Carleas
I understand Materialism to be the belief that only the matter/energy stuff exists, not a particular practice of anything.
You have a good point here. I do believe that materialistic explanations can be presented in such a way that they don't detract from the human experience- as you say, if pain is a particular arrangement of nervous responses, it doesn't follow that it [i]is not[/i] also heartbreak, or what-have you. Both descriptions are equally valid as far as the descriptions go. However, I don't think the explanation really adds any meaning, or explains our sense of meaning which is the larger problem.
That is to say, while the materialist is not obligated to [i]deny[/i] that there is such a thing as heartbreak, really, if they are asked what heartbreak is, they aren't going to have available an answer that justifies the songs and poems written about it, either.
I disagree with this- if materialism is a means of discovering explanations, then I am in large part a materialist, as I suppose are most other theists. You would be hard pressed to find a religious believer that doesn’t think empiricism is good for anything these days. I don’t think materialism becomes interesting contra religion until it makes claims about the sum total of what exists.
Maybe not refuted, but if there are other methods that do have explanations, and they are superior to what materialism has proposed (if not definitively), then that’s a good reason to go along with the alternatives.
This is important: When one is sufficiently committed to a particular system (That is, when one has enough faith), causes of skepticism become sources of wonder.
That said, there is very good reason to posit more than the brain to explain the mind.
Suppose we added more people to the Earth- a trillion total, maybe half a trillion. Now let’s arrange everybody on earth so that they are connected through vision- that is, every single person can see many other people, and is seen by many other people. Can you picture that? Now, give each one of these people a card, with a 0 on one side, and a 1 on the other.
If we give them certain rules to follow for flipping their cards (flip your card if you see less than 1000 zeros, don’t flip your card if you see more than 75 people simultaneously flipping theirs, etc), we could run computer programs in this way, you see? With enough people flipping enough cards (like I said, a trillion or so) we’d could run a human consciousness program.
The problem is, by materialism, we wouldn’t have a simulation of human consciousness, or a representation of it, we would have an actual, world-spanning consciousness every bit as real as yours, and just as capable of abstract thought, creativity, and independent motivation as you are. From people flipping cards according to rules.
To further complicate the problem, we have random systems in place already like that- the patterns of raindrops striking pavement, or the random twinkling of stars. Far, far worse than the monkeys typing on keyboards, enough stars twinkling randomly over enough time will bring about a sense of humor, if only for a moment. Again, not a simulation or a representation- the actual feeling of humor will be there (as to who is having the feeling, anyone's guess). The main problem here is that we thin k of consciousness as centered on a sort of 'point'- that is, we can say where it is, or [i]who[/i] is conscious. A materialistic explanation doesn't allow for that.
Argument to absurdity, or sense of wonder? Depends on your commitments.
Morals: What’s tricky in morality is not to explain why rules for behavior exist, by why certain things are Good and others Evil. If they aren’t, and all you can explain is why our brains are put together to experience them that way, then that’s the sort of reductivism you’d want to avoid.
Then I’m a materialist who believes in God, and I don’t see what the dispute is.