up religion. He remembers approving that Bibles had been filed under “mythology” in a bookstore he worked at. His college professors confirmed what he had already imbibed from pop culture: “Religion was the opiate of the masses, a lie concocted by the patriarchy to justify their bigotries and control people.”[1]
After graduating from law school, Nico and his wife decided to try for a baby. However, he didn’t want to decide the God question on behalf of his child, so he determined to look into religion again. He “did what any millennial would do” and began listening to podcasts.
When Nico stumbled across the Unbelievable? podcast, he found the show perfectly suited to his background as an attorney, as both sides made their case. “Not only was I blown away by the fact that the Christians in these debates weren’t the indoctrinated idiots I’d been led to believe, or the fact that there were logical arguments for the existence of God, but I found myself siding with the Christians in these debates, having expected the opposite to happen.”
As Nico began to question his atheism, he picked up a book by Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft, whom he’d heard about on the show. That turned into an email exchange with Kreeft in which Nico’s final defenses were brought down. “There was no hope for me to remain atheist at that point. A few exchanges later, and I told him I’d go to church.”[2]
Then there’s Tamara, a New Yorker now living in Scotland who has recently converted to Catholicism. She comes from a “very secular family,” her husband is an atheist, and she frequently experiences doubt. Sometimes “every single New York skeptic is screaming in my head!” she writes.
So why has Tamara converted? “The person of Jesus; the fact that everyone I know wants love, relationship, connection; the fact that everyone I know is often living somewhere between angst and misery and wanting ‘more’ (mixed with times of happiness); because people create and because beauty matters; because of morality.”[3]
Or there’s Jacqui, in her early seventies, who says the tide of her faith had completely receded after walking away from thirty years in fundamentalist Christian circles, leaving her feeling “like a stranded starfish.” Mercifully, she says, “the tide has come back in” during the “second half” of her spiritual life, thanks in part to the contributions of secular thinkers like Douglas Murray. She ends her email, “It seems that, at 71, I am lucky enough to have the chance of another half when I thought it was all but over!”[4]
There are also plenty of Unbelievable? listeners whose journeys have not decisively led to a commitment to Christianity. But they also know they aren’t atheists any longer.
Dean, a listener from Australia, got in touch with me shortly after Jordan Peterson appeared on the show. He is one of many people who discovered the podcast because they follow the work of the psychologist and have been influenced by his own grappling with Christian faith.
Dean is a talented novelist who works as a nurse in an intensive care unit and has appeared on the show to talk about his own search for faith. Christened in the Anglican church as a baby, he was exposed to a nominal form of Christianity in childhood but was dismissive of any form of organized religion by the time he reached adulthood.
However, the writings and lectures of Peterson on the Bible and the way Christianity has set the moral compass of the West led to new questions. Dean’s own battle with spinal cancer and his work on the front line of life and death in the ICU had led to soul-searching over the nature of suffering. Hearing responses to these topics via Unbelievable? gave Dean a new perspective on faith. He describes it as “one of the richest learning experiences I’ve encountered, and it is encouraging me to see the world and my place in it more considerately than I have before.”[5]
Every story is unique, but they all have something in common: a search for a meaningful account of life and purpose that New Atheism was unable to provide.
Dean says he has moved far beyond his atheist phase. He now devours philosophy and theology books but hasn’t yet felt able to embrace Christianity. “Intellectually I’m kind of there. But there’s something missing. There’s a spiritual and an emotional ingredient that I’m looking for. And I wrestle with that.”[6]
LIVING IN A DISTRACTED AGE
Dean is not alone in struggling to connect the intellectual and experiential dimensions of Christianity. Ever since the Enlightenment, Western culture has created an ever-widening gap between reason and religious experience. We trust the dispassionate use of science, data, and logic, and we are suspicious of feelings, instincts, and emotions.
But this is a false dichotomy. The analytical part of our mind exists alongside a broad array of sense-making faculties that allow us to function in the world. These are the parts of our personality that respond to art, music, love, and relationships. This can encompass the spine-tingling awe we experience when we walk into an ancient cathedral or the pit of fear in our stomachs when we encounter genuine malice. Or it can be found in the many day-to-day experiences where we just know things without necessarily understanding how.
All these phenomena can be given a level of explanation that involves the firing of neurons in our brain, but we also know that such a reductive explanation falls far short of the meaning these experiences actually involve. This awareness sometimes comes under the label of “emotional intelligence” or “intuition.” But we are in danger of losing this side of our sense-making faculties in modern society.
Until recently, our forebears always conceived of humans as a mixture of mind, body, and soul. In fact, they rarely distinguished between those things. Modern society, in its rush to understand everything in terms of material explanations, has radically undermined this holistic aspect of human experience. As our feelings, intuitions, and even sense of self have been increasingly “explained away” by biology, chemistry, and psychology, so we have increasingly been cut adrift in a spiritual vacuum where everything has an explanation but none of it necessarily means anything.
We know far more than our forebears did about how the world works and possess a hitherto unimaginable ability to control it through technology, medicine, and science. Yet today’s skyrocketing rates of anxiety and depression suggest we know far less about how to live happily in such a world.
This is not to disparage the advance of science and technology. In his books The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now, Steven Pinker convincingly shows how life expectancy and freedom from violence, hunger, and poverty far exceed previous ages. Yet such facts and figures don’t necessarily tell us much about how well we “fit” into the more prosperous world we have created for ourselves. Material prosperity can mask spiritual poverty. We already noted in chapter 2 the massive increase in the numbers who commit suicide each year[7] (especially of men) and the unique stresses induced by our technologically connected culture. These tell a different story to Pinker’s facts and figures.
