The case against atheistic materialism

by Fred Hutchison with a Rebuttal by Lloyd Harrison Whitling 2/11/2005

February 10, 2005

from: http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/hutchison/050210

 My name is Lloyd Harrison Whitling, and I will be writing in this color and typeface in response to the laughably erroneous statements that permeate Mister Hutchison’s arguments. Mister Hutchison's original words are set in crap-color sans serif.

 Let’s get something straight right up front: Mischievous usage of words proves nothing, and do not constitute a rebuttal except to those with their minds already made up. To get started on equal footing would require me to rename my self-proclaimed opponent’s beliefs “theistic immaterialism” or “theistic unrealism” and proclaim all theists to have been born atheists at the start, that the opposite of ‘natural’ can be nothing other than ‘unnatural’, and the study of anything other than nature to be "unscientific". In fact, I shall so declare! With that in mind, see what it would read like for me to simply rewrite his statements (even though I did not) from a secular materialist’s viewpoint, and see how foolish it would appear. That awareness ought to make anyone with a functioning brain realize how irrelevant atheists perceive theistic unrealism to be.

This essay is a rebuttal of the philosophy of materialism and its modern use to deny the existence of God. Atheists usually begin as theists, then decide for various reasons that they do not want God in their life. Subsequently, they develop a rationale to support atheism, attack theism and cover up the fact that their decision to become an atheist was made on non-rational grounds. Historically, atheists have argued their case from science and from philosophy. Atheists of this generation generally prefer the argument from science, so this essay will start with a rebuttal of the fallacy that science supports materialism or has a necessary connection with materialism.

I find it very hard to take that paragraph seriously, but I will try.         

To start with, even the name of this article is backwards, probably intentionally to give a wrong impression right from the very start. Atheism derives from materialism, not the reverse. It is a complete lie to claim that atheists may often be theists at “the start” (a short period of indoctrinated theism generally intervenes before they find their way back to the honest view), but “denying God” has nothing to do with it; if no God is found, nor ever present, and any evidence of His or Her existence amounts to no more than obvious bamboozlement, arrogant bluster and obfuscation, the smart thing to do would be to acknowledge that, for so long as that has to be true, there must be no God available to meet well-defined and long practiced standards of evidence. The truth is, it is theistic immaterialism’s claims about God that have been found wanting, not atheists as this man claims.

Atheists of this generation have begun to realize how hard philosophers have worked over the generations to reconcile religion and science, and not deal with the unvarnished truths science has unearthed, but to look at them through religion's eyes.

Theism requires a statement of belief be made before any investigation is started, that those beliefs be made on statements spoken and written by other human beings and acceptance of their claims be made, even without any reason for trusting them, and then any verification or investigation be limited to evidence they provide, or to be found only in places where they told the theist to look.

Think how much respect your police departments would earn under the same circumstances, where they would only accept evidence generously supplied by their suspects. People do lie.

Other people lie to protect them. That is why science has developed a process of verification that works. That is why science finds the same answers by different people in different places at different times, and so can develop a system that reads the same the world over, and a system of improvements and corrections that all scientists can verify and accept as correct per the latest knowledge, and teach the same subjects in the same way in schools and colleges all over the world; versus religion’s gaining a new denomination every time a new idea gets expressed, while theists are forced to struggle to verify that new materials meet their particular claims of truth before they can dare to expose themselves and their children to them.

In other words, if you meet a materialist on the street and you know he is wholeheartedly agreeable to the precepts of materialism, and not a halfway theist who has not really made up his mind, you know you can pick up any book of natural science and see what that person knows to be true. You can touch it, taste it, feel it, look at it, play with it, depend on it to keep you alive and fed and healthy and happy. You know what he believes in because you are standing in the midst of it, using it, depending on it the same as your maligned atheist.

You cannot say that about any theist, not even using the same bible as a reference text. Well, as the following theistical immaterialism shows (the fecal sans serif text), you can say it. It just won’t be true and, in spite of this man’s claims, I believe we all know what the word ‘true’ means. Beware of trees while you’re out taking a walk. They’re made from material, and they won’t budge if you insist they’re not really there.

The Fallacy of the Science-Materialism Link

Prior to the French Enlightenment there was no concept of a necessary link between science and the philosophy of materialism. Most of the founders of modern science were Christians. Two ideas, a rational idea and an empirical idea, were combined by the French "philosophes" in the 1750's and 60's to produce a new concept of scientific materialism. Atheists have used these arguments since that time.

The rational idea: Rene Descartes (day – cart) (1596 – 1650), a French rationalist philosopher proposed that matter is mechanistic in its behavior. He posited that the mind occupies a higher sphere and behaves differently than matter. His philosophy was discredited when he was not able to plausibly explain how the detached mind could connect with mechanistic matter and command the body into action and be obeyed. There has to be a mind-body connection before this can happen. Therefore, some individuals who embraced Descartes mechanistic cosmos rejected his idea of a higher sphere for the mind and posited that the mind is contained within the body.

Remember, this occurred long previous to any awareness, knowledge, or understanding of electricity and most certainly previous to any awareness about radio signals, the nervous system, synapses, genetics, etc., or any of the technology or medical advancements we presently enjoy. It must also be firmly remembered that we are talking about believers here, in all of these ancient philosophers, and their philosophies (I will repeat time and again) were attempts to reconcile belief in a supernatural realm with material discoveries about Nature. Their philosophies had little to do with science, except to state apologetics in response to it.

 
Fallacies of the rational idea: a) The presumption that the mind must be contained in the brain in order to be connected to the brain is an unwarranted. The mind does not have to be purely a function of the body in order to be connected with the body. b) Containment of the mind within mechanistic matter reduces the mind to a mechanistic program. However, human reason is capable rising above a set program, find fault with the program, reject the program and devise a new program as the history of culture, philosophy and science demonstrates at every turn. A mere program cannot rise above its own parameters c) The failure of Descartes dualism has been used by materialists since the French Enlightenment to deride all notions of an independent mind or a soul as dualism which is conceptually unworkable and unscientific. However, the failure of Descartes' dualism does not mean that all concepts which differentiate mind and body or soul and body are pure dualisms subject to the same problems as Descartes' dualism. We know from fallacy b) that the mind cannot be entirely contained within the physical brain and we know from Descartes' fallacy that the mind cannot be entirely separate from the body. Why cannot the brain be a hybrid entity with connections both to the material brain and connections to the immaterial spirit of man? That would solve fallacies a), b) and c) and Descartes fallacy.

