Thursday, March 30, 2017

Objectivity Is A Myth


The assertions from atheists that I answered yesterday occupied a lot of my free time yesterday.  For an ideological bunch who rail endlessly against "Cartesian dualism" they are mighty hell-bent on dividing things into dualisms, the one on display in the comments that motivated my post some of the most cherished delusions of atheists, today.

Atheists love to claim "reason, logic, science, objectivity" etc and ascribe what they assert are the opposites of those, mostly dealing with emotion, irrationality, subjectivity, superstition and subjectivity, to non-atheists.  Their methods of doing that are the same methods anyone who wants to set up a self-serving, dishonest dualism will use to do that, depending on superficial,  ignorant, paranoid and dishonest narratives designed to serve their ends - the opposite of their self-asserted, self-serving "objectivity".  

As can be heard in the "Bar Theology" discussion posted above, religious figures are far more likely to encounter the contradictions of such dualist conveniences than you are likely to hear atheists admit to.

I think anyone who wants to divide human minds and humanity in such a way is best suspected of having dishonest motives.   I doubt there is such a thing as "objectivity" or "reason" or even "logic" which can be distilled, sublimated, crystallized, etc. from the rest of the contents of the same minds that emote, narrate, twist facts, etc. in service to the desires of those minds.   The crude and far from perfect methods of doing formally and socially that in formal science are certainly not very effective in all but the rarest of cases.   As always, I would recommend you look at Retraction Watch and other watchdog groups that track the lapses of those methods within successfully published and asserted, cited and quoted science.  If they can't even do a better job of doing that within science, with all its safeguards, atheists who turn science into scientism are sure as hell not going to do it in their ideological assertions.  The social sciences, by the way, probably the least successful in following the idealized methods of science, are full to the top of such lapses, inserting ideological desires within the formal literature of their fields.  I am coming to believe that even biology has a real problem with that as, obviously, do cosmology, neuro-cognitive science.   I think those three, these days, are largely governed by such ideological motivation.

If scientists want to get away from that, they'd better consider the fact that they and their colleagues, in their professional work, are as fully human as theologians or artists and they are continually giving in to their own ideological and professional desires as anyone.

2 comments:

  1. Frankly, the atheists in internet comments or "professional", wouldn't make it through a Freshman philosophy course.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I just had to break the sad news to "Skeptic Tank" and one of his fellow trolls that they both lacked the things it would take to make me feel condescended to so they shouldn't bother trying.

    Really, the intellectual level of even PhD'd atheists is about as wedded to superficiality and ignorance as the fundamentalists they love to believe they're superior to. I suppose I should thank Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens and their ilk for leading me to that conclusion, not to mention their even less capable fellow atheists. It was through them I went back and looked at Russell, Ingraham, Huxley, Voltaire, etc. and found that they were a lot less impressive than I took them to be in my adolescent foolishness.

    ReplyDelete