NeoExistence Institute

Author Neo Israel

Contemporary scientific discourse frequently asserts that “everything is physical,” a claim often associated—explicitly or implicitly—with scientific naturalism (e.g., Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion). While typically intended to reject supernatural explanations, this formulation suffers from conceptual ambiguity and outdated metaphysical assumptions. The term physical, as commonly used, lacks the precision required to coherently describe modern scientific reality.
In its everyday sense, physical implies materiality, solidity, perceptibility, or objecthood. Yet contemporary physics no longer describes reality primarily in these terms. Fundamental entities are modeled as fields, interactions, probabilistic amplitudes, and relational structures rather than solid objects. Even atoms—often treated as paradigmatically physical—are emergent, stable patterns of interaction among subatomic constituents. Molecules, compounds, and macroscopic states (such as liquids and gases) exhibit properties irreducible to their components. Emergence, not material substance, is the dominant organizing principle across the sciences.
This observation undermines any definition of the physical that equates reality with fundamental, material, or non-emergent entities. If such criteria were applied consistently, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, and the social sciences would be rendered ontologically suspect—an untenable conclusion. Emergent phenomena are not less real than their components; they are real at different levels of organization, governed by their own lawful regularities.
The same reasoning extends beyond the natural sciences. Minds, meanings, social institutions, economic systems, and cultural norms are emergent structures arising from interacting agents. They are causally efficacious, empirically tractable, and indispensable to explanation, yet they are not “physical” in any commonsense or material sense. Conflating emergence with unreality reflects a category error: ontological dependence does not imply ontological reducibility.
What proponents of scientific naturalism typically intend, therefore, is not a commitment to reductive physicalism, but a rejection of supernatural entities and interventions. A more accurate formulation would be that all real phenomena are natural, law-governed, and embedded within a continuous causal order, even when they arise at higher, irreducible levels of organization.
The NeoExistence Institute adopts this refined naturalistic framework. We reject both supernaturalism and crude materialism, favoring instead an emergent, multi-level ontology in which physical, biological, psychological, and social phenomena are understood as distinct but interdependent domains of explanation. Precision in language is not a semantic luxury; it is a prerequisite for coherent inquiry into consciousness, society, technology, and the future of human existence.