Wonder and awe are well and good, and certainly the world is awe-inspiring and wonderful. And certainly, the deepening of our understanding of it is can lead us

Wonder and awe are well and good, and certainly the world is awe-inspiring and wonderful. And certainly, the deepening of our understanding of it is can lead us to marvel at it. However, the problem with the article is that it doesn't really get into the meat of the matter of mechanistic materialism. Mechanism is a metaphysical position that we often today take for granted and do so unthinkingly and tacitly, that is to say, without recognizing it for the metaphysical position that it is. As a result, it is confused with empirical science as such. To make matters worse, there are very serious problems with the mechanistic view of nature, and despite our tacit acceptance of it, the destructive consequences of a consistently held mechanism evade us. It is important to remember that when explaining a fact, it is important not to negate the fact in the process of explaining it. To do so would result not in an explanation, but something else. That something else may be useful, but explanations are not first and foremost about being useful. An explanation is about accounting completely for the causes of a fact as it actually is. The mechanistic philosophy, in construing the world and things within it as machines, destroys whole classes of facts, not least of all because what machines are is observer-relative. Their components are arranged according to human ends that are extrinsic to the machine itself and not according to some intrinsic tendency of the machine. Thus, to construe all of reality in mechanistic terms necessarily forces us to make these broad denials. Furthermore, these human ends (as well as the awe, wonder, experience of mystery and whatever else the author invokes and beyond) are facts which must themselves be accounted for. A mechanistic materialist, when confronted with these facts, is left to either deny their existence (eliminativism), posit a non-mechanistic mind-or-something-else where these facts exist (dualism and its variations) or to reject mechanism. While we need not resort to mental phenomena to criticize mechanism and reductionism, perhaps nowhere else is it made more obvious how defective mechanism is as a metaphysical position. Since Descartes, mechanists either swept broad classes of facts under the rug of the res cogitans or attributed them to God (think Paley). Mechanistic materialism, having denied both the res cogitans and God, is left to deal with these facts on mechanistic terms. Unfortunately, mechanistic methods are here in principle incapable of explaining them, at least not completely. Ultimately, mechanistic materialism must be rejected in favor of a richer metaphysics.