Atheist Materialism: What Is Real, and What Is An Illusion?

[rug]

Dec. 05, 2011

Atheists take a lot of guff from religious people for our ”materialism.” But what does that mean?

Some people treat materialism as a cartoonishly simple (and thus easy to dismiss) lifestyle: According to this view, atheists think that nothing in life matters beyond personally experiencing material pleasures and accumulating money and physical goods. Equating to hedonism and greed, this evil and supposedly rampant form of materialism is condemned as a consequence of atheism and secularism, especially during the holidays. People posit this caricature materialism as the only alternative to believing in gods, spirits, miracles, and other assorted religious nonsense.

Are there atheists who are nothing more than greedy hedonists? Yes, but in my experience they are as rare in atheist circles as they are in society in general. Which is to say, there are more of them than there should be because that’s a bad way to live – but there’s no reason to suspect that atheism is the cause of it.

Once we get past the cartoon caricature of materialism, we are left to consider a more serious definition. Here’s mine: The universe is made up of physical matter and energy, and the physical matter and energy interact according to laws, and nothing exists outside of the universe*. By this definition of materialism, there is nothing “outside” or “beyond” physical matter and energy and there are no “miracles” or exceptions to the laws by which matter and energy interact. Materialism by this general definition is accepted by every atheist that I know who has ever expressed an opinion about it. Materialism by this definition is also generally rejected by religionists, who believe in something “outside” or “beyond” the physical universe, and many of them also believe that whatever is “outside” or “beyond” also sometimes intervenes to create “miracles” - exceptions to the physical laws.

http://tucsoncitizen.com/freethought-arizona/2011/12/05/atheist-materialism-can-anything-immaterial-be-real/

[Jim__]

1. Yes, emergent properties with explanatory power are real.

Take the claim that the number that turns up on the roll of the die is determined even before you walk into the room. The fact that the brain is structured with a built-in unpredictability makes that wrong. Once the die leaves your hand (and assuming that quantum effects do not change the outcome of the roll of a die) then whether you describe the result as complex or random depends upon language.

I don't believe it would make sense to describe that actions of a human, such as walking into a room, from the perspective of the particles involved. The overall actions of the particles (entering the room) are mostly dependent upon the fact that they are constituents of a person rather than their behavior as individual particles.