Materialistic Worldview

The materialistic view of reality is opposed to the spiritualistic view that reigned throughout Middle Ages, part of Ancient Times, and which still exists today. Both have historical roots, but they are not linked to a single period in history, like the Medieval or the Renaissance worldview, nor to a particular culture, like the Western or the Chinese. Both the spiritualistic and materialistic worldviews are past and contemporary, transversal to many cultures.

They are more typical of one time than another, as well as more clinging to one specific culture than another. They are worldviews in the broadest sense of the term, since they are more comprehensive in both historical time and cultural space. Historically, the Middle Ages was all spiritualistic, while from the Renaissance onward, throughout the Modern and Contemporary Ages, they are more materialistic.

Whether it takes on a theoretical character, in the form of philosophy such as atheism or agnosticism, or a practical character, in the form of capitalist consumerism, self-gratification and the absence of values, materialism is today the philosophy of life or the worldview that governs most people. It clearly governs the world of politics, economics, and health, because money has always been a religion in itself, beyond the world of science, universities, the media, and culture in general.

I once asked someone if he was religious; offended, he replied, "How can I be religious? I'm a scientist." Being materialistic, agnostic, or atheistic, is fashionable nowadays, while being religious is out of fashion and connotes ignorance. Therefore, even the few who are religious, do not present themselves as such in order not to lose friends, jobs, or social position.

To the materialists, who live without meaning since matter does not give meaning to life, one can apply that famous phrase of the Dalai Lama: "They live as if they never had to die, and they die as if they had never lived." In fact, Karl Marx, the ultimate exponent of dialectical and historical atheism, faced the question of death in the same cynical way by saying that death should not concern us, because as long as we exist, it will not exist; when it eventually becomes a reality, we will no longer exist.

In other words, death should not be a cause for concern because we will never coexist with it. The fact is, however, no matter how much we hide it in society, it will show up, when first we lose our parents and our aunts and uncles, then our older siblings…

The Medieval society lived reconciled with death, in harmony with it, and in a quasi-friendship, even going so far as to give it a feminine form, dress it in white, and invite it to a circle dance and play chess to see if one could beat, deceive, or distract it. Contrastingly, the modern and contemporary society is afraid of death, afraid that it will take everything away because death is eternal, so they repress the thought of death, in the same manner the Victorian Puritan society repressed sex.

From Animism to Atheism
From animism to materialism there is a gradual materialization of matter and symbiosis with Man, the thinking being that analyzes and relates to it. In the beginning, everything had a soul, even the most material matter had a soul. In a materialistic world like today's, it is hard for us to think that this was the case in the past; however, without going any further, we all experienced a stage of animism in our childhood when we got hurt by something, we would hit, blame, and call that thing bad, as if it were a living entity.

At the adult level, superstition is a remnant of animism, that is, when one grants spiritual value or power to something that is purely material, such as a key or a horseshoe, this is animism, today called superstition.

Knowing certain material realities, knowing how it works and for what purpose, robbed them of their souls, so they became inanimate and returned to being just matter. However, it was not possible to know certain realities scientifically, or they were not easy to know, or it was not possible to completely know and master them. To these realities they were given the name gods and thus was born the god of war, the goddess of love, the god of time, the god of wine, the god of the sea, etc., and consequently polytheism came into being.

For the sake of simplification or in order to unite various peoples and avoid the quarrels of "my god is greater than your god", which could instigate holy wars or other disputes, man intuited that God must be one Lord and creator of everything and everyone. Thus, monotheism emerged in its absolute form, in Judaism and Islam, and in its trinitarian form, in Christianity.

Finally, when scientific progress allowed man to dominate most realities, he decided to kill God (psychoanalytic concept) in order to put himself in God’s place as superman (Nietzsche). In this dialectic of stealing the soul from the known, man ended up stealing the soul of God himself, affirming as Feuerbach did, that it was not God who created man in his image and likeness, but on the contrary, it was man who created God in his own image and likeness.

