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 .
So those materialists who write off stuff as superstition are no better than those the denigrate because THEY are the ones impeding the advance of knowledge. By labeling something as *supernatural* and then claiming that science does not deal with the *supernatural* they are excluding it from study in which we might actually learn something.
So to God, there is no *supernatural*, but to the "materialists", there is. That means the acknowlege they are not God.
“Poor dears” indeed. Thank you for your insights, dearest sister in Christ!
Otherwise, their young people will be easy prey for the sharpsters of this world....
They need to be fortified by the knowledge that God alone is their only shield against evil in this world.
Spirited: When Hermes taught the meaning of the 'Abyss' he taught "as above," meaning transcendent, "so below," meaning here in the material dimension.
In this way of thinking, nature (or cosmos) is a closed system consisting of the impersonal Mind, Spirit, etc. All things are "one with," meaning aspects of the Mind (i.e., Ein Sof, Brahma, Basilides, Star Maker).
Though there is but the one dimension as opposed to the Bible's two distinct yet interfacing, interactive dimensions(supernatural and natural), the impersonal Mind is said to be "above" because it is the top-most astral plane of the cosmic tree. The tree consists of many interconnected, descending-order planes. Some are hells, others heavens. Some are where the gods and goddesses exist. On others thought-forms exist. Some are the abode of demons, old souls, and other powers. Alice Baily teaches that one of the planes is where the Black Lodge exists. Gnostics placed Jehovah---the creator of evil matter---on a plane just above earth. The material world "here below" is the lowest rung on the cosmic tree.
When "Ben" teaches the blendability of Christianity and Buddhism he is calling for the submersion of the supernatural dimension of the living God with the closed system of Buddhism, the reduction of the living God to spiritualized matter, and the depersonalization of man.
Thank you for sharing your insights, dear spirited irish!
Thank you for the link, dear Heartlander!
Oh so very true, dear sister in Christ — and to see the depersonalization of man in all this is to understand what "Ben" is really up to.
It appears that Ben prefers reabsorption to physical resurrection. If you’re interested in the psychology behind the rejection of physical resurrection, then read:
Bus Ride from Hell
http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/kimball/120904
Cremer weaves a tale about things he can’t possibly know as if he knew them..
As Kimball weaves a tale about other things she can’t possibly know as if she wanted them to exist..
Others were mentioned with versions of other tales...
Some were cartoon-like others fictionalized.. with creative imagination...
As interesting as, anything, Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury, Clarke, or Jules Vern ever “imagined”..
Thanks.... I was entertained..
Interesting to me... what people “think” flesh(carnality) is..
As what they “think” Spirit, spirits, (ghosts) actually “is/are”...
I’m left thinking “we” don’t really know very much about those things .......
At least I don’t.... but am willing to admit it..
What is a human? and where does “it” stand among all the Universal “things”.?..
Including God which no one I know of knows, what God “IS”... and “Isn’t”..
According to my experience I know few that ever care about those things..
Most think they already “know”.. as much as they want to know.. which is little or nothing..
This discussion shows “some” actually do care.. and lean toward one Tale or another..
"It is not natural to see man as a natural product. It is not common sense to call man a common object of the country or the seashore. It is not seeing him straight to see him as an animal. It is not sane. It sins against the light; against that broad daylight of proportion which is the principal of all reality." The Everlasting Man
Peter Singer is mentioned in same. He chairs the bioethics department at Princeton.
I can't exactly say why, but every time I hear from this guy, I cannot fail but to detect a profound sense of self-loathing in this individual. At bottom, this could mean he not only hates himself, but basically also hates his fellow human beings as such.
Of course, if he hates and so denies God — and he most definitely does — then I suppose self-hated and hatred of his fellow human beings just turns out to naturally follow therefrom.
Personally, I consign the Peter Singers of this world to the category of insane persons.
So my question then becomes: Why is it that the sane people are so cowed by people like Peter Singer?
Spirited: Evil has that effect:
"No. I suppose that other world must be all a dream," said Jill
"Yes. It is all a dream," said the Witch
"Yes, all a dream," said Jill.
"There never was such a world," said the Witch.
"No," said Jill and Scrubb, "never was such a world."
"There never was any world but mine," said the Witch.
"There never was any world but yours," they said.
The witch is an important part of CS Lewis' novel, The Silver Chair, because her character symbolizes the principle of nihilism (negation) and rebellion in fallen mortal men (i.e., Peter Singer). Though the witch is not the actual devil she is of like mind with him and her mesmerizing powers of persuasion come from him.
Like her father the devil, the witch is not by any margin sane but rather dangerously insane. She is a convincing, practiced liar, a master of the black arts of deception and manipulation who knows that Narnia exists, but being spiritually dead (like Peter Singer) her lack of empathy and malignant narcissism permits her to negate reality (personhood with Singer) and impose on her victims a false reality (with Singer: man=ape)made up of distortions and fabrications.
Being of like mind with the devil she seemingly possesses a limitless supply of demonic energy, especially when engaged in imposing her will over the wills of others. Since she desires power for the sake of power, she wants the reins of control in her hands at all times as her overriding passion is to utterly control and dominate the minds and wills of others which she poisons by manipulating their perceptions. She does this by slowly but surely isolating her victims, one from the other, in a vast black widow's web of deception. She begins spinning her web by causing doubt, creating confusion, whispering behind backs, deftly massaging the pride and resentment of some while burdening those she perceives as threats with a false sense of guilt. This allows her to turn the hate and vengeance of the first group against the second, the scapegoats she quickly belittles, ridicules, undermines, discredits, denigrates and accuses of insanity should they dare to speak truth to lies:
""Narnia? I have often heard your Lordship utter that name in your ravings. Dear Prince, you are very sick. There is no land called Narnia."
The principle of negation rests on a foundation of pride, lust, covetousness, resentment and envy, and like the devil, the witch's brand of negation is so total that she lacks the capacity for empathy, making her very dangerous not only because she is motivated to scapegoat and crucify others but also because her lack of empathy negates the restraint resulting from empathy and respect for others.
Negation of empathy results in blindness to the humanity of victims which in turn permits them to be sacrificed without remorse on the altar of narcissism, for with the negation of humanity intended victims are no longer human beings but rather objects of pleasure or displeasure to be used, abused, tormented and discarded at will. This monstrous evil finds expression over and over in the writings of the sexual sadist, the Marquis de Sade:
"The philosopher sates his appetites without inquiring to know what his enjoyments may cost others, and without remorse." (Libido Dominandi, E. Michael Jones, p. 26)
The highly respected profiler of sex crimes, Roy Hazelwood describes sexual sadists like de Sade as malignant narcissists who are aroused by the suffering of another:
"It is not the infliction of pain that is arousing to the sadist, but the victim's suffering. The sadist may use physical or psychological pain as a tool to elicit the suffering, but it is the suffering that is crucial to his arousal." The most successful sexual sadists are narcissists for whom "there are no absolutes, the infinity of darkness." (Roy Hazelwood: Profiler of Sexual Crimes, Katherine Ramsland, Crime Library)
Peter Singer is a malignant narcissist who happens to chair the bioethics dept. at Princeton.
Somehow this man, and others like him, were put in positions of authority – and allowed to teach young minds eager to question everything… Dusting off an old poem -
Nice poem with lovely cadence..
Excellent! You’ve neatly captured the contentious, skeptical, rebellious spirit of our age: God is dead. He never spoke. Since there is no higher Authority, no personal Mind over our own, there is no truth but what man wills, therefore as Dostoevsky ominously foresaw, “all things are now possible.”
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