Transitions

The difference between an ideology defender and a truth seeker is immense: they are polar opposites. The chasm between them is something that I will now attempt to define. To start, I will elaborate some on my own experience, which was one of going from closed to open, from a perception of dominance to a voluntary position of subservience.

As an Atheist, I had confidence in my own superiority because I had consciously chosen the path of the elites. It works like this: To become an intellectual elite, all one has to do is to utter three little words: “ain’t no God”. By having had the intellect to make this choice, one is elevated to eliteness. But even better, one gets to choose an ethic, a morality, and to choose one that is convenient, one that fits what you do, who you are.

Having chosen a compatible morality, one becomes instantaneously righteous, perfectly moral, perfectly superior to, say, Christians, who cannot ever consistently meet the demands of their morality. The ease with which the self-anointed morality is achieved reflects directly on the character of the self-anointers: only a superior character could be so completely moral, so easily.

A perfectly righteous and intellectual elite then cannot be blamed for exuding self-righteousness; self-righteousness is almost certain for these individuals. This personal elevation has a meaning attached to it: this personal elevation was due to Atheism and to the self-selected morality – so they must be correct, because they work. This means that Atheism is morally correct, and that the morality is intellectually correct. What is not to love about that?

The Atheist has created a personal moral and intellectual superiority that is precious, it is cherished. The self is now highly satisfactory; it must be defended. In order to defend the Atheist self, the Atheist is free to use any position he finds necessary, because the defense of correct things must be correct no matter what it is. So any logic that supports the correct things must be correct. Any logic that does not support correct things must not be correct. The correct things are determined first; the axioms are created in their support.

Thus the logic that Atheists use bears no resemblance to traditional logic or rationality. This is an important feature to remember.

The chasm between ideologists and seekers of truth is binary: it is the difference between closed and open.

My own transition from ideologist to seeker began when I started to listen to other Atheists. Very frequently their positions went against common sense and common decency. I discovered that their self-endowed reputation for logic and rationality was highly disputable. As a logic designer I had some experience with logic. But I didn’t know how to define rationality, how to determine its coverage or its limits, what the actual functional limits of science were or why that was the case. So I had to learn how to think from the ground up. What is rationality? What is logic? How do we know that they are valid? How do we know that anything is valid? Most importantly, how do I construct a valid worldview?

Leaving an ideology can be painful, especially if one’s self-value is heavily invested in an ideology which supports that self-value. Leaving a supportive ideology means losing all the psychological benefits which that ideology bestowed, and it is a fearful loss of one’s internal, core, perceived personal value and self-image. In the case of Atheism, it is a loss of self-perceived superiority in both intellectual and moral eliteness. And what is gained? Only subservience. And not subservience to truth, because for the Atheist there are no absolutes, and that tenet is an Absolute Truth, a moral concept. So losing an ideology can also mean losing a morality, and even if the morality was self-derived, it can be a serious loss, an impediment to any transition. It is not a trade made lightly or without some source of coercion.

In fact, Atheists sometimes rail against subservience and humility: these are declared to be an abomination, a denigration of the human independence and integrity. (These same arguers will, of course, argue that there is no free will and that humans just happened and have no special value). Accepting the humility necessary to acquiesce to truth, when it is found, is not easy to choke down when a person has been basking as an intellectual elite and personally 100% moral in his past existence.

So if we are to use logic to define ourselves, the question becomes, which logic are we to use? Atheist rationalization or traditional rational logic? A seeker of truth has to consider how each logic is supported by its fundamental axioms and how it compares to observed reality both in life and across the universe. Traditional logic doesn’t work for Atheism and Atheist logic doesn’t work for seekers of truth.

The entire purpose of traditional logic is to discriminate against absurdity and falseness. It builds on a fundamental structure of universal validity, and provides methods of detecting fallacy. Logic is exclusive: it excludes falseness in favor of demanding validity. This is diametrically different from the increasingly popular use of inclusive thought and Atheist logic.

Two of the most powerfully deceptive of the inclusive theories are those of evolution and infinite universes. For example, evolution provides for any and all eventualities without exclusion (including no change at all) to have evolved from a single cell, and specifically denies anything to do with the advent of that original single cell. And the infinite universe theory means that anything that is conceivable not only could, but will exist in some parallel universe somewhere… including an orbiting teapot, a Flying Spaghetti Monster, and pink unicorns. This is declared inevitable: the equations defining it are “robust”. This is the new look of science.

But what does it mean to have a “theory of everything” that is, in reality, a theory of anything no matter how absurd? If theories and equations discriminate against nothing whatsoever, then what do they actually prove? Isn’t science supposed to be logic based, and designed, even required, to filter out the absurd? No longer, it appears. Much of science has quietly aligned itself with Philosophical Materialism over the past century, thereby becoming aligned with ideology, an eventuality that was not supposed to happen. When observations now include characteristics of the observer, the objectivity which science prided itself on in its heyday has become subjective. When a legitimate science such as biology becomes subservient to a non-empirical offshoot like evolution, science becomes beholden not to experiment and verification so much as to extrapolated inferences, and predictions retrofit into experimental results. Validity must be taken on the word of experts, who are never reticent to give it (especially biologists). The scientists become authoritarian in their ideology-of-absurdity, as Hawking demonstrates (“Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist”, Hawking says, with the definitude of a religious prophet). Something from nothing is now science, not absurdity. Even Feynman’s “many histories” model of quantum electrodynamics, which Hawking fearlessly applied to the emergent universe, means that histories of our existence are not really known – or knowable – knocking out all prior knowledge, scientific and otherwise. Absurdity is now endemic; a functional ignorance is “scientifically” enforced as an ideology.

So the thinking of the semi-educated is no longer held to the exclusivity of traditional logic; it is watered down with theories-of-anything-no-matter-how-absurd, and their acceptance without observational verification, and merely on the word handed down by the authority of the elites. It is indistinguishable from ideology because it is ideology.

Traditional logic is fighting uphill in today’s culture as well. Tolerance is valued over discrimination, to the point that discriminatory thinking is culturally and legally derogated. So how can discriminatory logic survive in a blatantly anti-discriminatory culture?

I don’t have an answer to this, short of personally defending the discrimination against fallacy as vehemently as I possibly can. And that is the purpose of this blog, which invites rational discussion based on, and held within, traditional principles of logic, and which has those principles explicit in the right hand column.

I’m not certain how to evaluate the difference in moral weight between temperance and truth; I certainly have the capacity to sacrifice the first in intemperate defense of the second. But I will hope for and try to maintain both temperance, and the pursuit of truth through traditional logic. There has to be something that is valid and true in the universe (even Atheists agree functionally as I showed above). Whatever is really, actually valid and true is worth defending, as is the process to find it.