Materialism

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An historical world view regarded as an implication of the discoveries in science, materialism attributed to matter the status of the underlying constituent of nature, matter as material particles subject to fundamental forces that determined the shape, size, and motion of all objects in the natural world, and excluded any explanations of reality that could not be reduced to physics.

Materialism denies supernaturalism, in that it denies that independent spiritual or divine powers ever account for events, and that natural forces always explain events, even in instances where lack of knowledge precludes explanation (Joad 2005). It affirms determinism, in that it asserts that all events of the world result from preceding ones, and that knowledge of the state of the world at any given time can in principle predict the state of the world at a future time.