Self-Exempting Reductionism Rides Again

‎"After comparing more than two thousand DNA samples, an American molecular geneticist, Dean Hamer, concluded that a person's capacity to believe in God is linked to his brain chemicals. . . . , and if he has refrained from arguing that a person's capacity to believe in molecular genetics is linked to a brain chemical, it is, no doubt, owing to a prudent sense that once -that- door is open, God knows how and when anyone will ever slam it shut again."


 --David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion


http://tinyurl.com/77ve7m8

Secret Reductionist Suicide Pact Revealed!

"And where is the objectivity of physical science when knowledge of any object is no more than a change in the brain-state of the observer-subject?"
--jack bodie, from Ed Feser's blog combox.

An excellent and challenging question. In some senses baffling, in fact.

The implications of such reductions for both objectivity and knowledge, seem to reduce those reductions themselves to nothing more than their own alleged universal explanatory factors.

Sort of a built-in cognitive death wish. Three cheers, I say.

Two Analysts Walk into a Method

"The major task of logic has been to establish a systematic way of deducing the logical consequences of a set of sentences." (First line of the 2007 Britannica "Knowledge In Depth" article, "Logic", Macropaedia Volume 23, page 225.)

True enough. But only minds or mind-based objects have tasks.

Dressing Up in God's Clothes

How do you even approach the question of atheism or God without using a system of assumptions whose status, if recognized or admitted, shows that they function as exact substitutes for features of God that were part of the basis for objecting to the very possibility of the existence or goodness of God in the first place?

The Gods of Mind and the Mind of God

A universal is just a quantification of a term in a claim or statement or predication. Is the "denial" of universals saying that no one can use the word "no" and other universal quantifiers? If so someone's flat out of luck, in the nature of the case, because of what that statement itself asserts.

Moreover---and I'm following Grisez and Boyle very closely here---once communicated, that universal denial becomes performatively and empirically inconsistent---not "just theory", as the presets of loop guruism would say. Notice that I'm no longer distinguishing between atheists and theists, except of course concerning The Grand Conclusion itself.

Because the set of communications is itself quantified so as to affect the set of objects with that name, "communication" (data transfer, sends, etc., call it what you like, doesn't change a thing)---including that communication itself---that same communication is thereby itself neutralized because of a self-imposed impossibility.

Kordig, the "Man With No Name" of the philosophy of logic, turned this kind of analysis into a science, and---sure enough---he was a theist. He knew well that divine mindfulness was inherent and necessarily assumed in the mind-ruling authority of how we treat our most basic and irreducible assumptions.

Hoisted by a Shared Petard

It's going to be funny to watch atheists and theists stumble all over themselves trying to explain why they've mutually ignored issues of criteria and the philosophy of logic for -decades- (centuries?), once the issues finally get traction in the media.

But first I'll make one point (there are many) about the Little Bo Peep "problem" of evil: An atheist can have an objective concept of good in the sense that any kind of reasoned approach to reality as a whole necessarily assumes a good in the notion of intellectual propriety. In other words, a good is already assumed in the logical/illogical distinction that prefers logicality. However, atheist thumpers still beg the question in assuming that an ultimate being must be good in order to exist, an assumption that remains unquestioned in the loop guru mentality among most atheists.

But the same type of thing is shared by both atheists and theists concerning background assumptions and meta-theoretic criteria. The longer they spar on a relatively adolescent level, philosophically speaking, the more explaining they'll eventually have to do.

Pathological Collectivism

"We are living in an age and in a culture increasingly antagonistic to individualism and to the ideal of personal autonomy. Many psychologists and psychiatrists share this antagonism and express their hostility through therapeutic practices that are subversive not only of the patient's autonomy but also of their self-esteem and mental health. Personal autonomy and self-esteem are essentials of the individual's well-being."

--Slightly redacted from a blurb on the dust jacket of Nathaniel Branden's The Disowned Self, 1970, from a paper delivered at the American Psychological Association annual convention. Why get the paperback when the used hardcovers are so cheap?