How Re-Enchantment is Unavoidably Revolutionary

You can’t have just a little transcendence. To acknowledge its existence implies giving it the primary position in our understanding of the world. There are today a handful of public intellectuals highlighting the inadequacy of a purely mechanistic, materialistic understanding of the universe, Iain McGilchrist and Jordan Peterson perhaps foremost among them. But to leave the door open to the possibility of something more out there – some higher meaning or power, some transcendent force – is no mere asterisk. If sheer materialism is inadequate, all other options are revolutionary.

This may be better appreciated if we remember that, for a time, science and transcendence co-existed peacefully. When we began to systematize and mathematize the movements of nature in the Enlightenment, this work was still performed atop a religious foundation. It was understood that the calculability of creation reflected the mind of its Creator. And acknowledging the existence of God allowed us to see that the perhaps mechanistic workings of nature are still suffused with meaning – the purposes of God and the drama of the cosmos are written in the movements of matter. However mechanical certain aspects of the world might be, human and divine will remained crucially beyond systematization. So, the light of transcendent higher meaning could still shine through the mundane.

But over time, as McGilchrist so forcefully argues, the mechanistic structure by which we understood the material world was drained of this divine light. As the left-brained mechanistic model of the cosmos was continually elaborated, anything that fell beyond the bounds of the system was dismissed as superfluous, and superfluity equated with falseness. Science turned into scientism. This is the victory of the Emissary over the Master that McGilchrist warns us of.

The theory of evolution was a crucial milestone in this victory of the materialist model over the religious paradigm. Its explanatory power opened the possibility of placing everything – the mystery and drama of our humanity included – into the cause-and-effect stream of material bits. Materialists believed that “God” was only ever an explanatory mechanism to account for the otherwise baffling processes of nature and was now being obsolesced by scientific sophistication, for now even life itself could be accounted for independent of divine intervention. And by the brutal logic of left-brained stringency, God himself – by now an extraneous hypothesis – was excised from the cosmic model by Occam’s razor.

This is the supposed victory of science over superstition celebrated by the more hard-boiled heirs of the enlightenment. Their materialism was absolute. In fact, the internal logic of the scientific process that spurred it forward demanded absolutization, hermetically sealed against transcendence. All existence must be material existence; all forces must be material forces; all causes material causes. For if there were anything that fell outside of the materialist model, that one defiant fact would be the undoing of scientistic conceit. For science to deliver the absolute truth that scientism promises, all truth must be accessible by its method. In short, the point of the mechanistic model of the materialists is that it holds without exception. The “supernatural” is not disproved so much as preemptively marked off-limits.

This is why the growing skepticism toward such strict materialism sets the stage for revolutionary change at every scale. Its strictness is an all-or-nothing endeavor. This skepticism is being driven by the skepticism of left-brained models of reality as such as argued by McGilchrist, the role and function of consciousness itself as argued by Jordan Peterson, and the inescapable meaning crisis that materialism entails as argued by John Vervaeke. To put their critiques in (absurdly) broad strokes, a materialist model of the cosmos fails on a couple of fronts: It first of all relies on facts that can only be gleaned from a pre-factual prioritization of attention, so that even the committed factualist cannot help but build his scientific edifice on faithfulness to a materialist narrative that precedes any observation. Thus it lacks the rock-solid grounding that it supposedly guarantees.

Second, this faithfulness to materialism fatally denies the legitimacy of the transcendent, infinite quality of the cosmos that is universally intuited across all culture and history. Materialism can satisfactorily explain everything – except human existence, meaning, and purpose. We cannot help but be dissatisfied by a worldview that reduces all nature to “resources” and all human endeavor to “survival.” Spiritual Crisis is inevitable.

Over time, the disparity grows between the meaningless materialism that we are taught and the inescapable meaningfulness of our aesthetic and religious intuitions, until the cumulative error of the mechanical model is too great to ignore. As more people tune in to the growing skepticism toward strict materialism, fewer people are ignoring this error. The preeminence of the new atheist movement is already decades past, and momentum is shifting in the direction of re-enchantment.

But it’s important to read the fine print in this shift. As much as we may like the idea of re-enchantment bringing a transcendent flavor to our world, it will not remain suspended like a cloud. As the religious founders of the enlightenment understood, whatever aspects of nature can be likened to a material mechanism in fact rest on a deeper fundament of being, descend from a transcendent height. If we seek re-enchantment, the source of that higher meaning is obviously the preeminent element of existence.

Strict materialism depends on the absolute boundedness of its paradigm to function: it must include and account for all things. Introducing enchantment or transcendence is not an adjustment but a peripety. Again, the purpose (and appeal) of the materialist model was that it excised the gods and ghosts of our superstitious past from existence. But if the materialist model is false, what is stopping their return? If we want to keep the door cracked for the possibility of some transcendent meaning, there is no telling what else may come rushing through.

Philosopher and filmmaker Nathan Jacobs, in his documentary “Becoming Truly Human” about the growing population of religiously unaffiliated, shows that lack of religion among younger generations does not imply a rejection of the supernatural. These so-called “nones” (because when a survey asks for their religious affiliation, they respond “none”) are people fascinated by gamut of paranormal sub-genres: the ghost hunters, the UFO enthusiasts, and all the crystals and rituals of the occult.

What we are discovering today is that, for many, dabbling in the supernatural is only the first step in a journey that leads back to the Church. And why wouldn’t it? If you believe in ghosts, there is no longer a rational basis for rejecting the virgin birth or the resurrection. This is why many “nones” are surprised to encounter the whole kit-n-kaboodle of religious faith as something now natural, even irresistible. It is supernaturalism taken seriously to its obvious conclusion. This is a trend well documented by Justin Brierley in his podcasts “The Surprising Rebirth of Belief of God” and “Re-Enchanting.”

It must be emphasized that the death of materialism is not the death of science, only the death of scientism. We can still engage in scientific pursuits much as the religious founders of the enlightenment did: with continued faith and faithfulness to a deeper religious paradigm. But as we happily break the bonds of the absolutized materialism, today’s hopeful gestures toward hazy ideas of transcendence or enchantment may prove a mere prelude to full-blown religious transformation at both the individual and cultural level.

It is the nature of our process of understanding to reach for bedrock. As a culture we have for generations trusted the bedrock surety of the scientific materialist model. Abandoning that foundation will require trusting a new foundation for understanding the world, though we may float amidst nebulous transitory ideas in the meantime. If there is something else out there beyond material nature, some deeper grounding to the human hope, grief, and beauty that we feel, we cannot help but ask what exactly it is. Theology may emerge from its niche in academic obscurity for the first time in centuries to answer the cultural and existential questions of a post-materialist age. We may have no other choice but to turn to theologians to perform the task to which physicists were unequal – the grounding of our self-understanding.