Oxford math prof John Lennox on whether God is a delusion

A fascinating Jewish video about a new institute they are setting up there, incorporating metaphysics (purposefully) into science. They expect that, in time, it will bring many scientists, currently too scared (understandably enough) of the Establishment's totalitarian 'thought police', to come out of the closet; in this way forcing the scientific community out of its nihilistic cul-de-sac, and rapidly advancing the progress of science. http://www.israelvideonetwork.com/ Axel

Excellent video, thanks! Jim Smith

Well, how can God be anything other than a delusion for people who believe that they themselves are merely an illusion? Repost from another thread: So lets see if we can get all this atheistic illusion business straight. According to atheists, consciousness is an illusion of the brain, free will is also an illusion of the brain, and even my own sense of self, the most sure thing I can know about reality, is also an illusion of the brain. Or like Dr. Pearcey recently put it:

Why Evolutionary Theory Cannot Survive Itself - Nancy Pearcey - March 8, 2015 Excerpt: Steven Pinker writes, "Our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes the truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not." The upshot is that survival is no guarantee of truth. If survival is the only standard, we can never know which ideas are true and which are adaptive but false. To make the dilemma even more puzzling, evolutionists tell us that natural selection has produced all sorts of false concepts in the human mind. Many evolutionary materialists maintain that free will is an illusion, consciousness is an illusion, even our sense of self is an illusion -- and that all these false ideas were selected for their survival value. So how can we know whether the theory of evolution itself is one of those false ideas? The theory undercuts itself.,,, Of course, the atheist pursuing his research has no choice but to rely on rationality, just as everyone else does. The point is that he has no philosophical basis for doing so. Only those who affirm a rational Creator have a basis for trusting human rationality. The reason so few atheists and materialists seem to recognize the problem is that, like Darwin, they apply their skepticism selectively. They apply it to undercut only ideas they reject, especially ideas about God. They make a tacit exception for their own worldview commitments. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/03/why_evolutionar094171.html

And here are a few references backing up Dr. Pearcey's contention that the atheistic worldview defeats itself from within:

The Confidence of Jerry Coyne – January 2014 Excerpt: Well and good. 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.) http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/06/the-confidence-of-jerry-coyne/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_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 There is only one sort of stuff, namely, matter-the physical stuff of physics, chemistry, and physiology-and the mind is somehow nothing but a physical phenomenon. In short, the mind is the brain. Daniel Dennett How does the brain go beyond processing information to become subjectively aware of information? The answer is: It doesn’t. The brain has arrived at a conclusion that is not correct. When we introspect and seem to find that ghostly thing — awareness, consciousness, the way green looks or pain feels — our cognitive machinery is accessing internal models and those models are providing information that is wrong. Michael S. A. Graziano Sam Harris's Free Will: The Medial Pre-Frontal Cortex Did It - Martin Cothran - November 9, 2012 Excerpt: There is something ironic about the position of thinkers like Harris on issues like this: they claim that their position is the result of the irresistible necessity of logic (in fact, they pride themselves on their logic). Their belief is the consequent, in a ground/consequent relation between their evidence and their conclusion. But their very stated position is that any mental state -- including their position on this issue -- is the effect of a physical, not logical cause. By their own logic, it isn't logic that demands their assent to the claim that free will is an illusion, but the prior chemical state of their brains. The only condition under which we could possibly find their argument convincing is if they are not true. The claim that free will is an illusion requires the possibility that minds have the freedom to assent to a logical argument, a freedom denied by the claim itself. It is an assent that must, in order to remain logical and not physiological, presume a perspective outside the physical order. http://www.evolutionnews.org/2012/11/sam_harriss_fre066221.html

So in effect under atheism, ‘I’ am not really a real person having the subjective experience that ‘I’ freely choose to eat vanilla ice cream instead of choosing to eat chocolate ice cream. No, under materialism, ‘I’ merely am an illusion of a person having an illusory subjective experience of free choice. In other words, the illusory person that I think is ‘me’, (man atheism can be confusing), is under the illusion that his illusory self freely choose to eat vanilla ice cream rather than chocolate. You got all that??? If ‘you’ did get it then please try to explain it to ‘me’. And please try to pretend that ‘I’ really exist when ‘you’ try to explain it to ‘me’. Thus, it is no wonder that atheists think Near Death Experiences(NDEs) (and God) are illusory no matter how much evidence you give them. They think that they themselves are illusory. In effect, when an atheist says that NDEs (and God) are illusory he is merely extending his illusion and saying that it is merely the illusion of a person having an illusion of an NDE! But then again, under materialism, the atheist had no choice to say anything else than what he said. He (if 'he' really existed) is merely under the illusion that he could have freely chosen to say otherwise and say that NDEs (and God) are not an illusion. Decartes must be up in heaven splitting his sides with laughter seeing the philosophical quagmire that atheists have imprisoned themselves in!