As the result, the dialectical or philosophical materialism emerged, then the historical materialism and the communist revolution with Karl Marx, and the atheistic psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud. Nietzsche declared "God is dead, long live the superman" and after God's burial, came Nietzsche's own nihilism followed by Sartre's Nausea about the banality and emptiness of existence.

Materialistic Ideology
This worldview became prominent during the Enlightenment, but it is as old as Democritus (370 B.C.). The materialistic worldview asserts that there is no spirit, no god, no soul. Nothing that cannot be known through the five senses and reason.

Nothing exists beyond nature that has causal influence or acts on nature itself. There is, therefore, no higher being that created nature and exerts any power over it. There is only material nature and nothing beyond it. Life on Earth arose by itself, when all the right conditions to support life came together by chance, from natural substances, by natural selection for natural purposes.

The supernatural or spiritual is a chimera, it does not exist, it is not observable. If something has no explanation, it is not because it is supernatural, but simply because the human being does not know everything yet; In the future, science may be able to explain it. So, it was and has been in the past: realities that were once seen as gods, today they are completely explainable.

The spiritual world is therefore an illusion (an infantile consolation, as Freud calls it). There is no higher being, we are mere complexes of matter, and when we die, we cease to exist, and the simple elements that make up our body will return to their simplicity as our body disintegrates. Since there is no intrinsic meaning to the universe, people have to create values for themselves. There is no right or wrong, except what society dictates, for purposes of survival and tranquility.

Many do not even create values to guide their lives by, because it is difficult to establish ethics without religion. Materialists are fortunate that more than 90% of humanity believes in the existence of a higher being, the foundation and guarantor of the social structure we have; otherwise, 1% of humanity could not have more wealth than the remaining 99%, as is the case today.

If human beings did not believe in life beyond death, the ultimate foundation of ethics, there would be no army or police powerful enough to contain human anger against injustice.  Napoleon Bonaparte was right when he said that religion is what makes the poor not kill the rich.

If what happens after death is the same for the just and the unjust, then it is difficult to distinguish justice from injustice if both have the same end: nothingness. That is why most materialists drown their sorrows in consumerism. Life is bread and circus, as the Romans said, Tempus fugit, Carpe diem, time escapes us, let us seize the day, or "Die Martha, die with a filled belly ".

The processes of evolution or change are essentially random, they have no predefined objective, because there is no intelligent design, as religious believers believe. Randomness reigns: dinosaurs were not predestined to disappear, if that meteorite that destroyed their habitat had not fallen, they might still be alive today, and humans would never have emerged. Beyond randomness, what exists is a natural selection governed by the law of the fittest or whatever adapts best to the circumstances of an ever-changing environment.

It is this and only this that determines why some living beings survive and others perish. Materialists believe that this unconscious, undirected "selection" process, together with random genetic fluctuations (i.e., mutations), are the keys that explain the origin of the world and the living things as we know them today, ourselves included.

Since there is no intelligent design nor any goal that nature has to fulfill, intelligence itself and what we call spiritual are the result of complex natural and material processes that are possible to know and explain. We do not need God to explain anything in the physical-chemical nature. There is nothing in the universe that is personal, everything is impersonal. The human person is another chimera created by spiritualists, there is nothing in the human person beyond complicated physical-chemical processes.

"Scientific" Analysis of Materialism, Atheism or Agnosticism
It is true that we can neither prove the existence of God nor his non-existence, so both theism and atheism or agnosticism are beliefs. That is, one is faith the other is anti-faith, but both involve faith.

Atheists or agnostics like to pose as scientists, friends of science, rational and enlightened. Science is logical-deductive, like mathematics, or intuitive, like Einstein's theory of relativity.

Atheism or agnosticism is not logical – It makes no sense that human beings are, as Karl Marx says, the moment when nature gained thought or self-consciousness, only to realize our misery, that is, that we come from nothing like everything else and will return to nothing along with the flea, the louse, and the bedbug.

If we gained self-consciousness for this, merely to know that we are the only living beings aware of our misery, we would be better off not being aware like the rest of the living beings. It is like knowing the day and circumstances of our death: I do not think there is a single person who is interested in that information.

