But once you do start with that most obvious and entirely pertinent fact about what that atheist-materialist song and dance of what is permitted to be called science is, where it comes from, that they can get away with doing it in an academic and scientific setting is one of the most bizarre spectacles in today's life. It rivals any of the long past, now ludicrous academic discussions of demonology or spontaneous generation* or any other now unfashionable or overturned dogma in academia past for irrationality. Actually, it doesn't rival them for irrationality, it surpasses any and all of the mistaken ideas of the past because it contains the discrediting and dismissal announcement for its own statements. Materialism is the ultimate in negative question begging, its starting premise contains the refutation of its conclusion.
Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Paul and Patricia Churchland, Peter Singer, Steven Pinker, E. O, Wilson .... all of the celebrity atheist-materialists who have attacked the idea that the mind transcends material causation, that consciousness exists as a significant thing, who claim that freedom of thought is an illusion, all of them peddle ideas that, under their ideological system could not be other than the pedestrian product of the particular and parochial physical components of their brains, any chance of them achieving the status of truth or, as they might like to think of it, "objective truth" is of a vanishingly low probability. The ideas of their rivals in academia, their intellectual enemies would have exactly the same probability of achieving truth and anyone who accepted their ideas would not be doing so as a transcendent act of truth seeking but, as well, merely having the chemistry of their brains modified according to acts determined, not by their choice but by physical necessity.
But all of them, every one of these high celebrities of materialist academia and fashion act as if they don't believe their own system. All of them publish and give talks and speeches asserting their ideas have a status of transcendent truth which their ideas hold is impossible. All of them look for converts, people who will be convinced that their ideas have a status that transcends the insignificance they demote the products of minds and the minds, themselves to. None of them really believes what they claim, themselves. They are the intellectual equivalent of some of the worst of the Popes, the Alexander VI's and Benedict IX's of science, people who have made a career on professions of belief while their actions prove they really don't believe any of it and that they have no intention of letting it rule their own lives. You would think that they would realize - if they really believed what they claim to - that, according to their claims, those who don't share their ideas fail to do that because their brains are not set up to concur with them and that there is nothing they could do to change that without changing the physical components of their brains, and how would they do that? But that's not how they act. They even present it as some kind of moral failing in those who don't agree with them when their own claims would invalidate that framing of the situation because they claim that the resulting thoughts are not a product of free choice. They are among the most clueless of intellectuals in history, failing to even take into account the consequences of their claims for the character of their own work.
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I am a political blogger, I started out that way and I continue that way. Most of what I post is political, either in a particular way dealing with current issues or more generally in support of egalitarian democracy, economic justice and personal freedoms matched with moral responsibility to others. I am a traditional, American style liberal whose liberalism is based in the line of monotheism of The Law, The Prophets and the Gospels but who believes any religious tradition that contains those same moral precepts is valid and has the potential to generate egalitarian democracy. It was never my intention in the beginning of my posting pieces to get into these issues but, in studying the problem of the failure of American liberalism it was inevitable that I would end up addressing them. It is as inevitable as it would be that I would attack the pseudo-Christianity of the Republican-fascist right because those are where the destruction of liberal governance come from.
The intellectual decadence of materialism is consequential politically because its demotion of human beings into objects and its attack on morality seriously undermine the foundations of egalitarian democracy. As I have pointed out before, that is something which can be seen in the declarations of such people as Haeckel, Huxley and in other Darwinian materialists. It can certainly be seen through out the entire history of the social sciences, despite any competing claims to the contrary. But I'm not really interested in that, I'm interested in the undramatic, gradual erosion of the foundations of democracy that come with believing people are objects available for use, that people have the same significance and availability for manipulation and use as a herd of animals as units of economic utility. The materialist demotion of human minds and human lives is intimately tied up with those consequences, that is seen throughout the literature of materialism, the literature of atheism. I think that history of thought is well long enough over enough time and through different languages and cultures so that its recurring character is discernable and it is inevitably destructive of egalitarian democracy, economic justice and the universal aspiration of a decent life.
* Of course atheist abiogenesists demand that any origin of life was an act of spontaneous generation, just one of their "give me one miracle and I'll demand that the rest of it was something else" features of materialist atheism.
"Maybe it's only a
ReplyDeletebizarre experience to read the claims of materialists who dismiss the
significance or even the existence of freedom of thought, free will, to
read their claims about the biological and physical determinism of
human minds and thoughts, the idea that we are mere "computers made of
meat," "lumbering robots" controlled by and at the service of our all
controlling genes.... if you take into account that their dismissal of
minds and what minds do is a product of their minds which they,
apparently, want to exclude from their materialist monist, universal
claims dismissing the transcendent significance of what minds do."
If this level of clarity of writing had been employed in the service of a recipe for fettucine alfredo, anybody who actually ate the finished product would be dead now.