A former 40 year Atheist analyzes Atheism, without resorting to theism, deism, or fantasy. *** If You Don't Value Truth, Then What DO You Value? *** If we say that the sane can be coaxed and persuaded to rationality, and we say that rationality presupposes logic, then what can we say of those who actively reject logic? *** Atheists have an obligation to give reasons in the form of logic and evidence for rejecting Theist theories.
Showing posts with label Atheist Logic Loops and Lapses. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Atheist Logic Loops and Lapses. Show all posts
The famous Bertrand Russell paradox which destroyed the attempt by him and Whitehead to outline the totality of mathematics, was just this:
The set of all sets cannot contain itself, so it is not the set of all sets.
This brings to mind a note to myself which recently re-surfaced, which said,
All things which exist are physical;
the source of all physical things is physical.
This statement of Philosophical Materialism is just as logically incestuous as the Russell Paradox. Is it actually the case that the source of all physical things is a physical thing which created itself, ex nihilo? And of course, subsequently created all other physical things?
In other words, all other physical things couldn't exist until and unless the first, creating physical thing created itself, under Philosophical Materialism and Atheism.
Where in nature do we see something come into physical existence without an identifiable prior causal existence? Even a quantum field is required in order to produce particle pairs, according to the Copenhagen understanding of quantum physics. Either particles are created by energy, or particles actually are energy (Quantum Field Theory). But what sort of a physical "thing" would the first, self-creating energy/particle be? What gives a probability field a positive value?
That is the paradox which surrounds the underlying theory of Philosophical Materialism, which is a necessary subset of Atheism - the rejection of a non-material creating entity. To drive the nail further home, the only valid evidence under the physicalist, Philosophical Materialism constraint is empirical data which is obtained in disciplined experimental fashion, successfully replicated, peer reviewed (for whatever that is worth), with open data for public examination of methods and results.
Can this empirical evaluation be done with regard to the "first self-creating physical thing"? Or even "any self-creating physical thing" That would require creating an absolute void containing not even any quantum field, much less radiation or outside particles. Then how, within this logically and actually empty environment could the creation, ex nihilo of course, be induced? Be replicated? It cannot be done. It is an effect without a cause outside itself, so there is no prior cause available to initiate the effect.
This seems almost too simple to avoid the truth of it. But it is not apparent to Atheists, who need the concept of physical self-creation and Philosophical Materialism in order to protect their chosen worldview. But they should have to admit that both logic and empirical evidence fail to indicate any value to support their choice. Why do they not admit to this, but rather claim the opposite: to have logic and evidence for their belief? There is only one remaining possibility, outside of insanity, and that is emotional neediness for their Atheism to be true.
Atheists have a choice:
A physical thing can and did create itself, as the source of itself, the cause of itself. (Not a property of known physical things; never observed; not inducible; a theory out of desperation).
Or,
Physical things always existed. (Infinite regression)
Or,
Physical things are illusions or delusions. (self reference).
Philosophical Materialism, and therefore Atheism, fail logically and empirically.
[Ed.: My comments are in brackets and bold, just like this. Caution: sarcasm ahead.]
"I asked him what his goal was.
“I’m not seeking to outlaw religion,” he answered.
[Remember this when you read further down]
“Every American has the right to practice a religion. But we would be a freer state, healthier, if we dropped the myths of yesteryear. We’d be a more knowledgeable country. Just look at Scandinavia. We see the positive effects of atheism there.”
[Oh yes! Ya gotta love what has been done to Scandinavian countries by the AtheoLeft]
The most critical flaw of faith, he told me, was the notion it offers of an “objective morality” – that is, unquestionable, immutable, heaven-decreed moral absolutes that cannot evolve as our consciousness does. “The lie of objective morality that make people do bad things and think they’re doing good,” with ISIS atrocities and attacks on abortion clinics serving as obvious examples thereof. Such murderers “think they’re doing God’s work, they think they’re doing good.”
[All religion is ISIS and abortion abbatoir attackers; that’s a revelation]
I asked why he chose the present moment to publish “Fighting God.”
“We’re seeing this rise in religious hatred all over the world,” he said, “and a pushback against criticizing religion. Yet religion is the problem.
[Well, it's not the problem in China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, Scandinavia, the EU, etc. And not all religion.]
We see its influence all over, in abortion, gay rights, climate change.
[Oh my yes. To be against killing one’s progeny, rampant buggering, and data molesting is defined as EVIL – objective and TRUE EVIL. It has been revealed as such by… the evangelist Silverman! So it is an objective absolute.]
In Europe, the rise of Islam” – especially with the influx of Muslim refugees – “is leading to the rise of firebrand atheism, as atheists are being pushed into realizing that they have something to fight, and something to defend.
[Hm. So it’s only Atheists who realize this? Who Knew? Atheists must be the Islamophobes everyone talks about.]
In Heidelberg and Basil and Zurich I spoke to packed crowds who wanted to know more about firebrand atheism because of the fear of the rise of Islam.
[Wait, it’s ALL religion, right? Why just Islam?]
Religion is hurting our species, it’s hurting the entire world, and yet we protect it.
[That’s better. It IS all religion, then.]
We need to put religion in its place, which is back in the church.” He paused. “Religion is a scam, a lie codified in our society, demanding respect, even from the non-religious, and cannot be challenged.
[So – you had to go to Europe to challenge religion? It's codified in the USA? Like a law? Again, who knew? I could swear that you have challenged religion for a living in the USA.]
But religious opinions are opinions just like any other opinions. It’s about time for the lie to come to an end, for the lie to die.”
[So religion is a lie, which is to die? And not to be allowed? OK, then. That’s what I thought you were all about! Now confirmed.]
“How exactly is it a scam?”
“A scam takes money from people for a promise that’s never kept. Religion tells people they will get to heaven. But they never get to heaven.
[Alriiiight! Promise never kept! There's no heaven! There must be facts and data coming next to support this claim; I can’t wait!]
Religion lies, takes money, funnels money to preachers and then demands respect.
[Whoa, what happened to the PROOF? This is not proof. It is a blanket condemnation based on lack of evidence cum ignorance of actual religion. Again where is the objective empirical proof for this? Obviously it's not required, since the Atheist evangelist has declared "religion" to be EVIL... absolutely, objectively, morally EVIL. So it's the Atheist MORAL CODE.]
No really powerful god would have to demand respect. So I refuse to give respect.”
[Oh, now I understand. You know precisely what a deity would do, because… um, why?]
Does disrespecting faith work as a tactic?
“Yes! When no one shows disrespect for religion, those inside the churches feel afraid and abandoned.
[Oh man. You are so powerful that believers actually cower at your disrespect? Impressive!]
Yet religion deserves no more respect than tarot cards or astrology.
[Uh oh. Bad analogy. Those things can be tested empirically.]
This is an outreach effort to those inside the churches.
[Oh yes! Those inside churches are desperate to hear how superior you are to them and their inferior, backward ways which you disrespect with such splendiferous arrogance and intellectual emptiness. Yes, that’ll work.]
We’re saying, you can get out! We can grow the movement by spreading atheism, but also by getting atheists who don’t call themselves atheists to call themselves what they are.
[So they're all held captive in there? And your Atheism will free them to hate like you do? That’s the way to dream.]
Ninety percent of atheists don’t call themselves atheists; the real number [of atheists] isn’t 3 percent but 35 percent.
[Not according to the experts who take the polls.]
All I need to do to multiply the movement by a factor of ten is get atheists to call themselves atheists, we don’t have to change opinions about God. There are even atheists behind pulpits.”
[Yes. Dream the Dream! So many people can't wait to hate... you can lead the way!]
What Silverman is cannot be characterized as evidence-based, logic-based or rational; he is an evangelist who spouts hatred for religion. In other words, an evangelistic hate monger in pseudo-rational clothes.
There is more at the SITE, but I stopped here because it is enough to demonstrate the “thought” process of the guy.
“You ask me if the God of the Christians forgives those who don’t believe and who don’t seek the faith. I start by saying – and this is the fundamental thing – that God’s mercy has no limits if you go to him with a sincere and contrite heart. The issue for those who do not believe in God is to obey their conscience.
“Sin, even for those who have no faith, exists when people disobey their conscience.”
Of course, what this really says is, "Go to him" sincerely and contritely; that is the condition for receiving God's Mercy. And that is not Atheism any more, is it?
[A: no it is not].
Further, to obey one's conscience is another way of saying, listen to the God inside you - the Holy Spirit. Atheists listen to their appetites and proclivities, then declare that to be "rational". And most have long since declared their superiority, intellectually and morally, not only to believers, but to God and certainly the Pope.
The false belief that the Pope says they need not believe in order to receive access to heaven will only serve to confirm their "specialness" in their already elitist minds.
Most actual Atheists have no chance of meeting the Pope's criteria. That's because these critieria are defining a believer, not an Atheist.
