AB,
You appear to be a bit obsessed with accusing me of deliberate lies when all I am doing is witnessing to what I sincerely believe to be the truth.
You can “witness” as you put it anything you like, but when you just ignore the arguments that undo your own and then repeat them nonetheless that’s dishonest. Stop doing it and finally engage honestly and the accusations of doing it will stop.
You have failed to explain how our conscious awareness can emerge from material reactions. Known emergent properties comprise recognisable functionality or patterns, but before you can presume conscious awareness to be an emergent property of material reactions you need to know what comprises conscious awareness and how it works. Without this knowledge you are just jumping to an inevitable evidenced conclusion based upon your materialistic viewpoint.
And speaking of dishonesty…
All emergent properties have certain characteristics – self-organising, basic repeated rules causing higher sophistication, unpredictably with knowledge only of the constituent parts, no central control or plan etc. If a phenomenon is congruent with these principles, we call it an emergent property. Ant colonies and cities and storms and tides and life itself are all congruent with these principles, so we call them emergent and proceed on that basis – we predict weather, develop medicines, make aeroplanes that fly etc. In all these cases we have gaps in knowing how every t is crossed an i is dotted, but that doesn’t matter. These gaps give us more to research and discover, but that doesn’t change the basic principle. The body of evidence we do have is good enough to proceed.
And guess what? Yup, consciousness also satisfies all the basic rules of an emergent property (no neurons individually are conscious, no central planner etc) so on the principle of parsimony, we treat it as an emergent property too.
What you’re doing though is demanding to have every t crossed and i dotted for (but only for) consciousness as an emergent property, and when they can’t be you dismiss the entire body of evidence we do have as if it didn’t exist at all.
It gets worse – what you do next is to insert into the false gap you’ve created speculations (”soul” etc) about which not only are the ts not crossed and the is not dotted, but there isn’t even an alphabet at all. There’s no information of any kind, no means of investigation, no logic, no evidence, no
anything. That is, the problem you think there to be for the naturalistic explanation of consciousness is massively amplified for “soul”, yet apparently that troubles you not at all.
What then should we make of this blatant double standard, and why by the way will you never, ever address it?
The child abuse in the Roman Catholic church and other institutions is clear evidence of the presence of evil in this world. I stand by my proclamation that I am proud to belong to a church which recognises and condemns such evil, including the evil of killing a child in its own mother's womb.
There’s aren’t “children” in wombs, and it isn’t evidence for “evil” at all. It’s just evidence for some people doing very bad things who can continue to do it because they’re protected from prosecution by the very organisation of which you’re so proud.
I asked you a question about this which, as ever, you just ignored: are you seriously suggesting that anything good the RCC does is to their credit, and anything bad it does can’t be their fault because there’s a mysterious entity out there called “evil” that it’s unable to resist?
And having invented that get out of jail free card, is there therefore nothing so morally disgusting that it could ever be the RCC’s fault or do even you draw the line somewhere?
And if the secular view concludes that we can have no control over what we do, surely this gives the green light to all kinds of perverts to carry on doing what they want. We all need to recognise just how powerful our gift of freewill is and to use it for the intended divine purpose of gaining eternal salvation for our souls.
Still telling lies for Jesus then. When bother given that repeating it makes you look either even more stupid or even more dishonest?