To answer that question requires an examination of Mister Hutchison’s evidence to support his supposition that an immaterial spirit exists; and, beyond that, the nature and location of said “connections”. If we suppose those "connections" to occur through something called a "soul", how does that continue on after a person's material brain has deteriorated to the point of imbecility, as in Alzheimer's? Does that "soul" fade into some kind of dormancy while waiting for the patient's body to die?—or does it go off into the Heavens someplace, so what gets left behind is less capable of self-surviving than an ordinary dog, cat or rat? When someone's brain dies while their body lives on, where did those connections go if what you say in your paragraph has any truth at all? Where is the mind, if it did not die right along with the brain whose processes once gave rise to it?

To say what something does or does not mean is vastly different from showing what something does or does not mean. Also, from what materials has he drawn his information about what atheists believe and how that is that reliant on Descarte’s hypothetical propositions about the nature of the human mind? From what source does he support his deterministic information that says a human mind can or cannot rise above its programming?— and by what method does he connect that to atheism (which could be considered an example that human minds can, indeed, rise above their programming—which they do in order to become atheists by careful consideration of reasoned and observed new information)?

Computer science has given many observant folks insights into the nature of a human mind and consciousness. Especially as computers grow increasingly complex and capable, they become more like us in many ways, especially in the developments spawning the advancement of artificial intelligence. Is a computer, especially an extremely advanced one on which artificial intelligence is employed, aware of consciousness or that it has a mind? If a human being is aware of its own consciousness only because it has a soul, then is a toddler without a soul until it has reached its own self awareness? Is a toddler as soul-less as a dog, a cat, or a goat? Is a newborn, or a fetus, soulless by such a religious decree, thereby making all the abortion arguments moot?

Consciousness is a product of electro-chemical processes that science is right now hard at work to figure out. The results of such research find immediate employment in the computer industry, and in the practices of modern medicine. Does your electronic enema bag have a soul? Is it self conscious about where it gets connected? What happens to these intelligent devices when we turn them on and off? Do they die and travel to a Heaven or a Hell? Do they scream unwillingly when they get yanked out of Heaven so they can go back to work again? Don’t discount these as illegitimate questions just yet. We are not finished here.

2. The empirical idea. Empirical philosophers prior to the French Enlightenment introduced false ideas about what we can know and how we know it. (Epistemology) English pioneer of empirical science Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626) insisted that the only reliable ideas we can have are grounded in imperial observation. Fallacy w) Just because empirical observation can be done in a disciplined way so as to make them reliable for some kinds of knowledge, this neither proves nor implies that other forms of knowledge are not valid and cannot be used effectively. Yet to this day some materialist scientists arrogantly claim that empirical science is our only authentic way of knowing. However, no man can conduct his private life strictly according to empirical science. Theologian Russell R. Reno wrote that postmodern college students live in an unhealthy schizophrenic state. When they are in their objective mind they say "we can know nothing except through empirical science." When they are in their personal subjective state, they put up walls against all forms of objective knowledge and live in a purely emotional, impulsive and self-absorbed state in which they make no decision empirically. Francis Shaeffer noticed that the insistence upon empiricism as our sole source of true knowledge put people in an impossible dilemma and pushed them towards schizophrenic solutions. It is impossible for the atheist materialist to act consistently according to what he says he believes.

      Epistemology, my handy dictionary tells me, studies the nature, extent, and validity of knowledge. If it follows the scientific method in doing so, that makes it a science, whatever name you might give to what Francis Bacon proposed. Your next statement, about imperial ideas, gives an impression they were founded by the royalty; perhaps a letter is missing, since you spelled it with a 'c' in later sentences.

Knowledge is useful information. True knowledge is knowledge that can be tested and verified the world over. True knowledge is information that people can discover in many places while unaware of each others' existences, and later be found to act as verification for each other. Can religious "knowledge" make that kind of claim. If someone insists it can, mayhap they can explain the thousands of conflicting religious doctrines all struggling to prevail over the world, and over science.

You wish to discredit what “materialist” sciences “arrogantly claim” while offering nothing of an alternative. How so? Do you not have one, thereby proposing NO path to knowledge is authentic? How, then, does that support your theism, when you have left your own self without a leg to stand on?

English philosopher John Locke (1634 – 1704) went further than Bacon and proposed that we start life as a tabula rasa, or parchments scraped clean by a razor, or in modern parlance an erased blackboard or a blank slate. He claimed that all our knowledge is merely sense experience written upon our tabula rasa. The empirical philosophy of Locke and the skeptical empiricism of Hume seems to lend support to the claims of some scientists that empirical science is the only true means of knowing. However, all scientists interpret the data according to the "prevailing paradigm" of their field, according to American science historian Thomas Kuhn (b.1922). The paradigm is a model constructed by the mind of man in order to explain scientific phenomenon. Hence, all scientific knowledge comes from both from nature and from the human mind. Two hundred years before Kuhn's discovery, philosopher Immanuel Kant (1704 – 1824) proposed that all human knowing comes from both nature and the human mind. First, the senses are impressed with phenomena from nature. Then the mind formulates a perception from these impressions. Subsequently, the mind draws upon innate knowledge in the mind to interpret the perceptions. Kant called the innate knowledge "a piori" meaning knowledge which comes before sense experience. The innate knowledge built into the mind defies Locke's concept of knowing purely by sense experience. It also defies the notion that the mind is entirely a faculty of material nature. We know some things innately before nature has a chance to speak. Kuhn discovered that down through history, scientists have consistently behaved this way. They never make a neutral interpretation of data. The mind cannot work that way. The mind must first conceive an hypothesis, theory, paradigm or program before it can interpret data. The hypothesis is confirmed or refuted by the data.