This demonstrates the Atheist VOID (of grounded intellects), as well as the adage that Atheists will believe anything. For you Atheists, the argument is against a claim not made: i.e., a Straw Man.
Tarico interviews Filmmaker and photographer Chris Johnson on the dangers of religion and his new documentary, “A Better Life”
“Our public conversation about atheism is two dimensional,” says Johnson. “It’s time to open the next phase. For ten years we’ve talked about what we don’t believe in. The dialogue kicked off by the New Atheist movement was much needed, but after we strip away gods and superstition, what is left? How do we see ourselves and our lives and our relationships? That’s what we need to talk about next.”
This is the necessary admission that they have nothing else, beyond rejection and personal opinions for moral constructs.
"Some people were expecting to hear the same thing from everyone—why religion is wrong. But instead, the atheists in the film were talking about really big questions: How do we find meaning and purpose? How do we relate with each other? How do we deal with our own mortality? How do we interact with the world around us? They talked about dimensions of the religious experience that are accessible to people outside of religion. So many people get incredible experiences going to church. But if you assume that all of this is natural, then these powerful experiences have natural causes. So we can ask, how can we have the same rich experiences without the things we don’t like about religion?"
Blatantly groping for religiousness without a deity. For blessings without a blessor, in a creation without a creator. Creating meaning in a material universe which has no meaning. Consider this sentence, excised from its context:
" If we can get that without the false truth claims of religion, we get the best of both worlds."
Atheism, being purely rejection without evidence or rational argument, gives the Atheist nothing. It empties the soul of hope. It empties the mind of logic. All because of rejecting the fundamentals: the single moral authority; the single source of rationality in a universe based on laws which are not man-made. Atheists have nothing but the accident of their existence in a cold and dying universe which cares nothing for them.
"People think that to have profound meaningful experiences and commitments takes religion or some higher power outside of yourself. But it doesn’t.
In fact, an evidence-based rational perspective can make you more understanding and compassionate. The naturalist worldview recognizes many complex causes and effects in people’s lives and that can lead to compassion. If you look at the bishop in Les Miserables who lies and saves Jean Valjean from going back to prison, that is an act of grace—an act of compassion. This idea of grace, the idea of undeserved forgiveness—we tend to think of that in a religious sense. But if you look at the world as purely natural, then you could be inclined to think of that in the same sense. I’m an atheist and the story of Les Miserables resonates with me in the same way it does with many believers. The ideas of compassion and forgiveness are universally human and not strictly religious."
This is a common Atheist lie.
The huge Atheist experiments of the 20th century, Marxist-Atheist Communism, were the exact opposite of compassionate and forgiving, and on a hugely bloody, torturing-murderous exercise of Atheism in power. This is evidence. It is the evidence-based rational perspective to which Atheists are blind and seemingly intellectually immune. And that places Atheism into the blind belief category.
Fact: compassion and forgiveness are NOT universally human; and they are strictly religious, in fact they are primarily Christian. (Not Islamic, for certain). The author is co-opting Christianity at every turn, while leaving out the deity. This is because Atheists want themselves to be the pinnacle of existence. By stealing Christianity from its deity, the Atheist may pretend to be what he is not: the deity himself.
But this Atheist is just a thief; without the prior existence of Christianity he has nothing new to offer. At least Atheist philosophers have contrary moral/ethical programs (all starting with consequentialism) which they wish to promote.
"If there is no god pulling the strings, then all that is left is the world and the people around us."
Nothing for the Atheist, except Christian precepts to steal.
Atheists are always suspect. That is because there is no moral authority behind any of this or any other Atheist moral/ethical proclamation. Only the presupposed "elitness" of the Atheist exists as a source for authority, and that is a delusion, an affect which Atheists try to maintain, despite their failures to ever produce either evidence or logic for their position, which flies in the face of their claim to be grounded in both evidence and logic.
There is more at the site, if you care to read it. I didn't.
How many times have you been in an argument with a theist, either in person or via the Internet, and they’ve at some point spoken the magic words...
“If you’re an atheist that’s fine, but you should respect my beliefs.”
Argh! A nightmare situation! Political correctness is pulling us away; something tells us that for some reason, we have to respect their beliefs. It’s like kryptonite to us; it is their magic umbrella that they whip out the second a little drop of logic wets their heads. Through those words, they can strut about like a triumphant peacock, safe under their respect umbrella, knowing that polite social convention prohibits us from taking further action. Well I am here to pour acid rain on that umbrella, because I don’t think we do have to respect people’s beliefs, and the beauty of this is that most theists agree with me. They just don’t know they do.
Case in point: the Westboro Baptist Church, the largest collection of nutters that Kansas has to offer, is run by possibly the most hated family in the world. At what point do people, Christian or otherwise, stand up and say,
“Yes they think all soldiers are burning in hell, as is Ghandi. Yes they think homosexuals consume faeces, yes they honestly believe that Barack Obama is literally the antichrist but...You have to respect their beliefs.”
No one says that or thinks that! No, we all treat the WBC how they deserve to be treated, and that is with ridicule. However, I will say this about the Westboro Baptist Church, they actually follow the scriptures; they’ve read them, understood them and follow them as much as the law will allow. They are the least hypocritical Christians out there, which goes to show that you’d have to be bananas to actually follow the scriptures.
Do All Cults Deserve Respect?
Nazism is another example; it wasn’t just a political movement, it was an ideology. It could be described as quasi-religious, a belief that the Aryan race was the perfect race and social groups such as homosexuals, Jews, Blacks, Slavs were inferior and needed exterminating. It’s funny, I can’t quite recall Winston Churchill giving a speech on respecting Nazism. As far as I know, almost the entire world was highly critical of Nazism. It just didn’t float our boat. We just weren’t keen on it. I’m sure poor Adolf was heartbroken the second we started persecuting his beliefs. What about the Aztec religion? Should we respect that? What if a load of people suddenly converted to Aztec belief and started sacrificing people to appease the Sun God? Should we respect that? Their religion does say they are allowed to take the beating heart out of someone before killing them by decapitation if the Sun is angry. Who are we to say that is not okay? Is it too much? Who gets to say what acceptable behaviour is?
Don't let Them Guilt You into Leaving them Alone
The reason I bring this up is because religious leaders are hiding behind this invisible shield of undeserved respect whilst enforcing laws that prohibit the movements of non-believers. The situation in Russia is a fine example of this; Putin has managed to take away the rights of LGBT citizens on grounds of religion, and his blasphemy laws restrict any backlash. Islam is carrying out horrendous tortures of women and children on a daily basis under religion’s protective wing. Christians are marching on abortion, trying and successfully managing to make it illegal in places, and falling back on “respect my beliefs” when challenged on it—which only results in desperate women doing desperate things. What makes the Holy Trinity immune to criticism? Why can we challenge Nazism, bizarre cults like Scientology and the WBC, but not Islam? Why is Islam free to do what it wants? Why can’t we point out the flaws in Christianity? In each book of the Holy Trinity there are blatant passages of hate, untruths, and complete bullshit, but for some reason we are to respect that. Both major religions are very clear how they feel about homosexuals yet for some reason I have to respect that? No I don’t respect that...I don’t respect a book that says,
“If a man lies with a male as he lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination. They shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them. (Leviticus 20:13)”
And this little gem from the Qur’ran:
“Slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out... If they attack you (there) then slay them. Such is the reward of disbelievers.--2:191”
I don’t have to respect books that promote this. Is there good stuff in the Bible and the Qur’ran? Sure, but there was good stuff in Nazism too. For example, Hitler was very kind to animals. Nazis made the first highway. I liked Nazi attitudes towards the working man, too. But that doesn’t mean I have to respect Nazism, and it doesn’t mean I have to respect the Holy Trinity. A line must be drawn so that religions cannot back people into a corner, hiding safely and offensively behind their phalanx of respect. Too easily and too widely is that formation arranged.
Respect Humanity not Theocracy
We weren’t respecting religion when DOMA was broken as made clear by the Republican response nor were we respecting religion when we stopped burning witches and if we are going to continue to break down the restrictive walls religion has built, we need to do a lot more disrespecting. I am NOT saying we should get out our torches and set fire to churches while chanting “atheism rules!” We need to handle this calmly, rationally and politely. Education and debate; those are the atheist weapons, and it is only with those weapons can we make people see the folly of religion. We need to
let the religious in power know they do not have the right to lord their religion over us.
If they want to go without sex, alcohol or gambling, that is their choice—but don’t make it so other people have to do the same.
Because
there is nothing quite like drunken fornication on a poker table..."
