"Materialism is a premise of science, not a finding."

The "new" new atheists [as opposed to the classical atheists, post-modern atheists, and formerly new atheists] are great believers in Materialism: only things that can be scientifically measured actually exist.  According to them, since God cannot be scientifically perceived or measured, God doesn't exist.  This view elevates science as the ultimate arbiter of what is real and what is not.  Science now replaces metaphysics, in that the study of anything that cannot currently be measured need not be intellectually engaged.

[Only once did I see the late Christopher Hitchens, one of the "new" new atheists, live.  He was onstage during one of those interminable debates about the existence of God; interminable because I can never understand why his opponents always fall for the impossible role of debating a negative statement.  Anyway, he was, in the parlance, blasted out of his mind; drunk as a lord; gooned on liquor.  He was also smoking cigarette after cigarette.  It occurred to me then that, if science, with its ability to accurately measure and note things such as the negative health effects of smoking and excessive drinking, is now the highest appeal in human existence, Hitchens was without question preaching a world view that he did not respect or share.  He was a fake.  Interestingly, he died of esophageal cancer, which is scientifically related to the practice of heavy simultaneous smoking and alcohol consumption.]

There's a new book that explores Materialistic view of human existence and finds it wanting.  From Ferguson's Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, comes this gem:

From a fruitful method, materialism becomes an axiom: If science can’t quantify something, it doesn’t exist, and so the subjective, unquantifiable, immaterial “manifest image” of our mental life is proved to be an illusion....

But this is a fatal weakness for a theory that aspires to be a comprehensive picture of the world. With magnetic resonance imaging, science can tell us which parts of my brain light
up when, for example, I glimpse my daughter’s face in a crowd; the bouncing neurons can be observed and measured. Science cannot quantify or describe the feelings I experience when I see my daughter. Yet the feelings are no less real than the neurons.

The point sounds more sentimental than it is. My bouncing neurons and my feelings of love and obligation are unquestionably bound together. But the difference between the neurons and the feelings, the material and the mental, is a qualitative difference, a difference in kind. And of the two, reductive materialism can capture only one.