Maybe, but it’s fair to note that it has been a way out of serious religious commitment for many people. WK offers one example:
Biologist Stephen Matheson is a longtime critic of the theory of intelligent design. His extensive attacks on Stephen Meyer’s Signature in the Cell, for one, ranged from the substantive to the trivial and personal. The tone was frequently…abrasive, and we responded at the time. With Arthur Hunt, Dr. Matheson has debated Dr. Meyer in a forum at Biola University. Formerly a professor at an Evangelical Christian school, Calvin College, Matheson is still listed as a Blog Author at the theistic evolutionary website BioLogos, where it notes that he enjoys “explor[ing] issues of science and Christian faith.”
Well, his theistic evolutionary explorations have now terminated. As he reports on his personal blog page, where he took a hiatus of more than five years along with a break from his teaching, he is “happily” no longer a Christian.
Wintery Knight, “Can A Person Believe in Both God and Darwinian Evolution?” at Wintery Knight
WK goes on to talk about Howard Van Till, also a Darwin defender, once at Calvin College and now an adherent of Freethought (?).
One of the outcomes of the huge backlist of stories here at UD (over 24,000) is that interesting stuff turns up in searches. We ran a search on Matheson and this stuff came up from 2011 about why he is no longer at Calvin College: “Calvin College leaders sent a letter to students, parents, faculty and staff Friday saying a professor resigned after a student claimed she had a ‘multi-year sexual relationship’ with him, a college spokesman confirmed.”
Note: The original link out from UD to Fox News at that time is dead. But a search on expected terms turned up the page linked at this post from mlive in Grand Rapids.
Again, a link from UD to a remarkable statement by Matheson at his blog a decade ago went dead. But we found it at ScienceBlogs, courtesy tfk on April 12, 2012: “Your Discovery Institute is a horrific mistake, an epic intellectual tragedy that is degrading the minds of those who consume its products and bringing dishonor to you and to the church. It is for good reason that Casey Luskin is held in such extreme contempt by your movement’s critics, and there’s something truly sick about the pattern of attacks that your operatives launched in the weeks after the Biola event. It’s clear that you have a cadre of attack dogs that do this work for you, and some of them seem unconstrained by standards of integrity. I can’t state this strongly enough: the Discovery Institute is a dangerous cancer on the Christian intellect, both because of its unyielding commitment to dishonesty and because of its creepy mission to undermine science itself. I’d like to see you do better, but I have no such hope for your institute. It needs to be destroyed, and I will do what I can to bring that about.”
Matheson now blogs at (but, of course) Peaceful Science where he describes himself as a “secular humanist” (August 3, 2020).
All of which raises a question: Do people embrace Darwinism and then lose their faith? Or is it more like this: Darwinism is a convenient and socially acceptable explanation for loss of faith, which may also have other roots?
‘Do people embrace Darwinism and then lose their faith? Or is it more like this: Darwinism is a convenient and socially acceptable explanation for loss of faith, which may also have other roots?’
Who cares?
“He is a dreamer. Let us leave him. Pass!”
Remove ID and you cannot have a single law of physics, since no law can come out of chaos. The laws had to come from something with far greater intelligence than man, since man is bound by the laws. Something created energy, but we cannot. Energy is not created by anything, since it cannot be created. That leaves only a great intelligence who created all the laws, including the creation of energy.
Without ID, you cannot have life anywhere, since life cannot come from no life. Something cannot come from nothing.
Ideology isn’t really relevant. Darwin is simply a prestige brand-cult like Tesla and Bitcoin. Biologists who actually work with genes abandoned the actual theory a long time ago. When you need to be approved in the Correct Circles, you need to loudly cheer for the Prestige Brands, and loudly mock the Neanderthal Brands. Apparently Matheson feels the need to be approved.
“Believe in”?
Interesting how people use that verb with regards to Blind Watchmaker-ism.
Nobody ever says they “believe in” gravity or quantum physics or fluid dynamics.
One can be an IDvolutionist!
In other words, religion is compatible with modern evolutionary biology (and indeed all of modern science) if the religion is effectively indistinguishable from atheism.1
…
The frequently made assertion that modern biology and the assumptions of the Judaeo-Christian tradition are fully compatible is false.2
…
Evolution is the greatest engine of atheism ever invented.
Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent.3
————–
As the creationists claim, belief in modern evolution makes atheists of people. One can have a religious view that is compatible with evolution only if the religious view is indistinguishable from atheism.4
———
‘Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear … There are no gods, no purposes, no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s the end for me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning to life, and no free will for humans, either.’ 5
1- Academe January 1987 pp.51-52 †
2-Evolutionary Progress (1988) p. 65 †
3- “Evolution: Free will and punishment and meaning in life” 1998 Darwin Day Keynote Address 1 2 †
4- No Free Will (1999) p.123
5- Provine, W.B., Origins Research 16(1), p.9, 1994.
I love how they refer to themselves as FrEeThOuGhT or FrEeThInKeRs as if being an atheist is anything of the sort.
They adherently stink to atheism as the only possible and logical choice. All others are intellectually dishonest, and anyone who believes in the others are roobs. Religious thought is cancerous and should be terminated. Darwinian evolution is the only outcome and there is no reason to believe in other possibilities. This is not free thought and they certainly don’t want me to think differently. Their debates and protests are proof of that.
Now I’ll sit with my mug and sign saying “change my mind”
“Darwinism is a convenient and socially acceptable explanation for loss of faith, which may also have other roots?”
I suspect it is this in most cases. I’d say there are a lot of spiritually and intellectually lazy people who could easily shift worldviews based on what’s they see as popular or trending, culturally.
But the Big Questions still can’t be answered by Darwinism/Evolution/Atheism. D/E/A has nothing to offer, and it’s really pathetic that someone even with just half a brain would religiously embrace that slop of empty ideas. But, that’s where we are.
Andrew
A blind evolution requires a blind faith.
I think News has said it very well. We have two kinds of truths that we live by: objective and subjective truths. Objective truths are the same for all people everywhere and at every time. Like the law of gravity for example. Subjective truths vary, but are nonetheless true: pain, happiness, depression, glory, worship, insults. Somewhere in the Enlightenment, we were told that we must live for objective truth, and let ethics/morality handle the subjective ones. This division of labor led to many advances that we have come to appreciate: machines, electricity, airplanes, computers. But it also led to poverty of spirit.
In the aftermath of WWII, Victor Frankl talked about the deadening effect of Nazi materialism, writing a book “Man’s search for meaning”. Meaning is one of those subjective truths that no amount of objective truth is going to satisfy. Faith is a form of meaning, or as St Paul puts it, the evidence of things not seen.
So what can remove our faith?
Certainly not objective truths. Only subjective truths are good at that. Infidelity, shame, betrayal–these are all the sorts of subjective truths that attack our faith. Christopher Hitchens was a vocal atheist who openly admitted that the suicide of his mother in the apartment of a priest was the factor that caused him to hate the Catholic church in particular and God in general. I listened to him debate Doug Wilson, and Chris’ argument distilled was “I am so angry at God that I get even by not believing he exists.” As an example of objective logic it totally failed, but Chris didn’t care.
So can objective truth, can Darwinism destroy faith?
Probably not, but having dispensed with subjective truth, it is very convenient to tell people that you are a Darwinian who no longer accepts the validity of subjective truth. And maybe you mean it, maybe those subjective truths of betrayal and shame are easier to bottle up, once you repeat the Mantra “only matter only” enough times.
Matheson and van Till may fool “Peaceful Science” people but they don’t fool me. Atheism has been the refuge of traitors, scammers, and degenerates since the beginning of written history. It is only since the Modernist century that atheism regained respectability. Now we see what that respectability consists of–a cheap tuxedo over prisoner’s orange. And now that tuxedo is threadbare and ripping at the seams.
EugeneS/9
Except in the case of evolution there is no need for blind faith. But if you want to ignore it you can be blind to the evidence.
No part of your reply to Eugene actually discredits him
You make a accusation claiming that he ignores the evidence of evolution
And what version of evolution are you referring too
I hope it’s not Darwinian evolution because that’s a philosophy and that’s what most people here hate
Are you referring to modern synthesis, were natural selection isn’t the centerstage, it’s still immensely important, but there’s so many other factors that poor little old man Darwin didn’t know about
And so far for all of your evidence the only form of evolution that we have seen so far is that an organisms adapt to its environment
NOBODY IS BLIND TO THIS OR ARGUES IT!