Actually, I agree with a good part of this: the parts concerned with freedom to choose (but not the rants about how abused Atheists are - they are not abused except in their fevered minds). But these days the "restrictive walls" this Atheist so fears and loathes are not built by anyone but Atheists in their Leftist personas. These days no one dares distress an Atheist/Leftist, who might faint at the microaggression of being in the presence of someone who is different - say an actual cis-white person who obviously has "cis-white privilege" regardless of actual economic or social birth status. Or gender privilege if one has not yet changed one's gender-clothes back and forth, and yet still goes into the opposite cis-lavatory. The resulting Leftist/Atheist bruhaha can lead to loss of jobs and lawsuits for those who object or even dissent.
But yes, it has been religion which, in now dimming memory has not accepted abnormal behaviors as normal. Now the abnormal is protected and the normal is "privileged" and shouted off the stage. And why not? There is no Atheist moral code, no unifying principles for acceptable behavior, much less principles for logic. Thus there is no "immoral code" either, and no Atheist standards for the maintenance of order in a civilization. And that is the actual objective of the iconoclasts, the standards destroyers, the removers of all restrictions which hamper their movement: destroy all barriers to their behaviors which they hate in civilization. With no one's behaviors judgeable or judged, all behaviors are EQUAL and not to be restricted -- and equally likely to be beyond libertine, and well into anarchy.
But total immunity is not the intent of the Atheist/Leftist either. It is only his own behaviors which are immune, and we learn that from this Atheist article above. Only those who actually subscribe to libertine anarchy are to be allowed immunity from judgment of their behaviors. Anyone who prescribes, or tries to prescribe limitation on behaviors (whoa, that would be morals: choke, gasp, swallow vomit in mouth) will be attacked, and by that he's not recommending torches this time around, just non-torch attacks (I think; maybe it's just British flashlights he means). And that, on his part, is ill-advised because no Atheist/Leftist can win a war of reasoning with an educated... um... non-Atheist.
Atheism is based in the anti-logic and hate rhetoric which infests this author. For him to claim that "education and debate" are their weapons is ludicrous. The Atheist can provide neither reasons (logical arguments based in first principles and Aristotelian deduction) nor empirical experimental, replicable, falisfiable data (real material science) which provides even a shred of evidence for Atheism. And further, the necessary support philosophy, Materialism, is demonstrably false due to its rather obvious and simplistic internal contradictions. So the poor Atheist might rant, but has no chance in a rational, logical head-butt.
Well this has been fun, watching yet another Atheist cherry pick verses and cults in order to produce a Literalist Atheist faux-analysis by which to denigrate and depreciate those who would "put restrictions which hamper the movements" of his poor, self-pitying, restricted self. It's just not clear which movements of his that it is which are hampered. Certainly not slobbering sex on a pool table.
In today's western society the main thrust in hampering is provied by AtheoLeftists who, for example, can't stand the presence of conservative arguments on their campus, so they get that microaggression stopped before it can even happen; who become ill at the sight of crosses and demand their removal for their health (gastric problems, ideologically triggered); and if anyone prays outside the confines of their own basements, the FFRF lawsuits fly in order to stop that atrocity. The concept of personal hampering is, well, relativistic, when it is asserted by an Atheist.
Still, there remain some areas of hampering, like group marriage, animal rights marriage - human/goat for example, lowering the age of marriage to 9 years old in order to accommodate those lovers who "were born that way" and are still without their New Rights, and the acceptance in the military of Trans-roaches or whatever abnormality is next. So yes, some "movement" is still "hampered", I suppose. But not much.
It appears to me -- no, it is obvious to me -- that what the author really can't stand is the actual existence of any remaining Christian (with Muslim thrown in too, because: equality). Because there might leak out of such a creature awful concepts of anachronistic (dead white man) civilization and its necessary need for restrictions on destructive behaviors, hated restrictions at least to some extent above and beyond total libertinism and behavioral anarchy (the Atheist default VOID). And that would ruin the Atheist's fragile digestion.
One last observation. I loved the author's vision of "desperate women" being deprived of shredding their progeny. Desperate women. There must have been 57,000,000 desperate women since Roe v Wade. What a mental image. And if you lay 57,000,000 dead fetuses end to end, they would reach roughly no Atheist conscience. Interesting.
"12, Atheism is dull - Atheists themselves may be exciting, charming, entertaining and vivacious people. It is not the atheists I object to as much as atheism. I say it is dull because it is, at its essence, it is a negation and a denial. There can be nothing festive about it. There can be nothing intriguing or mysterious about it. It is not fecund. It is a reduction not an addition. It is a negative not a positive. It is something empty, not full. I wrote further about this earlier this week here. It is therefore as motivating as a yawn… and as interesting."
Atheism is exactly nothing, in the sense of intellectual contribution. It is purely negation via denialism. The problem, though, is that after that anti-intellectual beginning in a person's worldview, the remainder of the worldview becomes intellectually corrupt as well. This is due to having lost the need for logic in support of one's worldview, any manner of irrational premises are easily adopted and claimed as Truth, including the premise that it is true that there is no truth.
While Atheism is dull, taken by itself, it is as exciting as any psychopathic adventure when extended to other elements of a worldview.
”Today is Openly Secular Day and Tom Krattenmaker uses the opportunity to bring up five challenges atheists still face.
I wanted to summarize his points and add a few thoughts of my own: 1) Even though we’re despised in some parts of the country and discriminated against in some ways, we don’t really get bullied or picked on. That makes it harder to gain sympathy for our views.
Krattenmaker is right (and I’m glad he is, because the alternative would be awful). We often make a lot of comparisons between our movement and the LGBT movement, and this is one area where that just falls apart. LGBT individuals have it much worse than we do on this front. (For that reason, I don’t buy the notion that the treatment of atheists is “America’s last prejudice.”)
That said, how do we make people more likely to trust us or consider us electable? Atheists who have the opportunity to do so need to talk more about their values and share stories about what they’re gone through. We have to find a way to get people who might disagree with us about God to be on our side in other ways. That doesn’t happen if we spend a lot of our time insulting them (publicly or otherwise).”
Do they actually think that talking about the fact that they have no common set of values short of scorn for religion and those who are religious is going to help their image? This first issue seems to point to the tone-deafness and lack of self-examination that is common to Atheists, although it is not value, it is a failing. It is demonstrably is a feature common to the narcissistic elite class.
”2) We have a shitty reputation.
We do. And what I said above still applies here. When you think about the most famous atheists — known to people beyond our community — the ones who immediately come to my mind are comedians (who mock religion) and authors (who criticize religion). All of that has it’s place, no doubt, but whenever possible, we need to promote and support voices who are tough to dislike. It’s tough to find Neil deGrasse Tyson-types who can reach out to multiple kinds of audiences without necessarily alienating them while talking about atheism (which Tyson doesn’t do). But the more people like that in the public eye, the tougher it is to pretend we’re all evil and immoral.”
Thinking that the slightly-milder-than-Dawkins snark of Tyson (also known for falsehoods) is a helpful feature is also odd. Tyson is so obviously self-absorbed in his eliteness and superior Materialist status that it is nauseatingly obvious that he is an Atheist even before he belittles religion. It becomes apparent that Atheists can’t recognize hate speech when they agree with it and think those same thoughts themselves.
”3) Too many people think God and morality go together.
That’s unfortunately true as well. Once again, this is a matter of stressing our Humanism: That not believing in God or an afterlife compels us to act certain ways right now. We have to fight for civil rights and against injustice because it’s not like these things will all get sorted out after we die.
Already, there have been advertising campaigns stressing how we’re “good without God,” though a catchy slogan is no match for tangible actions. That means more volunteering, more charity work, and being on the front lines on issues where religion gets it wrong.”
Many people recognize that there is no standard moral code at all which attaches to Atheism. They already know that moral behavior does not necessarily attach to those who actually do have a code; so how could moral behavior attach to those with no code at all, except whatever they make up themselves? So this is another tone-deafness issue with which Atheists are afflicted. Good Without God still resonates with Mehta, even though it is obvious that there is no Atheist definition for "good", and non-Atheists know that intuitively because it is self-evident. (There are several features of Atheism which are self-evident to everyone except Atheists; and that indicates an Atheist mental issue.
”4) We dismiss religious groups that might otherwise be natural allies on a host of church/state separation issues.
I’ve definitely experienced this, but that’s changing. That’s why Foundation Beyond Belief always includes an organization run by (non-proselytizing) religious groups in our slate of charities each quarter. That’s why the Secular Student Alliance has done more work recently with the Interfaith Youth Core. That’s why I’m a firm believer that achieving our common goals is more of a priority than debating who’s right, whether we’re supporting progressive churches for being LGBT inclusive or joining religious leaders in protests when we see racial inequality.”
First off, if there actually were any “natural allies”, under what common grounds could that alliance happen? As for common core values, there is no realistic possibility since Atheists have no common core values which are not attached to their rejection of ALL the morally grounded worldviews of all others. Rejection and denial are the only common core which Atheists have.
