Hate Mail

Remember, I was the one who said I didn't believe natural selection to be more than an application of the thinking behind the British class system and Malthusian class-based economic theory as a supposed universal explanation of evolution.  I think evolution is too big a thing to squeeze into the thinking of a small number of Brit and German aristocrats of the mid-19th century.  I doubt it will ever have an adequate, single explanation.  I suspect it might have millions of different explanations for individual cases among the trillions and trillions of organisms whose lives and reproductive lives have resulted in the present (alas, rapidly becoming former) abundant variety of life.  I doubt any real understanding of evolution will happen until Darwinism is thrown into that large and not to be discussed boneyard of discontinued science, into which evolutionary biology has heaped so many carcasses.  But that pile is dwarfed by the one that the alleged sciences of minds and behavior have thrown in to it.  Almost all of those under some scheme of materialist explanation of minds, many in the alleged context of natural selection.   I suspect Evolutionary Psychology is going to fill an entire section, alone.

You do not seem to understand that I'm not under any obligation to come up with an explanation of how minds arise - whatever that means in this very unknowable context - in order to point out that natural selection without divine intent or at least the transcendence of material causation can have no effect but to undermine the reliability of human and animal thinking.  Your claim that I have that obligation is certainly not the way science is supposed to work, disconfirmation of any experiment or proof doesn't fail if the person finding the problem with a hypothesis cannot solve the problem, themselves.  Science would not be capable of advancement except in the rarest of cases if that were required. 


I can point out the problem with materialist-determinism of our minds without having to come to any alternative story-line as to how minds came into being. 

And, considering the universally destructive aspects of materialistic doctrine as they impact the products of our minds, noting that the degradation and debunking of human minds applies equally to their thinking that produced their position.   They don't get to escape the consequences of their own doctrine, their thoughts are as debased if their belief which produced it is true.  

ALL MATERIALIST DETERMINISTIC IDEOLOGICAL POSITIONS, THE DARWINISTIC RELIANCE ON UNGUIDED NATURAL SELECTION, TO THE IDIOTIC POSITION OF ELIMINATIVE MATERAILISM OR THE MOST AMBITIOUS ONES SUCH AS MARXISM DESTROY THE POSSIBILITY OF OUR MINDS BEING CAPABLE OF ANY TRANSCENDENT FACULTIES SUCH AS DETERMINING TRUTH, MORALITY AND ALL OTHER SUCH TRANSCENDENTAL QUALITIES NOT PRESENT IN PHYSICAL MATTER AND ENERGY. Those transcendent qualities are not present in material objects.*

Any materialist who wants to retain a belief that their most cherished beliefs have any such transcendent character or value is either too lazy or stupid or emotionally unable to follow their beliefs to their necessary conclusions, that their beliefs fall under the same nihilistic program of denial they reserve for those ideas and things they despise.  

If you want to understand how Trump and his allegedly Christian supporters can throw aside the distinction between truth and lies, replacing sadistic cruelty for kindness, for raising up a crooked, self-indulgent, adulterous, thieving, treasonous Mammonist pagan as their man-god - following the word of Trump as they claim to follow the entirely opposite word of Jesus, it's kind of the vulgar materialist equivalent of what academic atheist materialists do all the time.  They live with a total lack of integrity based on what they like instead of what they claim to believe in.  They isolate islands of exception when the monistic nature of their materialism, in order to be valid, can have no possibility of such islands of exception, it is a relentlessly ruthless ideological position based in an emotional solipsism of denial.  While you can point to the contented and placidly otiose members of the scribbling classes and of university faculties who don't wish to exert themselves in a pursuit of more material acquisition and ruthless power seeking (at least until someone else's pursuit of it interferes with their placid comfortable existence) they are atypical of materialists, many of whom of the vulgar variety probably don't even realize they are materialists.  Materialism is quite able to function, fully, in total ignorance, it is not, basically, a product of deep intellectual activity unrelated to personal preference. 

Small draughts of philosophy lead to atheism but longer draughts bring one back to God.
Luigi Galvani

* I anticipate someone might bring up the use of the words "true"-"false" in computer science but those are just human labels that in that context have no transcendent quality.  It was unfortunate that they used those terms because people, some of them very eminent scientists, once a label is chosen seem to believe that the thing they're talking about in the vastly simplified sphere of their science have the same meaning outside of it.   They could have used "yes"-"no" "vanilla"-"chocolate" "paper"-"plastic" "boxers"-"briefs" to mean the same things they use "true" and "false" for.  Any transcendent quality that is inserted into it is put there by human understanding or, more likely, nothing more than human intention.  It is not related to the transcendent quality of some idea being true and many others being false in real life. 

The current and rather desperate fashion of panpsychism that attributes "consciousness" to non-living physical matter requires a similar change in meaning of the word "consciousness" which makes such an attribution absurd, especially when proposing it as an explanation of animal-human consciousness.  It only seems to move the materialist case forward by pretending that the two very different "things" proposed mean the same thing.  It in no way moves forward the attempt to explain how "lower forms of consciousness" turn into what human beings experience, it merely, in the most childish way possible, attributes consciousness to atoms and electrons in the way that very young children attribute it to teddy bears and dolls.  What I see in panpsychism is desperation of a failed ideology and an exposure of the delusional arrogance which forms the emotional basis of all scientistic-materialistic-atheism.