By slow and steady retreat over the past few centuries, Christians have ceded material definition of the cosmos to secular science. Though we may have continued to hold a divinely generated and sustained cosmos in our hearts and spoke of it in our private conversations and at Christian gatherings, publicly, we have learned to speak of Earth and Cosmos in the purely material terms of our usurpers in public and scientific discourse. The result has been a duality between faith and fact; spirit and matter, even; spirit and truth. The faithful have tried to resist this process by various means and arguments, but the overall trend has been a separation of our cosmos into two realms: one of material and another of spiritual reality. And the material one does not need the spiritual to be comprehended; God is but the ghost in the machine, and the more complete this segregation, the more Christian faith tends toward Gnosticism. For, by this separation we leave the wholistic world of our saintly forebears and move into a dualistic world of our minds quite apart from the material realm we inhabit. As Stephen J Gould put it—in an attempt to throw ‘faith’ a bone— “Science and religion comprise two non-intersecting magisteria”. We know this means that science is about the real, while religion is relegated to metaphorical narratives about symbolic human existence, intrinsically coherent perhaps, but extrinsically without evidence. As metaphor, the material world is the hardware, while our worldviews are various software applications we use on the cosmic hard drive. By this, religious indifferentism is inescapable, for, how do we say one application is true when they all, more or less, function as procedures over the underlying material reality, this reality being neutral to meaning.
By the orthodox understanding, well presented in St John of Damascus’ An Exact exposition of the Orthodox Faith in the first few chapters, and expounding on Jeremiah 23:23, “Shall a man be hid in secret places, and I not see him, says the Lord? do not I fill heaven and earth, says the Lord?”, the two entities, body and spirit, inhabit an integrated whole. Though the created material world is dependent on the uncreated God, and therefore is changeable and even replaceable by His will. Because it depends on His creative rational will for its being, this dependence makes the material cosmos inseparable from the Creator, though He is separable from His creation. That is, Creation is separable from His essential being, but inseparable from his sustaining will. Therefore, the true religion, and God’s acts of judgement and mercy in the history of salvation since the creation and the fall of man, happen within the material world that the true God made and sustains. Holding the material world as neutral to meaning is, therefore, wicked error. The material world is infused with the wisdom of the Logos; these are not just pretty words, nor a preferred conception, nor, least of all, a post hoc emergent property of matter, but are rather a true statement about the being of the visible realm, its material, formal, efficient, and final causes. As we have from St John’s Gospel 1:3 “All things were made by (the Logos): and without him was made nothing that was made.”
God both made the cosmic theatre and is the director of the drama within. Therefore, any true thing that we can know about the material cosmos will conform to this truth that it is the product of a creative rational will. We have been made timid of making this assertion outside of church, lest we make claims about God and His creation that may later be falsified. And we do well to be cautious about such claims, and all claims of human knowledge. Yet, we have also become timid about making this obviously true statement, if God is the author of all material being, the truth of this will be manifest in the ordering of creation. As God’s will is necessarily metaphysical, extra-material, and yet also intra-material, then we should expect to find the margin or interface between the material and meta-material reality in physical experimentation and contemplation. In absence of robust metaphysics, we have tended, implicitly, to give way to the deistic materialism of the Enlightenment. By this ontology, even if God created the cosmos, it functions as a self-sustaining physical monad, requiring no input from ‘outside’ above the inertial memory of Creation. At least we do not expect to find any such input through scientific experiment. If metaphysical substances are conceded under this reign of matter, they are only the implied structures of material relationships: effects, not affects. By a deep creation ontology, though, we should expect to see the presence of metaphysical affects through observation of their effects. I will demonstrate this communication with concrete examples in time.
I wrote, “any true thing we can know”, for, unlike the gnostic usurper, man-under-the-spell-of-the-serpent, we cannot suppose that all knowledge, even of material things, is within our grasp. Since the ‘Enlightenment’ we have been tempted to join along with the march of human progress, even though this crusade had as its battle cry the conquest of God’s world by and for man. And this conquest has been the occasion of innumerable sins of presumption, and blasphemies both overt and covert as we have progressively found ourselves under the devil’s gnostic delusion. Simple faith—statements of such—have been eroded because in the back of our minds we have lost confidence, worried that we will be caught out by some superior ‘knower’ with some special understanding of the material world against our ephemeral claims of spiritual causality. Of course, the worldling scientists have made a continuous stream of erroneous claims over the centuries and continue to do so today. Yet, they maintain an infallibility of best intentions toward eventual fact.
