Reddit reviews The Waning Of Materialism

This is from the intro to the book

> My intention is simply to
> offer a definition of the word “God,” or of its equivalents in other
> tongues, and to do so in fairly slavish obedience to the classical
> definitions of the divine found in the theological and philosophi-
> cal schools of most of the major religious traditions. My reason for
> wanting to do this is that I have come to the conclusion that, while
> there has been a great deal of public debate about belief in God in
> recent years (much of it a little petulant, much of it positively fe-
> rocious), the concept of God around which the arguments have
> run their seemingly interminable courses has remained strangely
> obscure the whole time....
>
> ....It is not obvious to
> me, therefore, that their differences really amount to a meaningful
> disagreement, as one cannot really have a disagreement without some prior agreement as to what the basic issue of contention is.....

So this is not a book of arguments, though it contains arguments and not a book on apologetics, though it contains that as well. If you are interested in the misconceptions prevalent in modern religious disputes, you'd do well to buy this book. Incidentally, Hart's prose is brilliant, and he does wonderful takedowns of opposing positions, which are appreciable and enjoyable even if you disagree with him. But this is not a thesis on materialism or its problems.

For that you can buy The waning of materialism which has 23 philosophical essays on the topic.

Let me suggest a more metaphysical interpretation of this verse which gives the Teacher a sense of wonder that is not addressed by modern scientific discoveries.

All translations are necessarily interpretive. We can't hope for every word in Hebrew to have an equivalent in English with the exact same range of meaning. So the first thing to understand that the Hebrew word ruah can mean "breath," "wind," or "spirit," and translators of the Bible into English have to limit the sense of a verse in choosing one. Second, both ancient and modern translations are divided on whether this verse means "the path of the wind, or how the bones are formed" or something more like "how the breath comes to the bones." Let's consider the meaning of the latter reading.

In Genesis 2, God "formed the man out of the dust of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life". The formation of man's body was one thing, but in the words of Dr Manhattan, "A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there's no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts." God unites that body in some mysterious way with a soul that makes it live. And not just the first man; God gives life and consciousness directly to each and every human being, and how He accomplishes this is a mystery beyond our understanding. (You may object that science can explain phenomena traditionally attributed to the soul purely in terms of chemical interactions; but materialism has problems.)

Further: the Teacher does not say, "because you do not know how the body is formed, you do not understand the work of God." Rather, he is drawing an analogy; he can't even understand how a baby is formed, and how much more mysterious is God's creation and providential ordering of all things? You could argue with him that the universe just exists, uncreated, and that's it, but you can't go on to say that's an answer we get from science which it is somehow unreasonable not to assent to.

If you want to see a solid collection of essays from analytic philosophers criticizing materialism, try Robert Koons' The Waning of Materialism.