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Materialism, as the philosophy exists today, is a relatively recent phenomenon. When we talk about someone being a 'materialist' we don't mean they shop for lots of handbags or fancy dining room sets. Instead, a materialist is generally defined as seeing all facts or pieces of the world, including the human mind and will, as dependable on or in the most extreme case reducible to physical processes.
In other words, there is only physical matter moving around and interacting, no other forces exist in the universe.
There are a number of major issues within determinism such as free will, and the seeming ability of humans to make choices that operate outside of physical processes. Of course this claim has been papered over from the materialist side by claiming that free will is just an illusion, but the determinists haven't made much headway. The most famous contemporary materialist from my understanding is Daniel Dennett, who has written extensively on free will, determinism, religion, et cetera, and basically come up with a convoluted 'compatibalist' view: that the world is all physical processes, yet we also have free will. Somehow.
Now challenges to materialism present a number of problems, primarily the fact that our modern, statistical, ScientificTM worldview cannot tolerate or understand any phenomena that aren't easily and simply repeated. Even if supernatural phenomenon did exist however, the bias against them has grown so massive in the last century that any respectable scientist wouldn't be caught dead going near these claims.
Why does this matter for the Culture War? Well outside of even religion, our entire cultural regime rests upon Science being the arbiter of truth and ender of disputes. If it turns out our materialistic worldview science has given us ends up being false, there are innumerable cultural repercussions, from the temporal vindication of religion to the re-opening of entire new vistas of understanding. Materialism's truth or falsity is, I would argue, the most important higher level question for our world to answer at the moment. Unfortunately, the mainstream consensus has been that materialism is true a priori despite massive contradictions. Even if many moderns don't outright argue this, their actions and stances on various topics reveal them as materialists through and through.
I'd imagine many people reading this haven't been exposed to some of the more respectable claims of anti-materialists. I'm going to quote heavily from this article by Roger's Bacon to give you an idea of some of the more interesting claims. Bacon, in turn, pulls heavily from a book entitled The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge, if you're interested in further reading.
Bacon explains how Freeman Dyson, an intellectual titan by any standard, posited this idea:
This view is generally referred to as "Traumatic Transcendence," or in other words you need extremely strong states to activate latent 'powers' or abilities, states which controlled experiments almost by definition cannot excite in patients. We're not just talking scaring someone a bit, we're talking extremely near death or something similar. And even in those states it's an extreme rarity of cases, apparently. However, we have extensive anecdotal reports, many from quite distinguished thinkers and well corroborated, that propose something like traumatic transcendence being real.
There are of course other examples. I'm going to quote this one from Mark Twain at length, which I find fascinating:
Again, there are almost endless examples of these types of phenomena occurring, which are unfortunately decried by any scientific establishment that exists today.
However, traumatic transcendence isn't the only explanation. Another reasonable explanation for our inability to capture these occurrences in experiments would be that they are mediated by an intelligent, non-human agent of some kind such as a ghost, demon, angel, God or gods, et cetera. In fact, this is the claim straightforwardly put forth by most believers in the supernatural throughout history. Which of course is essentially all humans before the last century.
If these other beings did in fact cause supernatural events to happen, or at least need to give their 'permission' so to speak for the normal laws of physics to be suspended, well then of course we wouldn't be able to predict when it would happen. We still aren't even good at predicting human behavior, outside of pacified and corralled Westerners who are manipulated 24/7 by intense media designed to change their behavior.
Another idea to explain supernatural phenomena, while a bit more 'out there,' is actually one I find quite compelling. Bacon outlines it as such:
This idea is actually explored quite a bit in fantasy and science fiction - for instance Warhammer 40K has a similar world, where every conscious mind's inherent beliefs do affect material reality, and enough of those together can cause a planet or part of the universe to operate drastically differently than others.
It's worth considering, at the very least.
Overall, there are still many mysteries to be explained in our universe, despite what our reductionist and materialist culture would have you think. I'll end with another block quote from Kripal, as he says it better than I ever could:
While I agree materialism was rare in the past, there are still groups like the ancient Greek Atomists (such as the school of Epicurus) and the Charvaka school in India that believed in it. I'm more familiar with the Epicurean philosophy, but they are remarkably similar to contemporary materialists in their beliefs (except with a strange insistence on a "swerve" in atoms that is supposedly the foundation of a form of free will.) That said, Epicurus didn't deny the existence of the gods - he just asserted that they were made of atoms and didn't intervene in human affairs.
That aside, I'm actually curious what makes you think "mind" or "soul" or whatever it is you think explains and unifies ESP, free will and supernatural beings wouldn't be "material" in some relevant sense? Like, the material world already has radio waves and magnetism and many other forces that we can't see, but which we see the effects of in our everyday lives. What makes you so sure that ESP, if it exists, wouldn't just be one more invisible force that operates in our material world?
And if you believe in angels or demons or spiritual beings of that kind, why do you think that they wouldn't work in fundamentally similar ways to how we do? Maybe they wouldn't have bodies and brains exactly like ours, but if angels can "see", then surely their sight would rely on "spiritual atoms" bouncing off of their "spiritual eyes"? Otherwise, I'm curious what you think would be happening when an angel sees something? How do they come to a knowledge of what is happening in their surroundings, if not in a fundamentally pseudo-materialist way?
I mean... kind of, but they also lived steeped in a highly symbolic world. Even if they had beliefs that kind of rhyme with modern materialism, I'm highly skeptical that it would resemble our actual worldview. I tend to see these thinkers as proto-Enlightenment thinkers, the beginnings of the demythologization of the world that started with the Enlightenment and led to the modern materialist malaise.
For the ancients, everything was symbolic. Divinity and non-human agentic beings were everywhere and in everything. Even if there was a 'materialist' in those societies who professed to believe the gods were fake through logical reasoning, it would be like the masses of modern Christians who profess to believe in God and yet don't act as if he exists. They may have arrived at that stance, but we can't always choose our beliefs, especially our deepest ones.
I don't pretend to know what exactly was going on in the heart or mind of Epicurus. I can only speak of the writings of him and his school that come down to us in the modern day, and I would say Epicurus' letter to Herodotus and Lucretius' De Rerum Natura seem to prefigure a lot of modern materialism. While there are a few things a modern reader might scoff at (such as Lucretius' insistence on a flat Earth, at least a century after Aristotle collected the best arguments for a spherical Earth in one place), their basic conclusions about the afterlife, divine intervention and the supernatural are remarkably similar to a modern materialist.
I actually think you underestimate the degree to which the educated elites of Greek and Roman society might have already cast off the highly symbolic world they lived in. Look at Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, where at a meeting of several philosophers of different schools, they just offhandedly reject the traditional concept of Hades as the afterlife, and even call the idea foolish. Most ancient philosophers believed in gods of some sort, but that doesn't mean that their concepts weren't far removed from what the masses believed. Even as early as Socrates and Plato, most philosophers seemed to reject Homeric conceptions of gods as impious and immoral.
If you want to believe that the Greek Atomists couldn't "really" believe in materialism in their heart of hearts because of the culture they found themselves in, then I'm not sure how I could argue you out of that idea. Yes, hypocrites exist in every era, but surely you believe sincere people exist in every era as well, however rare they may be?
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