It doesn't make the slightest difference if you don't like what I said, yesterday. If you want to hold that everything that is real conforms to the requirements of physical law and is the result of material substances or objects randomly combining with each other according to the present physical conditions at the time that happens, everything must conform to that system and nothing can have any more significance than anything else.
You can't debunk the status of minds in such matters as free choice without your debunking effort also applying, equally to all of human thought, including those thoughts you hold sacred, science, mathematics, even logic.
If free will and free thought are illusions masking merely physical combinations of molecules under randomly present conditions then your debunkery applies equally to all of those other aspects of our minds, literally, they can't be any more true than any other event in the physical universe. Your most cherished finding of science has exactly the same status in regard to truth as burning a piece of toast or the product of the chain of physical causation that produced Young Earth Creationism. Under materialism the physical causation that produced a Klansman has exactly the same truth value as that which produced a dedicated advocate for total equality. Rush Limbaugh's mind has the same truth status as that of Bill Moyers under materialism, none. That one group of minds were formed to believe Limbaugh and others were formed to believe Moyers is no different from one collection of water molecules forming into a puddle of water and another group into a sheet of ice.
Unless you can come up with a logically coherent case that your ideological system doesn't force that logical conclusion - and it can't be done - you have to accept that your ideology destroys the idea that truth is more than merely an illusion as much as you would like the idea of free choice to be, and if that is the case then your entire ideology and its entire base in science is as much an illusion, the acceptance of which is based in what your particular chemical components produce as an illusion of your own preference. It could not possibly have any more truth than what my chemistry produces in my brain. Yours is the ideology that has to be false in order for it to be true, the same if you want to dodge the label and call it "physicalism" or "naturalism" which would, as well, be merely illusions of coherent truth when they were just determined outcomes of random physical events acting on randomly assembled molecules.
Tell me how your ideology can escape itself.
They don't want to *explore*- let alone escape- what they think- they want to *celebrate* it- which is where *every* ideology goes off the rails
ReplyDeleteI think they just want uncritical, unconditional acceptance of their logical disconnect. Which is funny because, despite the enormous literature of questioning and criticism on just about every single point in theology, that's what they accuse religion of. And that's after they've declared they don't need to read the literature because theology is declared, unread, as bunk.
ReplyDeleteI have to conclude as others have that contemporary theology is a lot more interesting than contemporary philosophy because so much of contemporary philosophy, as cosmology and other topics in science, has turned to propping up materialist-scientistic- atheism instead of questioning its basic assumptions and what those imply for the rest of human culture and what would come about if its assumptions became a general rule for living.