(September 17, 2016 at 5:44 am)Tazzycorn Wrote: The number of atheist I know of who present materialism as an alternative to religious belief: 0. This includes public atheists, atheists I've ineracted with online and atheists I know personally. The whole materialism as a substitute for religion thing is a fundie slander, as they associate materialism with want for things.Perhaps that's not how they present it, or even intend to present it, but o the believer the "arguing atheist" is presenting, not some logically derived worldview, but rather an alternative reality and an alternative conception of what one is. You and I may think of materialism as having a kind of rational basis, but to many believers it is just another worldview - one that flies in the face of one they believe in .
People are asked to accept that they are material things because the evidence is increasingly saying that that is the case. For example neurology has pretty much shown that the brain does everything ascribed to souls. We should no more accept the validity of belief in souls than we do the validity of belief in phlogiston.
I don't know that science can account for any one, single thing I experience. Since no aspect of anything I experience - thoughts, color, sensation, etc. - can even be described in physical terms - mass, distance, time, charge, spin - there can be no physical theory of anything I experience. Materialists like to believe that (what they believe to be) material brains can "do everything ascribed to souls," but that's just a belief. (I won't even bring up the fact that, if materialism is right, I can't even FIND the material brain my experiences supposedly happen in, or the world such a brain would exist in - if it even existed.)
