Dr. J. Budziszewski

Like today.

Faith in God was eroding in his time.

A lot of it was on the surface or it was a pretense.

Many people thought that that was nonsense for various reasons.

Some of the reasons would be different than today.

There was...

There is a good deal of out-and-out materialism today, but in the sciences, it was even less questioned, perhaps, in some realms of the sciences than today.

And so people thought, well, of course there can't be a God.

You know, that's just silly.

It's just silly.

Although, you know, materialism itself is awfully silly.

Why is it silly?

Well, even if everything is matter... Which is what?

What does matter mean?

Well, matter is sometimes taken to mean that which has mass and takes up space, okay?

I was criticizing materialism once, and I said, well, how do these people even use the term matter?

There's something fishy going on here.

And the materialist who wrote the article on materialism, and I think it was Encyclopedia Britannica, defined it that way.

I thought, okay, okay.

Well, let's go with that.