Posted on 01/23/2014 9:19:28 AM PST by Heartlander
One can at least point a direction by now. I began this series by asking, what has materialism (naturalism) done for science? It made a virtue of preferring theory to evidence, if the theory supports naturalism and the evidence doesn't. Well-supported evidence that undermines naturalism (the Big Bang and fine tuning of the universe, for example) attracted increasingly speculative attempts at disconfirmation. Discouraging results from the search for life on Mars cause us to put our faith in life on exoplanets -- lest Earth be seen as unusual (the Copernican Principle).
All this might be just the beginning of a great adventure. World-changing discoveries, after all, have originated in the oddest circumstances. Who would have expected the Americas to be discovered by people who mainly wanted peppercorns, cinnamon, sugar, and such? But disturbingly, unlike the early modern adventurers who encountered advanced civilizations, we merely imagine them. We tell ourselves they must exist; in the absence of evidence, we make faith in them a virtue. So while Bigfoot was never science, the space alien must always be so, even if he is forever a discipline without a subject.
Then, having acquired the habit, we began to conjure like sorcerer's apprentices, and with a like result: We conjured countless universes where everything and its opposite turned out to be true except, of course, philosophy and religion. Bizarre is the new normal and science no longer necessarily means reality-based thinking.
But the evidence is still there, all along the road to reality. It is still saying what the new cosmologies do not want to hear. And the cost of ignoring it is the decline of real-world programs like NASA in favor of endlessly creative speculation. It turns out that, far from being the anchor of science, materialism has become its millstone.
But now, what if the ID theorists are right, that information rather than matter is the basic stuff of the universe? It is then reasonable to think that meaning underlies the universe. Meaning cannot then be explained away. It is the irreducible core. That is why reductive efforts to explain away evidence that supports meaning (Big Bang, fine-tuning, physical laws) have led to contradictory, unresearchable, and unintelligible outcomes.
The irreducible core of meaning is controversial principally because it provides support for theism. But the alternative has provided support for unintelligibility. Finally, one must choose. If we choose what intelligent design theorist Bill Dembski calls "information realism," the way we think about cosmology changes.
First, we live with what the evidence suggests. Not simply because it suits our beliefs but because research in a meaningful universe should gradually reveal a comprehensible reality, as scientists have traditionally assumed. If information, not matter, is the substrate of the universe, key stumbling blocks of current materialist science such as origin of life, of human beings, and of human consciousness can be approached in a different way. An information approach does not attempt to reduce these phenomena to a level of complexity below which they don't actually exist.
Materialist origin of life research, for example, has been an unmitigated failure principally because it seeks a high and replicable level of order that just somehow randomly happened at one point. The search for the origin of the human race has been similarly vitiated by the search for a not-quite-human subject, the small, shuffling fellow behind the man carrying the spear. In this case, it would have been well if researchers had simply never found their subject. Unfortunately, they have attempted at times to cast various human groups in the shuffler's role. Then gotten mired in controversy, and largely got the story wrong and missed its point.
One would have thought that materialists would know better than to even try addressing human consciousness. But materialism is a totalistic creed or else it is nothing. Current theories range from physicist Max Tegmark's claim that human consciousness is a material substance through to philosopher Daniel Dennett's notion that it is best treated somewhat like "figments of imagination" (don't ask whose) through philosopher Alex Rosenberg's idea that consciousness is a problem that will have to be dissolved by neuroscience. All these theories share two characteristics: They reduce consciousness to something that it isn't. And they get nowhere with understanding what it is. The only achievement that materialist thought can claim in the area of consciousness studies is to make them sound as fundamentally unserious as many current cosmologies. And that is no mean feat.
Suppose we look at the origin of life from an information perspective. Life forms show a much higher level of information, however that state of affairs came about, than non-living matter does. From our perspective, we break no rule if we assume, for the sake of investigation, that the reason we cannot find evidence for an accidental origin of life is that life did not originate in that way. For us, nothing depends one way or the other on demonstrating that life was an accident. We do not earn the right to study life's origin by declaring that "science" means assuming that such a proposition is true and proceeding from there irrespective of consequences. So, with this in mind, what are we to make of the current state of origin-of-life research?