Unlike the rest of living things, the awareness that we exist for a while and then cease to exist, instead of being a greatness of evolution is rather like going from a horse to a donkey. Where is the greatness of being aware of our own misery, with no solution to remedy it?

Unlike the rest of the living beings that, living in symbiosis with nature, have no freedom, autonomy or independence from it, human beings have their life in their own hands, they have a certain freedom to do with it as they want. Why this freedom, if no matter what we do, the end will be the same for everyone? On the other hand, having freedom is also taking a risk, in the sense that I can make bad choices and turn my life into hell, something that other living beings cannot do.

In life, living beings are happy, they do not need to work, or to study, or to suffer. We, human beings, can be happy or unhappy in life, but even those who are happy always have relative happiness, because the thought that one day we will cease to exist poisons any joy or pleasure, turning it into sadness and depression.

Atheism or agnosticism is not deductive – If the universe was not expanding, if it were static and not dynamic and constantly changing, like the waters of Heraclitus' river, if it had always been the same, if there had been no changes, no evolution, no revolution, we could deduce that it had always existed, that the universe was the god of itself.

This is what science once thought before the Hubble telescope, located far out in space, showed that galaxies are moving away from each other, which led us to deduce that the universe is expanding. The deductive Big Bang theory that states that galaxies are moving away from each other was formulated by the Belgian Catholic priest Georges Lemaître. According to him, the universe began with a big explosion; in this big explosion time/space and matter/energy were created.

In Nature, ignitions or explosions do not happen spontaneously. Everything happens on a cause/effect basis: there is no cause without effect, no effect without cause, there is no water without thirst, no thirst without water. Or, as the people say, "when the pot is made, the lid is made for it”. Furthermore, we do not observe in nature anything that creates itself; it is therefore more logical to deduce the existence of a creator than to deduce his non-existence.

If the universe did not always exist and then began to exist, then there was a "time" when it did not exist at all. And there will be a time when it will cease to exist. Only the Bible spoke of the end of the world, and the so-called scientists used to laugh at this idea and at Christians. Since he who laughs last, laughs the hardest, now we are the ones laughing. Faced with indisputable evidence, science had to concede that the world will cease to exist one day.

Atheists reacted to the Big Bang theory by coming up with their own Big Crunch theory, that is, that the universe would be expanding, as if it were a rubber band, until it could expand no further, then initiating the reverse process of contraction until it collapses on itself, with matter coming together all over again causing a new Big Bang. Thus, the universe would be a succession of Big Bangs and Big Crunches.

However, the second law of thermodynamics disproved this theory, because matter does not transform into energy without some loss. If this was not the case, it would be possible to make a machine that manufactures the energy it needs to keep itself going indefinitely. The sun will use up all its hydrogen and helium, just as the universe will use up all its energy until it disappears, and the little matter in this future universe will not have enough force of gravity to bind together. At that time, the universe will turn into a black hole.

Atheism or agnosticism is not intuitive – Intuition is the opposite of logic and deduction; if it was not for intuition, Einstein would never have arrived at the theory of relativity, for it is neither logical nor deduced from any observation. Intuition is both a qualitative and a quantitative leap. If I start from the observation of reality, I am catapulted by intuition to a reality that is neither observable nor experienceable, but that is related to what I observe and gives meaning to everything I observe.

In this sense, faith is an intuition; God is reached by intuition, but not only God: much of today's quantum physics, heir to the theory of relativity, is intuitive. Much of today's astronomy is intuitive, as we have no way yet of observing certain realities.

Atheism or agnosticism is inductive – Atheism or agnosticism is instigated; it is forced and supposes the repression of religious feeling, which is connatural to the human being and which we can observe in all times and in all places, and in most of the human beings who inhabit our planet today.

Theists have always made up more than 80% of the inhabitants of this planet in all eras, and in all cultures. To this day there have been many cultures and civilizations without science and technology, but there have never been any without religion.

