To your point above, and in acknowledgement to the materialists, their philosophy isn't necessarily wrong, but incomplete. Scientific tactics seem to usefully and appropriately describe many if not all aspects of the physical part of the universe, but it's the extrapolation that "because this approach is useful it must be the only approach" and the concomitant dismissal of the spiritual aspect of the universe I find...presumptuous, at best. Funnily, the scientific understanding of the scale of the universe and time and our place in it otherwise act (or should act!) as an effective check on our hubris...but maybe not in all cases. :)

There are indeed some parts of these ancient tracts (Timaeus is another one) where the writers seem to be plainly trying to describe physical phenomena and confounding spiritual things with physical processes that we understand differently today thanks to observation and more rigorous reasoning. But none of these tracts, so far as I understand them, profess to be infallible, and in some cases the conjectures read well if taken in a metaphorical (rather than literal) context.

Axé,
Fra' Lupo