The edifice of the Temple of Science is propped up by asserted power more than demonstrated truth. There are of course isolated truths and the manifestation of material wonders, but the cohesion of all this fragmented gnosis into an ontological singularity is pure illusion. This is best illustrated in our contemporary age by the ever-shifting climate emergency and, perhaps more acutely, by the Corona plague medical tyranny, which was founded on ever shifting data acted on as if infallible in each fresh iteration. Both of theses power expressions of the scientific industrial complex are predicated on a belief in the functional omniscience of Scientific Man. This statement is of course dismissed as foolish when stated plainly, “Of course we don’t know everything, though there is no reason we couldn’t!” The expertocracy will always feign humility when asked to the face but will enact policy as if epistemologically infallible. We have seen a lot of power exercised under both the Climate and Covid panics but the underlying data and the theoretical models that hold these policy complexes together into the social weapons used on the citizenry are less certain than the policies themselves. Very few actors in these mass global campaigns ‘to get something done about it’ could make even rudimentary scientific justification for their actions. Each expert who does, perhaps, ‘know something’, only knows some fragment of something, the Grand Knower is a collective social assumption, and only exists as the motivating justification for the social interventions. Such is the tragic end of the Enlightenment project, man as comic vanquisher of God asserting his own status as artificial deity, only to bring humanity to bow before his scattered half-understandings, and their policy intentions meted out with equal parts power, greed, and fear.
Why have the Gentiles raged, and the people devised vain things? The kings of the earth stood up, and the princes met together, against the Lord and against his Christ. Let us break their bonds asunder: and let us cast away their yoke from us. He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh at them: and the Lord shall deride them. Then shall he speak to them in his anger, and trouble them in his rage.
Psalm 2:1-5
Stubborn ignorance has, seemingly, been the only means of resisting the secular and implied atheistic victory over material reality. The social cost of this hard-nosed approach is credibility in this present age. And this means not being able to participate in academia unless the metaphysical and the material claims of our faith are left out of the conversation and are best kept in secret. The spiritual cost of this is that we allow atheists to determine the parameters, not only of study, but by implication, the parameters of reality, the arena of study itself. In the softer sciences, the social sciences, and the arts, this secular victory has been functionally total as well. It is clear to the careful observer that definitions of material and cosmological reality are the foundation of social-moral reality. The supposed hard proofs of the material sciences form the assumptions of the biological and social sciences, and even the arts, and in turn form the assumptions by which moral sanctions are justified. Yet, the fundamental secular statement of Being—the contra divine—is no more than assertion held by will rather than evidence. The autogenetic cosmos is the foundational truth of all contemporary research, it is an infallible dogma in the secular scientific university. Sadly, this has become true in theological speculation as well, and this in both the explicit acceptance of the primacy of matter, and the implicit assumption of the self sufficiency of the cosmos by deistic naturalism, and thus the acceptance of religion as an emergent communal function of social evolution. This capitulation is quite welcomed by many ‘thinkers of theologies’, as it serves the flesh, making Man the principal thing, while rendering the spiritual rule of the Church fungible—subservient to the social-moral implications of psychology and the other social sciences, the sciences of man. If material naturalism is infallibly true, then we probably need to accept our fate, the cosmos is a self-generated and self-maintained material structure and all meaning we see in it is at best a utility for providing purpose toward social cohesion. By this John Paul 2 was correct in his Christology of Man. For by evolutionary materialism, man is the pinnacle of biological being, having drawn himself up from the elements through many stages of brute existence to his current state of rational being. However, if the case for materialism is not as good as sold, then it may be time to make a deliberate stand against it, stubbornly but not in ignorance.
How soundly is the material naturalist worldview grounded? We know it has been very robust as a power assertion, but this is not the same thing as natural philosophical or even scientific proof. Truth and power are not intrinsically linked. Of course, many material claims of modern science are true, but many will be proven false in time as well. And over arching ‘theories of everything’ are not verifiable. Yet once a school is formed with some credibility it takes little time before the maths and research in that school start filling up the void after the initial postulation. Yet, there is no way of knowing if this new school is immutably true, and certainly no way of proving that its underlying commitment to material naturalism is true.