Therefore, atheism or agnosticism is induced by fashion, by the consumer society, by communism, or by any ideology that seeks to remove all orientation from the human being; thus, disoriented and bewildered, he is much easier to manipulate and turn into an obsessive and neurotic consumer, which is very good for the economy since this makes the GDP grow but reduces the health of individuals. The healthier the economy, the sicker the individuals who feed it.

And for this, the religious feeling natural to the human being and present in all cultures of all times must be ignored at first, but since it always resurfaces, it must be repressed, hidden.

I maintain that there are no true atheists or agnostics, but rather polytheists, that is, they deny the existence of the one true God in order to pay homage, veneration, and worship to many small gods. Money would be the father of this pantheon, just as Zeus and Jupiter were the fathers of the Greek and Roman pantheons, respectively. Then there are gods who are the patrons of certain realities that the atheist or materialist relates to: power, beauty, pleasure, fame, entertainment such as football, etc.

What would a world governed by the materialistic worldview look like? It would be a world without music, without art, without poetry, without literature, without human rights, without ethics, an authentic barbarism, an authentic anarchy. What does the materialistic consumerist society leave for posterity?

Given that the reflection of religious feeling has left us almost all of the most beautiful monuments and works of humanity, the pyramids of Egypt, the Gothic cathedrals, the mosques, the Hindu temples, what could materialism leave us but the nausea of Sartre, the Soviet gulags, and the current Chinese concentration camps to brainwash the Uighur people?

Conclusion - Materialists claim that the human being is merely the point at which matter becomes self-aware. However, it makes little sense for matter to awaken only to realize it is matter. Self-awareness is a spiritual activity, suggesting that matter is oriented toward the spirit, not the other way around. Atheists and agnostics repress the innate religious feeling present in all ages and cultures, much like Puritans repressed sexuality.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Renaissance worldview

The European world understands that there is no cultural, scientific, and philosophical continuity between the Ancient Times and the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages was like a trauma that paralyzed the world, and put it in a coma for a long time. The city is the place of culture, because it is where the largest number of people are concentrated, where a countless number of transactions and communications take place, and where a countless number of professions are practiced.

In the bucolic countryside only agriculture is practiced, people live isolated from each other. The medieval world was a rural world. It is true that the countryside is where one has a place to live and food to eat, but a life dedicated only to subsisting can hardly be called human, only animals spend their lives exclusively subsisting, that is their time is entirely devoted to look for food.

Agriculture is therefore the foundation of culture. However, the goal of agriculture should not stop at subsistence, but to create surpluses that will then be the basis of trade, which will allow the acquisition of other goods and promote the relationships between people, giving rise to other activities. In short, they will foster culture and development.

During the Renaissance, cities began to reappear. Europe, realizing the cultural discontinuity between the Ancient Times and the ten centuries of the Middle Ages, tried to perform a bypass, by passing over the Middle Ages to go back to the past to the Greco-Roman world to resurrect this culture without the mediation or the lenses of the Church.

Inspired by the values of classical antiquity, the Renaissance man has the idea that everything medieval is bad and everything belonging to the ancient world is good. This perspective is mistaken on multiple fronts. Philosophy, for example, though of Christian inspiration, advanced in the Middle Ages; architecture, especially Gothic architecture, took a huge step forward during Medieval Times.

The somewhat crude architecture of Greek and Roman times was recreated during Renaissance with the monumental style that lost to the Gothic style in beauty; it is merely monumental, that is, big, immense. For example, St. Peter's Basilica is monumental, it is Renaissance, but it is certainly not more beautiful than the simplest Gothic cathedral.

With the emergence of the burgh, a term that means city, at the end of the Middle Ages, another social class was born in the midst of the people, the bourgeoise, or literally the city dweller. They were not, of course, dedicated to agriculture, but to commerce, arts, and skilled trades which emerged as life became more diversified and no longer revolved around subsistence. This physical aspect was entrusted to the people and their work in agriculture, the spiritual and moral aspect was entrusted to the clergy, and the security aspect was entrusted to the nobility.