“Prevailing paradigm”! What a lovely way to describe science’s way of being self-correcting. I love that you claim science arises from nature and the human mind. Since materialism is about nature, that leaves religion with only the human mind to arise from. Congratulations, you have stated the atheist's case.

Here's a challenge for you: Obtain religious literature from, say, 400 years ago. Obtain recent literature on the same subjects. Get a lined tablet and use a line down the middle to separate a few pages into two columns. Compare them point by point: You'll see from doing so what religious apologetics has had to do to counter the influence of science, and get a sense of all the times religion has had to backstep.

Not convinced: Take another few pages and separate them into two columns again. Now, compare either version of your Xianity to the original Mithraism from which it arose, step by step. Let me make a prediction: They'll be so different you will be forced to deny a connection; and yet, so similar that it will frighten you to see that.

Kant, and the majority of philosophers (I repeat once more), have gone out of their ways to define science in accordance with, or to accommodate, religious concepts. Their philosophy was not far away from being theosophy. The deeper back into history you reach, the more this is true, as it still is today when the thoughts of zealots wearing white sheets and carrying fiery torches in the night still frightens many an heretic.

Of course, a person accustomed to referencing millenniums-old documents might consider hypotheses presented three or four hundred years ago to be the latest ideas in science, but that can hardly be the case. Until the so-called French Enlightenment, science was stifled by the Church and practiced by the dictates of the church, which still attempts to wield control and influence. Only very courageous human beings dared brave the stakes and guillotines by presenting their heretical notions to the public. Not until the founding of secular America and the daring advances by British scientists did anything only minimally tainted by decrees and filters from the church begin to show; and even now science suffers from churchian influences. Witness the current brouhaha going on about evolution, abortion, stem cells, cloning… Are you ready for an American Enlightenment? I have a feeling it is developing, unnoticed, elsewhere in the world while religion-originated barricades and distractions cost us the lead in this important work.

The difference between a scientific hypothesis and a theological statement, is that the hypothesis, yes, does require to be verified by experiments and data, and forever remains subject to correction and revision. The theological statement most generally gets talked about by “authorities” and then presented to the public after the “authorities” have reached their best compromises regarding it. If a theological compromise cannot be achieved, a new denomination, or even a new religion, is quite often the result.

Since we always use the innate knowledge of the mind or hypotheses constructed by the mind for all our knowledge including scientific knowledge, we must conclude that the human mind is a valid faculty for knowing. It is arbitrary, unreasonable and capricious to insist that the mind can only be validly employed for knowing by using it in science. To assert this to be so is fallacy x).

So, now we need an example of the logical relationships that demonstrate why this ‘x’ is a fallacy, once we have determined whether anyone has actually said that to start with. Who are you quoting to produce this ‘fallacy’? Do you have a demonstrable alternative that has been shown to not be a fallacy? It is a nice feature of religion to simply state something about something, and have it be believed merely because it got said and seemed readable. Refutation, however, requires facts and data that can be evaluated; and testable facts and data come only from the material. It would be a good thing to have in order to convince any skeptical person some valid arguments and statements are being presented here. Mister Hutchison’s undocumented and unverifiable and untestable fallacies are fallacious.

Some scientists go further and assert that everything that exists can eventually be known through science. This is fallacy y) This fallacy is built upon the assumption that nothing exists but the material realm. It is true that science can learn many things about the material realm, it is not necessarily true that science can learn everything about the material realm. Furthermore, science is explicitly designed to study the material realm. Therefore, science is not equipped to know about metaphysical or spiritual realms beyond the jurisdiction of science. For this reason, science is uniquely disqualified to make authoritative claims about the existence or nonexistence of realms beyond matter. Thus, the claim that science proves materialist philosophy or that materialism and science are necessarily linked is a monumental fallacy. This is why the American evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould (1941 – 2002) said that science can prove neither theism or atheism. Both must be decided, he said, on metaphysical grounds.

Fallacy y? How cute. Lists of logical fallacies abound on the Internet, but none of the ones listed here can be found, neither by name nor description. Science is a study of material, yes. That is why it is called “natural”, "physical" and “material” science. No evidence exists to elicit a hypothesis that anything exists that doesn’t exist or, in other words, that is nonexistent. Still, this supports the views that apparently actually deserve to be called ‘theistic immaterialism’.

Things are either real or unreal; there is no halfway point that has ever been discovered. The supernatural, for all the evidence that supports it, is nonexistent, and belongs to those whose creeds, already named ‘theistic unreality’ herein, must be of the realm of whole cloth. And, while it may be true that science cannot yet “learn many things about the material realm”, that can hardly be an indictment against it any more than it also must be true about theology, which has to be even less qualified than science to make claims about anything at all. That does not, however, stop theologians from making claims. Where’s the logic that shows this to be a true fallacy?

Science does not “make claims”, as anybody with any familiarity at all with the workings of science would be well aware. Science is a study, mankind’s way of satisfying curiosity, of knowing the facts in spite of what people say about things. What scientists may assert is a matter of their beliefs, and that is in the realm of religion for so long as such assertions remain unsupported by verifiable evidence. What ought to be plainly asserted is that it is not an interest of science to prove or disprove that which cannot be brought to evidence. Science makes no claims about what has not been discovered, nor about ancient myths still bandied about in our time. The application of scientific procedures to religious claims would yield the same results as would any failed experiment: “If it cannot be demonstrated to be true, the notion must be rejected.” Atheism is nothing more than abandonment of a notion that cannot be demonstrated as true; whereas materialism has more than adequately been demonstrated and verified true.

As for scientific parapsychology, the study of the paranormal, only probabilities about the existence of the paranormal can be gained through science. If the paranormal realm exists, parapsychology can get at best a shadowy hint of what the dark realm might consist of. The same is true of brain studies which attempt to learn about the soul. Some scientists foolishly assert there is no soul because they can trace experiences to the brain. A connection to the brain neither proves nor implies that there is no connection of the brain to another realm. This is fallacy z).

