I WONDER IF the atheism fad of the 00's and the resistance to it may not have led to a shattering of confidence in it among those who think more than a little. Reading the popular understanding of atheists starting about 2000 when I started reading online writing has led me to conclude they don't think very much more than other people do. They just like to think that they do. They certainly get pissed off when people don't think like they do. They're like a jr. high clique in that and as much suckers as any other group for professional propagandists who share similar inclinations to the ones they start out with.
I know that developing those apparently unanswerable questions I revived last week - you did not, no atheist I've encountered has honestly answered them yet - they may not have occurred to me until I was forced to think about the claims of "brain-only" materialists. I tested materialism on its own terms and concluded it cannot account for the most basic human experience of awareness or thought. Those questions were developed within the framing of materialists in which those are, I assert, unanswerable with anything but the typical, never-to-be redeemed promissory notes of materialism. Given the history of the cliche, it's remarkable how much pie in some far off future they promise and never deliver on. Those have been being issued by materialists all along and I don't think one of them has really been backed with secure and evidenced support. Certainly that's true when it's a matter of materialism being made to confront the most basic reality of human life, our own consciousness. If it can't account for that then its central claim that the material universe is the only thing that actually exists can't make sense of our own existence.
One previously most annoying "public scientist" Carl Sagan put it in his famous intro to his PBS series "The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be that only the cosmos exists and it's all that ever did," certainly a materialist-atheist credo which by defining "the cosmos" in the limits of his ideology tacitly claimed "the cosmos" for atheists. That's something they are wont to do. But their ownership of it is certainly contestable since far earlier and far more inclusive schools and ways of thought claimed it was never human beings' property but God's, however they conceived of God. Considering we all know that the cosmos existed without atheists and certainly without scientists to claim, "We own it!" their claim is as presumptuous as it is silly. As I've said, Sagan talking on his field of expertise, the first thing I did hear him talk about could be very interesting, when he got much afield of that things went downhill. Today's contenders generally are worse.
The modern resort of atheists, since well back into the 19th century and earlier, to demote human consciousness to an epiphenomon of physics and chemistry, is a desperate attempt to deny the most obvious thing that can't fall into their ideological materialist monist scheme of things, the very thing they use to dream up their illusory ideological systems and ideological denials, consciousness. The most decadent forms of that that reign in large parts of academia and is widely promoted in philosophically inept schools of science that I mentioned, Dawkinsian evo-psy, many working in semi-sciences such as cog and neuro-sci, the pseudo-social-sciences and the rump of idiocy in philosophical departments where such idiocy as eliminative positivism is pushed, may be the dying gasps of an ideology that any thinking person realizes is never going to back those promissory notes and the rational conclusion is that they never can because they are issued on a dishonest basis.
Contrary to your claim, I have a lot of respect for the methods of science, when those methods of science are rigorously tied to legitimate confirmation through honest observation, measurement and analysis AND REPEATED EXPERIMENTATION OR OBSERVATIONS within what those methods can validly be applied to. I have noted that especially in areas surrounding the pseudo-scientific study of minds that those methods are violated from the start and from there the methods of psychology, sociology, anthropology, etc. have infected even what should be the most rigorous of all sciences. I think it is notably revelatory that the current reigning ideology of evolutionary psychology entered into biology through the unfortunately ambitious scientific interpretation of what is largely unobservable, evolution, filling in the interplanetary space of the tacit fossil record and that which can never be recovered due to its traces being entirely gone forever, not only in the physical record but the actual, lived lives of the trillions and trillions of lives which would constitute the actual life which evolved, filling it in with story-telling which can never be verified due to that lost information. When science abandons the requirement of observation and measurement, the resultant "analysis" will mimic the worst pre-scientific practices of making stuff up which may at first seem plausible but will be built on in the most ideologically vulnerable ways. In that we can see in the modern period that science has allowed in the most blatantly subjective input imaginable.
I probably should have noted the start of that slide into degeneracy with economics since one of the worst of those is founded on the pseudo-science of Thomas Malthus, the economic class and racism-based ideology of natural selection. In all of those poisonous limpets and barnacles on science, the claim to be able to observe what cannot be observed is one of the most basic aspects of the con job.
