Independence

Independence. The very sound of it makes us giddy with excitement. People would die for the very notion of it, as is clearly shown throughout the annals of time, when men would rise up against tyrants for the sake of glorious liberty, shedding blood and having their blood shed in the name of freedom. Fledgling adolescents more or less desire it greatly, when the pubescent dreams of one day abandoning the nest in preference of a self-sustained existence. The very clamor for such a boon exists all around us in a vast and wide circle, encompassing all of humanity.

Yet how many of us stop to consider the fact that, for all our uplifting of the concept, we are not really completely independent per se?

Let's say you go to a grocery store. You pick up several bags of chips, a few cans of sausages and corned beef and a package of frozen salmon. Running the items through the counter, you feel a sense of pride knowing that you have done the groceries all by yourself. No mom helping you to make a shopping list or pick out which items to buy.

Yet have you taken the time to consider the people who made those products? The factory workers who operate machines to can them? The people who farm the animals and the laborers who process them?

Heck, what about...the lady at the cash register?

Let's get a bit irrational here for a while. "OK," you may think. "Let's say I was the one who had to run the items through the barcode reader. What about that?" Problem. What about the people who manufactured the barcode reader? Or the cash register?

Stepping out of the urban scene for a while. Let's say you had to hunt or fish for your own food. "Roughing it", so to speak. No cashiers, no meat processing plants, no delivery trucks. You get your own meat.

There's another problem. Doing so would still mean that you are dependent on the processes found in nature, i.e. the food chain, the water cycle, photosynthesis...these are necessary to ensure the wellbeing of the animals you hunt for and the vegetables you farm. The naturalistic materialist would claim that you are dependent on nature's operations in order to survive.

There are yet more problems. These natural processes depend on the laws of physics, at most up to the molecular/atomic level, in order to operate. These laws govern every single chemical reaction that occurs every second, from the evaporation of water to the operation of the neurotransmitters that permit you to perform your every action by (as the name implies) transmitting impulses from one neuron's axon to another neuron's dendrite.

It is here that the naturalistic materialist philosopher wishes to stop. For him, there could be nothing higher than the laws of nature. Yet common sense argues that laws require a lawgiver. Design requires a designer, and purpose requires a purpose-giver. Machines simply cannot manufacture themselves, and intelligence cannot proceed from non-intelligence. Life cannot begin from non-life, as Redi and Pasteur pointed out centuries ago.

In fact the very logic used to argue that there can be nothing higher than or beyond nature itself requires an orderly mind to put it together, since applying the laws of logic to itself in order to demonstrate its apparent self-existence would only result in circular reasoning. Attributing the existence thereof to extraterrestrial beings from the planet Spira only compounds the problem to an infinite degree, and concluding that these laws exist simply because they are would only serve to reveal one's presuppositions (as if the [unintentional] attempt to compound the problem doesn't show this already!).

Which brings me to my point: There needs to be a self-existent end to these notions. An end which can account not only for the order present in nature and logic, but also for the personality and moral law (conscience) that exists in humanity*.

And we see that in the holy God of the Bible; "...for by Him (Jesus Christ) were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: and he is before all things, and by him all things consist." (Collosians 1:16-17)

There are only two things men can do to this message: heed it and submit all to the Creator, the Potter who holds the clay in His hand, or (as natural man is wont to do) fight it and rebel against the Lord for the sake of your own preconceived "independence". And we all know the result of the second action:

"...every man did that which was right in his own eyes." (Judges 17:6)

God bless,
Machaira

*One cannot simply attribute this to genetics and evolutiuonary theory, as the materialists have sought to do; for one, if you propose that certain unselfish moral attributes are due to natural selection choosing such features as beneficial to society (thereby weeding out un-beneficial "immoral" behavior), could I not easily produce a counterclaim based on the same premise, e.g. that selfish people could just as quickly propagate due to either their advanced level of resourcefulness (owing to the fact that they are looking out for number one) or the fact that they may simply be leeching off of the "moral" and unselfish individuals in the community? Reading the first explanation, we have in reality gotten nowhere. "Natural selection" really hasn't weeded out the "immoral" behavior as in the first proposal; rather, the second proposal contradicts the first theory (Besides, wouldn't the first proposal undermine the very idea of "survival of the fittest"?)! Secondly, C.S. Lewis' age old argument still stands to this day: if our thoughts, ideas, emotions and morality are simply based off of chemical reactions with no transcendent quality to them, who's to say what's right or wrong?