A Short letter to a Materialist

  I have often had materialists[1] tell me that” there is nothing in nature that requires a supernatural explanation per say. My reply to that is, I might as well say there is nothing in nature which requires a scientific explanation[2]. Nature has no requirement to understand her.  You can put any  interpretation on her; you wish and she will not protest a bit.  Moreover, who says that everyone must look at nature or anything else through the narrow lens of our present human knowledge and the way some atheistic scientists constructed reality?[3] Their whole narrative is based on the assumption that there is no God, which they cannot prove any more than the theist can prove the existence of God. Both start from an assumption and then build a whole world view around that assumption[4]. One big difference is that the believer can still be open-minded enough to do science in his world view while the atheistic scientists are total blind by their materialism to anything outside of their narrow way of looking at things.

Read very carefully the below quote. It is extremely telling about people assumptions and the power they have over a person and groups of people. You also see there a man who I would say is a true believer in science-ism, although a weak form of it, because he knows much of it is false. However, he does admit that his faith is based upon an assumption that materialism is true.

“Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural.  We take the side of science in  spite of the patent absurdity  of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, to materialism.  It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our   prior adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.  Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.”[5] 

[1] A materialist is a person which believes that everything is made up of matter and denies the existence of spirit. Thus denying the supernatural.

[2] Read my article “Rocks on The Ground” http://wp.me/p5pJxI-lTw  at lyleduell.me

[3] I feel no intellectual compulsion to view all of life from a materialistic point of view. When you force reality into a closed ideological system as materialism you will surely distort reality. I also have chosen not to believe in Materialism for pragmatic reasons and my mind is closed to it. As William James would say “I am dead to it”. There is simply no life in that world view.

[4] If scientists that are believers and scientists that are atheist wish to argue and fight about the existence of God that’s fine but both sides must admit that they are debating as philosophers and not a scientist.

[5] Richard Leonine, “Billions and Billions of Demons”, New York Review of Books 44, no. 1 (January 9,1997) 28-32 . Lewontin teaches biology at Harvard.