They like to go so far as to deny free will and in some cases to say consciousness itself is an illusion, or at least nothing more than an evolutionary emergent property, a byproduct, of our brains.
Matter is the cause of everything and the brain creates all experience including the (perhaps illusory) experiences of being conscious and having free will, they say.
The materialist denies the primacy and significance of your immediate conscious experience; the materialist laughs at your belief that you are consciously choosing and making decisions that shape and create your life; the materialist loves to belittle you, saying you are nothing but a biological robot controlled by external factors completely beyond your volition, in fact you do not even have any volition to attempt to have any control over anything.
Perhaps the greatest anathema to the materialist is the idea of there being a God, a non-physical being that has divine power over us all. Yet materialists have created their own God, the God of matter and of universal physical causation.
Perhaps the greatest anathema to the materialist is the idea of there being a God, a non-physical being that has divine power over us all. Yet materialists have created their own God, the God of matter and of universal physical causation.
For the materialist, physical causation is the omniscient and omnipotent God of us all. The materialist God is absolute and uncompromising: there is is no relationship, no interplay, no thought, no meaning; their God is omnipresent, their God is responsible for every movement, every cause, every effect and every experience - these is no room for anything else in their world.
Maybe they are correct, but be clear what it is you are taking on board if you subscribe to this brand of metaphysics: your life is meaningless, literally devoid of any meaning; the entirety of your conscious experience is nothing more than a byproduct of chemical activity and is totally predetermined by non-sentient matter.
Think about that for a minute: the whole of human experience reduced to a random and accidental collision of meaningless objects.
But why is this a God? Because it is the materialist’s creation of something outside of ourselves that has complete power over us; it is the materialist’s creation myth that explains how everything comes to be; it is the materialist’s universal explanation of all things and their answer to all philosophical and existential questions - and their answer to all of these questions is simple and absolute: there is no meaning, there is no significance to life; the monotheistic God of physical causation is all.
And perhaps most importantly, their arguments for this God are based on faith, they believe in this God. There is no evidence that can ever prove that their chosen metaphysical belief in materialism is correct.
It is also of interest to note that the believers of this materialist God are all complete hypocrites: not a single one of them makes any attempt to live according to their beliefs.
But why is this a God? Because it is the materialist’s creation of something outside of ourselves that has complete power over us; it is the materialist’s creation myth that explains how everything comes to be; it is the materialist’s universal explanation of all things and their answer to all philosophical and existential questions - and their answer to all of these questions is simple and absolute: there is no meaning, there is no significance to life; the monotheistic God of physical causation is all.
And perhaps most importantly, their arguments for this God are based on faith, they believe in this God. There is no evidence that can ever prove that their chosen metaphysical belief in materialism is correct.
It is also of interest to note that the believers of this materialist God are all complete hypocrites: not a single one of them makes any attempt to live according to their beliefs.