Apologetics or the use of reason is the standard of our intellectual times . In the past, even near past, "revelation" revealed the higher world to the individual man who was able to present his findings to each of us as the truth in activity.

The soul has a natural appreciation of the truth and in "revelation" the man could see the truths of the same thereof. this was the times in which even the individual man was not so self conscious, being in a graduated sense clairvoyant to the higher worlds.

Being clairvoyant means to be within the higher realms as tender to knowing and knowledge. In the ancient mystery centers this activity (clairvoyance) was accomplished by suppression of the "ego" or that sense of a man's self consciousness or his "I" .

One man who comes to mind is Edgar Casey who was called the "sleeping prophet" who went into a type of trance state in order to bring forth his supersensible findings.

Times change as through the intellect the individual human becomes self centered as each man entertains his own particular thoughts which in turn act upon and act in creation of individuality. To turn back to previous times of "trance state" is out of time and to attempt to deny the intellect is no more than as illness, a supersensible dyscrasia.

Materialism is a natural conjoiner to the intellect and self centerdness (loss of the higher realms) ; in this approach we are all sensory bound . there may be those who say that we are more than the senses and in this we are dealing with a theoretical materialism of which most are .

There a very few "real" materialists who actually see themselves as only sense bound flesh and blood and no more, and this is an illness which calls for remedy.

The times have changed and each man, in evolution, will become clairvoyant as an individual "I" without a trance state and without loss of the intellect, this the future of Man.

The reasoned conclusion is that reason, and intellectuality and all of the capabilities of the thinking man is not the possession of the individual but in truth man is "being thought" not the creator of his own thoughts. Truth is common to all for each, in the traveling through the world thoughts is an explorer of the concept and idea (higher concept) as world process.

Through thinking men come together for the truth is the patina of the higher realm to which the ancients entered into via trance whereas we enter into via thinking.

As an aside the contentiousness of our times can be seen in "feelings" which are not so clear and in this we contend within nation, race, gender, family and clan which are "feelings", not comprehended. As I referred to in the previous post we have Ahriman doing his mischief within the "feelings" of men and in this we must work.

Just a you and I can come to agreement of the solar and planetary movements so do people come together through the thinking and thoughts, not ours, but our virtuous gift of world creativity.

I'm still not getting where he said that and then it was abandoned?

And this is why you're assuming yourself out of the conversation. Because it *is* a mindset. If you limit your concept of "proof" to only things you can prove using materialistic means, then you will never meaningfully contemplate the immaterial.

As far as "usefulness" is concerned, I simply refer you to math. Math, by most accounts, is immaterial. Yet it's imminently useful. The usefulness of math is contingent upon its universality, but you will not ever show "math exists" in using any materialist methods. You will only ever be able to claim that math is material because your brain is material. But math exists in a way that is beyond your brain. So where is it?

We can go further and talk about mathematical proof. Explain how the proof that (for example) "there exist infinitely many primes" is material in nature?

An analogy that might be useful would be to consider that you're currently applying a detector that is only able to detect red wavelengths. All you're doing is going around with this detector and reading red wavelengths. What reason do you have to think that there are other wavelengths? You need a fundamentally different tool.

And that's why you can't see that it's circular.

I think the claim of the existence of an external physical world is a good one for you to contemplate. Why do you even accept that such a thing exists if you can only experience in your brain? What does it even mean for you to accept a "mind-independent" reality if the only reality is your experience inside your brain?

You have a lot of work to do to uncover (reveal) your thinking here. And I think you ought to spend more time here than on these random theological things.

Take a long look at this. Because it's gibberish.

I've said nothing about free will. I've simply looked at the strict doctrine of determinism.

Also, all you're doing is asserting no-God in a manner that is intellectually equivalent to God-of-the-gaps. As long as you find a way to confirm your preconceived notions, even if you have no idea what that way might be, you're content that your explanation is sufficient. It's not. (I'll note here that you have not yet invoked Science-of-the-gaps, which is that whatever knowledge gaps there may be, science will eventually find an explanation. But you are starting down that type of path.)

In my opinion, your statement above reveals your ignorance of the work of most major apologists.

The majority of apologetics books apply an "evidential" approach.

For example:

EVIDENCE THAT DEMANDS A VERDICT by J. McDowell.

COLD CASE CHRISTIANITY by J.W. Wallace

THE CASE FOR CHRIST by L. Strobel.

etc...

