AB,
I came to realise a long time ago that my main aim on this forum was not to win arguments, but to witness to the truth.
But you can’t “witness to” something unless you can justify its existence in some way. What you actually do instead therefore is just to
assert your
beliefs,
not "witness to" their (supposed) truth.
So I am very grateful to you Blue, (and others) for giving me so many opportunities to reply to your posts and discover new depths of reasoning which point to the abundant evidence of our own spiritual nature and the inability of material arguments to come anywhere close to explaining the reality and freedom we all enjoy as human beings.
Not only do you not have “new depths of reasoning” – you have no sound reasoning
at all. Ignoring, disdaining or abusing the logic that falsifies you as you routinely do here invalidates a claim to such reasoning.
So I would like to summarise some of the main deficiencies in the materialist arguments which you and others have put forward to try to justify their non belief.
Er, no. All that’s needed to “justify non-belief” in the claims you make is to identify where your attempts to justify them fail – a simple thing to do.
The materialist view:
Everything is a consequence of physically defined material reactions.
Our conscious awareness somehow emerges from material reactions which will have already taken place before the results enter our conscious awareness. So any intelligent driving force must be attributed to subconscious brain activity over which we can have no conscious control. There can be no such thing as human free will, because every event in our material bodies will be an unavoidable consequence to previous events as we have no control over the past. In every moment of our lives on this earth, we could not possibly have done or thought anything differently.
Leaving aside for now open questions about “true” randomness and the quantum, that’s close enough to materialism to be serviceable. Try to remember still though that falsifying you needs only logically sound rebuttals of your attempted justifications,
not an argument for materialism.
Any amount of the specific, often unfathomable complexity needed to develop and sustain the abundant life forms on this planet is attributed to random unguided forces…
No. The mutation part may effectively be “random” but the interaction with environment part is anything but. “Forces” is wrong too – think of it as processes instead if that helps.
…involved in the inherently crude natural selection process postulated in the theory of evolution - which can have no identifiable aims. The reasoning behind this is obvious - there can be no other explanation from a materialist point of view, so it must all be attributed to natural selection.
No, the “reasoning behind this” is that that’s what all the available evidence indicates. It’s also the reasoning behind accepting that germs cause diseases, that objects fall because of gravity etc.
The incredibly fine tuning of the balance of forces and events needed to facilitate the formation and sustainability of the stars and planets in our universe, and the life forms on our planet is explained away as coincidence, or a multiverse theory in which we inhabit the one universe where all these things happen.
No, it’s “explained away” as a basic logical mistake on your part – essentially circular reasoning. I’ve corrected you on this before more than once but you just ignored the correction so I’m not sure there’d be much point in doing it again. Suffice it to say then that you’re still wrong about this.
The materialist view looks to be on very shaky foundations…
What “shaky foundations” do you think you’ve identified but not told us about? Just asserting that to be the case isn’t an argument.
, so instead of trying to think up reasons to not believe in God,…
I don’t do that. All I do is to identify where your arguments for there being a god are wrong – a simple thing to do. I must do this because if I abandoned reason and logic to accept your claims at face value I’d have no grounds not to accept any other faith claims with no sound arguments to justify them either.
…why not try truly searching for God instead? You may well be surprised.
Which one?
I thank God that I do not live in such a dreadful environment.
I thank God that I have the freedom to think, to worship, to witness to the truth - for the truth really does set you free.
I thank Ra for making enough sunshine to ripen my rhubarb. Anyway and yet again:
1. Do you have a justifying argument for your assertion that brains thinking for themselves is “totally impossible” that doesn’t instead just shift the burden of proof by demanding that other people tell you how brains do that?
2. If you can finally provide a positive answer to 1., do you have an argument for your assertion that “souls” do the thinking instead that exempts these supposed souls from the same argument for total impossibility (ie, avoids the infinite regress problem) that’s not effectively “it’s magic innit”?
