Inherit the Dust: Scientism Surrenders to Animism

Banish the Creator from His creation
and Mystery doesn’t exit the world.
But Intelligibility does.

Borrowing Reason to ‘Inherit the Dust’:
How Methodological Naturalism Gives Up the Ghost

by John D. Wise, PhD

For two centuries, the gatekeepers of scientific naturalism have lectured the world on intellectual hygiene. We were told in stern, uncompromising tones that true science demands the total banishment of mind, intention, and divine agency from scientific explanation. The universe, they’ve insisted, is a vast, blind mechanism. Living beings are accidental chance-arrangements of matter in motion.

Anyone proposing that the specified, information-rich architecture of the cell points to a transcendent Mind is immediately branded a purveyor of “medieval superstition” and cast out of respectable academic company. Yet they’ve depended upon Reason’s capital at every turn to make their case. When you routinely borrow such immense wealth, the debt eventually comes due. You must pay it … or go bankrupt.

In previous essays I’ve called this “the unavoidable binary.”

Is Everything Conscious? (Sam Kimpton-Nye, University of Southampton, Aeon 12 October 2026). This revealing essay published in Aeon, titled (in its URL) “Does the Principle of Sufficient Reason Make Panpsychism True?”, exposes what happens when secular reductionism finally exhausts its explanatory credit.

The conclusion of modern analytic metaphysics and its sister, scientism, is not a triumphant vindication of materialism. It is an unvarnished surrender to animism. Desperate to explain consciousness without admitting a transcendent God, secular thinkers are now seriously arguing that reality itself, in all its manifold presentations is conscious. The high priests of scientism have run the dialectic in reverse: having started with the bold promise to purge nature of the spiritual, they have ended by turning Nature itself into conscious agency. This should have been obvious the moment the scientific world embraced Evolution by Natural Selection.

The essay begins with this declaration: “When an explanation makes a fact intelligible, the mystery goes out of it.”

Well … does it?

Intellectual Malpractice: Erasing Descartes

To observe how our author’s trap springs, one must watch the sleight of hand performed at the very beginning of the essay. Kimpton-Nye sets up the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), the classic Leibnizian philosophical axiom that every fact must have an explanation for why it is thus and not otherwise. In surveying early modern attempts to ground this principle, Kimpton-Nye dismisses René Descartes with a breathtaking piece of revisionist history and exegetical dishonesty:

“One option is to understand consciousness in terms of a new substance entirely, one fully distinct from physical matter… This is called dualism. The most influential champion of dualism was the French philosopher René Descartes. But Descartes ultimately failed to uphold the PSR, since he couldn’t say why there are two substances as opposed to just one.” [emphasis added]

This is not merely sloppy history. It is intellectual gaslighting and academic malpractice. Anyone who has read Descartes’ Meditations knows he did not assert substance dualism without a foundation. The entire architecture of the Meditations anchors the distinction between res cogitans (thinking substance) and res extensa (extended matter) in the infinite, non-deceiving character of God.  The sufficient reason for two substances is grounded in Divine freedom: a transcendent Creator who brought forth an extended, contingent world and breathed into it thinking beings fashioned in His image. To claim Descartes left the question unanswered is to pretend the core thesis of his entire philosophical corpus was never written.

Why does Kimpton-Nye claim Descartes “failed to uphold the PSR”? Because within the arbitrarily narrow ideology of Methodological Naturalism (MN), appealing to a transcendent God is forbidden by scientistic fiat. Under secular rules, if your explanation points outside the materialistic field of play, the referee blows his whistle, declares an explanatory void, and wipes your reasoning from the gameboard. Descartes did not fail the PSR; modern naturalism simply outlawed his answer. Having erased Descartes’ transcendent Foundation, the secular metaphysician insists that the only way to satisfy reason is to collapse everything into an immanent monism: Spinoza’s pantheism or modern panpsychism.

The Secular Compulsion to Closure

This reveals the fatal flaw in the secular deployment of the Principle of Sufficient Reason: what we might call the Compulsion to Closure (CtoC).

For classical Christian theism, intelligibility is guaranteed by the infinite Logos. Reason Himself spoke the world into being, endowing it with real, dependable order. Because God is infinite and man is finite, our knowledge is necessarily asymptotic: we may approach true, objective understanding of creation, but we never circumscribe the infinite Mind of the Maker. Humility and mystery sit comfortably alongside rigorous scientific inquiry because the cosmos is open to its transcendent Ground.

