Joel 2:12-17
Psalm 103:15-18
Matthew 6:16-21

What Is Materialism?

We who have lived in the consumerist culture of twentieth- and twenty-first-century America have come to equate consumerism with materialism. I am not talking about capitalism or economic theory here, but rather about the love of things, the culture of acquisition, even the idolatry of shiny cars and sumptuous mansions. If television has replaced the Altar in American society, surely its holy objects are just these things. The pop culture's therapists may say that this materialism is in opposition to a more "spiritual life." But these are broad impressions — more like the report of a bad stomach after eating cotton candy, than authentic spiritual journey. Yes, the soul surely does complain in the form of depression or a feeling of emptiness, whether or not we pay attention to God or to God's things. We will come back to this in a moment, but let us begin at the beginning: What is materialism?

Materialism is way of looking at and ordering the entire universe. This way of seeing began with the empiricist revolution of the sixteenth century and developed into rigorous sciences that continue to study the material basis for all things. Empiricism would turn the world on its head, causing countless libraries to be emptied or burned, for the world began to ask "how do we know what we know"? And John Donne famously wrote, "Shall everything now be called into question?" Empiricism fueled a rampant enthusiasm for exploring New Worlds across the oceans, whose explorers dutifully returned with never-before-seen specimens. By the eighteenth century the earth's entire lifeworld was being collected, sorted, classified, and studied on an agreed upon grid: Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, ... down to Species and sub-species, giving rise to a new science: taxonomy. And the crowned heads of Europe busily expanded their collections of all things. Why, you couldn't visit a crowned head of Europe without being ushered into his study or private museum and be duly impressed with his collection! The President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, a leading natural philosopher (as empiricists were styled in those days) was keen to buy an enormous chunk of real estate between the Mississippi River to the East and including modern-day Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado to the West. But his imagination seemed more fired at the prospect of discovering new specimens than at the prospect of expanding natural resources, trade, or Western expansion.

As swiftly as collections expanded just that quickly new instruments for observing them, studying them, and experimenting upon them appeared on the scene. Developments in optics turned the search for new specimens downward, toward toward the tiniest things, as microscopes appeared and upward to study the furthest and largest things in the furthest heavens with the advent of telescopes. By the eighteenth century, the Western world began to see itself as having advanced far above Heaven. An Age of Reason would now supplant an Age of Faith. A world that had been ordered on a divine plan (it was claimed) — with kings descending from the footstool of God, nobles serving the monarch, and peasants serving the nobles — all came crashing down. In France, an entire ruling class was executed and the cathedrals were gutted. In the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris a great statue, replacing the Altar, was erected to ... Human Reason! And a new age would be told, "Here are your gods, O Israel" (Ex 32:08)! The human mind is your new god. And the Founding Fathers of the American Republic dismissed the possibility of a God who could hear our prayers and preferred the more fashionable and "respectable" position of Deism. Yes, Deism admitted. Perhaps there was a God a long time ago. After all, we have all His minute "inner clock workings" still lying all about. But a living and breathing God Who can number the hairs on our heads?! That, they averred, was a ridiculous idea. And when they returned to their studies, for matter was their only concern, they agreed with one another that matter was all that counted, for matter was the stuff of a material world, and the material world is all there is.

This tyranny, of course, was never a necessary part of the story of science. On the face of it, the very laws contained within these sciences can never warrant the reckless claim that all that is beyond one .... does not exist. Science, after all, derives from the desire to understand what is beyond one. In our own time, the great mathematician Edsger Dijkstra posited that while it is possible to demonstrate the presence of an error in any formal system, demonstrating the absence of any error is not possible, .... in fact, hopeless. You see, you can look at any system of data and declare that is contains this and this and this, but you can never declare what it does not contain, what might have eluded you, much less believe that you have found every contradiction in your system. Disciplined science leads to one of two states at all times: (1) You are in the positive position of having collected a verified datum, which now may ordered and studied perhaps in relation to other verified data, or (2) you are in a neutral position, an open position, as you continue to look for yet-to-be-verified data. A third state comes about through undiscipline: (3) You reject all that does not conform to your present expectations declaring that it does not exist .... out of recklessness, not science, out of emotion, not reason.

One of the landmarks in the history of science is the publication in 1962 of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which points out that this crisis between expectation and what contradicts expectation is the burning point of science, when breakthroughs occur. For science is not an orderly, "evolutionary" thing, but rather a history of violent shipwrecks, often with little to salvage when the old ship goes down.

On Ash Wednesday, as we consider our situation, I would like to broach a subject having to do with the unexpected and revolutionary, and this is that our primary, life-giving organ is the imperishable soul. For its purview is not simply "three score and ten years" (Ps 90:10), but eternity. Yet, there is no section in Gray's Anatomy that makes any reference to the immortal soul, our chief organ. Early attempts of empiricists to deal with this subject include placing a dying man on a scale to detect any possible changes in body weight before and after death. How much does a soul weigh?

This reminds me of the efficiency expert who came to Bell Labs many years ago who wanted to weigh our FORTRAN programs, which were encoded into paper punch cards, to measure productivity. A brilliant friend of mine pointed out that this exercise was pointless: "The program meaning," he said, "is not in the paper; it is in the holes. If you are to weigh, then you must weigh the holes." Ironically, it would turn out, greater productivity correlated to programmers who produced fewer cards, not more. Have you met people who require fifteen minutes to tell you something that another person can say in five?

