ALL OF our arguments, including the best possible and entirely theoretical, therefore not existing, argument that any human being living in time can make, are contingent on the information available to them at the time they make it. The atheist-materialist-scientistic never to be honored promissory note of materialism, that some day the ultimate materialistic explanation of questions unanswered in our time will be had in atheist-materialist-scientific terms is to make a claim that cannot be sustained today or at any time, else the claim of the contingency of all knowledge, a necessary component of scientific method, is invalid. If that contingency is breached, the scientific method, on which that claim rests is invalid. The problem then is who knows what future will bring?
Arguments are constructed of either fact or on what we believe or want to believe, and there are no real bright lines separating those. In the end everything we believe,true or not is believed on the basis of choosing to believe it. That's just the fact of it. And lo we inevitably walk a narrow way. Which is why I prefer the Jewish intellectual tradition and believe it is the best human beings have come up with, to date.
The quality of the argument and conclusions drawn through it are variable depending on the things those arguments are made of and the conclusions are made on them despite their quality. To pretend anything else is to make really lousy claims in arguing about what I just wrote, though that is often done.
When I wrote the statement that psychology is a pseudo-science, along with sociology, anthropology and economics, I did so because to claim that science can treat any of those, the matters supposedly treated by those academic cesspools of ideology, have the same qualities and characteristics as numbers and of celestial bodies and other physical objects, atoms, molecules, elements, chemicals, etc. that are convincingly and successfully treated with the methods of science.
Since all of those social-pseudo-sciences rest on that assumption made about human and, even more stupidly asserted, other minds are like physical objects and numbers made in psychology I will only deal with that.
To claim that our minds are subject to the same limits and forces that would seem to govern physical objects is to claim that our thoughts, our ideas, our perceptions are manifestations of physical entities, objects, generally claimed to be in our brains, the product of molecules and structures the body constructs of molecules in our brains.
Several years back I went through an exercise of, for a year, here and in places where materialist ideologues gathered online, posing what I then and still believe is an ultimate and fatal problem for that belief, I asked many people for a year and never, once got an answer that worked to back up their contentions that our ideas, other actions of our minds could possibly be the product of physical structures constructed out of matter and material patterns in our brains. I got not one answer that worked when looked at with even a slight level of rigorous challenge.
The problem deals with ideas which never were present in our brains before we had the idea, until we first thought them.
If our ideas are physical constructs, the brain would have to make new structures to be new ideas, different ideas could not have the same structure or they would be identical ideas. There would be no possibility of novel ideas arising in our minds without new and, for us, unprecedented structures being made by our brain, the idea-structure for that idea could not be present in our brain until it was constructed to BE the new idea.
How, before that idea was in the brain, could:
The brain know it needed to construct a structure to be that idea.
How would the brain know what it needed to make to be that idea without the idea there to inform it of what to make.
How could the brain know how to make that structure without the idea being present to instruct the brain on what the final structure was to be.
How could the brain, once a structure was built, know if it had built the right structure to be that idea if that idea-structure was the only type of thing present in the brain. (Trial and error, one of the atheist dodges in part of the argument wouldn't work because there would be nothing to make comparisons with. You have to have those to do trial and error. Anything there for comparison would be a structure made by the brain, liable to all of the problems stated here.)
Whatever a materialist comes up with to support their claim must work in the real time in which we have ideas novel to us or, indeed, in the human species. One of the dodges, the incantation of the magical word "DNA" doesn't work because all DNA does is make strings of amino acids - which are liable to all of the questions already asked above - which fold by elaborate actions within cells to become biologically active proteins. That process is sufficiently time-consuming that it couldn't possibly be how it happens, our experience of coming up with novel ideas is so much faster.
"Natural Selection" another of the magic phrases of materialism certainly doesn't work because it would have to work through DNA and trial and error and even more cumbersome mechanisms that take place over many generations instead of seconds. And "Natural Selection" is too stupid to evaluate what it makes for their truth, it only works through comparative success in producing offspring. If some dopey Darwinist wanted to make that claim for natural selection, I wouldn't be surprised if some moron like Daniel Dennett might try, it would be fun to press them on where the question of truth fits into it.
In order for any mechanism of materialism to work to fill in the chasm between our experience of having a new idea and a proposed mechanism of how it's supposed to happen, maintaining the claim that ideas are physical structures manifested as epiphenomena has to claim that that proposed mechanism has, a priori, to contain all of the ideas we generate, all that we will ever generate int the future, all of the structures to be those ideas (we have many ideas that have no physical substrate external of us, we make up a lot of things in our minds which are no less ideas) internally within the physical systems and structures to be those mechanisms.
To claim that "DNA" does it is to claim that the molecule "DNA" (and there is no one such molecule, there is only the general structure of DNA) has to internally have, present within its structure all of the ideas that it constructs or to claim "DNA" is to merely displace the problems the materialist model of our minds poses for our brains.
To come up with in this argument is as stupid as a materialist such as Francis Crick, when he faces with the incredible improbability of life arising by random chance events on Earth, merely claiming it must have come here from elsewhere. Giving it a dumb pseudo-Greek neologism as a smokes screen. Where the same problems would have had to be faced if someone was impolite enough to push his face in the mess that makes.
He was one of the arrogant mid-20th century materialist ideologues who figured solving the "hard problem" for materialist, scientistic ideology would be a cinch for someone as clever as him. I believe his colleague Watson believed something of the sort, too, fresh from their fame at having published the structure of DNA.
Every time I come back to this problem the more obvious it is that our minds cannot be the mere epiphenomena of material structures and material causation. There is every reason to not believe that our minds are material, if they are not material then they do not likely reside as mere dependents on our brains. They would have to transcend it or they would not be able to do what they do. If that is the case, the entire basis of psychology,etc. as "science" is a pudding-headed misconception of the hopes and wishes of atheist-materialist-scientistic ideologues and those who choose to be their suckers.
Update: No, trying to make trial and error part of the creation process wouldn't work because the idea of an ideal or even acceptable outcome would inevitably require an idea of what that would be in relation to the "idea-structure" that was present in the materialist-brain. How that was supposed to work only brings you back to the beginning in my list of problems with the whole model.
To claim "DNA" or "natural selection" is the creator of all possible human ideas, all possible animal ideas is to merely give those two "things" the power that traditional theology sometimes attributes to God. You are merely setting those up as divine idols, being a (golden) moon calf too stupid to understand that's what you've done. Atheists are always doing that and not understanding that's what they did and habitually do. I used to fall for the claim that atheists were intellectually superior, now I think they're just half-baked.
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