The whole point of Atheism is rejection of non-reductionist, non-materialist ideas and the worldviews which are deduced using those ideas. Atheism is 180 degrees out of phase with non-Atheism. And for the most part Atheists are proudly elitist in their contrary views. They take those contrary views on purpose, not on the basis of any rational value, but purely on the value of having views which are contrary. That's what sets them apart, and makes them "elite"; they reject that which is "common". So how can they have anything in "common" with putative allies?
”5) We have to stop being the “others.”
Krattenmaker is saying that most people still don’t know any open atheists, and that makes it a lot easier to demonize us. That’s why events like Openly Secular Day are so important, and why I just love to see people using new media to speak out about their non-belief. They’re using YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and their campus groups to send messages to strangers who may not know what freethought looks like. This is such a huge change from a couple of decades ago, and it’s only going to get better on this front in the future.”
I don’t think Atheists are demonized. I think they enjoy their perception of their "high intellectual status" (gained by uttering three words, “ain’t no God”), a status which they know sets them apart from the herd, a class which they scorn and spurn at every turn including in their Atheist churches which employ the ridicule of comedians rather than the moral lessons of real churches. The "othering" comes first from Atheists themselves, as they remove themselves from the scorned herd - the other. By "othering" the herd, it is only natural that they are "other" than the herd themselves. It is a tautological condition of Atheism with respect to non-Atheism, the same as NOT X is to X. There is no possible remedy for such a problem of mathematics and logic, which dictate "othering" for the set, NOT X, which is outside the set of X.
And the “use of new media to speak out about their non-belief“ can’t possibly help their image, since those images are also of rejection, scorn, elitism, and irrational materialist claims about existence as well as false and denigrating imagery of actual believers. Think about the movie "Religulous" for example.
As for Freethought, it is exactly "free": free of grounding logical principles and free of moral tenets which define an Atheist moral basis. In other words, Freethought is freely irrational and freely amoral. And that condition of mental anarchy leads very quickly to Leftist, statist, elitist top down control of the scorned classes. It's a very natural extension. And it is so obvious that is virtually self-evident - except to Atheists.
”To be sure, those aren’t the only challenges we face, but they’re pretty accurate from a broad public perspective. I’m an optimist about all of them. When you considering how much worse things were for us, on all five fronts, a few decades ago, it’s incredible how far we’ve come. The path ahead of us looks bright.”
Mehta thinks that these statements by Krattenmaker are “accurate”. That being the case, and if that thought process is extended, then it is made clear that Atheists have no concept of what their actual problems are regarding their desire for being accepted as “normal” people (who might vote for one someday). That self-blindness seems to be a disorder, and narcissistic disorder seems to come very close. Here’s why: Narcissists believe that other people have the problem, not themselves. Their self-image is that of flawlessness, of having no defect in either thought or behavior. They thus are above the others, above those with the actual problem, and therefore they are superior to them. Further, narcissism is untreatable because the narcissist will not work on issues which he knows he doesn’t have.
Lawrence Krauss, physicist and cosmologist, travels frequently as he proselytizes for Scientism. Sometimes he is with Dawkins, others he is with Dennett. Here is a video of some of his choice gems, which I have transcribed below, and commented on. Because there are diverse clips, I have numbered them for ease of reference.
1. “Beliefs are not innocuous. Belief in things that aren’t true often results in actions that are often harmful”.
Yes, associating actions with false beliefs certainly condemns the Atheist regimes of Lenin/Trotsky/Stalin/Mao/Pol Pot/Castro/Chavez, etc. Their actions were beyond harmful, they were evil, massively so. And they were based on false principles of Atheistic, Scientistic Materialism. And yes, Dialectical Materialism is the belief upon which they were and are specifically based. And these are false, have been demonstrated to be false, and more importantly,have been demonstrated to be highly harmful, even bloodily eugenic (but in a logical way). So the implication of Krauss' claim must be held especially true, highly visibly so, for Atheistic, Scientistic, Materialism.
2. (a) “The point is that the doctrines of religion are outdated, and that’s for good reason. They were created by bronze age, or iron age peasants, who didn’t even know that the earth orbited the sun. So the wisdom in those books is not wisdom at all, and people take the wisdom – in fact, we have learned something over the last 20 centuries and science has taught us how the world works (7:50). Now for science… the interesting thing for scientists is that God is completely irrelevant to scientists. Most scientists don’t spend enough time thinking about God to even know if they are Atheists. Because they try and understand how the world works and God never enters into it. It’s just completely irrelevant. And in fact, the more we learned about the natural world, the more we’ve learned that you don’t need any divine intervention to explain anything.
(b) As far as morality is concerned and the person you want to be, which I think is really the heart of what religion…. When religion provides many things for people and we can’t deny that. The question is, how can we take the things that people need – community; support; hope – and use the real world to build those quantities. Because if you base your beliefs and your actions on myths that are incorrect, you’re inevitably going to take irrational actions. And so what we want to do is what science does which is to force peoples’ beliefs to conform to the evidence of reality rather than the other way around, and not assume the answers to questions even before we ask them. And use the RATIONAL WORLD to build a global society, not an exclusionary society, but a global world where people can live together based on the reality that we are all humans sharing this planet. And we need to work together to build a better place. A morality based on rationality and not outmoded religious beliefs.”
The first part, 2(a), is false. There is no law of physics that predicts that any mineral combination will be self-aware, much less a conscious agent, by virtue of deterministic laws of physics. There is no law of physics that even comes close. In fact, the practice of physics requires that physical existence be deterministic, regular, orderly, stupidly so. That alone falsifies what Krauss maintains as being complete knowledge of the world and how it works. To maintain such a thing necessitates an internal contradiction. And that contradiction falsifies his use of the term “rational world”
Further, it is pointless to declare that God is irrelevant to scientists, science and the investigation of material existence. In fact that is counterproductive to open thought and hypothesis formation. Material existence is not God, and there is no expectation of finding God there. But the fact that the universe is rational, we are rational, and the question of why should that be so in a purely material, deterministic universe cannot be answered under deterministic physical laws. The source of material existence and obviously non-deterministic, non-physical features of the physical universe are outside of both the physical universe and the ability of science to address. More on that below.
And it is annoying for a person, even and especially a physicist, to pretend to know things that he doesn’t and cannot, as he implies that there is nothing which exists that cannot be addressed by science in his hurry to eliminate a non-physical agency involved with the universe. He unabashedly declares himself to more wise than any wisdom found in the ancient texts, and he Ad Hominem’s the source of the texts by declaring them bronze/iron age ignorants who didn’t know science facts which he knows. The arrogance of this pretension to supremacy entails a belief in something which cannot be true, especially considering that Krauss fails to differentiate between contingent fact and wisdom as if he, himself, is ignorant of the difference. He appears blinded by the presumed brilliance of himself as he makes proclamations for other people who he obviously considers his lessers, even while demonstrating his own limitations.
Part 2(b): Morals. My first experience with Krauss was through his book, “A Universe From Nothing”, which gave me a firm impression of the type of integrity to which Krauss holds himself. The title is a purposeful fraud designed to sell books because the book does not give any actual empirical science in support of the “nothing” which he claims in the title. If he actually had such information, he would be enshrined as a second Newton, Einstein or both. But he has no such information despite the claim of the title. He has stalwartly refused to acknowledge any error or malfeasance in his action, despite heavy criticism from public and peers. So I am pretty sure that his brand of “rational world morality” would not reflect any recognizable form of actual morality which is not self-aggrandizing.
The terms “real world” and “morals” are mutually incompatible when placed in conjunction. Morality does not spring from the “real world”, especially not the “real world” of evolution, “red in tooth and claw”, or the Atheist Nietzschean concept of “Will to Power”, much less the forced elitist drive toward communal one-world, one-concept, one-think under elitist “rational” supervision. “Rational” actions are not selfless under the scrutiny of evolution, kin selection theory notwithstanding. The hypotheses of logic are only as good as their premises, form and grounding; they are not beholden to any morality of outcome. For example, world depopulation to accomplish the salvation of the planet might be declared logical but declaring it to be moral is not actual morality. That’s because the choice of objectives requires actual moral gating before logic is applied to the tactics for accomplishing the objective. This concept lies outside the scope of empiricism.
3. “This is an amazing picture, because it is a picture of gravitational lensing.” [omitting dialog describing galaxies] “When you look at images like this, they inspire you, in ways like nothing else that I know of can inspire.”
Here he has declared in essence that his personal ability to receive or produce inspiration is unfortunately truncated, severely so.
