If the materialists are right, “all that is, or ever was, or ever will be” amounts to nothing. There is no “great adventure” to be found or had. All of the high-sounding rhetoric is a way to talk about the entropy that will end in the “Heat Death” of the universe, where all life, light, and order ends in darkness. Life is but a much longer version of Samuel Beckett’s short play, “Breath.” Life begins with a gasp, ends with a gasp, and everything that happens between is garbage. This worldview, however, is simply not big enough. 

According to the “Principle of the Day” posted on August 26 by multibillion dollar hedge fund manager Ray Dalio, “Evolution is the single greatest force in the universe; it is the only thing that is permanent, and it drives everything.”

He went on to declare, “Everything from the smallest subatomic particle to the entire galaxy is evolving. While everything apparently dies or disappears in time, the truth is that it all just gets reconfigured in evolving forms. Remember that energy can’t be destroyed—it can only be reconfigured. So the same stuff is continuously falling apart and coalescing in different forms. The force behind that is evolution.”

If this Psalm to the glory of non-religious materialism sounds religious, it is. Often, those who are most wholeheartedly dedicated to atheism and aimless cosmic progression make proclamations such as “Universe created,” “Nature provided,” or, as Dalio put it, “Evolution drives.” They claim that everything results from a purposeless, pointless series of atomic reactions but then imply this story of the universe is also the storyteller. They talk of evolution as if it is the Mind behind it all, a Mind that may not love us but which, nonetheless, has a plan for our lives. 

In the dramatic opening to his 1980 documentary, Cosmos, Carl Sagan announced, “The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.” Decades later, Neil deGrasse Tyson reincarnated the series by declaring, “A generation ago, the astronomer Carl Sagan … launched hundreds of millions of us on a great adventure.” I doubt he meant to quote Steven Curtis Chapman here, much less to borrow his theistic assumptions, but he saddled up the same horse. 

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