Yet again...
Posted by LaudateAgno on 2025-June-30 21:25:27, MondayIn reply to Materialism and value - another atheist screed posted by diogenes on 2025-June-29 11:50:39, Sunday
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... everything you say is false. And I mean everything! It's all so amenable, so reasonable, and yet entirely wrong. I'm not going to get sucked too deeply into all this, but I will make a few comments. You've lured me in, you bastard. Sentence #1: "The existence of a single animal being tortured is enough to prove that there is no God anywhere in the universe." Wow. To start with, no theist worth his salt in the last few millennia has ever thought there was a God anywhere in the universe. God is not a thing in or an element of any universe. God is Being itself. God is the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. Are you aware of the Book of Job, and of the Jewish and Christian understanding of its theodicy? No. I'll skip your ridiculous assertions concerning what Darwin and Hume "easily refute." They refute nothing, and you know it -- or maybe you don't, but either way. Next: "We must recognise that we are biological creatures who can only grasp the universe in a manner adapted to our perceptual and cognitive apparatus." All right, there's a nice tautology. Yes, we are capable of understanding what we are capable of understanding. And what, exactly, are the limits of that understanding? Are you suggesting there is a domain of understanding of the universe that we can imagine but not quite grasp? Well how about that! Here's my favorite part; I'll end with it: "Whatever being itself is, it is not spiritual. For it is characteristic of mind or spirit that its reactions are not stereotyped. Even quite primitive creatures can form conditioned reflexes, that is, their response to the same stimulus can be different on different occasions. Nature, by contrast, is governed by law. Given the exact same causes, the exact same effect will follow without fail. Without this, exact science would scarcely be possible." Nothing that follows the first sentence either follows from it or argues for it, and the rest is utterly incoherent. "it is characteristic of mind or spirit that its reactions are not stereotyped." What's that supposed to mean? Mind and spirit are not "stereotyped?" Do you mean they are not reducible to efficient causality, or to what is currently understood under the concept of "physical law," or something like that? And following this you suggest a contrast of mind and spirit with "nature," something which is governed by "law," this "law" being in every case deterministic, by fiat (and in odd accordance with a primitive mechanistic philosophy, already abandoned by Newton). But the physical sciences are the study precisely of what can be most directly described by appeal to law. Quite obviously, not everything can be so described -- a fact which any living, thinking, willful soul knows full well. Oh, one more thing: "The notion that a God could somehow explain the universe was comprehensively demolished by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason." Come on. Who ever thought God could "explain the universe?" Who ever said anything remotely approximating that sentiment? Who ever has had faith in God for that reason? Name names. Good luck! If anyone is in need of being disabused of "the childish anthropocentric illusions of theism", it's diogenes. |
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