Borrowed Splendor

A commenter on Ed's blog recently claimed that intellect is completely originated from the brain.

Here's the latest of my response. I'll edit significantly in the next day or so.

How do you get true from "comes from the brain"? By "true" are you meaning anything additional to origination in the brain? Another way of putting it is: Is ascribing truth to a claim *anything* beyond a repeat of "comes from the brain"? If not, then "X is true" simply means "X comes from the brain". If it *does* mean anything beyond "comes from the brain", then materialism is thereby contravened.

But more fundamentally, how could origination in the brain be *known*---as anything *beyond* mere brain origination---since that state or activity of intellect would *itself* be merely another brain-originated event, and in that case, its status as "knowledge" is superfluous to brain events. But that would fly in the face of the original claim against intellect being distinct from brain matter or events thereof.

A lot of the garbage by a handful of commenters over at Feser's (phaser's) blog is either self-referentially inconsistent (I *am* going to turbo Kordig's article on this, by the way) or in the case of anti-transcendentalism, made up of unargued universal claims/denials and with apparently no need to qualify the truth value of those claims themselves---shock---with regard to either space or time.  We must all accept the good news of the negation any transcendental method (maybe even the possibility if we're lucky), and spread the gospel of this timeless and even spaceless truth by restricting the possibility of methods of truth. Plus---an added bonus---this claim is itself part of the method of obtaining truth (which means it is it's *own* reason for its *own* truth) that, well, frankly, *transcends* (amazing, just amazing), in the universality of its predications, any claims about there being some transcendental method for attaining truth.

No argument needed. (Call now, and we'll ship a bonus Keyword Rotation System for making *any* view true---and *universally* true at that---which is yours to keep even if you decide not to accept our proprietary universal truth products) And any challenge to this is just another claim to an illusory transcendental method by definition, since the claim limits methods of truth to non-transcendental only. Which, "may then seem to require an eternal glorification in the motto: 'Damn you Jack; I'm fireproof!'"*

Flew, Antony. God: A Critical Inquiry, first page of Chapter 3, page 52. The remark was about interpretive slights of hand attempted by Christian theologians with regard to evil (which, curiously enough, Flew was a groundless thumper about, as I've pointed out several times on this blog) and God's assumed goodness. Go figure.

The Operating System That Won't Go Away

To merely *approach* the question of the existence of God, I'm already using an intellectual perfection standard to guide the inquiry.

But you can't just have some abstract standard on its own without a system of mind already in place and already referenced as a separate ideality to manage the analysis, including that of itself. This system that self-assumes mind and the ideality of mind through which one's own mind is identified (and therefore self-regarding), is not referenced in the same way as our limited, flawed, forgetful selves are, especially given their tendency toward willed self-contradiction, but is already there as the ultimate prior evaluative truth-deciding system, invariant, beneficial, and already necessary to even function as a mind in the first place. And a mind must function, to be a mind at all.

But criteria don't evaluate or decide what is true. Only minds do. Standards and criteria make no sense and are strictly irrelevant except to an already existing mind that has preferential regard for such intellectual factors by referring to a separate system of cognitive propriety that is treated as an ideal mind. An ultimate of mind is thereby necessarily an integral aspect of an assumed ultimate mind. It doesn't exist all on its own as some kind of ethereal pervasive abstraction, because by itself---and without mind---it has no meaning, significance, or even existence. Only a mind can evaluate and decide what is true, including what is true about the evaluation of that decision's evaluative criteria itself.

The Presumption of Theism

I do believe the burden of proof is on the theist, otherwise you end up trying to prove why it's not for theism but is for, say, The Great Pumpkin. You're assuming you have the burden of proof to show why you don't have the burden of proof. But that argument too, is not needed if there's no burden to prove the original burden in the first place.

But any atheist claims about the total reality carry the same burden---and it's just as heavy and question-begging as the claim that God exists was ever conceived of being.

In fact, thought criteria and universal assumptions generally are themselves the *real* adjudicative God of both atheists and theists: divine commandment status, epistemic free ride, sort of an unstated agreement to ignore the common-held and irreducibly basic set of predications assumed in the debate itself. What's not to like?

I'll cover this *exhaustively* in the book, and resolve the issue. I side with the philosophical atheists on this one, however. You theists better logic up, or I'm going to help the atheists take you down. And they *do* need help, that much is obvious.

