Now, first off, let me just be clear: the kind of materialism I'm talking about doesn't have anything to do with money. Rather, the materialism I adhere to is in contrast to dualism, and is a claim about what kinds of stuff there are in the world. Dualism is the stand that there are two kinds of stuff: usually physical stuff on the one hand, and spiritual or mental stuff on the other. I reject this position, and think that there is only one kind of stuff: material or physical stuff ("materialism" is also known as "physicalism," with maybe some slight differences in connotation, depending on who you talk to). One of the important reasons I reject any kind of dualism is because of an argument based on the unintelligibility of interaction between two fundamentally distinct substances.
Basically, the argument is that if there is some kind of spirit-stuff that is fundamentally distinct from physical stuff, then there doesn't seem to be any way for the two substances to interact. It's not just that we haven't yet found the right theory, but that it doesn't seem possible for there to be a right theory. The reason is that there doesn't seem to be any way for the two kinds of stuff to causally interact. Just think about it: spirit-stuff is claimed to be fundamentally non-physical. So, it must not have physical properties, like mass or size or color, and cannot be acted upon by any of the physical forces. If the spirit (or mind) cannot causally interact with the brain, then the mind is left as an impotent rider on the brain: willing your hand to raise cannot cause your hand to raise.
This, of course, seems crazy. I mean, we raise our hands all the damn time. One way to go with this is to bring in God. For instance, we could posit that God (or whatever all-powerful supernatural force you prefer) set up the world such that, though there isn't any causal interaction between the mental and physical, things were arranged at the beginning so they would always correspond. There is a problem with this: it destroys any possibility of free will and responsibility for one's actions. In other words, this "solution" undermines the foundation of moral theory. If what you think and, more importantly, what you choose, doesn't actually cause your body to act, then "you" (your mind/spirit) cannot be held responsible for actions your body takes: it quite literally wasn't you that did it!
Another possiblity is to say that every time you make a choice, it is God that steps in and makes it happen in the physical world. That is, there isn't any causal interaction directly between the mental and physical, but each interaction is really a kind of little miracle. First off, I'm hesitant to just go with "it's a miracle!" before we've even tried to give an account. But second, and I think perhaps even more importantly, this kind of answer seems to shackle God to the whims of each and every human being on this planet. In order for us to have free will, God MUST step in each time we will anything at all. S(he) has no choice! This also has the unpleasant corollary that God is in a real sense directly responsible for each and every terrible thing any human being has ever done.
So, I'm very hesitant to attempt to "fix" dualism by bringing in God. Without God, there doesn't seem to be any possibility of interaction between spirit-stuff and physical stuff. Therefore, I'm left with materialism. Though I am the first to admit we do not yet have a physical account that explains mind, there has been progress. If we can give a physical account of mind, then we can have a mind that really causes our actions, and so we have a shot at retaining free will and personal responsibility (not to mention just having a coherent theory!).
And that's why I'm a materialist.
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Immaterial things interact with the physical all the time though. Radio waves are intercepted by televisions. Of course, they're caused by material things, but the waves themselves are not physical. But also wind. Wind can move things and it has no physical limitations. But what about more nebulous concepts such as "momentum" in sports? That seems to be an instance of the mental interacting with the physical. Of course, one could say that it's merely the mental effecting the physical (much like I think about raising my hand, so I do). But I think those in sports would tell you that it's often more than that - that those adversely, or even those positively, affected by a "change" in momentum have, themselves, not changed their mental or physical exertion - "the ball just falls differently."
Of course, as you've mentioned, others have come up with some theory of a "God" to explain such things. God likes the Bears today and thus in the 3rd quarter, after a particularly thunderous tackle by Urlacher, God was so taken with emotion he caused the ball to fall differently for the opposing team as a reward to the Bears. Or something like that.
I think the real limitation in a Dualist paradigm is accepting the unexplained, or unexplainable. Materialists have or need a physical explanation for everything because there is no way to comprehend that a purely ethereal "thing" could act on a physical entity - how can "will" cause a spoon to bend? But many of the martial arts deal with these interactions all the time; harnessing your "chi" and all that jazz. So, I think dualism is probably most functional where a physical entity recognizes the potential "energy" (either real, in a physics sense; or mental in a "chi" sense) and uses that energy in some real physical interaction. But it seems silly to me to think that the "chi" could ever act on its own absent some corporeal entity to perform an action on its behalf.
I've always imagined the "God" excuses as some amalgam of "chi" and lack of knowledge of a specific problem. When we want to harness "chi" those of us in the west "pray to God for strength." But in another sense, we use God to explain why New Orleans flooded because we can comprehend no other rational explanation. We, Americans, feel better about things when we can blame it on something or someone else. 9/11 happened not because of our continued ignorance of middle-eastern cultures and values, but because THEY are religious zealots (besides the fact of it being true, it's only the zealots who acted on the more repressed feelings of the multitude. New Orleans happened not because natural disasters are an eventuality and the city was ridiculously short-sighted in failing to plan for something that was a long time coming, but we blame God for punishing the sinners on Bourbon Street.
Well, a couple things:
"Invisible" does not equal "non-physical." Radio waves, the whole EM spectrum actually, the strong and weak nuclear forces, etc., are all part of the physicalist explanation of the world. These just are properties of physical things. It was Einstein, of course, who came up with the equation that tells us just how matter (what you may be thinking of as "physical" stuff) converts to energy, which is also physical stuff. All of these things are part of and interact with the rest of the physical world, and are including in our scientific theories about the physical world. Our inability to see or touch something is not what makes it nonphysical.
So, to be clearer, my claim isn't that there is no such thing as momentum in sports, but rather that every instance of some kind of complex group-psychological phenomena called a "change in momentum" is identical to some physical process, and isn't in any meaningful way "over and above" or "in addition to" that physical process. Rather, it is only a matter of the level of explanation at which we're speaking. So, in reference to a football game, I'm not going to give some kind of story about the microphysical stuff going on at the time, because this isn't the info you're looking for. But, in another sense, that football game just is that microphysical stuff (atoms moving, forces interacting, etc). Now I don't think that giving you the microphysical story will necessarily give you any information about a football game: different levels of explanation can be quite independent of each other, and we can't necessarily get (derive) a higher level explanation ("change-in-momentum") from a lower ("atoms-moving-about"). But this doesn't mean that there is anything spooky or magical happening, anything that would lead us to need a second fundamental kind of stuff (apart from physical stuff, which includes matter, energy, maybe super-strings, whatever) to explain it.
Chi is more the kind of thing I think I'm eliminating here. I see talk about Chi as a kind of theory about what's going on when the martial artist practices and focuses in certain ways. I would argue that it is a mistaken theory, since inasmuch as Chi is purported to be some fundamentally non-physical type of "energy" (I use the word loosely here), it seems impossible that it could interact with anything physical (by means of the physical forces, for instance). This doesn't mean talk about "Chi" is utter nonsense, but it does indicate that there is a better explanation of what's going on, since really it seems that Chi can't be an explanation for anything in the physical world. Neither, for that matter, can some immaterial spirit be a part of any explanation, because it can't be a causal factor in anything that happens in this world. If you want to say, "Well, it's my spirit that feels sad and happy and such," that's fine, but now you've commited to saying that your emotions, since they're fundamentally non-physical, cannot affect your actions in the physical world, which has repercussions for notions of moral responsibility, etc.
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