Stupidity and Ignorance as Spiritual Virtues: Evidence of DNA mutations?
The Socio-Biological Manufacture of Madness?
I'm starting to wonder whether the willful stupidity and ignorance of believers in God is evidence of epigenetics, that the expression of genetics in the history of leader-driven vested-interested dumbing down of believing populations (to always be able to squeeze money out of them through fear and other tactics) has actually changed or even damaged believers' DNA, resulting in a conscious fixation on mindless illogical blind belief that is held to be some kind of protective-cocoon spiritual virtue by most all Beyondananda Blik-Faith believers.
Another Self-Referentially Clueless Christian Apologist
[Note: This is an actual email exchange (minus the last comment) between a very well-known Christian apologist and myself. No, it's not Craig or anyone else in the U.S. or the UK. Hopefully you Oprah-idled mentalities can make the analogy between the above graphic and the circularity of many believers in arguing for God's existence.]
Atheist: I ask you believers a question about logical justification and you just give me either an unargued ontological claim or else an ontological if-then conditional that still puts you in the position of assuming what is in question. A very dangerous thing to do in any area of inquiry.
In terms of the source of logical authority, the standards of analysis themselves are already God-level, and you don't need God to either believe them or effectively use them for any and all purposes and areas of thought and knowledge, in acquiring and verifying truth.
In fact, when it comes to adjudicating the question of God's existence, those criterial standards are higher in belief-deciding logical authority than any God could be conceived of being, because they are assumed to be the ultimate tolls for deciding the legitimacy of any conclusion in deciding God's epistemic fate in the minds of sentient beings.
To give reasons for X necessarily is to assume that those reasons have a higher logical authority than X, whether X is "God exists" or "A tumor exists next to Frank's heart". Reason must necessarily determine God's ontological status, and is therefore the God of mind, and equally to the theist apologist. That's why arguments are constructed in the first place: to get some logically higher-level authority about which conclusion to come to.
Consequently, because one need not believe in God to efficaciously use those rational standards, atheism wins by logically prior default, and the fact that apologists for God themselves use principles of thought that do not require belief in God is a tell-tale implicit admission that reason is the highest court of appeal, not God. Therefore, not only is the truth of atheism assumed by all parties that argue their respective cases, but all arguments for God are based on atheistic principles of rationality.
Therefore, atheism is true both existentially as a prior temporal but enduringly necessary assumption going into the debate about God, and also logically prior as necessarily presupposed in order to argue about whether there is a God."
Christian Apologist: Your conclusion does not follow from the premises.
The fact that one starts on a common ground of rationality with the atheist does not establish rational argument as more ultimate than God and thus make God superfluous. One thinks of the parallel presuppositionalist argument--e.g., Gordon Clark's viewpoint--that one must start with the God of Scripture in order to justify rational reasoning.
What apologists such as I are doing is simply to employ the common rationality that all humans do in fact (and must) use to make sense of the world we all live in. Rationality tells you something about human beings, but nothing necessarily about the existence of God, pro or con. One uses that rationality to show factual grounds for God's existence over against atheism.
To make the rationality itself ultimate would be like making a map ultimate--rather than the city to which one wished to go and found directions using the map. The map is a means-to-an-end; the fact that one starts with it doesn't make it somehow superior to the city itself. Reasoning is a "presupposition of method," a working hypothesis, that can lead to factual information.
Once one has shown God's existence factually (by the contingency argument, by the case for Jesus' deity, etc.), one can then argue that the God in question is rational and the source of rationality--for otherwise there is no adequate explanation for human rationality or for God's employment of rational revelation to communicate with his creatures and provide a means of salvation for them.
Atheist: Dude, you're using reason to argue that reason is not ultimate, as if reason is in fact the ultimate authority of your thinking after all.
Tis the Season to be Chat-Trigger Trigger-Happy
The main problem for atheism is that reason ends up getting treated as a comprehensively-obligating theistic mind-god, complete with various proof-textings of an invisible inference engine.
Kinda like an ultimate personal mind. How do you question that similarity?
Doesn't seem resolvable without repeating the use of reason to supervise the issue, as if it has mind-obligating and mind-directing powers in spite of the denial of its clearly theistic characteristics in all aspects of our thinking.
What would reason tell you?
Kinda like an ultimate personal mind. How do you question that similarity?
Doesn't seem resolvable without repeating the use of reason to supervise the issue, as if it has mind-obligating and mind-directing powers in spite of the denial of its clearly theistic characteristics in all aspects of our thinking.
