I feel intellectually, spiritually and specially ethically obligated to publish the evidence about the possible dangers and destructive intellectual, moral, psychological, emotional, existential and social consequences of a consistently assumed and practicized metaphysical naturalist and atheistic materialist worldview. In part, because such worldview is the ideological basis of pseudo-skepticism; and in part because, regardless of whether the paranormal exists or not, I don't want to see society being destroyed by the consistent and rigurous application of the naturalistic and materialistic beliefs.
But you don't need to accept my opinion at face value. Perhaps your first impression is to consider my opinion to be an overstatement, or an exagerated, biased or extreme view. As a matter of fact, I think my view is rationally justified by the evidence, and this post will give you some of this evidence that support my opinion, so you can decide by yourself.
I only ask you one thing: Examine carefully all of these citations, and ask yourself the 5 following questions while you read each citation:
-What would happen if most people on Earth become believers or active followers of such a beliefs and, consistently, apply them to themselves and others?
-Are these beliefs psychologically and emotionally healthy?
-Are they rational and likely to be true?
-Do they provide a reasonable basis to have a purpose for life?
-Are they constructive for society and the future generations?
You are the judge. Think hard and carefully about these questions and don't let anybody to influence your opinion.
(Note: I've included all of these citations as permanent quotes in the right side of my blog. I've given the specific reference in each case, so you can check the information by yourself if you want to. I could mention 100 or 200 citations more, but I think this brief summary is enough to make the point.)
But you don't need to accept my opinion at face value. Perhaps your first impression is to consider my opinion to be an overstatement, or an exagerated, biased or extreme view. As a matter of fact, I think my view is rationally justified by the evidence, and this post will give you some of this evidence that support my opinion, so you can decide by yourself.
I only ask you one thing: Examine carefully all of these citations, and ask yourself the 5 following questions while you read each citation:
-What would happen if most people on Earth become believers or active followers of such a beliefs and, consistently, apply them to themselves and others?
-Are these beliefs psychologically and emotionally healthy?
-Are they rational and likely to be true?
-Do they provide a reasonable basis to have a purpose for life?
-Are they constructive for society and the future generations?
You are the judge. Think hard and carefully about these questions and don't let anybody to influence your opinion.
(Note: I've included all of these citations as permanent quotes in the right side of my blog. I've given the specific reference in each case, so you can check the information by yourself if you want to. I could mention 100 or 200 citations more, but I think this brief summary is enough to make the point.)
NATURALISTS AND MATERIALISTS IN THEIR OWN WORDS:
-Being a philosopher, of course I would like to think that my stance is rational, held not just instinctively and scientistically and in the mainstream but because the arguments do indeed favor materialism over dualism. But I do not think that, though I used to. My position may be rational, broadly speaking, but not because the arguments favor it: Though the arguments for dualism do (indeed) fail, so do the arguments for materialism. And the standard objections to dualism are not very convincing; if one really manages to be a dualist in the first place, one should not be much impressed by them. My purpose in this paper is to hold my own feet to the fire and admit that I do not proportion my belief to the evidence. William Lycan's paper "Giving dualism its due" (emphasis in blue added)
-"You", your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased: "You're nothing but a pack of neurons". Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis (p. 3. Emphasis in blue added)
Compare Crick's view with this video where atheist Peter Atkins suggests too that we're nothing:
-A brain was always going to do what it was caused to do by local mechanical disturbances. Daniel Dennett, in his contribution to A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind (p.247).
Note: Think about the implications for society, morality, moral choice and moral responsability, if Dennett's materialistic view is right.
-In a deterministic universe, we understand that a criminal's career is not a matter of an unconditioned personal choice, but fully a function of a complex set of conditions, genetic and enviromental, that interact to produce the offender and his proclivities. Had we been in his shows in all respects, we too would have followed the same path, since there is no freely willing self that could have done otherwise as causality unfolds. There is no kernel of independent moral agency -- we are not, as philosopher Daniel Dennett puts it, "moral levitators" that rise above circunstances in our choices, including choices to rob, rape, or kill. Tom Clark, Director of the Center for Naturalism, in his article "Maximizing Liberty". Emphasis in blue added.
--The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. Richard Dawkins in River Out Of Eden (p.155. Emphasis in blue added).
-Now, if you then ask me where I get my 'ought' statements from, that's a more difficult question. If I say something is wrong, like killing people, I don't find that nearly such a defensible statement as 'I am a distant cousin of an orangutan... I couldn't, ultimately, argue intellectually against somebody who did something I found obnoxious. I think I could finally only say, "Well, in this society you can't get away with it" and call the police.
