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[Order Evan Sayet’s new book, Magic Soup, Typing Monkeys and Horny Aliens from Outer Space: HERE.]
Although Christianity is in decline throughout the West, and the youngest generation is the least religious since such figures have been counted, there does seem to be a budding, counterculture wave of young people today who are searching for more meaning and enchantment and divinity and numinosity in the universe than atheism has to offer. So the issue of God’s existence is still a vital one that commands and demands our full attention.
Evan Sayet agrees. Evan has had a wildly varied career as a stand-up comedian, a longtime writer for Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect, a speechwriter for then-President Trump, and the bestselling author of political commentaries such as The KinderGarden of Eden and The Woke Supremacy. His lecture to the Heritage Foundation on “How the Modern Liberal Thinks” remains, nearly 20 years later, the most-viewed lecture in Heritage Foundation history.
Evan’s brand new book, Magic Soup, Typing Monkeys and Horny Aliens from Outer Space: The Patently Absurd, Wholly Unsubstantiated and Extravagantly Failed Atheist Origin Myth, is a rebuttal to atheism, especially “New Atheist” icons such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. I posed some questions to Evan about the work.
Mark Tapson: In your new book you set out to debunk atheism and the New Atheists. But let’s talk about how you arrived at your own faith, because up until fairly late in your life you considered yourself an atheist, right? What led you out of that mindset?
Evan Sayet: Well, my atheism was like my politics: mindless. Just as my being a Democrat wasn’t the product of reason but, instead, was what our friend Andrew Breitbart would call just the “default factory setting” for someone born into my demographics, my atheism wasn’t a thoughtful belief. I’d fit Yale University professor David Gelernter’s description of not even rising to the level of an atheist; I’d simply not given God’s existence any thought at all.
MT: What changed?
ES: I started giving it some thought. It turns out, just as I always say that “the first time you think is the last time you’re a Democrat,” I now say that “the first time you think is the last time you’re an atheist.”
MT: Atheists don’t think?
ES: Not about God they don’t. Atheists ridicule, but they don’t refute and they offer nothing in God’s stead. They simply disqualify God out-of-hand as “not scientific” and that’s the end of that.
Since God is “not scientific” – at least according to the very limited and false definition of science that the Atheists have imposed on society which is really just “materialism” – the vast majority of today’s non-believers simply dismiss the God hypothesis having never given it even a moment’s thought. What those with a vested political interest in promoting non-belief don’t tell their young victims, however, is that, if one limits the definition of “science” to only those materials, forces and laws of our universe in the four dimensions of height, width, depth and time in which we humans can perceive, then any and every alternative to the God hypothesis is equally “not scientific.”
Given the fact that we are here and the universe exists, there are only two possibilities: either the universe was always here – which would mean it is outside the dimension of time – or it wasn’t always here, which means that it was created by forces, materials and laws from outside of our universe. The same limited and false definition of “science” that the atheists have inflicted on society in order to disqualify an intelligent creator renders impossible any alternative. Once one recognizes that there are two and only two possibilities and they are both, let’s say “extra-scientific” but one of them has to be true is when one, then, begins to think.
MT: The book has a pretty eyebrow-raising title. At the risk of asking you to give away spoilers, can you explain what you mean by “magic soup, typing monkeys, and horny aliens from outer space”?
ES: Well, let me start with the subtitle first. I begin this book with a quotation from Richard Lewontin, the Harvard “evolutionary biologist” and one of the most fervent of the new Militant Atheists, in which he confesses to the fact that he and other atheistic “scientists” promote as fact constructs that they know to be “patently absurd,” sell stories that they know to be “wholly unsubstantiated,” and embrace theories that they know to be “extravagantly failed” in their every test. He says that the reason they do so is because they have a “prior commitment” to atheism that supersedes their commitment to the truth.
So, the title includes some of their patently absurd, wholly unsubstantiated, and extravagantly failed theories such as that life arose from some sort of “Magic Soup” which they call the “primordial ooze” or that life began on earth when, billions of years ago, aliens built a spaceship and planted their seed in the earth. They call this theory “Directed Panspermia” and, given how absurd is their theory about Magic Soup, horny aliens from outer space having had sex with the earth is now the leading atheistic theory about how life might have started here. Of course, how it might have started there, the atheists don’t say.
