No Empiricist Is a Materialist - Keith Ward

Keith Ward sat down with the Biola University Center for Christian Thought (cct.biola.edu) in San Diego, California on July 2013. In this clip, Ward discusses the incompatibility of empiricism and materialism.
Keith Ward is Emeritus Regius Professor of Divinity, University of Oxford, Fellow of the British Academy, and currently Professorial Research Fellow at Heythrop College in London. He is the author of numerous books in philosophy and theology, including More Than Matter?, In Defense of the Soul, The Big Questions in Science and Religion, and his five-volume Comparative Theology.
Music: "Raise Them High" and "Hey! Get in the Van!" by Cinema Cycle (cinemacycle.bandcamp.com)

[@georgedoyle2487]

Exactly!!
According to the expert linguist and brilliant cognitive scientist Noam Chomsky…
“There are only two ways of looking at eliminative materialism (the idea that all things reduce to solid substance). One is that it is total gibberish until someone tells us what matter is. Until someone tells us what eliminative materialism is there can’t be such a thing as eliminative materialism and no one can tell us what matter is”. (Noam Chomsky). ⁠
The fact is that if one accepts only observable, empirical, measurable things as evidence, then any “measurable” and “quantifiable” sign of something as metaphysical as consciousness would simply just be interpreted as material right? A strictly reductive materialism, atheism or philosophical naturalism is an argument from ignorance, a question begging fallacy and special pleading fallacy of the highest degree!! No one even knows what “matter” actually is - right?
Moreover, nothing metaphysical and transcendental can ever be demonstrated to exist using only materialism as your grounding metaphysical presupposition, rendering materialism unfalsifiable, therefore an unscientific rigged game right?
The irony is that quantum mechanics and in particular quantum superposition actually demonstrated decades ago that classical materialism is dead!!
According to Scientific American…
“Atoms themselves can be further divided into smaller bits, and those into yet smaller ones, and so on, until what is left lacks shape and solidity altogether. At the bottom of the chain of “physical” reduction there are only elusive, phantasmal entities we label as “energy” and “fields”-abstract conceptual tools for describing nature, which themselves seem to lack any real, concrete essence.” (Scientific American).
Moreover, David Chalmers the Director of the Institute for Mind and Consciousness helpfully points out that we should think of mind and consciousness as an….
“Updated version of Descartes. The body effects the mind the mind effects the body. Integrated information theory tells us how physics affects consciousness and collapse tells us how consciousness effects physics.” [Professor David Chalmers].
Chalmers even goes on to point out the limitations of this strictly reductive, materialistic, causally closed, fan fiction …
“Materialism is a beautiful and compelling view of the world, but to account for consciousness, we have to go beyond the resources it provides” (David Chalmers).
“Finally, materialism is arguably incoherent. As we have seen, matter is a theoretical abstraction in and of mind. So when materialists try to reduce mind to matter, they are effectively trying to reduce mind to one of mind’s own conceptual creations. This is akin to a dog chasing its own tail. Better yet, it is like a painter who, having painted a self-portrait, points at it and proclaims himself to be the portrait. The ill-fated painter then has to explain his entire inner life in terms of patterns of pigment distribution on canvas. Absurd as this sounds, it is very much analogous to the situation materialists find themselves in.” (BK).

[@jjcm3135]

Top class

[@JamesBath-is-here]

My text editor changed the word "lover" to "live" and "really" to "rally" but you know what I mean.

[@wildhias]

Wow ward talked about "Freddy" Ayer without mentioning his near death god-expirience

[@JamesBath-is-here]

Thank you for pointing out the dogmatic snobbery of scientists. They rally get tedious. I'm a Berkeley live, too.

[@martin36369]

For me there are two aspects to physicalism, the empirical physicalism & the non-empirical physicalism which is an unnecessary extrapolation of the first.

[@panosotto8054]

Getting real tired of science...