Who are you quoting in your previous post?

By not useful I don't mean 'doesn't have a use', I mean that it doesn't explain anything, it's not predictive, you can't test it, it's not repeatable, and worst of all, it's not falsifiable and if you have no way to falsify something, you have no way to ever know if it's true.

I understand that you think I'm starting with materialism and then only accepting such evidence as fits that paradigm, but that's not the case. You can't prove immaterial', it's a concept that I don't find useful or credible and so I withhold acceptance of it until such a time as I have good reasons to accept it. My reasoning isn't circular at all. I think that as a method of knowledge acquisition and interpretation, materialism can provide explanations where immaterial just can't.


I'd rather withdraw my claim than get into a discussion about Exstitentialism that holds little interest for me and doesn't really help either of us. True, I can't know that anything outside my mind is real. Not useful. However, not being able to prove my claim doesn't mean that I have to accept yours, it's not a choice of 'accept both or neither', but if it were... I'd happily accept 'niether'. So this just just doesn't advance your cause.


Ok. Then I'm still not undertsanding your point. Just for the record though, I don't have a problem with the idea of Determinism, if there's a god, I think everything IS preordained, it can't not be, and although that's not the topic in this thread, I'm happy to explore that.

I haven't done that because it wouldn't serve any purpose. I do actually think that but how does it help me to state it? You're beyond that level of argument. Also, I actually understand what science is, Epistemology is my favourite area of philosophy.

Which eye witness do these apologists talk to? Do they "look in the store cupboard for oatmeal", so to speak?

The apologists you mention claim to apply an evidential approach, but it's not really the same as our oatmeal mystery, is it? See below...

I'm glad you asked!

I am quoting New Testament scholar, and Christian, Ian Mills (PhD candidate at Duke University).

He also has a podcast, with fellow scholar (and Christian) Laura Robinson, where they review scholarly work. Not long ago they reviewed Lee Strobel's book The Case for Christ. Here is the link:

https://soundcloud.com/user-82956013...ase-for-christ

Strobel's work is obviously not scholarly, and as a recent (?) April Fools joke they pretended that they were going to review his book. That's what they are talking about at the start of the podcast.


The quote comes at the end of their discussion. I don't think you'll like their conclusions (I did actually think of you when I listened to it myself!) but I'd like to know what you think about it. Would you give it a listen?

I will give it a listen.

Listened to part of this.

They're very good, imo.

Looking forward to listening more later.

None of this has any bearing on the underlying question of whether math is or is not physical.

You should also ask yourself the question about what it means to "know if something is true" since under the concept of falsifiability you don't ever actually establish that. You only ever establish that something is false.

This *is* circular because the definitions that you are establishing (definitions are assumptions) are just the conclusion you're reaching.

Consider that you are now defining "materialism" as a "method." This is deeply problematic because it means that you're probably not adequately separating the concepts in your mind. This blurring of ideas only further indicates the likelihood of the circular reasoning that I'm indicating.

You still have not even adequately interpreted the mental space.

Except that it does. If you explore this deeply, you'll discover that the way you've framed things, the "physical world" is simply everything that exists because you measure "physical-ness" by interactions in your brain. Again, you're simply assuming yourself out of the conversation and you don't even realize it.

With your framework, it would be more correct for you to say that there is neither material nor immaterial. Because you've really got nothing in your toolbox of understanding that can even make the distinction.


These are the sorts of things Zumby was talking about where you are more concerned with appearing to be wrong than you are worried about being wrong. All you've done here is say, "Well, I can avoid my previous comment by simply saying that I don't actually hold a belief" even though it seems absolutely clear that you really do hold a belief.


Reread what I wrote. You'll see that there is ZERO references to free will and ZERO references to "God":

So the fact that you keep chasing down these ancillary comments means that you're not actually focusing on what's being presented. It comes across that you're simply trying to defend atheism rather than understand what is being written.

You believe too strongly that everything you do is justified. Here is your statement, and consider the bolded:

The logic of this statement is that "the explanation doesn't require a God, so I should be okay with this." That's not the standard you should be applying to your understanding. You should be focused on whether you understand it or not. By this statement, you give the appearance that your standard is "as long as I can hold an atheistic reading of it, then it's fine."