Indeed, many contemporary thinkers such as Jonathan Haidt have recognized that “the meaning crisis” is partly a product of the rise of social media platforms and technology that prevent us from communicating in natural, human ways and instead lead to polarization, conspiracy theories, and cancellation in the echo chambers of both left- and right-wing culture wars. But, as Haidt writes, the greatest victims are the “digital natives” being raised in this not-so-brave new world:
While social media has eroded the art of association throughout society, it may be leaving its deepest and most enduring marks on adolescents. A surge in rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm among American teens began suddenly in the early 2010s. (The same thing happened to Canadian and British teens, at the same time.) The cause is not known, but the timing points to social media as a substantial contributor —the surge began just as the large majority of American teens became daily users of the major platforms.[8]
We live in a hyperconnected age of shallow relationships and constant distractions. Our minds are not designed to cope with the multiplicity of devices, choices, and concerns that crowd our waking hours. Our ancestors only needed to worry about immediate threats to their lives and liberty. If they did receive news of international wars or catastrophe, it was usually long after the fact and far removed from their world. Nowadays we feel the full force of the daily news cycle and are often intimately engaged with the tribulations and injustices of a billion other individuals we will never meet in person.
Life in previous centuries was not without its own challenges, but it was also predictably boring and made sense when lived alongside those in the same circumstances. Today, especially through social media, we are constantly confronted with images of success and achievement that urge us to accomplish more, do more, be more. Of course, the actual reality of the average Instagram influencer is very different to the curated image they present. Nevertheless, numerous studies show that any length of exposure to social media on average leaves people with heightened feelings of envy, inadequacy, and social isolation.[9] It’s hard to miss the irony of comparing how these platforms market themselves as tools of empowerment and connection to the reality of the feelings they actually engender.
Alan Noble, author of You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World, delivers a bleak but honest analysis of how our culture is self-medicating its way through this present time:
Ask an honest parent, student, or employee and they’ll tell you that their goal for the day is to survive —to “get through the day,” or “make it through.” Existence is a thing to be tolerated; time is a burden to be carried. And while there are moments of joy, nobody seems to be actually flourishing —except on Instagram, which only makes us feel worse.
Strikingly, even as our standard of living in the West continues to rise, our quality of life doesn’t.[10]
Yet the pressure to make a success of our lives only creates an intolerable burden that fuels the rampant anxiety and increasingly esoteric search for identity in modern culture. Noble writes, “This burden manifests as a desperate need to justify our lives through identity crafting and expression. But because everyone else is also working frantically to craft and express their own identity, society becomes a space of vicious competition between individuals vying for attention, meaning, and significance, not unlike the contrived drama of reality TV.”[11]
In reality, technology is only exacerbating a problem that already existed. The seeds of our modern malaise were sown long ago. Social media is simply accelerating their growth. The foundational problem is that we no longer possess the common story that Christianity once gave people to identify themselves as part of. Instead, we have all become free-floating entities in an indifferent universe, forced to make up our own story as we go along.
But as we’ll see in this chapter, while we have largely lost the story of Christianity as a way to define our lives, the tide is turning once again. Dissatisfaction with a naturalistic framework of the mind (and the despair it inevitably leads to) is pushing even secular thinkers to consider whether there might be more to what it means to be human than the New Atheists believed.
LIVING IN A MATERIAL WORLD
As new generations seek to carve out identity and meaning in a world devoid of both, they are often unaware that an alternative narrative has replaced the Judeo-Christian story. It is the background hum, the assumed fact, the white noise of our present-day culture. It is the materialist account of reality. This particular story goes under other names too, such as naturalism and physicalism. But whatever the name, it is ultimately a story which says, “There is no story.”
In this nonstory, the universe came from nowhere and is heading towards extinction. Its order and complexity do not require any explanation beyond their own existence. Energy and matter are the fundamental reality. Everything that does exist can ultimately be explained in terms of physical stuff —atoms, electrons, and energy. Human life and consciousness are the chance result of favorable conditions on a fortunate planet and an unlikely combination of chemical and physical processes.
In such a nonstory, any concepts of purpose, meaning, beauty, and morality are the inventions of human minds, selected for their survival value by the blind forces of evolutionary biology. As such, they are ultimately illusions, imposed on us by forces we have no control over. There is no ultimate meaning to life when we are the happy (or sometimes unhappy) accident of an indifferent universe.
And what is the final ending of this nonstory? There will be no happily ever after. Even if humanity escapes the bounds of earth before our sun incinerates the planet, we can’t outrun nature forever. As our universe expands, its energy will continue to dissipate, and the cosmos will gradually cool down. Granted, it will take a long time, but one day all of our human plans, purposes, and beliefs will be extinguished in the heat-death of the universe. All that will remain is a cold, sterile void, stretching on into infinity.
C. S. Lewis likened this account of nature to a “sinking ship,” writing, “If Nature is all that exists —in other words, if there is no God and no life of some quite different sort somewhere outside Nature —then all stories will end in the same way: in a universe from which all life is banished without possibility of return. It will have been an accidental flicker, and there will be no one even to remember it.”[12]
Lewis’s contemporary Bertrand Russell, one of the twentieth century’s most famous atheist philosophers, was brutally honest about the consequences of the materialist view:
That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins —all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.[13]
Whether expressed as explicitly as Russell or simply imbibed as the implicit worldview of science and academia, materialism is the background story that now frames many people’s existence.
Russell’s “unyielding despair” is not the sort of bumper-sticker sentimentality that characterizes most modern forms of humanism. I am much more likely to hear atheists respond, “But at least we can enjoy our moment in the sun and make the most of our brief lives. Perhaps they are all the more significant because we won’t be around forever. In a world with no ultimate meaning, we must make our own meaning in life.”
