Christianity Prevails: Materialism is Dying, and Even Secular Philosophy Now Knows It! By Brian Simpson

For most of the twentieth century, Christianity was told it had a science problem. Evolution, neuroscience, cosmology — all supposedly pointed in the same direction: matter is fundamental, mind is accidental, meaning is imaginary, God is unnecessary. Religion might survive as poetry or therapy, but not as truth.

But something strange has happened in the twenty-first century. It isn't theology that is dismantling materialism. It's physics and philosophy. Consciousness refuses to reduce to neurons. Quantum theory refuses to behave like classical physics billiard balls. Information increasingly replaces substance as the basic explanatory currency. And now a growing body of analytic philosophy is quietly reviving what Christianity always assumed: mind is fundamental, matter derivative.

One of the clearest contemporary expressions of this reversal appears in Bernardo Kastrup's book Why Materialism is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There is No Death and Fathom Answers to Life, the Universe, and Everything (iff Books / John Hunt Publishing, UK, 2014; updated editions since). Kastrup — a former CERN scientist turned philosopher — develops what he calls Analytic Idealism: a rigorously argued metaphysical system claiming that consciousness, not matter, is the ontological ground of reality. He goes further in his more recent book Analytic Idealism (2024).

Christians need not endorse Kastrup's metaphysics wholesale. But they should recognise its cultural significance. For the first time in over a century, a serious secular philosophy is openly dismantling materialism — the very worldview that has functioned as Christianity's deepest intellectual rival.

This matters. Because Christianity was never truly threatened by Darwin. It was threatened by materialism.

Materialism: The Real Rival Religion

Materialism is not just a scientific hypothesis. It is a metaphysical creed. It claims:

Mind emerges from matter.

Consciousness is a by-product of brain chemistry.

Meaning is an evolutionary illusion.

Purpose is projection.

God is unnecessary.

Once you accept this framework, Christianity is not false — it is redundant. Resurrection becomes metaphor. Sin becomes malfunction. Salvation becomes therapy. Worship becomes wellness branding. God becomes the universe's emotional support animal.

The danger of materialism was never that it disproved Christianity. It was that it redefined reality in a way that made Christianity unintelligible.

But materialism has always had a problem — consciousness. Not how brains work. Not cognition. But subjective experience itself: the fact that there is something it is like to be. No physical description of matter explains why anything should feel like anything at all. This is not a scientific gap. It is a conceptual one.

As philosopher David Chalmers famously put it, this is not the "easy problem" of explaining functions, but the "hard problem" of explaining experience — and no physical theory even gestures toward a solution.

Materialism explains everything except the one thing it must explain first: the existence of minds.

Enter Analytic Idealism

Bernardo Kastrup's Why Materialism is Baloney offers a systematic alternative: Analytic Idealism.

In essence, the view holds that:

Consciousness is fundamental.

Physical reality is not the cause of mind, but its representation.

What we call "matter" is how mental processes appear when observed from the outside.

Individual minds are dissociated aspects of a single universal consciousness, much like multiple personalities within one psyche.

The universe, on this account, is not a machine that accidentally developed minds. It is a mind that sometimes looks like a machine.

Importantly, this is not mystical speculation. Kastrup works within analytic philosophy, using arguments drawn from neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and the metaphysics of perception. He rejects dualism, rejects physicalism, and rejects vague spiritualism alike. His is a disciplined metaphysical claim: mind is ontologically basic; matter is derivative.

Whether or not one accepts the conclusion, the argument's mere existence signals something extraordinary: materialism is no longer the default intellectual position among serious philosophers of mind. It is increasingly viewed as incoherent, incomplete, or metaphysically extravagant — requiring more miracles than it explains.

Christianity was Already There

Christian theology never taught that matter was fundamental.

"In the beginning was the Word."
Not the particle.
Not the field.
Not the vacuum fluctuation.

Logos precedes cosmos. Meaning precedes mechanism. Mind precedes matter.

This is not metaphorical fluff. It is metaphysical structure. Creation, in Christian theology, is not the rearrangement of eternal matter but the expression of divine intelligence. The universe is intelligible because it is intentional. Nature is lawful because it is spoken into being.

Analytic Idealism — though not Christian — converges strikingly with this ancient intuition. It does not affirm a personal God. It does not affirm creation. It does not affirm divine will or love. But it dismantles the metaphysical firewall that materialism erected between Christianity and intellectual credibility.

Idealism gets you to Mind. Christianity gets you to God.

