Saturday, November 13, 2021

Before Going Back To The Light Of Heschel Next Monday - Boldly Going Where Godel Proved You Never Could Go And Hitting A Wall Instead

ONE OF THE greatest achievements in logical thinking was Kurt Godel's (and others') arguments that there were truths of mathematics that could not be proven from any set of axioms.  And all mathematics, the area of human experience which has most successfully applied logic to arrive at universally accepted proofs - accepted by those who understand the proofs and even those who don't - are dependent on such axioms.  All of it depends on things which, themselves, must be believed without proof, an idea which is no kind of a novelty, it's been known since before Euclid that was the perhaps sad truth of things. 

Since that would seem to be about as hard a truth as we have, the idea that any ideological program could do better than that and prove or disprove all of the very complex phenomena of human experience and life is worse than unreasonable, it is an actively believed in absurdity.  The idea that materialist monism was capable of doing that is even stupider than the idea that idealist ideology could because idealism doesn't deny the reality of the material universe, it merely states the obvious that any human conception or knowledge of the material universe primarily depended on human minds.  Of course idealism as an ideological position is no less capable of coming up with an ultimate truth  in the complex areas it deals with, though I think it's clear it can explain more than materialism ever could or has explained and it probably has fallen into less of a discreditable Slough of Despond than materialism constantly inhabits.

Materialism, as it developed, had the need to deny the reality of human consciousness and turned minds from the entities that comprehended parts of material reality and achieved a shared understanding of it into an abacus made of meat that operated by unknown mechanisms (the solution of that problem promised in a never to be redeemed promissory note) and totally dependent on deterministically predestined physical causation.  That it explained nothing about what the minds that thought up that ruse and that refused to be suckered by it and those who did is a far larger problem for the claims of completeness made by material monism than it is for the far more modest claims of mathematics which obtains its certainty about far simpler objects which can only be reached through acts of imagination by minds.  The idealists, focusing on the minds that all of that must precede and conduct the thinking all of that rely on, aren't at anything like the disadvantage that the materialists have to resort to in their desperate dodges to keep their beloved ideology afloat. 

The truth is the basic motivation of that was that materialists hated the idea of God and the moral laws, mostly of the Jewish tradition, especially Christianity because that was the vehicle with which the moral obligation to the lesser and least among us, The Law, entered into the wider gentile culture.  I would guess that in places where Islam is the dominant force of that transmission that its overturning is the motive of their indigenous atheist-materialists but I admit I have a hard enough time understanding the United States and haven't had time to read about Islam rejecting atheists. 

I freely admit and condemn the fact that Christians have been the worst enemies of Christianity through the scandal of not following the Gospel of Jesus or the Law, if they had consistently done that in the past or started doing so today, they would be among the most beloved and respected group of humans on the planet.  The media has defined "Christianity" away from those who have tried to do that and use the term exclusively to mean those who are the very worst at doing what Jesus would do.  As a Woman I once heard said, "It's a lot easier to praise The Lord than to follow him."   Many would call themselves Christians, few would follow it up and back it up.

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