Materialism, then, is a metaphysics of the rejection of metaphysics. It is an of faith-assumption that nature is a closed system whose every feature is caused by and explainable by matter alone, and that nothing exists beyond the physical order. Naturalism is a picture of the whole of reality that cannot, according to its own intrinsic premises, address the being of the whole; it is a transcendental certainty of the impossibility of transcendental truth, and so requires an act of pure credence logically immune to any verification… Naturalism’s claim that, by confining itself to purely material explanations for all things, it adheres to the only sure path of verifiable knowledge is nothing but a feat of sublimely circular thinking: physics explains everything, which we know because anything physics cannot explain does not exist, which we know because whatever exists must be explicable by physics, which we know because physics explains everything.