How My Five Year-Old is Like a Materialist
| September 4, 2018 | Posted by Barry Arrington under Intelligent Design |
My five year-old granddaughter is brilliant. But she shares a flaw with many other brilliant people. She absolutely hates to say “I don’t know.” And she sometimes just makes concepts up out of whole cloth in an attempt to disguise the fact that she does not know something.
Example: This evening LK brought home Chick-fil-A. Instead of packets of ketchup, for some reason she got packets of something called “Polynesian Sauce” that is red and gooey but slightly less viscous than ketchup. The following exchange ensued:
Granddaughter: Papa, this is not ketchup.
Papa: It’s not? What is it?
Granddaughter: uh, hmmm, uh, it’s Fraxee.
Fraxee? Not bad for a word she made up on the spot to disguise her ignorance. I would pass it off as an amusing stage she is going through except for one thing that really alarms me — I think my granddaughter might be a materialist. After all, if you ask a materialist how the mind can be reduced to the electro-chemical processes of the brain, they will say the mind is an “emergent property” of the brain. They say this with a straight face apparently expecting you to just swallow down their confession of ignorance disguised as an explanation. Instead of saying the mind is “emergent,” they might just as well take a cue from my granddaughter and say the mind is “Fraxee.” The accounts are equally explanatory.
56 Responses to How My Five Year-Old is Like a Materialist
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How does neurological interconnections produce the experience of “blue?” There is only one explanation:
Fraxee!
Sounds about right. ????
Hat’s off to G.D.A.
Barry, could you link to some articles where people say that the mind is an emergent property of the brain? I suspect there’s a bit more to the argument than that, so I’d like to judge for myself.
Bob O’H, start here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergentism
aarceng – can you be more specific about what parts of that Barry is referring to? Of the people mentioned who advocated for emergentism, the most recent publication cited is from 1925. Are you sure Barry hasn’t read anything written since then?
So Bob is too dim to be able to use a search engine. And apparently proud of it.
ET – I rather hope a search engine wouldn’t help, as it would mean that not only was Google/Microsoft closely monitoring what Barry was reading, but it would also be broadcasting it to the world.
I’m sure there is a lot of material about this online, but if it is not what Barry is thinking of, then basing a discussion on it would be to tart off with a mis-understanding. Better, I think, to make sure we’re all on the same page.
Here is a great article pointing out the fallacy with Daniel Dennett’s emergentism.
https://mindmatters.today/2018/08/can-a-game-prove-that-computers-could-really-think/
Bob- You are clearly hopeless and proudly willfully ignorant. It doesn’t follow that a search engine could help you find what you are asking for if they have read Barry’s mind.
And you have never cared about being on the same page before.
EricMH – that piece is strange. We are carefully walked up to this paragraph:
and then we get arm-waving and vagueness. But if we can “make sense of what it means for something to be a system possessing internal states” then we do have emergentism, so it rather falls down at exactly the point when it gets to what it’s promising.
@Bob O’H, perhaps you can be more specific about which part is “arm-waving and vagueness?” The article is saying Dennett is arm wavy and vague, then goes on to do a best guess what Dennett’s position is and why it doesn’t work. I’m happy to talk through any questions regarding the article.
I have differ on this. The child’s explanation is more innocent. Adults who play the “emergent” game should know better. But they do it anyway to prop up their (arguably destructive) agenda.
Maybe materialists are like a 5 year old.
What does Mung have against a 5 year old? 🙂
I think to understand “mind” or consciousness we have to begin with a few fundamental questions:
Do you exist? How do you know you exist? Is your existence real?
I would argue you know you exist (like I know it) because you are conscious of your own existence. However, if the conscious experience of your existence is real then what is consciousness? Does it have a chemical formula? A circuit diagram? If consciousness is created by the brain, how does the brain create it? And, what exactly does it create? Is it something we can measure and analyze like electrons, protons or photons? Supposedly we can “objectively” analyze the brain. Can we analyze and study consciousness in the same way?
David Chalmers puts it this way:
David J. Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory.
I would argue that if consciousness and mind can’t be studied in the same way then ontologically it is different and distinct from the physical things we study in science. If it’s different and distinct from physical world then that’s dualism.
What is really odd is that any pro-materialist argument is essentially defeated by internal contradiction the first time the arguer uses “I” as a subject and ANY voluntary action (such as reading a certain paper, choosing a model of behavior, deciding upon a certain school of thought ). As has been well said, “The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God._
@Mung #12
Maybe?
