a "free thinker" who denies that their free thinking is possible due to them being a materialist-atheist posed this
If you think deeply about my questions, you can clearly see how different our thinking is. Materialists (like me) tend to think about the "How" , not the "What" or the "why". To give me something that really clicks, so that it can bring me some closure, you need some explaination as to HOW the transcendental and the material communicate with each other.
Passing up, for now, the chance to trash the pretense that materialists and even the most theoretical of theoretical physicists aren't as fully involved with "what" or "why" questions as anyone else, my response given too quickly was to point out that if the validity of the transcendental entities of truth, value, and the such, things that I'd already argued can't be produced by material causation which are as able to produce non-truth and can't be used to identify a value of truth over non-truth anymore than it could identify any truth of pure iron over any of its oxides or any other physical state over another one. If science cannot identify why knowing something is real is better than believing what isn't real or pretending to believe something when you don't really believe in it that doesn't mean that even science can get by without actually making that a legal requirement of doing science. Why should we believe scientists when they deny the reality of the very basis of what they do?
Well, I guess I didn't pass that up, I'm just not going to go into it in the detail I'm tempted to because Tuesdays are my busiest day most weeks.
As to the old atheist standby of how an immaterial mind could interact with a material brain or body:
A. If the mind is immaterial it would have qualities that we cannot find in material substances and the forces we can observe working on them. If they did not have other properties or qualities they would not be immaterial. So whether or not we can understand them to the extent we can objects and their movements is immaterial to our inability to address that.
B. The scientistic-materialist-atheists have no problem fully and totally accepting the relationship of entirely non-material mathematical "objects" to the physical entities that science was designed to study through mathematics and logical conclusions made using mathematics matched with observation. The relationship of non-material mathematical objects and the material aspects of the universe is no less mysterious than the action of the mind on the physical brain that is in our body. If you're going to debunk the one you certainly at least imply the other is of less than secure validity. Which, in a linear line of thinking would lead to:
C. In the course of the brawl the scientistic materialist atheist seemed to want to deny the transcendence of the truth value of the correct answer to an equation over incorrect answers to the same problem - I used Eddington's example of a school boy getting the answer to 7x8 wrong, pointing out that he noted that nothing went wrong in the physical causal network in the schoolboy's brain as it produced the wrong answer. It's clear that the identification of the right answer and its superiority over the wrong answers to that equation is not a product of physical causation but of the identification of the right answer having a value that the wrong answer doesn't have.
I pointed out that unless you were ready to accept that the transcendent value of math being able to establish truth that surpassed the neutrality of scientific method you couldn't do that without discrediting the entirety of science. Science absolutely depends on mathematics being something that can't be the mere product of physical causation, it depends on mathematics being able to discern the truth of, at least, the entirely non-physical, imaginary objects that mathematics is concerned with.
I find that the longer I am forced to think about these things, both in addressing the ideological lunacy of scientistic materialist atheists and, especially, the political, social and other consequences for egalitarian, economic and social justice and the survival of life on Earth the more impressed I am that we delude ourselves if we don't admit that everything in all of this, from the most banal aspects of mathematics and science to the struggle for equal justice through the rights that God endowed us with on Earth, the immaterial mind is over all of the rest of it. That is not a matter of scientific discernment, it is a product of observation and experience and a reading of the history of human experience in the light of good will. That would probably be rejected with disdain by materialist atheists because they don't like that light, they'd rather remain in the egocentric dark. They remind me of Milton's Satan.
No comments:
Post a Comment