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Without meaning any offense, this kind of weasel logic makes me so angry. No! The ordinary, “materialist” colloquial conception of physical reality is no modern invention. A millennia ago, people of countless cultures and civilization knew what it was to combine yeast, water and flour to make bread. Medieval alchemists mostly knew that their experiments were unsuccessful in creating real gold, and those who employed them were well aware that declaring that lead was gold did not make it so. Our lay understanding of physical reality has been broadly materialist, with limited exceptions, for the entire history of the human race, such that we can’t even conceive of an existence in which this wasn’t the case.
Transubstantiation isn’t primarily a rejection of materialism but a test of faith. And - to be clear - many early Catholics (certainly lay peasant ones) may well have believed that wine or something that looked a lot like wine ran through Christ’s veins, although modern research suggests transubstantiation was a rearguard action in philosophical defense against upstart groups in the 10th and 11th centuries.
Liberalism’s spiritual and practical void, its failure at building happy societies, doesn’t stem from its conception of material reality. It stems from its founding myth, its central void, namely that of the equality or progress of man, from which is derived the Hegelian narrative. Liberalism isn’t primarily an embrace of a flawed ‘scientific method’ but an absolute rejection of material reality in a way no previous spiritual language dared, made possible by various technological and cultural developments.
Or, to put it another way, we realized that we’re animals and, the wool having fallen from our eyes, understand the mechanistic nature of our minds isn’t connected to something greater, isn’t part of some grander system of reincarnation or heaven in which our lives will persist beyond the brief time we have on earth. We understand that life is brutish, nasty and short. We understand - now, increasingly - that the brain is just a Large Language Model trained on the multimodal input of our senses, and that all of our philosophy is simply a product of this banal pattern recognition and prediction.
Like Chomsky desperately trying to salvage universal grammar one can twist words and definitions until some esoteric and easily toppled spiritual existence retains the thinnest veneer of credibility. I’m in favor of that, too. But let’s be clear: if the choice is ‘cope or rope’, let us admit that we are ‘coping’.
I feel like you deserve a reply, although your nihilism is so scathing it burns my heart. I just disagree with this, fundamentally.
I don't think that we are coping, I think there's a reason these religious traditions have survived and in many cases have flourished despite this narrative you're packing, which has a TON of power. I mean modern nihilistic materialism is the most extremely powerful framework for understanding the world ever. The more miraculous thing to me is that there are still so many people who believe in God.
Then I started to open myself up to the idea that maybe I was wrong, and well, I began to get undeniable personal evidence. 'Religious experience' as you would probably call it. I know it's not convenient or testable in a lab, but it's real nonetheless. That's the best explanation and response I can give you at the moment, though I'm sure you'll find it wanting.
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