I've said it before: you just can't get good theists *or* atheists anymore. But most theists' epistemology and philosophy of logic and reason are far more damaging to theism than atheist philosophy ever could be.

Thoroughly rationalist-objectivist atheistic assumptions imply that God exists. God's existence is not presupposed by those assumptions. But those assumptions do imply God's existence.

Inferential Values

The theist must at some point simply define goodness in terms of God's will.

But, first, that breaks with all ordinary standards of meaning and morality, for there is no implicit reference to God in any ordinary use of moral terms.

And second, in this sense of goodness, obligation refers *only* to God's will. Therefore, spirituality is nothing more than the worship of infinite power.

Decent appeals to what creatures owe to God become covert statements of the brute facts of God's desire, along with perhaps some built-in expression of the speaker's prudent intention to stay in line, and suggestion that others would benefit from doing the same.

But what were thought to be expressions of grounded praise become mere repetition of similar facts. God being good means that God does whatever God wants to do.

--Heavily redacted. My version of Antony Flew, God: A Critical Inquiry, page 44-45, Section 2.46.

Shifting Gears

Believers in God unwilling to engage atheistic claims and arguments---or are merely against the whole idea---appear to be deliberately deluding themselves.

Don't you know their kids are really proud of them.

Skiing in the Abyss, Wish You Were Here.

I'm out of the loop more, but The Black Book of Atheism is a tremendously huge project. God: A Critical Inquiry by Flew is very challenging just to understand a large number of his very sentences. Extremely germanic prose. So that's the first book whose arguments will be exhaustively documented in the book. It was originally titled God and Philosophy, if you're not familiar.

I don't really want to do Nielsen's Ethics Without God yet (Although that's what caused my intellectual epiphany-discovery of the criterial argument for the existence of God), so I'll pick a book of his that is more atheism proper, maybe Atheism and Philosophy, not sure yet.

But I can already see some blinks in God: A Critical Inquiry, which means I'm starting to smell blood in the water and get a rapid increase in bloodflow to the brain. Not a good sign for Flew's philosophy.

Don't get me wrong: I *love* Flew, as a person in fact, as well as writer and philosopher.

But back to the black book: I'm also memorizing it along with composing it. Of course the memorization can't even begin to keep up with the composition, but it icily wakes up the mind and disciplines it in a way nothing else can. Engage!

Also listening to mp3s of it using the text-to-speech program and my favorite ai voice, Mike16. Thanks to AT&T for that, in spite of other things about that company. So the mp3 sequence now is my notes of CraigVsHarris, notes on phaser's Last Superstition, and now the beginnings of The Black Book of Atheism, starting with notes on Flew's God book.

So what I do is compose and edit for a while, and then re-convert the longer text to mp3 and update my ipod and shuffle. Avoid those in the ear canal earbuds, by the way, if you don't want to suffer from earwax buildup and the intense headaches that comes with that. The resulting ear cleaning you have to get at an emergency room causes even worse pain, possibly the worst many of you will have ever experienced. lol

By the way, I often refer to Ed Feser as phaser now. lol He deserves the benefit of the notoriety of that nickname, and is definitely a street-fightin space-age theist. I've said it elsewhere: Edward Feser is the Jimi Hendrix of Thomism.

With the help of people like Edward Feser, Anthony Flew, and Kai Nielsen, I will *own* atheism before it's all over.

Ignorance of the Unctious

The only reason atheists have any influence is because most theists are stalwart ignoramuses, especially about precisely the metatheoretic and other oblique fallacies that are the *core* of atheistic objections to theism.

Gale is a pompous fraud who's obviously running scared and doesn't even realize he's committing one self-referential fallacy after another. Smith is a nice, serious, and I think earnest guy, but is cluelessly committing the Zeno trick fallacy I've outlined elsewhere. If this is the best they can do, then these people are pushovers, even though they are of course still kicking most dumbell theists' butts.

I want to know the specific names of the people who are funding this stupidass analytic mediocrity in educational institutions. Of course they might react by simply closing down philosophy departments, but that's a good thing that's already being done around the country. The philosophers couldn't justify themselves if their lives depended on it anyway. lol

Time to start contacting some people in the media, let'em know about a couple of big white elephants in philosophy, maybe three. They might need some fresh news in the God debate / gnu atheism area, who knows.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKsdED_bV3M&feature=related