Material Life: Mechanical Meat or Magical Matter?
Neither dare challenge the sacred cow
that unites them in common descent with
modification: Methodological Naturalism
Mechanical Meat or Magical Matter?
Materialist Science’s Two-Ring Circus
by John D. Wise, Ph.D.
My job for CEH is getting too easy.
As I’ve been asserting for some time now, “Scientific Materialism” has backed itself into a corner. The resulting panic is now routinely producing two distinct kinds of comedies in the peer-reviewed press.
In Ring One, cognitive neuroscientist Tom James of Indiana University:
Your brain may not actually “make” decisions (ScienceDaily, 25 August 2026). Publishing in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Professor James insists that the human brain does not make decisions. What “feels” like conscious deliberation is an illusion emerging from mindless sensorimotor feedback loops, demoting Man (created in the image and likeness of his Creator) to a glorified Roomba bumping into laboratory furniture.
In Ring Two, Chaplain[1] James Croft, University of Sussex:
The myth of dead matter leads to modern disenchantment (Institute of Art and Ideas (IAI), 24 August 2026). Disillusioned by the bleak, soul-crushing wasteland created by materialist reductionism, Croft is calling for a “quiet materialist revival” to re-enchant the cosmos. His solution? Matter, take it on his authority, is not “dead” or “lumpen”; it is inherently “fecund, generative, self-organizing, and lively.”
Welcome to the great secular materialist family reunion. Both attendees view the other as the embarrassing cousin they wish had stayed home.
This is not a tension within a unified field. It is its late-stage collapse. Philosopher of science Imre Lakatos would rightly label this a degenerating program.
We rightly view these poles not as legitimate scientific developments, but as desperate auxiliary hypotheses engineered to protect the untouchable “hard core” of materialism from fatal falsification. When the core dogma cannot account for reality, as the evidence mounts against eliminative materialism, its protective belt fractures into absurdity. One pole sacrifices human reason to preserve materialist theory, while the other endows dead matter with magical vitality to embrace the evidence of purpose.
Neither dare challenge the sacred cow that unites them in common descent with modification: Methodological Naturalism. Family dynamics are weird.
Self-Begotten Pixie Dust & Paradise Lost
Croft writes:
The “deadness” of matter is not a discovery, but a strategy: for hundreds of years this flattened picture has been employed as an apologetic tool against atheist worldviews. If matter is dead, and we are alive, we cannot possibly be made only of matter—that is the claim.
But matter resists its misdescription.
He continues:
The terms used to describe matter by its detractors are either literally false or metaphorically misleading. Matter is not “concatenated” but stunningly self-organizing. Most matter … is strikingly “lively.” It does not exist in “random lumps,” but in profound relational networks exhibiting extraordinary connectivity. The misdescription is a rhetorical trick, a strawman to burden materialists with, smuggling in the desired metaphysical outcome.
And he concludes:
Wherever you are, you are surrounded by matter. I am calling you to a quiet revival—a materialist one… As you go about your day, … try to love matter. Feel it. Smell it. Taste it. Hear it. Then ask yourself a simple question:
Does it seem dead to you?
Croft’s romantic materialist revival is not new, even if he thinks that it is. In Book V of Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, the loyal angel Abdiel confronts rebellious Satan, reminding him that he is a creature formed by the hands of God.
Satan responds with sneering indignation:
That we were formed then you say? and the work
Of secondary hands, by task transferred
From Father to his Son? Strange point and new!
… who saw / When this creation was? Do you remember
Your making …? / We know no time when we were not as now;
Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised
By our own quickening power [updated diction for clarity]
Satan denies his Creator by denying his creation, claiming to be ‘self-begotten, self-raised by his own quickening power.’ This is the archetype of Croft’s materialist sermon. Rather than acknowledge dependence and a transcendent Creator, Croft endows matter with miraculous, autogenetic powers. It is a familiar narrative.
Matter self-organizes! Matter brings forth mind!
By dressing up atoms in the language of vitalism and agency, Croft turns physical particles into tiny demiurges. It is animism in a lab coat, or better panpsychism, or as I style it: Absolute Idealism, the only “rational” alternative to Transcendence.
The Abolition of Science (The “Yoda Complex”)
If Croft represents the pagan retreat, Tom James represents the atheist abyss.
Drawing on the late Daniel Dennett’s eliminative materialism, James argues that non-physical phenomena cannot cause physical actions. There is no hard problem of consciousness because there is no such thing as consciousness. Materialism explains it away. This is the logical outcome of the materialist faith. If true, conscious decisions cannot cause you to lift your arm, speak a sentence, love your fellowman or design an experiment.
Sensation has identifiable sensory mechanisms, and action has identifiable motor mechanisms. But the supposed cognitive stage between the two does not appear to have a corresponding neural process … Rather than proposing a dedicated decision-making system …, James suggests that sensory, sensorimotor, and motor processes together produce what he calls ‘action selection.’
