Western Materialism

[sayak83]

It cannot be used to prove things outside of the scientific method, so what it has to do with God I have no idea, nor spirits, souls, or any other such thing that is outside its remit. So why are people using what amount to arguments based on MD to disprove things that are outside the purview of this philosophy? It's meaningless. It's the same as saying 'I don't believe in ghosts because this table is made of wood.' It makes no sense at all.

The basic justification is:-
Methodological Naturalism could not have had the explanatory success it has enjoyed in science unless metaphysical naturalism were true as well.

This is the jist of every argument for physical materialism I have encountered so far.

 

[RestlessSoul]

Becaues it is the philosophy that has given rise to Science, which has provided tech and medicine and all the things which has eased our suffering.

Eased our physical suffering. Arguably, at the expense of ever greater mental and spiritual suffering.

 

[Koldo]

Eased our physical suffering. Arguably, at the expense of ever greater mental and spiritual suffering.

Since spiritual suffering is a term that can be used to mean pretty much anything, and since psychology and psyquiatry are modern developements (unrelated to religions and yet related to the sciences), that is simply not the case at all.

 

[Koldo]

Saying you don't believe in God because God cannot be proved by naturalism (in any form I understand it) is a fallacy because naturalism is only made to study the material world, which God, as conventionally understood, is outside of, being immaterial. It's like trying to use a tape measure to weigh an object; you're using the wrong tool and concluding the object doesn't exist because you can't weight it with a tape measure.

That's a huge misunderstanding. God is not merely a metaphysical entity completely out of touch with our world. Rather, he has interacted with our world and offers explanatory power to natural events. Belief is intrinsically connected to this explanatory power. Point to me someone that ceased to believe into God's explanatory power and I will show you someone that is no longer a theist.

 

[wellwisher]

Why are most Western cultures materialist? They take Methodological Naturalism as some kind of baseline, which is a fallacy.

Why is this?

My guess is this connected to commercialism and the constant drum beat of advertisers. Advertising is about selling goods and services, mostly for the needs of the outer man/person and how others perceive you. Fashion is all about the outer person; dress for success instead of prepare for success. Prepare for success is more an inner effort with the behind the scenes stuff that is less appealing and more like work.

The auto manufacturer appeals to the young male, who is told this new car will make him a babe magnetic. The magic of the car will be seen as an extension of him, improving his appeal. With this daily conditioning people start to expect that only things outside themself; part of a mask, is what will trigger other things outside themself, without having to develop inner worth. One can even buy a stairway to heaven.

Character used to be important, before TV and internet. Character was part of 1940's movies; John Wayne. Now it is more about being a character; role play, that can be satisfied with merchandise and look, from the market place. Transgender is the latest example of people not seeking to adjust attitude from the inside, to find themselves, but rather are encouraged to adjust it from the outside, with material things that can be bought from the market place like medicine, surgery and fashion. Drag queens are the pinnacle of materialism.

Things like God are hard to justify by materialist, since you cannot see god and wear god like a piece of jewelry and expect the environment to change for your needs. God is more of an abstraction that requires you make inner adjustments such as character. The shallow person cannot justify the effort needed for character, since that does not have a magic outer appeal like simply buying diamonds.

Mother and matter come from the same root word. Materialism is feminine. The desire of the male, allows the look of the pretty girl to stimulate his desire, without any need for internal adjustments on her part. She, without even trying, naturally panders to his visual senses. Classically, males would sacrifice a wide range of inner worth in women; witch, for visual desire. The females learn this and then learn to enhance their visual appeal; make up, to take advantage of this predictable linear male behavior. This is the root of materialism.

In the case of Christianity, blessed are the poor, was connected to being told not to use materials things to create an outer shell for social advantage among the shallow people. The poor person cannot depend on this path. One had to find inner joy in simplicity, which can be achieved through in inner change of attitude. God is not for those who pray to be seen by others. It is easier to wear designer clothes and drive a fancy new car and be noticed.

The idea of being a virgin until marriage, was designed to repress the immediate external stimulus gratification and allow time so other parts of the personality can be seen beyond the natural talisman of desire. Without being able to become immediate linear with desire, other things start to mean more, such as inner character.

 

[Colt]

Why are most Western cultures materialist? They take Methodological Naturalism as some kind of baseline, which is a fallacy.

Why is this?

