Saturday, August 1, 2015

August Challenge To Materialists, Atheists and "Naturalists"

I have been inviting materialists, atheists, naturalists to give a coherent, non-self contradicting explanation of how their beliefs about the nature of reality produce equal rights and the moral obligations to not only admit that those are there but to act in a way that observes and respects equal rights.   I will publish any that seem to me stand up to the same standards that materialistic atheists of any name use to attack the Jewish, Christian, Islamic, religious ideas that can produce an absolute holding of equal rights and the moral obligation to act in respect to those rights.  As of yet I haven't had an atheist do more than mouth the current lines on that arising from evo-psy which don't stand up to the first level of atheist debunkery, even if you ignore that those claims are not only not founded in evidence but are widely debunked by observations in nature.

One of those I recently ran across in a Youtube is the notion that animals are programmed to not kill the young of their species when observations of animals in the wild, not to mention in human societies are full of the intentional killing of young, not only of the killers' own species but within their closely related cousins and closer relations but even by siblings and  parents. Lions, domestic cats, lemurs, rats, guinea pigs, owls, ... infanticide of near relatives is not an unknown phenomenon and the various, usually baseless and sometimes grotesquely attenuated attempts to fit those into natural selection are more notable for being self-serving than grounded in rigorously gathered statistical evidence that animals who kill their young are at a reproductive advantage over those who don't within any given species.   There is a greater chance among people that a young child, those in the age group covered by this Just-so fable explaining the origins of morality,  will be murdered by a member of their own family, including their parents, than by an unrelated stranger.

In murders of persons under age 12, the victims' parents accounted for 57% of the murderers,

which is rather a confirmation that the materialists' origin of morality on that basis is totally bogus.

In regard to the scientific presentation of human infanticide, as I noted in great detail, it has been described as a means of the improvement of the human population, a part of natural selection by the most orthodox of Darwinists, including the originator of natural selection on which such atheists mount their assertion.  In addition to that is the recent line of those in that incredibly named profession, "ethicists," who are some of the most explicit and extreme of current advocates of the most radical of legal permission of infanticide who are, so far as I was able to determine, uniformly atheists.

I have not reviewed the videos of Sean Carroll's Moving Naturalism conference in which an argument breaks out between the attending atheists as to whether or not they should hide the inevitable amoral nihilism that is a necessary logical conclusion of their "naturalism" and all materialist systems, in general or if they should come up with a cover story that will be more palatable for a general public, if they should tell a "noble lie" about that or not.  But it was one of the greatest shocks of my past decade of reading what atheists said about their own ideology how frequently that amorality was what was moved, beginning, not with Friedrich Nietzsche but with Ernst Haeckel*, the most prominent colleague of Charles Darwin on the European continent.  That's not a relic of 19th century Germany, it's current and the living assumption of people today, many of them prominent thinkers.  

So, this is a challenge.  I maintain that it's impossible to locate even a durable form of equally held rights among all people without it being the endowment of God, our Creator.   If someone can come up with that without God in a way that will withstand the atheists' rejection of the religious explanation I will publish it.   I should also say that no one has yet succeeded** in  my previous challenge to tell how a materialist's "brain-only" brain could know how to make the physical structure in the brain that comprises an idea before the idea is present in the brain and how it would know what to make before it could know that because the idea wasn't present in the brain until it made that structure.   Without that explanation it is impossible for the "brain-only" model to work unless some form of precognition was involved, only that means that the idea was introduced in the brain by means which cannot be accounted for by materialism as it is universally asserted by materialists.

*  If we contemplate the common life and the mutual relations between plants and animals (man included), we shall find everywhere, and at all times, the very opposite of that kindly and peaceful social life which the goodness of the Creator ought to have prepared for his creatures—we shall 20rather find everywhere a pitiless, most embittered Struggle of All against All. Nowhere in nature, no matter where we turn our eyes, does that idyllic peace, celebrated by the poets, exist; we find everywhere a struggle and a striving to annihilate neighbours and competitors. Passion and selfishness—conscious or unconscious—is everywhere the motive force of life. The well-known words of the German poet—
“Die Welt ist vollkommen überallWo der Mensch nicht hinkommt mit seiner Qual.”1
are beautiful, but, unfortunately, not true. Man in this respect certainly forms no exception to the rest of the animal world. The remarks which we shall have to make on the theory of “Struggle for Existence” will sufficiently justify this assertion. It is, in fact, Darwin who has placed this important point, in its high and general significance, very clearly before our eyes, and the chapter in his theory which he himself calls “Struggle for Existence” is one of the most important parts of it.
Whilst, then, we emphatically oppose the vital or teleological view of animate nature which presents animal and vegetable forms as the productions of a kind Creator, acting for a definite purpose, or of a creative, natural force acting for a definite purpose, we must, on the other hand, decidedly adopt that view of the universe which is called the mechanical or causal. It may also be called the monistic, or single-principle theory, as opposed to the twofold principle, or dualistic theory, which is necessarily implied in the teleological conception of the universe. The 21mechanical view of nature has for many years been so firmly established in certain domains of natural science, that it is here unnecessary to say much about it. It no longer occurs to physicists, chemists, mineralogists, or astronomers, to seek to find in the phenomena which continually appear before them in their scientific domain the action of a Creator acting for a definite purpose. They universally, and without hesitation, look upon the phenomena which appear in their different departments of study as the necessary and invariable effects of physical and chemical forces which are inherent in matter. Thus far their view is purely materialistic, in a certain sense of that “word of many meanings.”  
Ernst Haeckel,  The History of Creation vol 1. Translated by Ray Lankester.  I always need to point out that this was a view of natural selection that Charles Darwin totally endorsed, over and over again, most prominently in his continued citations in The Descent of Man, in which he said if he'd known Haeckel was writing this book he would not have bothered writing The Descent of Man because Haeckel had spoken for him in the book.   Lankester was another of Darwin's closest colleagues, his translation was endorsed by pretty much everyone as being accurate.  

** Remember the challenge has to be coherent and fulfill the requirements of atheists in their debunking methods.   A couple of incoherent attempts, made in comments elsewhere, didn't make it past the first stage.  

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