It is obvious that Barry is implying that “materialists” are like immature children.
The fact is, we are all born non-theists, until someone else puts theistic ideas into our heads.
Dog writes:
“It is obvious that Barry is implying that “materialists” are like immature children.”
Fascinating comment. I did not imply that. I don’t think I implied anything. What you see is what you get. I flat out stated that materialists are like my granddaughter when she makes up an “explanation” to disguise her ignorance. And they most certainly are. The fact that materialists are like her in that one respect does not mean they are like her generally. Get a grip.
@DD for that matter we are all born solipists. That doesn’t make solipism the more rational position.
We are all born theists with the knowledge of God fresh in our minds. We have to be brainwashed to think otherwise.
Deputy Dog is clearly confused.
Deputy Dog claims that,,,
That claim is shown to be false.
Moreover, “despite years of scientific training, even professional chemists, geologists, and physicists from major universities such as Harvard, MIT, and Yale cannot escape a deep-seated belief that natural phenomena exist for a purpose”
As the following video clearly shows, atheists have to mentally work suppressing their innate “knee jerk” design inference!
As the preceding video clearly highlighted, it is not that Atheists do not see purpose and/or Design in nature, it is that Atheists, for whatever severely misguided reason, live in denial of the purpose and/or Design that they themselves see in nature.
And yes, Denialism is a mental illness:
Perhaps the two most famous quotes of atheists suppressing their innate ‘design inference’ are the following two quotes:
First off, contrary to what Dawkins stated, natural selection certainly does NOT explain the “appearance of design”
Secondly, when just looking at a cross section of DNA, even before getting into the astonishing multiple overlapping coding within DNA, it is easy to see why Crick stated that “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.”
Thus in conclusion, the Christian is well justified in trusting his inborn intuition that the world is Designed. And the Atheist is found to be artificially, and without empirical warrant, suppressing that same inborn intuition in Design.
As molecular biologist Doug Axe stated in his book “Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed”, “Our intuition was right all along.”
Verse:
@ET I cannot say I was born with knowledge of God. However, when my parents told me about God it made a lot of sense.
Interesting. Arguments have gone all the way from “children act like materialists and make stuff up” to “children instinctively know the truth that God exists”
Can you theists get any more contradictory amongst yourselves?
Deputy Dog:
What? For once it would be nice to see our cowardly opponents actually make a case instead of just spewing nonsense as if that is all it takes.
Also the two statements aren’t even contradictory, even as misrepresented. Just because a child doesn’t know everything and tries to fill in the blanks doesn’t mean the child cannot know anything.
EricMH- Can you remember anything about your 1st year?
ET
I can’t remember what I had for dinner last night.
R J Sawyer:
Just go look in your trash or recycle bin to see what frozen dinner you microwaved. Or is the empty package still laying around? 😉
Also check for a McDonald’s receipt in your front pocket
@ET, yes I have memories from when I was 1 and 2, which I’ve confirmed with my parents.
@Deputy Dog, original sin makes sense of this seeming contradiction.
@EricMH #27
That the slave master lets us run on our leashes a bit, so that we can choke ourselves? Yeah, I’ve heard that rationalization before.
As usual, God’s behavior is consistent with him not existing at all.
As usual Deputy Dog is too cowardly to actually make a case.
Spoken like a 3 year old petulant child.
It is very telling that you have nothing that can explain our existence and can only hurl crap as if it means something
EricMH:
Cuz they have ironclad memories. I asked about your first year.
DD made up the contradiction with its misrepresentation. There clearly isn’t a contradiction just as I commented on
The only fatal self contradiction was from Deputy Dog. Deputy Dog claimed, without reference, that it was a fact that we are all born non-theist. He was shown to be wrong in that claim. He did not apologize for his false claim but tried to double down on it. ET is right.
The fact is that we are all born with a predisposition to believe in God. Moreover, it is now shown that even professional scientists cannot escape deep seeded belief that there is a purpose and teleology behind things. i.e. That there is a God.
Moreover, if Deputy Dog holds that evolution somehow produced this false deep-seeded belief in God, then he must also hold that evolution is capable of producing all sorts of false beliefs that we cannot trust. Darwinian evolution being one of those false beliefs that we cannot trust.
In other words, Darwinian evolution is a self refuting worldview.
BA77
Doesn’t your statement support DD’s claim. If we have a pre-disposition for something, it means that we do not have that “something” at birth, only that our probability for acquiring that “something” sometime during our lives is high.
