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Notes -
Phenomenology makes more sense to me than materialism. It was the phenomenological lens of Jordan Peterson that first spoke to me from a Christian perspective. I was already a Buddhist and I was used to navigating existence from a standpoint of phenomenological empiricism.
As a phenomenological empiricist, I could say that states of consciousness matter, and things that I do could predictably alter my consciousness. I could try different kinds of meditation or take a face-melting dose of mushrooms and reliably change my experience of existence.
The alternative to phenomenology is some kind of materialism. But materialism usually leads to some kind of nihilism. If matter is more real than consciousness, then the things that intuitively matter to humans are really meaningless. Love is just chemicals, beauty is just electric signals in your brain. It is the worldview of Neil DeGrasse Tysonism, and I don't find it particularly appealing.
Ultimately I decided on faith to not be a nihilist. I decided that love matters, beauty matters, and the people I love matter. I decided it was good to act in the world to bring about more good. And it seemed to me that phenomenology was an intellectually rigorous philosophical framework to act from, since consciousness is prior to any physical model of the world.
From there, Christianity was not so far away.
This is built on a spiritualistic premise that the only things with meaning are the ones without any grounding in the material.
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