On Monday, I started out with the subject of the mindlessness of materialism. The usual suspects were rounded up. Most of the PSU atheist club were on hand for their daily dose of the way, the truth, and the life. I departed from my usual procedure by taping most of my message. This day's preaching resulted in several 10-minute segments, which I posted on YouTube. Some links are included in this journal, but the remainder will be posted on my video page on BroCope.com

As I began to lay out the arguments for materialism being mindless, I gathered the attention of the atheists right off.

My premise was that materialism is an untenable inconsistent philosophy because it denies the existence of anything other than what is in the material realm. So for sure they reject the existence of spirit, soul, sin, judgment, and eternal life. None of those things are quantifiable. They exist to them only as myths foisted on mankind by mindless stone age savages trying to explain things that in their low level of evolution they are not able to grasp. To the materialist, life is a property of matter, not the evidence of a world outside our natural senses.

I took them to task because they try to employ reason and logic to prove their point, but both reason and logic are not material things either. Reason can not exist except there exists a mind to exercise it. So reason has no material existence if the mind has no material existence. There is no element on the periodic table whose name is "logic". The rules of logic are immaterial also, also dependent on the existence of mind to exist and have meaning.

So materialism, dependent on the existence of the immaterial things called logic and reason for it's proof, fails to be consistent. It is impossible to quantify anything dealing with reality just using the properties of matter and energy. Consciousness, all memory, all emotions, all thought, all sight, all sound, all touch, all taste, all smells every description of existence itself is dependent on the existence of the immaterial, which materialism denies exists.

Sure odors exist, but how they are registered on the brain is not a function of any property of matter, it is a function of interpretation by the brain, it is the immaterial concept of pleasant or odious, beauty or ugliness, smooth or rough. All the world is filled with data, which is a quantification of all objects status with regards to the 5 physical senses. The color of the object, it's scent, it's texture, it's weight, it's size, every thing about the object exists apart from the mind.

But without the mind to assign relative value to the different physical characteristics, they do not exist as information. And it is really the interpretations that our brain assigns to those quantifiable physical characteristics (information) that are the descriptors of our world. The physical characteristics without the immaterial mind to interpret them are meaningless. It is the interpretation by our immaterial mind that has any "substance" for us.

Information is not like data. Data is quantification of some characteristic associated with an object. But without the mind to make the quantification of the properties and their interrelationships, information has no existence. The data does, but the information that the data represents does not have an existence apart from the mind. It is the mind that turns data into information. But the mind, having no quantifiable material existence itself, must be rejected by the materialist, according to his own philosophy. And so materialism is a mindless philosophy that can not justify it's own existence without first presupposing the existence of the immaterial, supernatural world. In order to try to prove the nonexistence of the supernatural world, the materialist is forced to accept a priori the existence of the very thing they are trying to disprove.

If you don't see anything above this, you might have ActiveX being blocked by your browser. If so, please click on this link: Materialism, Part 1

If you don't see anything above this, you might have ActiveX being blocked by your browser. If so, please click on this link: Materialism, Part 2

The action was pretty intense, and raged inside and outside. I preached again against the atheist and materialist philosophies. The discussion that started on Monday when I mentioned the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics blazed from one hot spot to another. Thursday is usually the day that Dimitri comes out to preach. As was my expectation, he was there, along with several other crowd workers.

We preachers long for the day when the church will become so on fire for the Lord that they will come out in force to take a stand with us as we proclaim the gospel. When we see more and more people working the crowd, we are greatly encouraged. On the day of Pentecost, they ALL ran out on the street to preach, and 3,000 believed in one instant.

In the picture above, I am contending with the atheists, while on the left, Dimitri is passing out tracts.

In the pictures below from left to right: Dimitri, Bill, Dimitri, and Ed A. Ed drives the hour and a quarter from Williamsport to join in the work. Bill is a long time friend who is studying to be a pastor, and hopes to start a campus ministry in conjuction with his church. In the picture on the right, Ed A. witnessed to an open minded Muslim for quite some time.

