Back about four years ago there was an eruption in the long tantrum that the new atheism has been when one of their own, Thomas Nagel, published his book Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. The tantrum, expressed in many book reviews of varying degrees of anger and poses of hauteur, was almost as interesting as any of the ideas in the book because it was such a good example of how these would-be men of hard science, really, when you sweep away the pretense, are as emotionally invested in their ideology as any other fundamentalist. When you add in the professional, financial and social status gained and maintained by holding what is the hegemonic elite ideology and what any endangerment of that status questioning it would hold, the rage is as cynical and calculating as that of any of the worst late-Renaissance papacies. I have noticed that a number of the big figures in atheist orthodoxy are scientists, a number of them working in the highest status theoretical side of science, some of those having been freed by academic license to not deal with the tedious and vulgar observation of nature, who have a huge amount invested in the supremacy of the physical universe as either described or speculated on by people paid money to do that. But they're hardly alone. There is something to be gained from adherence to orthodox atheism, if only in the social status of not being a faith-head, the smug assurance that you are superior to the ignorant masses of humanity who lack the strength of character and intellect to face the hard reality of materialism.
I don't think the complex of character traits and social interactions explaining atheist fundamentalism is investigated nearly enough.
That is common among those who work in journalism, which automatically promotes that materialism and the views of the world, our species and society which they learned right thinking people held when they were in college. Either that or, just as they know they can gain status by elevating the status of the vulgar materialists of right-wing Republicans or at least avoid being shoved aside if they don't report stenographically what they get from them. I really don't think the promotion of hoity-toity, academic materialism is all that different from the promotion of its vulgar wing in Republican Mammonism and I think that the professional advantage gained by doing both is a very present motivation in our media. At the very least reporters, editors, publishers and even columnists know that there is a price to be paid if you promote the opposite, at least in the world that the reputable, elite scribblers and babblers travel in or hope to travel in.
All of this is a long introduction to another in my periodic issues of challenges to atheists.
How can the materialists' brain-only model of the mind could build just the right structure to embody just the right information to comprise an idea before that information and idea could exist in the brain because it hadn't been made yet? How does the brain know how to do that and manage to do it in the extremely short time period in which we experience the thinking of new ideas, sometimes extremely novel ideas, sometimes ideas for which there is no physical existence? The mechanism must work in real time, not make-believe time or it is not credible. I have been asking that question here and in other places for more than a year and other than having the magic formulas of "natural selection" thrown at it without any explanation of that citation, the atheists have come up with nothing.
Try as they might to ignore such problems, Thomas Nagel, rightly, noted that if materialism couldn't deal with the experience of consciousness then it could not be either true or a valid framework for thinking about the universe. And if that's the case then the entire edifice of "the materialist neo-Darwinist conception of nature" is wrong and maintaining it is rank superstition and, certainly, a hindrance to furthering knowledge of the real universe. With that goes the inevitable conclusion that the high-priesthood of academic atheism in the past, that establishment which still holds hegemonic control of universities and colleges and sway among those so trained are no more enlightened than any chosen group of benighted people that those atheistic folk choose to look down on, ridicule and mock. It could be hoped that the record of the many and horrific sins of such people chalked up in the last few centuries would be investigated to see the relationship between those their logical motivation and the ideology of reducing people, animals and other living things to the status of inanimate objects having no rights anyone needed to take as more than a mere social convention. In that atheism has a far stronger burden of guilt because, unlike Christianity, Judaism or Islam, any such sins were in accord with materialist atheism while they were a violation of the commandments of those despised religions. You cannot both follow Jesus and do what he condemned and refusing to do what he said to do, you are being bad at being a Christian if you kill, oppress, enslave or fail to treat even your enemies and the most outcast of the "undeserving destitute" among you well. You could kill all of them in the name of economic efficiency or even just because it makes you feel good if you're a materialist and you would be violating nothing in materialism as you did. You would certainly be acting in accord with natural selection to do that, as a number of the champion murderers of the 20th century held they were doing. Natural selection is all about the stronger killing off the weak in a struggle for existence, no matter how many times it's tried to turn into something else.
Materialism really is a different and far more dangerous ideology because, as so many of its better thinkers concluded, it led to the inevitable dismissal of moral constraint. There really is nothing to keep someone so inclined from doing whatever they want except a calculation that they will likely not get away with it and that they might pay a price that is higher than the satisfaction of doing the most appalling things. Relying on social conventions and the otiosity displayed by a majority of academics has not proven to be any kind of reliable constraint on even the most genteel of them. If there is a lesson in the monumentally murderous regimes of the 20th century, most of them quite motivated by their understanding of science and thoroughly materialistic, either in the elite or the vulgar expressions of it, it is that people are quite able to go home from a hard day of killing people, of creating weapons of mass destruction, of consigning entire ethnic or other groups to the kill list and live rather perfumed, conventionally estimable lives.
No comments:
Post a Comment