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Bro: the thread’s originator, and their anti-science language is not tempered by any respect for their fellow FReepers. Imho, these people need to be called out and made accountable for their lies and false accusations.

Spirited: There are emotionally-self-controlled higher order thinkers (i.e., Fyodor Dostoevsky, Dr. Thomas Molnar) whose minds penetrate ideas, concepts, etc. right down to the deepest level where source, meaning, veracity or lack of it, and consequence lie and then there are the vertical thinkers whose minds run along the top blind to all levels of meaning and consequence lying below.

The worst of this sort are intellectually impoverished and being not emotionally self-controlled, are most vulnerable to the temptation in our day to worship science and swallow toxic isms (i.e., Darwinism, methodological naturalism) “whole,” without ever questioning their veracity nor seeing their consequences until too late, if even then.

As emotions trump intellect, this sort inevitably resents and even hates anyone who exposes their intellectual impoverishment, thus like the irrational Red Queen, demand their heads be cut off:

“Imho, these people need to be called out and made accountable for their lies and false accusations.”

Bro in reaction to Nihilism and Satanic Inversion: America’s ‘New’ Reality of Non-Self and Madness:”

“....right away I notice the author’s effort to equate methodological naturalism (aka “science”) with philosophical and dialectical materialism (aka “atheistic communism”).I don’t agree that the two are the same, or that all scientists are necessarily atheistic communists.

Spirited: Whether you personally agree or not has no bearing, no effect at all upon the fact that methodological naturalism is a consistent philosophy of neo-pagan materialism applied to the seen (natural dimension) and the unseen (supernatural Holy God, soul/spirit, Heaven, hell, etc.)

Read on and discover the nature of the toxins you have swallowed whole:

“An age of science is necessarily an age of materialism,” declared Hugh Elliot early last century, “Ours is a scientific age, and it may be said with truth that we are all materialists now.” (Darwin Day in America, John G. West, xiv)

Julien de la Mettrie (1709-51), Paul Henri Thiery, and Baron D’Holbach (1723-89) all agreed that mind (soul/spirit)is the property of matter and man nothing but a machine. La Mettrie speculated that the rational life of machine-man is entirely determined by physical causes that run the gamut from raw meat, to climate, blood circulation, and gender. Genetic inheritance, posits la Mettrie, causes machine-man to think bad thoughts and commit crime.

This view casts parents, skin color, gender and even ‘thoughts’ into the role of “first cause” and would later manifest itself in the belief that State ‘experts,’ or Hillary’s “village” experts should have the ‘scientific’ control and the politically correct programming of the minds of children lest they think wrong thoughts and commit genetically-caused hate crime (i.e., homophobia, xenophobia)and worse, commit the blasphemy of being anti-scientific. (ibid, pp. 16-18)

Pierre Simon Laplace (1749-1827) viewed scientific materialism as not only the pursuit of God-like omniscience but of the Holy Grail itself-—power to create a New Man.

If an intelligence could grasp “at a given instant...all the forces by which nature is animated” proclaimed Laplace, it could devise a mathematical formula that would predict everything that would ever happen, and “nothing would be uncertain, and the future, like the past, would be open to its eyes.”

Scientists should reduce everything in the universe to mechanical laws that could be expressed in terms of mathematics, advised Laplace, for the promise of such knowledge was incredible power...even over life and mind itself. (ibid, p. 20)

Herbert Spencer, Fechner, Lotze, Wundt, and pantheist Ernst Haeckel, inventor of the scientism dictum-—ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny-—all agreed that life and mind are properties of matter. Haeckel moreover imagined ether to be the primitive life-making substance which, as was the case with the primitive fire of the Stoics, changed one part of itself into inert mass while the other part became the active evolutionary principle (spiritualized matter and energies working in and through it). Today, many scientists routinely resort to Haeckel’s postulate without ever inquiring into its mystical pantheist implications.

