Even those who profess to belong to this or that religious tradition or denomination are often crypto-materialists whose religious beliefs are only a thin veneer that they display whenever convenient. Beneath they are agnostics or cynics who, when push comes to shove, turn to scientific materialistic rather than religious doctrines for solace, hope, and meaningful explanations. While religious provincialism has a long history, as part of the exoteric culture surrounding the esoteric core of a spiritual tradition, scientific materialism is comparatively young. For generations, scientific progress has been hailed as the alpha and omega of human evolution. Yet, over the course of the last three centuries, science has so bedazzled the ordinary citizen that its practitioners have in many respects become the new priesthood.
Scientific materialism is the ideology of one-dimensional metaphysics crafted onto science itself.
It is a deliberate distortion of science, which is first and foremost a method and certainly not a philosophy of life. Science is a means of understanding the universe in its parts. As it is practiced today, it is even a very limited means, which can give us partially meaningful answers to only some of our questions about specific aspects of existence. It clearly has no spiritual function. Science has been called the Western form of Yoga, but this is misleading.