The Dangers of Not Believing in the Devil
MARCH 22, 2025
by Jared Brock
It is vital to the devil that you do not believe in a real spiritual realm. In C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, the demon Screwtape warns his nephew-trainee Wormwood, “When they believe in us, we cannot make them materialists and skeptics.”
Materialism is the term for the denial of a spiritual realm. Materialism assumes reality is composed solely of matter and energy. Why would one assume that? We can’t empirically prove love, faith, hope, grace, hate, or the soul, so why leap to the conclusion that the material is all there is? Why not at the very least leave the door open to possibility? Or is there more at work here? Is there—dare I say—a spirit that shuts the door to the possibility of a spiritual dimension beyond the physical?
One of the best arguments in favor of a maker is that something rather than nothing exists. It’s deceptively simple, which is why most people ignore it. Why does stuff exist instead of not exist? The very existence of things tips the scales slightly in favor of a something maker.
I don’t like the sort of closed-minded atheist thinking that can’t even admit the possibility of the supernatural beyond the natural and the eternal beyond the temporal. It is the sort of extremist thinking that signals a serious God complex. How can someone who cannot even prove their memories or their own existence possibly be trustworthy about so grand a claim as God’s status? We are not know-nothings, but we are not know-it-alls. Indeed, we are likely far nearer the former than the latter. “I think. I hope. I believe. I have faith. I am convinced. . . .” These are the statements of reasonable minds. To rule out mere possibility is to be a fundamentalist. The last thing we need in this world is more know-it-all arrogance. This is what makes today’s materialist mindset so covertly dangerous—it is callous in the extreme, cold, hard, calculating, narrow-minded, hard-headed, hard-hearted, closed off from those with differing perspectives, exclusionary. In other words, materialism is everything that its proponents claim to hate.
Materialists don’t even believe in the existence of evil. In the materialist metaverse, evil is not a hardware problem, but just a temporary software systems glitch that can be fixed with a few better lines of coding. How many demagogues have promised utopia just around the corner if only we improve education, the economic system, or the political order? To be sure, some economic systems spread well-being more widely than others. Wisdom is proven right by what it produces (Matthew 11:19; Luke 7:35). Some political systems spread power more widely than others. Some education systems spread knowledge and wisdom more widely than others. We can and should use all three tools to improve life for the weak and poor, but no physical system can change the spiritual heart.
Materialism—the idea that matter matters more than people— leads to a dangerous slavery as matter becomes the god. A few million incinerated Jews don’t really matter—they were just atoms, after all. An aboriginal nation’s water source doesn’t matter nearly as much as corporate profits for Big Oil shareholders. Matter cannot have ultimacy. It makes people into objects, mere things instead of eternal beings created in the image of God. A thing can then be treated as a tool. A thing can be treated as capital. A thing can be used. A thing can be mistreated. A thing can be controlled. A thing can be consumed. A thing can be ignored and abandoned. A thing can be destroyed. Much of the world has now entered an age of hyper-individualist materialist consumerism. No wonder the West is collapsing.
The materialist worldview is literally life-threatening. This is the same satanic mindset that drove the resurrection-denying Sadducee high priest Annas Ben Sethi to engineer the assassination of Jesus after Christ disrupted his economic exploitation of the Israelite Passover crowds. (See A God Named Josh for the whole sordid affair.) If this life is really all that there is, then it is rational to amass as much power and wealth as feasibly possible.
It’s vital we know what the devil looks like—in both a material and spiritual sense—so we can more easily spot him at work in the world around us. He rarely appears as the water-spewing dragon. Fear is not nearly as powerful as seduction.
If you want to be keenly aware of the satanic, stay on the lookout for the material without the spiritual, beauty without humility, riches without contribution, knowledge without wisdom, action without mission, justice without mercy, receiving without giving, tolerance without discernment, rights without foundation, sex without commitment, communication without meaning, enjoyment without gratitude, distraction without purpose, power without stewardship, and being without love. All that glitters is not gold.