[sphinx]

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[spirited irish]

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[sphinx]

Once upon a time, in a place far, far, away (i.e., when I was in college, 45 years ago), I came across a phrase that has stuck. How I came to be reading B.F. Skinner, and where, I no longer recall, but in one passage he was attempting to provide a materialist explanation for a poem or painting about (for example) a sunrise. How, in a thoroughly reductionist materialist scheme, could he account for the human propensity to produce such things? His answer was that the sunrise might be "a metaphorical adumbration of the idea of survival value."

Hope that settles it.

Though I did wonder how a materialist could account for "metaphors," "adumbrations," and "ideas."

[RobinOfKingston]

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[Slyfox]

This article is a great description of what universals and particulars are. Thanks for posting.

[blueunicorn6]

The neighbors are complaining about the lawn. I guess I’d better mow it. The lawnmower doesn’t seem to be working. Ahhhh....but it truly is a wonder. It has wheels. I wonder who first came up with the idea of a wheel? And it has an engine. Gosh. A cylinder and a piston and a spark plug. Who discovered steel? Where did the iron come from? And the gas explodes. Compression, air and spark. Where did the oil come from? Dinosaurs? Where did the dinosaurs come from?

The neighbors are complaining about the lawn. Screw’em. Who wants to think that much. Where’s my beer?

[reasonisfaith]

Another thing that can’t be explained materialistically is the materialist’s desire to believe materialism.

[mjp]

Modern materialists confidently deny free will and deny the immateriality of the intellect

Secular humanists are metaphysical materialists who believe that all being is matter in motion, and the mind is simply a manifestation of the brain, and explainable in physical terms, and what appears as consciousness is simply the result of evolution.

The result of this monism is that there is no possibility that human consciousness, with its memory and awareness of self-identity intact, can survive the shock and disintegration of death.

A second result is that the ideals shared by secular humanists would most consistently lead to them being sympathetic to socialism.

Thank God that Aristotle's demonstration of the immateriality of intellect and will and his implicit defense of the freedom of the will from materialist determinism is as valid and pertinent today as it was two thousand years ago.

[aquila48]

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[spirited irish]

While Jerry Coyne cannot or will not accept the immateriality of the intellect, will, and reality of free will, Karl Popper had no such problem.

Popper (1902-1994) was a British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics. Because he is regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century, what he had to say about philosophical materialism and Darwinism is of utmost importance to the down and dirty war of attrition waged by methodological and ontological naturalists against creationists and intelligent design adherents.

Though Popper favored evolutionary theory and natural selection, he also forthrightly stated that Darwinism is not a testable scientific theory but rather a metaphysical research program. By this he means that not only is Darwinism metaphysical (immaterial/spiritual), but so are its' two most important foundations, classical empiricism and the observationalist philosophy of science that grew out of it.

Empiricism is a theory of knowledge that contradicts itself by asserting that human knowledge comes only or primarily via sensory experience rather than the mind while observationalism asserts that human knowledge and theories must be based on empirical observations....instead of the mind. For this reason, Popper argued strongly against empiricism and observationalism, saying that scientific theories and human knowledge generally, is conjectural or hypothetical and is generated by the immaterial creative imagination.

In other words, all three theories originated in the immaterial mind, a power of which is imagination. As spirit (intellect and will) is the citadel of the soul, then Darwinism, empiricism, and observationalism are spiritual.

The Founding generation knew that mind is a power of soul, and imagination the power by which mind conceives. In Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828, soul and imagination are respectively defined as:

1. Soul: "The spiritual, rational and immortal substance in man, which distinguishes him from brutes; that part of man which enables him to think and reason."

2. Imagination: "...the power or faculty of the mind by which it conceives and forms ideas of things communicated to it by the senses....The business of conception (and the) power of modifying our conceptions, by combining the parts of different ones so as to form new wholes of our own creation...(imagination) selects the parts of different conceptions, or objects of memory, to form a whole more pleasing, more terrible, or more awful, than has ever been presented in the ordinary course of nature."

In short, Darwinism, classical empiricism and the observationalist philosophy of science claim to be what they are not in order to obtain an advantage over the Genesis account of creation and intelligent design by imposition of immoral means. We need to realize that the most zealous and outspoken defenders of this false science are arrogant sophists who hate truth and reality and mean to keep it out.

[Talisker]

There’s no orchestra in the radio.

But if you break the radio you can no longer hear the orchestra.

That about sums it up.

[AllAmericanGirl44]

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