Editor's note: Here is the "Science Fictions" series to date at your fingertips .
I can see how a zealot would sidestep discussion of unintended consequences by deriding anyone who might consider them.
Who’s going to peer review Genesis?
Oh my!!! Thus these "yelpers" — methodological materialists, a/k/a/ "MMs" — just keep on "yelping!" Their logical position is self-contradictory and thus perilous; but they just don't seem to care or want to notice.
Good grief, I just loved "the publicity condition" the yelpers would impose on us — NOT!!!
I'm sorry, but I just suspect that people who think the way the MMs do are totally out of their minds. They are psychiatric patients — or ought to be.
Plus their behavior kind of reminds me of a turkey house: initial conditions are quiet; but then, one turkey starts yelling — and sets off the entire turkey community within earshot to do likewise, as if in total panic.
Result: NOISE. Nothing means anything in this scenario. It is just turkeys "communicating" with each other....
Better stop for now. Thank you ever so much for writing, dear Heartlander!
For someone who’s supposedly above materialism, you seem curiously fixated on material theory.
Thank you so much for all of your insights, dearest sister in Christ!
“Apologists for MM provide a number of supporting rationales. It is claimed that design: is objectionably unobservable, violates a ‘publicity’ condition on scientific evidence, precludes general, law-based explanation, is a ‘science stopper’, is an argument from ignorance, fails to provide a mechanism, is ‘intractable’, is not ‘controllable’, is empirically sterile, makes no practical difference to science, and, in any case, has been decisively refuted.”
Spirited: These are the brazen lies of con-artists-—men who hate God and blame Him for the evils of this world. It is not that design does not exist, everyone can see that it does, but that unscrupulous, intellectually arrogant self- worshippers manipulate our perception of reality (mind control) in order to force us to exist in a false reality void of morality, truth, meaning and purpose.
In the former Soviet Union such people had the absolute power over life and death that permitted them to force their false reality onto everyone else. Here in America, anyone who poses a threat to the power they exert through imposition of false reality is mercilessly whipped with the help of our compliant media with a cat ‘o nine of cruel ridicule, mockery, and accusations of hatred, intolerance and insanity in order to cause other people to shun them.
In the Soviet Union, truth-tellers were killed. Here they must be destroyed via psychological terror.
"Philosophical" is something you believe. "Methodological" is something you do.
Spirited: In other words, betty's 'curious fixation' implies some-sort of 'mental health' problem.
The method utilized by all people who are offended by higher truth, meaning, purpose, and moral constraints invariably consists of the charge of insanity. They routinely level this hideous charge against anyone who poses a threat to their inflated sense of self. The self-confessed Big Liar, Hitler, always charged truth-tellers with insanity.
The Soviet Union and Hitler's Third Reich were criminal enterprises---hell's on earth-- run for the benefit of the criminally-minded. Among common denominators of both earthly hells were: hatred of God, Darwinism, neo-paganism (i.e., materialism), mental hygiene, political correctness, sexual perversions, and brutal human experimentation under the banner of science (magic science).
The method utilized by all people who are offended by higher truth, meaning, purpose, and moral constraints invariably consists of the charge of insanity.
Kind of like the implications of delusion implied in "second reality"?
Spirited: To begin at the beginning, your accusations against betty arose in reaction against her observations regarding the materialist worldview. Therefore, it is only on a shallow level that turning around my statement seems clever since you are in effect defending the nihilism of materialist assumptions. In other words, underlying your cleverness is nothing but arrogance.
