Most adherents of the view that the paradigmatic research methods of modern science are equipped to explain everything there is have jettisoned the designation of “materialists” and assumed the more authoritative-sounding title of “physicalist” in the same way that a hermit crab will seek a new refuge when it has worn out its old shell. The metaphor is meant to say that for a creature to swap a Latin epithet for a Greek one hardly makes a difference if it remains the same creature before the exchange as after, and that there remains no reason to assume that the dimensions of our fishing net should coincide with the dimensions of the sea. “There may be more in Heaven and Earth,” as Hamlet sayeth, “than is dreamt of in your Philosophy.”
Here are three reasons that materialism is definitely wrong.
By wrong is meant “misconceived”—something analogous to trying to understand a painting by scrutinizing the canvas, assaying the chemical makeup of paint, and trying to infer by one or another telltale sign, the pressure of diverse brush strokes. All of the resulting inferences could be close to correct but: who cares? Nevertheless, presuming the information that could be gleaned from such an investigation were indeed of the greatest moment, the point is that the issue at hand has no longer anything to do with the painting as such and everything to do with some sort of forensic analysis. What seemed to concern a work of art has become an investigation into a white collar crime, perhaps. In other words, the investigator has changed the subject. Of course, to bend and meander is as natural for discourse as for a stream but it ceases to be natural at all and becomes a form of gaslighting when it is insisted that no change of the subject has been made, as does every scientist who has ever held forth on “the way things really are.” It is perhaps telling that I come up empty-handed if I attempt to fit the riparian conceit to this situation because a watercourse does not possess the guile to deceive people in the way that intellectuals do. Simply put, if we wish to learn about life and truth and Divine Creation, scientific method will often be the wrong tool for the job and to change the job to suit the tool is, well….
Materialism or physicalism presupposes that the only real things are matter or physics. Hence, phenomena like consciousness, thought, will, and feeling, are supposed to “emerge” through an extremely scientific form of alchemy, from underlying physiological processes. The truth and reality of the materialist theories themselves are also, by the logic of this view, to be reducible to further physiological process—brain states, in this case—as are the intentions of those who promulgate the theories. Obviously, it has already begun to sound extremely fantastic. Ignoring the fact that physiological processes themselves already completely defy the scope of materialist explanation as much as a performance of “Moonlight Sonata” defies explanation that limits itself to the instrument alone and not the one who plays upon it, it is still self-evident, and even axiomatic, that the phenomena indicated above are qualitatively different from anything to be found within the ontology of a paradigm that established itself by bracketing out all phenomena of this kind. It’s possible to get a picture from an actual scenario, but it’s not possible to get the actual scenario back out of the picture.
Suppose someone insisted that this thing I claimed to be impossible were indeed possible. “That is the wonder of science,” he might say, “we are working miracles.” I can’t see what reason I should have to believe him when nothing in either reason or experience suggests that it could be so and everything in my experience testifies against it. Empiricists pretend that attention to experience ratifies the physicalist paradigm but the boot is on the other leg. Scripture itself warns against seduction by “false Christs, and false prophets” who shall “arise…and shall shew great signs and wonders.”1 Don’t be deceived by the magic of science into believing that its tenets of faith are true. Consider that a man will be liable to do the bidding of someone at gunpoint but this is a violation of the former’s being, essence, and reality, and not a disclosure of it. And if someone says, “Scientist are experts and, by definition, experts know best: therefore scientists know best, Q.E.D.” and continues:
When I need my car fixed, I don’t go to a ‘philosopher’ but to a mechanic. And if I won’t ask a philosopher for advice about my old car, I sure as hell won’t seek his advice when I want to know about vaccines, or Global Warming, or any other real and momentous question. I’m looking for expertise not arguments; I will ask a scientist and not a philosopher.
Then he or she has probably taken leave of his or her reason entirely and is therefore unlikely to hear anything to the contrary by the one on the receiving end of this imagined exchange. It’s a pity that our ears often remain fortified against the one thing most needful for us to hear. In any case, what this person needs to hear is that scientists, in the most ideal and immaculate conception of the term,2 can tell you about their climate models but not what should be done in response to them. They can tell you about vaccines but not whether to take them. A mechanic can tell you how to fix your car but not where to drive it. The world and our lives also include our intentions as embodied in our actions, and because the former subsist in and the latter originate in a dimension of reality orthogonal to anything within the block-universe of physical science, it should be clear that Hamlet was right about that too.
Matthew 24:24
ie It’s perfectly obvious to anyone who cares to look that institutionalized science is ridden with perverse incentives. Just consider the stakes to a climatologist or vaccinologist’s career were he to dissent from the scientific orthodoxy in either of these fields. The sanctioned models might turn out to be correct but it would be by accident if they were, given the massive pressures that non-science sources manifestly exert on these “scientific” conclusions.
I like the title Through a glass, darkly. The materialistic outlook can certainly be a dim, narrow perspective. Too many people have adopted this way of seeing life and as a means to an end. I think people take to materialism because it's an easy answer for them, especially if living in fear. I try to forgive but be sure to plant my seeds with these mindsets. On a larger scale, science has been viewed and abused through this dark glass perception and it has morphed into crude rationalism. Science may use math, but science can rarely arrive at true or false conclusions like math equations can.
I agree. Every idea is imagined by human beings that learn in a context.