However, there is one more bitter pill that the committed materialist must swallow which undercuts even this sunny optimism. But to get there we must take a detour into the depths of another slightly mind-boggling concept —determinism.
A CLOCKWORK UNIVERSE
Perhaps it’s no surprise that scientific materialism rose to prominence at the same time that combustion engines and the industrial revolution got going. Just as a child can dismantle a clock in order to find out how it works, so the scientists of the Enlightenment were pulling apart the universe and concluding that the cogs and pulleys they found there explained the whole show. When nature and all its workings can be fully described by their constituent parts —those atoms and electrons mindlessly banging around —then we have essentially described a machine.
But if nature is ultimately a machine, then its mechanisms, once set in motion, need no external intervention to do what they do. The cogs and wheels of the machine run automatically. Likewise, in a universe that consists entirely of physical causes and effects, there is no freedom to maneuver or change the outcome. Every molecule in existence has a path it will necessarily follow from the beginning of time until the end.
This doctrine of “determinism” is the twin sister of materialism. In short, it states that every single physical event —from the orbits of the planets to the movements of electrons in our brains —follows predictable laws of cause and effect. Therefore, the way that everything in the universe is now is a direct result of the way it was when it first began.
What does this mean in practice? An awful lot, it turns out.
When I spoke to atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett, a committed determinist (and one of the famous “four horsemen” of New Atheism), he gave the example of lining up a putt on a golfing green. A golfer who misses their putt may say, “If I could take it again, I’d get it in the hole.” Certainly, Dennett says, if they simply lined it up and tried again, they may be successful the second time around. However, if there were some way to rewind the clock by several seconds to the exact same moment, with the exact same external physical conditions on the course and the exact same physical arrangements of atoms in the golfer’s body and brain, then exactly the same miss would occur . . . every time.[14] By the same token, on a cosmic scale, whether you rewound the clock by thirteen seconds or thirteen billion years to the exact same physical state of affairs, events would roll out in exactly the same way they already have.
This is what it means to live in a clockwork universe. The whole show is running according to a predetermined script which cannot be changed no matter how much influence we think we have. The only reason we can’t predict what will happen (whether Tiger Woods will miss that putt or not) is because we know only a tiny fraction of the variables that affect outcomes. But in principle, if we had knowledge of the position and activity of every particle in the universe, we could predict every outcome in the future.
Determinism has become an increasingly widespread belief, not just among philosophers like Dennett but also among their followers, especially in the world of technology and computation. Predicting the outworking of a deterministic universe was the intriguing premise of the sci-fi series Devs, which envisioned the creation of an all-knowing computer that could map the past and future with unerring accuracy.
There are, of course, several major consequences of this worldview. For one thing, the concept of human choice evaporates. When you become one more constituent in a predetermined process, you are no longer the operator at the wheel but simply a cog in the machine. Every thought, feeling, or decision you have ever made was not really made by you at all. It was made by the inevitable outworking of a series of physical events involving the interaction of atoms and electrons in your brain over which you have no control. If you wound the clock back a minute, a day, a year, or a lifetime to the exact same physical state, then every thought, feeling, and decision you have ever made would play out in exactly the same way.
Hence why (according to a deterministic view) free will no longer exists. You could not have done anything differently than you actually did. If you are leading a happy, prosperous, and morally upright life, then congratulations! You happen to be the lucky recipient of a good set of cards dealt from the beginning of time. But you did nothing yourself to earn such a life. The universe delivered it to you. Likewise, if you have led an unhappy life marked by poor choices and tragedy, then bad luck. You got a bad deal from the universe. But there is nothing you could ever have done to change that reality. Whether happy, sad, or something else, your destiny was determined from the outset. Every aspect of your existence was predestined by a cosmos blindly following the laws of cause and effect.
It should be noted that Dennett and some other philosophers who believe in determinism have tried to avoid these bleak consequences by positing the idea of “compatibilism.” This is the claim that there are first-order and second-order forms of freedom. Even in a fully causally determined universe, humans are still free in a meaningful sense, they say, just so long as we are not being forced to act against our own will by anybody else. That the golfer can at least take the putt again and get a different outcome means we don’t have to worry that the result of the second attempt is just as inevitable as the first.
I’ve never understood this logic (nor has Sam Harris, another notable determinist, who had quite the public falling out with Dennett over this philosophical question[15]). It seems to me that the compatibilist view is (to quote Kant) a “wretched subterfuge.”[16] All it hands us is the illusion of freedom. It’s like saying that Keanu Reeves’s character Neo should have just accepted that he was living in a computer-generated virtual reality in The Matrix. After all, it seemed real enough, right? But once you’ve seen through the illusion, you can’t unsee it. Our will is never truly free if determinism is still the bottom line.
WHY DETERMINISM CRUSHES HUMANISM
And so we return to the plucky secular humanists who cheerfully advise us that we must simply strive to make our own meaning in life. Why does the doctrine of determinism undercut such sunny optimism?
For this reason: How can we begin to speak of making our own meaning in life when we have no control whatsoever over the physical processes that actually deliver the thoughts, habits, and life that make us who we are? How can we aspire to develop the noble values of justice, compassion, and humility that humanism espouses when all such virtues are predetermined to either manifest or be absent from our lives depending on the physical conditions that the universe happened to produce in our circumstances, body, and brain at any given moment?
