Materialist
philosophy lies at the basis of the theory of evolution.
Materialism rests on the supposition that everything that
exists is matter. According to this philosophy, matter has
existed since eternity, will continue to exist forever, and
there is nothing but matter. In order to provide support for
their claim, materialists use a logic called "reductionism."
This is the idea that things which are not observable can
also be explained by material causes.
To make matters clearer, let us take the example
of the human mind. It is evident that the mind cannot be touched
or seen. Moreover, it has no center in the human brain. This
situation unavoidably leads us to the conclusion that mind
is a concept beyond matter. Therefore, the being which we
refer to as "I," who thinks, loves, fears, worries, and feels
pleasure or pain, is not a material being in the same way
as a sofa, a table or a stone.
Materialists, however, claim
that mind is "reducible to matter." According to the materialist
claim, thinking, loving, worrying and all our mental activities
are nothing but chemical reactions taking place between the
atoms in the brain. Loving someone is a chemical reaction
in some cells in our brain, and fear is another. The famous
materialist philosopher Karl Vogt is notorious
for his assertion that "the brain secretes thought
just as the liver secretes bile."384
Bile, however, is matter, whereas there is no evidence that
thought is.
Reductionism is a logical deduction. However,
a logical deduction can be based on solid grounds or on shaky
ones. For this reason, the question we need to ask is: What
happens when reductionism is compared to scientific data?
Nineteenth-century materialist scientists and
thinkers thought that the answer would be that science verifies
reductionism. Twentieth-century science, however, has revealed
a very different picture.
One of the most salient feature of this
picture is "information," which is present in nature and can
never be reduced to matter.
  
384 Encyclopędia
Britannica, "Modern Materialism." (emphasis added)
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