Materialism Revisited

Part of an ongoing, if not neverending, conversation. We are discussing the favorite topic of materialists everywhere, Materialism. Dr. Rolf Andreassen has volunteered to act as my assistant from the audience to see if we together can pull off the trick of deducing our way from our separate axioms and mutually alien worldviews toward anything like a mutual understanding.

The questions are directed at him, and the comments written in the second person, albeit any reader may participate to his heart’s content. An alert reader will notice that I am trying to discover the unspoken axioms of epistemology and ontology, that is, the metaphysical theory of what Materialism holds to be real or unreal, knowledge or opinion. I suspect there is a paradox hidden at this level, which makes the conclusions of Materialism so startlingly unlike reality.

One difficulty that arises in any philosophical conversation is that what is being discussed is usually an unspoken axiom or assumption not shared by the two parties in the conversation. This is why the patience of Job and the humor of Socrates is needed to thread through the labyrinths of such conversations.

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