Year End Challenges To Atheists, Materialists, Sci-rangers and Other True Believers In Scientism

As we come to that great holiday which is no more significant than taking down an old calendar and putting up a new one, as the chosen crooner of modest Time Square talent is warming up to intone John Lennon's dopey, insipid atheist anthem which would make anyone who has any musical taste long for the days of Guy and the Royal Canadians oozing out Auld Lang Syne, I'm going to reissue my several challenges to atheists that I've been making most of this year with a new spin on one of them.

The first is to explain how the currently fashionable materialist's "brain only" mind in which all ideas are the epiphenomenona  of physical structures made by our body chemistry acted on by physics would create a new idea.  The brain, to create a new idea, would have to make exactly the right physical structure to embody that idea before the idea existed within the brain that was to make it.  That would go for all ideas, those coming in from the outside and those which arise within the mind.

How would the brain know what to make, exactly, before the information contained in the idea could exist as a physical structure in the brain?

How would the brain know it had made the right structure since it would have nothing to judge what it had made on except what it had produced?

Remember, anything you come up with for a proposed mechanism to create these idea-structures will have to work in real time, matching the real-life experience of thought and creation of new ideas.  And it will have to work for every, single idea that we come up with in the course of our life, those which are "correct" and those which we accept as accurate.  If you propose some kind of "trial and error method" which would have to work at incredible speed and largely unconsciously, it would have to account for the myriad of "bad ideas" which our brains end up accepting and maintaining, that is if you can even account for such cumbersome, clunky "brain-only" minds being able to distinguish the good from the bad.

The few proposals that came in exposed nothing more than the superficial thinking that sustains the materialist "brain-only" dogma, either coming up with a vague, illogical and baseless Just-so story of evo-psy style natural selection or some even sillier assertions.  My past decade of seriously looking at materialism has led me to the same conclusion that David Bentley Hart has that materialism is one of if not the most logically incoherent ideologies that have ever gained currency among the allegedly educated.  That any trained philosopher could hold with it is simply amazing, certainly a defect in their educations and the logical rigor required by contemporary academic philosophy.  That scientists could, in such large numbers, hold with it probably shows a great deal about the down side of the time required to devote a life to a narrow scientific specialty and the downside of allowing them to opt out of prerequisites in training in logical rigor in favor of nothing but their narrow vocational training.

I also posed the similar question of the materialist-atheist location of equal rights and, as important, the equal endowment with moral obligations to respect those rights.   I will assert that since scientistic materialism is a program holding that all reality is reducible to the smallest physical objects and forces and their movements and arrangement, in order for their conception of people as physical objects to have rights, those rights would have to be an embodied aspect of those smallest and most general of objects and physical forces.  In order for us to have rights which were real, subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, physical structures, the most primitive of life forms would have to have rights and moral obligations to other physical objects, those rights and obligations would have to be a generally held physical condition extending throughout the entire scale of physical existence.  They would have to be true in any of the imaginary universe such as is fashionable with today's insane cosmologists.

I would like an explanation of where atheists imagine rights come from, taking into account what they require by way of explanation of origins such as the incoherent question "who made God, then".  Such a demand that they account for where rights come from, where the moral obligation to respect rights from under their monistic materialism is far more coherent as, in theistic belief, our status as created beings would require such an explanation. Far more than their demand to account for the creation of God.  The God of monotheism is not a created being, the God of monotheism is not a thing in the created universe, to ask where God came from is an incoherent misconception of what thinking theists believe about God.  And the monotheistic religions also have a coherent explanation of the origin of equal rights and moral obligations because those are endowments of all people, perhaps all sentient beings, from the uncreated God who created the universe.   You might not like that answer but it is a logically coherent assertion from which assertions of rights and moral obligations come from, the foundations of egalitarian democracy.  Atheism provides nothing to make those from, the best they seem to be able to do is to either skirt the issue or to deny the reality of those things, so real in the experience of human beings but which they can't fit into their ideologically girdled minds.


Update:  I'm old enough so I remember when Matt Groening was still mildly amusing.  Though just barely.  "Genius" yeah, just like ol' Gert Stein, huh?

Ok, here's his cartoon:



You tell me how that differs from your typical member of the rump Eschaton community.  I suspect in Matt's case, it was a self-parody from his Life is Hell period, back when I used to read him in  In These Times, before I started to think he was kind of boring and obvious.  A "genius"?  Compared to who?