Among other things, it's intellectually honest. You seem so afraid to admit any weakness in what you actually think or believe that you will never uncover what you're actually thinking. You're too busy trying to appear to not be wrong rather than exploring the possibility that you might be wrong.

We've been through this before, so there's no point in rehashing it at length. But you don't actually understand what science is because you've reduced science to a list of adjectives that you sometimes randomly capitalize and appear to have done basically no reading in the philosophy of science. You've already shown that you don't understand falsifiability, given that you made a statement about knowing things are true above.

Epistemology may be your favorite area of philosophy, but you are not demonstrating that you understand it particularly deeply. Otherwise, you would not be making the falsifiability error.

From the section quoted in the OP
I certainly don't know that!! Even ignoring the fact that this is a proof by example error, I personally think it's false. I think it's possible for soulless, robotic machines to be "moral, ethical or intelligent". And that's hardly an obscure view. Alan Turing argued the same in likely the most famous philosophy paper of the last 100 years.

The great irony there is Turing worries more about the "moral, ethical, and intelligent right thinking" of humans rather than the machine when he sadly posits that no clever engineering could prevent a robot child from being made fun of excessively at school.

Overall, It's strange to me that a religious person would make this argument without even mentioning the fact that many, if not most atheists in the scientific community likely agree with Turing on at least the possibility of morality from a machine, which many theists would also hesitate to assign a soul.

"Logical" apologetics is perhaps the least convincing style and this certainly is an example. I don't believe either of those statements, but ignoring that, logic itself is pretty bad at separating true from false. It's far better at syntax ie provable than semantics ie true.

Math chugs along because you pretty much always (and perhaps arbitrarily!) ignore the entire universe of logically valid systems in which proving for example Fermats Last theorem doesn't allow for it to still be false. But we know this model of the integers exist and our preferred model is valid if and only if this other one is as well. So when you try to use "logic" to show the impossibility of something like atheism, you're using it for the exact opposite of what it's good at, which is creating models of equal validity where something true in one system is false in the other.

Maths is abstract, but without a human brain to consider it, it's not even a thing, no material brains means no maths, so unless it can be shown that thoughts are immaterial I'm going to continue to believe that thoughts are actually material, just chemical sequences, molecules and energy, physical.

By the way, I'm just letting you direct the conversation here, I don't mind where it goes, it's all useful to me. I'm well aware that I've stopped arguing a point so much as I'm dealing with your objections. It's all good.

And if you can't show that something is false, you can't ever know that it's not false. Is it reasonable to believe something strongly without being able to know if it's false? I think not. For me, anything at all immaterial, including gods, ghosts, anything supernatural etc, fails at this point.

I'm not describing materialism as a method, I'm describing science as a method, because that's what it is, a method of acquiring and interpreting knowledge that doesn't address anything immaterial. It doesn't rule it out, it simply has nothing to say about it because it's not useful. I agree.

The physical world is all that I have good reasons to think exists. All I need to change that is good reasons.


That's not what's happening here. I didn't bring it up because it has exactly zero chance of persuading you to anything and it doesn't help me. So it's utterly pointless to say that I think you fill the gaps in your knowledge with god. Gonna achieve nothing. I gave you more respect than to say it.

I'm uncertain how we can discuss Determinism without considering free will.


Maybe I am and I don't see anything wrong with that, it's the position I've arrived at, it's what I think is more likely to be true, naturally, I 'defend' it (although I think of it as 'taking that side of the discussion') but that doesn't mean that you couldn't change my mind.

Then give me an argument for god that's so inarguable that my (alleged) preconceptions can't survive it? Rather than spend time arguing that I'm preventing myself from understanding in the hope that this will change my mind, 'force' me to change my mind. I need to understand why I don't understand, just telling me that I don't understand is achieving nothing,


I think all theists fill the gaps in their understanding with a god they can't prove the existence of. Ok, now can we move on to things that are useful to the conversation? I understand the reason why some atheists use those types of claims or arguments, but it would achieve nothing with you, and I know that. Frankly, I'm not surewho it would achieve anything with, it wouldn't convince me if I were on the other end of it.

I do understand exactly what science is (and what it isn't, and different interpretations of Philosophical Naturalism) and I do understand falsifiability.

As for erroneous capitalisation, sometimes I get confused between nouns and proper nouns, it's irrelevant and trivial and has zero bearing on my understanding of Epistemological issues, although I am getting better as I'm studying French and it's improving my understanding of english grammar. (notice that I capitalised French but not english since I was using the latter as an adjective )

This is where the concept of logical supervenience can be useful.

