Materialism on the mind
Part 1: Heaven
“There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol."
-Carl Jung, on the “collective unconscious.”
I wonder sometimes whether Christians truly believe what they say they believe. Many of our actions as Christians call our beliefs into question, since we often live functionally as atheists in everything except the obvious physical, verbal and social rituals. In a society in which people are deeply influenced by philosophical materialism, it is likely that Christians do not escape the many subconscious influences passed across to them socially. The majority of people in the average Western Christian’s workplace consciously espouse materialism. Other related questions of trans-historical “collective unconscious” influences are different and we might get back to them in far-future posts.
For this piece I will suppose that God exists and talk about the idea of an afterlife in a culture that is nevertheless heavily influenced by materialism. I wonder how many Christians believe in Heaven in all the glory that is ascribed to it? How many believe in the supposed goodness of the God they will be in contact with? How many trust that we will be satisfied? And how many believe that such a place of bodily resurrection really exists at all? We will just deal with the last question here.
I’ve been in the unfortunate and bizarre position of believing in a good God and somehow struggling to believe that he had the power to resurrect us. I lean towards materialism when it comes to things that aren’t God, since it seems as if human minds are “emergent” from physical brains, although not all questions have been answered. I also adhere to the idea that many things evolved from a small point, such that God did not create man physically from the dust like a sculptor but in a perhaps truer sense from compounds and elements which are present in the soil but originated at a point from which God could see all possible futures and chose one. So I tend to believe that he created us from a distance. I find (or at least found) it harder to believe that he can do the sculptor’s work in re-creating our bodies after we die.
I can look at my hands and hold them up, and if I let them fall they will hit the table and cause physical pain. They have weight. They allow a pulse, governed by a heart that is flawed and conditional and non-metaphorical. I get up in the morning and my bed creaks, and the ensuing silence is filled by a real bird or the unfortunate patter of shower water in the competition to be in the right place at the right time. Opening my cupboard reveals the consequences of my previous actions, as the contents sit frankly sometimes accusing me of a lack of self-care in planning. This world is real. After my corpse decomposes and my thoughts (dependent as they seem to be on my physical brain) die, it sometimes is hard to believe that this can be resurrected again somewhere else. Does God take the atoms that composed my brain and replicate them? Would my experience be preserved? Would that person be “me” or just a clone? Would “I” experience heaven?
Is God even capable of rearranging atoms like that? How does he create the physical thing - does he chip at it subtractively like a statue or build it additively like a sandcastle? The neuroticism might be unusually intense here but my mind was swimming in a pool of nothing, trying to latch on to images, incapable of trusting.
Two things helped me restore my faith in resurrection. The first one was walking on a street in spring. The sun was high and there were no clouds. The air was shimmering, every colour awaiting the alighting of a gaze to manifest its exorbitant display. God saw this future from when there were only flitting subatomic particles. He must have the vision to carry this scene on to perfection.
The second thing came out of Descartes’ “brain in a vat” idea. The idea challenges a reader of Descartes to give evidence that they are a real person, and not just a brain in a jar which generates artificial sights, sounds, feelings, tastes and smells. My brain (maybe that brain in a vat) sees the table as hard. That hardness however is the result of repulsive electrostatic forces, although to my fingers it feels like “woodiness”. So wood is real but its reality is different to what I see. It is supposedly made up of “particles”, but what are particles made up of? Do I really know how easy or difficult it might be for God to rearrange them in a blink? And what am I? All the information about the atoms that make up my body could potentially be remembered as a file on a hard drive with ingredients (the atoms in particular) and the arrangement or position of them. As Descartes realised, all I know is my consciousness exists. All the details of something that is happening to me, for example an upset stomach, can be information of the state of my atoms, fed by a computer program into my consciousness to provoke the reaction. Perhaps even consciousness can be part of the computer program. If God is a programmer, he could simply copy and paste me – somewhere else. The computer program is really just an analogy to illustrate that although the physicality of our bodies is important and real, it only exists as physicality because we perceive it that way. Even this tangible earthed-ness is conditional on something, and we don’t know what that something is exactly.
“As for man, his days are like grass;
he flourishes like a flower of the field;
for the wind passes over it, and it is gone,
and its place knows it no more.”
Whatever we are made of is ultimately inaccessible to us. The philosophical framework of our physical existence is also subject to the same wind. The only person who can see our comings and goings objectively is God.
