Is Materialism, as a view of reality, justified on rational and empirical ground? Support your answer with reasoning.

Materialism is the name given to a family of doctrines concerning the nature of the world that give to matter a primary position and accord to mind (or spirit) a secondary, dependent reality or even none at all. Extreme materialism asserts that the real world is spatiotemporal and consists of material things and nothing else, with two important qualifications: first, space and time, or space-time, must also be included if these are realities rather than mere systems of relations, for they are not material things in any straightforward sense.

Second, materialism is fundamentally a doctrine concerning the character of the concrete natural world we inhabit, and it is probably best to set to one side controversies over abstract entities such as numbers, or geometric figures, or the relations of entailment and contradiction studied in logic. A strictly extreme materialism would undertake to show that, to the extent that any of these were genuine realities, they are all material in nature, but the issues raised by abstract entities will not be pursued here. It is with extreme materialist views in the concrete realm that this entry is concerned, and in what follows, “materialist” is to be understood in that sense.

Philosophers and scientists have had various views regarding the constitution and behavior of material objects and over whether every material thing is a body, or whether forces, or waves, or fields of force are also realities in their own right. Thus, the cardinal tenet of materialism, “Everything that is, is material,” covers a range of different claims.

To accommodate these differences, a material thing can be defined as a being possessing many physical properties and no other properties, or as being made up of parts all of whose properties are physical. The physical properties are position in space and time, size, shape, duration, mass, velocity, solidity, inertia, electric charge, spin, rigidity, temperature, hardness, magnetic field intensity, and the like. The phrase “and the like” is important, for it indicates that any list of physical properties is open-ended….