Is materialism “unraveling”? It is, according to Cambridge University philosopher of religion James Orr in a very rich and sometimes hilarious conversation with Stephen Meyer and David Berlinski, hosted by the inimitable Peter Robinson of Stanford’s Hoover Institution. The title of the Uncommon Knowledge episode, “The Magician’s Twin,” is drawn from the book of the same name edited by John West, examining the relationship between the “twins,” science and magic, as C. S. Lewis saw them. 

Berlinski, or the “Remarkable Consciousness Known as Berlinski,” as Robinson dubs him, is a consummate skeptic and a very funny man who at age 82 speaks in perfect paragraphs that could be transcribed and published with no editing. Orr and Meyer are more in agreement with each other than with Berlinski that developments in science have largely pulled the rug out from any purely materialist understanding of nature. Meyer argues for an inference to intelligent design, while Orr thinks that’s a bit hasty, but they are otherwise of very similar views.

Behind the universe there must be a mind. As Meyer puts it, “The laws of nature are expressed in mathematics, but how is it that mathematical expressions are causing something in the real world? This is a conflation that occurs a lot among physicists. It’s a category mistake.” Those physicists neglect to ask about the agent of that causation.

Godlessness of the Gaps

Orr finds that materialists are increasingly reduced to pushing a “Godlessness of the Gaps,” which is a great phrase. He may not be ready to embrace ID, but he speaks its language fluently. Richard Dawkins, he says, “is onto something, that after 1859 it becomes possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. But it seems to me that after 1958 — that’s the second, the neo-Darwinian revolution — it becomes very, very difficult to be an intellectually fulfilled materialist. What is the materialist claim? That the fundamental nature of reality is explicable in material terms. Now we find that deep, deep down is a phenomenon — coding, information — that is intrinsically ideal or mental, immaterial, and that poses an enormous challenge.”

Citing Lewis in The Abolition of Man, Meyer calls the drama of materialism’s unravelling a kind “repentance,” in the sense of a rethinking of the position that prevailed from 1859 to 1958. Watch below, and for more background, seek out John West’s book, The Magician’s Twin: C. S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society. Also, be sure to watch to the end when Berlinski reads a touching passage from his own book, Newton’s Gift, quoting from Isaac Newton as an old man as he looked back on his life with a “majestic detachment.”