"Cogito ergo sum" “I think, therefore I am”, or “I am thinking, therefore I exist” – René Descartes. David Chalmers on Consciousness (Philosophical Zombies and the Hard Problem) – video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1Yo6VbRoo

On the other hand, Theists hold that there is really only one real illusion to be dealt with in all this materialistic mess. And that illusion to be dealt with is none other than the atheist’s own illusion that material reality is the only reality that exists. Leggett’s inequality, in over the top fashion (120 standard deviations), falsified materialism as to being the true ‘ultimate’ reality. (In fact, materialism is often called ‘illusory’ and ‘naive’ in Quantum mechanics) Here are many more references, from quantum mechanics, falsifying materialism as being true and validating Theism as to being true:

A Short Survey Of Quantum Mechanics and Consciousness Excerpt: Putting all the lines of evidence together the argument for God from consciousness can now be framed like this: 1. Consciousness either preceded all of material reality or is a ‘epi-phenomena’ of material reality. 2. If consciousness is a ‘epi-phenomena’ of material reality then consciousness will be found to have no special position within material reality. Whereas conversely, if consciousness precedes material reality then consciousness will be found to have a special position within material reality. 3. Consciousness is found to have a special, even central, position within material reality. 4. Therefore, consciousness is found to precede material reality. Four intersecting lines of experimental evidence from quantum mechanics that shows that consciousness precedes material reality (Wigner’s Quantum Symmetries, Wheeler’s Delayed Choice, Leggett’s Inequalities, Quantum Zeno effect) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uLcJUgLm1vwFyjwcbwuYP0bK6k8mXy-of990HudzduI/edit The Mental Universe – Richard Conn Henry – Professor of Physics John Hopkins University Excerpt: The only reality is mind and observations, but observations are not of things. To see the Universe as it really is, we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things.,,, Physicists shy away from the truth because the truth is so alien to everyday physics. A common way to evade the mental universe is to invoke “decoherence” – the notion that “the physical environment” is sufficient to create reality, independent of the human mind. Yet the idea that any irreversible act of amplification is necessary to collapse the wave function is known to be wrong: in “Renninger-type” experiments, the wave function is collapsed simply by your human mind seeing nothing. The universe is entirely mental,,,, The Universe is immaterial — mental and spiritual. Live, and enjoy. http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/The.mental.universe.pdf

As to the atheist’s poverty of evidence in ever rationally explaining consciousness, here are a few quotes:

‘But the hard problem of consciousness is so hard that I can’t even imagine what kind of empirical findings would satisfactorily solve it. In fact, I don’t even know what kind of discovery would get us to first base, not to mention a home run.’ David Barash – Materialist/Atheist Darwinian Psychologist “We have so much confidence in our materialist assumptions (which are assumptions, not facts) that something like free will is denied in principle. Maybe it doesn’t exist, but I don’t really know that. Either way, it doesn’t matter because if free will and consciousness are just an illusion, they are the most seamless illusions ever created. Film maker James Cameron wishes he had special effects that good.” Matthew D. Lieberman – neuroscientist – materialist – UCLA professor

Here are a few more quotes on the empirical poverty within materialism to ever explain consciousness coherently:

There is simply no direct evidence that anything material is capable of generating consciousness. As Rutgers University philosopher Jerry Fodor says, "Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious. So much for the philosophy of consciousness. Regardless of our knowledge of the structure of the brain, no one has any idea how the brain could possibly generate conscious experience." As Nobel neurophysiologist Roger Sperry wrote, "Those centermost processes of the brain with which consciousness is presumably associated are simply not understood. They are so far beyond our comprehension at present that no one I know of has been able even to imagine their nature." From modern physics, Nobel prize-winner Eugene Wigner agreed: "We have at present not even the vaguest idea how to connect the physio-chemical processes with the state of mind." Contemporary physicist Nick Herbert states, "Science's biggest mystery is the nature of consciousness. It is not that we possess bad or imperfect theories of human awareness; we simply have no such theories at all. About all we know about consciousness is that it has something to do with the head, rather than the foot." Physician and author Larry Dossey wrote: "No experiment has ever demonstrated the genesis of consciousness from matter. One might as well believe that rabbits emerge from magicians' hats. Yet this vaporous possibility, this neuro-mythology, has enchanted generations of gullible scientists, in spite of the fact that there is not a shred of direct evidence to support it." http://www.merkawah.nl/public_html/images/stories/ccvsgwrepr.pdf

Verse and Music:

John 8:58 "Very truly I tell you," Jesus answered, "before Abraham was born, I am!" I AM - MARK SCHULTZ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hILaSh78yHQ

bornagain77

Lennox is always a breath of fresh air and bracing thought! kairosfocus