Why Materialism is Utterly Irrational, Part 2

         The core contradiction which turned C.S. Lewis from atheism to belief in God

 

               Yet materialism is at odds not only with the laws and documentable patterns of cosmological evolution.[1]  It furthermore also contradicts the laws of rationality.  Materialism rejects not only the existence of God, but spirits of any kind in any context.  Now if that doesn’t seem so important to “non-religious” readers, I urge you to think again!  By adding the suffix “ism” to the word “material,” the term materialism” means nothing exists at all except matter.  The logical fallout from materialism threatens to be the metaphorical “death ” of every single human with respect to their personhood.  According to materialism, what we call our thoughts and also our sense of consciousness and self, are merely illusory.  Atheist, Dr. Daniel Dennett, in a lecture on YouTube promoting his materialistic interpretation of “con-sciousness,” said that what human beings imagine to be consciousness consists purely of impressions produced by the complex operations of mechanistic computers in the brain (17:50).  He further added, “There is no little man in the brain (11:35) … What lies in ‘the middle’ is a virtual self (15:43)…an abstrac-tion (16:05) … Inside the ghost [of a machine?] is a robot” (17:50).[2]  In summary, the events occurring in our brains are not intellectual ponderings and insights, but rather merely electro-chemical firings across the chasms between our brain’s billions of synapses.  Yet when these phenomena, which are document-table, are arbitrarily severed from connectivity to spirits (souls), they utterly contradict what humans have always assumed occurs during internal reflection.  On the one hand, electro-chemical events, with-out exception, necessarily align with the invariable and repetitious laws of nature, while information on the other hand, in terms of thoughts, reflections and perceptions, are guided by the specific data and perceptions that are derived from the almost infinite variety of their sources.  In addition, our rational choices of any kind assume that our perceptions accurately convey phenomenal reality.  Yet ascribing such perceptions to merely physical interactions within the confines of our skeleton overthrows any plausibility that such desired connections are valid.[3]  So notice finally how these processes cannot be reconciled as if they’re the same process (or similar) since they are conceptually incompatible.   

Now I wish to bring to the table those contradictions which directly muddle and confound the assertions of the very proponents of materialism.  If materialism (MTLSM) was an accurate assessment of human experience, it would consequently be impossible for anyone to know it to be the case since the MTLSM assertions that are employed for the purpose of dehumanizing humanity as a whole, applies also to the very ones who advance them.  For by what principle can they exempt themselves from the disparaging anthropological swipe they brush over humanity as a whole?  “What is good for the goose is good for the gander!”  Further, according to MTLM, their propagandistic agenda to persuade others is rendered utterly pointless since the notion of a “person” with a free intellect (which is prima facie re-quired in order for any audience to have the capacity to rethink any views at all) simply does not exist.

For these reasons, it isn’t humans who are hastening the loss of personhood, but anti-humane materialism, which has here been as discredited on both scientific and logical grounds.  Firstly, although, up until the early mid-20^th century, the cosmos was deemed (or assumed) to be self-existent for reasons of being without beginning or end; the advancement of scientific knowledge since then has brought that dogmatic view to an end with the dawning reality that the universe had a beginning at the BB.  Although questions that have no bearing on the fact of the BB continue, that model is not about to be overthrown since the details which secure its facticity consist of a pattern of observable evidence.[4]  Secondly, anthropological materialism demands of its proponents that they buy into an array of logical fallacies summed up as a recurrence of one reductio absurdum-after-another.  It was this body of  absurdities which led Lewis to repudiate materialism while consequently accepting the existence of God.

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[1] As distinguished from Darwinian biological evolution.

[2] Daniel Dennett. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JP1nmExfgpg. He states, “There is no inner show and there is no single inner witness [in the brain]” (11:20). Dennett initially stated that the dualistic view of the body/soul distinction is a “hopeless theory” (3:35).  ** See also my paper, “The Case for the Soul” at my website, Op.cit. (3).

