More cool science facts that should be dealt with at summer camp (or OCF) -- these ones scientifically disprove materialism (or naturalism, take your pick):
1. materialism is a naive notion of matter that cannot stand up under scientific scrutiny ... any attempt to define matter turns out to be simply a description of the form that "matter" has assumed
2. not a single materialist (such as Descartes, or Dennett/Dawkins/Harris -- sorry, Rene) has been able to account for consciousness without introducing non-material principles ... my personal favorite contradiction is the case of those who think that consciousness is an illusion (which raises the unavoidable embarrassment of where the idea of illusion came from)
3. materialism cannot provide a responsible answer to the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" ... unfortunately for most Christians, this question is considered non-essential, even annoying -- despite the fact that they (along with some other theists) should have a confident, rigorous answer
4. consciousness is the one "non-contingent" certainty of human experience, despite anything that Descartes or his successors said ... the cartesian duality dividing subject from object turns out to be a destructive distortion
5. energy and mass are interchangeable, space and time are interdependent: Einstein (and his legacy) was no friend of materialists
6. "the substance and limits of the physical universe seem in some sense to consist in the nature of light" ... zowie ... thus, Bonaventure's "metaphysics of light" may not be so unthinkable, and for an easterner like me, one is hard-pressed not to wonder whether there is some connection to our own tradition of light as substantial symbol
7. "What science has not yet probed is the convertibility between light-energy-vacuum and consciousness, what Dante calls luce intellettual."
-- from The Metaphysics of Dante's Comedy, by Christian Moevs
Why on earth do we not talk more about this stuff with our youth (and media-addled adults)?
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