You don’t have to look far to find the strange paradox of those who insist on meaning in a meaningless world. I stumbled upon one such epithet in a book of inspirational quotes by leading humanists. It reads, “The meaning of life is to live it, as wholly as we can, as abundantly as we can, as bravely as we can, here and now, sharing the experience with others, caring for others as we care for ourselves, and accepting our responsibility for leaving the world better than we found it.”[17]
This beautiful quote comes from educational pioneer James Hemming, a former president of the British Humanist Association. As I argued in chapter 3, I believe the noble sentiments expressed in this quote owe more to the inheritance of Christianity than to any secular philosophy. However, quibbling over the source of the wisdom is only half the problem.
I do not know precisely what Hemming’s metaphysical commitments were, but if he did believe in a purely material universe, it is difficult to see how such an unequivocal description of the “meaning of life” can amount to anything more than his personal preferences about how he would like people to behave. In a world which can be reduced to the blind process of physical causes and effects, the moral beliefs a person holds are entirely a product of their brain chemistry. All this heartwarming stuff about living as “wholly,” “abundantly,” and “bravely” as we can becomes meaningless in a world where none of us have any direct control over our thoughts, attitudes, or direction in life.
Likewise, nor can Hemming or anyone else demand that others abide by their moral worldview. In a materialistic account of reality, there are no “shoulds,” “oughts,” or “responsibilities” that any of us are subject to. There is simply what happens when nature takes its course. If a self-centered person disagrees with his philosophy, Hemming cannot take the moral high ground. Their selfish viewpoint is as fixed and predetermined as his generous vision for “leaving the world better than we found it.”
This is another major concern raised by the determinist perspective. The concept of morality itself becomes incoherent if our behavior is wholly decided by a combination of nature, nurture, genetics, chemicals, and atoms that irrevocably determine who we are and what we do. The axe murderer cannot be blamed for their actions any more than the person who volunteers weekly at the soup kitchen should be commended for theirs. We “deserve neither such praise nor such censure” (to quote Elizabeth Bennet) when it comes to the good or evil we do.[18] It was never our decision in the first place.
This raises all sorts of ethical dilemmas. In such a world, how can we punish people for their choices (sending them to jail, imposing fines, etc.) when they had no agency in their decisions? Why should we reward those who make great sacrifices for the common good (with accolades or medals of honor) when they likewise had no real choice in their actions? How on earth do we order a society in which “good” and “bad” actions are no longer . . . well, good or bad? They just are.
Many committed materialists either seem unaware of these contradictions between their worldview and the values they espouse, or they choose to embrace them as a paradox they must live with. But for some, as we will see later, it becomes the catalyst for a complete change of worldview.
WHY DETERMINISM IS FALSE
But what if —whether we like it or not —determinism is simply true?
For instance, there have been claims that scientific experiments prove that determinism is a fact of nature. Famously, trials conducted by neuroscience researcher Benjamin Libet in the 1980s appeared to show that subjects who “chose” when to tap a finger were not, in fact, acting from free will. Brain scans of the subjects showed a faint blip of activity (supposedly the brain’s “readiness potential”) milliseconds before they consciously chose to move their finger. This, argued Libet, proved that our choices are in fact a product of our brain chemistry acting independently of us before we are even aware of our own desire to do something.
However, Libet’s conclusions (which were already contested by many) were debunked in 2012 by another brain researcher, Aaron Schurger.
Schurger showed that the blips of neural activity Libet had identified were not evidence of the brain gearing up to tap the finger. Rather, they were the natural peaks and troughs that arose in the background noise of the brain’s activity. With no other external cues to influence their choice of when to tap, people tended to act on these internal cues, hence the correlation on the charts. But the brain activity was not predetermining the choice; it was merely prompting the decision.[19]
Nevertheless, even in the absence of experimental evidence for determinism, there are many who still believe in it as a logical outworking of their naturalist worldview. (And I agree with them —if materialism is true, then so is determinism.) But there is one more significant challenge for the twin doctrines of materialism and determinism. And in my view, it is fatal.
While many materialists are willing to concede that concepts of justice, morality, purpose, and beauty lose their meaning in a deterministic world, they still tend to satisfy themselves with the fact that they have at least worked out the way things are. Even if we must accept the harsh reality that —as Bertrand Russell so eloquently put it —our origin, growth, hopes, fears, loves, and beliefs are “but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms,” at least we can comfort ourselves that we are still in the position of being able to work out our place in the universe using reason and evidence. There is certainly no need, they say, for any religious notion of a God-given purpose or meaning to life.
But hang on . . . let’s look at that quote from Russell a little more closely. Among the products of the accidental collocation of atoms he lists our beliefs. Now, this presents a serious problem.
If our beliefs are themselves the result of an undirected, predetermined process that boils down to the movements of atoms in our head, then how can we claim to have based those beliefs on reason or evidence? Surely any process of reasoning requires the freedom to be able to associate one idea with another, to weigh the evidence, and, using logic and inference, come to a considered belief. Most atheists I know say that this process is precisely why they are atheists and why they believe in determinism. They reasoned themselves into their naturalism.
But if the thoughts we have and the reasoning process itself are completely outside of our control, being instead the inevitable result of a deterministic physical process, how can any of us claim to have used reason or logic to arrive at our beliefs?
In a purely deterministic understanding of ourselves and our universe, no one arrives at their beliefs through a process of reason. The atheist believes in atheism simply because their brain chemistry fizzes one way, and the Christian believes in theism because their brain fizzes another way. But there’s nothing true or false about the fizzing of brain chemistry. Therefore, the idea that we choose our beliefs on the basis of reason and evidence is yet another illusion. In fact, our beliefs were handed to us by the universe from the moment the great clockwork machine was set in motion. It could never have been otherwise.