So are you talking about abiogenesis because that’s very debatable or have you been blind to all of the science on that
And evolution seems to be very dependent on our immensely fine-tune physics
Which is generally the starting point of a lot of Christians (we both agree YEC are wrong don’t bring them up)
Also are you referring to macro evolution or micro evolution
In any case Darwin didn’t have a freaking clue about any of this
And was completely blind to all of the evidence that science is found today, much of which does and does not support his original theory
And if did them Lamarck wouldn’t be making a come back
But magically his philosophy, oops I mean, sorry scientific theory was able to adjust to all of it
Hooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwww Convenient
And that’s because Darwinian evolution can explain everything from a fish to a toaster
It has a very powerful God of gaps formula too
Much like if you can’t explain it you can claim God did it
When you can’t explain it then you can claim it’s evolutionary Sprandel with the magic of evolution
So when evolution fails, well, it’s just Sprandel but then when it succeeds it’s evolution toiling away making everything perfect
That’s exactly like God of gaps that is literally god of gaps
And if you can’t see that and you claim it to be this wonderful for scientific theory then you were willfully ignorant
How many times has in organ been tossed away is evolutionary Sprandel to be found out later that it actually had important function and still does. Appendix is a great example, consciousness is the current evolutionary sprandel (thanks Coyne you so cool)
There have been so many organs that have been pulled out of the closet that were deemed evolutionary Sprandel because we couldn’t figure out what it was at the time
This does not make a good scientific theory because it can explain what ever, that is a huge weakness in the theory and people are willfully blind to that because they don’t want to except that their theory it’s just the reverse of God of gaps, it’s godless gaps.
Robert Sheldon/10
“Truth” being defined how in this case?
Faith that our lives have meaning in the sense that they fulfill a purpose conceived by some other being? How is that better than defining our own purpose?
True faith should be impervious to any other influence. This is why I take the strength of the attacks on evolution as a measure of how unsure the attacker is of their own faith.
The trope of the angry atheist is an old and a tired one. It is absurd to be angry at a being you don’t believe exists. I am not angry at Emperor Palpatine or Lord Sauron.
I was raised as a Christian and, for a while, was as certain God and Jesus exist as I am that the Sun exists. Over time, however, I became more interested in science and gradually lost my faith. I still regard much of the core morality of Christianity as good and if anything angers me it is how corrupt the public manifestations of the faith in the US have become, the televangelists, prosperity gospelers, the so-called pastors who preach the sort of hatred and bigotry that has nothing to do with compassion, charity or the Golden Rule but everything to do with pandering to the worst instincts of their congregants.
No, the theory of evolution has nothing to say about God. There is no reason why a God could not have devised the processes of evolution to fulfill some mysterious purpose of His own.
What exactly have I betrayed or should I feel ashamed about?
I can point to Luther’s On the Jews and Their Lies, the Inquisition, the pogroms against the Jews or just so-called heretics over the centuries in Christian Europe, the colonization by those same Europeans of other lands, atrocious treatment of the indigenous populations such as being forcefully dispossessed of their lands and their children confined to boarding-schools where they were forced to wear European clothing and forbidden to speak their own languages or practice their own faiths, all by those who considered themselves good Christians by the standards of their times.
The fact is that people have been behaving badly towards their fellows throughout recorded history whether they were religious or atheist because the problem is within all of us and until we have the humility to acknowledge this rather than the arrogance which says my “in-group” is better than all the rest, this will continue regardless of faith or the lack of it.
Robert Sheldon is down right poetic at the end of post 10:
At 13 Seversky asks,
Nothing like an illusory self making up illusory purposes for your life, eh Seversky? 🙂
The point Rosenberg, an atheist, is making is that, if atheism is true, then our lives truly are objectively meaningless.
But hey, you don’t have to believe Alex Rosenberg, even though he is an atheist himself, As Dr. Craig points out in the following video and article, many leading atheistic philosophers in the past, such as Sartre and Russell, have also honestly admitted that, without God, life is objectively meaningless, but choose, (as if they had the free will to choose), in an act of self delusion, to make up illusory purposes for life.
The fact that leading atheistic philosophers themselves honestly admit that, without God, their life is objectively meaningless, and yet they choose to make up illusory meaning and purposes for their lives anyway, underscores the fact that Atheism itself can not possibly be true but instead Atheism must be based on a delusion.
Namely, if it is impossible for you to live as if your worldview were actually true then your worldview cannot possibly reflect reality as it really is but your worldview must instead be based on a delusion.
Moreover this act of self-delusion on the part of atheists, (of making up illusory meaning and purposes for their lives although they personally believe their lives are objectively meaningless), besides being self-refuting to their worldview, is also of an extremely limited benefit for them.