IMOP this is one explanation:

Secular Totalitarianism​

195:8.1 (2081.1) But even after materialism and mechanism have been more or less vanquished, the devastating influence of twentieth-century secularism will still blight the spiritual experience of millions of unsuspecting souls.

195:8.2 (2081.2) Modern secularism has been fostered by two world-wide influences. The father of secularism was the narrow-minded and godless attitude of nineteenth- and twentieth-century so-called science—atheistic science. The mother of modern secularism was the totalitarian medieval Christian church. Secularism had its inception as a rising protest against the almost complete domination of Western civilization by the institutionalized Christian church.

195:8.3 (2081.3) At the time of this revelation, the prevailing intellectual and philosophical climate of both European and American life is decidedly secular—humanistic. For three hundred years Western thinking has been progressively secularized. Religion has become more and more a nominal influence, largely a ritualistic exercise. The majority of professed Christians of Western civilization are unwittingly actual secularists.

195:8.4 (2081.4) It required a great power, a mighty influence, to free the thinking and living of the Western peoples from the withering grasp of a totalitarian ecclesiastical domination. Secularism did break the bonds of church control, and now in turn it threatens to establish a new and godless type of mastery over the hearts and minds of modern man. The tyrannical and dictatorial political state is the direct offspring of scientific materialism and philosophic secularism. Secularism no sooner frees man from the domination of the institutionalized church than it sells him into slavish bondage to the totalitarian state. Secularism frees man from ecclesiastical slavery only to betray him into the tyranny of political and economic slavery.

195:8.5 (2081.5) Materialism denies God, secularism simply ignores him; at least that was the earlier attitude. More recently, secularism has assumed a more militant attitude, assuming to take the place of the religion whose totalitarian bondage it onetime resisted. Twentieth-century secularism tends to affirm that man does not need God. But beware! this godless philosophy of human society will lead only to unrest, animosity, unhappiness, war, and world-wide disaster.

195:8.6 (2081.6) Secularism can never bring peace to mankind. Nothing can take the place of God in human society. But mark you well! do not be quick to surrender the beneficent gains of the secular revolt from ecclesiastical totalitarianism. Western civilization today enjoys many liberties and satisfactions as a result of the secular revolt. The great mistake of secularism was this: In revolting against the almost total control of life by religious authority, and after attaining the liberation from such ecclesiastical tyranny, the secularists went on to institute a revolt against God himself, sometimes tacitly and sometimes openly.

195:8.7 (2081.7) To the secularistic revolt you owe the amazing creativity of American industrialism and the unprecedented material progress of Western civilization. And because the secularistic revolt went too far and lost sight of God and true religion, there also followed the unlooked-for harvest of world wars and international unsettledness.

195:8.8 (2081.8) It is not necessary to sacrifice faith in God in order to enjoy the blessings of the modern secularistic revolt: tolerance, social service, democratic government, and civil liberties. It was not necessary for the secularists to antagonize true religion in order to promote science and to advance education.

195:8.9 (2082.1) But secularism is not the sole parent of all these recent gains in the enlargement of living. Behind the gains of the twentieth century are not only science and secularism but also the unrecognized and unacknowledged spiritual workings of the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.

195:8.10 (2082.2) Without God, without religion, scientific secularism can never co-ordinate its forces, harmonize its divergent and rivalrous interests, races, and nationalisms. This secularistic human society, notwithstanding its unparalleled materialistic achievement, is slowly disintegrating. The chief cohesive force resisting this disintegration of antagonism is nationalism. And nationalism is the chief barrier to world peace.

195:8.11 (2082.3) The inherent weakness of secularism is that it discards ethics and religion for politics and power. You simply cannot establish the brotherhood of men while ignoring or denying the fatherhood of God.

195:8.12 (2082.4) Secular social and political optimism is an illusion. Without God, neither freedom and liberty, nor property and wealth will lead to peace.

195:8.13 (2082.5) The complete secularization of science, education, industry, and society can lead only to disaster. During the first third of the twentieth century Urantians killed more human beings than were killed during the whole of the Christian dispensation up to that time. And this is only the beginning of the dire harvest of materialism and secularism; still more terrible destruction is yet to come.: UB 1955

 

[1137]

Why assume a non-material when all we can detect is material?

What? All we directly experience is our immaterial consciousness. Even matter itself is only known through consciousness, which is why it can be doubted while one's consciousness can not be.

 

[LuisDantas]

Why are most Western cultures materialist? They take Methodological Naturalism as some kind of baseline, which is a fallacy.

Why is this?

How is that a fallacy?

