Physicalism rarely appears as an explicit article of faith in any tradition this atlas covers, but it is the default working assumption of neuroscience, psychiatry, and most of the modern academy, which makes it the quiet backdrop against which every religious claim about a soul, a spirit, or a mind surviving the body has to argue. Its critics inside philosophy are not primarily religious dualists but panpsychists and property dualists, who accept the findings of physics and neuroscience wholesale but doubt that any physical description, however complete, could ever entail the qualitative feel of experience, a gap physicalists variously deny exists, expect future science to close, or accept as a genuine but non-threatening mystery.
The position's practical stakes are considerable: it is difficult to reconcile with any doctrine of personal survival after bodily death, and most traditions that affirm such survival are, whatever their other commitments, implicitly rejecting physicalism about the person. The position's defenders answer that this cost is exactly the honest price of taking neuroscience seriously, and that a soul-based account which cannot be tested against any physical evidence purchases its comfort at the expense of explanatory accountability, a tradeoff physicalists are willing to make and dualists and property dualists are not.