Take the quite recent change in electrical theory. For quite a long time it was assumed that a spare electron of the current-medium moved physically, or ‘jumped’, along the wire atom by atom. Now it is taken that energy moves along the wire without this material transfer. This means that, electricians and electrical engineers and even physicists had a false conception of what happens when we flip a light switch, and the light turns on. Copper and aluminum were still mined and recycled and turned into wire, electrical generators were still being designed to greater efficiency and put into operation, buildings were still built and wired, and lights were still turned on and off, all under a false conception of the underlying electro-mechanical reality. Fascinating. We can see dogmatic bias in the initial electron transfer hypothesis. It seems to fit better with materialism, which wants to see something physical happening. Of course, materialists accept the presence of energies, to the hard version of the materialist macro-hypothesis, all there is in the universe is matter and its attending energies. Still, these energies carry a certain metaphysical implication, and metaphysics is mostly forbidden in the hard materialist view. Invisible, nonmaterial, substance is pretty hard to include in an auto-genetic material universe without diluting the probability of its unplanned spontaneous becoming toward impossibility.
By historical development, material naturalism (like evolutionary hypothesis) was posited before much was known about the details of material being. The claim that there is nothing but matter and energy, though still a leap of faith, was easier to make without all the metaphysical implications of material being we see now through atomic and subatomic discoveries. By the time the later discoveries were made, the dogmatic implications of secular scientific atheism were well established into the social fabric as the ascendant mythos. So, the implied metaphysical properties of material being are relegated to express only as emergent properties of material substance. That is, matter is primary, as by the materialist creation myth, nothing can exist prior to the spontaneous emergence of matter, so any unifying metaphysical substances must either be merely virtual or are the effect of material relationships.
There is, as well, an epistemological trick played by materialists, I will dub it the belief transfer error. This is when the beliefs of researchers are implied in the results of their research. Nearly all contemporary research is done by radical materialists. The discoveries are seen to support materialist dogma because these discoveries were made under the auspices of those who hold the dogma, “there is nothing but matter and its energies in the universe”. This belief transfer happens without notice. Yet, as we have seen with the recent change in electromagnetic theory, or hypothesis, the beliefs of practitioners do not shape material reality. There is much of this usurpation in the secular scientific world. As mentioned, the case for DNA as ‘proof’ of natural selection by random mutation is telling. The discovery of genetic information coding should be clear evidence of a metaphysical intention behind biological being, as it is not credible, apart from prior dogmatic insistence, that such intricate molecular machines can be autogenetic. Again, the dogmatic convictions of the discoverers are transferred to the discoveries, even when those discoveries should bring the discoverers ‘matter only’ dogma into doubt. Quite apart from their epistemological hubris, atheist materialist scientists are fallible as all human beings.
I certainly do not want to propose radical universal skepticism. We can learn much about the world about us, yet there will be limits to our knowledge. I propose, though, that these limits can be defined, at least sometimes. That is, the margin of our understanding can be pointed to, and that this margin will very often point to a metaphysical intention; we will see an effect in our material world for which an invisible affect is its cause. By working within the current ontology of the physical monad have Christians made a fundamental error in assuming the universality of this realm of scientific discovery? Have we been too willing to put our metaphysics on the shelf and pretend that we can engage in a tradition of inquiry of the sequestered material realm? Does such a realm exist, even conceptually? That is, can we really understand, even supposed material things, apart from the metaphysical intentions that form, house, and motivate them? Or, as soon as we enter that materialist universe of discourse, have we left ultimate reality, ironically, for an imaginary realm, for a world of human gnostic delusion? Have we behaved wickedly in order to save some face before our fellow human beings whom we have counted as clever or powerful, and so, have we snubbed the divine Logos in favour of human fragmented gnosis willfully ignorant of the divine metaphysical intentions? And if so, are we prepared to face our judgement with this compromise on our souls?
Hard questions for sure, but ones that every Christian who practices Science within the secular scientific establishment will have to give answer for. In truth, every Christian who has allowed the presumptuous knowledge of man to eclipse his confidence in the veracity of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic faith will have to give account. It is hard now in the pit of apostacy to find souls untainted by this gnostic delusion. I have certainly been guilty of this wicked presumption, and so pernicious is this corruption of the clear simple teaching of our forebears, and I cannot yet claim to be clean of it. So, I am not hurling stones of condemnation from a high place of fidelity. Rather, I seek others who have seen the error of their way who want to climb back up the mountain and commune with our Master, to a life with simplicity of faith in the world that He made and sustains. I at least hope to remove a stumbling stone from the way of those non scientists whose faith has been undermined by the assumption that the materialists have the upper hand. Even more, I hope to present simple but convincing arguments to show that the materialist worldview is unsupported by reason following observation, that we can see the very hand of God through natural philosophical observation and contemplation of material processes. I want to make it acceptable to Include these divine intentions into our conception of the material world. To show how rejecting their obvious presence blinds us from the truth, and so blinds us from the Author of truth. So, more to the point, I want to make it unacceptable to exclude these metaphysical intentions from a complete consideration of physical processes. This may require us to develop schools separate from the ruling secular orthodoxy. I do not mean that everything discovered by secular, even atheistic scientists is necessarily false. Not at all. What is true is true. Only, we must be clear that the physical monad is a dogma we cannot hold on theological grounds, and as we will see, a proper contemplation of the physical world confirms this claim.
