Saturday, July 20, 2019

The Decay Of "Skepticism" The Decadence Of Atheist Materialism The Durability Of Theological Skepticism

I listened to several of Rebecca Watson's Youtubes and have to say that she's an idiot.  She has an even more superficial knowledge or view of science than your typical NPR style of science reporter, I'm not even sure I'd put her at the level of your typical major network news reader feed writer on that count.  I don't know if she still is on that podcast-radio program thing that Steven Novella (also a vehicle for him to hire his idiot family members) but any claim to scientific expertise he squeezes out of him having a career as a medical practitioner should be obliterated by her presence on it.  If she's bad her audience, or at least the ones who comment in the comment sections are even stupider. 

I don't, as a matter of fact, hold that questions of religion are treatable with the methods of science AS I MUST HAVE STATED A THOUSAND TIMES ONLINE, MANY OF THEM IN THESE PIECES I POST.  As I mentioned, that's something that, if anything, the theologians I read have a deeper understanding of than any ideological atheist I've encountered does.  That is due to something which I have to say I've been rather surprised to find while reading theologians such as Hans Kung, among the most exigent skeptical methodology I've encountered is practiced by such theologians, even as it is most definitely not even approached by the pro and semi-pro professional "skeptics" such as Watson, Novella and the others in the atheism industry.   Here's an example of how Kung's skeptical method is applied to the question of the historical or scientific investigation of the Resurrection of Jesus.

Raising up as a historical event?   Since according to New Testament faith the raising is an act of God within God's dimensions, it can not be a historical event in the strict sense:  it is not an event which can be verified by historical science with the aid of historical methods. For the raising of Jesus is not a miracle violating the laws of nature, verifiable within the present world, not a supernatural intervention which can be located and dated to space and time.  There was nothing to photograph or to record.  What can be historically verified are the death of Jesus and after this the Easter faith and the Easter message of the disciples.  But neither the raising itself nor the person raised can be apprehended, objectified, by historical methods.  In this respect the question would demand too much of historical science - which, like the sciences of chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology or theology, never sees more than one aspect of the complex reality - since, on the basis of its own premises, it deliberately excludes the very reality which alone comes into question for a resurrection as also for creation and consummation:  the reality of God. 

Note what I presented in blue and underlined in that passage from On Being A Christian.

I give that passage, not as an argument for the truth of the Resurrection of Jesus,  which Hans Kung's skeptical method contained in it would make a very difficult thing to use it for but as an example of how rigorous his methodology is.*  He doesn't make the typical scientistic-materialist-atheist mistake of expecting a comprehensive view of reality from either rigorous science or rigorous history, he disqualifes them from being able to do that by admitting the severe limits that the best methodologies of both of those academic field INCLUDING HIS OWN FIELD OF THEOLOGY for being able to do that.  I have seldom heard a scientists and never one who was involved in the "skepticism" racket admit that their own field is, by its very methodology, its very means of coming to reliable information about a very limited number of very specific things within observable physical phenomena which are susceptible to the honestly applied methods of science.  

That said, I have to say that every time in the past two decades, when I've rigorously considered the atheist substitute for the Creator, God, the reliance on probability, or, rather, the mere rote recitation of the word without even a very deep consideration of whether or not it could get the job done as needed, the less probable its adequacy seems to me.  That reliance on "random chance", especially as the early Darwinists presented it to the convincement of the very superficial and those who wanted to be relieved from having to restrain themselves due to moral considerations, is especially superficial because as the physical basis of life is discovered to be ever more complex, at every level looked at, from the alleged workings of "natural selection" down to the ever increasing complexity of molecular biology, the inadequacy of probabilistic random chance producing the complexity of life seems ever more improbable.  

There is a habit of superficial thought that thinks of "probability" of "random chance" in purely abstract terms and then believing that when you apply those to specific, real world conditions with their very real limits of time in which the results came about and the numbers of organisms within which those results were achieved, in many cases the working through of the mathematically possible variations would seem to far, far, very, very far outstrip the actual time frame and populations in which those would have to work out with exquisite precision to have produced the results that we experience in the phenomenon of embodied life in the one and only case we know it worked, our life on Earth in the one and only universe we have any evidence exists outside of human imagination motivated to pretend others exist.  I suspect that those vanishingly minute improbabilities which are generally considered so troubling to atheist ideologues who dominate the scientific profession of cosmology are huge compared to the improbabilities which would be encountered if the full range of biological complexity which did, actually, produce life on our one planet in our one universe was capable of being addressed in the same way.  I think that if life arose in different forms, the complexities of that kind which produced those successful lives would increase by factors as large, perhaps larger ones that would have to be addressed in figuring the improbability of it happening here in the one reality which we can intelligently address. 

And note, Kung would certainly see more fundamental problems than almost any scientist I've encountered with all of this as apprehending "the truth" of such things.  One of the rare scientists I've read who seems to have had a good understanding of it was one of the greatest mathematical physicists of the 20th century,  the Quaker, Eddington.

Every time I look at the "skepticism" industry, that subsidiary of the wider atheism industry, the more I'm convinced it is, actually, a product of superficiality and appeals to stupidity and laziness.  That's why it has devolved from even the Martin Gardiner level of superficiality, down through the CSICOP-CFI style, down to the Steven Novellas and Rebecca Watsons.   It is just so stupid at that, the TV mega-church preacher level of it. 

*  Also as a refutation to the idiotic claim that I practice "God in the gaps" thinking.  God isn't found in gaps, God is imminent in creation, including those few parts of it science has addressed, everything science discovers.  The only "god" you're going to find in gaps of science is not God but some inadequate cousin to the material gods of Greco-Roman paganism.

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