Oh, wow, another fallacy that can only be found within the margins of Mister Hutchison’s document. “Scientific parapsychology”!— Now we have a true conundrum. Fallacy z, the “brain connection fallacy wherein scientists foolishly assert a complete lack of evidence in support of existence for the soul”. This fallacy has something to do with “scientific parapsychology”. Does anybody know what branch of science that is attached to? The X Files live on in the pages of nonexistent scholarly documents, the pages of unproductive college experiments, rightwing obfuscation, and dark contrivances of religious apologists who have to invent material to argue against.

Experiments not demonstrating an hypothesis to be true lead to the rejection of the hypothesis, or to its restatement and retrial. When there are no more restatements to be made, and everybody who wants to has verified the hypothesis cannot be demonstrated as true, then the hypothesis gets rejected. That does not mean new data cannot yield new statements and new experiments, but that is not the same as saying science cannot “prove” a negative hypothesis. It is not up to science, but to those whose interests support it, to find new statements to put to a test. It is religion’s failure, not science’s, if that has not happened. Claims by theistic unrealism about existences of immaterialistic, nonexistent entities and realms cannot be claimed true if the nonexistent cannot be shown to have existence.

An atheist I know who is stuck in fallacy z) claims that because out of body experiences involve false perceptions as the soul is floating about the room, these experiences are delusions, and hence no soul independent of the body can exist. But if souls float, why is a floating soul expected to have scientifically accurate observations of the room? Maybe floating souls are confused or lacking in astuteness about material arrangements. If souls do not float, and out of body experiences are delusions, then how does this prove that the soul does not exist? All we can get from this study is a probability of whether or not souls float.

Once again, no data is presented from which to draw a conclusion. We are left to wonder if Mister Hutchinson has ever floated, and if he can reproduce the conditions in which the phenomenon occurred. This sounds like something testable! Has anybody ever stated an hypothesis about it and done the experiment? Those of us who have never floated would like to know how it is done, and expect that if someone would show us that, we could find out how it works and why so we could verify it. Otherwise, we have to take the word of people who were in questionable circumstances at the time they claim their experiences occurred, apparently asleep and dreaming. Or, telling stories for reasons only they would know. "Maybe", "why?", "if" do not answer questions, they elicit them if they make sense at all. And, for something to make sense, do we not use our awareness of the material world to assess that?

Finally, I wish to emphasize that just because we can know some things from science, it does not prove or imply that science is our only way of valid knowing. Science is only competent in the material real. It is not competent in questions concerning the existence or nonexistence of realms outside of matter. Not only is science unable to prove that nothing exists but matter, it can say little that is useful on the subject. Therefore, the assumption of a necessary link between science and materialist philosophy is false. Science owes nothing to bad philosophy. The progress of science is hindered when it becomes encumbered with bad philosophy.

Very true, and religious philosophy is exactly the kind that has to be considered bad, and it does strive to work against science, as history has more than made clear. It must necessarily also be true that science cannot measure the nonexistent. Religion is too obviously incompetent in any realm to measure anything, let alone come to an across the board agreement they can show the world to be true and useful.

If theologians can demonstrate that realms exist beyond those with which science has grown increasingly proficient, they need to quickly do so. Otherwise, they speak only for and to those who already have resorted to taking their word, and who have already made their choices of which, from among the many variations, of those whose words they accept without foundation. What does religion have to say about immaterial realms that is useful?— let alone verifiable? Most of religion’s edicts can be demonstrated to be anti-human and harmful, and inhumane in their applications.

As far as what science says that is useful or not useful, the very fact that you and I are alive most likely can be accredited to the scientists of our time. The increasing interference of religionists in their work increases the likelihood of their failure to keep that up, and the artifices they have contrived for our comfort and security will not continue to prevail under the pressure of our excessive numbers. Look where religion thrives in our world, especially in places where science is conspicuously absent, and you will see the alternative.

Closed System Materialism

Materialist philosophy posits a closed system of matter subject to the laws of cause and effect. No supernatural power can invade the system, according to the materialist. No paranormal being or force which is not subject to material laws can exist within the system. Why? Because the skepticism which all materialists have inherited from Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume (1711-1776) will find a way of debunking any such things. When Ebeneezer Scrooge was speaking to the ghost of Jacob Marley, Scrooge claimed that he was having bad dreams because of an undigested piece of beef or a bad potato." Notice the fierce determination to find a naturalistic explanation for everything? However, the illogical logicalness of real scientists sometimes surpass even that of the fictional Scrooge. If I were to write a tale of a modern scrooge, I would place a scientist in a haunted house. "The ghost has no weight and casts no shadow. Therefore, it does not exist." A child would answer the scientist, "If it had weight and cast a shadow it would not be a ghost."

Wow, now we resort to fictional characters to support our arguments? Mister Dickens ought to be proud that he has been elevated to the level of credence attributed to the myths in the Bible. Mister Hutchison assumes the existence of a supernatural power, offers no evidence to support it, and then requires science to provide evidence for the results of its own work. Notice the fierce determination to find a supernatural explanation for everything? To put words in the mouth of a fictional child and fictional scientist might be convincing to folks looking to be appeased for their ready-made beliefs, but it demonstrates nothing to a person prepared to assess the value of actual evidence and draw at least a tentative conclusion.

Debunking is done to claims that are suspected to be untrue. If the claims are true, attempts at debunking often show that. A rule that Mister Hutchison might find interesting: Conclusions will be drawn by thoughtful people from the lack of evidence as well as from the presentation of it. That is a principle of atheology. If someone tells a story and can’t show that it’s true, any reasonable person in his right mind must doubt his word, and continue to do so for so long as the lack of evidence is all the evidence he has. To see this at work firsthand, get yourself assigned to jury duty on a nonfictional murder trial.

Moreover, science does not recognize "cause and effect" as natural laws. That is something we have inherited from religion, and that makes everything based on that a moot statement. That includes determinism itself, which I will acknowledge to be supported by many secular people who have not thought it through with any wisdom or thoroughness. Determinism, to get ahead of you, is also inherited from religious Calvinism and was once known as predestination.

