Materialism holding science back
Scientists Ask, “Is Materialism Holding Science Back?”
June 5, 2026
Philosophy of Science, Scientific Reasoning
That’s the title of a discussion featuring astrophysicist Adam Frank, neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, and biologist Michael Levin, at Institute for Arts and Ideas (IAI)’s YouTube channel:
Display "Is materialism holding science back? | Adam Frank, Lisa Feldman Barrett, Michael Levin" from YouTube
Host Güneş Taylor poses the question to the three:
Does science need to assume a materialist account of the world or might this have fundamental limitations? Could a different metaphysics help science make progress on key questions, from the origin of life to the mysteries of quantum gravity? Or would abandoning materialism risk returning us to the myths of superstition and religion?
Or as IAI summarizes:
For centuries, we’ve assumed that science has banished the transcendent and established that reality is entirely physical. But critics argue there are signs that a rigorous materialism might be holding science back. Increasingly, “emergence” is used to account for everything from consciousness to spacetime — a convenient placeholder for what materialist science may be unable to explain. Physicists like Heisenberg and Hawking concluded that science gives us models of reality, rather than final descriptions of its true nature, while there are scientists working in everything from biology to computer science who suggest that dualism is a productive metaphysical framework for their research. Materialism may have enabled science to reach beyond the dogmas of religion, but there are now those who are restlessly probing the limits of materialism itself.
Says Professor Frank, from the University of Rochester: “Really the only way we get reality is from a perspectival point of view. There is no third-person view of the universe.”
Is materialist dogma a straightjacket? The very fact that a respectable conversation is going on around this question tells us that something has changed.