Materialist philosophy lies at the basis of the theory of evolution. Materialism rests on the supposition that everything that exists is matter. According to this philosophy, matter has existed since eternity, will continue to exist forever, and there is nothing but matter. In order to provide support for their claim, materialists use a logic called "reductionism." This is the idea that things which are not observable can also be explained by material causes.
To make matters clearer, let us take the example of the human mind. It is evident that the mind cannot be touched or seen. Moreover, it has no center in the human brain. This situation unavoidably leads us to the conclusion that mind is a concept beyond matter. Therefore, the being which we refer to as "I," who thinks, loves, fears, worries, and feels pleasure or pain, is not a material being in the same way as a sofa, a table or a stone.
Materialists, however, claim that mind is "reducible to matter." According to the materialist claim, thinking, loving, worrying and all our mental activities are nothing but chemical reactions taking place between the atoms in the brain. Loving someone is a chemical reaction in some cells in our brain, and fear is another. The famous materialist philosopher Karl Vogt is notorious for his assertion that "the brain secretes thought just as the liver secretes bile."384 Bile, however, is matter, whereas there is no evidence that thought is.
Reductionism is a logical deduction. However, a logical deduction can be based on solid grounds or on shaky ones. For this reason, the question we need to ask is: What happens when reductionism is compared to scientific data?
Nineteenth-century materialist scientists and thinkers thought that the answer would be that science verifies reductionism. Twentieth-century science, however, has revealed a very different picture.
One of the most salient feature of this picture is "information," which is present in nature and can never be reduced to matter.
384 Encyclopædia Britannica, "Modern Materialism." (emphasis added)
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