Dear My Generation,
It’s a meme now, a tired out joke, but it is the whole of materialism. In the light of comedy it is shown for hollow meaningless twaddle, and yet it remains the unchallenged assumption of my generation. The joke sums up materialism so succinctly one wonders how this babble has steamrolled its way over reason.
Love, recites the materialist from his book of Rick and Morty, is only chemicals, nature’s way of perpetuating the species.
What a wonder, that if we can recount the physical events behind love, love subsequently disappears. But our materialist is a cheat if he stops there. For, we can with similar method describe in detail the ways in which the eye peruses this page, how the light refracts, and how the nerves react. In the end, this too is all chemicals. So, this page must therefore cease to exist as well, for if love can be disappeared by explaining the science behind it, then so can explanation of our vision—and indeed, every other faculty of sense we possess—do away with the world.
And why stop there? This wonderful proof can do away with our very selves, for we know ourselves by a physical process—more chemicals; we must therefore, like love, cease to exist. We would go further, reminding our materialist that chemicals and their reactions are only knowable by further process of chemical reactions and must also be scratched off the list of things that are, except we no longer exist, nor is there a world for us to not exist in.
It seems materialism’s removing magic is at work upon my hair, for in arguing against this folly, I’ve already lost a few strands. But where, by heaven, has the world, ourselves, love, and even our materialist disappeared to? Wherever this noplace is, we seem to be. An explanation which explains away everything when given its head can only be used dishonestly, or by the unthinking.
And yet I hear our materialist protest—dear God, there’s more than one of them, “But we see, we hear, we taste, smell, feel. These are real, they happen.”
“Yes,” I shout back. “They happen, and so does love.”
My father suggested a good joke, the slogan of my generation: I cease to think, therefore I am naught.
If I have not made my case strong enough, let me add this. A material explanation explains material, and if it fails to explain anything beyond, it is not the poverty of the immaterial, but the poverty of the method, that is at fault. Enjoy your cartoons, my generation, but grow up.
Sincerely,
Dr. Agonson
Tale Told 