Determinism: Materialism is a form of determinism. Determinism means that everything we are, think, or do is determined by impersonal forces such as genetics, environment, nutrition, economics, biological urges, etc. Determinists claim we have utterly no control of our destiny and no influence on who we are. My atheist friend is trying to explain me from brain chemistry. I am not kidding. This is exactly the blinkered way determinists think.

And what if I say that determinism is a form of materialism, and you have this also entirely backward? Does that make no difference to you, or was it done intentionally? Not all materialists (including myself) agree with determinism for the very same reasons we do not agree with any other religion, but I expect that does not stop you from obfuscating things by introducing arguments that have little to do with “refuting materialism”. Can a man of focused vision be justifiably discredited as “blinkered” by a blind man?– or should we acknowledge he is seeing where he is looking, and not looking for what you want him to see?

If materialism is true, we can have no reason, free-will or conscious. As noted before, reason submerged in the body is reduced to a program. Free-will cannot exist in a deterministic closed system. In such a system everything we do is a product of cause and effect working within the system. No will that contravenes the preordained outcomes decreed by the system can exist. If the will could defy the system and do something contrary to the outcomes of cause and effects, then it would no longer be a closed maternalistic system.

Show us how that could, or has, happened. To which definition of free will are you referring?

You present some very strange and unscientific language here. When has reason ever been “submerged in a body”? Why is reason “reduced” to a program? Of course everything we do looks like a product of cause and effect, but that is not a recognized part of material science, it is a claim that determinists inherited from religious predestination and modified to fit a newer schema. Do you have a demonstrable alternative hypothesis? Can you demonstrate one time ever that free will has existed? Come to think of it, maybe a definition is in order, considering the strange language, to make sure we have the same subject matter and are not violating the Principle of Focus.

I interpret religious and deterministic "free will" to mean the impossible, that a person may make choices where no options can be presented, and that those choices will be independent of prevailing circumstances as well as independent of past experience and from effects introduced by that person’s physical nature and beliefs. In other words, will free from all constrictions and limitations. In other words, any person could will himself to fly into space, visit the back side of the moon, and then will himself back home with no ill effects. Do you have an alternative definition that does not impose restrictions of some kind? All I can find are limited by our physical circumstances, within which we all must operate.

Scientists who are trying to prove that the mind is nothing more than the brain call reason, free will and consciousness "metaphenomena"of the brain. They make this claim because the events of thought, will and consciousness are recorded by the brain and retained by the memory. But this is nearsighted thinking. Everything is recorded by the brain but that gives us no information about the extent to which the brain is the author of particular faculties. My voice is recorded by a tape recorder but that does not mean that my voice is a metaphenomena of the tape recorder. The scientists are trying to reduce the events of thinking and willing to empirical phenomena. The phenomema is "meta" because it involves faculties which transcend the normal biological processes of the body. The word metaphenomena is used to signify that reason, free will and consciousness are illusions. We seem to have these faculties but don't really. They are really processes of the brain which functions in a closed material cause and effect system. Perceptions, ideas, feelings, intuitions, values and purposes are really fantasies of the mind.

What makes "nearsighted" a worse condition than blindness? Do the senses, all of them, not require awareness to function, and is this awareness not of the material? This demonstrates an almost insulting portrayal of science as “trying to prove” whatever. What is this science you are talking about here? Where is this science taking place that is trying to prove these things, or is this just another one of those urban legends people make up from whole cloth? Why are you pointing out those involved in innocent pursuits as guilty of what you indulge in?

Science is a study, and scientists are people engaged in that kind of study. Scientists will, of course, make statements and have beliefs, like any human being has the right to do. The difference between a scientist and a theologian, however, is that the scientist will be working toward functional and useful knowledge, while the theologian will be standing around with his hands in his pockets poking fun at the scientist.

Now, an important thing to note here is that ‘illusions’ and ‘delusions’ are two different animals. An illusion is the way something appears to function or to be. A delusion is about something nonexistent and nonfactual to begin with. The conclusions Mister Hutchison drew about fantasies are his own, and not those proposed by materialism.

Notice that materialism leads to an absolute nihilism. Life becomes absolutely meaningless. Also consider that anyone who really believes he has no free will or reason or values and tries to live his life accordingly would be paralyzed and unable to think and act. No one behaves this way because no one really believes the mind and will are mere illusions. Ah, the nonsense that men will claim to believe if it will allow them to also claim that God, the soul and conscience does not exist.

In my electronic dictionary I have found: “Meta: a. Beyond; transcending; more comprehensive: metalinguistics. b. At a higher state of development: metazoan.” Once again, the conclusions Mister Hutchison draws here must be his own. As a materialist, I suffer none of the paralysis and sense of inhumane devaluation that I did suffer while under the influence of anti-human religious dogma. I know the difference between illusion and delusion. I can act upon the interactive causes and effects influencing my life according to my own best interests for the family who depends upon me for their support. I am not pre-limited to a preordained set of immoral and inhumane practices and beliefs that restrict my ability to consider new knowledge, nor how to respond to the threats that any person alive will sometimes face, nor to enjoy and benefit from opportunities life may sometimes present to me. Ah, the nonsense that men will claim to believe if it allows them to put words into others' mouths and ideas into others' heads, and then insist they originated there.

The Jerry-Built House of Evolution

Evolutionists who claim that the mind is a closed system of cause and effect and will turn right around and say that life appeared by accident and evolved randomly. No one seems to notice the contradiction. If our world is a product of pure randomness, it cannot be an orderly closed system. If it is an orderly system it cannot appear by mistake and operate any random way the dice falls. If the world is an orderly closed system we cannot have random evolution. The orderly system must have a designer. Materialism is refuted. If we have random evolution, the world is not an orderly system. Therefore it is not a closed system, and no assertions can be made about whether or not supernatural and paranormal forces exist. Random evolution rules out a strict materialism. Materialism is not a logically feasible idea.

Now, Mister Hutchison, will you please get your Jerrybuilt and jury rigged stories straight? Evolution is a product of cause and effect the same as all other phenomena. Evolution permeates existence. Evolution is existence. Evolution perpetuates itself, and interactive cause and effect are its tools. Cause and effect of your perceptions is a religious notion. A more accurate and meaningful description of the concatenation of effects through space time would be "action and consequence".