MT: And the “typing monkeys?”
ES: Given that there are no known laws of any of the known sciences, or even a single observation, discovery or experiment – you know, what real scientists call “data” – going all the way back to the very first day of the world’s very first caveman that shows that even just one small part of even just one of their theories about origin and design is even possible, the Atheists simply attempt to make the case that their theories aren’t each and all and in every way impossible because, with “enough time,” anything’s possible.
This is known as the “Infinite Monkey” theorem, and chances are that you’ve heard it stated something like, “If you put enough monkeys in a room with enough typewriters for enough time, eventually they’ll type the collective works of William Shakespeare.” There is not a single atheistic theory that has been shown to even be possible, much less that they did, in fact, happen. Every single atheistic theory about the Big Questions comes down to “with enough time, anything’s possible.”
MT: Is there one argument in your book that you feel is particularly damning of atheism, a sort of mic-drop argument that atheists can’t rebut?
ES: I am leery to point out any one, because so much of the power of this book comes from the cumulative effect; how on issue after issue – across every single part of every one of their theories about origin and design – the atheists have nothing at all about anything at all, anywhere at all, ever that supports their efforts.
Still, given how heavily the Atheists rely on Darwinism – how the professional Atheists portray it as the be-all and end-all of science and how, when the Atheists say “I believe in science” all they mean is that they believe in Darwinism – I was surprised and shocked not only by how small, local, vague and contradictory a theory that it is, but that it, too is patently absurd, wholly unsubstantiated, extravagantly failed in its every test and nothing more than a more clever-sounding version of monkeys in rooms with typewriters.
MT: Atheists always condescend to believers by saying, “I believe in science.” But what do they really mean when they say that?
ES: All they mean is that they don’t believe in God and that they have blind faith that someday, after ten thousand years of trying and meeting with abject failure at every turn, the materialistic answers will finally all someday be found. There is no actual science that they believe in – no known laws of any of the known sciences or even a single observation, discovery or experiment (you know, what real scientists call “data”) going all the way back to the very first day of the world’s very first caveman – that they embrace. As I show in the book repeatedly, just to attempt to make their case, the atheists must not only reject all known science, but they must deny the very existence of science itself.
MT: Former congressman Thaddeus McCotter reviewed your book for Chronicles Magazine and said you understand something fundamental about the postmodern debate over God’s existence: that for the left, it is not a scientific inquiry; it is a political crusade. Is he right about that?
ES: Indeed. Atheism is not a scientific belief; it is a moral and political imperative. Here we need to be clear about the distinction between atheism – which is a personal belief – and the kind of Militant Atheism practiced by folks like Lewontin, Dawkins, Harris and the others.
Atheism, as a personal belief, has likely been around for as long as we humans have and, while it is sad for the individual who must believe that his life is meaningless, his death is imminent, his doom is eternal and that his every effort on this earth is futile, so long as God is infused throughout society, the cultural consequences are minimal.
Militant Atheism, on the other hand, which is the concerted and calculated effort to instill and enforce non-belief across the entirety of society as part of a political crusade, is a precursor and necessity for evil.
Militant Atheism is not an ideology in and of itself; it is a weapon wielded by would-be revolutionaries in order to clear the moral path to their rise to power and the ungodly way in which they then intend to rule. Just as the communists, for example, need to enforce non-belief in order to then govern as they do; the Woke need to enforce non-belief so that they can bring about the new world that they envision. This, in fact, is exactly what they mean when they talk about the “Great Reset.” Their plan is to revert humanity back to its very beginnings and then engineer a population that is created in their image. In order for them to take on the role of gods – whether it was the Leninists, the Stalinists, the Hitlerists, the Maoists or the fictional amalgamation of the four known as Big Brother – before those we call the “Woke” can take on the role of God, they must outlaw belief in the God that exists.
MT: What has the reaction to your book from atheists been so far?
ES: Just as one would expect. A lot of frothing at the mouth, a lot of name-calling. The way I tend to respond to them is to acknowledge that I am everything that they say I am. I’m a moron and I’ve been brainwashed and so and then I say, “but enough about me; tell me, what do you believe about the origin of the universe or the finetuning of the cosmos or how life might have come from the insentient” and, of course, they can’t. Not even Lewontin or Dawkins or Harris, et al, can offer even a theory that they don’t know to be anything other than patently absurd, wholly unsubstantiated and failed in its every test. As I’ve said, atheists can ridicule, but they cannot refute and they can offer nothing in God’s stead.
MT: Recently you discovered that positive reviews of your book are disappearing from Amazon.com. What do you think is happening there?
ES: No doubt the same folks who created logarithms to single out and censor posts and comments that go against the orthodoxies of the Left have done the same with those who attempt to shed light on the reality of God’s existence and the true purpose of the Militant Atheist movement. Non-belief in God is as essential to today’s Leftist revolution as it has been to all of the other militantly atheistic ideologies and censorship is essential to non-belief. Since the atheists cannot refute; they will not allow others to be heard. The other thing that all of these Militant Atheist movements have in common is people who call themselves “scientists” who have a “prior commitment” to their political cause.
MT: Given that there are untold thousands of books available today on the subject of the existence of God, why did you think the world needed one more?
ES: Most of the other books – or at least the ones I know about – are extremely earnest in their approach. These books all tend to litigate God’s existence which, just by the effort alone, gives atheism more credence than it deserves. To me, attempting to litigate the fine points of atheism is like attempting to litigate the fact that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes. By arguing over thread-counts and hemlines, you be giving credibility to the idea that the emperor might be wearing cloths. With atheism, there simply is no “there” there, and that fact needs to be not debated but exposed, ridiculed and laughed at.
MT: And with your background as a stand-up comedian and writer for Bill Maher as well as your more serious side, you were just the guy to do it.
ES: I think so. I also think that it’s necessary. By employing humor, snark and ridicule, I think my book is at once entertaining and enlightening. I realized that, if I was going to reach the audience I wrote this book for – today’s atheists who are deeply dissatisfied with life – it needed to be factual and convincing, of course, but it also had to be accessible, engaging and fun to read.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior
There was this old Sci Fi RV series during the 1960’s THE INVADERS about aliens from a dying planet who wanted to take over Earth they had to regenerate themselves every do often in glass tubes and they disintegrated when they died in a cloud of red smoke leaving their ashes behind and the Ships looked like a Inverted Wok
Who’s God are we talking about? The Muslim god? The Christian god? The Jewish god? The Deist god?
According to Judaism Yahweh has never come to earth and incarnated, so for Judaism Jesus was not God Incarnate nor was he the Messiah. Christianity is literally a Jewish heresy. That’s why according to the New Testament the Jews were happy to get rid of the heretic Jesus by giving their consent to the Romans to execute Jesus of Nazareth.
The you have the Deist God, this god created everything that exists but does not intervene or interfere with the universe, this god does not perform miracles.
The Christians persecuted, imprisoned, killed, slaughtered, and went to war with each other for centuries over HERESY and BLASPHEMY, over the nature and definition of the Christian God, the Donatist heresy, the Catharist heresy, there were many heresies that led to bloodshed. So who’s God are we talking about?
“Whose God” is irrelevant to the case I make in my book. You are conflating an intelligent designer with religion. The ONLY thing that I say about religion is that science and reason suggests that it would have to be a singular — monotheistic — God.
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The question still stands, what is God, what is God’s identity, nature, properties? Without a definition of what God is the word “God” becomes contentless, it becomes just a sound and a symbol identifying nothing.
To exist is to have identity, to be identifiable, to have definite properties, to have definition. to have limits, to have finitude.
This is not simply a scientific question but a philosophical question. The philosophical conflict is the primacy of existence versus the primacy of consciousness.
Is God a super-consciousness that creates existence? The rational and objective concept of “consciousness” identifies a property of some biological creatures, it is identifiable as a cognitive faculty that PERCEIVES that which exists but does not create existence. Therefore to call God a super-consciousness that creates existence ex nihilo is to obliterate the actual meaning of consciousness. Whatever God is, if God exists, cannot be any kind of consciousness. You would need a whole different concept and word for God to identify God.
To reiterate, existence is identity, to exist is to be some-thing, a-thing, a specific thing, with specific, limited, and finite properties.
Your stupid question stands because you want it to stand. If Sayet says it is irrellevant to what he is talking about why don’t you just accept it.
Maybe he just doesn’t want to engage in your circular gobbdegook nonsense with someone like you.
And yet, you’ve managed to write 5 paragrphs about something you haven’t provided a definition for…hmmm.
Stop drinking your bong water.
No doubt God is some “thing”, but he is a thing that is beyond our understanding. We are extremely limited in our understanding both by the mere four dimensions in which we can perceive and the limits of our specific and the limited laws of our sciences. This fact is reflected in the Atheists’ latest theories of the “multiverse” and “strings.” There is no evidence for nor reason to believe in either of these theories. The only reason the Atheists invente3d them was because they understand that the answer is outside of the laws and materials of our universe (the multiverse) and beyond our mere four dimensions (strings).
If you are extremely limited in your understanding and your God is beyond your rational understanding then you have no reason to claim that I or anyone else should listen to your argument that your God exists. You have ejected yourself out of reason. You are implicitly if not explicitly proclaiming that you, your argument, and your book should be ignored because your reasoning mind is so limited you cannot know the God you are claiming to talk about.
“Man’s mind is his basic means of survival—and of self-protection. Reason is the most selfish human faculty: it has to be used in and by a man’s own mind, and its product—truth—makes him inflexible, intransigent, impervious to the power of any pack or any ruler. Deprived of the ability to reason, man becomes a docile, pliant, impotent chunk of clay, to be shaped into any subhuman form and used for any purpose by anyone who wants to bother.
There has never been a philosophy, a theory or a doctrine that attacked (or “limited”) reason, which did not also preach submission to the power of some authority. Philosophically, most men do not understand the issue to this day; but psycho-epistemologically, they have sensed it since prehistoric times. Observe the nature of mankind’s earliest legends—such as the fall of Lucifer, “the light-bearer,” for the sin of defying authority; or the story of Prometheus, who taught men the practical arts of survival. Power-seekers have always known that if men are to be made submissive, the obstacle is not their feelings, their wishes or their “instincts,” but their minds; if men are to be ruled, then the enemy is reason.” – Ayn Rand
“Dominating philosophy from Plato to Hume was the supematuralistic version. In this view, existence is a product of a cosmic consciousness, God. This idea is implicit in Plato’s theory of Forms and became explicit with the Christian development from Plato. According to Christianity (and Judaism),
God is an infinite consciousness who created existence, sustains it, makes it lawful, then periodically subjects it to decrees that flout the regular order, thereby producing “miracles.” Epistemologically, this variant leads to mysticism: knowledge is said to rest on communications from the Supreme
Mind to the human, whether in the form of revelations sent to select individuals or of ideas implanted, innately or otherwise, throughout the species. The religious view of the world, though it has been abandoned
by most philosophers, is still entrenched in the public mind. Witness the popular question “Who created the universe? “—which presupposes that the universe is not eternal, but has a source beyond itself, in some cosmic personality or will. It is useless to object that this question involves an infinite
regress, even though it does (if a creator is required to explain existence, then a second creator is required to explain the first, and so on). Typically, the believer will reply: “One can’t ask for an explanation of God. He is an inherently necessary being. After all, one must start somewhere.” Such a
person does not contest the need of an irreducible starting point, as long as it is a form of consciousness; what he finds unsatisfactory is the idea of existence as the starting point. Driven by the primacy of consciousness, a person of this mentality refuses to begin with the world, which we know to
exist; he insists on jumping beyond the world to the unknowable, even though such a procedure explains nothing. The root of this mentality is not rational argument, but the influence of Christianity. In many respects, the West has not recovered from the Middle Ages.” – Leonard Peikoff
If one is an “objectivist” then one should believe in intelligent design. After all, there is NO objective evidence that it is even possible for everything to have come from nothing, for chaos to turn into precision, for life to have come from the insentient by luck and so on — no a single observation, discovery or experiment — while all objective evidence known says that it’s NOT possible..
The universe is eternal. Matter and energy change form all the time but they cannot go in or out of existence. Existence exists is the axiomatic starting point of consciousness. Existence exists prior to consciousness, only then can consciousness emerge. To be conscious is to be conscious of some-thing prior to consciousness, otherwise there would be no-thing to be conscious of. A consciousness, conscious only of itself, is a contradiction of what consciousness is.
The Big Bang Theory, if it is true, does not point to a super-natural consciousness that willed existence into existing, it points to an eternal cycle of implosion and explosion of matter and energy.
“This can be illustrated by reference to any version of idealism. But let us confine the discussion here to the popular notion of God. Is God the creator of the universe? Not if existence has primacy over consciousness. Is God the designer of the universe? Not if A is A. The alternative to “design” is not “chance.” It is causality. Is God omnipotent? Nothing and no one can alter the metaphysically given. Is God infinite? “Infinite” does not mean large; it means larger than any specific quantity, i.e., of no specific quantity. An infinite quantity would be a quantity without identity. But A is A. Every entity, accordingly, is finite; it is limited in the number of its qualities and in their extent; this applies to the universe as well.”
― Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand
Do yourself a favor and don’t waste your time with this clown. He is our rezidentura Objectivist idiot who loves nothing better than to insult Christians at Easter and Christmas, as well the rest of the year.
He has the same screeds that he posts ad nauseum which garner way more than his share of downvotes.
Several years ago even Daniel Greenfield told him basically what an a$$ he is.
“The fundamental concept [of religion] is FAITH. “Faith” in this context means belief in the absence of evidence. This is the essential that distinguishes religion from science. A scientist may believe in entities which he cannot observe but he can only do so only id he can prove their existence logically, by inference from things he does observe. A religious man, however, believes in “some higher unseen power” which he cannot observe and which he cannot logically prove. As the whole history of philosophy demonstrates, no study of the natural universe can warrant jumping outside it to a supernatural entity. The five arguments for God offered by the greatest of all religious thinkers, Thomas Aquinas, are widely recognized by philosophers to be logically defective; they have each been refuted many times, and they are the best arguments ever offered on this subject.
Many philosophers indeed now go further: they point out that God is not only an article of faith, but that this is essential to religion. A God susceptible of proof, they argue, would actually wreck religion. A God open to human logic, to scientific study, to rational understanding, would have to be definable, delimited, finite, amenable to human concepts, obedient to scientific law, and thus incapable of miracles. Such a thing would be merely one object among others within the natural world; it would be merely another datum for the scientist, like some new kind of galaxy or cosmic ray, not a transcendent power running the universe and demanding man’s worship. What religion rests on is a true God, i.e., a God not of reason but of faith.” – Leonard Peikoff
Are you really this desperate. No one knows or cares about Peikoff either.
“Peik” is Russian for “Jack.”
Biblical FAITH can best be defined as: A confident trust in a reliable source.
THX, your definition of faith will only fit something called: Blind faith.
The Bible does not demand nor require blind faith from believers.
It is ignorant to declare that there is no scientific evidence for a Creator God. Our generation has now amassed a trove of such ‘evidence’; ie, the physics and evidence of fine tuning throughout our cosmos and the biological information evidenced in DNA. Science must concede that such “information” can only come from an intelligent source.
Finally, reason and logic dictate that because our universe had a beginning, there is, of necessity, a reality beyond it. A reality, of necessity, that is not made of space, time & matter.
There is nothing in the Bible, when properly read and understood, that contradicts what science has uncovered for us concerning the natural world.
May the scales covering your heart be lifted before it is too late.
Kent
That’s a good comment but I think you mean the biological information present in our genes.
No, actually that definition of faith is promoted by the Atheists and it better describes the belief that the universe came out of nothing and nowhere for no reason, the cosmos went from utter chaos in the wake of the Big Bang to utter precision by “luck” (and against all known laws of science), that life came from the insentient without an outside and intelligent force, the DNA code and the machinery to translate and effectuate it came about by random interactions of insentient materials., Faith, in fact, is the belief in something unknown based on previous experience. When I used to lend the family car to my then-teenage children, I had no “evidence” that they would drive safety that night or not drink. I had FAITH that they’d do the right things based on past performance.
Yeah, it’s hard to believe a huge explosion randomly resulted in the universe, all its physics, life and sentience. That takes a lot of faith.
Do you have a reading disability? Go back and read what Sayet wrote and respond to THAT. Stop boring the shit out of everybody else on this thread.
Ayn Rand, the philosophical ignoramus who venerated Aristotle, would have believed that the universe is eternal, as “her teacher” wrote. Modern cosmology has pretty much put paid to that theory, but she would never have agreed to it, just as she refused to believe that smoking is linked to increased risk of lung cancer, even as she smoked as she was dying of lung cancer. She had a singularly illogical mind.
Bravo Mr. Sayet !
I started reading the book today and I find your written delivery impeccable.
I love it and I highly recommend it to both believers and atheists alike.
All the best to you !
Kent
Thank you, Kent! If you could put up a review on Amazon, it would be much appreciated. Amazon is blocking a lot of reviews claiming that they violate their community standards even though there is nothing wrong with them. Avoid the word “woke” for sure!
I look forward to reading it myself!
Bitter, table for one. One thing we can be sure of is no one is talking about your god…..Ayn Rand and Objectivism.
I have known Evan personally for years from our Los Angeles days. He is smarter than you. He is a published author. He will always be smarter and more accomplished than you. And he has a rapier wit….something you couldn’t comprehend.
All you offer up is the same screed that you run to because you are a bitter Christianity hating coward and bigot who despises everything everyone believes in.
He has spoken at the Heritage Foundation, appeared on the radio, and is a respected author and thinker.
You think throwing your worn out tired screeds that we have all seen a million times somehow puts you on his level. It doesn’t.
You will always be a small minded speck of dust in the universe.
Yeah, dust. Butt crust dust.
Hey Intrepid, let’s be fair; we’re all nothing but specks of dust in the universe. The miracle of it is that the Creator of that and any other universe knew us before we were formed and has loved us ever since.
Maybe God is a goddess? For you, anyway. Ayn Rand, right? You obviously worship her.
“The Catholic Church required its adherents to accept a specific religious doctrine. Because this dogma was based on faith, not facts, reason was out as a means of adjudicating theological disputes. For example, the Church decreed that Jesus was God; but Arius (250–336 AD), presbyter of Alexandria, argued that Jesus was a creation of God—divine, but not identical to God the Father. How could one side or the other prove itself right? Given that each side started from the nonobservable claim that there exist spiritual beings independent of bodily means—ghosts—there were no facts to appeal to—merely competing arbitrary faith-based beliefs. American philosopher Ayn Rand states: “When men deal with one another by means of reason, reality is their objective standard and frame of reference. But when men claim to possess supernatural means of knowledge, no persuasion [or] communication . . . are possible. . . . [M]ysticism reduces mankind [to] a state where, in case of disagreement, men have no recourse except to physical violence.” Inevitably, the Church condemned Arius and his supporters as heretics, and the dispute devolved into massive violence where “over three thousand Christians . . . died at the hands of fellow Christians.” (continued below)
OMG, not another homework assignment that no one reads. You simply come off as a desperate, verbose atheist that no one gives a crap about.
These aren’t even your words. Yet another atheist screed by another of your Objectivist heroes. Pathetic.
TLDR.
I think his heroes are more objectionists than objectivists.
I make this point repeatedly about atheists; they can ridicule but they cannot refute and they can offer no science in God’s stead.
I haven’t ridiculed you or anyone here with my comments.
I’m the one being ridiculed by the theists here. Every comment I have posted has been intellectual, philosophical, and serious. With no ad hominems, personal insults, or ridicule.
The existence of God is not a question that applied science can answer, it is a philosophical question involving philosophical axioms. Science rests upon rational philosophy and rational philosophy rests on the Law of Identity and its corollary the Law of Causality.
“Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.
If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness: a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something. If that which you claim to perceive does not exist, what you possess is not consciousness.
Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two—existence and consciousness—are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end. Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it.
To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of nonexistence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes. Centuries ago, the man who was—no matter what his errors—the greatest of your philosophers, has stated the formula defining the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete it: Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification….
Science was born as a result and consequence of philosophy; it cannot survive without a philosophical (particularly epistemological) base. If philosophy perishes, science will be next to go….
It is not the special sciences that teach man to think; it is philosophy that lays down the epistemological criteria of all special sciences.” – Ayn Rand
A Catholic thinker with sufficient temerity to question any tenet of the Church’s orthodoxy ran the risk of being charged with heresy. For example, the Church condemned as heretical several conclusions of John Scotus Erigena (810–877 AD)—Europe’s sole original philosopher for a full six hundred years—and burned one of his books so efficiently that not a single copy has survived. Likewise, the Church hounded Peter Abelard (1079–1142), the most brilliant European mind since Aristotle, throughout his life. Church officials condemned several of his conclusions, burned some of his writings, and finally sentenced him to perpetual silence. Abelard, the premier teacher and lecturer of his age, was forbidden to communicate in any form. A consummate master of Aristotelian logic, Abelard had infuriated Church watchdogs by his refusal to leave critically unexamined any faith-based belief. Durant makes the point eloquently: “What disturbed the Church more than any specific heresy in Abelard was his assumption that there were no mysteries in the faith, that all dogmas should be capable of rational explanation.” Even Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), centuries later to be designated the Church’s official philosopher, was in his era suppressed by Church censors. In 1277, the Bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, banned as heretical 219 propositions taught at the University of Paris, including several of Aquinas’s.” – Andrew Bernstein, “Christianity’s War against the Mind”
Abelard enraged Church watchdogs by having an affair with and impregnating the niece of a very high-ranking clergyman. The girl, a very brilliant child with a mind grown far beyond her years, was entrusted to the tutelage of Abelard and, when she got a little older, they fell in love. That was Peter Abelard’s crime. Read about it in one of the many medieval romances of the day.
Freedom. liberty, individual rights, private property rights, Laissez-Faire Capitalism, the personal pursuit of happiness here on earth, cannot be RATIONALLY and OBJECTIVELY defended simply by saying “My God wills these values, he has granted these rights to mankind”.
If freedom. liberty, individual rights, private property rights, Laissez-Faire Capitalism, the personal pursuit of happiness here on earth, the actual meaning of the “American” way of life, are what you seek to defend then a rational and objective defense is needed.
The Rights of Man and the existence of God are two separate issues. Rights can and have been successfully defended on secular, rational, and objective grounds. Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism has accomplished that historical feat,
“Although the notion that rights come from God served to establish America, it has not served and cannot serve to sustain America. This is because no matter how many people believe that rights come from God, there is no evidence for such a being, much less evidence that rights somehow emanate from his will.
Since the founding of America, positivists, utilitarians, and “progressives” have taken advantage of this fact. They’ve argued that the idea of “rights anterior to the establishment of government” is “nonsense upon stilts” (Jeremy Bentham), and that the idea of absolute, inalienable rights is “one with witches and unicorns” (Alasdair MacIntyre). Why? Because, they say, there is no evidence to support such rights. Accordingly, they profess, rights do not precede political laws but follow from them: Governments create laws, and the laws, in turn, dictate the rights and non-rights of the people who live under those governments. “Absent a government,” writes E. J. Dionne, “there are no rights.” Insofar as rights exist at all, say Stephen Holmes and Cass Sunstein, they are “granted by the political community” and they exist only to the extent that the legal system protects them.
To defend inalienable rights against the left’s relentless assault, we need an evidence-based, demonstrably true conception of rights. Never has this been clearer than it is today.” – Craig Biddle
https://theobjectivestandard.com/2016/04/why-religious-conservatives-should-embrace-secular-rights/
As usual THX, you manage to inject some facts and history into a discussion about God.
Congrats on that but railing against organized religion is not the same as refuting the existence of an ultimate Creator, which is the point of the book’s’ author.
