A second time within one week I am required to point out to the same group of scoffers that when I wrote a sentence, this one:
You have to wonder how any two people could ever have the same
laws of science in their brain, how that could remain in existence as a
uniform entity in different forms for even a minute.
I was addressing problems with an idea I rejected, not promoting its consequences. And also lost on these conceited materialists, it was not with an idea that I accepted and promoted but an idea I've been in the process of demolishing for the past year, the same group mocking my rejection of an idea which is, in fact, theirs, the materialist-atheist "brain-only" mind.
They love the idea that the mind is a material thing, the structures in the brain, because, in their formulation, not mine, they believe such a mind model is necessary to get atheism past the "hard problem" of the mind. They don't, though, have much interest in the consequences and implications of their brain-dead, brain-only model. In fact, they just hate it when someone thinks some of those through to their necessary results.
For anyone who doesn't buy that illogical model the mind is a mystery, it isn't a hard problem for science. If you believe in a non-material mind then that removes it from the bailiwick of science which is equipped to only study physical entities. The official scientific study of the mind has been ongoing for at least a century and a half, with enormous numbers of people granted degrees in science and with enormous funding, especially in the period after World War Two, the results are pathetically unimpressive, the relevant sciences some of the most shoddy, slip shod and fraudulent of those still denominated as science*. And, quite early in that quixotic quest, not being able to find the mind with the methods of science, it was declared to not be real, to be an illusion and, in its equivalent today, to be a mere epiphenoenon of physical structures determined by physical causation.
However, it helps if someone championing science is able to navigate the implications of their methods, or at least be aware of what the subject matter of science is. I am aware that several of those who have scoffed during this series have been people who purportedly work in science but who seemed entirely unaware of so much as the boundaries within which it can possibly work.
The extent to which the conceit of scientism produced the brain-dead brain-only model is an interesting problem,
itself, one knowable, not through science but through an examination of
the declarations of those who invented it. I might get around to that
historical research one day. Scientism, by the way excludes anything which can't be studied scientifically from being knowable or, in its most widely spread popular version, possibly existing. How that fits into the astonishing frequency of materialists declaring that the mind, even consciousness, itself is an illusion - as they use their minds to make that declaration - is another fascinating study. It is only one of the reasons that materialism is the most decadent ideology currently held by large numbers of people credentialed as being educated.
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History, especially recent history, by the way, is often able to produce much more precise knowledge about far more complex phenomena than science can. I can point out that, at times, when someone attempts to debunk the hardest of hard knowledge of history with alleged science the results can quickly turn into the kind of pseudo-science practiced by the Holocaust denier and phony engineer, Fred Leuchter. Ironically, Leuchter has a bachelors degree in History from Boston University, he has none in any science nor in engineering. Perhaps he found that the standards of history proving the Holocaust beyond any rational doubt were so definitive that he felt he had to turn himself into an imaginary engineer using "science" to deny that massive confirmation of that historical fact. His creation of himself as an engineer was accepted by, first, the right-wing capital punishment establishement (the guy is seriously one of the most creepily disturbing characters of the end of the last century) and then, right-wing Holocaust denial and neo-Nazism. But Leuchter was only one of the sources of "scientific" obfuscation depended on by the Holocaust denier David Irving. Irving also depended on the officially accepted science of such guys as the Evolutionary Psychologist, Professor Kevin MacDonald of California State University, Long Branch.
The Evolutionary Psychology used by MacDonald and others, such as John Hartung** to produce reviewed, published "science" and supposedly expert papers and reviews of a nature useful to Holocaust Denial and related hate campaigns is a good example of how the standards and generalization accepted as science can, often, produce science which is useful to deny the most founded and reliable of historical fact, historical fact which has massive contemporary documentation, massive archeological confirmation in physical artifacts, the testimony of enormous numbers of contemporary witnesses, some of whom carried surgical scars, tattoos and other evidence on their living bodies. And, lest it be forgotten, evidence directly in the words of those who carried out the Holocaust.
