More properly, my title should probably be “Why I claim that I am not a materialist.” I say that, because I am often called a materialist, usually by creationists or id proponents whom I have engaged in debate. So I guess that I should allow the possibility that I am mistaken about whether I am a materialist.
While there are some differences between materialism, physicalism and naturalism, most of what I say in this post will apply to all.
For those who are not sure what materialism, physicalism and naturalism entail, may I suggest that you check the entries in Wikipedia, SEP (Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy) and other online sources. When you have finished reading those, you might still be unsure what these isms entail, but your time reading them won’t have been wasted.
Take 1:
I am not a materialist, because materialism is a metaphysical position, and I don’t do metaphysics. As best I can tell, metaphysics is impossible. The only method available for doing metaphysics appears to be making stuff up, and one should distrust what is made up.
Take 2:
I am not a materialist, because I don’t know what material is. Our current ideas about the nature of material are very different from those of the Newtonian scientist. It would seem to be bad form to commit oneself to materialism, yet retain the freedom to change what we mean by “material.” Since honest science requires a willingness to change what we mean by “material”, it seems wiser to not commit oneself to materialism.
Take 3:
I am not a materialist, because there is too much that is important to us, that has no adequate material account. Take mathematics as an example. The last time that I asked a self-proclaimed materialist for an account of mathematics, his response was “pencil marks on paper.” I find that grossly inadequate. We cannot give a satisfactory account of mathematics in the form of a theory of pencil marks on paper.
For myself, I am a fictionalist with respect to mathematics. That is, I take mathematical objects (such as numbers) to be useful fictions. Of course, one can say that a fiction is maintained by the human mind, so can be explained in terms of the material that constitutes neurons. However, I am dubious of the adequacy of that approach. We pass those useful fictions around from one mathematician to another, and it is doubtful that there could ever be a wholly material account of that passing around.
It is not just abstractions, such as mathematics, that I see as posing a problem. Take an ordinary every day object such as a chair. And for sure, the chair is made of material. However, I doubt that we can give a definition of chair in purely material terms. Whatever definition we come up with today might be proven wrong tomorrow when a chair shows up that is made of a new material that we had not considered in our definition. We probably cannot adequately define chair in terms of shape, either. For chairs of novel shape often show up.
A note on the supernatural
Some people seem to take materialism to be a denial of the supernatural. I do not make any claim that there is a supernatural realm. Nor to I claim that there isn’t. I’ll say only that there are no known supernatural causes, and if the history of science is any indication then it is unlikely that any supernatural causes will show up.
Whether or not there actually is a supernatural realm – that seems to be a metaphysical question. And, as already said, I don’t do metaphysics. The most I can say, is that if there is a supernatural, then it has no relevance to the way I live my life.