We can make excuses for our falling away, for it was stepwise both corporately, generation by generation, and individually, concession by concession, following the supposed settling of ‘Science’. We can see now that our error was in going along too far with the material enquirers. For, their path was to godlessness. At first, of course, a few centuries ago, the schools were mixed, and outright atheism was scorned in academic discussion. The implicit deism of material enquiry is heresy enough though and should be eschewed as implied by Satan himself. As this false ontology has nothing to do with “Him in whom we live and move and have our being”. So, at some point, in order to preserve the integrity of our faith in the omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent author and sustainer of all things visible and invisible we should have separated from the schools of the neopagan materialist wizards, for all the ‘signs and wonders’ they were able to conjure, as none of these technological and medical advances were necessary for salvation, and participation with the materialist lie has been most detrimental to the saving intention of true faith. While even only pragmatically participating in the worship of the creation above the Creator—the worship of the gnosis of man above the divine Logos—implicates us in idolatry, however disenchanted. It is no use tacking God on at the end of our enquiry of nature, if we refuse, like the godless, to see his necessary infused will in our contemplation, and merely see him as the prior maker of a self maintaining material monad, we are guilty of this idolatry. It would be better for our souls to be ignorant of the speculations of particle physics while holding a simple faith inhabiting a geocentric cosmos than to participate, as many of us have done, in the serpentine gnosis—the modern adoration of human knowledge of good and evil. All the knowledge which the Modern world considers to be what separates us from the filthy ages of ignorance has no necessary efficacy in the salvation of souls. It is background noise against the pure clear Word of God. We must admit that we do not need to know precisely how electric lights work, nor do we need them in our lives at all, nor any modern technical convenience, to please our Creator in works of faith. Indeed, as for the metaphysical part of any material thing, we can never know its affect, we can only take some measurement of its effect. If we felt the need to continue such extraneous material inquiry once it became clear where it was leading, we should have separated and carried on our own traditions of natural philosophy, according to our own metaphysical doctrines and limited the violence of our methods by our own moral principles. If we did so we might not have helped develop instruments of mass destruction, not performed gratuitous vivisection, and not been tainted by proximity with abortion and euthanasia. Yet, we may have grounded our humbler discoveries in reality more so than do the secular atheists we have followed in train.
That is a lot of big talk coming from a man of no account in either the world or the Church; where is the substance of my boldness? As an example of what I mean by the rational demonstrability of metaphysical substance, I will consider only one very basic example in the following post, but one that is so essential as to bring all material being under its being: the substance of Spacetime as the metaphysical container of Matter. The discussion in the following post, Space Matter Time, is from a chapter section from The Restoration, a book I have written as, among other things, a critique of the tradition of Newtonian Naturalism. In that work I introduce how uncertainly the atheistic materialistic cosmology is grounded on the tradition of Newtonian Gravity. The Spacetime demonstration places the groundwork for the gravitational work, so I will use this as my first demonstration of a meta-material substance.
As the demonstration will show, Spacetime is necessarily a metaphysical substantial container required for the Being and Becoming of material substance. That is, Space and Time are non-material co-substances with Matter. Matter itself has a metaphysical conceptual substance in the information nature of atomic structure. But I will leave this demonstration for a later post. We will consider matter as given and received through observation. I assert here, though, that contemplation on material being, properly ordered toward the Creator, reveals His invisible presence in all things. This is not some prosaic metaphor, nor does such theistic presumption blind us from seeing the truth. The notion that material being can be grasped without reference to the Creator’s intentions is satanic. And this deception in its implied form is so ubiquitous as to leave very few of us free of its taint. Save those blessed souls with simple faith who never felt the need to conform with the gnosis of the Modern age. For quite the opposite is the true case: we cannot grasp the true nature of material being apart from seeing the presence of a Creative Rational Will.