For scientism, however, the PSR has been perverted into a suffocating, airtight cage. The creature demands total closure within the boundaries of the immanent system. Human reason must construct an autonomous Theory of Everything where every link of the causal chain terminates inside the natural world.

When that closed system crashes into the undeniable reality of conscious experience (what David Chalmers famously termed the “hard problem“), the secular apparatus panics. Kimpton-Nye admits the failure of the mechanistic model with surprising candor:

“However closely we look at the physical matter that makes up conscious beings, we get no closer to understanding how consciousness arises. Leibniz encouraged us to imagine increasing the size of the human brain to the size of a mill so that we can walk around inside it and observe all its working parts in meticulous detail. If we did this, at no point would we observe conscious experience.”

Leibniz’s mill can’t explain the observer looking at it. Mechanical reductionism is bankrupt as we’ve documented here at CEH, and science is increasingly acknowledging this fact. But because the secularist’s Compulsion to Closure forbids looking upward to a transcendent Designer, the only remaining move is to project mind downward, into the dirt[1]:

“If consciousness is a fundamental property of matter, then the problem of explaining consciousness, as formulated above, does not arise… According to panpsychism, we no longer need to bridge the gap from non-conscious fundamental matter to consciousness at higher levels of organization, since consciousness is present all the way down.”

Electrons in Pain: Animism for a Scientific Age

Notice the sheer audacity of this maneuver. To preserve naturalism, naturalists are willing to destroy the very definition of matter they spent three centuries defending. Kimpton-Nye leans heavily on the work of philosopher Hedda Hassel Mørch, who argues that we must attribute mental properties to fundamental physics because science only tells us what matter does, not what matter is:

“Why do the properties of an electron dispose it towards certain behaviours? How can this be rendered intelligible as per the demands of the PSR?…

In the interest of rendering the behaviour of matter intelligible, we should take those properties responsible for that behaviour to be conscious mental properties. That is to say: all paradigm physical properties such as charge, mass and quantum spin are conscious mental properties. This move provides an answer to the question why matter does what it does. The fundamental properties of matter are properties of consciousness.”

Read those words carefully. Early modern science prided itself on purging Aristotelian teleology, occult qualities, and intrinsic agency from nature. Matter was declared to be passive, inert, and governed entirely by blind mathematical laws. Now, having realized that blind mechanism cannot account for causality or human consciousness, contemporary thinkers are assigning proto-pain and proto-motivation to electrons!

This is not cutting-edge metaphysics, nor does it remotely resemble MN. It is stone-age animism wrapped in the jargon of analytic philosophy. They’ve given up the very ground they’re still ferociously defending. Only one logical regime allows for this sort of lived-contradiction: Hegelian dialectic.

Welcome to the world that Darwin built.

The Biological Twin: “Natural Selection” as Micro-Animism

This panpsychist retreat exposes the exact same conceptual shell game operating inside evolutionary biology from its inception.

As we have argued extensively in these pages (see “Evolution is Hegelian Process-Metaphysics,” May 2025), modern evolutionary theory is not an empirical deduction from raw observation. It is an immanent dialectical myth. Neo-Darwinism insisted that it had banished teleology and design from the living world.

Yet the moment Darwinists eliminated the transcendent Mind of the Creator, they immediately re-endowed the physical environment with creative, discerning, and design-like faculties. In standard Darwinian literature, the environment constantly “selects,” “favors,” “engineers,” “fine-tunes,” and “solves problems.” Blind physical conditions are granted the (unconscious) conscious[2] capacity to discern subtle phenotypic advantages across millions of years and sculpt intricate molecular motors.

Panpsychism and Darwinian natural selection are ideological twins:

• The panpsychist says: “We can’t explain how consciousness arises from non-conscious matter, so we will claim consciousness was inside the matter all along.”
• The Darwinist says: “We can’t explain how complex, specified genetic information arises from unguided physics, so we will claim the creative power of design resides within the selective pressure of the environment.”

Both systems are driven by the exact same terror: the refusal to acknowledge the God of the Bible. Both systems commit the same idolatry: imputing the attributes of the transcendent Creator to the dust of the ground.