Life appeared by accident? I suppose somebody, somewhere, said that but he or she was wrong and not necessarily an evolutionary scientist. The appearance of life is not a concern of biological evolution, which only concerns itself with the development of life.

 Life appeared because that’s what life does when the conditions are of the proper mix for it to do so. We have good reason to believe the universe teems with life of all kinds, because the same causes and effects that work here are bound to be found in millions or billions of other places.

Wow, you say what you feel like about what scientists supposedly say, but whose words are you quoting? Can you explain your personal meaning of “closed system”? Can you explain from where the idea of “orderly” came? I suppose if two large objects smashed together a few billion years ago, and enough of them did so to get it behind them, and if an “explosion” took place at a point in empty space and all the resultant spatter flew away from that central location it would appear to be “orderly” in our time, just like an explosion on the face of our planet appears to be if you don’t look too closely. All the causes and all the effects are there that led to where everything is today.

Can you personally feature trying to keep track of it all just for the purpose of proving your position in a discussion? No one claims life appeared "by accident" except the Intelligent Design people whose intelligent designer must also have appeared "by accident" and apparently disappeared in that same way. No one but those same mistaken people claims there is anything at all random about the process, when they want to put their words into scientists' mouths.

The famous atheist Anthony Flew recently became a theist because the work of the intelligent design scientists proved to him that the intricate order of the genetic code (DNA) cannot appear at random. The orderly design must have a designer. The design is "irreducibly complex." A small change in the design would be fatal to the creature. An incomplete creature evolving towards the complex design of a species would perish because a piece of a design cannot work in nature. Every creature must have a complete design of its own. An intelligent design must have an intelligent designer.

Here we go in circles with red herring statements about a subject from a school of thought that actually proves nothing, and actually serves to undermine religion’s own causes, as I will show. Have you ever demonstrated how any of that is true? "Would be" is not a scientific statement, whatever might follow. It is a statement of presumptiousness.

Sure, and every intelligent designer had to have an intelligent designer. The Intelligent Designer’s Intelligent Designer would have to be even more complex and advanced than the Intelligent Designer He or She designed, and it would go backward through an eternity of increasingly complicated and advanced Intelligent Designers until one has reached an inevitable conclusion: The Intelligent Designer is 1): a figment of the imagination or 2): an actual logical fallacy, and not one some theist made up while purporting to discredit those who have already seen through the immaterialist unreality described by his predecessors.

Now, cause and effect aside, what is orderly about the current result of crashing stars and planets, exploding novas and suns, tsunamis and earthquakes, hurricanes and cyclones and tornadoes, and the predator/prey relationship of every category of animal and plant that has not suffered an attack by one or more of the innumerable diseases?

 Sure, it’s complex. There’s a lot of it, for Cat’s sake. I suppose “small changes in design being fatal to the creature” explains why there is no life on the moon, Venus, the asteroids, but that is also certain to be findable in other places we may never get to visit that do meet the requisite conditions amenable to life. Let me pose a question: "How large are ‘small changes in design’?— is it larger than the differences between the surface at the North Pole, for example, and the deepest depths at the ocean bottoms?" Life is found at those places and everywhere in between.

Explain what you mean by an “incomplete creature”. Is a germ an incomplete creature because its body is only one cell? Is a worm an incomplete creature because it lacks the appendages required for walking and grasping things? How about a tadpole? It at least seems to have eyes, but it hasn’t achieved the legs and feet of a frog or toad. How about a frog or toad, that seem not able to produce fur or give live birth. Maybe a rabbit of a cow, or a horse, that have legs and feet or hooves, but cannot talk any more than can a monkey or an ape? How about a man or a woman, who can think and talk, but have only one kind of sexual apparatus, unlike much simpler creatures found in the seas? What is an incomplete creature? Is it necessarily hermaphroditic? Is this a part of discrediting materialism? What has any of this so far to do with the objective you had stated at the start?

Are you still nursing that subterfuge about phyla that has been so soundly discredited? I hope not. I hate wasting a lot of energy on someone's essay the author of which has not been paying attention.

Anthony Flew became a theist? Not according to his own statement about your highly touted but unverified rumor, at least, not in any way that will help promote your interests. I am sure you can find more links than just these: http://www.intheagora.com/archives/2004/12/anthony_flew_ba.html#001010

http://www.intheagora.com/archives/2004/12/anthony_flew_ba.html#001024

http://www.secweb.org/asset.asp?AssetID=369

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=315976

http://www.geoffarnold.com/mt-archives/000349.html

Evolutionists believe that simple life appeared by accident and evolved into all life on earth today. However, this defies the evidence of the fossil record. The Cambrian rock in China has fossils of all nine phyla of animals, all of which are complex creatures. None of these phyla can be found in the Precambrian rock. All nine phyla appeared suddenly with no transitional forms. There is no basis for assuming that the complex animals in the Cambrian period are the instant descendants of the tiny simple organisms imprinted on Cambrian rock. When Chinese scientists presented these findings at an international symposium of science and called for a revision of Darwinism, the American scientists shouted them down. American scientific dogmatism trumps empirical evidence and freedom of speech and thought in Communist China.

And that proves…? I think it’s nice to be able to say things entirely irrelevant to anything in a subject, and have people feel like you really said it all. What does your paragraph have to do with evolution? How many millions of years does your ‘suddenly’ encompass? Why is your “evidence” some place I cannot easily visit? Why does it seem to exist in only one remote place in the entire world that I cannot visit other places to verify?

Science uses a step that you have apparently avoided in your previous paragraph, and that is called ‘verification’: "Where else does this show up to prove this is not an anomaly?" It is a crucial part of science, and as a result of applying it to the concept of evolution, science’s statements about it are based on evidence found worldwide. A question of logic persists also in that paragraph: You are using something in a rock layer formed over an unstated period of time to prove (to folks who claim mankind appeared only six thousand years ago as two single individuals, and that all our variety took that short amount of time to spread all over the world, and that several varieties of us had time to die out) that a simple animal could not develop an amazing number of varieties in an actually long period of time. Let me ask you: From how many original individuals of that species did these phyla originate? Don’t forget the claims that Noah’s famous flood supposed to have occurred about four thousand years ago allowed humanity to develop from eight complex individuals into the current six billion with all our uniqueness in a time span so short we can safely doubt any new rock layers have been formed during it. I do believe that science’s version of evolution makes more sense that the American Christian version, and that your "suddenly" is absolutely irrelevant.

