Midterm Question 10

I looked up the term “materialism” to help me with this question. I found that it is the metaphysical view that there is only one substance in the universe and that substance is physical, empirical or material. So materialists believe that a spiritual substance does not exist and that any phenomena considered to be paranormal, supernatural, or occult are either delusions or can be reduced to physical forces. If you’re a materialist and you’re trying to answer philosophical questions, you’re going to answer all questions scientifically. You’ll be able to observe, study, and test hypotheses until you come to a sound conclusion based upon physical facts. I believe the biggest “help” to one who is a materialist is that they’ll never be tempted to try to explain something using theology.

Here’s an example: I’m a villager, and I want to know why one of my fellow villagers is ill.

I could look at the question spiritually and say that his illness is a curse brought upon him by god. I could decide to give reasoning for the curse, such as, “the gods do not favor this man. Look they have been cursing his crops all season. This is a bad man, and it will only do harm to associate yourself with him.”

Or I could look at that same question materialistically and test to see what’s wrong with him. After observation, I notice that he’s vomiting and shitting repeatedly. I could then hypothesize that it was his bad crops that gave him the food poisoning. I could then test this by seeing if the rest of his family develops similar symptoms, or I could take it a step further and test the effects of the man’s crops on another man of similar features.

The question of why was this man sick was answered by both types of philosophers. Only one of them has a sound and structured answer to the question. The other searches for answers that aren’t even testable.

If after a month, a different man (who is widely well known for being a holy and sacred friend of the gods) develops the same symptoms as the first, which philosopher would have the more accurate answer?

The spiritual philosopher would have to change his diagnosis of the original sick man in order to come up with a believable reason for the holy man getting sick.

The materialistic philosopher wouldn’t have to change a thing. He would simply observe the physical surroundings of the holy man and determine what it was that cause this man’s food poisoning. This materialistic way of philosophy is much more helpful because you don’t have to change your ways of reasoning. The physical world is a scientific one. If for some reason one of your scientific theories needs to be altered, it would only be due to new information that was not previously available which would provide an even more accurate theory.