THE NATURALIST'S ALCHEMY OF THE SOUL

Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, posted a short piece yesterday about the folly of substituting a belief in Man for a belief in God.  As the pithy one put it, "[T]he conclusion to draw is that we should get by as best we can until Night falls, rather than making things worse by drinking the Left's utopian Kool-Aid."

I always understood the evil of oppression, but it wasn't until after the fall of the Berlin Wall I began to grasp the horror of utopian projects.  Not just the communist and fascist projects of the collectivists, but also the anarcho-capitalist and secularist projects of the individualists.  They are all predicated upon an impossibility, the perfectibility of human nature.  They all pursue the same delusion, heaven on Earth.  And they all come to the same wretched end as the believers in Man gain the power to hammer the square pegs of humanity into the round holes of a false paradise.

It was at this point I got a glimpse of the wisdom of the Scriptures.  The grace of God touched my reason.  Slowly I saw more and more of the wonder of His creation as I tore away at the blinkers of naturalism that I had firmly affixed to myself.  As a creature who is in part flesh and blood, I understand that I will not ever be completely free of those blinkers in this life.  But I do know that a belief in Man shackles a person to his sins and blinds him to the hope of release that is knowable only through a belief in God.

To escape the despair of his shackles, the believer in Man begins to rationalize his sins away.  He practices an alchemy of the soul to transmute his vices into virtues.  He persuades himself that the transmutation has succeeded by clutching ever more tightly to the philosopher's stone of naturalism.  His faith in Man will not be shaken despite the plain evidence all around him refuting it.  Thus, he keeps his mind behind the wall of a false paradise lest the reality of his shackles intrudes into his awareness.

The irony, of which the believer in Man is oblivious, is that his false paradise is in fact the weight of his shackles grown even heavier.  Their burden will destroy him, unless he finally sees them for what they are.  Only then can he grasp that the philosopher's stone of naturalism, like the mercury used by the alchemists of matter, is a poison that weakens him under the weight of his shackles.  Abstaining from the poison perhaps his mind clears a bit, and he considers what he refused to consider before.  Maybe he allows God's grace to touch his reason.  Then, for the first time in his life, he tastes the freedom that comes of knowing that God alone can and will unshackle him -- if he asks to be released.

This, as a believer in God who was once a believer in Man, I know to be true.