4(a) “Certainly there are limits to science; an empiricist – which is what I am – [smugness noted] empirically there are limits to what science can do. In fact, in my own field, cosmology, there are clearly limits because we are, we have one universe to observe and most of us live in that universe. The Republican Party in my country doesn’t, but, but, but, um, the, uh, therefore [11:13] there may be many universes and therefore there’s obviously in some real physical sense a limited domain in which we can explore, and that’s a key point. It’s not just tools. Every academic discipline uses tools, [11:27] in some ways they’re not that different. But the key part of what makes science, science, and what makes it work is that it is based on empirical evidence. So rational thought applies to empirical evidence. And therefore , you can’t measure, even in principle… I mean there are lots of things we can’t measure that we can talk about as theoretical physicists I think about things… a lot of things we can’t measure right now.
(b) But, if you can’t ever measure it in principle, then... then science really has nothing to say about it. I would argue that anything else you say about it is not worth much either, but, uh, uh, but… it’s certainly a fact that science generally can’t address it if you can’t measure it in principle.
And that’s, um, that’s of fundamental importance and I think that we forget that.
(c) So I think, the difference that I would say is that I don’t know what the ultimate limits of science are; there are limits now, and there are many areas where science has little to say right now.
(d) But can I say that it will NEVER have anything to say about it? Absolutely not! There’s a huge difference between what’s unknowable and what’s not known. And so the only way you can find out if science has anything to say about it is, try. And if it has something useful to say, it makes predictions which agree with experiments, then you can make progress. But you could try it and it might not work.
(e) An example might be sociology, where they tried to use the language of physics to apply to society and it was far too premature, it was too complex and consciousness, which I was just telling Dan [Dennett, sitting nearby] - I do physics because it’s easy. If I wanted to do the hard stuff, I’d do consciousness.
Having this written out allows the reader to try to follow the train of thought by backing up as the train jumps tracks, and to attempt to apply linear logic to it by going slowly through the jump. The most obvious jump off track occurs between 4(b), where he outlines the limits of empiricism, and and 4(c) where he then claims not to know the limits. All in the space of two sentences.
Then he jumps further off track from 4(b) to 4(d), by assuming that there actually are no limits. But still he pulls back to “prediction/experiment”, at least briefly. By 4(e) he's completely derailed, as he claims that it is complexity which is limiting, not ability to test it in principle which make science difficult but presumably not impossible.
He has jumped off the limiting rails of empirical science into the derailed world of Scientism as is necessary for his ideology.
I have transcribed the entire 10+ minute speech (after 1:40). I thought it necessary, because he doesn't present a single, coherent argument, he presents a welded series of assertions which are necessary to view as a whole. In that same sense, he doesn't present a single empirical data point, but uses the meta-concept of empiricism as a weapon. So any analysis needs to be against his meta-narrative, and that meant that the entire narrative must be viewed in order that the overall truth value can be mined from it. I have made comments throughout, but the analysis is after the end of the speech, below.
Carroll:
(1:40) "Something we learned by doing science for 400 years is something called “Naturalism”, the idea that there is only one reality; that there are not separate planes of the natural and the supernatural; that there is only one material existence; that we are part of the universe and do not stand outside of it in any way. And the way that science got there is by basically realizing that human beings are not that smart. You are not Vulcans, you are not Mr. Spock, you are not perfectly logical.
We as human beings are subject to all sorts of biases and cognitive shortcomings. We tend to be wishful thinkers and to see patterns where they are not there and so forth. And in response to this science developed techniques for giving ourselves reality checks, for not letting us believe things that the evidence does not stand up to.
[Pure Scientism with unrestricted intellectual range]
One technique is simply skepticism which you may have heard of. Scientists are taught that we should be our own theories harshest critics. Scientists spend all their time trying to disprove all their favorite ideas. It’s a little bit counter intutitve, a different way of doing things, but it helps us resist the lure of wishful thinking.
The other technique is empiricism. We realize that we are not smart enough to get to knowledge of the world just be thinking about it. We have to go out there and LOOK at the world. And what we done by looking at this for the past 400 years is to realize that human beings are not separate; that the world is one thing, the natural world, and that it can be understood.
It is all very counterintuitive; it is not very obvious, this Naturalism claim. When you talk to a person, they have thoughts and feelings and responses. When you talk to a dead person, a corpse – a bit morbid here – you don’t get those same responses, the same thoughts and feelings. It’s very natural, very commonsensical to think that a living person possesses something that a corpse does not, some sort of spirit, some sort of soul or animating life source.
[But science can’t detect it so it cannot exist]
"But this idea does not stand up to closer scrutiny. A big step toward realizing this was made back in the 1600’s by a remarkable woman named Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia. They made princesses differently back in the seventeenth century. Elisabeth carried on a year-long correspondence with Rene Descartes, the (unintelligible) theory of mind, body and dualism. And Elisabeth said, “I really don’t understand what you said, because if you really believe that my mind is a separate realm from the body, it’s my mind that makes a choice to lift my arm but it’s my body that does it. [4:09] How does an immaterial mind which you say doesn’t exist at a location in space, how does it act causally on the body? How does it interact with the stuff of which you are made? And Descartes never came up with a reliable, believable response to these objections.
[Why is this not “thinking without looking directly at it and measuring”?]
"Of course, these days the objections are enormously stronger. We say, “you are made of atoms. You’re made of molecules, you’re made of cells, you’re made of atoms, and as (unintelligible), WE KNOW HOW ATOMS BEHAVE. The laws of physics covering the behavior of atoms are COMPLETELY understood. You put an atom in a certain set of circumstances, and you tell me what those circumstances are, and as a physicist, I will tell you what the atom will do.
[pure devotion to determinism and his own ability to predict human behavior, based on determinism]
"If you believe that the atoms inside your brain and your body act differently because they are in your body as opposed to being in a rock or a crystal, then what you are saying is that the laws of physics are wrong…
[But, of course, no one is saying that]
"…that they need to be altered because of the influence of a spirit or soul or something like that. That may be true. We can’t DISPROVE that. But there is no evidence for it. [5:12]
[Of course not. Science has LIMITS, as anyone who has read Popper knows. Refusal to acknowledge the known limits of physical science is obtuse, especially for a scientist promoting metaphysical claims]
[Presupposition of the naturalist dichotomy:
"Either empirical proof for X,
Or X = superstition.
i.e.
Either there is “evidence” for X,
Or, X = superstition.
“Evidence” is defined as material/empirical, under Naturalism.
But Carroll does not apply this principle to his own belief set; only to metaphysics. That demonstrates the lack of actual "evidence" which exists for direct support of metaphysical Naturalism, and Carroll fails to reveal that to the audience.]
[5:12]
"You get a much stronger explanatory framework by assuming that it’s just the laws of physics.
[Where’s the empirical data when you need it? Must we "assume" without such data? Of course we must; there is no data.]
"That kind of reasoning is a big step toward Naturalism.
[Yes, it would be, if you actually believe it without proof].
"Another big step also happened in the 1600s, when Gallileo came across the idea of conservation of momentum. You might say, “Why does conservation of energy get in the way of (unintelligible) and God, but it does. Before Gallileo came along, physics was described by Aristotle, and Aristotle said something that, again, was very obvious and commonsensical – that if you want something to keep moving, you need to push it. Things naturally come to rest, left to their own devices. But if you look at the world, you realize that things are moving all over the place. So Aristotle very logically eventually concluded that you need to invoke the existence of an unmoved mover, which can be identified, of course, with God.
But then of course Gallileo comes along and says, “actually the natural behavior of matter is to keep moving at a constant velocity. Motion is perfectly natural. When things stop, it is because you are acting on them through friction or air resistance or dissipation.
And then Isaac Newton comes along with an elaborate edifice of mechanics which explains the world beautifully in purely material principles. And it’s very, very interesting; once that happened, you realize that the prime mover argument doesn’t work as well, and you can actually see a change in the theological literature of the time.
Before Newton and Gallileo, there was emphasis put on ideas of prime movers and first causes, arguments from cosmology, contingency and so forth; after Newton and Gallileo, the arguments emphasized something else, the argument from design. People would say, “sure you can explain all the planets moving, that’s easy, but all the life forms, the marvelous diversity of life here on earth, that had to be made by some guiding external intelligence. In fact, in the 1700’s Immanuel Kant said, “there will never be an Isaac Newton-made blade of grass”. Then of course in the 1800’s we GOT an Isaac Newton for a blade of grass, his name was Charles Darwin.
Darwin showed how material, matter, all by itself, without guidance, without purpose, without an aim, just by the natural motions of ordinary things can lead to the marvelous diversity of organic life that we see here on Earth. Another huge step in the direction of Naturalism.
[Darwin has been debunked 150 years later. Notice how the words imply that first life is solved without actually saying so.]
Now of course I could go on, we could talk about modern cosmology and the origin of the universe, we could talk about neuroscience and what consciousness is and so forth, but I don’t want to do that right now, we can maybe talk about that later. I don’t want to do it right now, basically because it’s kind of boring.
[actually these are unanswerable; he's wise to avoid them as he so easily dances around them].