All worldviews begin with a religious declaration. The Biblical or Revealed Word perspective begins with, "In the beginning God created..." Evolutionary atheism begins with divinized man declaring, "In the beginning void, matter, and energy." Rather than the living, personal God, evolutionists prefer instead, void (abyss), matter, and energy. This is all there is, and despite that none of it lives or thinks, matter nevertheless thinks, chooses, is miraculously self-perfecting and Divine: "…matter itself continually attains to higher perfection under its own power, thanks to indwelling dialectic…the dialectical materialists attribution of 'dialectic' to matter confers on it, not mental attributes only, but even divine ones." (Dialectical Materialism, Gustav A. Wetter, 1977, p. 58) In explicitly religious language, the following neo-pagan religionist offers all praise, honor, and glory to his non-life bearing anti-human anti-creator: "We may regard the material and cosmic world as the supreme being, as the cause of all causes, as the creator of heaven and earth." (Vladimir Lenin quoted in Communism versus Creation, Francis Nigel Lee, 1969, p. 28) Now who is delusional? The man whose reality is defined by, and his hopes rest upon, the living, personal God, Creator of time, matter and energy and sustainer of life and being or the man whose 'reality' is defined by, and his hopes rest upon, non-life-bearing, mindless created stuff--- the 'alternative reality" of non-self?--- void (nothingness), matter, and energy?
Everyone has a "worldview", regardless of whether they've ever had any religious indocrination or not.
Thank you for sharing your insights, dear spirited irish!
you: "Philosophical" is something you believe. "Methodological" is something you do.
When methodological materialism is a belief, the one so believing is ill.
That argument obfuscates the semantics. When it becomes a belief it's philosophical, and not just methodological.
Again, you make the point rather well.
Then why should we employ arguments that obfuscate what's being discussed?
Worldviews are always religiously held. Though evolutionary atheists like to believe that it is by “reason” that they adhere to the presuppositions, ideations, theories, etc. of which their worldview consists, like all believers, they hold to them religiously. Most in fact, are as zealous in their beliefs as are the most zealous of Muslims. Meaning their desire to enforce their beliefs, i.e., evolution, ranks with Muslim enforcers of Sharia. This is why evolutionary atheists murdered in excess of 160,000,000 during the 20th century.
tacticalogic: "Kind of like the implications of delusion implied in "second reality"?
Spirited: To begin at the beginning, your accusations against betty arose in reaction against her observations regarding the materialist worldview. Therefore, it is only on a shallow level that turning around my statement seems clever since you are in effect defending the nihilism of materialist assumptions. In other words, underlying your cleverness is nothing but arrogance.
All worldviews begin with a religious declaration. The Biblical or Revealed Word perspective begins with, "In the beginning God created..." Evolutionary atheism begins with divinized man declaring, "In the beginning void, matter, and energy."
Rather than the living, personal God, evolutionists prefer instead, void (abyss), matter, and energy. This is all there is, and despite that none of it lives or thinks, matter nevertheless thinks, chooses, is miraculously self-perfecting and Divine:
"…matter itself continually attains to higher perfection under its own power, thanks to indwelling dialectic…the dialectical materialists attribution of 'dialectic' to matter confers on it, not mental attributes only, but even divine ones." (Dialectical Materialism, Gustav A. Wetter, 1977, p. 58)
In explicitly religious language, the following neo-pagan religionist offers all praise, honor, and glory to his non-life bearing anti-human anti-creator:
"We may regard the material and cosmic world as the supreme being, as the cause of all causes, as the creator of heaven and earth." (Vladimir Lenin quoted in Communism versus Creation, Francis Nigel Lee, 1969, p. 28)
Now who is delusional? The man whose reality is defined by, and his hopes rest upon, the living, personal God, Creator of time, matter and energy and sustainer of life and being or the man whose 'reality' is defined by, and his hopes rest upon, non-life-bearing, mindless created stuff--- the 'alternative reality" of non-self?--- void (nothingness), matter, and energy?
Who sees reality more clearly: Someone who looks at the world, and chooses to believe in a living personal God based on what they see, or someone who starts with having been taught someone else's theology and looking at the world through it?
Hmmm... I thought I was plain spoken.
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