“So only by supposing that supernatural forces are accountable for physical phenomena can our souls be saved and our minds be subject to reason”
Spirited: Physical phenomena cannot account for the “immaterial” mind anymore than they can account for consciousness. If they could then rocks ought to be thinking, dreaming “physical phenomena.”
But then as materialist monism fades, neo-platonist monism rushes into the void and lo, it teaches that rocks do in fact “think” because everything that exists is “god.”
Not long before he died, Antony Flew rejected naturalism, saying that “physical phenomena” cannot and will never account for the soul, mind, and consciousness.
Flew had come to see the danger of dogmatic atheism to be the way it automatically closes itself off from certain questions, such as “why does the world exist?” A no-nonsense acceptance of “brute” (i.e., physical phenomena) facts is no explanation and should not be accorded special authority, noted Flew.
Flew came to see that the realm of science is not science itself but philosophy, thereby refuting Kant’s contradictory dichotomy. Thus philosophical issues carry more weight than the merely scientific.
The fact that nature obeys laws, that intelligently organized and purpose-driven beings came to be, the very existence of something rather than nothing...these philosophical issues in tandem with a renewed study of the classical philosophical arguments and a deep respect for the Apostle Paul in conjunction with certain scientific findings (i.e. fine-tuned universe) culminated in Flew’s acceptance of God.
Flew thought of God as self-existent, immutable, immaterial, omnipotent, and omniscient but not personal even though the resurrection was clearly on his mind.
Flew ended his last book with these words: “Some claim to have made contact with this Mind. I have not-—yet. But who knows what could happen next? Someday I might hear a Voice that says, ‘Can you hear me now?”
The resistance of naturalists to supernatural explanations is not “scientific” but psychological. For the claim that Jesus was alive, after having been dead, involves a miracle that entails the falsity of naturalism.
Whether you like it or not, the spiritual realm is intruding into the natural on a daily basis. Near death experiences and the Transcended spirit-guides of many globally-powerful progressives are just two examples of many.
Flew obviously sought God. And since He said that all who seek will find, I believe that at the very end, Flew did indeed find Him.
LOL!
Your battlelines are drawn clearly in your own mind, but they are a delusion.
You are not battling atheism by making futile arguments against science.
Science is not atheism. Science is based upon presupposing natural causes for natural phenomena and has shown its worth. It is not “psychological” for scientists to reject supernatural causation any more than it is “psychological” for a chess player to insist that bishops move only on the diagonal.
Science without methodological naturalism is nothing but the half baked loony tunes “spirit guide” soft headed mushy nonsense you seem to prefer.
Science need not address the “immaterial” mind, the spirit, the soul, spirit guides or any such immaterial fancies. Science addresses the “material” mind - the one that needs blood, consumes a large amount of our nutritional resources, and must be of a large size in order to be physically capable of human level cognition.