Are We Really Living in a Materialist Age?: Let’s just say that I am skeptical. (Kit Wilson, 4/18/25, Hedgehog Review)
Reductive materialism is the view that all of reality can be explained by, and ultimately reduced to, the purely physical. Whatever cannot be accounted for in this way—consciousness, morality, free will, feelings—must be illusory. As the biologist Francis Crick likes to point out, this includes even you: “‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”
The basic rationale is well rehearsed: that physics, having been remarkably successful at toppling superstitions up to now, must naturally go on to conquer every last corner of reality. The problem with this argument—that it means eliminating not just angels and ghosts but also the very things on which scientific knowledge itself depends, such as reason, free will, and abstract thought—appears not to have occurred to the reductive materialists until too late.
For this reason, to call reductive materialism a “belief” is perhaps a bit misleading. Plenty of people—the biologist Richard Dawkins, the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, and the physicist Lawrence Krauss among them—piously recite its creed: I do not exist, life is meaningless, morality is an illusion. But do any of them really believe it?
Certainly, they don’t act as though they do.