Magical Thinking Pervades The Atheist Ideology

Since first noticing the bizarre practice of atheist cosmologists to create the most absurd, stupendously massive and entirely unevidenced "things" by intoning the word "probability" I've come to realize how much magic is done by those people who so despise and disdain "magical thinking."   I call it "magic" because that is what it is, the creation of  "things" that are to be taken as real and whose reality is not to be questioned and which are to be talked about seriously.   How the discussion of Boltzmann brains differs from that of late medieval demonology in character is worth considering.   And the creation of "things" by atheists intoning "probability" is far more ambitious than most of the earlier traditions of belief.  You have to come up with some of the more extensive estimates of the dimensions of the highest level of Hindu deity to even approach the vastness of what the atheists are inventing these days.   The admission reportedly made by Martin Rees, that the motive of atheist cosmologists in magic-ing up their greatest achievement, to date, the bazillions of universes under multi-universe theory, that it was done so they could figure out some way to have the fine tuning of this universe without a God, was honest, at least.  That is the motivation of atheists using magic words as science.  That is why the educated class of the West has been practicing a form of magical materialism for more than a hundred-sixty years.

Oddly, I think that, for cosmology and physics, this form of magical thinking, giving the most extensive of creative powers to mathematics, is a survival from the previous faith of those two branches of science.   Lord Kelvin, in his "Baltimore Lectures" given at Johns Hopkins University,  His attempt to create a physical model of the aether displayed a similar faith in the power of mathematics under the 17th-19th century mechanical model of the universe.   But within a few years Kelvin would admit that there were problems to be accounted for in that mechanical universe,  especially the problems raised by the Michleson-Morley experiments, giving a practical refutation of Kelvin's declaration that he knew the aether was there because he could measure it.  In a few years after that the mechanical model of the universe would be destroyed in Germany, but not the habits of thought built up under it.  Those habits of the disposed of mechanical universe still pervade atheist culture and, I suspect, they always will.   I think this kind of magical thinking among atheists today is an unadmitted aspect of that.

It was after realizing that use of magic in the physical sciences that I came to see that, beginning in the 1860s, atheists were using the phrase, "natural selection" as a magical incantation in much the same way.  You can look at the publications of some of Darwin's most informed and sophisticated of followers and see how, with no evidence, whatsoever, they created all kinds of organisms and forces without any kind of observation by the application of "natural selection".   

Ernst Haeckel, one of the most influential of all of Darwin's colleagues and followers immediately set about to inventing everything from micro-organisms, traits of embryology, right up to a complete and final and, he said, "triumphant" universal monist material system, all on the basis of "natural selection".   And that form of creation has pervaded the life sciences and, even more so, the slippery sciences dealing with the non-material aspects of behavior and thought, right up till today.   As I noted recently, hardly a day passes when some scientist won't be heard on NPR or PBS or even the commercial statements intoning the potent phrase "natural selection" inventing class inequality, gender inequality, class inequality, special abilities but, even more so "inabilities" that have the same effect of Haeckel's magic,  propping up existing inequality, turning it into a real "thing" that is the right and immutable nature of things.   

And since such things as "behaviors" and thoughts are easily transmuted into a form convenient to any purpose, the magic of such scientists is potent in a way that is most persuasive to those whose faith in everything called "science", who despise and disdain anything that is CALLED "magic" who believe that they are upholding the rational tradition that has left magic and other such superstition in the past.   Their faith in "science" and their moderny materialist conception of the world blinds them to the obviously magical quality of the entire thing.

We have gone from a scientific tradition that understood the limits of its methods, that those were dependent, in the end, on observation of physical entities, to one that values the immaterial products of theory divorced from observation.  Frequently the excuse is that physical observation is either impossible or that a real, non-subjectively evaluated observation is impossible.  And instead of admitting that such things, no matter how much they would like, can't really enter into the same realm and share the same prestige as the science based on the adequate observation of actual things.    Or, at least, that they shouldn't be admitted into that body of ideas that have, in fact, the reliability of those kinds of observations and evaluations.   The desire to weasel even the wildest speculations on behaviors and the insanely issued promissory notes of materialism into the category "science" has won out over the most basic methods and requirements of science.   I don't doubt that will continue because the interests of those involved, professionally, financially, in terms of status gained and through ideological desire, will sustain this means of introducing magic into science.   But those of us not involved should call them on their hypocrisy and willful blindness of what they are making the real public understanding of science.