The Position Every Doctrine of an Afterlife Has to Answer

Materialism sits opposite nearly every religious tradition's account of a soul that survives the body, which is exactly why it has so often been treated, especially in Epicurus's own ancient reception, as effectively atheistic even when its proponents did not deny gods outright. In the modern era it underwrites physicalism in philosophy of mind and methodological naturalism in the sciences, and its main contemporary rival is not idealism so much as any dualist or panpsychist attempt to keep consciousness from being fully absorbed into physics. Materialism's own internal debates concern how strict the reduction has to be: eliminative materialists hold that talk of beliefs and desires will eventually be replaced outright by neuroscience, while non-reductive materialists hold that mental properties are real and irreducible even though nothing but matter ultimately exists, a distinction with real consequences for how confidently the position can claim to have explained consciousness rather than simply denied that the problem is as hard as it looks.

Buddhist and Jain traditions add a further complication worth noting plainly: both take matter and causal process extremely seriously without endorsing a Western-style eliminative materialism about the person, since karma and rebirth require some form of causal continuity that a purely eliminativist reading of mind would struggle to support, which is one reason the label materialism should be applied to non-Western systems only with real care.