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Working Notes : Are Materialism and Fundamentalism the Same?

So much of philosophy is simply a rational attempt at understanding our religious urge. From the Greeks through the Enlightenment and to the early 20th Century, believers and non-believers tried to understand how purpose and consciousness could exist in the world as we observe it.

William James' Pragmatism is also a focused attempt at reconciling religion with the world as observed. While James spends time discussing why materialism is insufficient, he also attacks various forms of idealism even more as being irrelevant.

In our century, materialism has won. Philosophies that assert the existence of an abstract reality seem to make no sense to us anymore. Reading Plato or Berkley now seems like a quaint visit to a bewigged era.

The failure of philosophy to provide an alternative to materialism may be responsible for our cultural divide. Within the US and around the world, we see materialist philosophy opposed to fundamental religious approach. It strikes me that fundamentalism is no more than a materialist approach to religion. By taking revealed texts as the reliable basis for experience, one embraces creationism rather than evolution. Philosophically, there is no difference, as existence consists only of that which is sensed in the world.

William James thought that Pragmatism provided an alternative in which abstractions can be realized. Alfred North Whitehead, Gregory Bateson and Stephen Toulmin also sought to grant existence to emergent concepts allowing there to be more in the world than just the matter and energy.