So when an atheist confidently affirms their belief in determinism, they are rather like the person who has climbed a tree and is now confidently sawing away at the branch they are sitting on. It is a self-defeating philosophy that radically undercuts itself. We are supposed to believe things on the basis of reason and evidence. Yet if determinism is true, then anyone who professes such a belief only holds to it because they were predetermined to do so.
This vicious circle seems inescapable for the materialist. As far as I can see, the only way we can trust in the concept of rationality is if we live in a universe in which free will actually exists and in which materialism is false —a universe in which there is something (or someone) beyond the physical world that acts as a guarantor of reason.
C. S. Lewis put it succinctly:
Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen for physical or chemical reasons to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It’s like upsetting a milk-jug and hoping that the way the splash arranges itself will give you a map of London. But if I can’t trust my own thinking, of course I can’t trust the arguments leading to atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I can’t believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.[20]
Lewis seems to have hit the nail on the head, and such arguments have persuaded some atheists to abandon materialism. However, there is far more at stake here than scoring philosophical points against the atheist position.
Whether it is consciously recognized or not, I believe the materialist view of reality is the background assumption that many people in the West live by: that nature is a machine and we are insignificant cogs within it; that there is no ultimate meaning to the choices we make; that we are simply being herded along by a vast, undirected, and uncaring universe in which, as Richard Dawkins famously put it, there is “no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”[21]
But what we believe about reality has real-world consequences. In such an environment, it’s no surprise that a meaning crisis exacerbated by the dehumanizing effects of modern technology has begun to surface in our culture. When we are cut adrift from the shared story that invested our lives with significance and agency, and instead conceive of our place in the universe as meaningless and arbitrary, it shouldn’t surprise us when we collectively slip into distracted, anxious, and even nihilistic directions.
So is there any hope? At first sight it may seem that the Christian story has lost all its ground in the battle against the materialist philosophy being propounded in academia by intellectual popularizers like Dennett and Harris. But as we have already seen in other areas of science and culture, reinforcements can often join the battlefield from unexpected quarters.
A NEW CHALLENGER
Iain McGilchrist has a graying beard and wears a pair of spectacles that are balanced carefully on the end of his nose. When he peers over them and fixes me with a quizzical look, I am transported back to my undergraduate days at Oxford University, being interrogated by professors in one-on-one tutorials.
The associations are apt since McGilchrist is an Oxford don who has been researching psychiatry and brain science for decades, studying the nature of the human brain and the illnesses that can affect it. However, before turning to medicine, his interests lay in literature, philosophy, and theology. Consequently, his wide perspective on science and culture has led him to diagnose a far more serious problem in the world.
I had invited McGilchrist to an episode of The Big Conversation with Christian neuroscientist Sharon Dirckx to talk about his influential theory that the two hemispheres of the human brain are no longer cooperating as they once did. In his bestselling books The Master and His Emissary and The Matter with Things, McGilchrist takes the popular notion of the split between the left and right brain and applies it at a whole new level.
In popular psychology, we often speak of left- or right-brained people. The left hemisphere of the brain is typically associated with analytics and reasoning (think of logical, scientific types) and the right hemisphere with creativity and feelings (think of artsy, imaginative types). In fact, says McGilchrist, their roles are actually far more nuanced than this popular caricature. Ultimately, however, the left side of the brain does most of the work of analysis and dissecting the world piece by piece, while the right side of the brain is concerned with big-picture thinking that also encompasses intuition, context, and understanding relationships.
This is why McGilchrist refers to the right hemisphere as “the master” and the left hemisphere as “his emissary.” They are not equal partners. The left brain is supposed to serve the right brain by doing computation of the individual pieces of data it has gathered. The right brain then fits this information into a larger sphere of sense-making. For millennia we have been guided by the harmony of this relationship, with the right brain taking precedence.
However, McGilchrist’s thesis is that, with the prolific rise of science and technology in the last few centuries, this cooperative relationship has become inverted. Now left-brained thinking rules a culture in which the world can be explained mechanistically and where the role of intuition and imagination has been sidelined. So when atheistically inclined scientists reduce the world to a set of physical constituents and, in doing so, believe they have explained the nature of reality (to the exclusion of purpose, meaning, and design), it is yet another sign of the left brain dominance in our culture.
Many of our modern problems, says McGilchrist, stem from the fact that the left side of our brain has overtaken its right counterpart in culture, science, and education. More worryingly, McGilchrist believes that historically vibrant cultures have always imploded when the left side of the brain took over. “They became more and more bureaucratic, devitalized, categorical rather than subtle. Effectively the life, the magic, the imagination, the spirit went out of the civilizations, and they collapsed.”[22]
The polarization, alienation, and social ills we are experiencing in the modern West are evidence of a similar fall and decline:
What I see very, very vividly in the last couple of hundred years and particularly accelerating in the last thirty or forty, is that we are moving into a world in which things are atomistic, static, certain, known, black-and-white in their nature, disembodied, abstract, categorical, and really only representations of the reality.[23]
THE GOD INTUITION
McGilchrist was raised, like many of his peers, in a Christian culture but claims no particular religious affiliation. Yet his theory about the brain’s influence on our modern world has attracted admirers from both the religious and the secular world.
When The Master and His Emissary was published, it gained glowing endorsements from voices as diverse as atheist philosopher A. C. Grayling, secular novelist Philip Pullman, comedian John Cleese, and then-archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. A book that traverses the religious-secular divide is worth taking notice of and is one of the reasons why McGilchrist strikes me as another bellwether of the new intellectual attitude towards faith emerging in our culture.
In his most recent two-volume work The Matter with Things (not a short read at more than three thousand pages), McGilchrist tackles the God question head-on. Knowing how much baggage is associated with religion, he was nervous about including a chapter that argues for a divine source underlying our minds and the cosmos, saying, “Many of my colleagues begged me not to include it.”[24] However, McGilchrist felt compelled to name a divine “something” behind material reality, “something very powerful, of ultimate importance, of great beauty and the source of life and creativity, which is behind this cosmos.”
