Help wanted ad: Monitor circuit between Dawkins’ Send button and Twitter

2 Replies to “Help wanted ad: Monitor circuit between Dawkins’ Send button and Twitter”

1. 1
   bornagain77 says:

   July 18, 2015 at 10:39 am

   Of related note:

   The amazing thing about Dawkins, and other militant atheists, in their denial that God does not really exist, is that, in their denial of the reality of God, also end up denying that they really exist as persons. In other words, given atheistic premises, there really is no such person named Dawkins, (or Coyne or etc..), there is only a neuronal illusion of a brain who thinks, (if illusions could think), that it is a person named Dawkins

   Faith and Science – Dr. Raymond Bohlin – video – (2015) (48:46 minute mark)
   https://youtu.be/vTIp1kgSqzU?t=2552

   Who wrote Richard Dawkins’s new book? – October 28, 2006
   http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....02783.html

   The Confidence of Jerry Coyne – January 6, 2014
   Excerpt: But then halfway through this peroration, we have as an aside the confession that yes, okay, it’s quite possible given materialist premises that “our sense of self is a neuronal illusion.” At which point the entire edifice suddenly looks terribly wobbly — because who, exactly, is doing all of this forging and shaping and purpose-creating if Jerry Coyne, as I understand him (and I assume he understands himself) quite possibly does not actually exist at all? The theme of his argument is the crucial importance of human agency under eliminative materialism, but if under materialist premises the actual agent is quite possibly a fiction, then who exactly is this I who “reads” and “learns” and “teaches,” and why in the universe’s name should my illusory self believe Coyne’s bold proclamation that his illusory self’s purposes are somehow “real” and worthy of devotion and pursuit? (Let alone that they’re morally significant: But more on that below.) Prometheus cannot be at once unbound and unreal; the human will cannot be simultaneously triumphant and imaginary.
   http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.c.....oyne/?_r=0

   “that “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.” This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people today that it can truly be called astonishing.”
   Francis Crick – “The Astonishing Hypothesis” 1994

   Darwin’s Robots: When Evolutionary Materialists Admit that Their Own Worldview Fails – Nancy Pearcey – April 23, 2015
   Excerpt: Even materialists often admit that, in practice, it is impossible for humans to live any other way. One philosopher jokes that if people deny free will, then when ordering at a restaurant they should say, “Just bring me whatever the laws of nature have determined I will get.”
   An especially clear example is Galen Strawson, a philosopher who states with great bravado, “The impossibility of free will … can be proved with complete certainty.” Yet in an interview, Strawson admits that, in practice, no one accepts his deterministic view. “To be honest, I can’t really accept it myself,” he says. “I can’t really live with this fact from day to day. Can you, really?”,,,
   In What Science Offers the Humanities, Edward Slingerland, identifies himself as an unabashed materialist and reductionist. Slingerland argues that Darwinian materialism leads logically to the conclusion that humans are robots — that our sense of having a will or self or consciousness is an illusion. Yet, he admits, it is an illusion we find impossible to shake. No one “can help acting like and at some level really feeling that he or she is free.” We are “constitutionally incapable of experiencing ourselves and other conspecifics [humans] as robots.”
   One section in his book is even titled “We Are Robots Designed Not to Believe That We Are Robots.”,,,
   When I teach these concepts in the classroom, an example my students find especially poignant is Flesh and Machines by Rodney Brooks, professor emeritus at MIT. Brooks writes that a human being is nothing but a machine — a “big bag of skin full of biomolecules” interacting by the laws of physics and chemistry. In ordinary life, of course, it is difficult to actually see people that way. But, he says, “When I look at my children, I can, when I force myself, … see that they are machines.”
   Is that how he treats them, though? Of course not: “That is not how I treat them…. I interact with them on an entirely different level. They have my unconditional love, the furthest one might be able to get from rational analysis.” Certainly if what counts as “rational” is a materialist worldview in which humans are machines, then loving your children is irrational. It has no basis
   within Brooks’s worldview. It sticks out of his box.
   How does he reconcile such a heart-wrenching cognitive dissonance? He doesn’t. Brooks ends by saying, “I maintain two sets of inconsistent beliefs.” He has given up on any attempt to reconcile his theory with his experience. He has abandoned all hope for a unified, logically consistent worldview.
   http://www.evolutionnews.org/2.....95451.html

   [Nancy Pearcey] When Reality Clashes with Your Atheistic Worldview – video
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0Kpn3HBMiQ

   Existential Argument against Atheism – November 1, 2013 by Jason Petersen
   1. If a worldview is true then you should be able to live consistently with that worldview.
   2. Atheists are unable to live consistently with their worldview.
   3. If you can’t live consistently with an atheist worldview then the worldview does not reflect reality.
   4. If a worldview does not reflect reality then that worldview is a delusion.
   5. If atheism is a delusion then atheism cannot be true.
   Conclusion: Atheism is false.
   http://answersforhope.com/exis.....t-atheism/
2. 2
   Bob O'H says:

   July 20, 2015 at 2:39 am

   I (O’Leary for News) would like to know what is so wrong with WikiLeaks?

   Ask your local CIA agent.

   More seriously, I think the problem is with Assange, not Wikileaks itself. He’s in the Ecuadorian Embassy because he doesn’t want to be extradited to Sweden to be questioned about allegations of sexual assault. He’s worried that the US government might use this to get him extradited to the US.