I was going to not post anything at all to day because I think the posts of the last couple of days are important enough to not swamp them, and it's a holiday weekend here. But several points.
A. for reasons I've given and with the massive evidence of materialist-atheists claiming that material determinism makes free thought impossible, indeed, they make free will impossible* and in a more and more often read assertion that consciousness, itself is an illusion.
B. that for that demotion of human thought as a mere product of physical causation in the brain impeaches the reliability of human ideas, which, due to the monistic, totalistic claims of materialism must also be true of things the materialist-atheist wants to give an exemption to, such as the thinking that produces science, logic, reason, even in intellectual structures up to and including theories and ideologies, INEVITABLY IMPEACHING THE IDEAS AND THINKING THAT PRODUCES ATHEISM AND MATERIALISM.
C. that any assertion which inevitably includes the destruction or discrediting of its own foundational premises cannot be true. Something which comes as a surprise to even allegedly educated people in the allegedly hard sciences.
I've come to the conclusion that materialism is the only idea I can think of which can only be true if it is false, that it can only be right if it is wrong.
The idea I've been dealing with the last few days, that, BY THE ASSERTIONS OF THE DARWINISTS, THEMSELVES, Darwinism destroys the intellectual basis of egalitarian democracy, and produces the conclusion that some kind of aristocratic, oligarchic tyranny of the hereditary superior in intellect rightly rules over, not only the most intellectually disabled but, also the "average man" that Darwinian materialist causation also is an argument for fascism, in its various forms. That fascism and Nazism arose when it did, as Darwinism was, in fact, the major new idea in the same cultures where it arose is no accident. As I showed, the absolutely orthodox Darwinists, Galton, Haeckel, Schallemyer, etc. including Darwin, himself, had made that same argument in various forms, the eugenicist - all of the not only orthodox Darwinists but true believers who were ready to put their new found scientific belief into practice, even if it meant violating the rights and the bodies of those they believed to be scientifically determined to be inferior.
In the post-war period, even as the results of that Darwinism were exposed as able to, as likely and inevitably producing the slaughter that Darwin, Haeckel and others asserted were guaranteed to come, using their reasons for making that assertion, scientists still asserted that eugenics as a logical conclusion given an assumption that natural selection is real. Such noted scientists as those in biology James Watson, Francis Crick, Ronald Fisher and others in the genine sciences such as the Nobel physicist William Shockley, myriad members of the quasi and, in fact, pseudo sciences such as Arthur Jensen, Richard Herrnstein, Carleton Coons**, .... and who knows how many non-scientists who believe them have all made and still make exactly the same kinds of arguments which led to the slaughters of millions, legal discrimination and the unequal distribution of resources which are, in fact, making a huge comeback in the United States, today. I have no confidence that the present members of the Supreme Court and, likely, those who will be in place four or five years from now aren't fully capable of overturning even the greatest landmarks such as Brown vs. Board citing such science to do it. I have no doubt, at all, that the neo-segregationists, neo-confederates running the federal government wouldn't cite such science in allowing states to do the most depraved things, including forced sterilizations - which continued even after they were supposedly declared to be a violation of rights, here, in Canada and elsewhere.
This is something we'd better hash out right now because it's a matter that has been pending since the 1860s when intellectual critics of Darwinism came to the same conclusions about its materialistic, deterministic claims for human society, both for and against. As I've noted the Victorian intellectual Frances Cobbe was one of the most insightful and informed of those early critics who knew the claims being made by Darwin and his inner circle better than most of today's champions and supporters of Darwin Day. Most of them know nothing but that he's their team mascot. Unfortunately, the reason he is their mascot carries some seriously dangerous infection of proven deadliness.
* I've just begun to consider the implications of that for the Darwinian characterization of intelligence as arising as an adaptive advantage under natural selection. My early suspicion is that material determinism either damages that argument and attribution or it discredits it in the same muddle of random indeterminacy that it does choices made, in general but the idea just came to me a little while ago and I like to think things out, have arguments ready, before I commit to an idea.
** Such scientists and others, including such scientific racists as David Irving's one witness in his backfiring law suit, Kevin Macdonald are cited by neo-Nazis, neo-fascists, and in almost every instance their claims are based on natural selection. His field, evolutionary psychology, Sociobiology, are entirely based on claims made, scenarios and stories invented out of little else than assertions that it must be that way due to natural selection and materialist determinism. And, it should never be forgotten that until he became known in the wider world as producing scientific racism, making antisemetic claims in his science,he was a fully accepted and honored member of his scientific community within evolutionary psychology. One of his supporters, John Hartung, produced an equally offensive piece of such science which was cited by the pope of evo-psy, Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion, without comment on its antisemitic character.
My parents were both veterans of the anti-fascist, anti-Nazi side in World War II. Both of them volunteered to defeat exactly the results of a belief in natural selection. It would dishonor their sacrifice - my father was permanently and fully disabled in battle - to not post this. It's certainly a better memorial than waving the flag and saying "thank you for your service".
"I've come to the conclusion that materialism is the only idea I can
ReplyDeletethink of which can only be true if it is false, that it can only be
right if it is wrong."
I believe Luther Ingram put it better and more succinctly in his 1972 smash hit "If Loving You is Wrong I Don't Want to Be Right."