RODNEY HIDE: The Architecture of Belief

I was a materialist from primary school. An atheist without residual superstition. I had flown in an airplane and seen no old man sitting on the clouds. That child’s observation hardened into adult conviction. Science, not revelation, described the world. Cause and effect were sufficient. “God did it” was an intellectual dead end.

None of the smart people in university believed in God.

Yet the deeper I went into science, the clearer it became that science itself rests on a premise it cannot prove. To practice science you must first believe that the universe is ordered and that the human mind is fitted to discern that order. This is not a scientific statement. It cannot be tested or falsified. Karl Popper called such commitments metaphysical research programmes: frameworks that make science possible but stand outside it. The same is true of natural selection in its grand form. The sweeping claim that all complexity arises through undirected variation and selection is not itself a laboratory result; it is a metaphysical scaffold that generates testable hypotheses.

Modern science did not emerge in a vacuum; it was birthed by the Judeo-Christian conviction that the cosmos is the rational product of an ordered Mind, and therefore discoverable. Far from replacing belief, science relies upon it.

I knew this but believed we could justify the belief through reason.

I built my early life around environmentalism. I felt a genuine kinship with the natural world and believed we must live within its limits. The movement cured me of that belief. I watched the arguments reverse while the conclusion stayed fixed: industrial civilisation is the enemy. First fossil fuels would run out; then they would cook the planet. Either way the West must shrink. The seminal texts—Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb”, the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth”, and Ehrlich’s later “Ecoscience” (my Bible) —predicted mass starvation and resource collapse that never arrived. Ehrlich, well into his nineties, was still issuing the same warnings. Failure did not revise the programme; it only intensified the call for control.

I came to see that resources are not a fixed physical stock. Human ingenuity turns matter into resources. The ultimate resource is the mind, and the mind is maximally unleashed with maximum freedom. Top-down direction suppresses the experiments that generate knowledge. Free-market capitalism maximises trial and error and punishes waste through bankruptcy. When I said so, I was excommunicated from the green church. I went and studied economics instead.

Elected to Parliament, I spent years watching intelligent people defend positions that could not survive contact with evidence. The pattern was always the same. Facts were secondary. Moral accusations did the real work. Question the consensus on CO2 and you were a denier who did not care about the planet. In the universities the pattern was sharper still: ideology first, reason as a rhetorical device. Debating became exhausting and largely futile. Ten glib claims could be launched in two minutes; dismantling them took hours, by which time another ten had taken their place.

The final rupture came after Parliament with gender theory in primary schools. This should not be difficult. It is not tax policy or climate modelling. It was the claim that a child could be born in the wrong body, that sex is a spectrum, and that to notice the biological reality of male and female was an act of hatred. But every cell in the human body is sexed. Sexual reproduction is the foundation of our species. Yet stating this became dangerous. Parents who objected were silenced. Teachers and activists treated dissent as moral failure.

I stopped writing. My old toolkit—data, incentives, trade-offs—had nothing left to say. I read critical theory properly for the first time and found a closed system: power is the only currency, objective truth is a mask for oppression, and the feelings of the designated oppressed settle every question. Logical contradiction is irrelevant. My disagreement simply proved I was the oppressor as if my whiteness, maleness and age weren’t proof enough.

I found myself using the word “evil.” The weight of it forced a question I had spent a lifetime avoiding. Do good and evil actually exist, or are they merely preferences? My materialism had no answer. It could describe the chemistry of a brain; it could not account for the obligation to protect a child’s sense of reality from adult ideology.

I realised that the moral and rational framework I thought I had constructed for myself was largely inherited. I had been raised and schooled in Christian assumptions about the value of the person, the reality of truth, and the difference between good and evil. I had discarded the theology while continuing to live off the moral capital. I began reading the Bible, then Tom Holland’s “Dominion” and C.S. Lewis’s “Mere Christianity”. The historical claim that Western moral instincts are downstream of Christianity became harder to dismiss.

One evening I suggested we say grace before dinner. The family agreed. We began giving thanks out loud for our everyday humdrum lives. Within two weeks the atmosphere in the house had changed. We were praying. Within months we were going to church. I cannot give a mechanistic account of what happened. I can only report that a grey, functional world became vivid, that my children ceased to be clever animals for whom I had affection but sacred gifts from God, and that the sense of being alone in a cold universe lifted. I would have called this psychological once. I no longer do.

We had felt it inside and it was as real as the table I now write at. I could not convince my old self of this and so I do not know what to say to others. I can only suggest that you try it. Read the Bible. Pray. Confess your sins. Repent. Ask for God’s help. The results will surprise you.

I now see that everyone worships. Something is always placed first in life: the self, the tribe, the feeling of righteousness, the promise of belonging. Progressive gender ideology is not the absence of religion; it is a rival one, complete with original sin (privilege), sacred victims, heresy tests, and the demand for ritual affirmation. It cannot explain itself coherently, yet it is enforced with religious intensity. When two groups no longer share a basic account of what a human being is, debate becomes impossible. That is the deeper fracture.

Materialism left me without resources when the culture began to deny the most basic realities of the body and the child. The Christian story, which I had spent decades treating as a fairy story, proved more adequate to the world I was actually living in. I do not offer this as a proof. I offer it as a report. The architecture of my belief has changed because the previous structure could no longer bear the weight placed upon it. And in exploring the Bible I acknowledged God and was baptised with the Holy Spirit in my life.

My disagreement with the gender theorists is not biology, facts, or reason: it is rather what it is to be human and what it is that is our purpose. That is my question for them now. What do you think it is to be a human? And what do you think we are here for?

Rodney Hide is a former Minister and ACT Party leader