The moral of the story is, no accidental appearance of life millions of years ago can account for the highly complex life today. Evolutionist fail in their mission to rule out the possibility of a creator or a designer. Therefore, evolutionists can offer no serious support for the assertion of a purely materialistic cosmos.

Life is a result of evolution, and interactive cause and effect are the tools by which evolution progresses. Cause and effect are the ongoing results of interaction with each other, within the circumstances prevalent at any certain place, at any certain point in time. Evolution has been verified by mathematics, by extrapolation, by experiment, and by the record buried in the ground.

By what has immaterialism or unreal nonexistence been verified? Is that verification traceable to a point of origin? Are the events and causes of that origination known and reproducible by mathematics, if not by demonstration? Will other religious ‘philosophies’ agree with you each step of the way by verifying or duplicating the processes you used in your experiment? The correct answer to those four questions must be ‘No’. If not, do your cause a service by demonstrating why it should be otherwise, somehow others can duplicate on their own.

Here is a hint for you: Buy and read and understand my ebook, EVOLUTION, available at http://www.lulu.com/content/309396.  In it you will discover how completely materialism saps the strength out from any of your claims about an intelligent designer, and your (wished for) claimed impossibility of a universe arising from what humans perceive to be ‘nothing’.

When DNA was discovered in 1953, it was a crisis for evolutionists. Regardless of the effects of natural selection, an animal can only pass down the information in its genes to its children. Any variation which is passed down must already be in the gene code. Thus, "microevolution" is possible, such as producing a collie from wolves through many generations of selective breeding. However, a cat cannot descend from a dog because cats have information in their DNA which is nowhere to be found in a dog's DNA. 'Macroevolution," the evolution from one species to another cannot occur from natural selection alone.

And this proves…? The difference between science and religion is found in the fact that science corrects its mistakes and religion defends theirs. As a religionist, accustomed to that practice of religion, it can be understood why you would adjudge what is science’s strength to be a weakness and a fault. Its inability to correct its own blatant errors, and its proclivity for papering them over with fantastic stories, shows why religion can only be defended with character assassination, murder, lies, bluster, force, governmental manipulation, political mudslinging, demonization, and that is the list of kinder tools.

Religion would have no presence in a society if it were kept separated from children who have not yet reached the age of skepticism, and knowing that is why it must struggle so hard to invade the schools and classrooms of our country in any way it can. Religion must be perpetuated by molesting the innocent, information-hungry minds of children with misinformation such as that paragraph contains in almost every sentence.

Moreover, that natural selection can make one species evolve into another is a religious statement, not one from science.

This tremendous problem was discovered by evolutionists! After a few years evolutionists put a patch on their theoretical flat tire. Gene mutation supplies the new information in the DNA to make macroevolution possible. No single case of macroevolution from one species to another through mutations has ever been observed. All the cases of species change which evolutionists point to are clearly cases of microevolution (evolving from wolves to collies) not macroevolution, evolving cats from dogs. Random mutations cannot take you from dogs to cats because the cat has a complex, orderly, sophisticated design elements which are not in the dog DNA.

And this proves…? DNA was a breakthrough in science that cinched evolution’s verifiability, and showed scientists the mechanism by which mutations come about. Scientists have for the longest time been playing with it in labs, and have applied it to create breakthrough products for medicine. What you see as a problem only points a finger at your own lack of comprehension in this one more instance where you have cause and effect backward. What you are requiring of evolution demands a belief in magic for one to accept it. Of course, magic and religion are different evolutionary stages of belief systems, and you are religious. Tell me, can you change a molecule and cause a nail to become a screw? Can you change water into desert sand?

Assuming gene mutations can produce evolution is similar to the fallacy we previously discussed of assuming an accidental beginning followed by random events can produce an orderly closed system. Only an intelligent designer can bring about a species or an orderly closed system.

And this proves…? Once again, you have it backwards. Genetic mutations do not produce evolution. Evolution introduces genetic mutations. Here is a man who invents logical fallacies for his own convenience, and then haphazardly overlooks his own.

 Because cross-mutations have never been observed, he claims, means that linear mutations must never be traceable also. Have you no idea about the experiments in the lab and in the field that scientists have performed and documented all over the world that show just how much in error this whole piece is? The only people apt to be convinced by this will be those whose proclivities (as in cause and effect) will lead them to take you at your word, and who will never bother to adventure into the written documents produced by scientists the world over who have performed the same tasks and recorded their very similar results.

Show me the theologians who can verifiably present the interactions they have had with an intelligent designer, and have traced the lineage of that back to its origin, which they have also put into evidence and adequately explained. You point your fingers elsewhere only so you can avoid investigation.

Conclusion: Science cannot support materialism and materialism is an untenable concept. Atheists are ill advised to trust in scientific materialism as their rationale for denying the existence of God. Atheist are well advised to become theists like Antony Flew unless they can come up with a more workable rationale for atheism.

And here we are once again, backward with the “atheists denying the existence of God, god, gods, et al”. Gods deny their own existence; atheists have nothing to do with that.

Anthony Flew as a theist is a lie created by folks jumping the gun with intentional misinterpretations for propaganda purposes, as Anthony Flew himself has stated. He says to call him a deist, but never anything like a Christian or Muslim.

Where did “scientific materialism” come from in this discussion? Science is a process that results from investigating materialism as a world view—that’s why, as I said, it is called “material science”, another item you presented in reverse.

Theologians are ill advised to abandon scientific benefits in their lives, as they most likely will find it impossible to survive with any comfort in our modern world. Picture yourself going in to the wilds with absolutely nothing that resulted from science: By yourself, or with a friend, naked, shoeless, not one kind of tool or modern (or even old-fashioned) kind of convenience or utilities.