I would agree that humans, for whatever reason, are predisposed to believe that there is more to life than just life. But to say that we are born theists is just not supported by the evidence. If we are born in a christian facility, we are more likely to believe in the christian God. If we are born in a Hindu family, we are more likely to believe in the Hindu gods. If we were born in ancient Roman times, we would be more likely to believe in the ancient Roman gods.
“Doesn’t your statement support DD’s claim.”
NO!
As to the rest of your self contradicting gobbledygook, read my reference in 20, slowly if it helps, for clarity.
FYI, I do not suffer trolls patiently.
RJS
BA77
DD’s claim was that all humans are born atheists (i.e., not believing in a higher being) and that any theistic beliefs develop later. You responded that babies are born with a predisposition to believe in God. Which, by definition, means that we are born not believing in God (i.e., atheist). I don’t mean to be contradictory, I just think that you may have used the wrong term when you said “predisposition”.
R J Sawyer:
How do you know? How many just-birthed people have been properly interviewed?
The only evidence to refute the claim would be the evidence that life arose just because.
R J Sawyer:
For which no evidence was ever provided
No, that is wrong. Buy a dictionary and a vowel
ET
I agree with BA77 that we are predisposed to believe that there is more to our lives that just our existence. I think that is quite obvious. Every culture that we have run across have had some belief system, some creation story. That would not happen if we did not have a strong predisposition for it.
It wouldn’t happen if we were not Intelligently Designed.
ET
Perhaps.
No, it’s a fact. The only reason we are so inclined is because we were designed that way. But then again there isn’t any other viable mechanism to explain our existence anyway.
Pointless trollish semantics aside, the reason we each have a predisposition to believe in God is because we are, each of us, created by God in “the image of God”.
More specifically than than that, each of us are formed by God in our mother’s womb.
And while scripture has informed us of this fact for thousands of years,,,
,, we no longer have to rely on scripture alone to know the fact that God created each of us in our mother’s womb but can now also, as was made clear in the “Darwinism vs Biological Form” video, appeal directly to empirical evidence to support our belief that God forms each of us in our mother’s womb.
Here is another video, (and excerpt from the video), that goes along with the “Darwinism vs Biological Form” video which offers further compelling evidence that we each have an immaterial and eternal soul that is created by God:
And to further substantiate my claim that we are, uniquely among all the creatures on earth, made in ‘the image of God’, I refer to the following,,,
In 2014 a group of leading evolutionary scientists stated that, after 4 decades of intense research, they have “essentially no explanation of how and why our linguistic computations and representations evolved.,,,”
The late best selling author Tom Wolfe was so taken aback by this honest confession by leading Darwinists that he wrote a book on the subject. Wolfe summed up his main argument in his book in the following quote: “In hand-to-paw, hand-to-claw, or hand-to-incisor combat, any animal his size would have him for lunch. Yet man owns or controls them all, every animal that exists, thanks to his superpower: speech.”
Simply put, although humans are fairly defenseless creatures in the wild compared to other creatures, such as bears, lions and sharks, etc.., nonetheless, humans have, completely contrary to Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ thinking, managed to somehow become masters of the planet, not by brute force, but simply by our unique ability to communicate information and, more specifically, by our ability infuse information into material substrates in order to create tools and objects that are extremely useful for our defense, our shelter, and for growing and hunting food, etc.. etc..
What is more interesting still, besides the fact that humans have a unique ability to understand and create information and have come to ‘master the planet’ through this ‘top-down’ infusion of information into material substrates,
,,, is the fact that, due to advances in science, both the universe and life itself are now found to be ‘information theoretic’ in their foundational basis.
In the following video at the 48:24 mark, Anton Zeilinger states that “It is operationally impossible to separate Reality and Information” and he goes on to note, at the 49:45 mark, the Theological significance of John 1:1 “In the Beginning was the Word”
Dr. Vedral, who is a Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, and who is also a recognized leader in the field of quantum mechanics, states, “The most fundamental definition of reality is not matter or energy, but information–and it is the processing of information that lies at the root of all physical, biological, economic, and social phenomena.”
It is hard to imagine a more convincing scientific proof that we are made ‘in the image of God’, and that we therefore have a very deep meaning and purpose for our lives, than finding both the universe, and life itself, are ‘information theoretic’ in their foundational basis, and that we, of all the creatures on earth, uniquely possess an ability to understand and create information, and, moreover, have come to ‘master the planet’ precisely because of our unique ability infuse information into material substrates.
