This final triumph of the monistic conception of nature . . .
Ernst Haeckel
It's not a hard argument, there's nothing complex about it but it's obviously a harder argument than your typical college-credentialed atheist is able to deal with. It's got several parts that you've got to know but they're not hard. I mean, materialist-atheists came up with them so they can't be that hard.
1. Materialism, the theoretical basis of most atheism and all of scientism is a radically monist ideology.
It claims that everything that is real is material and that nothing which is not material exists.
As science has, several times, shown that the old-fashioned articulations of materialism are basically wrong about the nature of the "material" universe, the ideology has been tweaked and renamed, things like "physicalism (which stupidly equates scientific laws created within human minds with the stuff of the physical universe rather than human explanations of what happens with that stuff) and the only somewhat less naive "naturalism" which is pretty much the same thing as "physicalism" but omits the mention of its reliance on human-created any of science. It's been my experience that second-rate philosophers with a slight knowledge of science go for the "physicalist" label and scientists with little to no knowledge of philosophy but some of science prefer the "naturalist" brand.
The thing to remember is that no claim made by materialists can violate the strictly monistic claim that materialism is based in or their whole framing of reality is destroyed.
The converse of that is that they must deny or ignore the reality of anything which is not explainable in terms of matter-energy, space-time, even if it requires them to create, out of nothing but their own words, an infinity of universes for which there is no explanation and no empirical evidence.
Empiricism (see the definition below) is an even more basic foundation of materialism, though, as with their totally unevidenced and all-too-human creation of multiverses,* they have to violate those foundations continually.
2. Since there is the reliance on both claims of empiricism and their monist materialism and, as my questions asked below prove, those can't be reconciled, their entire framing has to fail. Atheist-materialists can't account for even the most basic experiences of our experienced reality on a materialistic basis. Every single claim in that regard that doesn't answer those questions I asked has to fail the test of empirical knowledge and they can't do it.
For our brains to construct their theorized structures to "be" ideas without the information that is the idea being already present in the brain to instruct it (or DNA or "neural circuits") to make the structure to be that idea would require that those physical structures in our heads would have to continually perform magic and it would have to work better than either Dumbledore or Voldemort or Snape or McGonagall managed to make magic happen in the Harry Potter books. By the time you'd eaten breakfast your brain would have performed magic thousands of times. You wouldn't be able to navigate to the bathroom or kitchen without that happening. Every slight perception within and outside of your body to do that, every variation in it would have to be accounted for in structures inside your head. Some scientist coming up with a picture of a model for how that happens that can't fit into virtual simultaneity and continuity of our everyday experience is promoting a failed model.
Materialist-atheist-scientism is an ideology that can only be true if it is false, though that argument requires a few more steps dealing with the inevitable debunking of human minds, which, as mentioned, is one of the more vigorously pursused goals of materialist-atheist-scientists including many of the biggest names in it such as Francis Crick. And with that any reason to believe in any of the work of such scientists evaporates. And with it the very category of truth as opposed to error or falsity evaporates into a banal and meaningless chemical reaction like water evaporating or iron oxidizing. Materialism is the one ideology that can only be true if it is false because it corrodes the meaning of the idea of truth.
If you want to get a chuckle, you can read a couple of very conceited atheists trying to come up with something - or, more typically, trying to intimidate and trash talk their way out of coming up with something - in this one time some of them took up my challenge. It's pretty hilarious to see how pathetically unable they were to get to the first step. Modern atheism is as profoundly anti-intellectual as modern religious fundamentalism
* If our species manages to survive long enough to have this period of science turn into ancient history, I predict that they will find it hillarious that atheists, in order to debunk the idea that an all-powerful God created this one universe, they granted the license to atheist cosmologists, even those as flaky as Hugh Everett to invent jillions and jillions and jillions of universes. And not only him but every one of us, unintentionally as we do literally everything we do. They so hate the idea that the ultimate intelligence designed the universe that they gave us the power to create universes without any thought going into it, at all.
It is remarkable that even one of their number, one of the current big heroes of atheism has said that one of the consequences of the multiverse fashion is that if you really believe it, it totally destroys the ability of physics to come to any kind of certain or "objective" knowledge about even what is taken as known physics, or, in fact anything
Inflation is naturally chaotic. Bubbles form in the expanding universe, each developing into a big or small bang, perhaps each with different values for what we usually call the constants of nature. The inhabitants (if any) of one bubble cannot observe other bubbles, so to them their bubble appears as the whole universe. The whole assembly of all these universes has come to be called the “multiverse.”
These bubbles may realize all the different solutions of the equations of string theory. If this is true, then the hope of finding a rational explanation for the precise values of quark masses and other constants of the standard model that we observe in our big bang is doomed, for their values would be an accident of the particular part of the multiverse in which we live. We would have to content ourselves with a crude anthropic explanation for some aspects of the universe we see: any beings like ourselves that are capable of studying the universe must be in a part of the universe in which the constants of nature allow the evolution of life and intelligence. Man may indeed be the measure of all things, though not quite in the sense intended by Protagoras.