What I would say is that it seems useful to be able to make some ontological distinction between thoughts (or math concepts, or plays by Shakespeare...) and brains while also recognizing that thoughts (and the rest, at least as we know of them) are logically dependent on brains.

Thanks WN, I'll check it out. I'm not at all comfortable with this line of exploration, I'm well aware that I know next to nothing about it. But can an abstract concept exist as a thing independent of the material, physical medium in which it's being considered?

In any case, I reject it as an argument for god, seeing it virtually as an argument from ignorance. Immaterial can exist (or, you can't prove immaterial doesn't exist) therefore you can't say god doesn't exist.

But then what *would* exist if there were no human brains to experience them? How are you distinguishing between the various things?

Would 1+1=2 be untrue if humans didn't exist?

Again, all you're doing is reiterating your assumptions. You can believe things to be true without knowing they are true. You can believe things are false without knowing they are false. You believe in a mind-independent universe, but you have no way to prove that it is either true or false.

You also haven't established any statement that shows that the immaterial doesn't exist. All you do is assert it.

To be clear, your literal words are "as a method of knowledge acquisition and interpretation, materialism can provide explanations where immaterial just can't." This says that you are classifying materialism is a method.

And it's important to distinguish between materialism and science, as they are completely disconnected concepts. Again, it's very important that you disentangle your ideas, because it's not helpful for you when you repeatedly jumble things up.

This is where you're quite literally chasing your own tail. Because you've explicitly limited your knowledge to "scientific" knowledge (your understanding of it, at least), and that this precludes certain types of observations. But then you go beyond to assume that the things that cannot be measured by this particular method don't exist. Intellectual consistency would mean that you ought to be agnostic towards those other things.

Again, red wavelength detectors. If you only understand how to work this one tool, all you will find is what this one tool is capable of, and you ought not extend your claims beyond that.

You have provided *NO* reasons to think the physical world exists. And when pressed on it, you just shrugged. Again, I point to math. Your assumptions about math carry implications that I don't think you would be willing to accept, such as 1+1=2 is not true if there are no humans, but true if there are humans.

This is about assessing the quality of your reasoning and argumentation. This isn't about you changing my opinion about something. The fact that you are even considering that comes back to you worrying about appearing to be wrong rather than worrying about being wrong.

You can talk about rocks for a very long time before you have to worry about things that aren't rocks

I actually can't change your mind. Only you can change your mind. You have yet to adopt a sufficiently humble intellectual position to allow yourself to assess the quality of your thoughts on their own merits. Rather, you are measuring the quality of your thoughts based on how well or poorly they support your suppositions.

For you, this is going to be much more of a journey of introspection. When I told you what the literal words you typed said, you couldn't even acknowledge them. You swapped "science" for "materialism" as if it was nothing. These are not signs of an honest intellect that is even able to change based on plain facts.

Then why would you ever talk about knowing something is "true" in that context? There is such thing as "proven true" under that concept. There's only "proven false."

Except that your choice of capitalization is actually incorrect. You would *still* capitalize English in the phrase "English grammar." There are subtleties to this that are not strictly rule-based and require a broader understanding of language to understand. But since you are not as familiar with the English language, you simply don't know what you don't know.

And this is an incredibly perfect analogy for this entire conversation.

It's curious that you keep feeling the need to defend your atheism when it's not under attack. This was not even remotely an argument that was being made.

Again, this is flagging like you're more worried about appearing to be wrong than you are worried about being wrong. You have an unnecessary need to keep raising up defenses against things that literally are not happening.

The better question for you to ask: Why couldn't such a thing exist?

You are the one who is essentially trying to deny the existence of these things. What reasons do you have? Your argument before was based around "usefulness" but that's not going to help you here. Useless things can exist.

It's clear that your true belief system rejects the existence of these things, and intellectual honesty would demand that you explore and understand that belief, rather than simply putting up the agnostic smoke screen.

Under physicalism the answer is no. Supervenience defines what it means for the answer to be no. I would also suggest that ontologies aren't really that useful as some final answer about reality. They're useful analytically. There really are meaningful differences between rocks and number theory, so it's useful to have an ontology that allows them to be analyzed.