Numerous studies have now shown that faith in God has a tremendous beneficial effect on both our mental and physical health.
As Professor Andrew Sims, former President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, states, “The advantageous effect of religious belief and spirituality on mental and physical health is one of the best-kept secrets in psychiatry and medicine generally.”,,, “In the majority of studies, religious involvement is correlated with well-being, happiness and life satisfaction; hope and optimism; purpose and meaning in life;,,”
In fact, in the following study it was found that, “those middle-aged adults who go to church, synagogues, mosques or other houses of worship reduce their mortality risk by 55%.” and live 9.45 and 5.64 years longer,
Thus, it is readily apparent that the Atheist’s attempt to create illusory meaning and purposes for his life, minus belief in God and an afterlife falls dramatically short for the atheist on both the mental and physical level.
Personally, I don’t see how anyone can possibly live their lives without any hope whatsoever that their lives, and especially the lives of their loved ones, will continue on in a heavenly paradise.
Moreover, it is not as if belief in a heavenly paradise is something for which we have no evidence.
In fact, as Dr. Egnor has pointed out, we have far more evidence that heaven is real than we have evidence for Darwinian evolution.
So it is not as if Christians are asking atheists to believe in some ‘pie in the sky’ fairy tale. To repeat, we, literally, have far more evidence for the reality of heaven than we do for Darwinian evolution.
Supplemental notes on the surprising scientific evidence supporting the reality of heaven and supporting the reality of our ‘quantum’ souls,
Verse:
“Faith that our lives have meaning in the sense that they fulfill a purpose conceived by some other being? How is that better than defining our own purpose?“
Not to be insulting here, but it will sound that way
Because as a single spec in an infinite universe, you have zero intrinsic value. You are meaningless, worthless, and effectively nonexistent. The only real worth you may have would be for breeding and food for something else. Your value can’t simply be declared as value is placed on you by something else finding worth and purpose in you. By yourself you are meaningless. If you existed but no knew what value would you really have? No one cares if they don’t no known.
Secondly if you think you have purpose and value derived from yourself, then you would be delusional, a psychopath, naive, arrogant, or all of the above.
It would simply take one person who cared not for your self given value to eliminate it.
Victims of abuse, severe bullying (what happened to me), torture, violence and so on know this to be very very true. We spend years repairing our self worth and often rely on others to provide it for us
And Darwinian evolution doesn’t provide me it actually strips at
So a person can pretend that they’re special all they want and everybody else can consider them crazy
In the world of science you can tell yourself in the mirror all you want but you have purposing meaning. Meanwhile I’ll be fetching your medications so you can cope with this horrible world
Because your self-worth and purpose is no more in illusion than love, your consciousness, your feelings, and anything else that you value
In the end you’re just a carbon bag that moved around 90+ years and then you stop existing and you insignificant self purpose goes with it
(The human race is doomed to extinction at some point so no matter what anyone does it doesn’t matter)
If God doesn’t exist then we all suffer this fate
If God exists and gives human beings and life value then we can disregard this
So I hope for everybody’s sake that God exists because even if it’s Spinoza is God, it cared enough to allow us to continue our existence
Nonsense. There’s tons of evidence for evolution . . . or so we’ve been told. Repeatedly. Ad nauseum. Only . . . all of the supposed evidence seems to fall apart when it gets carefully examined.
We used to have scores of vestigial organs, junk DNA, a gradual and incremental succession of fossils, strata being deposited over millions of years, birds whose beaks evolve slowly over time, moths that evolve from white to sooty and back, and on and on.
But most “vestigial” organs have been found to be functional, “junk” DNA is now termed “non-coding DNA” after more and more of it has been shown to be functional, fossil succession has been falsified by “living fossils” and earlier manifestations of what appear to be modern organisms far back in the “fossil record,” strata contain tree trunks that cross millions of years of strata, carbon 14 is found in places where it shouldn’t exist such as the stretchy marrow in dinosaur bones that are supposedly 65+ millions of years old, finches beaks can change shape in a single generation due to epigenetic coding, the peppered moths story is a science myth as are Disney’s suicidal lemmings, a long and infamous list of “missing links” has been touted and then abandoned, and on and on.
Actually believing that prebiotic coacervates evolved into kangaroos takes a massive amount of faith, gullibility, or desperation for God not to exist.