Behavior is a mechanistic loop of perception and motor response, identical in principle to a simple robot following a wall. What we experience as conscious decision is mere mechanism, an illusion of our material makeup.
As C.S. Lewis famously observed in The Abolition of Man:
You cannot go on ‘explaining away’ for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.
We at CEH call this practice the “Yoda Complex”:
a delusional mental disorder in Darwinian circles characterized by imagining oneself on an exalted plane that exempts oneself from the evolutionary forces to which other humans are subject; e.g., an evolutionist who speaks as if he were a rational scientist with free will while claiming evolution destroys free will… He imagines himself to be a kind of exalted master, an Enlightened One on an alternate plane of reality, like the green Jedi Master Yoda in Star Wars.
Did Dr. James decide to write this paper? Did he consciously weigh evidence, reject bad hypotheses, and deliberately choose the truest explanation? If his thesis is correct, no such rational evaluation occurred. His fingers merely twitched on the keyboard in response to environmental stimuli. Yet he submits his paper to academic journals, expecting rational peers to read it, evaluate the logic, and choose to abandon the old model of rational choice it replaces!
You cannot write a book proving that the writing of books is an unguided mechanical accident, nor can you ask an audience of non-deciding biological automatons to make a conscious choice to agree with you.
Unless you’re Yoda … or Hegel.
Schizophrenic Science: Aristotle by Day, Hegel by Night
How does the secular scientific establishment tolerate this absurd contradiction? The answer lies at the level of foundational logic.
Materialist science operates on a profound logical schizophrenia:
1. The Public Ideal (Aristotle): In its textbooks and promotional campaigns, science presents itself as the bastion of classical Aristotelian logic, strictly enforcing the laws of Identity, Non-Contradiction and Excluded Middle. It demands rigorous boundaries, empirical verification, and rational consistency. This sort of (ideal of) science has earned its keep, and our respect.
But does this vision of science really represent science as it is practiced today?
2. The Practical Engine (Hegel): Unfortunately, in the 19th century science embraced a darker vision. In actual practice, when materialism now confronts origins, mind, or intentionality, it swaps Aristotle for Hegel, adopting a dialectical logic that treats contradiction not as an error to be abandoned, but as the generative, dynamic engine of theory. And as we’ve said before, this logic does not maintain discrete boundaries; it colonizes.
The Unavoidable Inversion
Science today is a victim of its own technological success. We have peered so deeply into the irreducible, four-dimensional algorithmic machinery of the cell, and analyzed the deep irreducibility of conscious thought, that the materialist framework is buckling under the weight of real data.
Materialism as secularists imagine it to be does not exist, and it never has. A decision-point is inevitable, and the choice is stark:
Either we follow Tom James to the bottom of the abyss, accepting that humans are meat-robots, rationality is a myth, and science itself is meaningless physics rattling our skull. This option’s shelf-life is quite limited; scientific evidence is rapidly retiring its viability.
Or we recognize that Mind, Information, and Purpose are primary, not derivative. Are we stuck then with the ‘panpsychic materialist idealism’ of Croft? With Pixie Dust? Of course not, though given the current state of scientific discourse it seems likely to become the default candidate.
There is always one other option (though of course this one never gets invited to the reunions) and its track record with science is impeccable: that the cosmos is intelligible because it was spoken into existence by a transcendent Creator whose Logos upholds all things.
There have always been only two choices before Man. We must choose.
Either the Serpent’s voice, or God’s.
[1] The irony is almost beyond bearing. Here’s how the IAI article introduces him: “James Croft | University Chaplain and Lead Faith Advisor at the University of Sussex, and the first non-religious Lead Chaplain at a British university.”
You read that correctly: James Croft is the first non-religious religious leader to become a Lead Chaplain at a British university. That represents a meme for this entire article.
I could not make this stuff up!
Croft, who holds an education doctorate from Harvard, previously led the Ethical Society of St. Louis, and represents the ultimate Hegelian synthesis. Having abolished the Transcendent, our new secular high priest ascends the lectern to preach that we should worship and adore the generative Magic of Matter (our new MoM).
John Wise received his PhD in philosophy from the University of CA, Irvine in 2004. His dissertation was titled Sartre’s Phenomenological Ontology and the German Idealist Tradition. His area of specialization is 19th to early 20th century continental philosophy.
He tells the story of his 25-year odyssey from atheism to Christianity in the book, Through the Looking Glass: The Imploding of an Atheist Professor’s Worldview (available on Amazon). Since his return to Christ, his research interests include developing a Christian (YEC) philosophy of science and the integration of all human knowledge with God’s word.
He has taught philosophy for the University of CA, Irvine, East Stroudsburg University of PA, Grand Canyon University, American Intercontinental University, and Ashford University. He currently teaches online for the University of Arizona, Global Campus, and is a member of the Heterodox Academy. He and his wife Jenny are known online as The Christian Atheist with a podcast of that name, in addition to a YouTube channel: John and Jenny Wise.