Origin of the Renaissance
In the Italian peninsula, cities never totally disappeared and the peoples did not stop trading or using money. There was, however, a decrease in these activities during the Middle Ages. Due to the geographical situation of the Italian peninsula in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, several riverside cities such as Venice, Genoa, Florence, Rome, among others, benefited from trade with the East. Marco Polo is said to have paved the way.

These regions grew rich with the development of trade on the Mediterranean Sea, giving rise to a rich merchant bourgeoisie class. In order to assert themselves socially, these merchants sponsored artists and writers, who inaugurated a new way of expressing art. The Church and the nobility were also patrons of artists like Michelangelo, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Pietro della Francesca, among many others.

The new bourgeoise social class that emerged in the Renaissance had money but no status, unlike the clergy and the nobility. On the other hand, since they had money, they did not fit in with the peasants. Thus, they sought to invest their wealth by sponsoring works of art, in order to be socially recognized.

Reborn
‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.’ Nicodemus said to him, ‘How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?’ Jesus answered, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.’ John 3:3-5

In mid-14th century, a transition began between the medieval and modern worlds. This transition is known as the Renaissance or being born again, as the Gospel suggests.

The movement began in Italy which had been the center of Greco-Roman culture and its last stronghold, the center of the Roman Empire. It was also the place most dominated by the Church, since almost all of Italy at the end of the Middle Ages was a Papal State, made up of lands that the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne gave to the Church. Therefore, those who call the Church obscurantic forget that it was the greatest promoter of Renaissance in the field of architecture, painting, sculpture, and other art forms. And that Greco-Roman culture was reborn precisely where it had been made extinct by the barbarians.

The Renaissance encompassed almost every facet of life, economics, politics, philosophy, and art among many, and especially science. The major contributors to the Renaissance (such as Petrarch, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Dante) classified the medieval period as slow and dark, a time of limited education or innovation. They saw the medieval period as an interruption of culture between the classical world of Greece and Rome and the Renaissance.

The idea of community distinguished the medieval period. The people—clergy, nobility, and peasantry —faced real threats of famine, disease, and war, which were dangers that fostered community dependence in areas such as labour, religion, and defense. For example, a medieval tradesman belonged to an association that dictated every aspect of his business. The idea was that all craftsmen would earn an equitable living, and not that some would earn more than others.  Uniformity was the norm; each profession had its own way of dressing, even prostitutes had their distinct habit, a way of dressing that distinguished them from other women.

The Renaissance, on the other hand, underlined the importance of individual talents. This idea, known as individualism, is visible in the philosophy and art of the time. Moreover, while medieval scholars had studied ancient Greek and Roman documents to learn about God and Christianity, Renaissance scholars studied them to discover more about human nature. This new interpretation was known as humanism.

Thus, a humanism not directly linked to Christianity emerged, that is, a secular humanism that would grow exponentially throughout the Modern Times. In fact, the Renaissance was the first stone of the materialistic humanistic worldview opposed to a spiritualistic worldview that reigned throughout the Middle Ages.

Renaissance art also reflected this humanistic worldview. While medieval art was intended to teach a lesson, perhaps tell a biblical story, like the stained-glass windows of Gothic cathedrals, Renaissance art glorified the humanity of the individuals portrayed. Medieval statues tend to be of saints and in an unnatural mystical position. In contrast, Michelangelo's David, the Pieta, and Moses seem to be more realistic. The statues stopped being frozen images of piety and began to reveal human emotions, appearing ready for action.

Renaissance Values
Rationalism – Reason was the only path to reach knowledge. Everything could be explained through reason and science. Medieval scholasticism also valued reason, but not exclusively. Faith is another way of knowing, which Renaissance ignores, as does culture in general after it.

Scientism – For the Renaissance, all knowledge should be demonstrated through scientific experiments. The expression "experience is the mother of science" is from this period. Today we know that experience is not the only mother of all sciences. Science is not only the result of logic and deduction, but also of intuition, as demonstrated by the theory of relativity.