Think of how you would survive. You would start from scratch (but with the advantage of whatever modern knowhow you possess) to kill or gather your own food, which you’d likely ingest raw. Your first tools would be rocks and heavy clubs, because every single item we take for granted in our modern life has resulted directly or indirectly from science.

Were I you, I would take a hard look at my hard-but-empty line. Theologians are well advised to study what science actually does proclaim, and learn its reasons for doing so, so that they can increase their odds of doing actually beneficial work during the one time they will get to be alive in this world.

And, once again you mentioned only atheists. Do you not realize any atheist may have no better understanding of materialism than you? Do you not realize that all that’s needed for one to be called an ‘atheist’ is to accept that the lack of evidence for the existence of anything supernatural (or only just the gods part of it) can only lead to one conclusion if a person has the guts and interest to follow the lack of evidence to where it has to lead? Why not also include your Christian friends who also believe material is composed of atoms and molecules and energy, but whose knowledge is, like you have presented yours to be, incomplete and twisted, and backward?

The only reason religionists can get away with attacks like this (and this one is mild in comparison with most) is that scientists refrain from fighting back. Perhaps too little time has passed since the days of religionists burning them in bonfires or hiding them in gaols? Maybe freedom of thought and expression, even in the United States, is not complete enough to allow for scientists to openly defend their concepts? No, the one great error science makes is in the common belief that truth will prevail in the long run against the continued reign of terror fanaticism enjoys.

Look: Freedom of expression requires not only the right to freely express offensive thoughts, it also requires the right to publish them in the same places where accepted ideas and opinions now reign. That does not happen because it would reach the minds of thinking people, and thinking people will recognize what has a basis in facts, if they can ever gain easy exposure to those facts. Theistic unrealists and theistic immaterialists cannot afford to have their marketplace invaded by the truth; they will lose their customers inside of a couple of generations.

Tell me: Where on general TV, or in newspapers, magazines, radio, or book publishers can an atheist expect to have his well written work well received, let alone promoted? Any volunteers in the general markets who would love to have me state my case for you?

Let me express one last sentiment to you: Were scientists to attack religion in all of its aspects as heartily and zealously as religionists attack science and scientists, religion would soon stand exposed and bared and embarrassed, its finest points combed and all of its twists and warps of reality straightened and held up for all to see.

Were scientists actually engaged in a culture war (in the light of what follows here) as something other than as targets and victims of religion’s antagonistic barbs and insults and, yes, lies, religion would stand hardly a chance to survive intact.

Scientists do not have the same kind emotional involvement with their subject material as do the religionists, and so the war will remain one-sided. It will continue to be fought, by an onslaught of emotionally irate apologists for anecdotal authority, against those whose emotional involvement arises not from defensiveness, but from their interest in discovering what’s actually true, and whose only weapons are data and verifiable facts. Data and verifiable facts are required for making an effective refutation of anything. You have provided none of that in your attack against materialism, nor your attack against atheism, nor your attack against evolution.

Here’s a quote of Larry Darby, then President of the Atheist Law Center: "…the worldview of materialism is not to be confused with consumerism. Atheism is a conclusion, not a religion or ideology." From Larry Darby letter to Gov. Bob Riley, Jan. 22, 2005

Fred Hutchison, a Christian layman, has had a variety of opportunities to teach, ranging from pulpit invitations to being a banquet speaker. He has written hundreds of essays about religion, politics, history, philosophy, and science, and is the author and director of short dramas and comedies.

He has an MBA and a CPA and is retired. During his career, he was a technical specialist in governmental accounting and auditing, and he wrote technical literature, did research, taught classes, prepared training seminars, and performed quality review work.

Fred is motivated by the pursuit of truth, and is fascinated by how we can abstract information from many fields to assemble a framework of ideas with which to understand the world. However, he believes that scriptural truth is the essential foundation for wisdom and knowledge and an indispensable antidote to self-deception. His book The Stages of Sanctification is the product of twenty years of intermittent study and meditation on the subject.

Fred is working on another book, which will be titled, The Rise and Fall of Western Culture. Later chapters in the book will examine the roots of Postmodernism and our present culture war. Fred was the first "Christian intellectual" selected by the Talbot Department of Philosophy, of the Talbot School of Theology, for a special program. Talbot seeks to network with Christian intellectuals for cooperation in fighting the culture war and to build up the intellectual discipline of Evangelicals.

© Copyright 2005 by Fred Hutchison http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/hutchison/050210

Lloyd Harrison Whitling has authored many books, eight of which he has self-published through Authors’ Club, and articles you’ll find scattered all over the Internet. His main interests in memetics and lexicology (applications of language to human understanding), and the effects of religion upon humanity, were spawned by the attempts of older generations to thwart and stifle his innate curiosity, and by the twists of terminology he observed them continuously using in their attempts to force him into subservience, during those times when sheer force of threatened brutality were not resorted to.

Reality 101 and The complete Universe of Memes are must reads for anyone attempting to truly comprehend Whitling’s evolving philosophy, which has developed over the expanse of more than six decades of interested study and interactions with religionists and researchers, his studies of their works, and his attempts to merge them into any kind of reasonable, tenable, realistic accommodation. He emerged from that disheartened, but with a new awareness of religion’s actual practices, and especially a complete understanding of its practice of double think, its presence in the important study of Memetics, and its role as a framing system. His interests have now turned to the processes involved in framing systems, where terminology is utilized to support concepts for which no actual evidence exists.

Lloyd’s newest book, entitled The Problem With Dying, utilizes the power of fiction to elicit mental images to make his presentation of a case in which the immorality of religion struggles against a view of humanity as a natural animal whose greatest problems are those it has raised against itself.

http://tinyurl.com/peh9

"To deny a right to the experience of pleasure is immoral unless that denial can be justified by a valid presentation of how pain will result from that experience in an amount that would render the expected pleasure regrettable; or, if it can be shown that pain will be induced in others innocent of any involvement. The role of science in moral issues should be to test that, predict that, and find harmless ways to demonstrate that."

— L. H. Whitling in the eBook, Secular Morality —