In what our friend Eric Metaxas calls the “scientistic materialist” perspective, there is not only no ultimate purpose or meaning to life. “If we are just material beings,” says Eric, “then there is actually no such thing as life,” either.

That’s a profound point that comes out of his new radio and podcast interview with J. Scott Turner, State University of New York biologist and author of Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It. Listen to the conversation here. Brian Miller and Ann Gauger have written about the book this week.

Turner’s spot-on phrase, the “Reverse Pinocchio,” captures the idea well. The wooden boy wished to become a real, living boy, and in the movie, he gets his wish. Materialists, on the other hand, look at life and deny that it is what it seems to be, a dance of purpose and desire not explicable in the familiar mechanistic terms of Darwinian ideology.

In seeking to explain the phenomenon of life, says Dr. Turner, Darwinism “falls flat on its face.” He explains that that is why it has to bracket words such as intelligence and design in “scare quotes.”

Speaking of good reads, this has nothing to do with evolution, but the new book by Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed, is on the Top 10 New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list now. Congratulations! You go, Eric!

Photo credit: jackmac34, via Pixabay.