Karl Marx infamously referred to religion as the “opiate of the masses” (sometimes translated as the “opium of the people”). He realized that religious belief provided many people with consolation and hope in the midst of their earthly sufferings, but he also thought that religion was an “illusion” that prevented people from seeing reality clearly and recognizing what he believed to be the primary causes of their suffering (economic and social oppression) and taking steps to change their plight in life via economic and political revolution.
Marx was a materialist; he believed that the universe consists of nothing more than matter in motion, the random and absolutely purposeless swirl of atoms, or, as Democritus expressed it, “atoms and the void.” According to this view, there is no God, there is no transcendent realm or possibility of life after death, and human life is ultimately meaningless.
After referring to religion as the opiate of the masses, Marx went on to say, “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.” Marx believed that people’s “real” happiness lay exclusively in this earthly life, in the satisfaction of their economic needs.
Modern-day materialists have continued to argue against religion as an “illusion” or “delusion,” and materialism, as a world view, is even more common today than it was in the middle of the nineteenth century, when Marx was writing his most influential works. But one can make a convincing argument that it is materialism, rather than religion, that is the true “opiate of the masses” (or, perhaps to update the metaphor, the “opioid of the masses”), in that it is materialism, not religion, that prevents people from seeing the universe and human life as they really are.
As a worldview, materialism is typically far less demanding on its adherents than is religion or theism (the belief that God exists). If there is no God, then we are not going to be subjected to divine judgment at the end of our lives, and so we need not be concerned about being held accountable for the choices we’ve made in our lives and any evil we may have committed. In fact, if materialism is true, there’s no such thing as good and evil anyway, so we need not really concern ourselves with such issues: I can do whatever I want, and there are no eternal consequences to my actions. This strikes many people as tremendously liberating (at least, it can seem that way initially).
“The soul cannot be open to the morally good if its movements are determined by the blind natural causality of physics, chemistry, and biology.”
Materialism, as a reductionistic view of human nature, tends to encourage our fallen human tendency toward acedia, sloth, or what Søren Kierkegaard called the “despair of weakness”: settling for being less than what we are capable of being and becoming. As Roger Scruton expressed it,
Human nature, once something to live up to, becomes something to live down to instead. Biological reductionism nurtures this ‘living down,’ which is why people so readily fall for it. It makes cynicism respectable and degeneracy chic. It abolishes our kind, and with it our kindness.
Materialism, for at least some adherents, tends to lead to a life of self-centered hedonism. “If life is nothing more than the random swirl of atoms,” they think, “then why shouldn’t I reach out for as much pleasure as I can obtain in this ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ life?” Such a life is much less demanding and seemingly more gratifying (at least in the short run) than the life of a religious believer, which involves such potentially rigorous disciplines as selfless self-sacrifice and “dying to self” for the sake of love of God and neighbor (Mark 8:34–36; John 12:24–26).
Materialism, if it were true, would imply determinism and hence the denial of free will, a key aspect of our dignity as human beings. Materialists tend to view characteristics of human nature such as consciousness, intelligence, reason, and personality as mere “epiphenomena” of physiological processes. Because of this, materialism actually excludes our ability to be open to beauty, goodness, and truth in life (and would exclude the concept of the “good” outright, as previously mentioned). Hermann Weyl, the German mathematician, physicist, and philosopher, pointed all of this out almost a century ago. Stephen M. Barr, an American physicist, provides a concise summary of Weyl’s logic in this regard:
The [human] mind, if completely determined by factors that are below it, such as chemical reactions in the brain, is not open to those nonmaterial realities that are above it, such as truth and meaning. This is indeed the decisive point: our openness to truth not only demonstrates that we are intellectually free, but explains what that freedom is for and why it is important. Truth cannot enter a mind that is not first open to it; it cannot move a mind whose movements are already dictated by ‘blind natural causality.’ The same is true of moral freedom. The soul cannot be open to the morally good if its movements are determined by the blind natural causality of physics, chemistry, and biology. It is our freedom that makes possible our openness to truth, beauty, goodness. Christians believe that it is primarily in the possession of this freedom that we are made in God’s image and likeness.
Materialism tends to close some people’s minds and hearts to even the sheer possibility of transcendence in our lives: to the possibility that we human beings might be more than just a “pack of neurons”; that we might be called to something greater (and infinitely more fulfilling) than the mere gratification of our physical desires; that there might be a transcendent realm and a transcendent life beyond our earthly existence.
But actually, evidence that seriously undermines the sweeping and radically reductive claims of materialism has been accumulating for over a century now. Eugene Wigner, a Nobel laureate in physics, has bluntly pointed out that materialism is not “logically consistent” with quantum theory in physics nor the findings of research based on that theory. Other thinkers have pointed out that materialism cannot explain human consciousness, including Thomas Nagel, the American philosopher, and Sir Rudolf Peierls, an eminent British physicist, who asserted, “The premise that you can describe in terms of physics the whole function of a human being . . . including its knowledge, and its consciousness, is untenable. There is still something missing.” Barr, in agreeing with Wigner and Peierls, has argued that the logic of the traditional understanding of quantum mechanics leads to the conclusion that
not everything is just matter in motion, and that in particular there is something about the human mind that transcends matter and its laws. It then becomes possible to take seriously certain questions that materialism had ruled out of court: If the human mind transcends matter to some extent, could there not exist minds that transcend the physical universe altogether? And might there not even exist an ultimate Mind?
Admittedly, neither materialism nor theism can be proven conclusively to be true. Materialists cannot prove that “matter in motion” is all that exists, nor can theists definitively prove that God exists. Of course, some persuasive arguments for the existence of God have been formulated, but these do not always convince unbelievers. As John Haldane, the Scottish philosopher, has noted, “Most philosophers who favour theism are now inclined to think that there simply cannot be a strict demonstration of the existence of God, but only a probabilistic proof. In other words, an argument to the effect that given the world it is more likely than not that there is a God, or that God’s existence provides the best explanation of things we observe.” And as Barr points out, “Recent discoveries have begun to confound the materialist’s expectations and confirm those of the believer in God.”
Ultimately, because neither materialism nor theism can be conclusively proven to be true, one has to choose one’s worldview (although materialists would, of course, deny that there is any such freedom to choose). Perhaps just a few questions should be posed here, while keeping in mind the growing evidence that undermines the materialist position:
Which way of looking at life and the cosmos, materialism or theism, is more open-minded?
Which is more open-hearted?
Which is more conducive to a thriving, profoundly meaningful life, both as individuals and as a society: The view that we human beings are nothing more than a “pack of neurons,” “meat-puppets” or “animated meat,” a “curious accident in a backwater” of the cosmos, or the view that we human beings are made in the image and likeness of God in our freedom, our ability to reason, and our ability to love, and that we were created by God so that we might choose to accept his invitation to share forever in the divine life, love, and bliss (2 Peter 1:3–4)?