Thank you, this makes a lot of sense. I do see how the history of science kind of narrows its way down towards materialism, and if we assume that path will continue in the same direction, pure materialism is the logical outcome.
But...
I disagree with the narrative that science is narrowing in on materialism. Popular culture certainly interprets the message of Science with a capital S that way, but reading actual scientific work doesn't leave that impression at all.
The message I got from my middle school science classes was that science is profoundly uncertain of what matter is, but that it appears to manifest probabilistically under the governance of forces, which are really just measurable tendencies of the behavior of matter, whose origin we also have no guess at.
The spiritualists were wrong in their specific guesses, but so were the scientists, who as you note when citing Aristotle.
I have no doubt you will be on the right side of history. The priesthood will change the definitions of matter to accommodate whatever spiritual magic we discover next. Past scriptures will be reinterpreted to show how science was always progressing here, the present is the logical endpoint of the past, or at least, of our team in the past.
So far we've got a perfect record of everybody clamoring for the first option and then things turning out to be the second one.
That's because materialists write the record. It's easy to construct History to serve Ideology, so history, at least not epic narrative history like this, is a bad teacher when received from power. Primitive pagan mythology stumbled ignorantly towards the True Religion, or even the inverse of your claim, history is full of self-sure clockwork Newtonians eating crow when the bizarre, uncertain nature of modern physics slowly unraveled before their arrogant, annoyed eyes.
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Thanks again for taking the time to discuss this btw, your response answered my question very well. After all, I'm arguing about whether people should be materialists, but you only explained why they are, so feel free to ignore my ramblings and accept my gratitude :)
A funny thing happens with woo sometimes, in the rationality community. There's a frame that says: this is a mix of figurative stuff and dumb stuff, let's try to figure out what the figurative stuff is pointing at and salvage it. Let's call this "salvage epistemology". Unambiguous examples include the rationality community's engagement with religions, cold-reading professions like psychics, bodywork, and chaos magic. Ambiguous examples include intensive meditation, Circling, and many uses of psychedelics.
The salvage epistemology frame got locally popular in parts of the rationality community for awhile. And this is a basically fine thing to do, in a context where you have hyper-analytical programmers who are not at risk of buying into the crazy, but who do need a lens that will weaken their perceptual filters around social dynamics, body language, and muscle tension.
But there's a bad thing happens when you have a group that are culturally adjacent to the hyper-analytical programmers, but who aren't that sort of person themselves. They can't, or shouldn't, take for granted that they're not at risk of falling into the crazy. For them, salvage epistemology disarms an important piece of their immune system.
I think salvage epistemology is infohazardous to a subset of people, and we should use it less, disclaim it more, and be careful to notice when it's leading people in over their heads.