Subversive Thinking: The new atheist Christopher Hitchens dies of cancer at 62

Friday, December 16, 2011

The new atheist Christopher Hitchens dies of cancer at 62

Christopher Hitchens, one of the so-called "New Atheists", lost his battle against cancer. He died at 62.

Hitchens said, even after his disease, that he didn't believe in the afterlife. But if the afterlife exists (as I think it does), then I think that by now he could have changed his opinion.

Hitchens was a seasoned polemicist and a harsh critic of religions. But in my opinion, he wasn't a sophisticated thinker. Just watch his performance in his debate with William Lane Craig in 2009 (in which Hitchens was badly beaten):

Debate - Does God Exist - Christopher Hitchens Vs William Lane Craig from Iglesia Bautista Nueva Esperanza on Vimeo.

Anyway, let's hope he will be in a better place now. QEP.

Professional materialistic debunkers' concessions on the evidence for psi phenomena and psi research

-I agree that by the standards of any other area of science that remote viewing is proven. Richard Wiseman on remote viewing research (See more)

-It is a slight misquote, because I was using the term in the more general sense of ESP -- that is, I was not talking about remote viewing per se, but rather Ganzfeld, etc as well. I think that they meet the usual standards for a normal claim, but are not convincing enough for an extraordinary claim. Richard Wiseman's clarification of his previous citation on remote viewing. Emphasis in blue added (See more )

-The SAIC experiments are well-designed and the investigators have taken pains to eliminate the known weaknesses in previous parapsychological research. In addition, I cannot provide suitable candidates for what flaws, if any, might be present.- Ray Hyman on SAIC experiments on remote viewing. (See Hyman's paper)

-The other major challenge to the skeptic's position is, of course, the fact that opposing positive evidence exists in the parapsychological literature. I couldn't dismiss it all. Susan Blackmore in "Confessions of a Parapsychologist" (p.74)

-Human beings are not built to have open minds. If they try to have open minds they experience cognitive dissonance. Leon Festinger first used the term. He argued that people strive to make their beliefs and actions consistent and when there is inconsistency they experience this unpleasant state of "cognitive dissonance", and they then use lots of ploys to reduce it. I have to admit I have become rather familiar with some of them. Susan Blackmore in "The Elusive Open Mind" (pp.250-1). Emphasis in blue added.

-I am glad to be able to agree with his final conclusion--"that drawing any conclusion, positive or negative, about the reality of psi that are based on the Blackmore psi experiments must be considered unwarranted". Susan Blackmore's reply to Rick Berger's critical examination of her psi experiments. (Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, vol.83 , April 1989, p. 152)

-Why do we not accept ESP as a psychological fact? Rhine has offered enough evidence to have convinced us on almost any other issue... Personally, I do not accept ESP for a moment, because it does not make sense. My external criteria, both of physics and of physiology, say that ESP is not a fact despite the behavioural evidence that has been reported. I cannot see what other basis my colleagues have for rejecting it... Rhine may still turn out to be right, improbable as I think that is, and my own rejection of his view is - in the literal sense, prejudice. Donald Hebb (see more)

Atheistic materialists/ naturalists on the motivations and dangerous consequences of naturalism

-Being a philosopher, of course I would like to think that my stance is rational, held not just instinctively and scientistically and in the mainstream but because the arguments do indeed favor materialism over dualism. But I do not think that, though I used to. My position may be rational, broadly speaking, but not because the arguments favor it: Though the arguments for dualism do (indeed) fail, so do the arguments for materialism. And the standard objections to dualism are not very convincing; if one really manages to be a dualist in the first place, one should not be much impressed by them. My purpose in this paper is to hold my own feet to the fire and admit that I do not proportion my belief to the evidence. William Lycan's paper "Giving dualism its due" (emphasis in blue added)

-"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". Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis (p. 3. Emphasis in blue added)

-Nothing did indeed come from nothing... the universe is in fact a big confidence trick. There's truly nothing here. All there is it's a separation of opposites. Peter Atkins in this video.

-A brain was always going to do what it was caused to do by local mechanical disturbances. Daniel Dennett, in his contribution to A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind (p.247. Emphasis in blue added). Think about the implications for morality, moral choice and moral responsability, if Dennett's materialistic-determinitic view is right.

--In a deterministic universe, we understand that a criminal's career is not a matter of an unconditioned personal choice, but fully a function of a complex set of conditions, genetic and enviromental, that interact to produce the offender and his proclivities. Had we been in his shows in all respects, we too would have followed the same path, since there is no freely willing self that could have done otherwise as causality unfolds. There is no kernel of independent moral agency -- we are not, as philosopher Daniel Dennett puts it, "moral levitators" that rise above circunstances in our choices, including choices to rob, rape, or kill. Tom Clark, Director of the Center for Naturalism, in his article "Maximizing Liberty". Emphasis in blue added.

