I occasionally encounter the argument that "everything around us can't all just be matter -- protons, electrons, neutrons, and so on, all the constituents of physics. The world around us is too rich and wonderful and mysterious, there must be something more, something transcendent!"

This is sometimes styled as an "argument against materialism". I've heard (slightly!) dressed up versions of this argument from usually very thoughtful people. The immediate case stimulating this note is Charles Taylor in his wonderful book, "A Secular Age". But others make similar arguments.

The argument bothers me. It seems to me that they're arguing against a straw man, a version of materialism that no-one believes. And in so doing they fail to engage a much stronger set of ideas.

I think most of the error is in the "just" in "can't all just be matter".

It's very much like arguing that the text of a book can't "just" be punctuation and the letters of the alphabet; that what books can do is so much richer and more wonderful, more full of meaning and mystery, that it can't merely be made up of a few banal symbols.

And yet, of course, "Taaaaaaaaaaabbbbbddddeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeefffffgggghhhhhhhiiiiiiiiklllmmmnnnnnnnnnnnnooooooooooooooooooppqrrrrrrrrrrrsssssssssssssttttttttttttttttttuuuuuuwwy',,,.: " is meaningless gibberish, whereas: "To be, or not to be, that is the question: whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them." is one of the more famous and, many find, meaningful lines in literature.

The only difference between the two strings of characters is in the pattern of arrangement. But that pattern matters, since the meaning lies not merely in the constituents, but also in their relationship. I'm reminded of Douglas Adams describing the task of a novelist as "putting 80,000 words in a cunning order". Figuring out the order is the difficult and meaningful part.