My impression, and I think this happens a lot when "materialism" is discussed in a theism vs. atheism context, is that you're conflating materialism and naturalism. That is, what you are really concerned with is rejecting supernaturalism. But the opposite thesis isn't materialism, it's naturalism. I think there are other philosophical problems with ontological dualisms (which supervenience tries to resolve), but technically you could be a dualist and a naturalist. This describes some philosophers of mind. Thomas Nagel might be the most famous?

Right. I don't think you have to be concerned that doubting some strongly reductive version of materialism allows for any convincing argument for theism. God concepts require a lot more than just the "existence" (in whatever sense) of the immaterial.

I think a weaker form of 3 that I actually believe is we should be weary of the existence of abstract concepts that don't seem to have any impact at all on the material world. I think most people are fine with saying the integers exist or the axioms of first order predicate logic. But most mathematicians let alone regular people will be highly skeptical about the existence of something like highly inaccessible large cardinals. The problem with theism is that over time and as materialism has grown more and more capable of describing the universe, god has not coincidentally gone from something simple like and obvious like in the old testament to something hopelessly abstract that cannot possibly impact the result of something in the real world.

This seems it would be a difficult distinction to maintain without some fairly convoluted mental gymnastics, at least as far as ontology is concerned. A random speck of dust floating through the vast emptiness of space would still exist even if it has essentially no impact on the material world. So as a measure of existence, that becomes problematic.

It's also problematic because we don't know what abstract concepts actually do or do not have impact on the material world. The universe is not limited by our understanding. That we cannot conceive of ways that large cardinals may impact the material does not mean that they do not.

You could potentially come to the table as a finitist, and use that to reject infinite objects, but that has more to do with the nature of the objects themselves and not as a measure of impact on the material world.

Woops. Typo fixed. We should be suspicious/cautious of such concepts. Not tired.

I've answered but taken out every point that was discussing me personally or the manner in which the conversation is being had, as those things do not progress the subject usefully.

I think that it would be neither true nor untrue, it simply wouldn't be a thing. Ditto for the question. No brains no minds, no minds no maths. Just because our minds are capable of imagining abstract properties of the universe doesn't make those properties independently present.

Well actually I haven't asserted it even one time, I've repeatedly said that I have no good reasons to think it the case.

You can't have science without materialism but science goes beyond materialism. Yes, I appear to be conflating the two and that wasn't clear, but I needed to explain what it is about the concept of immaterial that doesn't work for me so I contrasted it with materialism, but I'm going beyond that to the practical use of the concept of materialism, i.e. science.


You don't really need to keep making this point, I get it, I don't agree. We're discussing what it's possible to know, and out of all the ways of acquiring knowledge that I've encountered, the scientific method is the only one that I think provides meaningful answers. The others, that I'm aware of, including theism, don't appear to be anything other than wishful thinking.

Really it's just a form of 'since you don't agree with me you clearly don't have an open mind', and about as effective as that. I'm willing to accept the immaterial, just offer me some indisputable evidence that it exists Aaron, don't just keep saying 'you're not listening dude..'.

I could try 'you're an atheist too Aaron', and talk about how you don't believe in the FSM because you've deliberately limited your detector to 'Christian god' setting, would that work on you? No, I'm sure that like me you're completely open to the idea of the FSM, you simply reject it because you don't consider that you have good reasons to believe it, right?



Because I can't, and we both know this, but again, not sure where this line can get you. How does it help your position to argue that we can't prove anything really? I'm not going to accept things simply because I can't disprove them, give me good reasons to accept them.

And you're misstating my position on maths. My view is "1+1=2 true if there are humans, but isn't a thing that exists if there are no humans to think it" (And this is an example of the more I have to try to explain what I think about this the clearer that becomes for me and the better I get at articulating it. I'm working towards a position on this based on what seems correct to me currently with the understanding that I possess at this point in time. It might change...)


If there's a way to prove something false, and you can't do it, you have more reason to trust that what you believe is true. With no way to prove something false, you can't ever know if it's false.

I'm sure you're well aware of why I'm wary of claiming that anything is 'true', which is why I haven't done that.

Claiming "You can't have science without materialism" just shows that you have no idea what "materialism" is.

What do you think materialism means?

Materialism (as defined by dictionary.com):

"the philosophical theory that regards matter and its motions as constituting the universe, and all phenomena, including those of mind, as due to material agencies."

Is it your current position that science is possible only if the above theory is correct?