Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
I felt the same way at about 25. After thinking about things a bit, and reading some of the history of materialist thought and argument through the last couple of centuries, it became clearer to me that physicalism is limited. It doesn't explain where the universe came from, and it assumes away the possibility of non-material, super-natural entities or phenomena as an axiom rather than proving that such things don't exist. Likewise the behaviourists 'solved' the hard problem of consciousness fifty years ago by decreeing that consciousness didn't exist - since it was not scientifically measurable, it would be presumed not to exist by fiat.
The materialism that we grew up with is a set of assumptions, axioms. Occam's razor, Betrand Russel's teapot. As a belief system it's perfectly acceptable, it holds together, but it's one among many and cannot be proved to be true, nor disprove its rivals. Believing in physicalism, in materialism, is a choice not an inevitability. And once I realised that I had the ability to make that choice, I decided to use it. I cannot prove that Christianity is true, but I decided to hope that it was, and to act as if it was.
Now, I don't know if that gives me the comfort that you're looking for. It is very difficult, maybe impossible, to grow up a materialist, and live in a materialist society, and not have the tenets of materialism burned into you at a fundamental level. I know perfectly well that I can't prove my current beliefs any more than I can prove materialism, and they may well be wrong. But I choose to try and believe, and I find it helps a bit.
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