Haeckel would later write,

“Pantheism teaches that God and the world are one...pantheism is...an advanced conception of nature (and) a polite form of atheism.” The truth of pantheism, confessed Haeckel, “lies in its destruction of the dualist antithesis of God...” The godless world system being constructed, said Haeckel, “substantially agrees with the monism or pantheism of the modern scientist.” (Monism, Ernst Haeckel, www.pantheist.net/)

During the century to follow, Charles Darwin (1809-82) would help spread materialism/methodological naturalism to the masses. As Stephen Jay Gould argues,

“Darwin applied a consistent philosophy of materialism to his interpretation of nature, “and “the ground of all existence; mind, spirit, and God (are reduced to) neural complexity.” (ibid, p. 41)

According to Darwin, natural selection and the laws of heredity acting on matter produced mind, morality, and civilization. By describing how (mystical) natural mechanisms caused the complexity of life to emerge from matter, Darwin helped transform metaphysical materialism from a fantastically bizarre tale told by power-mad Prometheans on the fringe of society to a hallowed scientism principle enshrined and worshipped by modern methodological materialists (one-dimensional naturalists), ‘enlightened’ Westerners and evolutionary theists.

It was during this time that Social Darwinism, Progressivism, Socialism, Communism, Nazism, and Secular Humanism were developed out of scientific materialism. Classical Liberalism on the other hand, was subverted and corrupted by the materialist faith into what is now known as modern Liberalism.

Of these, Marxist Communism (dialectical materialism), is considered to be the most highly developed philosophy of materialism. It rests on three fundamental metaphysical presuppositions:

1. Deified Matter: The Ultimate One Substance which, though non-living, non-intelligent, and non-conscious, nevertheless somehow possesses the emergent properties of life, mind, consciousness, and soul.

2. Evolution: Since Marxist dialectic requires a theory with clashes (thesis and antithesis) and leaps (synthesis), Marxists have all but abandoned vulgar Darwinism and instead embraced punctuated equilibrium:

“Many people confound dialectic with the theory of evolution,” noted G. Plekhanov. “Dialectic is, in fact, a theory of evolution. But it differs profoundly from the vulgar (Darwinian) theory of evolution.” (Fundamental Problems of Marxism, 1929, p. 145)

3. Big Bang/Spontaneous Generation: An offshoot of specifically Darwinian thought accepted unreservedly by Marxists as their dialectic requires a strictly materialist explanation for the origin of life from matter. In the words of M.A. Leonov:

“Marxist philosophical materialism remains beyond all doubt that at some time or other in the remote past, life must have arisen from non-living matter.” (Outline of Dialectical Materialism, 1948, p. 494)

In a modified version of the Stoic conception of the earth as a living organism possessed of its own soul, neo-pantheist dialectical materialism declares that earth is “one entire organism...its organs the various races and nations of men.” Not only is the earth alive and evolving upward on evolution’s magical escalator, but so too are Christianity, history and society, for they also are living entities in a continuous state of motion. And man? In a modified conception of ancient Greek Atomism’s dehumanizing view of man, dialectical materialism states that man is nothing but:

“a colonial aggregation of cells,” and to “consider him an individual would be an error.” Man-—the aggregate of cells-— is nothing but an extension of society, history, and earth. (Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics, Chapter II: The Constitution of Man as a Political Organism)

Robert Jastrow (b. 1925), recipient of NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Studies explains there are only two possible explanations for the origin of life: evolution and supernatural creation ex nihilo:

“...science has no...answer to the question of the origin of life on earth. Perhaps (life) is a miracle. Scientists are reluctant to accept that view, but their choices are limited: either life was created...by the will of a being outside...scientific understanding, or it evolved...spontaneously through chemical reactions...in nonliving matter...The first theory...is a statement of faith in the power of a Supreme Being not subject to the laws of science. The second theory is also an act of faith (which assumes) that the scientific view...is correct, without having concrete evidence to support that belief.” (Until the Sun Dies, Jastrow, 1977, pp. 62-63)

Once more, it matters not at all what you elect to believe or not believe about methodological naturalism and evolution, BroJoeK. Methodological naturalism is what it is and your beliefs about it do not in any way affect its’ nature and certainly not its nihilism. And this is why evolutionary theism’s accommodation of Scripture to methodological naturalism and evolution through the reduction of the book of beginnings (Genesis account of creation ex nihilo)to myth inevitably collapses into mystical materialism or neo-Gnostic pagan nihilism (see Hans Jonas analysis in the essay).

Your faith Bro, is not in the living Holy God who spoke to Moses (creation ex nihilo) but in methodological naturalism and evolution.