-"You", your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll's Alice might have phrased: "You're nothing but a pack of neurons". Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis (p. 3. Emphasis in blue added)
Compare Crick's view with this video where atheist Peter Atkins suggests too that we're nothing:
-A brain was always going to do what it was caused to do by local mechanical disturbances. Daniel Dennett, in his contribution to A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind (p.247).
Note: Think about the implications for society, morality, moral choice and moral responsability, if Dennett's materialistic view is right.
-In a deterministic universe, we understand that a criminal's career is not a matter of an unconditioned personal choice, but fully a function of a complex set of conditions, genetic and enviromental, that interact to produce the offender and his proclivities. Had we been in his shows in all respects, we too would have followed the same path, since there is no freely willing self that could have done otherwise as causality unfolds. There is no kernel of independent moral agency -- we are not, as philosopher Daniel Dennett puts it, "moral levitators" that rise above circunstances in our choices, including choices to rob, rape, or kill. Tom Clark, Director of the Center for Naturalism, in his article "Maximizing Liberty". Emphasis in blue added.
--The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. Richard Dawkins in River Out Of Eden (p.155. Emphasis in blue added).
-Now, if you then ask me where I get my 'ought' statements from, that's a more difficult question. If I say something is wrong, like killing people, I don't find that nearly such a defensible statement as 'I am a distant cousin of an orangutan... I couldn't, ultimately, argue intellectually against somebody who did something I found obnoxious. I think I could finally only say, "Well, in this society you can't get away with it" and call the police.
I realise this is very weak, and I've said I don't feel equipped to produce moral arguments in the way I feel equipped to produce arguments of a cosmological and biological kind. But I still think it's a separate issue from beliefs in cosmic truths. Richard Dawkins in this interview. (emphasis in blue added)
-There is a non-overlapping and exhaustive distinction between ideas that are false or true about the real world (factual matters, in the broad sense) and ideas about what we ought to do – normative or moral ideas, for which the words ‘true’ and ‘false’ have no meaning. Richard Dawkins, ‘Afterword’ in John Brockman (ed.), What Is Your Dangerous Idea?, (London: Pocket Books, 2006), (p. 307)
-The modern age, more or less repudiating the idea of a divine lawgiver, has nevertheless tried to retain the ideas of moral right and wrong, not noticing that, in casting God aside, they have also abolished the conditions of meaningfulness for moral right and wrong as well. Richard Taylor in his book Ethics, Faith, and Reason (pp.2-3).
Compare Taylor's view with Dawkins' quote above.
-The moral principles that govern our behaviour are rooted in habit and custom, feeling and fashion. Paul Kurtz in his book Forbidden Fruit (p.65)
Compare Taylor's view with Dawkins' quote above.
-The moral principles that govern our behaviour are rooted in habit and custom, feeling and fashion. Paul Kurtz in his book Forbidden Fruit (p.65)
-The position of the modern evolutionist is that humans have an awareness of morality because such awareness is of biological worth. Morality is a biological adaptation no less than hands and feet and teeth. Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. Michael Ruse, The Evolutionary Theory and Christian Ethics, in the Darwinian Paradigm (pp. 262-269. Emphasis in blue added.)
-If ... there are ... objective values, they make the existence of God more probable than it would have been without them. Thus we have ... a defensible argument from morality to the existence of God. J.L.Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (pp. 115-116)
-I think there is a certain degree of plausibility among atheists in the view that without some kind of transcendental intelligence in the universe, there can be no objective moral laws.
-I think there is a certain degree of plausibility among atheists in the view that without some kind of transcendental intelligence in the universe, there can be no objective moral laws.
Moral laws are maxims which tell sentient beings that certain actions are to be deemed moral or immoral. But how could such laws exist in the absence of any mind or sentience in the universe at all? Are moral laws objective in the way that laws of nature are? They do not seem to be, for few would argue that "murder is wrong" existed in some Platonic realm of ideas when galaxies were forming over ten billion years ago and there was no sign life or consciousness anywhere in the universe. The use of the word "law" implies an objective existence of unchanging moral maxims independently of sentience. Yet it appears that there can be nothing objective about so-called "moral laws", because it seems absurd on its face to say that maxims which tell sentient beings that certain actions of sentient beings are moral or immoral could exist in the absence of sentience.
It seems to me that all ethical codes must ultimately be man-made, and thus there could be no objective criteria for determining if human actions are right or wrong. Admitting that moral laws are man-made is equivalent to acknowledging that ethical rules are arbitrary and therefore human beings are not obligated to follow them.