Perhaps more important: which alternatives do you see that are not fallacies by the same yardstick?

 

[Rival]

How is that a fallacy?

Perhaps more important: which alternatives do you see that are not fallacies by the same yardstick?

Trying to measure something immaterial with a tool made for measuring material is a fallacy.

 

[LuisDantas]

Trying to measure something immaterial with a tool made for measuring material is a fallacy.

Probably. But that does not clarify a whole lot.

How would we distinguish material from immaterial, for a starter?

 

[Rival]

Probably. But that does not clarify a whole lot.

How would we distinguish material from immaterial, for a starter?

The latter isn't reducible to parts, nor available to be studied using naturalistic methods.

Methodological naturalism is the scientific study of material.

Theology and much of philosophy is the study of immaterial (numbers, ideas, concepts, etc).

One wouldn't dream of using theology or philosophy to study the material components of a table, for example.

 

[LuisDantas]

I mean the 'Gods don't exist because I can't see them', 'People who believe in ghosts are stupid' types. Very common in the UK.

That may correlate with materialism to some degree, but I think that it is more accurate to call that attitude a rejection of supernaturalism, perhaps mixed with skepticism of some form.

I don't know that it is a majority stance in western societies either, much as I want to believe that it is.

Instead, I think that the various takes on the supernatural just don't converge sufficiently to appear as unified as some would like.

 

[LuisDantas]

The latter isn't reducible to parts, nor available to be studied using naturalistic methods.

Methodological naturalism is the scientific study of material.

Theology and much of philosophy is the study of immaterial (numbers, ideas, concepts, etc).

One wouldn't dream of using theology or philosophy to study the material components of a table, for example.

It seems to me that you are ultimately simply making an appeal for people to believe in the immaterial, here presented as perhaps undetectable or at least undemonstrable.

 

[Rival]

It seems to me that you are ultimately simply making an appeal for people to believe in the immaterial, here presented as perhaps undetectable or at least undemonstrable.

No, I'm trying to help people to understand that asking for material evidence of an immaterial object is to miss the point. So asking for scientific proof of God, not finding any, then declaring God non-existent is a bad argument. It's the tools that are wrong, not the object.

 

[RestlessSoul]

Since spiritual suffering is a term that can be used to mean pretty much anything, and since psychology and psyquiatry are modern developements (unrelated to religions and yet related to the sciences), that is simply not the case at all.

Since spiritual suffering is a term to which you have chosen to assign zero value, we can disregard it for now; no point attempting to converse, if we are both speaking entirely different languages.

But even the most idealogically committed materialist must acknowledge a qualitative distinction between the mind and the body. So the observation that the increase in modern man’s material comfort may have come at the expense of ever greater mental distress, cannot be dismissed out of hand.

As for psychology, we can define that as an attempt to apply certain principles of natural philosophy to the study of the mind; the mind is not the body, nor is it the brain. The mind is it’s own place, to quote John Milton, and in itself may make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

 

[LuisDantas]

No, I'm trying to help people to understand that asking for material evidence of an immaterial object is to miss the point. So asking for scientific proof of God, not finding any, then declaring God non-existent is a bad argument. It's the tools that are wrong, not the object.

Fair enough.

 

[blü 2]

The latter isn't reducible to parts, nor available to be studied using naturalistic methods.

Methodological naturalism is the scientific study of material.

Theology and much of philosophy is the study of immaterial (numbers, ideas, concepts, etc).

One wouldn't dream of using theology or philosophy to study the material components of a table, for example.

I have found no exceptions to the observation that the only manner in which the immaterial is known to exist is as a concept or thing imagined in an individual brain. By definition it's not found in reality, the world external to the self.

 

[Rival]

I have found no exceptions to the observation that the only manner in which the immaterial is known to exist is as a concept or thing imagined in an individual brain. By definition it's not found in reality, the world external to the self.

So you would deny the existence of numbers/pure mathematics etc? Are you a fictionalist?

 

[F1fan]

What? All we directly experience is our immaterial consciousness.

Sorry, consciousness is a material property of material brains. There is no consciousness in dead brains. Where did you hear that it is immaterial?

Even matter itself is only known through consciousness, which is why it can be doubted while one's consciousness can not be.

"Knowing" is a material process since it is brains processing sensory data and using experiences.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

Why are most Western cultures materialist? They take Methodological Naturalism as some kind of baseline, which is a fallacy.

Why is this?

Because it fits the evidence?