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Saturday, April 20, 2013

Reasoning with materialists

In short, it is logically impossible to reason with materialists, for the -ism they have freely chosen to assert utterly denies the very possibility of reason, and of freedom. Consider the argument at the end of this post --
Victor Reppert: "We have seen the argument that atheism must be true, because it's the wave of the future? But is it? Apparently atheists don't reproduce at the rate of religious believers, so the future belongs to...well, not the atheists. "

LadyAtheist: "But... 100% of babies born to believers are atheists!"

Victor Reppert: "If you are going to claim all the babies [for atheism] because they lack a belief in God, then I suppose you can have my cats, too. But, so much for atheists being brighter than the rest of us."

Martin: "And rocks. Rocks are atheists as well."

ME: "And, on average, [God-deniers are] as clear-thinking [as rocks]."

I don't know what 'skeptical' means: "Unlike theists, who are WRONG about so, so much."

My response --

So asserts the foolish materialist who also ultimately asserts that he himself does not, and cannot, exist.

And yet, you (singular and collective) never can manage to identify even one thing about which Christians are so, so "WRONG". The nearest you (again, singular and collective) ever come to making a rational argument against Christianity goes like this:
1) IF there is a Creator-God, then Christians would be right about that, and I would be wrong;
2) BUT, Christians are stupid "faith-heads", who by definition (for I have defined the terms) do not believe what they believe for rational reasons;
3) ERGO, Christians are wrong. PLUS, they’re stupid.

Notice, Gentle Reader, there is nothing rational about that; it a rationalization for the God-denier’s own refusal to reason about the reality of God -

1) IF there is no Creator-God (*), then the only sorts of cause existing ab initio are those of non-rational mechanical necessity;
2) No purely non-rational mechanically necessary cause can ever give rise to a free result, nor to a rational result;
3) THUS, *all* subsequent events in the history of the world are purely non-rational mechanically necessary;
4) BUT, “all subsequent events in the history of the world” includes all our own ratiocinations -
4a) meaning that it is not a free-and-rational comprehension of the logical truth of some matter that enables us to say ‘X’ - nor, contrarywise, a free-if-irrational refusal to say ‘X’ that enables us to say ‘not-X’ - but rather, our saying of ‘X’, or of ‘not-X’, is simply the purely non-rational mechanically necessary effect of some prior purely non-rational mechanically necessary cause. Tomorrow, due to some other purely non-rational mechanically necessary cause, we may well say ‘Y’.
4b) THUS, if there is no Creator-God, then we humans do not, for we cannot, reason.
5) BUT, we human beings *do* reason;
6) THEREFORE, there is a Creator-God -- which is the Necessary Being, and which is both rational and free ... which is to say, the Necessary Being is not a 'what', but a 'who': he is personal.

(*) who is a Necessary Being, and who is personal - being both rational and free
As I keep saying, *you* are the proof that God is!

Edit (2013/04/29):
Now, consider the response of this epitome of Reason Against Religious Obscurantism --
Me: "2) No purely non-rational mechanically necessary cause can ever give rise to a free result, nor a rational result;"

I don't know what 'rational' or 'argument' (neither alone nor in conjunction) mean: " Some mechanistic thinking machines work better than others. Addled by faulty religious programming, yours is not one of them.

http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/3195
"
I'm not going to waste my time following his link -- I mean, even aside from the fact that "Free Thought Blogs" had next to nothing to do with either freedom or thought, all he has said, in both his first post and this one is, "Yer stoopid!" And some inane ramblings by Richard Carrier will never substantiate that risible asserting -- and I certainly don't expect Gentle Reader to follow the link.

There is not, and never has been, and never will be any such thing as a "mechanistic thinking machine" -- 'mechanism' and 'thought' are mutually exclusive: thus, "thinking machine" is an oxymoron.

But, let's set aside that truth, and pretend that there can be, and are, such things as "mechanistic thinking machines". Let us pretend -- for this is his strange assertion -- that human beings are "mechanistic thinking machines".

When this fool asserts, " Some mechanistic thinking machines work better than others. Addled by faulty religious programming, yours is not one of them." all he is really saying is: "You do not assert the same things I assert, *therefore* you are not thinking correctly" -- keeping in mind that he's not actually using the word 'thinking' to mean, well, thinking.

Surely, Gentle Reader can see, without it needing to be spelled out in greater detail, that to assert "You do not assert the same things I assert, *therefore* you are not thinking correctly" is to turn reason on its head; that such an attitude is the antithesis of reasoning. And yet, this is commonly how "free-thinkers" (ahem) reason.

Another thing "free-thinkers" like to assert, and he is at least implicitly doing it here, is not merely that Christians don't think correctly/logically and rationally, but that, due to our "programming", we cannot think correctly/logically and rationally, while, at the same time, asserting that *they* do think correctly/logically and rationally -- the "proof" being, of course, that they arrive at the "correct" "conclusion", and we do not.

To put it another way, they commonly assert, and he is asserting, that contrary to us, they can and do exceed their own "programming". But this assertion is absurd on so many levels. Non-exhaustively, and in no particular order --
1) If *I* were to say, "You do not assert the same things I assert, *therefore* you are not thinking correctly", you can be sure that *he* would never accept that as sound and valid reasoning; as it is not. Thus, it is intellectual hypocrisy -- hence, I call him, and all his ilk, 'fool' -- that *he* asserts that.
2) If human "reasoning", and results of human "reasoning", were indeed *caused* by mechanistic cause-and-effect, then there is no way, nor could be, for humans to distinguish sound and valid reasoning from the contrary;
2a) thus, we could not distinguish truth from falsehood;
3) In asserting that they can and do exceed their own "programming", these fools are *denying* the main thing they want to assert, namely that there is such a thing as a "mechanistic thinking machine", and that human beings are examples such;


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