Kit Wilson, “Are We Really Living in a Materialist Age?” The Hedgehog Review, Spring 2025.
More evidence that the secular and materialistic narrative is losing its appeal. Wilson shows how science, which has sought to stake out all epistemological turf as its own domain, cannot exist without certain pre-scientific assumptions which amount to beliefs and derive from common sense observation of the world right in front of us.
That is, science, like the religion it has tried so hard to displace, is itself a form of thinking, learning, acting, and working that begins with some creedal formula: “I believe.”
For all of us it is true that “Any thought, for it to make sense, depends on a vast constellation of prior assumptions…” The assumptions under-girding reductive materialism are imported from beyond that realm, from the realm of common sense, to which science lends no credibility. And while Wilson does not go this far, all acknowledged assumptions and beliefs that have held true over the years derive from the fact that people are made in the image of God. And these assumptions have been proven, reinforced, and expanded by Christianity through the ages, so effectively and universally that they are accepted without question and without considering their provenance.
Wilson explains that, without certain very basic assumptions, the modern scientific enterprise could not function. While this has been explained by thinkers from over the past 150 years, reductive materialists have managed to brush these insights aside and to foist their views on the world. Wilson deftly exposes the inconsistency of this view and insists that we simply cannot deny certain manifest obser-vations—I exist, I think, morality is real, the world is real—and must take them by faith, since they are the common possession of all people. But this view, which he refers to as “quiet realism”—quiet, because we agree not to disagree about these basic assumptions—still begs the question of how we can know this, which is a religious, not a philo-sophical question.
But Wilson says that we simply must live with the fact that these assumptions are true. He may tip his hand, however, when he writes, “No doubt some ultimate explanation exists—and, whether we will ever be able fully to sign them off, some metaphysical beliefs will thus get closer to that ultimate explanation than others.”
Reductive materialism, however, cannot offer that explanation. As Wilson explains, “a broad, modest outline of the truth—an imperfect but clear-eyed description of what we find immediately in front of us—is better than nothing. Whereas reductive materialism, having undercut all basis for saying anything, ends up unable to give us any answer at all.”
The cracks in the ceiling of reductive materialism may be fissures through which the light of truth will shine in due course. But that light to fill the void created by reductive materialism as the explanation of all things, those who know the truth will need to step up and demonstrate its explanatory power of the Light of God.