Even in attempting to categorize and name it, he admits we are engaging in a typically left-brained activity but says our culture needs to be directed back towards this divine source as experienced by the right brain through art, literature, music, and yes, even meditation, prayer, and religion.
When forced to place a label on his belief in God, the psychiatrist describes himself as a “panentheist,” distinguishing it from pantheism, saying, “Pantheism is the belief that all things are God and that God is all things. But panentheism is really importantly different —that little syllable ‘en’ in the middle means ‘in.’ So God is in all things and all things are in God, but neither of these things exhausts God.”
McGilchrist’s panentheism is not necessarily incompatible with Christianity (I received a scholarly telling off from him for creating a “false dichotomy” when I suggested it). The Eastern Orthodox tradition has always focused on the “immanence” of a God who is deeply involved in and through his creation. St. Paul himself endorsed a similar description of God by ancient philosophers, saying, “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
However, McGilchrist does not describe himself as a Christian. He struggles with the concept of a divine hand that directly intervenes in history and with the exclusive truth claims of Christianity, preferring to see God expressed in many religions. Nevertheless, he describes the Christian story of Jesus’ incarnation, death, and resurrection as “the most powerful mythos about God that I can think of.”
Like many of the other new thinkers who straddle secular and Christian culture, McGilchrist has been deeply critical of the New Atheist approach to science and reality. He says that the reductionist perspective of these rationalists and scientists is a prime example of the pernicious left-brained way of seeing the world.
The way we end up shaping the world is radically determined by the way we attend to it, according to McGilchrist. If we go the left-hemisphere route of reducing everything to discrete atoms and electrons, we will end up with a mechanistic view of reality in which dead matter is all that ultimately exists. This results in technocratic, soulless cultures in which people are no longer connected to anything beyond their immediate concerns and circumstances.
Only by attending to the bigger picture that our right hemisphere inspires —taking seriously the religious impulse, being willing to admit the transcendent significance of beauty, morality, and our relationships with each other —will we find our way back to the kind of meaning that allows humans to flourish. Likewise, the reality of God will only make sense to our culture when we allow our intuition, imagination, and emotional intelligence to inform our thinking once again.
ABANDONING MATERIALISM
The fact that we can think, feel, and reason is itself one of the greatest challenges to materialism.
McGilchrist is among a number of thinkers who take issue with the “emergent” theory of consciousness, popularized by atheist philosophers such as Daniel Dennett. Dennett and other physicalists argue that the phenomena of our mind can be fully explained by the physical processes going on in the brain. In this view, consciousness is on a sliding scale —as the brain gets physically more complex, it gives rise to our ability to experience greater levels of awareness and mental ability. Effectively, we are our brains.
Indeed, in Dennett’s view there really is no “you” or “me” to speak of. The concept of a continuous independent “self” is itself an illusion foisted on us by this process of consciousness. “You” are simply a set of experiences fused together by a brain. And there isn’t even such a thing as “experience” in the sense of a private, first-person sensation. Consciousness really isn’t anything special at all, says Dennett; it’s just a function of the brain.
For his part, McGilchrist is perplexed by Dennett’s insistence on this physicalist view: “I think his position is wholly incoherent: he says that consciousness is an illusion, but I would point out that for it to be an illusion, there must be a consciousness to be ‘illuded.’ It’s one of the most remarkable statements by an obviously rather intelligent man.”[25]
Like many other philosophers such as David Chalmers and Thomas Nagel, McGilchrist also recognizes the so-called “hard problem of consciousness” as a significant challenge to a materialist account of the mind. It asks how a purely physical understanding of the brain that boils everything down to electrical impulses and chemistry can possibly explain the actual experiences they give rise to.
For example, could you explain to someone who had never felt any physical sensations what pain is like by showing them a brain scan of what happens when you step on that piece of Lego dropped by your child? Could someone who exists in a world of purely black-and-white visual perception understand what the color red looks like, even if they fully understood the neurochemical activity that accompanies that experience?[26] Could the smell of freshly brewed coffee be described through a comprehensive knowledge of the way the chemicals from the brewing process interact with our brain’s synapses? Of course the answer to all these questions is no. These experiences (“qualia” in philosophical jargon) are qualitatively different to the physical brain processes that accompany them. While our conscious experiences are clearly connected to brain activity, they are also clearly not the same thing as the brain activity itself.
These and other considerations about consciousness have led many to abandon the hard reductionism preferred by New Atheists and have prompted a revival of interest in more open-minded perspectives, such as panpsychism, the view that consciousness is the primary nature of reality and that every atom in the universe is ultimately conscious in some simple way. Rather than creating the illusion of consciousness, as Dennett claims, a brain “permits” the consciousness that already exists in the universe to be manifest through humans in a unique way.[27]
What was once viewed as an anti-scientific trickle of resistance to the materialist view of reality now seems to be turning into a surging river as more and more philosophers such as David Chalmers, Galen Strawson, Rupert Sheldrake, and Philip Goff argue for panpsychism. This has happened alongside a revival of interest in the use of meditation or even psychedelics to induce altered states of consciousness, popularized by well-known personalities such as Jordan Peterson, Russell Brand, and Joe Rogan.
Even bestselling atheist author Philip Pullman, whose His Dark Materials trilogy is highly critical of organized religion, has become an enthusiastic supporter of McGilchrist. I was made aware that Pullman’s own views on consciousness had been turning away from strict naturalism when he was a guest on my Unbelievable? show and revealed that he was a panpsychist, admitting that it put him “in a very odd position”[28] compared to his secular peers.
