"Materialism is an objective fact"

One of my dimmer trolls who works in some science lab on the West coast has, or so I'm told, declared that "materialism is an objective fact".   Now, that's probably a succinct statement of the common view of materialism held by a large number, if not a majority of college educated folk in the English speaking peoples and those who would like to be mistaken as educated but it is as pig-ignorant a statement of what materialism is as could be made.  In someone with pretensions of being a scientist, it  is an exhibition of a common and disturbing unawareness of even the most basic of objective facts in the matter.

Materialism was never "an objective fact" it was a metaphysical and ideological dogma that began as abstract thought problems about cutting things in half over and over again, continued on the basis of preferred ways of looking at human experience - primarily as a denial, at times somewhat sophisticated but mostly quite naive, of the existence of gods and, eventually, God - and hardened into the kind of rigid scientistic materialism which became the dominant ideology of Western education in the late 19th century and which survived, even though science demolished its basic framing in the early 20th century.

The statement also supports my contention that people granted degrees in science, these days, are generally so unaware of philosophy of any rigor that they not only can't make coherent philosophical arguments but that they are even unaware of having strayed into making philosophical statements even as they are making them.  It was a sad day when they stopped calling it "natural philosophy" and acknowledging that philosophy was inseparable from what they were doing and partitioned off the mere methodology and application into "science".   It was a sadder day when, for reasons of economy and fitting complex topics into a 4-year degree program that they dropped requirements in teaching students the basics of rigorous thought and philosophy.   I suspect that my generation was about the last to have mandatory Freshman Rhetoric classes which consisted of the rudiments of those topics. Or, maybe I was just lucky in my Frosh Rhetoric teacher.

I don't know but that the rigid faith in 19th century materialism isn't strongest in those who work in biology and the too-often pseudo-social-sciences, though it has certainly not sunk in with a lot of those who work in physics.   I have, before, quoted the eminent geneticist, Richard Lewontin as honestly stating that the materialism of scientists is not a conclusion reached on the basis of science but a personal preference based on their desire that science, that the subject matter of science, be the sine qua non of existence.

Or 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, a 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 a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.


I suspect that as any materialist who nods in agreement with the paraphrase of Lewis Beck will have missed the point of what Lewontin confessed

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, a 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 a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.

What Lewontin gave as the reason atheists, like himself, cling to materialism isn't science, it is their "a priori adherence to material causes" and, though he didn't admit as much, in the context of his paragraph, it is clear that is the product of their dislike of religion.  It is a personal preference because of what they don't like.  It isn't even a purely positive preference for materialism, it is an emotional compulsion based in their often angry, and even in his case, derisive dislike of religion.  And Lewontin is one of the most generous and amiable of the lot.

His citation of Lewis Beck* rings ever more hollow due to what materialists in the more fashionable guise of "naturalists" and "physicalists" demand we take on faith.

Considering that the range of those unsubstantiated things which scientists, especially cosmologists, were pushing at that time and continue to push today, including the obviously desperate invention of jillions of universes so that they can pretend that physics has disposed of God the creator, even as honest and rational a materialist as Lewontin is demands that people pretend to not see how ridiculous the faith in materialism is.  I say that anyone who can pretend that muti-verse theory is a reasonable conjecture, especially in some of its more outlandish versions which have been published as science, then its obvious that materialists can believe in anything and, in fact, they allow those to be introduced into published science, no matter how baseless they are and how outlandish they are.

Much as I respect Lewontin when he is dealing with the substance of his specialty, itself prone to the most outrageous abuse by his fellow materialists, and due to his general honesty and rigorous thinking, what he presents as a reason to accept materialism has become entirely unreasonable due to the demands that they make on peoples' credulity.   He, himself, must know that the 19th century materialism of his fellow scientists and, even more so the ignorant sci-groupies, was demolished about the time he was born.  Materialism is the ultimate Just-so story, it is the ideology of  Lewontin's scientific opponents that he intended his readers to understand he was referring to when he made that provocative statement.  It has become, ever more a Just-so story as atheist-materialists in science push it ever more into the formal literature of science.

No serious theologian would demand that a religious view of creation or a miraculous explanation be introduced into a scientific paper but materialists, especially those working in cosmology, have glutted the pages of scientific journals and books with their materialist a-theology in the form of such conjecture. Theologians generally have a rigorous training in philosophy which cosmologists seem to generally lack, these days.   As I've heard a number of theologians, philosophers and scientists who have a background in those point out, the most eminent of them, Stephen Hawking, for example, don't even realize that as they dismiss philosophy, they do so in philosophical terms making tissue thin arguments that fall to pieces under the slightest stress of testing.

Update:  *  I wrote this about four o'clock AM, I'm not going to get too worked up over a mistyped name, especially as I understood the problem of what was said.  I typed it out the right way, as well.

You, on the other hand, say stupid stuff 24 hours a day.