The human being can only be studied in the same way as the objects of hard science if the human being is only a material object, say like a lab mouse, or a tree, or a mineral. For the Atheist and Marxist this is not a problem, but for the religious it is – since man is understood to have a supernatural component.

-Actually, for any thinking atheist it should be a problem too. The fact that humanity is characterized by our shared uses of transcendent signs that have no material existence – words exist, in the material domain, only as letters or as sounds that the brain can associate in apprehending the transcendent sign – should throw into doubt any strictly materialist philosophy. One can bracket the question of whether God exists; but a serious student of the human sciences cannot argue away, as something unnecessary, the fact that humans are religious beings. Atheism is a form of religion too.