What would reason tell you?
Transcendent Mind in the Supervisory Necessity of Reason
You memorize the following two Questions Of Metatheoretic Magic below, and practice saying them until you can say them repeatedly 21 times naturally---and absolutely perfectly---without stumbling or mispronouncing a single syllable, and you'll have the most profound eureka moments. It's that simple.
Yes there's some science behind the 21. I call the questions magic because they do things on their own when a mind knows and understands them, and then all truth outs itself if the theoretic evidence is followed out wherever it leads and the questioner faces all the worst against it.
But don't practice them fast, either. The immediate rule for impatience is: do not imprint imperfections. Super slow perfection now is you're only goal other than indefinitely repeating until that complete memorized perfection is reached. only slow perfect practice can minimize the time to perfect performance.
This degree of perfection will both keep the two magic questions in mind when encountering self-inclusive universal claims (you'll think of some at first only a while after hearing them, but you'll get much quicker at it, trust me) and also make them recurrent in consciousness which is a sure sign there is analysis going on, digesting previous imprints in relation to these two magic questions.
What about that statement itself?
and
How does that statement impact its own truth?
. . . and then wait on the Holy Spirit.
And while you're waiting, read the first page of either the introduction, or if there's no introduction, the first chapter, of 100 single-author philosophy books. Keep track of titles in a cloud list that you can access anywhere, so you don't repeat yourself. Plus you'll get a sense of not only the differences in quality but also you'll start getting a sense of the entire forest. Yes, just from those first pages. Be sure to, as Nietzsche said, use "the psychology that knows how to look around corners". Share with the world those first pages in a single pdf, because it will be unique to you and yet helpful to many others to whom maybe only your list appeals.
Or do the same for journal articles, reading only the single-paragraph abstracts. Before long you'll be able to interpret the prophecy that only such surveys can reveal---and only when you do them yourself.
Combine these things, and in about three weeks the skeletal structure of the new mindset should be detectable, and you can then counter a lot of anti-intellectualism.
Weinstein: Hidden in Plain Sight
I need to go back and double-speed more Eric Weinstein videos. A true catalyst for sparking new thoughts and developments and refinements and even challenges of old ones.
Just one thing after another as I type and still listen to it. Need a transcript.
This is a mind-blowing interview. Pay very close attention to what Weinstein says at various times in this fascinating 2-hour interview.
And no, I'm no "follower" of either of them. Stumbled onto this, and I was negative about listening to Weinstein going into the interview, which I clicked only because of the dark web title.
The Ontological Self-Help Movement Among Abstract Objects
Self-Boot-Strapping: Petard Hoisting by Another Name
It's not rocket science to realize that you have to use abstract objects to analyze and decide what they are. What do people think they're doing in the very process of assessing them?
That already assumes what they are: universally authoritative as components of evaluating and deciding questions about universals. Such as universals claiming what abstract objects are or must be, or assumptions about how to decide what abstract objects are or must be. Abstract objects are always already required, assumed, and used in the process of carrying out such an analysis in the first place.
Any discussion of abstract objects already assumes them and the role they play in thinking, among other equally basic assumptions and implications.
In terms of the ultimate criteria of general analysis, they are God Objects, and persons apply them personally to their lives in the structure of their own conceptualizing just about every waking moment of their lives. So the system of reason is necessarily theistic in the very definition of what it is.
But the approach of this book is a major fail and just blank about this stuff.
You have to use abstract objects to think at all, and specifically in this context to think about those abstract objects themselves. How do you decide what they are, or if that's not a problem, whether they're real or not? By using abstract objects as ontology-determining components in order to even construct claims and analyze them. In fact, however they're even defined, definitions require abstract objects, as do attempted reductions of abstract objects to useful fiction status or consensus or whatever.
It's a case of "by what authority do you say these things?" when saying anything already assumes a system of abstract objects. Questions about anything including questioning itself, assumes a system of inquiry made up of abstract objects.
A detailed look at all the definitions of abstract objects clearly shows that people are using them in order to think about them at all in the first place, but never mentioning that fact as they proclaim one abstract universal after another. And what that implies is a necessary theory of abstract objects, that cannot even be thought without assuming them in the process.
So to my mind, it's just a matter of collecting an inventory of them, maybe starting with the 1100 or so basic concepts of the latest Roget thesauruses, especially the mind/ideas section which contains about 250 or so of the most basic ones. And then see which ones can survive attempts to do without them.