"And the reason that it’s kind of boring is that the argument is finished. The debate is over. We’ve come to a conclusion. Naturalism has won. If you go to any university physics department, listen to the talks they give or the papers they write; go to any biology department; go to any neuroscience department; any philosophy department; people whose professional job it is to explain the world, to come up with explanatory framework that matches what we see, no one mentions God. There is never an appeal to a supernatural realm, by people whose job it is to explain what happens in the world. Everyone knows that the Naturalist explanations are the ones that work.
And yet! Here we are! We’re having a debate. Why are we having a debate? Because, clearly, religion speaks to people for reasons other than explaining what happens in the world.
Most people who turn to religious belief do not do so because they think it provides the best biology or cosmology. They turn to religious belief because it provides them with purpose and meaning in their lives. With a sense of Right and Wrong. With a community. With hope.
[He has the massive hubris to declare why theism is accepted by "most people", merely in Naturalistic terms, as if he actually knows that. He most emphatically does not. It has something to do with the resonant ringing of truth value on the one hand vs. personal attachment to a blank, void ideology being declared as empirical truth without empirical proof on the other hand.]
"So if we want to say that science has refuted religion, we need to say that science has something to say about those issues. And on that I have good news and bad news for you. The bad news is that the universe does not care about you. (laughter) Qua universe. The universe is made up of elementary particles that don’t have intelligence, don’t pass judgment, don’t have a sense of Right and Wrong. And the fear is, the existential anxiety is that if that purpose and meaningfulness is not given to me by the universe, then it cannot exist. The good news is that that fear is a mistake. That there is another option: that we create purpose and meaning in the world.
[Really? I thought we were deterministic, just a bunch of atoms ruled by physics with outcomes predictable by Carroll himself.]
"If you love somebody, it is not because that love is put into you by something outside, it is because you created that from inside yourself. If you act goodness (sic) to somebody, it’s not because you are given instructions to do so, it’s that it’s a choice that you made. In the very scary world, you should be affected at a very deep level [Should? Is that the empirical ‘should’?], by the thought that the universe doesn’t care, does not pass judgment on you, but it’s also challenging and liberating [Atheist freedom of the VOID] that we can create lives that are worth living.
I have never met God. I have never met any spirits or angels. But I have met human beings; many of them are amazing people. And I truly believe that if we accept the universe for what it is, if we approach reality with an open mind and an open heart, then we can create lives very much worth living.
Thank you.
An Analysis of the Content of the Speech:
Carroll is at least consistent. He presumes that science can, in fact, disprove the existence of non-physical reality. He said so up front, and in these words:
” Something we learned by doing science for 400 years is something called “Naturalism”, the idea that there is only one reality; that there are not separate planes of the natural and the supernatural;”
This is, of course, entirely false. Under Popper's falsifiability demarcation, science is limited to the pursuit of physical questions which can be disproven during the attempt to prove them. That eliminates metaphysical issues from the scientific mix. They cannot be tested, physically, experimentally, independently replicated for data comparison. To eliminate the falsification requirement eradicates the ability to declare any unfalsifiable principle to be "objective knowledge". Such unfalsifiable principles are subjective, and are suspect at best. What Carroll has presented is of two kinds: false association (metaphysics conflated with physical phenomenon), and circular (presupposing the conclusion in the premises).
Further, it is easily shown that theism does not address the physical realm, and when ecclesiasticism attempts to do so, it frequently but not always, fails, a point which Carroll attempts to bend into a refutation. But theism is not about the physical realm, and attacking it based on that premise will fail to address the essence of theism altogether. Carroll's case does not extend that far, because empiricism doesn't go there.
So how does he form his argument? What is the basis of his proof? His proof for that assertion is not empirical; it is an Appeal to Authority (famous scientists) and an associated False Association (conflating non-physical with physical, which is also a Category Error). So he compounds at least three logic errors into a support structure for his Scientism and Naturalism, right at the start, making the entire speech circular.
One must assume that Naturalism is the case if it is asserted that Science can disprove metaphysical existence. That’s because science can disprove X only if science can test for X. To say that science has the ability to test for and disprove X, is to say that science has X-abilities. To conclude that science has X abilities, but cannot find X, is a hazardous statement, because it does not prove that there is no X. To say that would be to commit the Inductive Fallacy.
And if science has X abilities, then X is presumed to be physical (because that’s what science is). So the redefinition is implicit: X is physical by definition, and if X is then designated as "metaphysical", then metaphysical is physical by the redefinition of science. By this circular reasoning, either physical existence is actually metaphysical (not what he believes), or metaphysical existence is actually physical (also not what he believes), or metaphysical existence does not exist due to the definitional problems encountered within Naturalism (this is what he believes, although without specifically tumbling to it). So metaphysics is defined not to exist, due to this logical morass.
The convolutions in this logical train wreck are painful to observe, and astounding to watch as they are proposed without critical analysis.
Carroll does not provide the science which proves his "scientific" convictions; that's because there is no experimental data on X. What he does instead of providing empirical scientific data for a disciplined direct experimental assault on metaphysics is to claim that the increased knowledge of the universe and its physical characteristics somehow proves conclusively that there is no existence which is not available for scientific, physical analysis. How does he justify this? He does not; he presupposes it. He slides his argument into a position of Scientism - I'll predict your behavior from your atoms - in order to support his metaphysical Naturalism, which he has already presupposed, a spectacular error of circular reasoning.
He invokes Gallileo and Newton and Darwin, and winds up using their observations of cosmos, forces, and finches to conclude that they had disproven metaphysical existence. But he does that by invoking changes in ecclesiastic theory, not basic theism. Basic theism is totally unaffected by the findings of these men, or by the natural laws governing the cosmos, forces, and finches.
None of these famous scientific findings bear on metaphysics in even the remotest empirical fashion. They all describe physical characteristics, not metaphysical existence, metaphysical truths, or origins – not even Darwin’s Origins discusses actual life origins and how life came to be, merely from inanimate and rather stupid minerals obeying the laws of physics. And of course, Darwin’s premises, all of them, are now discounted fully by evolutionists themselves, who are groping for hope in meta-meta-principles for the salvation of evolution.
What Carroll preaches is metaphysical Naturalism. But science uses only methodological naturalism and abjures metaphysical Naturalism because it is (a) a physically unprovable metaphysical claim, and (b) an ideology, not an empirical conclusion, not even contingently. The idea that physical science can disprove the existence of nonphysical reality is a Category Error, and is absurd in the logical sense.
Also, Carroll repeats his idea that humans are nothing but atoms, atoms are deterministic, we know the physics and laws that govern the behavior of atoms. And yet he also asserts that humans are agents, creative, intelligent and moral. His explanation for that internal contradiction is: none.
And as a finale, he dodges consciousness and other non-physical characteristics of actual life by declaring them trivial, and the war against metaphysics to have been won… by metaphysical Naturalism.
That is hardly the case. One cannot achieve a victory in war by ignoring the atomic bombs still in the adversary's rockets and merely declaring victory any way.
This entire speech is a metaphysical, philosophical and ideological statement in support for the presumption of the omniscience of science (Metaphysical Scientism), which presumptively disproves metaphysics, philosophy and ideologies (which are anti-science and are superstitions).
The self-refutation and non-coherence are obvious.
Sean Carroll and the Argument From Quantum Field Theory against life after death; although he refers briefly to QFF, much of the speech is otherwise. I suggest that the reader view the speech and analyze it fully before reading my own analysis, below; that would be great exercise for the cranial logic machine. We could then compare our analyses. But it is quite an investment in time. I don't like having to work from video, because I can't use a search tool to find some point I remember being somewhere in the middle, and also because I have to type up his words in order to present his argument here. The advantage of video, though, is that it does allow the speaker's attitude to shine through. Scientists are supposed to hold their opinions conditionally, with skepticism. You are encouraged to judge for yourself.
We have here a physicist making a physical case; so we should look for sophisticated empirical solutions in the approved format for producing the objective knowledge which supports his claim: falsifiable hypotheses, experimental design and implementation, open data and data analysis, history of replication and falsifying/supporting results.
We should understand that this is not a forum for rigorous detail; still, when analyzed, the arguments should be grounded in either disciplined empirical content, or deductive premises grounded in First Principles; otherwise they should not be accepted.
1. First Argument:
p1. The mind is the brain;
P2. The brain is atoms;
P3. We know how atoms work;
(He cites quantum field theory and shows a complex equation containing “all” of the possible influences on the atoms in the brain. They are, he says, completely known, and no other influence is possible, or they (physicists) would know about it. Since they know all that, they also know that, after death, there is no possibility for the information contained in brain atoms to continue to exist.)
C. Therefore, there is no way for “you” to persist after death.
Carroll asserts that the premises are all agreed on, therefore the argument is scientifically true.