Verses
Perhaps a more convincing proof that we are made in the image of God, and that our lives truly do have meaning and purpose, could be if God Himself became a man, defeated death on a cross, and then rose from the dead to prove that He was indeed God.
And that is precisely the claim of Christianity:
And here a few videos that, IMHO, provide fairly compelling evidence that the claims of Christianity, and the claims of Jesus Christ in particular, are indeed true:
Verses:
@ET, the memories correlate exactly with significant events. It’s unlikely they are false memories. And I’ve talked to a number of people with very early childhood memories, so such early memories are not rare.
At any rate, I also remember when I first explicitly started believing in God, around 4 or 5. It made a lot of sense that God created the world, and I went on to attribute everything to God, including things that people had invented.
I was first introduced to the Bible and God in Sunday School about the age of six. By the time I was ten I felt certain that it couldn’t all be true. (Jonah swallowed by a whale? A talking snake?) I had read a lot of mythology during those years, and it was clear that the Bible stories were just more myths, despite what my Sunday School teachers told me.
Also, my dear sweet grandmother taught me to say my prayers every night, but it was just a formality, as I couldn’t believe they were addressed to anything real.
So to each his own.
Whatever, Jack. We have all noticed that you have absolutely nothing that can explain our existence. All you can do is try to poke people who make a stand on the issue.
So, yes, to each his own but yours is just pathetic.
@jdk Yes, I definitely was skeptical about Christianity and what was taught and had questions about the Bible. Which is partly why I ended up becoming Catholic, because I could see as a child the Bible did not support Protestantism. But, I was also extremely skeptical of the easy secularism that others followed. It was obviously just a matter of them wanting to do whatever they wanted without an external authority figure, not based on any sort of rational decision. It was also quite ugly and distasteful and boring, so regardless of the truth of Christianity and theism, the alternative seemed both irrational and unattractive.
re 46: ErikMH writes,
I saw many people become secular for whom what you saw as “obvious” didn’t apply at all. Rather many of us went searching for justice, caring community, enlightenment about meaning, etc. through exploring those ideas, values, and emotions in a secular humanist context.
So my mileage varies from yours.
jdk:
Umm, in a Darwinian world all of that is pure nonsense.
Secular humanism is riding on the coat-tails of the religions it chooses to ignore.
From a more academic point of view, I think children are born predisposed to animism: they see things as animated just as they experience themselves, at whatever level of early cognitive development they are at, as animated. However, very early (earlier than we perhaps naively recognize), they start absorbing the cultural metaphysics, whatever it might be.
If we look at the growth of religion from an anthropological point of view, the earliest religions seem to have been animistic: even at the mature level, key things, both living and not, are imbued with an animistic spirit.
At some point, some of those animistic spirits became anthropomorphized into Gods, analogous to humans (such as with the Greek Gods.) This polytheism later condensed into monotheism in some places. And in the East, the transition from polytheism took a different path than with Western monotheism, leading to a couple of major ways the student of religion can now see metaphysical religious possibilities.
Again, whatever. Given that we exist, the limited options for that existence and only one that can actually be tested, at least religions have some foundation in scientific truth.
Barry Arrington,
Your granddaughter has a discerning palate. The “natural flavor” is legally acceptable levels of mouse feces, insect parts, and the like, known in the jargon of the food industry as fracksy.
EW, I remember my shock years ago on learning of acceptability thresholds for similar contaminants in for instance Chocolate. This is one of those issues where a very unpalatable regulation has a legitimate place. KF
JDK,
I find it interesting that you seem to imply that you framework for rejecting the Biblical worldview traces to in effect simple Sunday School lessons from ages 6 – 10.
At that stage, we are not ready for abstract thought (I take Piaget seriously) and we are not at all likely to be exposed to the more complex lessons in texts such as:
. . . much less, to serious instruction in worldviews analysis, the logic of being and major Bible-based historic creeds such as the Nicene and Athanasian, much less systematic theology.
Just perhaps, some reconsideration on a more advanced exposure [cf. 101 here on in context], is in order.
KF
That’s just when I started, kf, because the OP was about 5 year olds. I didn’t describe any about my further path concerning my thoughts on religion. However, such simple reasons for disbelieving the Bible, obvious to an 8 year old, as well as an early interest in mythology, certainly set the stage for a more mature evaluation as the years went by.
Jack, you don’t have any place to talk about any “mature evaluation” because you definitely do not apply that equally.
The OP is about 5 year olds because that is the mentality of a/mats
At least there’s a chance your 5 year old will grow out of it.