...But ethics does not come into play in the history of the universe until very recently--when Homo sapiens appeared. It is possible that moral laws have existed since the Big Bang, but that they could not manifest themselves until sentient beings arose. However, such a view implies that there is some element of purposefulness in the universe--that the universe was created with the evolution of sentient beings "in mind" (in the mind of a Creator?). To accept the existence of objective moral laws that have existed since the beginning of time is to believe that the evolution of sentient beings capable of moral reasoning (such as human beings) has somehow been predetermined or is inevitable, a belief that is contrary to naturalistic explanations of origins (such as evolution by natural selection) which maintain that sentient beings came into existence due to contingent, accidental circumstances. If objective moral laws are part of the natural universe (not part of some supernatural realm), then the universe cannot be unconscious--it must be, in some unknown sense, sentient. Few naturalists would want to accept such a nonscientific pantheistic conclusion. Keith Augustine, in the original version of his online paper "Defending Moral Subjectivism". Emphasis in blue added.
(Note: Keith has informed me that currently he has new opinions about these meta-ethical questions and that it's likely he'll update his online article. But I've mentioned the original version of his article because it summarizes in a rigurous philosophical form the subjectivism and relativism implied by naturalism, as evidenced by all the citations on morality by the naturalists quoted in this post. In fact, I consider that if naturalism is true, Keith's above argumentation is impeccable and his conclusion irrefutable. Obviously, I don't think that naturalism is true...)
-Naturalism", I believe, is often driven by fear, fear that accepting conceptual pluralism will let in the "occult", the "supernatural. Hilary Putnam, in his contribution for the book "Naturalism in question"
-How is it that so many philosophers and cognitive scientists can say so many things that, to me at least, seem obviously false?... I believe one of the unstated assumptions behind current batch of views is that they represent the only scientifically acceptable alternatives to the anti-scientism that went with traditional dualism, the belief in the immortality of the soul, spiritualism, and so on. Acceptance of the current views is motivated not so much by an independent conviction of their truth as by a terror of what are apparently the only alternatives. That is, the choice we are tacitly presented with is between a "scientific" approach, as represented by one or another of the current versions of "materialism", and an "unscientific" approach, as represented by Cartesianism or some other traditional religious conception of the mind. John Searle in The Rediscovery of the Mind, pp. 3-4. (Emphasis in blue added).
-Naturalism is, indeed, inherently skeptical. Naturalism naturally gives rise to skepticism and the naturalists’ only way of answering such skepticism is to beg the skeptic’s question. Radical skepticism is not, as naturalists tend to think, a dispensable feature of the new scientific account of man but its natural corollary. David MacArthur in his paper "Naturalism and Skepticism"
Note: MacArthur is not referring to skepticism of the paranormal (e.g. CSICOP, Randi, etc.), but to philosophical skepticism: (roughly, the doctrine that we have basis to doubt the possibility of knowledge).
-If there is no purpose to life in general, biological or human for that matter, the question arises whether there is meaning in our individual lives, and if it is not there already, whether we can put it there. One source of meaning on which many have relied is the intrinsic value, in particular the moral value, of human life. People have also sought moral rules, codes, principles which are supposed to distinguish us from merely biological critters whose lives lack (as much) meaning or value (as ours). Besides morality as a source of meaning, value, or purpose, people have looked to consciousness, introspection, self-knowledge as a source of insight into what makes us more than the merely physical facts about us. Scientism must reject all of these straws that people have grasped, and it’s not hard to show why. Science has to be nihilistic about ethics and morality. Alex Rosenberg, in his article "The Disenchanted Naturalistic Guide to Reality"
-If beliefs are anything they are brain states—physical configurations of matter. But one configuration of matter cannot, in virtue just of its structure, composition, location, or causal relation, be “about” another configuration of matter in the way original intentionality requires (because it cant pass the referential opacity test). So, there are no beliefs. Alex Rosenberg, in the comments on his article mentioned above.
Note: If there are no beliefs, is the belief in naturalism or in science rational? Judge by yourself the intellectual consequences of naturalism.
-There is no room in a world where all the facts are fixed by physical facts for a set of free floating independently existing norms or values (or facts about them) that humans are uniquely equipped to discern and act upon. Alex Rosenberg, same article.
-I believe that this is one manifestation of a fear of religion which has large and often pernicious consequences for modern intellectual life... My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world. Thomas Nagel in "The Last Word" (see a comment on it here). Emphasis in blue added.
