I thoroughly enjoyed the interview. It aligns very much with my own worldview and beliefs. I intend to order and read the book. Keep up the thought provoking articles. Best to you and your family.TedZ
Great interview. The implications of materialism are actually even more insane than Mr. Arrington has described here, as I'm sure he would agree.
If in the entire universe there is and never has been and never will be anything other than particles in blind and mechanistic motion, then picking out any particular set of those particles and designating them as a singular object, such as "a human being," is utterly arbitrary and merely conventional. Singular objects don't objectively exist by this view taken to its logical conclusion, just subjective groupings in our minds.
Except if you take THAT to its logical conclusion, we and our minds don't objectively exist either, so we can't even subjectively group anything in our minds nor take anything to its logical conclusion. What actually follows from materialism is therefore absolute eliminativism, and with it the total abandonment of reason and logic of any sort.
Now nobody actually does this. Even arch-reductionists like Dennett and self-identified eliminativists like the Churchhills or Alex Rosenberg are implicitly trying to work out a compromise position that lets them have their cake and eat it too. They want to say that their belief is objectively "true" and the most "rational" and "implied by science" and so forth, which is an appeal to things that cannot be real given materialism.
Darwinism is ultimately incoherent for the same reason. It's an attempt to account for biological function (the defining feature of biological organisms) in terms of blind mechanism, but by even treating them as objectively real things that need to be explained in the first place it contradicts that premise.
You see some of the New Atheist types whining and complaining recently about Critical Theory and transgender ideology and other forms of crazy "wokeness" invading and consuming all of the hard sciences. I'm thinking of Richard Dawkins, Colin Wright, Peter Boghossian, Steven Pinker, and so forth.
But this is all completely futile on their part. The "woke" crazies are closer to taking their materialism to its logical conclusion than they are. True, the woke haven't embraced absolute eliminativism (which is impossible to do in any event), but they have taken it to the logical implication immediately preceding that, namely radical nominalism, the idea that objects don't objectively exist, and that the way we categorize some collections of blind and mechanistic particles and assign functions and purposes to them (such as "male" or "female" or the rules of valid reasoning) is utterly subjective, conventional, and arbitrary.
There's just no way to argue our way back to sanity and the pursuit of objective truth from here from within the premises of materialism. Materialists let the toothpaste out of the tube, and there's no way to put it back in short of the abandonment of materialism by the intelligentsia (or their replacement by a new intelligentsia that rejects it already).
I have purchased the kindle version of the book and have scanned it using some terms of interest. It is fantastic. The section on proofs is worth the admission alone.
I am aware of atheists objections to theism which I studied in the last couple of years and my assessment is that there are none. I was stunned by this but yet the conventional wisdom is that they are devastating. They are anything but. Proofs for a creator is overwhelming. It is not apodictic but close.
Proofs that Jesus is God is my main area of interest. I will report on that after reading especially chapters 6 and 7.
I thoroughly enjoyed the interview. It aligns very much with my own worldview and beliefs. I intend to order and read the book. Keep up the thought provoking articles. Best to you and your family.TedZ
Thanks Ted. I appreciate this vote of confidence! Best to you and your family as well! --Bill
Great interview. The implications of materialism are actually even more insane than Mr. Arrington has described here, as I'm sure he would agree.
If in the entire universe there is and never has been and never will be anything other than particles in blind and mechanistic motion, then picking out any particular set of those particles and designating them as a singular object, such as "a human being," is utterly arbitrary and merely conventional. Singular objects don't objectively exist by this view taken to its logical conclusion, just subjective groupings in our minds.
Except if you take THAT to its logical conclusion, we and our minds don't objectively exist either, so we can't even subjectively group anything in our minds nor take anything to its logical conclusion. What actually follows from materialism is therefore absolute eliminativism, and with it the total abandonment of reason and logic of any sort.
Now nobody actually does this. Even arch-reductionists like Dennett and self-identified eliminativists like the Churchhills or Alex Rosenberg are implicitly trying to work out a compromise position that lets them have their cake and eat it too. They want to say that their belief is objectively "true" and the most "rational" and "implied by science" and so forth, which is an appeal to things that cannot be real given materialism.
Darwinism is ultimately incoherent for the same reason. It's an attempt to account for biological function (the defining feature of biological organisms) in terms of blind mechanism, but by even treating them as objectively real things that need to be explained in the first place it contradicts that premise.
You see some of the New Atheist types whining and complaining recently about Critical Theory and transgender ideology and other forms of crazy "wokeness" invading and consuming all of the hard sciences. I'm thinking of Richard Dawkins, Colin Wright, Peter Boghossian, Steven Pinker, and so forth.
But this is all completely futile on their part. The "woke" crazies are closer to taking their materialism to its logical conclusion than they are. True, the woke haven't embraced absolute eliminativism (which is impossible to do in any event), but they have taken it to the logical implication immediately preceding that, namely radical nominalism, the idea that objects don't objectively exist, and that the way we categorize some collections of blind and mechanistic particles and assign functions and purposes to them (such as "male" or "female" or the rules of valid reasoning) is utterly subjective, conventional, and arbitrary.
There's just no way to argue our way back to sanity and the pursuit of objective truth from here from within the premises of materialism. Materialists let the toothpaste out of the tube, and there's no way to put it back in short of the abandonment of materialism by the intelligentsia (or their replacement by a new intelligentsia that rejects it already).
I have purchased the kindle version of the book and have scanned it using some terms of interest. It is fantastic. The section on proofs is worth the admission alone.
I am aware of atheists objections to theism which I studied in the last couple of years and my assessment is that there are none. I was stunned by this but yet the conventional wisdom is that they are devastating. They are anything but. Proofs for a creator is overwhelming. It is not apodictic but close.
Proofs that Jesus is God is my main area of interest. I will report on that after reading especially chapters 6 and 7.
The problem with materialism is that it is just so immaterial.
Thank you so much for gifting us the transcript of this incredibly helpful interview!