IT IS MY INTENTION TO CONTINUE with the four lecture-sermon-Q&A sessions the wonderful Walter Brueggemann gave on Jeremiah but I've learned two things in the process of going through them so far, A. they are far more complex than most of the things I go through here, B. I shouldn't attempt to go through a complex religious topic during growing season because I don't have time to do it justice, though I'm going to slog through these now that I've started. Of course, if you have the time you could listen to them, do background reading - I'd love to have the time and money to go through all of the books he recommends - and come up with your own conclusions. That's one of my main goals, to encourage people to do that.
But even being worn out from garden work doesn't keep me from getting into brawls- much more convenient to do that online instead of at a bar. I've been having one with what I believe is a Brit materialist who didn't like a comment about psychology I posted on one of Sabine Hossenfelder's videos. It quickly became apparent that the psych guy wanted to assert materialist ideology with the typical claims about our minds being the product of physical structures in our brains to which I posed my as yet not even touched challenges to that, as I said in my response to him:
Ah, what you're doing isn't science, it's promoting the ideology of materialism. Which is not uncommon among psychologists and in allied alleged-sciences. What you do is pretend that psychologists come up with valid scientific studies to support your ideology. I went through an experiment for more than a year, asking your fellow materialist ideologues if it is true that an idea is an epiphenomenon of a physical structure in the brain, that must mean that for any given idea there is a unique structure that will produce that idea and not another idea. If that is the case, how does the brain a. know that it needs to make such a structure before the idea is present in the brain, b. how the brain knows what it needs to know to be the basis of that idea before the physical structure to produce that idea has been made in the brain, c. how does it know HOW to make that structure before that structure is present to produce that idea in the brain, d. once it has made some structure as a representation of that idea how does it know it has made the right structure to produce that idea, especially as a different idea would have just been made by it. YOUR PROPOSED MECHANISM MUST WORK WITHIN THE LIMITS OF YOUR IDEOLOGICAL CLAIM AND MUST MATCH THE NEAR INSTANTANEOUS EXPERIENCE OF US HAVING IDEAS THAT ARE QUITE ACCURATE, something that happens literally hundreds of times before we have been awake for a couple of hours in the morning and all day long. I got ridiculous non answers such as "DNA" (which doesn't work due to time, not to mention then "DNA" would have to do all the things the brain can't do or "natural selection" which would have had to been prescient for literally every novel idea that no human being has ever had before and have near omniscience in being able to do all of those things I listed. Materialism is an ideology that is the most decadent inf human history because it must debunk the mind that holds it and it ends up being able to have the quality of truth only if it is false.
Which to long time readers here will know I've pointed out over and over again never to have an atheist-materialist answer in the five years since I first started making that challenge. I have yet to have them get past the first hurdle.
This time I did expand the problem by pointing out that every step of the problem contained discrete ideas within it that would, as well, have to have ideas constructed by the brain in order for those ideas to be entertained and settled, for example, the brain would have both had to have an idea it didn't have a structure for present in it and it would also have to have the idea of the structure it had to make to BE that idea and the idea that it needed to make that structure to be that idea all of which would, themselves generate a series of component ideas. The concept of a structure is, itself, a composite of separable concepts and making the structure would involve other components, such as what materials would have to be assembled to make that structure. For any atheist who thinks they can do the other typical thing of saying the structure is like a computer program or routine, that doesn't do much but change the kind of thing needing to be made which is, itself, made of non-interchangeable component concepts arranged in a specific order. Whether it's made up out of molecules or "numbers" doesn't do a thing to the the materialists' brain started on doing what, by their own claims, would have to be done in the absence of any ideas to guide the brain.
Anyway, that got me to thinking about the basis of modern materialism in scientism which inevitably gets you back to mathematics because science, from the start of modern science was an attempt to find durable truths about the physical world that had the same absolute nature and absolutely solid foundation that mathematics was believed to have reliably found something which the pseudo-sciences regularly fail to do (my remark was an answer to a slam against the hardly precise science of nutrition as opposed to the totally unreliable science of psychology - S. H. was talking about the replication crisis with a psychologist). And it is also something that even the most successful sciences have failed to find. Much of Hossenfelder's Youtube channel discusses the lapses in even the best established theories of physics. And, of course, despite what was believed about mathematics in the 16th and 17th centuries when the ideological basis of modern science was being formed, the 20th century revealed that that conception of mathematics was seriously wrong, mathematics, itself had serious gaps in its logical foundation, as was famously proven by Kurt Godel and supported by others.
I was looking for things I could listen to while doing garden work and downloaded the audio from this Numberphile video which has a good, simple explanation of the problem.
It would be interesting to know why any modern physicist or cosmologist claiming to be on the trail of a Theory of Everything would believe it was possible under their subsidiary study if there was every reason to believe nothing like that is possible for mathematics. I think one of the problems is that they pretend that all of that isn't based, ultimately, on a hardly mathematical or scientific action of belief which has nothing much to do with formal proof. It could be that formal proof and absolute completeness, the kind of absolute and eternal reliability that was attributed to mathematics is a kind of illusion which, when insisted on to the extent which an ideological holding of scientism becomes a delusion, itself one of the more blatant self-contradictions which is, notwithstanding, the controlling ideology among most modern people of the educated class.
If you want a good example of that, it comes right at the end of the video in which the film-maker inserts, out of nowhere, a slam against religion which I think is a. them inserting the required ideology of the Brit academic class because, b. they sense that they have just loosened the foundation of their ideology which is all important to that effort, even more so than logicality and any sense of open-minded consideration.
Update: I should have noted that the bald guy in the video is Marcus de Sautoy, the successor of Richard Dawkins in the Simonyi Chair For The Public [alleged] Understanding of Science, who claimed that his focus would be more on understanding science and less on slamming religion, I would think you'd have to do a statistical analysis to find out the extent to which his frequent mocking of religion in his public presentations supports that or not. What he said, inserted at the end of that video is, actually, of relevance to the entirety of this post, especially seeing where I started out with it:
To think that you know, I think it's still interesting to explore the things which might always transcend our knowledge, and of course religion just gives these things far too many properties they should never have but I think I think that rather abstract idea of the unknown is still quite an intriguing one.
Elsewhere he defines religion in terms of an atheist god of the gaps framing, in which religion depends on what isn't known, a definition both ignorant of the history and literature of religion and quite convenient to his atheist-materialist-scientistic ideology. I think, though, he stumbled on one of the greatest differences between what math and science do and what religions do. As I found out in my difficulties of dealing with Brueggemann on Jeremiah, the subject matter of the Jewish-Christian-Islamic tradition is enormous, complex, difficult and contains many unknowns that science and math simply don't bother to consider, especially science narrowing its focus so it can come up with presumably durable and reliable statements about a narrow range of things that its methods are able to deal with. Religion must deal with a far wider range of human life and experience in a far broader context than the mere physical matter involved. As I pointed out, when it tries to shoe horn a larger range of human experience and life into its tiny confines, it has to lie to do that.
It is a real life irony that Charles Simonyi, the financier of the Oxford Chair for the Public Understanding of Science which, I believe, he more or less controls as to who gets to "sit" in it, was a large donor to both the 2016 and 2020 campaigns of the most anti-science of all recent or perhaps all U.S. presidents, Donald Trump. He certainly wasn't in favor of the U.S. Voters having a very deep understanding of science in his choice in those elections. Materialism, both the high-academic kind and the vulgar, Trumpian style are really not different, in the end.
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