Materialists appear to be genuinely worried that confidence in their model of mind and brain - i.e. that mind is simply a word we use to describe what the brain does - is being eroded by contemporary challenges to that model.
Amanda Gefter is herself a philosophical materialist and a writer for New Scientist. She attended a September conference of neuroscientists who are skeptical that materialism can explain the problems posed by human consciousness and reports on the proceedings here. Her article includes this summary of remarks by Jeffrey Schwartz:
"YOU cannot overestimate," thundered psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz, "how threatened the scientific establishment is by the fact that it now looks like the materialist paradigm is genuinely breaking down. You're gonna hear a lot in the next calendar year about... how Darwin's explanation of how human intelligence arose is the only scientific way of doing it... I'm asking us as a world community to go out there and tell the scientific establishment, enough is enough! Materialism needs to start fading away and non-materialist causation needs to be understood as part of natural reality."
Gefter interviews materialist neuroscientists for their reaction, which is unsurprisingly hostile, to the speakers at the conference. Nevertheless, despite their disdain for the views expressed by those speakers, everyone of the researchers she interviews admits there's no evidence for their conviction that mind is fundamentally reducible to the operations of the material brain. Their conviction is obviously an assertion of faith, a product of their a priori commitment to materialism.
Gefter's article raises two essential questions: First, is materialism false, and, second, does substance dualism, if true, refute evolutionary Darwinism? David Chalmers, who's considered one of the top thinkers in the field, answers yes to the first and no to the second. Michael Egnor disagrees and answers yes to both of them. Egnor's article is heavy surf but it's worth the effort it takes to row through it.
The fact that so many people in the field of neuroscience are having doubts about the materialist paradigm is an intriguing development. A generation ago hardly anyone doubted it, but today dualism is experiencing a resurgence. This is significant because metaphysical materialism and naturalistic evolution comprise the two intellectual pillars holding up contemporary atheism, and both are teetering from serious challenges to which it has proven difficult for them to muster adequate responses.
It may well be that we're living in what Alister McGrath calls the twilight of atheism.
RLC