We might spend an entire morning contemplating the conundrums of science and scientific notation. The amusing story I just told points to the trap which "common sense rationality" can set for us. More difficult to grasp is the trap that awaited the rationalists of the Age of Reason, the so-called "Enlightenment" — the period from 1685 to 1815, styled the "long eighteenth century." During this period, human reason was king, and a sunny optimism prevailed, predicting that all things would be clearly understood in due time. The whole world and every question in it would be settled by human reason! Yet it would not be long before alarms began to ring.

Not long after the long century, the great physicist Werner Heisenberg posited an "Uncertainty Principle." He was able to show that the act of observation alters the object being studied. We can discuss photons striking electrons which then are no longer present where they were, but the thing to grasp is, There goes objectivity! For as soon as you are present to observe, everything changes. Ask any anthropologist, and they will tell you that this is also their dilemma. Eventually, Ludwig Wittenstein would elaborate this semantically, pointing out that the very act of designing an experiment, with the bounding of data collection that must follow, renders any claim to objectivity impossible. You can only find what you were looking for in the first place! That is not objectivity.

These waters run deep. For now, suffice it to say that the classical physicists who followed Sir Isaac Newton — so high in their confidence, so sure of their findings, so apt to crow about human reason, and the obsolescence of God — would have been dealt a death blow if they were transported in time to witness the revolution of quantum physics and then later, of chaos theory and string theory. Learning that twentieth-century quantum physicists had cut the ground out from under deterministic causality(!) would have been the last straw, for this was their bedrock.

Yet, even their classical physics, — the pride of the Enlightenment, the great triumph of human reason — contained a troubling feature at its very foundation. Let us dig down and survey this foundation. Now, listen closely, students, for here is our most basic principle: Matter is defined as "something that has mass." Very important! So what is Mass? Mass is defined as "something that is composed of matter." Wait a minute! Isn't this circular reasoning, something like what Wittenstein would call a tautology — a statement defined in terms of itself, words that bend back on themselves over and over again? If matter can only be defined in terms of mass and mass can only be defined of matter, then where is the "hard linkage" between this relational closure and what we might call "physical reality"? Isn't this just a word game? Well, scientists prefer the word, axiom, but in any wider arena, this would be as a fallacy in logic, a "dead end." You see, this space bends back on itself, something any good empiricist would notice right away? Shall I now confidently crow that I have dislodged the claims of God on the basis of a dead end? Now, these finer levels can be described and enumerate and have been. But let us say, in brief, that the "hard linkage" between these descriptions and enumerations and what we think of reality is a bridge that has never been established.

Let us say in charity that empiricism and the sciences were never fitted to ask, much less answer, questions concerning absolute values or meanings. They only propose to do useful things within the sphere of their own semantics. And we must admit that these useful things have done a lot of good .... as I survey two sisters who have recently had eye operations, one to strip away the darkness that was forming over her eyes and the other to turn back glaucoma and blindness. Should not, then, the materialists and the religious embrace as friends, who are complementary and, therefore, natural partners? Certainly, I make no claim that spiritual discourse is a science. I do not believe theology is a science. In a phrase oft repeated by Robert Cardinal Bellarmine during the seventeenth century, "So it turns out that the Sacred Scriptures are not about how the heavens go, but rather about how to go to Heaven.

What is the alternative to a friendly, mutual respect concerning the domains of science and religion, of the material world and the spiritual world? On the one side, you may commit yourself exclusively to the material world, confident that science will save you. And as I look out on the world, I can only conclude that this in the commitment that nearly everybody has made. But as the material world is confined to ... well, matter, then all you will have in the end is dust ... ashes, which is all that remains and is irreducible in the material world. By contrast, the divine world, can never be bounded, much less reduced, can never be measured in material terms, for "God is Spirit" (Jn 4:24) and is without limit.

Yet, He has placed within each of our material bodies, a spiritual organ, which we call the soul. Perhaps it is better to say, not organ, but rather "a hole inside us which contains all the meaning." You cannot weight it. Let us conceive this hole as being a God-shaped hole (to slightly alter Blaise Pascal's thought) which can never be filled unless it be filled with the love of, and for, God. Otherwise, one exhausts his entire life, and all he has, attempting to fill this hole, attempting to assuage the depression and emptiness and futility that arises from this gaping, life-controlling hole. No wilderness of shiny cars or sumptuous homes or rare wines ... or depraved relationships can fill this space. For it is this space where you meet your Father Who is in secret .... Who eludes microscopes, telescopes, and all other instruments that attempt to see in secret. For He is a mystery, and this hole belongs to Him — this mystery of a place-which-is-not-a-place and a nowhere-which-is-everywhere. It is not visible by any means other than the special way in which He sees, and we return His glance. Oh, yes. We can return that secret glance.

At the end of the day there is ... only Relationship, the God-of-Three-Persons, Who sees and seeks to embrace each one of us ... in secret. Remarkably, One of these Persons is Fully God and Fully Man, pointing the way to our birthright, our royal title of citizenship in His Everywhere-which-is-Nowhere ... the Kingdom not of this world (Jn 18:36), the Kingdom the empiricist Pontius Pilate could not see.

How abundant beyond measure is this gift! How fulfilling of every hole in every person on the earth! And what exactly is the alternative to this once-only-given gift? Well, all that remains, when God is ruled out, is dust.