Hitchens, Shave Thyself

Hitchens assures us that theists "have consistently failed to overcome [Ockham's] objection [to a First Cause]." In fact, as we have seen, it was overcome long before Ockham was born. What Hitchens should have written is: "I wouldn't know the difference between conceptualism and realism, essentially and accidentally ordered causal series, Aristotle and Hume, etc., *even* *if* I were intellectually honest; but then neither will the book reviewer at the New York Times, so who cares?"


--Edward Feser, The Last Superstition, pages 169-170.

The Usual Self-Exempting Suspects

"Hitchens is no scientist, but he did take a degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Oxford forty years ago, where, presumably, he came upon Karl Popper's dictum that "a theory that is unfalsifiable is to that extent a weak one." It never occurs to him that by refusing to allow even one of the 100 million corpses produced by Communism to count as evidence against the moral claims of atheism, he makes his own position far more "unfalsifiable" than anything Paley ever said (since, after all, the latter did allow that it was at least *possible* that organisms could have arisen through impersonal process). But then, that is the Christopher Hitchens recipe for Serious Journalism: one part real knowledge, one part filibuster, one part sheer bluff."


---Edward Feser, The Last Superstition, page 160.

Left Out

Liberalism: The view that you're a bigot and I'm not.

Final Causal Hypocrisy

"Compared to the way in which final causality has maintained its grip on biological thinking in actual practice, the Darwinian revolution is a trivial blip on the continued silent and unacknowledged hegemony of Aristotle. The unhealthy fixation of Dawkins, Dennett, and Co. on the relatively insignificant Paley has kept them from seeing this fatal difficulty with their position. They have been frantically shooting their flit guns at a gnat even while an elephant grinds them into paste under its feet."

--Edward Feser, The Last Superstition, page 130.

Hidden Ghosts of Materialism 2

If thought is merely the motion of physical components in the brain (or anywhere else in the organism for that matter), how can I remember a previous experience? Once a motion becomes a past motion, it never recurs as the same motion. How could one know or even be aware of generic similarities between two motions? To classify two entities within the same genus, I must observe some similarity between them. But materialism claims that the thought "This motion and that motion are similar" would also itself be merely a motion. And before the motion of predicating that similarity occurs, the motion of the original experience and the motion of the alleged memory experience would be in the past, and no longer exist. And no motion could connect two motions that no longer exist. Consequently, for it to be even possible for me to think generically similar thoughts, which is necessary to remember anything, I must assume that materialism is false.

Hidden Ghosts in Materialism's Inferential Methodology Machine

1.  The very process of materialist theory development already involves its falsity.

To seek correlates in the brain and nerves of the organism to explain observed differences in how we perceive things such as colors---already assumes that:

(1 the conscious state is -something- distinct from the physical correlate one is seeking for it,

(2 the conscious state can pass judgment on physical reality and all distinctions and relations between objects (such as those between correlation and the objects correlated), and

(3 all physical correlates are necessarily insignificant to the most basic and transcendent universal judgments about the comparative status of conscious states, and judgments about conscious states, in relation to those physical objects.
--Highly redacted from Stuart Hackett, The Resurrection of Theism, 1957, page 222.

The Real Origin of Positive Thinking

Wisdom is always a crow feeding on dead bodies.
--Nietzsche