Materialism and Naturalism

Naturalism and Materialism are both claimed by Atheists as fundamental truths, maybe even first principles. What are these things and are they self-evident, incontrovertable principles of the universe?

Materialism
Keith Augustine of infidels.org, writes:

“Materialism has enjoyed widespread acceptance among well-educated twentieth-century thinkers. In the Preface to Contemporary Materialism: A Reader, Paul Moser and J. D. Trout write:

"Materialism, put broadly, affirms that all phenomena are physical... Materialism is now the dominant systematic ontology among philosophers and scientists, and there are currently no established alternative ontological views competing with it" (p. ix).
Augustine, End Notes; infidels.org/library/modern/richard_vitzthum/materialism.html

“Jaegwon Kim, a philosopher at the forefront in the philosophy of mind, agrees:”

"There has been a virtual consensus, one that has held for years, that the world is essentially physical, at least in the following sense: if all matter were to be removed from the world, nothing would remain--no minds, no 'entelechies', and no 'vital forces'... [M]ental states and processes are to be construed as states and processes occurring in certain complex physical systems, such as biological organisms, not as states of some ghostly immaterial beings [i.e. souls]" (p. 579 of " Mind-body problem, the " by Jaegwon Kim in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy edited by Ted Honderich).” Per Augustine, End Notes; infidels.org/library/modern/richard_vitzthum/materialism.html

Naturalism
“Philosophical naturalism itself exists in two forms: (1) ontological or metaphysical naturalism and (2) methodological naturalism. The former is philosophical naturalism as described above; the latter is the tacit adoption or assumption of philosophical naturalism within scientific method with or without fully accepting or believing it. As will be exhaustively discussed below, science is not metaphysical and does not depend on the ultimate truth of any metaphysics for its success (although science does have metaphysical implications), but methodological naturalism must be adopted as a strategy or working hypothesis for science to succeed, since the various methods and necessary underlying epistemologies of science cannot operate in a supernaturalistic framework.. We may therefore be agnostic about the ultimate truth of naturalism, but must nevertheless adopt it and investigate nature as if nature is all that there is. This is methodological naturalism.”
Steven D. Schafersman, “Naturalism is an Essential Part of Science and Critical Inquiry; Conference on Naturalism, Theism and the Scientific Enterprise, sponsored by the Department of Philosophy, The University of Texas, Austin, Texas, February 20-23, 1997 (emph added)


Well, To Start With....
In order to be a philosopher, two things are required: first, one must reject all previous philosophies in order to make room for one’s own personal mullings; second, one must reject all higher authority. Materialism and Metaphysical Naturalism fall out immediately as requisite due to the intellectual constrictions necessarily imposed on philosophers. This is why no original thought is any longer expected from today’s group of mullers. Placing the Materialist restriction on reality clamps off any abstract thought. Schafersman, at least, recognizes the obvious difference between metaphysical naturalism and functional naturalism. The latter is a fundamental, voluntary presumption of empiricism; the former is a religion. Since philosophers are not scientists, their naturalism is metaphysical: the religious form of naturalism. And their mullings are therefore apologetics for the unprovable: “there is no reality beyond the physical phenomena”.

This is so utterly refutable that it is a wonder that philosophers can remain employed with this faith. Let’s take “experience” for example.

Experience
We who are not blind or color-blind have experienced “blue”. The experience of blue is not a list of neurons firing. It is not a spectrum analyzer registering a specific wavelength. In my case, with cobalt-blue on a deeply polished automobile fender, the experience relates well to joy. The colors of a perfect sunset evoke a similar experience.

These experiences, and many more like them, are personal, nontransferable, hardly communicable, and non-empirical in the external sense (I cannot measure your experience in any meaningful way).

Let’s take the position of Jaegwon Kim, that if all physical reality is removed, nothing is left. For starters, where is the data for that? Where is the empirical evidence? In fact where is the math? One suspects that, as with dark matter, quantum fields, the 8 extra dimensions of string theory, and so on, that Kim has no scientific leg to stand on. In fact some creative monists have declared that consciousness is contained on some new form of matter, not detectable by current science. How would this jibe with Kim’s assertion?

And what of Kim’s prior assertion that there are only mental states, presumably just ones and zeros? Compare this to our well known personal mental experiences of, say, blue. Kim is left holding the bag, an empty one at that.

Metaphysical Naturalism and Materialism are not coherent philosophies; but they are deemed necessary in order to support the underlying, baseline philosophy, Metaphysical Atheism, which is also not coherent (if you believe Huxley). To support irrational, noncoherent theories in order to truss a philosophy of inverted logic, rebellion, and denial is a falsification of the supposed rationality of Atheism.