Apologetics · Naturalism — if matter is all there is, there is no one left to blame
A man reads an article over breakfast explaining that free will is an illusion. Everything you do, it says, is the product of prior physical causes you did not choose — genes, chemistry, upbringing, the state of your brain one second ago. He finds it fascinating. He agrees with it.
Forty minutes later somebody cuts him off on the interstate, and he is furious.
Not furious at the laws of physics. Not furious at a chain of causes reaching back to the Big Bang. Furious at the guy. He has an opinion about the guy’s character. He believes the guy should not have done that.
That gap — between what he affirmed at the table and what he could not help believing on the road — is the subject of this post. It is not a cheap gotcha. It is the deepest practical problem philosophical naturalism has, and it deserves to be stated carefully before it is pressed.
State the Case Honestly First
Philosophical naturalism is the claim that the physical universe is all there is — no God, no soul, no immaterial mind. You are, as the phrase goes, your brain.
If that is true, then every choice you make is an event in a physical system. It has a complete physical explanation: neurons in a certain state, firing according to the laws that govern matter. Given the exact state of the universe one moment before you decided, you could not have decided otherwise. Adding quantum indeterminacy does not rescue anything, because a decision that comes out differently by random chance is not a decision you control. Randomness is not freedom. It is just noise where the gears were.
Serious thinkers hold this and follow it where it goes. Some argue openly that blame and desert are pre-scientific leftovers, that we should keep the criminal justice system for public safety and deterrence but drop the moral outrage, the way we quarantine a man with a contagious illness without hating him for it. That is a coherent position, and it is more honest than most.
There is also a stronger and more common reply, and it deserves a real hearing. It is called compatibilism, and it is the position of most professional philosophers who are naturalists. The compatibilist says the whole debate rests on a bad definition. Freedom was never supposed to mean “uncaused.” Freedom means acting from your own desires and reasons, without external coercion. The man who hands over his wallet at gunpoint is unfree; the man who buys a truck because he wants a truck is free — even if wanting the truck was itself caused. On that definition, responsibility survives determinism intact. We hold people accountable because they acted from their own settled character, and because holding them accountable shapes character going forward.
That is not a dodge. It has real explanatory power, and a great deal of ordinary language does work that way.
But press it at the one place that matters.
Where the Redefinition Runs Out
Ask the compatibilist about the desires themselves.
A man acts from his own character — granted. But on naturalism, where did that character come from? Genetics he did not select, a childhood he did not arrange, a brain chemistry he did not order, experiences that landed on him. If a man’s cruelty is the output of a system he did not build, running on inputs he did not choose, then praising or blaming him for it is like praising a river for running downhill. It is behaving exactly as a river must.
Second, notice what the forward-looking account can and cannot buy. Deterrence explains why punishing is useful. It does not explain why punishing is deserved — and desert is precisely what the word guilty means. On a pure usefulness standard, punishing an innocent man would be fine whenever it produced the better social outcome. Nearly everyone recoils from that, and the recoil is the tell: we are not doing cost-benefit math. We think something is owed.
Third, and most telling, watch what happens when the people who hold this view encounter real evil. They do not respond with clinical detachment about unfortunate neural configurations. They are indignant. They write with heat. They demand that someone answer for it. That reaction is backward-looking and personal, and it is the one thing their framework has no room for.
Now, an argument from inconsistency does not by itself prove a view false. A man can believe something true and live badly out of step with it. But this is not a small slip. This is a claim that cannot be inhabited for the length of a single afternoon by the person making it. When a worldview must be set down every time its holder feels gratitude, grief, or moral outrage, that is data about the worldview.
What Scripture Assumes About You
Now put the Bible next to it, and notice that Scripture never argues for human responsibility. It assumes it, from the fourth chapter of Genesis forward.
Cain’s face has fallen. He is about to murder his brother. And God does not describe him. God addresses him:
And the LORD said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? and why is thy countenance fallen? If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him. (Genesis 4:6–7, KJV)
Thou shalt rule over him. That sentence presupposes somebody home to do the ruling. You do not issue a command to a chemical reaction. You do not ask a weather system why its countenance is fallen. The grammar of the whole Bible — every command, every warning, every invitation — requires an addressee who is genuinely being addressed.
I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live. (Deuteronomy 30:19, KJV)
And the internal witness is not optional equipment. Paul says it runs even in people who never had the Scriptures:
Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another. (Romans 2:15, KJV)
Accusing or else excusing. That is a courtroom running inside every human being, whatever his stated philosophy. The naturalist has to call that courtroom a malfunction — a useful fiction installed by evolution. The Christian can call it what it obviously is: equipment that came with being made in the image of God.
An Honest Word About the Family Argument
Somebody reading this is already objecting, and he is right to.
Christians have argued among themselves for centuries about the nature of human freedom. Reformed believers hold that the will is genuinely ours but genuinely bound by our nature until grace changes it, and many of them are compatibilists in a theological sense. Others hold to a libertarian freedom in which the choice could genuinely have gone the other way. That is a real, serious, in-house disagreement, and it is not settled by a blog post.
But notice that it is not the same disagreement at all. Both sides affirm that there is a self — a soul, a person, a moral agent whom God addresses and holds accountable. They differ about how that agent’s will relates to his nature and to God’s sovereignty. The materialist has no agent to argue about. He has a process. There is no you in there to be bound or unbound, saved or condemned; there is only matter doing the next thing matter does.
That is the real divide. Not how free the will is, but whether anybody has one.
The Verdict You Cannot Give Up
Here is where this stops being philosophy and starts being personal.
Some people find “nobody is really to blame” comforting. If no one is guilty, then I am not guilty, and the thing I did at twenty-six was just chemistry doing chemistry. A great many men would pay real money for that sentence.
But the sentence does not stop where you want it to. If your guilt is a fiction, so is your forgiveness. A machine cannot be pardoned. It can only be repaired or scrapped. Erase the defendant and you have not won an acquittal — you have shut the courtroom, and with it the only room in the universe where a man can be told that the thing he did has been dealt with and will not be held against him.
Christianity will not let you off that cheaply, and that is its mercy. It tells you the truth: you did it, you meant it, and you are accountable.
So then every one of us shall give account of himself to God. (Romans 14:12, KJV)
Now we know that what things soever the law saith, it saith to them who are under the law: that every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty before God. (Romans 3:19, KJV)
Every mouth stopped. No appeal to your upbringing. No neurological excuse. Real guilt, honestly named.
And then, one page later, the only sentence that has ever actually relieved a human conscience:
There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit. (Romans 8:1, KJV)
Read those two verses together and you have the whole gospel. Guilt real enough to require a cross. Grace sufficient to cover it completely.
The materialist offers you an excuse. Christ offers you a pardon. Only one of those requires that you actually exist — and only one of them will still be standing when you are lying awake at two in the morning, arguing with a conscience that refuses to accept the explanation that nobody is to blame.
That voice is not a malfunction. It is a witness. And it is telling you the truth about yourself so that you will go find the One who can do something about it.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist