And within the same time frame, over at The Mormon Interpreter -- which was recently admitted by the author of both articles to have received its named from Doctor Scratch -- there is another yawn-fest of this variety by the same author:
MI wrote:Scores of studies show that religious faith or religious involvement correlates, on the whole, with superior physical, mental, and emotional health.
The Mopologists must be outliers.
At any rate, this is another essay just like all of his others that paint atheism as the tomb of despair; all there is are atoms in motion, if that. The author refuses to cite an atheist quote that isn't at least one hundred years old. One might think he would target New Atheism, or something that's relevant to stealing away the youth of Mormonism today. One might think such things, but one would be wrong. As usual, the author goes for fool's mate. No wonder this stuff never makes it to JSTOR.
@atheism wrote:You are a temporary, incidental accumulation of particles
HOWEVER: A ray of hope?
One problem with willful ignorance is that education tends to slip in beneath one's awareness. from his article asserting genetic information isn't material:
not sure? wrote:Hubert Yockey used a linguistic analogy to make the point that the information contained in the genetic code, although it is embodied in matter, is not itself material. It cannot be reduced to a chemical or physical property. He points out that the meaning of words or letter sequences, if they have any, is essentially arbitrary. It is determined by the natural language that they are seeking to represent, and is not an intrinsic property of the letters or their arrangement, let alone of the ink with which they may be printed on a page.
Huh. Now let's think about that. I wonder if ole Yocky is the only person to ever entertain such a thought? From the SEP article on eliminative materialism.
SEP wrote:Here we see a tension that runs throughout the writings of many early eliminative materialists. The problem involves a vacillation between two different conditions under which mental concepts and terms are dropped. The first scenario proposes that certain mental concepts will turn out to be empty, with mental state terms referring to nothing that actually exists.
We can stop at option one since the Sic Et Non idea is that the mind will never be found in the random neural firings of the brain. But you have to wonder if ole Yockey was onto something. If the information of the genetic code is embodied in matter, but is not matter itself, is it possible that mental states are embodied in matter, but not matter itself? There are some startling points to consider here. First, as a general response to eliminativism:
SEP wrote:In response to this line of reasoning, many have argued that it is mistake to treat folk psychology as committed to a quasi-linguistic structure to propositional attitudes (Horgan and Graham, 1991; Dennett, 1991). And even for those who find this reading of folk psychology plausible, there is a further difficulty regarding the relevance of neuroscience for determining the status of folk psychology. Some, such as Zenon Pylyshyn (1984), have insisted that just as the physical circuitry of a computer is the wrong level of analysis to look for computational symbol structures, so too, the detailed neurological wiring of the brain is the wrong level of organization to look for structures that might qualify as beliefs.
Yockey's reasoning leaves the author's king unguarded and quickly put into "check," as we entertain the possibility that mind is a very real thing not reducible to neural states yet constituted of matter.
But from whence cometh "checkmate?"
It may seem the author's king is already done in at this point. I might agree, but "mate" is properly understood when observing the column of squares already secured by his opponent's rook, upon which the author's king dare not tread in escape. Allow me to explain. What the "author" is attempting to show by his remarks about genetics is that the information within genetics can't exist in the mindless matter, but was encoded by the intelligent guidance of a creator. Do you see the problem here? Yes, I thought you might, but the author surely doesn't, nor will he, ever. The problem is that by positing the hand of God to account for the information, he denies an underlying ontological substance that might "encapsulate" the information natively. The information itself, isn't a real, non-material thing, it's a programmed, material thing bearing the mark of the programmer. I mean, certainly it makes little sense to think about an "out of genetic experience" by the logic of the DNA's sequencing floating around in it's own ontological life, nor would it make sense to speak of a "creator" as a glorified pineal gland that merges the two self-sustained worlds together.
Goodbye soul. God designed a mind that lives within the matter of a brain and bears his mark, and the bad news is, that to say the brain dies, is to imply that the mind dies with it.