Questions for Materialists

1. Is the mechanical worldview a testable scientific theory, or a metaphor?
2. If it is a metaphor, why is the machine metaphor better in every respect than the organism metaphor? If it is a scientific theory, how could it be tested or refuted?
3. Is your belief in the conservation of matter and energy an assumption, or is it based on evidence? If so, what is the evidence?
4. Do you think that dark matter is conserved?
5. If the laws of nature existed before the Big Bang, and governed the Big Bang from its first instant, where were they?
6. If the laws and constants of nature all came into being at the moment of the Big Bang, how does the universe remember them? Where are they “imprinted”?
7. How do you know that the laws of nature are fixed and not evolutionary?
8. Do you believe that your own consciousness is merely an aspect of epiphenomenon of the activity of your brain?
9. If consciousness does nothing, why has it evolved as an evolutionary adaptation?
10. How do you know that there are no purposes in nature? Is this merely an assumption?
11. If there are no purposes in nature, how can you have purposes yourself?
12. Is there any evidence for the materialist belief that the entire evolutionary process is purposeless?
13. If you believe genes “program” organisms, how do you think the programs work?
14. Do you think the mathematical models will eventually explain the inheritance of form and behavior? If so, are organisms “reifications” of mathematics?
15. Do you believe that memories are stored as material traces in brains? If so, can you summarize the evidence?
16. How do you think memory-retrieval systems recognize the memories they are trying to retrieve from memory stores?
17. Have you ever considered the possibility that memory might depend on some kind of resonance rather than on material traces?
18. If the trace theory of memory is a testable hypothesis, rather than a dogma, how could it be established experimentally that memory depends on traces rather than resonance?
19. Do you believe that all your conscious life and all your bodily experience is inside your brain?
20. In quantum physics, electrons are described by wave equations that include all the electron’s future possibilities, which are not material. Do you think that the possibilities among which you choose are more material than those of electrons?
21. If you think telepathy and precognition are theoretically impossible, or very improbable, can you explain why?
22. Have you ever looked at the evidence for physic phenomena? If so, can you summarize it, and explain what is wrong with it?
23. How do you explain the placebo response?
24. How do you think governments and insurance companies should deal with the escalating costs of medicine?
25. Do you think governments should fund comparative effectiveness research on different kinds of therapy, including alternative therapies?
26. Experimenters’ expectations are known to affect the results of research in psychology, parapsychology and medicine, which is why researchers often use blind methodologies. Do you think that experimenter effects could play a role in other fields of science too?
27. Most scientists publish only a small proportion of the their results. Do you think that this is likely to introduce serious biases into the scientific literature?
28. How should scientists deal with ideologically, politically or commercially motivated skepticism?

Source: Science Set Free. 10 Paths to New Discovery (2012) by Rupert Sheldrake.