That difference matters. But so does the shared rejection of matter as ultimate.

Why Materialism Cannot Survive Resurrection

Materialism cannot even make sense of consciousness continuing after bodily death, let alone resurrection. If the brain generates the mind, then when the brain decomposes, consciousness must vanish. Survival is incoherent. Resurrection is metaphysically impossible.

Christianity, by contrast, has always distinguished between the soul and the body — not in a Cartesian way, but in a holistic one: the human person is embodied spirit, not animated matter. Death is not annihilation but rupture; resurrection is not reanimation but restoration.

Analytic Idealism unexpectedly helps here. If consciousness is not generated by the brain but merely filtered or localised through it — much like radio waves through a receiver — then bodily death does not logically entail mental extinction. Consciousness can persist even if embodiment ceases.

This does not prove resurrection. But it restores metaphysical intelligibility to doctrines that materialism renders incoherent by definition.

Materialism doesn't merely disagree with Christianity. It disqualifies it in advance.

Idealism reopens the case.

The Deeper Cultural Stakes

The triumph of materialism did not merely affect theology. It transformed moral psychology, anthropology, and politics.

If humans are biochemical machines:

Moral responsibility becomes neurological determinism.

Sin becomes sickness.

Evil becomes pathology.

Justice becomes treatment.

Meaning becomes narrative therapy.

But Christianity insists that humans are not machines but persons — creatures capable of truth, love, guilt, repentance, and redemption. These are not mechanical properties. They are spiritual ones.

Materialism dissolves personhood into process. Idealism restores subjectivity to the centre of ontology.

Again, Kastrup's version is not Christian. But it retrieves something Christianity always knew: experience is not an accident of matter; matter is an expression of experience.

That reversal has massive ethical implications. It re-grounds dignity. It re-grounds agency. It re-grounds meaning. It reopens metaphysical space for responsibility, worship, repentance, and hope.

Why Christians Should Care About Secular Idealism

People often assume that metaphysics is settled and hostile — that science has disproven the soul and philosophy has buried God. That assumption is wrong.

Materialism now faces three fatal problems:

1.The Hard Problem of Consciousness — No physical theory explains experience.

2.The Measurement Problem in Physics — Observation appears irreducible.

3.The Meaning Problem — Normativity, value, logic and truth resist naturalisation.

Analytical Idealism does not solve all these problems — but it dissolves the first by refusing to treat consciousness as derivative. It also renders the second intelligible and the third metaphysically tractable.

Christian theology should not fear this development. It should recognise it as a cultural shift: the collapse of the worldview that once declared God unnecessary.

Not false — unnecessary.

Those are different claims. And only one required refutation.

What Idealism Still Lacks

Christians should not confuse philosophical idealism with Christian revelation.

Analytic Idealism affirms:

Universal consciousness.

Mental primacy.

Ontological unity.

Christianity affirms:

A personal God.

Creation ex nihilo.

Moral law.

Incarnation.

Redemption.

Resurrection.

Idealism gets you a mental universe. Christianity gets you a personal universe.

Idealism gives you consciousness. Christianity gives you covenant.

Idealism gives you unity. Christianity gives you love.

But Christianity cannot even be heard in a world where matter is fundamental and mind is illusion. Idealism clears the metaphysical ground on which revelation can once again be intelligible.

In this sense, Analytic Idealism functions as a modern praeparatio evangelica — a philosophical clearing of the rubble left by materialism.

Materialism was the Real Heresy

Christianity was never truly threatened by Darwin. Evolution concerns biological mechanisms, not metaphysical foundations. Christianity has survived Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, Freud, and Einstein. What nearly suffocated it culturally was something far more insidious: the belief that matter is all that exists and mind is merely a by-product of chemistry.

Once that premise is accepted, theology becomes decorative. Prayer becomes self-talk. Worship becomes group therapy. Resurrection becomes metaphor. God becomes poetry.

But that premise is now collapsing — not because pastors attacked it, but because philosophers and physicists found it incoherent.

Bernardo Kastrup's Why Materialism is Baloney is not Christian apologetics. It is something more unexpected and, in some ways, more valuable: a secular demolition of the worldview that once made Christianity impossible by definition.

Christians should not fear idealism. They should welcome the collapse of materialism — because Christianity never belonged to the materialist universe in the first place.

"In the beginning was the Word."

Not the atom.
Not the vacuum.
Not the fluctuation.

The Word.

And after a century of metaphysical detours, at long last, philosophy is finally finding its way back home.