The Death of Materialism

Constituting as it does the philosophical underpinnings of the theory of evolution, 19th-century materialism suggested that the universe existed since eternity, that it was not created, and that the organic world could be explained in terms of the interactions of matter. The discoveries of 20th-century science however have completely invalidated these hypotheses.

The supposition that the universe has existed since eternity was blown away by the discovery that the universe originated from a great explosion (the so-called "Big Bang") that took place nearly 15 billion years ago. The Big Bang shows that all physical substances in the universe came into being out of nothing: in other words, they were created. One of the foremost advocates of materialism, the atheist philosopher Anthony Flew concedes:

Notoriously, confession is good for the soul. I will therefore begin by confessing that the Stratonician atheist has to be embarressed by the contemporary cosmological consensus (Big Bang). For it seems that the cosmologists are providing a scientific proof ... that the universe had a beginning.1

The Big Bang also shows that at each stage, the universe was shaped by a controlled creation. This is made clear by the order that came about after the Big Bang, which was too perfect to have been formed from an uncontrolled explosion. The famous physician Paul Davies explains this situation:

It is hard to resist the impression that the present structure of the universe, apparently so sensitive to minor alterations in the numbers, has been rather carefully thought out... The seeming miraculous concurrence of numerical values that nature has assigned to her fundamental constants must remain the most compelling evidence for an element of cosmic design.2

The same reality makes an American professor of astronomy, George Greenstein, say:

As we survey all the evidence, the thought insistently arises that some supernatural agency -or rather Agency- must be involved.3

Thus, the materialistic hypothesis that life can be explained solely in terms of the interactions of matter also collapsed in the face of the the discoveries of science. In particular, the origin of the genetic information that determines all living things can by no means be explained by any purely material agent. One of the leading defenders of the theory of evolution, George C. Williams, admits this fact in an article he wrote in 1995:

Evolutionist biologists have failed to realize that they work with two more or less incommensurable domains: that of information and that of matter... the gene is a package of information, not an object... This dearth descriptors makes matter and information two separate domains of existence, which have to be discussed separately, in their own terms.4

This situation is evidence for the existence of a supra-material Wisdom that makes genetic information exist. It is impossible for matter to produce information within itself. The director of the German Federal Institute of Physics and Technology, Proffessor Werner Gitt, remarks:

All experiences indicate that a thinking being voluntarily exercising his own free will, cognition, and creativity, is required. There is no known law of nature, no known process and no known sequence of events which can cause information to originate by itself in matter.5

All these scientific facts illustrate that a Creator God, Who has external power and knowledge, that is, God, creates the universe and all living things. As for materialism, Arthur Koestler, one of the most renowned philosophers of our century says: "It can no longer claim to be a scientific philosophy"6