[3] Charles Darwin too was skeptical over the capacity of an evolved brain to yield trustworthy insights. (www://nature.com/articles/4611173b).

[4] Consider that the two concepts, “pattern” and “observable,” are organically intertwined. Op.cit. (7).

Why Philosophical Materialism is Utterly Irrational, part 1

     The core contradiction which turned C.S. Lewis from atheism to belief in God

The recent movie about C.S. Lewis, The Most Reluctant Convert, narrates Lewis’ conversion from his denial of the existence of God to conceding that the innate orderliness of the cosmos demands that there be a Creator.  That two-stage intellectual journey – since indeed it was a process – firstly led him in 1929 to unhappily concede that nothing short of a supernatural force[1] could account for the existence of the universe.[2]  The second stage occurred in 1931 when he accepted that Jesus is God by having been persuaded from rational historical analysis that the Gospels are reliable testimonies to His identity.  For the purpose of this paper however, it is important to note that documented interactions with other scholars indicate the arguments driving his turnabout did not focus on scientific facts, but philosophical reasons.  The scientific data at that time, for example, which suggested that the universe had a begin-ning out of nothing from what came later to be called the “Big Bang” (BB), was mostly speculative.  The clear reason is that, though the initial evidence supporting the BB came to light 10-15 years prior to Lewis’ conversion, the result of that research (by Georges Lemaitre, Albert Einstein, and Edwin Hubble)[3] was at that time only a live possibility which competed with two other more popular theories (“steady-state” and “oscillating universe”).[4]  It was only decades later, in 1970, that further evidence came to light which was sufficiently strong to defeat the other hypotheses, that the BB was elevated to the scientific[5] status that it holds today.[6]  Ironically it is this very category of evidence (scientific),[7] which nevertheless shifted the causal implications of cosmology away from science to the religious proposition that Spirit (as in a transcendent God) is more fundamental to reality than is physicality.  For example, not only does the BB posit that the cosmos came into being out of absolutely nothing material (consistent with Genesis 1:1), it also suggests that prior to that beginning, neither matter/energy nor space/time existed out of/from which scientific processes could even conceivably have occurred.  In short, the cosmological history of the universe indicates that, apart from God, no matter would exist at all.  Significantly, in 1943, even C.S. Lewis foresaw both this reality and its implications as he states:

“If anything emerges clearly from modern physics, it is that nature is not everlasting. The universe had a beginning and will have an end. But the great materialistic systems of the past all believed in the eternity, and thence in the self-existence of matter…This fundamental ground for materialism has now been withdrawn.”[8] 

To be continued...

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._S._Lewis

[2] Even by this time serious questions were raised as to whether certain “nebula” visible through Edwin Hubble’s Mount Wilson telescope, might lie outside our Milky Way Galaxy, thereby hinting the existence of other galaxies.

[3] See my paper, “Was the Big Bang the Big Beginning?” at my website: www.christianityontheoffense.com  ** also, Fred Heeren. “The Big Bang Theory.” Show Me God: What the Message from Space Shows Us about God, revised ed. (Day Star, 2004), ch. six.

[4] Since the latter two more easily evaded the potential intervention by a deity.

[5] Although prominent voices are seeking to undermine confidence that a BB happened by appealing to their own advance-degree, their driving impetus relies NOT on scientific data, but instead theoretical speculations which cannot be tested by the hard scientific data. See my paper on the BB beginning, Ibid.

[6] With the advancement of scientific knowledge over the course of Lewis’ lifetime, his allegiance to the relevance of that body of insight becomes obvious and plain. See his essay from barely a decade and a half later, “God and the Universe,” in his collected essays, God in the Dock (March 19, 1943) at https://stertin.word.press.com/2016/09/27/dogma-and-the-universe-by-c-s-lewis-from-god-in-the-dock/   

[7] See my paper, “God’s Prints are Everywhere,” p. 2 at my website. Op.cit. (3).

[8] Op.cit. (6). Boldface mine.