Individualism – Human beings sought to assert their own personality, showcase their talents, achieve fame, and fulfill their ambitions through the concept that individual right was above collective right. Thus, liberalism in all its forms emerged. We will have to wait for the socialist revolution to talk more about equality, because the equality of the French revolution was an equality where some are more equal than others, as George Orwell puts it.

Anthropocentrism – Places man as God’s supreme creation and the center of the universe. The phrase “man is the measure of all things” is from this time. God begins to be cast aside, until he is completely replaced by Nietzsche's superman.

Classicism – Artists looked to Greco-Roman Classical Antiquity for inspiration to realize their works. The idea was that any moment in the past is better than the Medieval one.

Renaissance Writings
Great writers who are still famous worldwide are from this time, because they wrote world-renowned works for all times, as well as becoming ex libris or representative of the culture where they arose.

• Dante Alighieri: Italian writer, author of the great poem "Divine Comedy". It deals with the three instances after death – Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory – and is a jewel of universal literature and the ex libris of Italian culture.
• Machiavelli: author of "The Prince", a precursor work of political science where the author gives advice to the rulers of the time.
• Shakespeare: considered one of the greatest playwrights of all times. In his work, he addressed human conflicts in the most diverse dimensions: personal, social, political. He wrote comedies and tragedies, such as "Romeo and Juliet", "Macbeth", "The Taming of the Shrew", "Othello" and several others. Ex libris of English culture.
• Miguel de Cervantes: Spanish author of "Don Quixote", a scathing critique of medieval chivalry. Ex libris of Spanish culture.
• Luís de Camões: stood out in Renaissance literature in Portugal, as the author of the great epic poem "Os Lusíadas", ex libris of Portuguese nationality.

Renaissance Arts
We highlight Leonardo da Vinci who is the ex libris, stereotype or prototype of the Renaissance man; the man of a hundred trades. He was a mathematician, physicist, anatomist, inventor, architect, sculptor, and painter; he was the Renaissance man who mastered several sciences. For this reason, he is considered an absolute genius. The mysterious Mona Lisa and the Last Supper are his masterpieces. When someone tells us about the Last Supper of Christ, the image that always comes to mind is that of Leonardo da Vinci's timeless painting.

Scientific Renaissance
The Renaissance was marked by important scientific discoveries, notably in the fields of astronomy, physics, medicine, mathematics, and geography. The Polish Nicolaus Copernicus denied the geocentric theory defended by the Church, inherited from Aristotle and Ptolemy, by stating that "the Earth is not the center of the universe, but simply one of the many planets that revolves around the Sun”. The new center was now the sun. Today we know that neither the Earth nor the sun is the center of the universe. The universe may not have a center...

Galileo Galilei discovered the rings of Saturn, the sunspots, the satellites of Jupiter. Persecuted and threatened by the Church, Galileo was forced to publicly deny his ideas and discoveries. "And yet it moves," Galileo is said to have said as he left the courtroom where he was forced to lie, the ‘it’ refers to the Earth. The Church was wrong to look at the Bible as a book of science.

Galileo said that it was the Earth that went around the sun, but he never managed to prove it because what people saw was the opposite: empirical experiment in this case tells us the opposite of the truth. Poor Galileo could have simply said that when we ride or move in a horse carriage, we know that it is we who move; yet our eyes see the trees moving. In the same way, we see that it is the sun that moves, even though we know that it is fixed in relation to us because we, inhabitants of this planet, are riding in the motion of a moving planet, like the carriage.

In medicine, knowledge advanced with works and experiments on blood circulation, cauterization methods, and general principles of anatomy. The first autopsies to investigate causes of death and learning about the human body and how it works are from this time.

Conclusion: upon waking up from a dream that had lasted a thousand years, the Renaissance realized that the Middle Ages, from the trauma of the barbarian invasions, was not a logical continuation of the Ancient Times that had been buried alive. The Renaissance was a bypass from the classical world to the present day, without passing through the Middle Ages. It was the drinking of the fountains and putting down roots in the Ancient Times as a model of inspiration, and casting aside the Middle Ages as if it had never happened.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC