To Do with the Idea of God

A certain difficulty I have with the notion of “materialism” is the question of whether an existence defined as consisting of neither more nor less than matter (and its convertible counterpart, energy) is to be understood as an existence of a certain type (“a material world would be such-and-such”) or as an existence of a—the “only”—type known to us (“our observable world composed of matter is all we can contend to exist”).

It would seem that designating our “world” as “material only” and as an observable manifestation of more largely-described “material” existence would presume that there is a “type” of world called “material”—presupposing the existence of an idealized “materialism” that would be revealed as presumptuous by its very premises.  We can observe our world and declare it to be merely a material phenomenon, but it is confined thereby by its “type” to a “type category” of one—itself.  Admittedly, nothing in the observation of our universe as purely material precludes the existence of universes described otherwise—though the strict materialist would be possessed of no means to test the existence of other universes, and moreover possessed, it would seem, of no reason to pursue such speculation.

So, materialism must describe our one and only universe—our materialist universe is simply what a materialist universe is (not what a materialist universe is “like,” but merely what a materialist universe “is.”)  And so, inescapably, material existence probed by any tools available to the materialist is an existence relating the idea of “God”—as well as any other idea ever held, or that will ever be held.  An “idea” can be described as merely a materially-related and materially-contemplated phenomenon of the interactions of particles, but an “idea” so described is an immortal thing—an “idea” that is a momentary (or life-long or civilization-long) overt psychological phenomenon will leave its imprint on the ensuing cause-and-effect permutations of anything it touches (either directly or through force-interactions.)  Nothing that lives (though “life” be a rather circumscribed thing for a materialist) ever—by the implications of materialism—truly dies.  Neither is any idea held by a living being a thing that truly dies.

The only way, in the materialist sense, that an idea might ever be extinguished is if every trace of its physical existence were to be lost—a conceptual impossibility, if each particle (or its even-smaller parts, or the energy expended in its material dissolution) impacts—in an albeit miniscule fashion—the whole.  A (materially-described) idea is intrinsic to the material world it inhabits.  Of course, it might be contended that an idea is “lost” if it is not translated in recognizable form to ensuing creatures, or it is dissipated in matter-energy interactions that cannot possibly be collected and/or interpreted by creatures as yet undiscovered, but all such scenarios of ideas being lost are conjectural—and thereby inimical to a strict materialist philosophy.  If ideas exist, they exist forever—barring some “faith-founded” certainty that the case is otherwise.

Moreover, if this is the one and only material existence—that is, if a “materialist” does not consider our existence as being within a belief-system of potentially infinite other “universe-lives” or “universe-case-studies,” then this one and only material universe, playing out in purely material terms, has been possessed from its beginning (or from its un-beginning beginning) of the material precursors of all ideas—such “precursors” in the strict materialist sense being indistinguishable from the ideas themselves.

The “God-idea” has always existed, exists now, and will always exist.  The question is what, if anything, we as creatures will do with it.