Interesting Article on Materialism

The original article titled "The Heretic" may be found here.
A brief synopsis can be found here.

Basically the article refers to why the book "Mind and Cosmos: Why the Naturalist
Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False" by Thomas Nagel
has a majority of the materialist community in an uproar.

In Andrew Ferguson's article, he highlights the folly of the reasoning
used by most materialists:
The truth of using the scientific method to lead to useful discoveries about
physical causes and effects doesn't necessarily produce the conclusion
that only physical objects subject to this sort of study are real.

In a dazzling six-part tour de force rebutting Nagel’s critics, the philosopher Edward Feser provided a good analogy to describe the basic materialist error—the attempt to stretch materialism from a working assumption [methodological naturalism] into a comprehensive explanation of the world [ontological naturalism]. Feser suggests a parody of materialist reasoning: “1. Metal detectors have had far greater success in finding coins and other metallic objects in more places than any other method has. 2. Therefore we have good reason to think that metal detectors can reveal to us everything that can be revealed” about metallic objects.

But of course a metal detector only detects the metallic content of an object; it tells us nothing about its color, size, weight, or shape. In the same way, Feser writes, the methods of “mechanistic science are as successful as they are in predicting and controlling natural phenomena precisely because they focus on only those aspects of nature susceptible to prediction and control.”

Meanwhile, they ignore everything else. 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.