Hate Mail

If you can't explain the mind that thinks up materialism with materialism, it not only sort of refutes the validity of materialism, it obliterates it.  Unless you can answer the first of those questions, the argument might continue but the side supporting materialism - even if you call it "naturalism" or "physicalism" or any of the other names for the failed ideology - hasn't even made it to the starting line. 

I find it so telling that scientists as astute as Gould and Lewontin still hold with an ideology that is so incompetent and have to believe that it is believed because they want it to be so and not due to any merit contained in it.  

But I don't, for a second believe that supporting materialism is the real goal of such people, I don't think they really care about that.  Never mind the likes of Sean Carroll, Jerry Coyne and Steven Weinberg.   

I think that arguing for materialism is a weapon against religion and, as I think is fairly obvious, a rather desperately reached for, ineffective weapon.  Its success depends not on such mid-brow followers thinking it through but on not thinking about it hard at all.  I think that resort is made, not because they like materialism, it is because they dislike religion, in most cases, in the modern era, Christianity.*  And that effort saturates the retrospective life sciences, the alleged scientific study of minds and behavior and other such fields as those in theoretical physics where actual observation is not possible.  It is present in the actual scientific literature as a subtext in a way that such scientists go all paranoid over the merest possible, not even expressed inkling that things like the Big Bang and the fine-tuning of the universe imply a conscious creator, railing against such science in Nature magazine, for the love of Mike.   The do that because they get away with murder in that regard on behalf of atheist-materialism all the time.  Read the passage from Haeckel's The History of Creation - a scientific text cited many times by scientists as science, including Darwin. 

I would now expect such an effort to take advantage of any proposed area of scientific study in which observation, measurement and analyses of actual data that derives from actual observation is impossible.  Such fields as cosmology and evolutionary biology and such ideological speculation as string-M theory and multiverse stuff will be largely motivated by the desire of atheists to confirm atheism by misguided attempts to use science to attack religion.  As I noted the other day in pointing out how the claims that Darwinism had disposed of a teleological view of life had, in fact, made arguments that reinforce the legitimate belief in a probability of intelligent design.  They have to pretend they're doing what they're not to even make their arguments.  I would say that's pretty much a sure sign that they've got nothing. 

*  Though I would not think it is the motive of lefties like Lewontin and Gould, I think it is the radical egalitarianism of The Law, the Prophets and the Gospels that are the first motives in the long campaign in the modern era against Christianity, the predominant carrier of that egalitarianism in the West.  Science, academic study is a human activity carried out by humans with their own interests at heart, what they do will be informed by what they want for themselves as much as anything else. 

 I think the form of that which is found in Marx is especially confused because it pretends to promote social egalitarianism even as its application turns out to be just another form of gangsterism and the materialism of Marx provides no intellectual support for the legitimacy of any morality.  

What the Marxists with power have done in a highly concentrated way is to reproduce the scandalous history of nominal Christianity gaining worldly power, starting in the time of Constantine, and proving the rightness of Jesus proclaiming that he had no worldly kingdom - the scandal of Christianity with political and economic power has given its enemies, atheist or religious, enormous propaganda value.  

Unlike Marxism, though, every act of evil that can be charged against Christians  can be proved to be at odds with the ultimate authority of what constitutes the religion of Jesus and his early movement.  You cannot do evil by doing unto others what you would have them do unto you, loving your enemies and praying for those who hurt you, forgiving debts, turning the other cheek. etc.   You can't say the same thing about, for example, the eugenic-genocide that comes with Darwinism because Darwin, himself, said that such genocides would be beneficial for the health of the survivor-murderers.  He, himself, in letters endorsed imperial genocide as a boon for the future of the world.