Revolt of the Star Children

Lawrence Krauss, the atheist activist and physicist, has made a name for himself among contemporary materialists by declaring that we humans are made from the refuse of burned out stars. Krauss triumphantly assures us:

The amazing thing is that every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements – the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution – weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way they could get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.

Of course, this latter-day atheist sought to wax poetic and declare that we are the children of star dust, with ancient stars making a sacrifice far greater than that of Christ during his crucifixion. Strangely enough, Krauss the materialist echos 20th-century black magician Aleister Crowley (as noted by my friend Jay Dyer), who in his cosmic narcissism proclaimed “every man a star.” While Krauss prides himself as a warrior against superstition, one could easily mistake him in this moment as a New Ager, a slightly more nerdy Deepak Chopra. After all, for a representative of empirical materialism, this is a flatly unempirical assertion. How does Krauss know whence the atoms composing our bodies came? As far as we know, he wasn’t around how ever many billions of years ago to observe, test, and document which atoms came from where and subsequently went where.

Mr. Krauss may be an expert in his particular field. I have no wish to challenge his scientific credentials, but I do take pause when he is trumpeted as a “public intellectual”, as if public intellectuals are any more digestible than supplies of fluoride-laced public water. There is a notion presented to the mass mind that scientists are not only credible in their particular fields of study, but are some how qualified to talk about every and any aspect of reality. The perpetual media presence of Neil DeGrasse Tyson serves as evidence of this particularly irksome phenomenon. Tyson, a serial quote fabricator, is often consulted and treated as an authority on not only on generic astronomy topics, but also on religion and philosophy (which Tyson has snidely dismissed as useless), even though he has no academic training or deep knowledge of either subject.

Indeed, Tyson once admitted to the comedian Stephen Colbert in an interview that he’s never even read Dante’s Divine Comedy. It is suffice to say that old Dante, even with his Ptolemaic solar system structure, was much closer to the truth of things than Tyson has ever gotten, but I digress.

Krauss, like Tyson, is another proud celebrity-science demigod who wishes to step outside his field, with great media fanfare, and pontificate about metaphysics, claiming that empirical science (the only valid form of knowledge according to scientism) is not only the measure of all knowledge, but the only means of understanding and explaining the world (itself another entirely unempirical assertion). He’ll entertain any and all “scientific” theories, but just don’t bring God into the mix (after all, “God don’t do science!”). How physics can explain that which is above and beyond it is not important, nor are we to ponder what empirical evidence exists for assuming that science can explain everything. Rather, some supposedly important scientist has spoken and we are obliged to take his insipid attempts at poetry with grave seriousness.

It is not without good reason that the Hungarian traditionalist Béla Hamvas described the radical atheists as “our poor in spirit” and “the needy children of our time”. The wise Hamvas went further of course, to ask why “should a healthy person fight with the lame and the blind?” As such, we certainly should have little interest in some meaningless debate with the likes Krauss, or any of his fellow travelers.

Indeed Hamvas summed up the religious creed of desacralized mass man, and it is very much an inverted faith. Herein lie the motivations of our wayward New Atheists:

The name of atheistic bigotry is materialism. This religion contains three dogmas: there is no soul, a human is an animal, death is annihilation. All three can be summed up by simply saying that atheists are terribly afraid of God. Böhme tells us that they live in God’s wrath. They know only the angry God: therefore, they hide themselves and tell lies. They think that by saying that God does not exist, they will cease to be afraid. Instead, of course, they are even more afraid.

To be fair, the atheism of Krauss suggests more of childish rebellion (“I’ve outgrown you, Daddy!”) than the sort of irrational fear that Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens displays toward religion (not to mention their legion of neck-bearded enthusiasts). Atheistic thinkers like Ludwig Feuerbach and Sigmund Freud sought to explain and dismiss religion and belief in God as collective and individual psychological projections and pathologies, yet it’s worth wondering if such explanations might be a more fitting analysis of the atheism of the scientific materialists, who will go to any length to expel God from the universe while harboring a pathological attitude toward religious belief.

But following Hamvas, perhaps patronizing compassion is the only proper manner in which to deal with someone who boldly proclaims everything came from nothing, and that we are not made in the image of our Creator, but only from some left-over stardust.