In our first post in this series we considered whether the “Exile as suspicion of Empire” concept can be applied more broadly than just to theology and religion, and I suggested that it can. Further, I then nominated a candidate for the most meta of all metanarratives, the mack-daddy of myths that few today even think to question: Scientific Materialism.
Yes, this is absolutely something that Exile can (and should) slow-blink at.
In his recent book, A Fool’s Wisdom, Steven A. Young puts forth five concepts that together comprise Scientific Materialism (or Scientism for short):
- Atomism
- Gravity
- Heliocentrism
- Evolution
- Germ Theory
(And according to Young, these ideas stand or fall together with each building upon the one before it.)
For my part, while I certainly rejected #4 when I was an evangelical, I never gave much thought to the others. To the degree that I did, I just sort of adopted them by osmosis and then assumed them to be true by default. But Young insists that these ideas work together to create and further a narrative according to which we are but specks of dust on a larger speck of dust rotating around an even larger speck of dust, all while hurtling through the vast emptiness of space at breakneck speeds for no real reason (and by “we” I mean “we clumps of cells without souls whose existence has no real meaning or significance in the cosmic scheme of things”).
If that describes your worldview, great. But if you are one of those stubborn people who believes that things like spirituality, consciousness, and (dare I say) God are important for understanding ourselves and others, then you are exactly a part of Young’s target audience.
Let’s tackle #1.
“Atomism is a school of thought,” Young writes, “that postulates all matter (all that matters) as consisting of infinitesimal, indivisible, corpuscular particles called Atoms.” He continues: “The model of the atom we are taught at school, the one with the ‘electrons’ orbiting a ‘nucleus’ made of ‘neutrons’ and ‘protons,’ is absolutely not a fact of reality. [These] are all conjecture.” He goes on to insist that quantum particles are essentially nothing more than mathematical concepts that are hypothetical in nature (hence the distinction between theoretical- and applied physics).
Yet despite this, Atomism (coupled as it was with Darwinism in the nineteenth century) has become the focal point of all scientific enquiry and has “changed how we view the universe and even how we view ourselves.” He goes on:
“Quantum, nuclear, and atomic physics is pure sophistry, and relatively unchallenged…. It is not even really necessary to debunk all the math, since we can see clearly that it has produced no applications or benefits for humanity. It debunks itself by its lack of usefulness…. It has literally no application in any areas of life. Every time the word ‘quantum’ is used without irony or criticism, you are being manipulated. You are being lied to, there is nothing ‘quantum’ about any of it.”
Now I realize that denying the existence of invisible particles that are literally 10,000,000 times smaller than a grain of sand is hardly the kind of thing that is likely to revolutionize anyone’s life. Practically speaking, atoms’ existence or non-existence makes zero difference.
But when we appreciate Young’s larger point, namely, that Atomism is the foundation of a superstructure that undermines just about every human intuition that we have entertained for millennia — that we matter, that beauty and virtue and sacredness are real, that we are not mere “meat suits” and clumps of cells with nothing transcendent about us beyond the brain inside our skulls — then it may be a worthwhile endeavor to question whether all of reality really is a mere random collection of these infinitesimally small round balls that are the supposed building blocks of everything that has ever existed in the world.
I mean, Exile is a suspicion of Empire, right? So are we doing this or not?
