Materialism as a research program fusing science and philosophy is unraveling because science cannot reduce or eliminate consciousness, mathematics, modality, or morality without cutting against fundamental intuitions

The wars of religion in the Early Modern period were not primarily about religious doctrine but represented the birth pangs of the secular nation-state, with Protestants killing Protestants and Catholics killing Catholics for political rather than theological reasons

Carl Sagan's assertion that 'the cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be' is an aggressive metaphysical claim asserting that the natural scientist is the ultimate arbiter of what is real, ruling out any religious or transcendent sensibility.

David Armstrong's account of laws proposes that properties like force, mass, and acceleration are universals that have quasi-causal connections, and concrete instances conform to these universals in a way that can be explained scientifically without requiring divine lawmaker.

How mathematical expressions cause effects in the real world is itself a conceptual confusion; confusing the map (mathematics) with the territory (physical world), as when one mistakes longitude/latitude lines for causes of mountain heights.

The association between materialism and religion as opposites is a shoddy reading of the history of philosophy; Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics rejected materialism without being theists, and materialism was a minority position historically.

Laws of nature distinguish between accidental regularities (regularities that could be otherwise) and non-accidental law-like regularities; for example, you cannot have a cubic sphere of gold more than a mile wide (accidental) but you cannot have a sphere of uranium a mile wide (law-like, because it would trigger chain reaction).

Explaining laws of nature in purely secular, naturalistic terms is extremely difficult because laws appear to require a lawmaker or ordering principle; without invoking a divine legislator imposing laws top-down, it's unclear how naturalists can account for why nature is law-governed.

The hard problem of consciousness for materialists is to explain how mind can be identified with and reduced without remainder to neurophysiological processes.

Lewis's distinction is not between rational and causal processes, but between rational and merely causal processes; reasoning involves rational inference (following reasons) which is logically distinct from causal connections, even if they are neurologically correlated.

Atheists accuse religious believers of holding false belief systems explained by Darwinian survival value (religion as coping mechanism), but if this explanation works, then it also applies to atheism itself, creating a dilemma: either both are unreliable or the criterion for reliability cannot be evolutionary utility.

From the materialist perspective, the emergence of mind and truth-tracking cognitive faculties is a genuine puzzle that cannot be easily explained, whereas from a non-materialist perspective it is not problematic.

Unless there is nothing but mathematics and no physical world exists, there must be something beyond mathematics that mathematics describes; this suggests a decidedly anti-materialistic view.

Laws of nature as a concept emerged in the 17th-18th centuries with the language of a divine legislator or deus ex machina, but paradoxically, as widespread belief in God declined in the 19th-20th centuries, the concept of laws persisted as the foundation of materialism

The Protestant Reformation contributed to the rise of capitalism and modern science not primarily through religious doctrine but through the structural emphasis on individual autonomy, personal responsibility, and the capacity of the individual subject to understand and act on the world—principles that enabled both economic and scientific flourishing.