The Inevitable Retreat to Sisyphus

Forgive me, but I spent my graduate years studying Existentialism. I know the atheist illusion when I see it. The most revealing moment of Kimpton-Nye’s essay comes at its end. After parading Spinoza’s monism and promising that panpsychism can finally deliver the grand Enlightenment dream of universal intelligibility, the author abruptly suffers a failure of nerve. Faced with the suffocating fatalism of Spinoza’s closed universe, where every event is inexorably necessary and personal meaning is obliterated, Kimpton-Nye retreats into existential absurdity:

“Instead of seeking perfect reasons for all our pursuits, perhaps we ought to just embrace what we do, whatever it may be, for what it is. As the French philosopher and writer Albert Camus reflected, solace for Sisyphus can only come from positively embracing his situation: ‘The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.'”

Behold the terminal trajectory of secular thought as I lived it:

1. The Rationalist Hubris: We will explain the whole universe without God through the sheer power of human reason. Knowledge, not faith!
2. The Mechanistic Dead-End: Dead matter in motion cannot explain the philosopher or the scientist holding the test tube, nor can it provide what human life requires: objective truth, meaning and morality.
3. The Animist Patch: Sensing the Enlightenment promise slipping forever beyond our grasp, we choose to believe that electrons feel pain and rocks have minds.
4. The Nihilistic Collapse: Realizing that conscious rocks and elementary particles are absurdities born of desperation, we shrug our shoulders, surrender to Camus and tell ourselves to be happy pushing a useless boulder up a hill for eternity.

What is it with French intellectuals?

The Grand Reversal

The modern academy has spent generations warning its students against the dangers of bringing “religion into science.” We now see the hollow hubris of that warning.

Who was pulling the strings?

Scientism was never an objective, neutral referee standing above religious dogma. It chose a 19^th century immanentist, monistic faith. By adopting the Hegelian impulse that elevates closed historical and material processes above transcendent grounding, secular science set itself on an inescapable trajectory toward self-deification and animism.

The Word of God was banished, but religion was not defeated. It was merely replaced by an ancient paganism in which men bow down to the creation rather than the Creator. When thinkers suppress the truth in unrighteousness, they do not become neutral rationalists. Professing themselves to be wise, they become fools, trading the glory of the incorruptible, transcendent God for conscious electrons, thinking primates, and an absurdly smiling scientist vacantly rolling a stone.

The Vanishing Mystery?

Which brings us back to Kimpton-Nye’s opening quip: “When an explanation makes a fact intelligible, the mystery goes out of it.”

Well, did it?

Does the mystery vanish when secular philosophy decides subatomic particles feel proto-pain? Does the universe become intelligible when the high priests of hyper-reason[3] conclude that rocks, tables, and electrons are moments in the evolving consciousness that is Existence?

Hardly.

Mystery hasn’t dissolved under the regime of Methodological Naturalism.

But it has been disfigured.

True explanation doesn’t extinguish wonder; it amplifies it. For the Christian, intelligibility does not mean clamping an airtight lid over reality and proclaiming it understood. It means recognizing that the cosmos is an open, contingent creation, upheld by an infinite Mind whose depths we must approach in humble reverence. For the Christian scientist, wonder never ceases because the depth of our Creator’s mind is unfathomable.

Banish the Creator from His creation and Mystery doesn’t exit the world.

But intelligibility does.

And in its place, you are left with the tragic spectacle of modern academia: talking to dust in the dark, pretending to be wise, and whistling a manufactured tune of cheer as the boulder rolls back down the hill.

Footnotes

[1] In Genesis this is the adamah, the soil from which Man is formed, and which he works to earn his daily bread. Adam (Man), formed from the adamah, is not nephesh chayyah (a living soul) until God breathes life into his nostrils. Life is not a universal principle, but the special gift of God.

[2] The contradiction in terms mirrors the dialectic itself, which advances by means of the antithesis.

[3] As we noted here, GK Chesterton diagnosed what I call ‘hyper-rationalism’ in this way: “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” Chesterton points out that the maniac’s explanation is always clean, unbroken, and fiercely logical, but … it is confined to a tiny, claustrophobic circle.

Further Reading on CEH

• Does the Mind Create Reality or Discover it? (21 July 2013)
• Can an Evolved Brain Reason? (12 March 2008)
• Materialists Shoot Themselves in the Foot (19 January 2014)
• Why You Can’t Evolve Reason and Morality (27 November 2016)
• How Secular Science Deceives Itself (6 June 2025)

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.