It is one of the things I've gotten out of my choice to confront the atheist fad of the 00s that it made me consider, carefully, the mockery and denigration of the human imagination and the logical conclusion that that mockery and denigration is done purely through the as arrogant as it is ignorant and superificial denial that those things the atheists claim to value the most, science, mathematics, logic, reason, are as fully dependent on the human act of imagination as every single other aspect of human culture and thought, whether for the bad or for the good.
An atheist troll wants to mock the title of Walter Brueggemann's great book that I'm going through slowly, The Prophetic Imagination because it contains the word "imagination". There was a time when I thought atheists tended to be smarter than the average person, that was before I encountered so many of them online and looked at the likes of James Randi, Richard Dawkins and Paul Kurtz and realized they tended to be, in fact, somewhat stupid.
Every act of human abstraction happens in the human imagination, it doesn't happen anywhere else. Every concept we hold about the objects of sense is an act of human imagination. We imagine that what we see before us is the thing as it is when that's certainly not true. Even the imaginative creation of machines to see frequencies of particles bouncing off of objects proves that we don't see everything that there is to it.
EVERY SINGLE LAW OF SCIENCE, EVERY PROOF OF MATHEMATICS, EVERY FORMULATION OF LOGIC IS A PRODUCT OF HUMAN IMAGINATION. As such, every imagined, articulated law is partial and deficient and liable to expansion or refutation.
Even when the most arrogant and presumptuous of scientists claim to have or will soon have a full understanding of even the smallest - we like to believe "simplest" objects in the universe - they are contradicting some of the most widely held beliefs about science that the 20th century provided us with. It's one of my weaknesses that I can't help but allude to what might have been my greatest hit online, getting one of the most arrogant ideologues of our time, Sean Carroll to admit that as a fact after 17 days of harassing him with the question that he so obviously didn't want to answer. He'd claimed that that quixotic goal of ideology masquerading as science, cosmology,* was on the cusp of having a theory of everything when the truth is, they don't have a theory of everything about even the most "simple" of objects that have fallen under the intensive study of legitimate science, physics. I don't think any rational person has any obligation to believe on faith that cosmologists have a theory of everything - that would be everything in the universe - until they had uniform agreement that they had a theory of everything about any one thing within the universe. I mean any single subatomic particle, say an electron, first. And that faith, as almost all faith in science held by virtually all laymen as well as the priesthood of science, is an act of faith based in the imaginations of those without the capacity to fact check, to understand the math and reasoning or to read the papers, both those making the claims and those reporting the replications which confirm the results (which are often never conducted). About things outside of their area of expertise, even great scientists are inevitably dependent on their sometimes misplaced faith in their colleagues and the formal bodies and journals of science.
I think one thing that I've also come to conclude about atheist materialism, especially in light of the ubiquitious denial by atheist, scientistic materialists that free thought is impossible because a mind capable of it could not fall within the material causation that their ideology demands everything does fall within, is the enemy of human freedom, not its champion and defender. The self-designated "free thinkers" typically are in the position of denying the very thing they claim to do is impossible.
Walter Brueggemann is right, a free God is necessary as the source of human freedom, the imagined God of freedom's reality is evidenced in that God's allowance of human freedom as a freely chosen endowment of sentient beings, as is sentience, itself. I'd say that far from being a source of oppression, inslavement, conformity and ignorance, the God as imagined by Moses is the source of those possibilities in human culture but such a conception of God is not merely far from being the source of those evils, that God is definitively separate from such things.
The material gods of European paganism, of Egyptian paganism are the kinds of static gods subject to things such as the will of other gods and, either as vague suggestion or of overt declaration, subject to fate, are the gods of imperial, oppressive imaginings. Such gods are the gods of an oppressive, enslaving order. In later European culture and in the United States, we have elevated such imaginary gods substituting the names of the Jewish-Christian God and Jesus for them, much to the scandalization of those who want to believe thin those anti-Christian gods in order to deny the genuine conception of God and the documented Jesus of the Gospels and the Epistles. The gods of American-Brit Mammonism are, in fact, not the God of Abraham, Issac and Jacob, they are not the God who informed the imagination of Moses or the one who Jesus taught, they are an entirely different thing and those are the enemy of human freedom, dignity and the sustaining of life on Earth.
Human freedom cannot, I have come to believe, rest on anything short of the free God as perceived by Moses and Jesus, whether others in other traditions call that God by the same words or not. The static material gods of atheism, scientism, materialism or paganisms which share in such deficiently imagined gods will inevitably produce oppression. And, as Walter Brueggeman notes, the largest part of the Jewish scriptures document how hard it is to maintain that imagination of the real God who, early on in Exodus, Moses imagines as being entirely different, entirely outside of his or humanities ability to imagine. It is that dimension of the imagination of Moses which I find powerfully convincing that what he was perceiving, what he was imagining, was the real God or creation, the God who created us as free beings endowed with abilities to surpass fate (material causation) and to become free IF WE ACT ACCORDING TO THE LAW, the summation is to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. To treat them as free and worthy of dignity and respect.
* I think it's well past due time that we admit that in the 20th century cosmology, conventionally considered a science, has, in fact, become a matter of ideological materialist ideology, for the most part. As, in fact, has a great deal of evolutionary biology, especially that area which was born in an attempt to disprove God by science, abiogenesis. I would include the ideological atheist Carl Sagan's "exobiology" only it's such an absurdity that I doubt most scientists would claim it as science - unless they're making grant money and getting appointments over it.
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