© Michael Dziedzic via Unsplash.
Scientific materialism is an atheistic worldview that sees all reality as the result of accidental collisions and combinations of elementary particles governed by a mysteriously fortuitous set of laws that control how matter interacts. It's a worldview devoid of higher meaning and purpose.
Today, scientific materialism has captured much of the academic world. Science itself has virtually come to be defined as the study of this mechanical, robotic, meaningless, accidental combination of particles of matter and energy. Any belief in design, purpose, ultimate meaning, inherent values, morality, or beauty is ridiculed as equivalent to belief in the Easter Bunny.
Although scientific materialists in the last century didn't usually pretend to have all the answers, most did express confidence that it was only a matter of time before any shortcomings in their paradigm would be shored up by fresh discoveries.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century.
It from Bit
The computer revolution and information age, combined with advances in microscopy and theoretical physics, have transformed our understanding of the power of information processing and opened our eyes to the deep structures of physical reality. The central insight:
the essence of the physical world is energy and information. There is no such thing as mere "solid" matter. Instead, the substructure of physical reality is
an unbelievably complex network of interlocking information-processing systems all working in harmony to afford progressively more capable information-processing systems.
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