Whether it is the panentheism of McGilchrist or the panpsychism of these alternative thinkers, the tide certainly seems to be turning away from the purely material understanding of nature that has dominated academia for some time. Some of these thinkers seem to be traveling in the direction of recognizing a Mind behind the cosmos. Others are simply recognizing that the universe is stranger than a materialist perspective allows, even if they haven’t yet opened the door to God as a possible explanation.
While the philosophical questions around consciousness may seem complex, the actual experience of it is not. That we are conscious beings is one of the most obvious things we can ever know. Yet it is an aspect of our experience that resolutely refuses to fit into the box of atheist materialism. Perhaps the evidence for God is, quite literally, staring us in the face.
MEANING MAKES CONVERTS
For many, the stark mystery of consciousness and a growing dissatisfaction with the materialist account of reality has resulted in a search for meaning that has led them all the way to Christianity.
There’s Robbie’s story, an Australian listener who told me of how he lost his faith as a university student after being confronted with a variety of arguments against religion. He still clung to the value of Christianity’s ethical principles but became an atheist as far as belief in God was concerned.
However, Robbie is philosophically inclined, and he soon began to realize that the materialist worldview failed to explain his direct experience of the world. The popular view that his sense of self was an illusion and his experiences were explicable by brain chemistry alone seemed to continually jar with the meaning he met in music and art. “I remember one occasion when I nearly lost my atheism simply whilst listening to a Beethoven symphony and watching the sunrise over Sydney Harbor,” says Robbie. “I couldn’t understand how such an experience could be explained by a material world without some form of independent conscious awareness.”[29]
It was the “hard problem of consciousness” that convinced Robbie that materialism was false and, in conjunction with other philosophical arguments, set him on an intellectual path, first to deism (belief in a God behind nature) and finally to Christianity.
Jen Fulwiler, an American author, comedian, and podcast host, tells the engaging story of her own adult conversion, which was sparked by an existential crisis about meaning.
Growing up, Fulwiler had neither experience of nor respect for Christianity, seeing religious people as gullible and deluded. “I was a true atheist materialist,” she says. “I believed that the physical world around us that we can touch and observe is all that there is.”[30]
However, it was the experience of having a child that first shook Fulwiler’s worldview. She describes a moment, while looking at her firstborn son, in which she had an epiphany:
I looked down and thought, “What is this baby?” And I thought, “Well, from a pure atheist materialist perspective he is a collection of randomly evolved chemical reactions.” And I realized if that’s true, that all the love I feel for him, it is all nothing more than chemical reactions in our brains. And I looked down at him and I realized, “That’s not true. That’s not the truth.”[31]
This was the experiential jolt that sent Fulwiler on a journey to investigate the intellectual arguments for faith. Her disdain for Christianity began to dissolve as she met intelligent believers and realized that many of the greatest minds in history —such as Augustine, Aquinas, and Descartes —had been Christians. “I was really surprised when I actually found these very intellectually rigorous books where people talked about their faith from a place of reason and not a place of emotion.”[32]
From being a happy “lifelong atheist” in her midtwenties, Jen Fulwiler, along with her husband, entered the Catholic church in her early thirties —a convert whose journey began because she recognized the conflict between the materialist story of reality and her own experience of love.
A similar pattern emerges out of many of these conversion accounts. Before the full embrace of Christianity and its historical creeds, there is first an intellectual metamorphosis that takes place as the materialist worldview gets chipped away. There is often a growing sense that purpose, beauty, right, and wrong really do exist and that our emotions, thoughts, and feelings can’t be reduced to the movements of electrons in our brain.
The idea that the love we feel for a newborn child or the intensity of emotion that accompanies a stirring piece of music is fully explained by a series of chemical reactions in our brain stops making sense. This is not to deny that these physical phenomena are linked to those experiences. If we were being monitored by an MRI scanner, we would certainly see the appropriate parts of our brain light up during these moments. But that doesn’t mean that’s all that is going on. That would be like looking at the notes written on the page of a Beethoven concerto and thinking we understood it, without ever having heard the notes played. Meaning cannot be contained by such one-dimensional explanations.
Perhaps these conversion stories are only the first ripples of a forthcoming tide of people looking for the source of meaning that they sense must exist somewhere over the horizon.
SYMPTOMS OF THE MEANING CRISIS
“Humans are storytelling creatures” is a widespread dictum that probably originated with Jerome Bruner, a pioneer of cognitive psychology in the twentieth century. He emphasized the importance of storytelling for the healthy development of children. But seeing ourselves as part of a meaningful story is important throughout our lives.
Jonathan Gotschall’s book The Storytelling Animal emphasizes how important it is for humans to create a narrative for their own lives, rather than seeing themselves as simply bouncing around chaotically with no plotline or destination. “We all have a story that we tell about ourselves —about who we are, what our formative experiences were, and what our lives mean,” says Gotschall.[33]
The psychologist admits that the stories we tell ourselves aren’t always trustworthy. We habitually overrate our own qualities. “Yet,” he says, “crafting these stories —and believing them —seems to preserve our mental health.”[34]
For centuries Christianity gave people in the West a story to measure their lives by —a story in which they had been created for a purpose within a universe which, although it was broken, was headed for redemption. True or not, it was a story that gave people meaning even in the midst of misery and helped make sense of suffering. Shakespeare wrote that “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Yet even if the roles seemed insignificant in the scheme of things, there was still nobility in being part of a larger story. The narrative may have included many twists and turns, but it was heading towards a grand conclusion.
