9 January 2024 Mark 1:21-28
Teaching with authority is teaching about something very important, and as soon as people hear it, they know it to be true, and maybe, even despite themselves, want it to be true.
In the early 2000s it became fashionable for people to reject religious faith in favor of materialism, naturalism and science. It became trendy to believe that you could say everything there was to say about people simply by identifying the physical state of their brains. Close analysis of the electrochemical interactions in our neurons shows us who we are, and it works the same way for everyone. In that sense, we were told, materialism, naturalism, and science truly unite us, and deliver us from the irrational, anti-rational religious, or ethnic, or political claims that poison everything. We were told that this was the key to a more intelligent, more just, more peaceful, more joyful life.
Of course, it hasn’t worked out that way.
No sentient adult today with a straight face can say that we are more intelligent, more just, more peaceful, more joyful now, and a brief examination of the claims that not so long ago we thought so wise can show why. If we are just the electrochemical interactions in our brains, then there is no way that we can say that anything is true. There is no such thing as true chemicals and false chemicals – it’s just chemicals. There is no such thing as true electricity or false electricity – it’s just electricity. What we have been calling truth is simply our central nervous system playing tricks on us. Truth, as such, doesn’t exist.
Can anyone really live that way? Without Truth?
It gets worse. If everything about us is reducible to the electrochemical interactions in our brains, then the way we are now is the inevitable outcome of previous physical states of our brains, and those physical states were the inevitable result of earlier physical states. In other words, determinism is (if you will excuse the expression) true. We could never be otherwise than the way we are right now. There are, therefore, no such things as choices or decisions. There is no such thing as racism, or sexism, or terrorism, or bigotry, there is no such thing as morality or immorality, happiness or unhappiness, kindness or unkindness, loving or loveless. All those things are choices, and that is just the fizz, as it were, of the chemical brew in our brains.
Can anyone really live that way? We are what we are, no way to anything else?
Jennifer Fulwiler grew up with no experience of or respect for religion, and considered faithful people simply gullible or deluded. “I believed,” she said, “that the physical world around us that we can touch and observe is all there is.” She believed all that right up until she had her first child, and then she changed her mind:
I looked down and thought, “What is this baby?” Well, from a
purely materialist perspective he is a collection of randomly
evolved chemical reactions. And I realized that, if that’s
true, then all the love I feel for him is all nothing more than
chemical reactions in my brain. And I looked down at him, and
I realized that’s not true. That is not the truth.
Not long after this, Jennifer Fulwiler joined the Catholic Church. She knew something else had to be true, and maybe, even despite herself, wanted it to be true.
There is the truth, there are choices to take us to the truth, there is a life of such surpassing goodness, truth, and beauty that everything else is something to be rescued from.
Way, Truth, Life. Teaching with authority.
“I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except by me” (John 14:6)
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