-Q
@ querius
I mentioned that above really anything is considered evidence for evolution
Darwinian evolution is heads I win tails you lose
It explains the bad and the good
And as you and I put it, there are so many vestigial organs that have ended up being important but we’re declared useless originally by darwinsplain
Currently it’s consciousness, it’s just evolutionary sprandel.
Ta-da the power of evolution!
Now we just leave it at that and we have to except it. It is settled science because evolution did it, we don’t need to explore it anymore or actually even do science!
Godless gaps!
Seversky
Pravda and other Soviet propaganda sources were anti-Semitic and divisive from the moment Stalin took control. His 1st 4 years in power led to the death of 10,000 people, 600,000 of which were Jewish. As Hitler rose to power, nothing about Nazis being anti-Semitic was reported. Prior to Stalin agreeing to split eastern Europe with Hitler, Trotskyites were called Nazi agents among many other things. When the agreement was made with Hitler, Jewish communists who had fled Hitler were handed over to the SS via trains heading west. Even after the Hitler broke his deal with Stalin, Soviet propaganda within the Soviet Union never mentioned Jews as being targeted by the Nazis. 100s of thousands of people under Soviet control were pulled east after the invasion by Hitler, but most Jews remained where they were.
BobRyan: led to the death of 10,000 people, 600,000 of which were Jewish
Someone needs to read what he wrote before he posts it.
A reasonable estimate of “excess deaths” between 1932 and 1939 under Stalin is estimated from census counts at about 10 million, not 10 thousand.
Regarding treatment of the Jews, most nations have an abysmal record. Before the Second World War, most nations of the world accepted exactly zero Jewish refugees. Before 1941, the Soviet Union admitted around 250,000-300,000 Jewish refugees, the largest number of any nation on earth, but sadly, most were murdered by the Nazis after their invasion of the USSR in 1941. And how about the USA? The U.S. admitted only about 124,000 and turned away more Jews than the USSR gave sanctuary to, fulfilling only about 10% of the authorized quota. And now the U.S. is allowing a new wave of antisemitism. Lovely, isn’t it, JVL?
-Q
Bornagain77/15
How is a purpose we create for ourselves any more illusory than one created by a god?
They would still be objectively meaningless even if there were a god.
Belief in a god in the face a lack of substantive evidence for such a being is also arguably delusory.
In other words the study found a health benefit for any religious belief, which was also what Professor Sims claimed. None of those studies found that only Christian belief provided those benefits.
Which may well be the case for most people and explains the persistence of religious belief to this day. It may not be true but it makes people feel a lot better about life. Hence Marx’s comment about the “opium of the people”.
NDE’s may be reports of what patients actually experienced but that does not make them any more real than some sort of dream. They are near death experiences. Nobody has died and then come back to life days or weeks later to report what heaven is like.
AaronS1978/16
All very true and, as wrote above, may well explain the prevalence of religious belief. And, as you say, value or worth or meaning are not intrinsic properties of anything. They exist, like beauty, only in the eye of the beholder. So. even if there were a god who values us for some reason, that does still not mean we have intrinsic worth.
Which, if true, would also apply to a god who thought in the same way?
The theory of evolution in biology was not intended to provide psychotherapy for victims of abuse.
If you don’t value yourself, who else will?
At one level of description, yes we are a bag of chemicals and water but that is not all we are.
That is what most believers hope, yes. Unfortunately, the evidence from the Old Testament tends not to support that interpretation.
Earth to seversky- Your willful ignorance is not an argument. There isn’t any evidence that nature can produce coded information processing systems and living organisms are ruled by them. There isn’t even a way to test the claim that nature is up to the task. However, there is ONE and ONLY one known cause for coded information processing systems and that is via intelligent agency volition.
And that is substantive evidence for such a being. Especially when taken in with everything else. Without such a being all you have to try to account for our existence is sheer dumb luck. And that is the antithesis of science and reason.
What does the alleged theory of evolution in biology say? Somethings happened sometime in the past for some unknown reason and here we are? Thanks to evolutionary biology, evolutionary biologists still don’t know what determines biological form! The most basic question in biology remains unanswered.
BobRyan/19
Which was sort of my point. The anti-Semitism of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany was a continuation of what had been endemic in Christian Europe for centuries before. In other words, neither religious beliefs nor political ideologies vaccinate people against committing atrocities against their fellows. The fault is in us. What is needed is humility and compassion, not nationalism and exceptionalism.
Querius “ And now the U.S. is allowing a new wave of antisemitism. “
Could you elaborate? How is the US allowing a new wave of antisemitism?