Steven Weinberg: Physics: What We Do and Don’t Know
I will remind you, though, that as physicists and cosmologists have been confronted by the increasing evidence that their highest of high science is inescapably caught up in the vissisitudes of the human minds that do science, their fellow atheists are debunking the significance of human minds that do all of science into nothing of any significance.
Anyone who suspects that materialist-atheist-scientism, now that it has reached this pinnacle of achievement, has turned out to be everything from basically wrong to of proven degeneracy would have much more than a leg to stand on.
"Materialism, the theoretical basis of most atheism...."
ReplyDeleteThere is no theoretical basis for atheism. You either believe that God bullshit, or you don't, or you simply don't give a shit. Sorry.
Notice that little word "most". I wasn't talking about the atheism of people like you who are too stupid and vacuously unthinking to not require any theoretical basis of your prejudices, I was talking about people who do know at least that much. I figure your basis of believing, or at least claiming to believe stuff is what you figure is fashionable or de rigueur among the kew-el krowd. You're one of the kew-el krowd klucks.
ReplyDeleteApparently other atheists don't share anything that complex with you figuring you're too stupid to understand it.
Oh yes, those organized atheists you're always gassing about. Apparently, they have secret handshakes and everything.
ReplyDeleteNo, Stupy, though there are a number of them who do belong to atheist organizations, "Freedom from Religion Foundation", "Center For Inquiry", "American Atheists", "The James Randi 'Educational' Foundation", various "Humanist" groups, various "skeptics" organizations, . . .
DeleteMaybe you don't know about any of those because they all figured you were ugly and stupid and no one likes you so they didn't tell you about them.
So they’re your version of the Deep State. I’m so surprised.
ReplyDelete😀
Explain how what I said equals the myth of "the Deep State"?
DeleteAs I said, Stupy, you don't even try to make it cohere, you just throw any old thing out and don't particularly care if it is relevant and you're so vacuous that you figure you've done your job. Considering your life in pop music criticism, it's probably a deeply ingrained habit of yours.
"Explain how what I said equals the myth of "the Deep State"?"
ReplyDeleteThere's a concept called "irony", Sparkles. Look into it. And while you're at it, delve into "mockery," "parody," "satire," and "making fun of idiots for saying really stupid shit because they're too thick to get the simplest joke."
I believe I'd already added "satire" to the list of words you have demonstrated you don't know the meaning of, we can now add "irony" and "parody" to that ever growing list.
DeleteAnd "irony" is not an explanation of how your stupid comment cohered, as it was incoherent. I was hoping that you'd make an attempt so I could mock it or parody it, though it was too stupid to satirize. But I wasn't hoping hard because you are a an idiot douche bag.
"I figure your basis of believing, or at least claiming to believe stuff is what you figure is fashionable or de rigueur among the kew-el krowd."
ReplyDeleteOh, please. I figured out the whole god bullshit thing back when I was in Hebrew School in 1957.
Oh, I can imagine the young Simps was already an accomplished conformist.
DeleteI'm sure it's not only atheists who figure it's a sign of intelligence that they froze their thinking at the age of, what was it, Simps, 10? 12? Surely before you were 13, for you never seem to have developed into a man. Your fellow a-hole, Ricky Gervais arrested his mind at the age of eight. I don't think that counts as you being more sophisticated, in that you'll always be 12.
Says the worlds Oldest Fogey.😀
ReplyDeleteUnlike you I don't inhabit a world of geezers, going on and on and on about the music and movies and times when I was a teenager and young adult. I teach young people who don't find me to be an old fogey, I'm always learning new things from them. Sometimes they bring me interesting music they know but which I don't yet. Sometimes it's good sometimes it isn't, what it isn't, though, is something I've heard a thousand times, unlike, you know, the stuff you groove on over at Duncan's idea of an Athenaeum. Simels and the Senescents, band name.
Delete"Unlike you I don't inhabit a world of geezers, going on and on and on about the music and movies and times when I was a teenager and young adult. "
ReplyDeleteUh, Schmucko -- you do know that I just did some studio sessions with a brilliant kid young enough to be my grandson, right?
http://powerpop.blogspot.com/2018/01/and-speaking-of-gorgeous.html
So, middle aged?
DeleteOne sparrow does not make the spring, one spring chicken doesn't keep the goofy old geezer groovy.
Ah, but up in the woods, The Ponce de Leon of Maine is on an endless quest for hick youngsters at the keyboard to rejuvenate him.
ReplyDeleteHas a kind of Nosferatu vibe. Maybe Anne Rice can get a novel out of it.
No wonder you never learned anything except what you were told by the movies.
DeleteAnne Rice, I never found gothic novels interesting, or short stories. The only "gothic" writing I have ever had any use for was the poetry of Edgar Allen Poe. I never found his short stories or novel even slightly interesting. If they hadn't made movies of some of Rice's I doubt you'd have ever heard of her.