For many years now, that story has been replaced in the West by an account of reality in which there are no plotlines or cues, no scripting or directions, and certainly no playwright to bring it all together in the end. This is the all-pervasive materialist worldview, where we are but one cog in a mindless machine. Indeed, even the belief that we are in some small way the master of our own destiny has been extinguished by its wholly deterministic account of the universe.
There are many potential factors contributing to the rise in anxiety, depression, and distraction in our culture, especially the pressures of living in industrialized urban communities that make us less connected with nature and with each other. But the modern materialist story is, in my view, the overwhelming reason for today’s meaning crisis.
As I mentioned near the start of this book, the term “meaning crisis” was coined by psychologist John Vervaeke. It describes the sense of alienation people experience when they move through life feeling disconnected from each other and the world. Most especially they feel disconnected from a purpose to live for, or a story that makes sense of who they are. It ties into the description of the world becoming atomized, disembodied, and abstract that McGilchrist identified.
Vervaeke sees a range of symptoms to this crisis, including “the rise in suicide, even suicide independent of clinical depression right now, which is a very telling sign. A loneliness epidemic, the mental health crisis . . . depression and anxiety disorders, the addiction crisis, the opioid crisis.”[35]
Vervaeke is also concerned by “the virtual exodus” —the attempt by many to distract themselves from real life by immersing themselves in technology and gaming. Indeed, with the proliferation of immersive multiplayer online role-playing games, the existence of “gaming widows” —those who have lost partners to video game addiction —has been well-documented. But now many young men are surrendering any aspirations of career or family to begin with.
These are the increasing numbers of adults who have given up on pursuing “real life” goals because the rewards of the online gaming world are so much easier to attain. Writing for the Economist on “game drain,” Ryan Avent states that “today’s games seem to be displacing careers, friendships and families, and thus stopping young people (particularly men) from starting real, adult lives.”[36]
Again, for Vervaeke this is yet one more symptom of a world in which people have lost connection with a meaningful story. “People are explicitly declaring that they prefer to live in the virtual world rather than the real world. . . . They’re finding something in that world that’s missing from the real world.”
Gotschall expresses similar concerns. “If you had a technology that allowed you to live any story you wanted, why would you ever come out? Why would you ever want to stop being god?”[37]
TURNING THE TIDE
Faced with this burgeoning meaning crisis, many have tried to find solutions in the form of the mindfulness revolution. There has been an explosion in pop psychology books, courses, and apps aiming to soothe our anxiety and develop positive habits for mental health, often drawing on ancient forms of wisdom to do so. These are welcome developments insofar as they help stressed and anxious people to find a sense of equilibrium. Even Sam Harris has reinvented himself in recent years as a mindfulness guru with his own popular meditation app and podcast.
But these attempts to redeploy ancient wisdom through modern technology and psychology still feel like a temporary fix rather than a solution. The optimistic slogans of humanists who insist that we must “make our own meaning” are well-intentioned. But as long as their best minds are also reminding us that we are “accidental collocations of atoms” for whom personhood and free will are an illusion, their efforts will always be a placebo rather than a cure.
Is there a way back from this crisis? I am confident there is and that we are beginning to see the turning of the tide. It begins with recognizing that we have been living in the wrong story for too many years. The materialist-determinist paradigm is an atheistic assumption supported by neither science nor philosophy. We need not be compelled to live in such a nonstory.
I welcome the growing influence of thinkers from the secular world such as the panpsychists, who are pointing out the problems with materialism, or the psychiatrists and psychologists like McGilchrist and Vervaeke, who are encouraging us to return to holistic ways of thinking about the world. At the same time, I don’t want to settle for anything less than the true story of reality.
The way forward must involve recovering the power of storytelling. We are all searching for a story to live our lives by. Stories allow us to see ourselves as part of something much bigger than ourselves. But the purpose of storytelling is not to be led off into fairy tales or the simulacrum of a virtual world but to recover the true story that all other stories are ultimately pointing towards.
If there is a story that makes sense of who we are, then we must inquire of the Playwright to find out what it is and how we can play our part in it. If there is a path we are meant to take, then there must be one who can show us the way. If there is a meaning to be discovered out there, then there must be a source of truth. If there is a way to be truly human, then there must be one who can show us what fullness of life consists of.
Having been starved of meaning, purpose, and a story to live by, the West is, I believe, beginning to recover the story of Christianity and its central protagonist’s claim to be the personal embodiment of the way, the truth, and the life. Throughout this book I’ve tried to spell out the ways we are seeing that happen intellectually in culture, history, and science.
But perhaps more importantly, it will happen as we begin to overcome the false dichotomy of the left and right brain, of scientist and storyteller, of reason and imagination. I see it already happening in the stories of the heterodox thinkers pushing against the prevailing paradigms and the converts finding God as they reject the machine of materialism to explore the meaning of a great Mind behind it all. These are early signs that people are giving themselves permission to live in a different story.
It is the story of the one described as the Logos —the Word —who created a world out of love, placed humans at the center of it, and when it all went wrong, entered the story himself to redeem and restore the creation he had made. It is a grand story that declares that every individual story matters. Far from being one more product of a mindless, purposeless universe headed towards oblivion, we have each been offered an integral role in a cosmic drama. What you do with your part is up to you, but you are nevertheless invited into a story that is being woven through time and space, a story in which you are intended, purposed, and loved.
This is the story that shaped and fed us for almost two millennia. Its power has not gone away, even if it is often only dimly remembered now. But when people do embrace it today, it continues to transform individual lives and whole civilizations in turn.
What if the tide is due to turn?
In the final chapter of this book, I will explain why I think we may see it happen in our own generation. The surprising rebirth of belief in God is underway, and we may yet live to see the rebirth of our culture in the process.