Haven’t you read the newspaper accounts of increasing attacks and labels against Jews in the US?
Here’s a quote from a Jewish publication from last October:
While online media continues to ban people for various statements, this sensitivity has not extended to banning online hate speech against Jews.
-Q
Seversky has apparently gone off the deep end into his atheistic insanity and has now, literally, completely ‘lost his mind’
Seversky asks,
and Seversky also states,
For crying out loud, the denial of purpose for life is literally the defining foundational prerequisite in the Darwinist’s claim that life was created randomly by chance, and was not created by the purposeful intention of an intelligent mind.
Teleology, (i.e. goals, purposes) is simply denied altogether within the primary precept of random chance that lies at the basis of Darwinian thought,,
Again teleology, (i.e. goals and/or purposes) of any sort is simply denied altogether in Darwinian explanations for why life exists.
And yet Seversky, even though the denial of purpose for life is literally the defining prerequisite of the Darwinian worldview, has the audacity to ask, “How is a purpose we create for ourselves any more illusory than one created by a god?”
You simply can’t make this level of ignorance up. Nobody would believe it.
Moreover, Darwinists, although they insist, (with their primary claim that life is the result of random chance), that there is no teleology, (goals, purposes) for, or within, life, are, (self-refutingly), forced to use the language of teleology, i.e. of goals, purposes, in their explanations of life.
As biologist J. B. S. Haldane honestly confessed, “Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he’s unwilling to be seen with her in public.”
It is simply impossible for Darwinists to speak of biological life for any length of time without illegitimately using teleological langange.
As Stephen Talbott points out in the following article, it is impossible to describe the complexities of biological life without illegitimately using “language that avoids all implication of agency, cognition, and purposiveness” (i.e. teleology):
Denis Noble also notes that “it is virtually impossible to speak of living beings for any length of time without using teleological and normative language”.
This working biologist also agrees with Talbott and Noble’s assessment and states, “in our work, we biologists use words that imply intentionality, functionality, strategy, and design in biology–we simply cannot avoid them.”
Thus, the very words that biologists themselves are forced to use when they are doing their research, (words that invoke teleology, i.e. goals, purposes), directly refutes their Darwinian worldview and their foundational claim that there is no purpose in, or for, life.
Without mind, there simply can be no teleology and/or purpose, in, or for, life. (or in, or for, anything else for that matter).
As Michael Egnor explains, “Stated another way, physical processes (understood without teleology) have no purpose. Mental processes always have purpose. In fact, purpose (aboutness-intentionality-teleology) is what defines the mind. And we see the same purpose (aboutness-intentionality-teleology) in nature.
Intentionality is a form of teleology. Both intentionality and teleology are goal-directedness — intentionality is directedness in thought, and teleology is directedness in nature. Mind and teleology are both manifestations of purpose in nature. The mind is, within nature, the same kind of process that directs nature.
In this sense, eliminative materialism is necessary if a materialist is to maintain a non-teleological Darwinian metaphysical perspective. It is purpose that must be denied in order to deny design in nature. So the mind, as well as teleology, must be denied. Eliminative materialism is just Darwinian metaphysics carried to its logical end and applied to man. If there is no teleology, there is no intentionality, and there is no purpose in nature nor in man’s thoughts.”
Thus for Seversky to ask,,,
,, is for Seversky to profoundly misunderstand what the foundation of his own Darwinian worldview actually entails. i.e. that life, (and everything else), is the product of random chance and is therefore completely devoid of any teleology, i.e. of any purpose.
It is only with the intentionality of a conscious mind that we are able to derive any teleology, i.e. purpose, for life at all. Teleology of any sort simply does not exist in the Darwinian worldview.
And I might add, (with the Mind of God being infinite in omniscience), then the teleology, i.e. purpose, that God has for our lives on this earth, and for our lives in the afterlife, is, necessarily, infinite in extent.
As the apostle Paul stated,
Ah, so now we’re hiding in Nihilism. From Wikipedia
So, lessee . . . what’s left to deny?
I know–Free Will doesn’t exist . . . and neither does Consciousness, which is merely a hallucination. And hallucinations don’t exist either and neither do we exist. So, how can God exist when nothing else exists? Hah! Gotcha now. LOL
Try stabbing your hand with a fork. Not too hard though because things might exist after all. Gosh, wouldn’t that be embarrassing . . .
-Q