--The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. Richard Dawkins in River Out Of Eden (p.155. Emphasis in blue added).

-Now, if you then ask me where I get my 'ought' statements from, that's a more difficult question. If I say something is wrong, like killing people, I don't find that nearly such a defensible statement as 'I am a distant cousin of an orangutan... I couldn't, ultimately, argue intellectually against somebody who did something I found obnoxious. I think I could finally only say, "Well, in this society you can't get away with it" and call the police.

I realise this is very weak, and I've said I don't feel equipped to produce moral arguments in the way I feel equipped to produce arguments of a cosmological and biological kind. But I still think it's a separate issue from beliefs in cosmic truths. Richard Dawkins in this interview.

-There is a non-overlapping and exhaustive distinction between ideas that are false or true about the real world (factual matters, in the broad sense) and ideas about what we ought to do – normative or moral ideas, for which the words ‘true’ and ‘false’ have no meaning. Richard Dawkins, ‘Afterword’ in John Brockman (ed.), What Is Your Dangerous Idea?, (London: Pocket Books, 2006), (p. 307)

-The modern age, more or less repudiating the idea of a divine lawgiver, has nevertheless tried to retain the ideas of moral right and wrong, not noticing that, in casting God aside, they have also abolished the conditions of meaningfulness for moral right and wrong as well. Richard Taylor in his book Ethics, Faith, and Reason (pp.2-3). Compare it with Dawkins' quote above.

-There is no such a thing as objective morality. We got that straightened out. Morality in human cultures has evolved and is still evolving, and what is moral for you might not be moral for the guy next door and certainly is not moral for the guy across the ocean, the Atlantic or the Pacific Ocean, and so on. Massimo Pigliucci in his debate with William Lane Craig. Emphasis in blue added.

-The moral principles that govern our behaviour are rooted in habit and custom, feeling and fashion. Paul Kurtz in his book Forbidden Fruit (p.65). (Keep in mind that Kurtz is the founder of Prometheus Books, an atheistic publishing company which directly or indirectly endorses abortion, bestiality, infanticide, transvestism, zoophilia, paedophilia, pornography and other similar practiques, as you can read in this post.)

-The position of the modern evolutionist is that humans have an awareness of morality because such awareness is of biological worth. Morality is a biological adaptation no less than hands and feet and teeth. Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. Michael Ruse, The Evolutionary Theory and Christian Ethics, in the Darwinian Paradigm (pp. 262-269. Emphasis in blue added.)

-If ... there are ... objective values, they make the existence of God more probable than it would have been without them. Thus we have ... a defensible argument from morality to the existence of God. J.L.Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (pp. 115-116)

-I think there is a certain degree of plausibility among atheists in the view that without some kind of transcendental intelligence in the universe, there can be no objective moral laws.

Moral laws are maxims which tell sentient beings that certain actions are to be deemed moral or immoral. But how could such laws exist in the absence of any mind or sentience in the universe at all? Are moral laws objective in the way that laws of nature are? They do not seem to be, for few would argue that "murder is wrong" existed in some Platonic realm of ideas when galaxies were forming over ten billion years ago and there was no sign life or consciousness anywhere in the universe. The use of the word "law" implies an objective existence of unchanging moral maxims independently of sentience. Yet it appears that there can be nothing objective about so-called "moral laws", because it seems absurd on its face to say that maxims which tell sentient beings that certain actions of sentient beings are moral or immoral could exist in the absence of sentience.

It seems to me that all ethical codes must ultimately be man-made, and thus there could be no objective criteria for determining if human actions are right or wrong. Admitting that moral laws are man-made is equivalent to acknowledging that ethical rules are arbitrary and therefore human beings are not obligated to follow them.