Premise P1:
With a little rhetorical prestidigitation Carroll has gotten the audience (100% Atheist) to consent to premise 1 as if it were axiomatically self-evident, a necessary Truth of the Universe and beyond. With the consent that premise 1 is axiomatically a First Principle with no actual empirical proof necessary, Carroll is not tasked with dealing with it, nor with the logical consequences of a Reductio Ad Absurdum performed on it. And without premise 1 as axiomatically True, the entire argument collapses into rubble. Premise 1 will need a Reductio, at minimum.
So let’s look at premise P1 and its necessary consequences, one of which is determinism. The entire argument hinges on the reductive physicalist notion that the mind is purely physical, is driven by purely physical phenomena (the four physical forces), and produces purely physical effects. Thus the principle of initial conditions comes into play, meaning that the outcome of any change is a result of forces acting upon initial conditions and states. That produces a completely determinable outcome with complete physical predictability, and is thus subject to physical measurement for confirmation.
So if the mind is the brain and Philosophical Materialism/Naturalism is valid, and the universe is comprehensible by scientific analysis, then every mental change or neural transaction is predetermined by its initial atomic and subatomic state and the known physical forces (irreducible forces are: electromagnetic, strong, weak, gravity). The premise, being a physical claim, should be fully testable experimentally.
Both the initial state and the influence of any force are fully predetermined in a causal chain going back to a time just after the Big Bang. This means that the mind, being merely the brain, produces nothing that cannot be attributed to this full causality, and therefore the mind is fully deterministic as well.
But, as many philosophers of mind have pointed out, and Carroll is not such a being, the effects of the mind are observably not causal, not deterministic and therefore are not the products of the brain initial states and physical forces alone. This has been called the “Hard Problem” of mind theory, an appellation most recently attributed to philosopher David Chalmers, but actually going back at least a century before. Bertrand Russell acknowledged it with the thought that a “different kind of substance” must exist which is causally involved in consciousness, agency and qualia, in his “Nine Lectures on Mind”.
The Hard Problem, aka “the mind-body problem”, has not, contra Carroll, been resolved in favor of Quantum Field Theory. And Carroll has not claimed that it has been resolved; he merely presupposes that when he asserts the validity of Premise 1.
Premise P1 cannot be accepted without being grounded in either empirical data or universal First Principles. Further, it is most likely false, due to the Hard Problem which presents the internal non-coherence which inheres.
Ideological Dependency:
Further, Carroll’s argument presumes that a specific ideology is incorrigibly True: Philosophical Materialism. However, PM fails for a very obvious reason. It cannot prove what it claims under its own provisos. In other words, it cannot be proven – physically, empirically – that its central tenet (which that there is no non-physical existence) is a true concept. So it cannot be a known, objectively provable, empirically replicable sentence of objective knowledge that PM is true. The claim is a Category Error due to attempting to make a metaphysical claim using only physical resources, and the ideology itself cannot be shown to be logically true under the First Principles. Thus the use of Philosophical Materialism as a premise, even (especially) an unstated, presupposed premise, nullifies the truth value of the argument.
Methodological Opaqueness:
The next problem with Carroll’s argument is that the entire argument, being a Materialist argument made by a scientist, should lead to testable hypotheses which result in affirming or negating data under the disciplined rules of empirical testing. But the argument cannot be tested, because it requires testing a state which is totally inaccessible to physical sensors. (Category Error, as shown above). This also fails Popper's demarcation criterion of falsifiability.
That physically inaccessible state is the specific claim being made: the existence of non-physical mind, untethered to physical constraints – including the constraints of the initial conditions of atomic and sub-atomic states in the brain, the four forces of physics, the presupposed need for physical neural hosting. Any claim made for or against that specific state cannot be either validated or falsified using physical instrumentation. Therefore, any counter-claim to have falsified it materially cannot be either true or valid. And that leaves any claims made by physicists for their physics as valid premises for non-physical claims, out in the cold, even and especially from a rigorous empirical standpoint.
Conclusion regarding Carroll’s syllogism:
What Carroll actually has is just this: rhetoric which he uses with flourishes to cover for the numerous reasons that his own premises are not valid, either empirically or logically. It amounts to a shell game posing as a logic argument, even including ridicule.
2. The False Dichotomy.
He progresses to this False Dichotomy, which he presents as much as ridicule as an argument:
”What to make of the evidence for an afterlife?
Options:
Some ill-defined metaphysical substance, not subject to the known laws of physics, interacts with the atoms of our brains in ways that thus far eluded every controlled experiment in the history of science,
OR
People hallucinate when they are nearly dead.”
The first horn of this dilemma presents some false statements regarding an actual metaphysical theory:
a. The use of the term “substance” is prejudicial and incorrect. Substance strongly implies a physical existence, even when modified by use of the term "metaphysical". No physical substance would be involved. It’s use is a leading bias toward the physicalization of metaphysics, and thus the empirical testability of metaphysical entities. That bias is false, (Category Error) and prejudices the remainder of the statement.
b. The expectation that “every controlled experiment in the history of science” is the repository for all possible knowledge is ideological (again Philosophically Materialist and Scientismist). That expectation is used, however, as a faux grounding for the first horn, giving it an aura of respectability by its Appeal To Authority.
c. The appeal to hallucination is absurd, because Carroll has no material evidence to support that claim.
Despite the blatant imagery of the authority of Scientism and Philosophical Materialism, Carroll ignores all of the issues raised above – universal determinism vs. non-deterministic life; Category Error of underlying ideologies; lack of falsifiability or testability of either horn; and in addition, the Equivocation Error in the false use of the term “substance” (the same logic error made by Russell a century earlier).
Thus the Carroll dichotomy is ungrounded, with prejudiced language attempting to bias toward Scientism, is untestable and unfalsifiable empirically, and is meaningless as either objective knowledge or a truth statement.
3. The Circular Definition.
Next he makes the classic logic error of circularity within the very question he asks:
”We can ask, OK, given that we are made of atoms, we understand what the atoms are doing, what is LIFE, what is this complex, non-fundamental phenomenon that arises out of the motions and interactions of the fundamental particles of which we are made.”
12:46
He has poisoned the well by asking for a definition, but then making a constraining definition himself which is purely Materialist/Physicalist; that prevents others from providing their own definition as he asked. By placing the desired answer inside the question he has reduced the issue to a circular tautology, defined only by himself (but with supreme confidence), without opportunity to challenge his presuppositions.
Further, he has no evidence, material or otherwise, to support the claims upon which the “definition” is declared. The definition is presented as tautological necessity, a new First Principle, a Truth statement upon which he will continue his non-empirical arguments. There are many definitions of life that precede and supercede his definition.
4. Invoking Schroedinger and negentropy.
Carroll moves on to Erwin Schroedinger and his theory of “negentropy”, as he presented in his book, “What Is Life”. Negentropy is the concept that open systems can receive extra energy from external sources, and that extra energy overcomes the lossy-ness of the system thus providing for the possibility of anentropic emergence rather than degradation. That principle is controversial among physicists, and requires some background and analysis.
Entropy is a descriptive observational law of the effect of loss in physical systems (open or closed); it is not a prescriptive causal law. Thus negentropy is not a prescriptive causal law, either. Especially since it is a terminology ploy which does not even exist physically or logically, as will be discussed below.
Says Carroll: the Sun is “low entropy energy”.
Sunshine is modulated energy, with a seasonally variable duty cycle. The type of receiving systems determine whether it is high energy or averaged energy, depending upon the duty cycle of the receiving system vs the duty cycle of the sunshine.
Entropy is defined by the excess energy transfer from the "hot reservoir" to the "cold reservoir". Energy in photonic form is the currency of entropy and the photon is not a system which incurs entropy. The entropy of energy is a meaningless concept, because entropy applies to processes and systems, not raw energy.
For sunshine energy and earth systems, entropy in our context applies to the receiving systems here on Earth. There are three possibilities for those open systems on Earth:
(a) those which require more energy still in order to avoid rundown due to internal system energy loss being greater than the input energy;
(b) those which receive exactly sufficient energy for maintaining operation indefinitely, because input energy equals energy loss in the system; or,
(c) those which must either shed the excess energy received, or face destruction due to receiving more energy input than system energy loss can shed.
Adding excess energy to an open system on Earth does not produce a negative version of entropy which might be interpreted as increasing orderliness. It cannot happen. All that happens is that excess energy must be shed in order to avoid destruction. The ideal case, where input energy equals energy loss produces a maintenance condition, not new information. Other types of loss in the system (friction, oxidation, etc.) still will lead ultimately to system disorder, randomness, and non-reducibility to algorithmic information.
Note that the discussion centers on energy loss, not system design, construction, or information loss. A pendulum that moves in ever shorter arcs is losing energy, not design, construction, or information. So adding energy to the system does not add anything to information. Adding just enough to keep the pendulum moving does not add information. Adding too much energy to the pendulum will cause it to either shed the excess energy or ultimately be destroyed by it, but no new information (algorithmic or semantic) will emerge.
