Golo

the mystery of the missing mind

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“Of all the things I've lost, it's my mind I miss the most.” – Ozzy Osbourne, quoted in Foolish Words: The Most Stupid Words Ever Spoken

God love ‘em. I really have to chuckle at our village atheists here on the electronic sidewalks of Goloburg. The other day we were having a discussion about something and I mentioned God. Not wanting to waste an opportunity, one of our village atheists pounced on my statement and I received the inevitable challenge: “What god? There's no such thing. Really. He/she doesn't exist. Unless you have seen him/her? If so, please elaborate.” Most people will recognize this as the utterance of a mind that clings to something called materialism. It is the claim that only physical things exist and is the first assumption of science (The Ten Assumptions of Science, by Glenn Borchardt).

Well, since I do not ascribe to the belief that only atheists are entitled to physically see unseen things I countered with a request of my own. I substituted the word “mind” for “god” and asked our village atheist to show me his mind. Now I did not think that that was such a gargantuan task compared with holding up God by His collar for all to see. Surely our atheist believed he had a mind. He certainly wouldn’t believe in something, let alone employ something, he could not see, would he? If our atheist was guilty of that he certainly wouldn’t be true to his fellow traveler in atheism, Friedrich Nietzsche, who said: "I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth and do not believe those who speak to you of other-worldly hopes."

All our atheist had to do was to go to where ever he kept his mind, pop out that puppy, snap some photos and post a jpeg or two here on Golo for all the world to see. But all I got was some muttering to the effect that he was not sure what I meant and I should allow him to think on it as he wandered (and wondered) off into the electronic bit bucket of Goloburg. To this day I still don’t have a photo of his mind or even an explanation of why he couldn’t find his. If he couldn’t find his mind, the least he could have done was make one in a laboratory!

Well, anyone having done a little research into the beliefs of materialistic atheism soon realizes that this is one of their favorite tricks of levitation. That is, while claiming that only matter, matters, they hold up their sleeve certain beliefs in non-material things such as the mind, reason, or evolution. They even believe in things they know are scientifically impossible. Consider this startling admission by Nobel Prize winner George Wald:

“There are only two possible explanations as to how life arose. Spontaneous generation arising to evolution or a supernatural creative act of God. . . . There is no other possibility. Spontaneous generation was scientifically disproved 120 years ago by Louis Pasteur and others, but that just leaves us with only one other possibility. . . that life came as a supernatural act of creation by God, but I can’t accept that philosophy because I do not want to believe in God. Therefore I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible, spontaneous generation leading to evolution.” (George Wald, “Origin, Life and Evolution,” Scientific American (1978). Quoted in Joe White and Nicholas Comninellis, Darwin’s Demise: Why Evolution Can’t Take the Heat (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2001), 46)

They even believe in absurdities and unsubstantiated and counterintuitive explanations. These are known as fairy tales to the uninitiated. Consider Richard Lewontin, evolutionist and Marxist who said:

“We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.” (Richard Lewontin, “Billions and billions of demons,” The New York Review (January 9, 1997), 31)

Do you get the idea that the main purpose of materialism has recently been subverted into a tool for denying God?

They even have a received mythology they also expect you and I to believe. Evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould has written:

“The stereotype of a fully rational and objective ‘scientific method,’ with individual scientists as logical (and interchangeable) robots, is self-serving mythology.” (Stephen Jay Gould, “In the Mind of the Beholder,” Natural History (February 1994), 103:14)

While atheists see nothing problematic in believing in the invisibility of this evolution thingy that created life out of non-life, or the unseen quality of the mind, they think it’s a philosophical no-no to believe in the unseen nature of God. There is an old adage about glass houses and throwing stones I think atheists need to read up on.

Getting back to our village atheist’s dilemma of the missing mind. Where does he derive his mind? In a material-only worldview the mind is just the result of some chemical secretions of the brain working in concert with random electrical charges. If that is true then about the only thing our atheist can come up with is a jpeg of the smoke emanating from the fire in the hole science calls a brain. Do you think it might look something like the above jpeg?

I hope our village atheist hasn’t lost his self-respect (there’s another unseen entity) as a result of his realization that his mind is an illusion. It can be pretty rough as a letter writer to Time magazine put it. The writer responded to a series Time did on the mind and body in an earlier issue. He said:

“I’m not sure I’ll ever have the same degree of self-respect now that I know I’m just an illusion created by 100 billion jabbering neurons.” (Letters, Time, February 12, 2007, p. 18)

No wonder atheists borrow everything God is and does to make their universe work. I guess that is the price they have to pay when they rule out, a priori, a good portion of the evidence before they even start to examine the evidence.

So in the interest of helping out as much as I can, I have a suggestion as to where our atheist might look for his unseen mind. Just check your invisible skyhook. You know, that thing on which you guys hang all things unseen, things which you cannot account for, but really like to show off.



***To see from where I obtained the descriptive term “village atheist” please view my profile. Just scroll down to the lower reaches.