...But ethics does not come into play in the history of the universe until very recently--when Homo sapiens appeared. It is possible that moral laws have existed since the Big Bang, but that they could not manifest themselves until sentient beings arose. However, such a view implies that there is some element of purposefulness in the universe--that the universe was created with the evolution of sentient beings "in mind" (in the mind of a Creator?). To accept the existence of objective moral laws that have existed since the beginning of time is to believe that the evolution of sentient beings capable of moral reasoning (such as human beings) has somehow been predetermined or is inevitable, a belief that is contrary to naturalistic explanations of origins (such as evolution by natural selection) which maintain that sentient beings came into existence due to contingent, accidental circumstances. If objective moral laws are part of the natural universe (not part of some supernatural realm), then the universe cannot be unconscious--it must be, in some unknown sense, sentient. Few naturalists would want to accept such a nonscientific pantheistic conclusion... But given that moral subjectivism is just as logically viable as moral objectivism and that moral objectivism is implausible if a scientific naturalism is true, I think that there is a good case for the nonexistence of objective moral values. Keith Augustine, in the original version of his online paper "Defending Moral Subjectivism". Emphasis in blue added. (Note: Keith has informed me that currently he has new opinions about these meta-ethical questions and that it's likely he'll update his online article. But I've mentioned the original version of his article because it summarizes in a rigurous philosophical form the subjectivism and relativism implied by naturalism, as evidenced by all the citations on morality by naturalists above)

-Naturalism", I believe, is often driven by fear, fear that accepting conceptual pluralism will let in the "occult", the "supernatural. Hilary Putnam, in his contribution for the book "Naturalism in question"

-How is it that so many philosophers and cognitive scientists can say so many things that, to me at least, seem obviously false?... I believe one of the unstated assumptions behind current batch of views is that they represent the only scientifically acceptable alternatives to the anti-scientism that went with traditional dualism, the belief in the immortality of the soul, spiritualism, and so on. Acceptance of the current views is motivated not so much by an independent conviction of their truth as by a terror of what are apparently the only alternatives. That is, the choice we are tacitly presented with is between a "scientific" approach, as represented by one or another of the current versions of "materialism", and an "unscientific" approach, as represented by Cartesianism or some other traditional religious conception of the mind. John Searle in The Rediscovery of the Mind, pp. 3-4. (Emphasis in blue added).

-Naturalism is, indeed, inherently skeptical. Naturalism naturally gives rise to skepticism and the naturalists’ only way of answering such skepticism is to beg the skeptic’s question. Radical skepticism is not, as naturalists tend to think, a dispensable feature of the new scientific account of man but its natural corollary. David MacArthur in his paper "Naturalism and Skepticism" (Note: Keep in mind that the "skepticism" to which MacArthur is referring to is not pseudo-skepticism, but philosophical skepticism, i.e., rougly, the view that we cannot have true knowledge)

-If there is no purpose to life in general, biological or human for that matter, the question arises whether there is meaning in our individual lives, and if it is not there already, whether we can put it there. One source of meaning on which many have relied is the intrinsic value, in particular the moral value, of human life. People have also sought moral rules, codes, principles which are supposed to distinguish us from merely biological critters whose lives lack (as much) meaning or value (as ours). Besides morality as a source of meaning, value, or purpose, people have looked to consciousness, introspection, self-knowledge as a source of insight into what makes us more than the merely physical facts about us. Scientism must reject all of these straws that people have grasped, and it’s not hard to show why. Science has to be nihilistic about ethics and morality. Alex Rosenberg, in his article "The Disenchanted Naturalistic Guide to Reality". Emphasis in blue added.

-If beliefs are anything they are brain states—physical configurations of matter. But one configuration of matter cannot, in virtue just of its structure, composition, location, or causal relation, be “about” another configuration of matter in the way original intentionality requires (because it cant pass the referential opacity test). So, there are no beliefs. Alex Rosenberg, in the comments on his article mentioned above. (Note: If there are no beliefs, is the belief in naturalism rational? And for that matter, is there any actual and objective difference between rational and irrational beliefs, if beliefs don't actually exist at all? Judge by yourself the logical and intellectual consequences of naturalism)

-There is no room in a world where all the facts are fixed by physical facts for a set of free floating independently existing norms or values (or facts about them) that humans are uniquely equipped to discern and act upon. Alex Rosenberg, same article.

-I believe that this is one manifestation of a fear of religion which has large and often pernicious consequences for modern intellectual life... My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind. Darwin enabled modern secular culture to heave a great collective sigh of relief, by apparently providing a way to eliminate purpose, meaning, and design as fundamental features of the world. Thomas Nagel in "The Last Word" (see a comment on it here). Emphasis in blue added.

-In our worldview, we are just another tiny byproduct of nature, special in no sense to anyone but among ourselves, subject to a plethora of ramdom accidents and forces, and there is no perfect or supreme being at all, least of all us. Richard Carrier in his book Sense and Goodness without God (p. 259) Emphasis in blue added.

-When we have exhausted all options, and still conclude there is no longer any prospect of happiness, death becomes an acceptable alternative. Richard Carrier, same book (p.342. Emphasis in blue added)

Subversive Thinking

Friday, December 16, 2011

The new atheist Christopher Hitchens dies of cancer at 62

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