Our Obsession with Material Cause and Effect

When I was a young lad, I remember being fascinated by reading an article about predicting the weather. Very simply put, the article commented on how excited the meteorological community was when computers first entered the scene in the 1960s. They believed, without a doubt, that once computers became more practical and could fit into the space of an office suite rather than take up a city block, they would be able to predict the weather with perfect accuracy.

Materialist scientists—meteorologists included—believe the entire universe, including all of human experience, can ultimately be reduced to nothing more than particles interacting with other particles. In their view, reality is just one vast, intricate chain of cause and effect: one electron bouncing off another, setting off predictable sequences of events.

That’s it. All problems solved.