I am a little disappointed that though I had to take a day off from writing something important my usual messengers of materialism didn't note something that I'd thought of, that someone could claim that that same problem I noted determinism is for the atheist-materialist-scientistic view of life can be a big problem for a believer who believes in free thought, free will. Determinism is anathema when it comes to physics and cosmology in quantum mechanics (rather hilarious because doing those depends on an inherent determinacy in natural phenomena) but it is an absolute necessity when they want to dispose of human and other minds which cannot be made to fit into their requirements of causal determination as an explanation of the universe of our experience. Minds that escape the determinism they like are an intolerable fact of the very same experience upon which the science they deify depends - there is no place that science is known to exist except in human minds, science cannot be significant, it can't be true independent of the significance of minds and their capacity for knowing truth independent of any physical causation determining the outcome of our thoughts.
The problem for materialism, for the scientism that rests on that materialism and the atheism which is supported by both is that materialism is perhaps the only ideological position which, when treated rigorously, checking it for both logical coherence and consistency, MATERIALISM CAN ONLY BE TRUE IF IT IS FALSE.
But, an atheist, scientistic materialist might then say, for a believer in the signficiance of minds, the capacity for minds to know truth, to be free of the determiancy of physical causality, determinacy is no less of a problem.
How can human minds escape a divine determinacy such as that hated so much by those who use the "fine tuning" that cosmologists - a good number of them atheist materialists, even some of them devotees of scientism - tell us makes our particular life allowing, intelligence sustaining universe is so wildly improbable.*
The answer for a materialist may be insoluble, remembering that materialism is, by fiat of the materialists, a monist system, whatever "material" is, matter-energy, it must be the only constituent of reality. But if you believe God created the universe you have already made the materialists only allowable thing subordinate to Who created it, who made it as it is, who is not bound by whatever determinism that God created the physical universe appears to us to follow.
God would be quite able to create a universe in which those improbabilities which human science and mathematics may well merely impose on reality are not the all powerful thing that materialists elevate them to be in their deification of math, science, material causation. The universe may not be monistic or dualistic or even poly-istic. It may be far different. And I would imagine you could come up with many ways in which such a reality could account for free minds, free thoughts, free observations of reality and conclusions about it, because God is not bound by physical causality or even the logical coherence which is the human sense of an order to things, in so far as we can know them. Freedom of thought may well be explanable as a gift to us from God where it can't ever be explained (or rationally disposed of) by atheist materialism.
Almost a century ago, A. S. Eddington, fresh from his producing confirmation that Einstein was on to something with his new physics and writing what Einstein said was the finest explanation of it, said:
It is one thing for the human mind to extract from the phenomena of nature the laws which it has itself put into them; it may be a far harder thing to extract laws over which it has had no control. It is even possible that laws which have not their origin in the mind may be irrational and we can never succeed in formulating them.**
And that's conceiving such uncalculable "laws" laws that "have not their origin in the mind" in terms congenial to physics, such "laws" would be a totally different thing than the things we call "laws" which are a product of humanly conducted science. If such unimaginable entities are a force in the universe, they would certainly not have the same character as those things which we can conceive of as laws in terms of observation as treated by mathematics and the other methods of that thing which is produced by mutual consent by humans, science.
I think science should have stuck to questions about the understanding and manipulation of the phenomena of nature which it could honestly deal with - though I think exempting the world of science from questions of morality was probably an even worse mistake than allowing it to become the tool of atheist ideological desire. As it is, we have a large number of very eminent and professionally successful scientists who impose their ideology on the cultural view of science and inject it directly into science, itself. The number of scientists who are obsessed with getting rid of God is rather shocking when you think of it. Hawking is supposed to have called cosmology a "religion for atheists," and so it is as practiced by many, abiogenesis is a biological quest to do the same thing, one which is even more obviously so. And those are only two of the areas of science saturated with the desires ideological claims and restrictions of some of the most eminent of scientists, prohibiting finding anything that would violate that atheist desire.
That is certainly why Robert Oppenheimer implored his colleagues that if they couldn't refute David Bohm, they "must agree to ignore him." It should be shocking that such an eminent scientist with such an eminent position in the scientific establishment could make such a demand of his scientific colleagues a and not be dressed down by them for violating the alleged fearless and objective quest for truth no matter where that leads them. But they didn't, violating that value of science will not get you in trouble, violating the anti-scientific imposition of atheist-materialism will, though there seems to be a bit of room for doubting scientism which is one of the most plainly stupid of claims which cannot sustain itself since the ideology of scientism is not open to scientific examination, itself.
* And, I'll add here, from what I've seen of that thinking the enormous improbabilities that they calculate vastly underestimate instead of cover the probability of life as we know it and see it around us. But that would get us back to just how improbable random chance assembling even the first organism so as it came to life, a persisting containing membrane structure just happening to contain the chemicals and structures so as to begin metabolism and maintenance of the organism before we get to the more incredible liklihood of random chance allowing its reproduction on the first and only try it would get to do that successfully, ending up with at least two of itself - if it reproduced to three, that first time or more, the chances against that happening rise incredibly fast. I love thinking about that problem, nothing shows the idiocy of materialist, scientistic atheism for what it is like thinking about that problem they inevitably don't consider or they could not maintain their naive faith. I wonder if it would be possible to come up with a probability of a random chance that could get that random chance to produce such an incredibly improbable thing happening once, as opposed to random chance that would not produce that ever. Live by the math, die by the math.
** I would call your attention to Eddington's phrase for the proper and only legitimate object of science, "the phenomena of nature." I think any scientist, atheist-materialist or not would have to agree that humanly preceived phenomena are what science was invented to look at and analyze so as to understand them. Phenomena only become such as they are seen, perceived, by minds, our human minds in the case of science. That vicissitude of science insures that to pretend that that fact isn't totally determinative of the nature of what science can tell you about anything will lead you astray. Yet the ideological requirements of deveoped atheist-materialist-scientism demands that that absolute requirement of science be denied or, since it can't be refuted, ignored. I doubt that the outcome of that will be true, certainly not in most or even many cases.
To pretend that our experience is irrelevant at any second to science is one of the most insane of the host of delusions of current scientific culture. I cannot think that the insistence that that can be done is not part of the same ideological program that the above descries. It fits in with the rest of it too well for it to have other motives.
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