I pray that someday you will be willing to let go of your contempt for organized religion long enough to consider the life and teachings of the Christ, Jesus of Nazareth.
In His brief ministry, He emphasized our ‘relationship’ with our Creator.
Now, before you react to my comments above, please consider consulting one of those Bible commentaries I suggested to you previously in order to better understand who Jesus really was and what He really taught.
True Christians (those who follow Jesus’ teachings) don’t wish to burn “heretics” but rather to listen and then convert them.
We don’t seek to silence them because we do not fear their arguments; rather, we see contrary views as an opportunity to better hone our presentation of the Gospel to better inform a blind and dying world of its path to salvation.
May peace and truth find your heart THX.
Kent
Desperate much? Yes you are that pathetic and full of crap.
Definitely buying Sayet’s book!
People, take note! THIS is the right reply!!!
“With ‘enough time,’ anything’s possible.’” Of course the word “enough” is a weasel word. How long is “enough” time? Whatever it takes? The trouble is that there isn’t enough time. Not even the 4.5 billion years of the Earth’s life could by mere mechanical change create living matter from dead. And it didn’t take the full 4.5 billion years. Life appeared nearly instantly as soon as the Earth was able to support it. And then it remained entirely microbial for maybe 2 more billion years, unchanged. That means no evolution was happening. Then at the Cambrian era, another explosion, not the evolutionary slow change over time but massive change in a tiny amount of time into a vast plethora of new complex life forms.
None of this can come from mechanical material chance.
It’s not just that “enough” is open-ended and, thus, meaningless, it’s that the concept that ANYTHING is possible requires one to deny the existence of the laws and constants of the various sciences. If there are laws and constants then, no, not just anything and everything is possible, even aftert a really, really, really long time..
Thanks for your response.
The problem is the atheists have formulated the idea the wrong way around. It’s not “With ‘enough time,’ anything’s possible.” It should be “With God all things are possible”. That’s how we get life out of dust. Like Pascal we need “The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, not the god of the philosophers.”
Stephen C. Meyer and others have done a nice analysis of this notion. The estimated number of elementary particles in the entire known universe is around 10 to the 80th power, and the total number of “quantum events” since the Big Bang is around 10 to the 135th power. Those numbers are large but nowhere large enough to assemble the simplest possible living cell by random chance- or even a few functional proteins for that matter. They are too small by thousands of orders of magnitude. If every “quantum event” since the Big Bang was a keystroke by a monkey at a keyboard, it would be extremely unlikely to ever produce more than a few lines of Shakespear. Materialists who pontificate about “billions and billions” of years don’t seem to understand basic combinatorics.
I, of course, cite Stephen repeatedly. What I’ve tried to do is create a book that is more entertaining (and thus more likely to be read by atheists who know that there has to be something more than time and chance) and, unlike Stephen, I talk about the cost of atheism and the real purpose of Militant Atheist movement as part of the Woke revolution.
Pan-Spermia is good example of a circular argument: it “answers” the questikn of the origin of life on Earth by crediting it to clever aliens who presumably originated and evolved elsewhere, begging the question how did their life first originate?
To my way of thinking, atheism is like solipsism.
Can solipsism ever be proven or disproven? No, it can’t. It sure seems that other minds exist out there beyond my own, but how could I or anyone else ever know for sure or prove it either way? My intuitive belief that other beings are conscious could just be a delusion in my own mind. But if I really believed that I am ultimately the only conscious being, would I spend my time trying to convince others of it? Would I suffer from “stage fright” when speaking in public? No, of course not.
Hardcore atheists are like a deranged solipsist. Indeed, some of them deny the reality of consciousness itself, claiming it is an illusion! But why would someone who believes that consciousness is an illusion try to convince others of it or even care what others think? Think about it. Common sense goes a long way!
Some mechanists have, in the past have suggested that the fundamental constants that describe the behavior of matter and energy in our universe are so essential that if any were missing, no universe could hold together. As an agnostic, I say I can’t know for certain, but I would suggest that these physical constants may be either the foot prints of God, or the rule book God had to go by to create the universe we get to inhabit.