The idea, “negentropy”, thus is not a process for adding useful complexity or semantic information, either universally or locally; there is no negative entropy because the systemic losses still exist, even in the presence of added energy to open systems. And in fact, too much added energy causes destruction, which is positive entropy, not negative entropy.
The use of entropy as a factor in complexity emergence is a fallacy because increased energy does not produce increased semantic information; a pre-existing mechanism for creating information must be in place, a system which utilizes energy in order to produce information. The fallacy is that of non-comprehension of systemic entropy in open systems.
5. History of the Universe: Big Bang to universal death:
At 23:00 into the video, Carroll presents a “Complexity” graph. it's a sort of Bell Curve or at least a parabola. According to Carroll, complexity in the universe starts at zero, gradually rises toward a parabolic peak at mid-life, then decreases to zero at the end of life and universal death.
Complexity is declared to be equivalent to life, based on that graph. 23:15
Carroll actually defines complexity in terms of order:
”But complexity, the organization of the stuff that is going on, is a completely different thing than [linear] entropy.” And, “It is in between [Beginning and end] that the universe becomes complex, forms planets and stars, and galaxies and living organisms.”
The terms, complexity and order (or "organization" as Carroll calls it), are not interchangeable. And the historical items of the universe he listed are not created by similar causal actions. The difference is in the information content. Because information content is not related to orderliness, the two terms are mutually independent. For example, a Shakespeare play has no rule for order of the letters of the alphabet to appear, yet it has semantic meaning (information) and is non-compressible to an algorithm. On the other hand, a repetitive sequence of 1,7,3,1,7,3,1,7,3,1,7,3… (three characters repeated for the same length as the Shakespeare play) has order, but little or no semantic meaning or information, and is easily reduced to a simple algorithm.
Here is an example of order migration vs state change, with complexity actually in complete stasis:
Water progresses from vapor (disordered individual molecules), to liquid (non-compressible with definable distance boundaries between molecules), to crystalline (ordered physical relationship with respect to other adjacent molecules), to Bose-Einstein condensate (disorder), to atomic collapse (fully disordered). This is the same curve that the universe lifetime would follow, with “ordered” in the middle. But ice contains no more information (complexity) than does vapor. Complexity does not change throughout the phase changes. That's because the behaviors of each phase are determined by the same set of algorithms (set of physical laws).
Complexity is inversely related to orderliness.[1] The most orderly is the least complex; the least orderly is the most complex. Stated differently, the most orderly requires the smallest algorithm (1,1,1,1,1,1… n=n-1, for n=2 to infinity); the least orderly requires the most difficult algorithm (random output; irreducible system).
In the physical universe, order increases as atomic bonds are made and elements combine into molecules. The algorithm for this process is not created by the process, nor is it created by the molecules controlled by the algorithm. Further, the molecules do not contain algorithmic coding for the creation of the process. The information (laws of physics) are external and stable and have been since shortly after the Big Bang.
Until, that is, first life occurred with a dramatic, singular increase in information, stored in and used by molecules in the metabolism and replication of life. With the creation of first life, local complexity instantaneously increased to far beyond the original physics algorithms. The non-living universe, however, remained at the low complexity, high orderliness level.
The information in the universe is not a curve as is shown by Carroll’s complexity parabola; information and complexity is a huge step function going from the stasis of physics laws for eons, then stepping in a singular jump immediately to the incredibly high complexity of the information required for first life, finding stasis at that level, then jumping very rapidly into the Cambrian Explosion, and then increasing gradually over time to the present.
The complexity curve should be this sort of step function, which describe life only, and NOT the universe of minerals, molecules, atoms and sub-atomic particles:
______
_____________-------------- ^ | ^ Humans
Infinity | Complexity of all phyla
| |
| |
| ___________|
| | ^
| | Single cell complexity(high)
| |
| | Complexity of mineral universe (low)
_v_______________| _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ V _ _ _
^ ^ ^
t=0 First Life Cambrian Explosion
So the entropy curves given by Carroll are equivocations in terminology, resulting in incorrect interpretation. Complexity does not peak in the middle of entropic degradation. Complexity peaks locally, not universally. Complexity will vanish from the universe the instant that life is extinguished. The complexity argument placed by Carroll is seriously flawed, because it misinterprets complexity and confuses it with orderliness, its exact opposite: Equivocation Fallacy; and it mislabels the increase in complexity as "universal", when it is actually restricted to life and living things, while the remaining non-life universe remains in complexity stasis. Reductio: If this were not the case, then the laws of physics would be changing in complexity over time; physics actually depends on that not happening.
5. Michael Russell, Geochemist at Jet Propulsion Laboratories:
Russell is quoted as giving the meaning of life: “to hydrogenate carbon dioxide.” at 24:55
Carroll: Entropy “required” the increase of complexity to get from CO2 to methane, and the “sloshing about of all the complex reactions produced life – that’s what life is”.
No. Entropy does not "require" anything; it is not a force, nor is it a prescriptive law of causation. This is a continuation of misconstrual of order vs. complexity.
Next, no: methane is not an increase in complexity, it is a continuation of existing chemical laws which apply when the environment (temperature, pressure, concentration, mobility conditions, etc) allows. It is like crystallization in that it is a reduction to a lower state, one of increased order but not increased complexity.
And NO. That is not what life is. Life has specific requirements not deducible from chemistry or physics. To be defined as life requires that separate but necessary sub-systems are all activated to work in concert toward mutual goals (metabolism and replication) for no known activation cause; when they coincidentally are programmed to cease to function in concert toward mutual goals, death occurs (programmed death).[2]
Life is not a substance, not a natural force, not an energy, it is a self-animated, autonomous, self-contained process. End of life is the end of the process: “extinguishing the candle; you don’t GO anywhere. You stop happening”. The reaction stops. Ultimately we will all reach equilibrium.
6. Ridiculing heaven.
I'll just briefly acknowledge the completely non-empirical ridiculing of the concept of heaven, as if that is satisfactory proof for Carroll.
"Heaven is a bad idea, because you reach thermal equilibrium and nothing happens."
He charges though a list of non-science, nonsense, non-empirical ridicules:
Happiness is a bad idea. Heaven fetishness iconizes perfect happiness. Hedonic treadmill, in psychology: happiness is unchanging regardless of circumstances.
He even refers to the catacombs of skeletons in Paris, for proof of what, is not clear.
But he finally addresses a significant question: free will (42:30 – 43:25):
“Depends on your definition of free will. If by free will you mean that somehow you are able to override the laws of physics, no you can’t do that. You are made of atoms; if we knew the state of your brain to arbitrary accuracy, and we knew all the laws of physics to arbitrary accuracy, and we had infinite computational power, we could predict what you would do. But the point is that we don’t have any of those things. So this is a fact, and not a very relevant fact to how we should treat actual people in the actual world. The way I like to think about free will is that it is an emergent phenomenon. The right way to think about people, since we don’t know where all there atoms are and we can’t do the math, is as rational, hopefully rational, agents that have the ability to make choices.”
So yes: the mind is deterministic; and yes, people have both rationality and agency.
No internal contradiction is noticed, at least visibly, and he rapidly leaves.
As for "emergent phenomenon", this has become a very popular phrase which is code for: "it just started to happen, coming out of nowhere, for no apparent reason - it just... emerged, because: negentropy... or something complicated, here, look at my equations."
There's not much that is more entertaining than watching a physicist try to disprove metaphysics with his own metaphysics.
In Summary:
1. Empirical content of the subject matter, life after death: none. 2. Failure to produce a proper understanding of the science of complexity and information. 3. Building syllogistic arguments on false premises.
Conclusion:
Complete failure to produce empirical, objective knowledge regarding the proposition of non-physical consciousness, intellect, qualia, etc., being detached from material host and continuing after host death.
No objective knowledge or empirical data regarding the actual subject was produced or discussed, and much inference and innuendo was produced with the apparent intent of using that as if it were objective knowledge for the discussion of the continued existence of the non-physical consciousness, intellect, etc., when detached from the physical tether of the living organism.
NOTES:
1. The order/complexity scale is presented by Hubert Yockey, "Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life", Cambridge University Press, 2005; p169:
"Information is a measure of complexity. Complexity is a scale with orderliness at one end and randomness at the other."
Orderliness/small information content<--less---complexity---more-->Randomness/large information content.
Orderliness is reducible to small algorithms and contains little information. Randomness, and semantic information are irreducible to small algorithms and contain large information content.
2. Cells don't just die, they are programmed to undergo a managed death and dismemberment process, called apoptosis.
Cooper and Hausman; "The Cell; A Molecular Approach"; Sinauer, 2013; p682 - 689.
