Materialism is Unscientific

If there could only be one kind of science in the world - and it had to be physics or biology - which would you choose? How would you weigh the truth and practical importance of each?

But that's absurd, nobody is stopping us having both physics and biology, are they? From a logical point of view, that is just what materialism does. Materialism says the ultimate substances of the universe are all matter (material) and comprise the only reality of the universe. Everything else -  tables, chairs, planets, minds - reduces to matter. 

So what about biology, isn't that a materialistic world view? Not really. For one thing, much biological explanation is teleological (i.e. it frequently treats organic behavior as goal-oriented), whereas matter has no goals and can never have goals, being completely inert. But more importantly, if physics really explains the ultimate reality and materials of the universe, biology is an illusion, a mere conceptual projection, a 'useful fiction' as Hans Vaihinger put in the 1920's. Not really true, its artifacts not really real, for only physics can say what is really real. 

For example, the biologist can explain muscle movement in organisms by reference to motor neurons in the brain. But for the materialist, neurons, muscles, the brain and so forth are illusions, for really these are only arrangements of elementary particles. 

Even within classical physics, the existence of atoms and molecules is an illusion, for ultimately, there are only elementary particles, strings and so forth. Materialism, in treating the lowest substratum of physics as the only ultimate reality, renders everything else an illusion.

A materialist cannot choose biology over physics as the source of ultimate explanation of the universe. Biological phenomena are historically more recent than the primordial substances of astrophysics. 

These days, people get this naturalist urge, a modern spirit of the enlightenment age, where they want to be rational, objective and scientific, like a modern day Bacon or Boyle, in contrast to the more foolish and unenlightened sections of society, who are like the pre-moderns (serfs). These nouveau-rationalists want to discard the soul, God and even mind itself from culture and discourse. They have a strong notion that they themselves have achieved this through some sublime act of intellect or will, a triumph over their baser nature, usually achieved early in life (perhaps after reading Richard Dawkins), and look with contempt on those who continue to cling to such false ideas. 

But if the discarding of the soul, God and the mind has no stronger basis than materialism, then metaphysical notions of soul, God and mind are on the same footing as everything else outside of particle physics - including ordinary objects and the sciences of biology, medicine, electrical engineering and satellite navigation. That is to say, under materialism, all are to be thought of as unreal and subordinate to particle physics in a uniform way.

The nouveau-rationalist wants to say, "But biology is scientific, so I will keep it. I reject only the unscientific ideas." The paradigm of science here is particle physics. He imagines that biology, engineering and certain other 'hard' disciplines have a special relationship or kinship with particle physics - that they are or will become reducible to it in some sense. But this notion of 'reduce' is not itself part of particle physics, and so not obviously scientific or true. The reduction of an extraneous science (e.g. biology or classical physics) to a fundamental science (particle physics) essentially goes beyond the domain of that fundamental science, for it bridges the gap between the two disciplines or sciences. If it does not bridge a gap, it cannot be a reduction in any sense at all. So if a scientific 'reduction' is ultimately true, it will violate the sine qua non materialist principle that only particle physics is ultimately true. 

And so materialism rests on the contradiction: only fundamental science is ultimately true, but the reduction of other sciences to it is also ultimately true. 

Materialism is a monistic philosophy. Contemporary science however is de facto pluralistic. How can anyone go on thinking materialism is scientific or has any deep kinship with science? Materialism, like the Cartesian dualism of which is it a derivative, is incompatible with actual scientific practice and explanation. 

What, then, is the ultimate truth? That is a topic for another time. But, to point in the general direction of this, as it says in the Avatamsaka sutra,

All philosophies of the world
Are mental fabrications.
There has never been one, single doctrine
With which one can enter into the true nature of things.