As the day progressed,and the temperature dropped, we moved inside and kept Willard lobby warm and toasty. The debate over the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics went on till about 6:00 or even a little later. Ed A. and I finally called it a night and went downtown to the Corner Room for a bite to eat. As we got to College Avenue, we ran into David N., a very old and dear friend of mine.

I invited David to join us and Ed graciously agreed. We had a wonderful discussion, and a delightful meal. David is Catholic, Ed is an independent (I think). Me, I am, as best as I can determine, an orthodox Bapticostal. But coming from three different backgrounds did not interfere with sweet fellowship between brothers who serve the Lord in spirit and truth.

David and his wife used to preach with me on campus back in the late 70's - early 80's. David was about the best "natural" preacher I had come across. From the time he first opened his mouth, he seemed to know instinctively how to preach - drawing crowds, cementing their attention, directing the flow of the conversation, and taking advantage of the preacher's unwitting ally, the heckler. We preached together for a couple of semesters, until he and his wife moved out of the area. He has been back in this area for a while now, and I always enjoy whatever time that I can spend with him. Good to see you David!

Well, today was a real departure from my norm. Yasik, the #2 PSU atheist wanted to take the free speech area and to have his say on atheism. He considers himself to be an "evangelical atheist". So Gary and I let him have an hour to do his thing. I taped the whole thing and the links are below. It was interesting. Yasik's two main complaints were (1) atheists are too lukewarm, and (2) Christians are hypocrites.

To hear an atheist striving to stir up "revival" amongst the atheists was quite interesting. Just how do you get an atheist to lay down his life for his cause? For the first 15 minutes, Yasik is ranting about discrimination, apathy, and the hypocrisy of the church.

Then the heckling began. It started with his own people. The atheists began to take him to task. Then after a while, Gary and I jumped into the fray and heckled Yasik also. Ahhh, turnabout is such fun! It was GREAT! We heckled the main heckler!

We held Yasik's feet to the fire over a simple truth that atheism always stumbles over. If there is no God, then there can be no objective definition of good and evil. There can only be subjective definitions, but they do not have any authority. If good and evil are defined only in the minds of individuals, then there is no absolute good and evil, and all behaviors are allowed. Atheists dance around this point, but can never find an answer. If morality is everyone's choice then no one atheist has any moral authority to say their morality is superior to an oher man's morality. If there is no God, then every man is free to do as he wishes. Law becomes suggestion, and nothing is forbidden.

Gary came up with a brilliant analysis of what goes on in an atheists mind. They object to the idea of an objective good and evil declared by God. To them God declares good from evil on the basis of His power. So they perceive it to be tyrannical because it is based on raw power. Gary argues that no, God's declaration of good and evil is not based on His power but on His qualities: He is the creator, He is perfect love, His judgments are rooted in perfect love and perfect justice, He is not influenced by any selfishness at all, He is only influenced by benevolence. Therefore His qualities prove His right to declare good from evil.

Press an atheist on the basis of their moral code and guess what you get? Yes, their moral code is personal in nature, but it can be an overarching definition if they get enough people to agree to it. In getting a lot of people to agree to the moral code, are they not appealing to the very thing that causes them to reject God's moral code? Are they not saying that it is good (or evil) because we say so and we have more power? Indeed they are authenticating their moral code by the power argument that they reject in God. Lots of people, with lots of bigger guns is how they argue for the superiority of their morality. They do the very thing that they decry in God.

In the second segment, around minute seven, Gary and I wade in. I would not recommend the first segment, but the remaining parts might be of interest. All in all the day was fruitful because the reversed situation enabled us to keep the atheists on the defensive.

If there are any out there that would like to experience what it is like to preach, I invite you to contact me, and we will make arrangements for you to come and get your feet wet. To be a success in the Lord, find out what God is doing in your day, and throw yourself into it without reservation. Street Preaching is what God is doing in this day.

Factoid: Google search for "Street Preach*" last week yielded 8,460,000 hits. Today that search returned 8,750,000. An increase of 290,000 pages in less than 7 days.