You cannot honestly observe economic activity objectively, the attempt when made will inevitably spring from the personal, family, class interests - including wealth protection and enhancement - of the ones making the attempt. Thomas Malthus's approach, pretending the British class system, a creation of human made laws and corruption and theft, was a natural entity and its results something of a constant power was never scientific, that it is the basis of the reigning ideology of biology has done nothing to make the results any more scientific. You cannot possibly come up with an honest model of economic activity because it is too big and too varied and too unobservable even though it goes on right now. Whatever assertions are adopted by those with the power to enforce their adoption will be fraught with unarticulated assumptions, presumptions and wishful thinking. I would like to be able to know enough about the biographies of the eminent economists and their academic assertions because I doubt if you look hard at it you will find much of any of them who don't assert something they favor as what is and what should be and seldom to never assert that which is not in their favor or to their liking. In that their view of economies is exactly like Carl Sagan's view of "the cosmos" or Antonin Scalia's "originalist" reading of the United States Constitution or Amy Coney Barrett's "textualist" reading of it. It's like Darwin's and Galton's conception of evolution, it's like Richard Dawkin's view of life, it's like that meat-head hanger-on, Douglass Adam's tedious and cynical view of reality.
And that's assuming that what those figures in academia really believe what they are asserting and not that they're just telling the powers that be what they want to hear so as best to make a nice living for themselves. Though I really believe that that motive in academic and judicial and scientific fudging and lying is never to be discounted. That is if you want to be coldly realistic about it. A look at Retraction Watch in those kinds of cases when there was clearly conscious fraud and not just wishful thinking at the root of things in science is certainly instructive in that instance. Often the powers that be are the wealthy and, so, powerful, many times it's just those currently dominant in their academic or professional field, sometimes it's no more sophisticated than what I remember a cyincal music major telling me, "You find out what the teacher thinks and write that in your tests and papers." Works if you want to get ahead on the job, too.
I certainly have more respect for scientific method than the typical atheists who believe themselves to be "skeptics" because reading the controlled research into some aspects classified as "psychic phenomena" I had to admit that, by the rules of science, they have demonstrated the reality of a number of those. I think the studies into what Dean Radin calls "presentiment" are especially persuasive, though it's clear that certainly as far back as Rhine's telepathy experiments, it was validly demonstrated at a stupendously higher than chance level in repeated experiments, answering their critics over methodology. "Skeptics" -many of whom would have been more honestly called "liars" - have had to continually lie about the experimental methodologies employed and every other aspect of it because their ideology can't be made to square with it. They have certainly and repeatedly lied about the honor of the scientists who have conducted that work, relying on a con-man like James Randi and his tactics to do so.*
So, the answer to your claims is where is your answer to those questions? I pointed out that the atheist gods of "DNA," "natural selection," and "it's like a computer program" don't work and you didn't even tell me how one of those would. I didn't mention the other currently favored atheist creator gods of "probability" and "random chance" certainly don't work, not on the time frame of human experience and certainly not with the efficacy of our thinking to keep us alive. If we had to depend on those two mathematical entities, human beings and even life on Earth would have probably ended within the first few generations of life if not immediately. We can't know if animal consciousness was present on Earth at that time, I strongly suspect that life on Earth could never have even begun unless there was some consciousness behind it. Though that's a reasonable conclusion, not science. Most of what we can rely on in life is not the product of science, a lot which modern people stupidly rely on, including those credentialed in the degree mills - make that especially them - unfortunately, gets passed off as science. Science can't study earliest life on Earth or consciousness, it can't be observed or measured, anyone is within their rights to come to their own reasoned and modestly held ideas of it. Given the impossibility of us ever doing much of anything about the creation of life more than three billion years ago as we imperil life on Earth now, that scientists are allowed to waste time and resources on it is the height of the typical decadence of materialist, atheist, scientistic modernism. That nonsense started as a means of scientists wanting to nail the coffin of God shut and it continues in that, the practice having gotten professional status and, with that and nothing like scientific validity, is unthinkingly called "science" and treated as something important, when it hardly is.
* It's hilarious that the "My Pillow" Republican-fascist crackpot got caught up in his version of Randi's bogus wager. Though I doubt he will anymore than Randi ever would have come clean about it and put his money where his mouth was recorded as being. Anyone with any pretenses of having any respect for science who didn't condemn Randi's "million dollar" wager as a method of verification of experimental science should have their educational credentials pulled. Mike Lindell and James Randi were pretty much two of a kind, and there are many more like them in popular atheist propaganda, many of them public scientists.
"It seems to me that to organize on the basis of feeding people or righting social injustice and all that is very valuable. But to rally people around the idea of modernism, modernity, or something is simply silly. I mean, I don't know what kind of a cause that is, to be up to date. I think it ultimately leads to fashion and snobbery and I'm against it." Jack Levine: January 3, 1915 – November 8, 2010 LEVEL BILLIONAIRES OUT OF EXISTENCE
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