-In our worldview, we are just another tiny byproduct of nature, special in no sense to anyone but among ourselves, subject to a plethora of ramdom accidents and forces, and there is no perfect or supreme being at all, least of all us. Richard Carrier in his book Sense and Goodness without God (p. 259)
-When we have exhausted all options, and still conclude there is no longer any prospect of happiness, death becomes an acceptable alternative. Richard Carrier, same book (p.342. Emphasis in blue added)
...But ethics does not come into play in the history of the universe until very recently--when Homo sapiens appeared. It is possible that moral laws have existed since the Big Bang, but that they could not manifest themselves until sentient beings arose. However, such a view implies that there is some element of purposefulness in the universe--that the universe was created with the evolution of sentient beings "in mind" (in the mind of a Creator?). To accept the existence of objective moral laws that have existed since the beginning of time is to believe that the evolution of sentient beings capable of moral reasoning (such as human beings) has somehow been predetermined or is inevitable, a belief that is contrary to naturalistic explanations of origins (such as evolution by natural selection) which maintain that sentient beings came into existence due to contingent, accidental circumstances. If objective moral laws are part of the natural universe (not part of some supernatural realm), then the universe cannot be unconscious--it must be, in some unknown sense, sentient. Few naturalists would want to accept such a nonscientific pantheistic conclusion. Keith Augustine, in the original version of his online paper "Defending Moral Subjectivism". Emphasis in blue added.
(Note: Keith has informed me that currently he has new opinions about these meta-ethical questions and that it's likely he'll update his online article. But I've mentioned the original version of his article because it summarizes in a rigurous philosophical form the subjectivism and relativism implied by naturalism, as evidenced by all the citations on morality by the naturalists quoted in this post. In fact, I consider that if naturalism is true, Keith's above argumentation is impeccable and his conclusion irrefutable. Obviously, I don't think that naturalism is true...)
-Naturalism", I believe, is often driven by fear, fear that accepting conceptual pluralism will let in the "occult", the "supernatural. Hilary Putnam, in his contribution for the book "Naturalism in question"
-How is it that so many philosophers and cognitive scientists can say so many things that, to me at least, seem obviously false?... I believe one of the unstated assumptions behind current batch of views is that they represent the only scientifically acceptable alternatives to the anti-scientism that went with traditional dualism, the belief in the immortality of the soul, spiritualism, and so on. Acceptance of the current views is motivated not so much by an independent conviction of their truth as by a terror of what are apparently the only alternatives. That is, the choice we are tacitly presented with is between a "scientific" approach, as represented by one or another of the current versions of "materialism", and an "unscientific" approach, as represented by Cartesianism or some other traditional religious conception of the mind. John Searle in The Rediscovery of the Mind, pp. 3-4. (Emphasis in blue added).
-Naturalism is, indeed, inherently skeptical. Naturalism naturally gives rise to skepticism and the naturalists’ only way of answering such skepticism is to beg the skeptic’s question. Radical skepticism is not, as naturalists tend to think, a dispensable feature of the new scientific account of man but its natural corollary. David MacArthur in his paper "Naturalism and Skepticism"
Note: MacArthur is not referring to skepticism of the paranormal (e.g. CSICOP, Randi, etc.), but to philosophical skepticism: (roughly, the doctrine that we have basis to doubt the possibility of knowledge).
-If there is no purpose to life in general, biological or human for that matter, the question arises whether there is meaning in our individual lives, and if it is not there already, whether we can put it there. One source of meaning on which many have relied is the intrinsic value, in particular the moral value, of human life. People have also sought moral rules, codes, principles which are supposed to distinguish us from merely biological critters whose lives lack (as much) meaning or value (as ours). Besides morality as a source of meaning, value, or purpose, people have looked to consciousness, introspection, self-knowledge as a source of insight into what makes us more than the merely physical facts about us. Scientism must reject all of these straws that people have grasped, and it’s not hard to show why. Science has to be nihilistic about ethics and morality. Alex Rosenberg, in his article "The Disenchanted Naturalistic Guide to Reality"
-If beliefs are anything they are brain states—physical configurations of matter. But one configuration of matter cannot, in virtue just of its structure, composition, location, or causal relation, be “about” another configuration of matter in the way original intentionality requires (because it cant pass the referential opacity test). So, there are no beliefs. Alex Rosenberg, in the comments on his article mentioned above.
Note: If there are no beliefs, is the belief in naturalism or in science rational? Judge by yourself the intellectual consequences of naturalism.
-There is no room in a world where all the facts are fixed by physical facts for a set of free floating independently existing norms or values (or facts about them) that humans are uniquely equipped to discern and act upon. Alex Rosenberg, same article.
-I believe that this is one manifestation of a fear of religion which has large and often pernicious consequences for modern intellectual life... My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world. Thomas Nagel in "The Last Word" (see a comment on it here). Emphasis in blue added.
-In our worldview, we are just another tiny byproduct of nature, special in no sense to anyone but among ourselves, subject to a plethora of ramdom accidents and forces, and there is no perfect or supreme being at all, least of all us. Richard Carrier in his book Sense and Goodness without God (p. 259)
-When we have exhausted all options, and still conclude there is no longer any prospect of happiness, death becomes an acceptable alternative. Richard Carrier, same book (p.342. Emphasis in blue added)
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