I think, in light of that affair and the continuing position of such scientists within science, that it should be asked that science define its boundaries to prevent such abuse which is so liable to gull and seduce and deceive the naive and foolish and be useful to such "experts" who want to gull, seduce and deceive them. You would think that scientists would be concerned with such an abuse of the name, science, for such a purpose. I haven't noticed any signs of self-correction or reform on that count.
If you want to deny such "science" is science, it was reviewed by scientists, it didn't result in MacDonald being fired. He's retired as a professor and, I believe, still publishing stuff and, I believe, still retains his identity as a scientist. Fred Leuchter who, after his exposure as an engineering fraud and having a mere B.S. in History ended up working in a call center.
* For example, apparently 80% of university psychology programs still
teach the Rorschach test and a large majority of practitioners still use
that entirely pseudo-scientific "diagnostic" method. Not to mention
load of crap. Don't get me started on ethology.
** John Hartung is listed online as Professor of Anesthesiology at the State University of New York, with a Harvard granted degree in anthropology. Hartung's quasi-anti-semetic paper, Love Thy Neighbor: The Evolution of In- Group Morality, which, falsely claims that the Hebrew commandments requiring justice applied only to other Jews when the texts he extracted those commandments from extend their application to gentiles. His paper was cited favorably by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion and his argument is often used by atheists in their pseudo-historical invective against Jews and Christians. As Marilynne Robinson, in her review of The God Delusion pointed out:
Dawkins says, “I need to call attention to one particularly
unpalatable aspect of its [the Bible’s] ethical teaching. Christians
seldom realize that much of the moral consideration for others which is
apparently promoted by both the Old and New Testaments was originally
intended to apply only to a narrowly defined in-group. ‘Love thy
neighbor’ didn’t mean what we now think it means. It meant only ‘Love
another Jew.” As for the New Testament interpretation of the text,
“Hartung puts it more bluntly than I dare: ‘Jesus would have turned over
in his grave if he had known that Paul would be taking his plan to the
pigs.” Pigs being, of course, gentiles.
There are two major objections to be made to this reading. First, the
verse quoted here, Leviticus 19:18, does indeed begin, “You shall not
take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people,” language
that allows a narrow interpretation of the commandment. But Leviticus
19:33—34 says “When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall
not oppress the alien. . . . You shall love the alien as yourself.” In
light of these verses, it is wrong by Dawkins’s own standards to argue
that the ethos of the law does not imply moral consideration for others.
(It would be interesting to see the response to a proposal to display
this Mosaic law in our courthouses.) Second, Jesus provided a gloss on
19:18, the famous Parable of the Good Samaritan. With specific reference
to this verse, a lawyer asks Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus
tells a story that moves the lawyer to answer that the merciful
Samaritan—a non-Jew— embodies the word “neighbor.” That the question
would be posed to Jesus, or by Luke, is evidence that the meaning of the
law was not obvious or settled in antiquity. In general, Dawkins’s air
of genteel familiarity with Scripture, though becoming in one aware as
he is of its contributions to the arts, dissipates under the slightest
scrutiny.
Robinson follows with more criticism of Richard Dawkins abuse of history, abuse which, in the following years of reading the thoughts of online atheists, is ubiquitous among them. She also noted in the review that Hartung gave a positive review of one of Kevin MacDonald's more infamous and obviously anti-Semitic books. Such a record didn't lead to someone of Dawkins' scientific character viewing his declarations useful to him in his own hate campaign, which included Judaism, to be discredited. It wasn't the obvious anti-semetic content of his reviewed science that got his scientific colleagues to shun MacDonald instead of bestowing professional honors on him - he'd been the editor of more than one journal in his profession during that period - it was the bad publicity that he got from being associated with David Irving when he infamously lost the libel trial he brought against the eminent historian of the Holocaust, Deborah Lipstadt.
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