German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) had built his system on the pantheistic notion that everything in the universe is God, and that human beings are the highest manifestation of this world-soul on Earth. His dialectic was a spiritual force in which a thesis battled with an anti-thesis to create a new synthesis. That’s what progress was all about, and that’s why Hegel’s absolute idealism made him the father of Progressivism.
But the Left, in its abhorrence at the thought of a spiritual essence ruling the universe, adopted Marx’s atheistic dialectical materialism along with the class struggle as the way to utopian communism. And so, since the emergence of Marx and the Communist Manifesto, the Left has been stuck with this 19th-century concept of matter that prevents them from understanding the spiritual nature of man. In fact, communists are the primary violators of man’s spiritual being. That is why they resort to mass extermination of human beings as a means of reforming the human race. After all, they are only dealing with blobs of matter.
But it is the Bible that assures us that man is indeed a spiritual being made in the likeness of his creator. Thus we read in Genesis 1:27: “And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”
We were created to be like God, to have certain attributes of God, but not be God. The next passage makes that clear: “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and of every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
And in order to do all of that, God gave man a brain properly endowed with extraordinary intelligence in order to carry out these huge tasks. The Bible further states in Genesis 2:19: “And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.”
In other words, God made Adam into a lexicographer — an inventor of names, a creator of vocabulary. Indeed, God gave man the power of language in order to serve four different functions: The first, to know God and be able to communicate with Him. We do that every day through prayer. We’ve done that by writing the Bible, the history of man’s relations with God. Second, we use language to know one’s mate with the ability to communicate at the deepest intimate level. Third, we use language to be able to know other human beings and create society. And Fourth, we use language to know oneself. We are constantly speaking inwardly to ourselves in order to understand who and what we are, and in order to transform our dreams and ideas into reality.
Indeed, man had to become a scientist in order to replenish the Earth and subdue it. He had to become an astute observer of nature in order to take dominion over it all. And in order to write the Bible, he had to develop written language and become a historian.
And it is the scientists, notably the physicists, who are proving that man is a spiritual being. For the deeper they probe into the nature of matter, the more they find less and less matter and more and more “spirit.” That’s what the quantum theory is all about. It was Max Planck (1858-1947), the German physicist, who formulated the quantum theory, which has permitted man to go from exploration of visible matter to the exploration of invisible matter, which is really non-matter.
Max Planck wrote: “However much discussed and however promising this atomic theory might appear, it was, until recently, regarded merely as a brilliant hypothesis, since it appeared to many far-sighted workers too risky to take the enormous step from the visible and directly controllable to the invisible sphere, from the macrocosm to the microcosm.”
In his book, Microcosm, George Gilder writes: “The central event of the twentieth century is the overthrow of matter. In technology, economics, and the politics of nations, wealth in the form of physical resources is steadily declining in value and significance. The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things. This change marks a great historic divide.”
It has permitted a Mark Zuckerberg to become a billionaire just on the basis of an idea, nothing tangible, nothing that you can lift or sit on. Gilder writes further: “The exemplary technology of this era is the microchip — the computer inscribed on a tiny piece of processed material. More than any other invention, this device epitomizes the overthrow of matter…. The microchip not only epitomizes but also impels the worldwide shift of the worth of goods from materials to idea.”
And that is why the Marxists and lefties, the union goons pushing and provoking the class-struggle, seem so foolish and out of touch. Physics has passed them by, but they cling to materialism as their last hope, failing to realize that they are being left behind by the march of science and computer technology.
Only a spiritual being could produce a Facebook or a Twitter or the universe of the Internet. It uses the microcosm to produce real wealth. And what is the microcosm? Waves of electrons with no body, no substance, no weight. It is a world in which Newtonian physics doesn’t work. And that is why it is so difficult to understand. While we sense our spiritual being in ideas and dreams, we are still physically stuck on Earth by the force of gravity.
Gilder writes: “The overthrow of matter in science leads plausibly to the ascendancy of information and mind in contemporary technology, and hence in economics as well.”
It might also lead to a growing affirmation that there is life after death. What is death? It is the end of our material existence. But it cannot be the end of our spiritual existence. The hypothesis that matter is really a form of spirit will further be tested as our exploration and use of the microcosm makes us more familiar with what is at the basis of this material world. That should make us all fascinated by what the physicists come up with next.
