The following was written by a guest blogger.
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Really I’ll try not to hog the blog, after just one more. The empiricism thing needs to be addressed, so here goes.
The Atheist’s claim that Atheism is an “empirical decision” is incorrect. Here’s why. There are very few if any literate people in the western cultures who have not heard of the concept of a deity. Now suppose we find a pocket of truly reclusive folks who have not ever been introduced to the concept. These folks might be considered a-theistic, assuming they do not worship a deity on their own. Now, take these folks and tell them about the idea of a deity. At that point the decision is forced to be made: accept or reject. The decision to become an Atheist is one of rejection, pure and simple. If one knows about the deity, one can’t just “be without”; either one accepts it, or one rejects it.
And the decision basis absolutely cannot be empirical, unless one changes the meaning of the word, empirical. Empiricism might be taken in a classical sense to mean sensory input. In this sense, if I stick my finger in a flame I can ascertain first hand that flames are hot. If I do it several times I can extrapolate that all flames are hot, and this is induction at work. Inductive logic is part of empiricism, but not all, because it has limitations that can be fatal.
Induction is subject to the “black swan issue”, which is this: “Every swan I see is white, therefore all swans are white”. But this is not true because I have not yet observed black swans, which do in fact exist. Similarly, I cannot say that “Fred does not exist, because I have never seen one”. Nor can one say that “this thing you describe does not exist, because I have not seen it”.
If “empiricism” is taken to be the modern form, then it means that experiments are devised that will both isolate and induce the hypothesized effect that is desired; the experiments will be conducted under controlled conditions, and the results analyzed objectively; the results will be screened using peer review; and other experimenters will attempt to replicate the entire thing. Plus it must be falsifiable, or it is just a tautology.
It is doubtful that any Atheist has used this procedure to eliminate the possibility of the existence of a deity. When an Atheist claims empiricism, what he generally seems to actually mean is that he, personally, sees no material evidence of a deity, and therefore the odds against are overwhelmingly against such an existence. But this of course is merely the induction talking, and the logical flaw is obvious_ except to the Atheist, it appears.
One might think that if 88% of the population claims knowledge that Fred does exist, then the denier might reconsider. But it doesn’t work that way with Atheism, because Atheism is based on denial and emotional issues, not on classical logic.
The college freshman daughter of an acquaintance recently told him that she had looked through the telescope all over outer space, and saw no god; therefore he does not exist. This is a crashingly poor piece of thinking. One does not see the carpenter when looking at a house, nor the engineer when looking at a cell phone, nor the biochemist when looking at an aspirin.
It appears that the study of science these days does not address the issue of the limitations of science. When an Atheist says that philosophical materialism is a subset of voluntary materialism, something is just very wrong. So I will point out again: empiricism voluntarily restricts itself to material subjects because that is what it can measure; it cannot measure non-material items (I’m going slow here on purpose_). This restriction is self-imposed due to inability to measure, not because there is nothing there. Empiricism says nothing, NOTHING about the existence or non-existence of entities outside its material purview.
On the other hand, Philosophical Materialism is the philosophy that nothing exists that is not material. This is not an subset of voluntary materialism, it is an unwarranted extension, a gratuitous extrapolation beyond the boundaries of empiricism. As I showed before, it collapses immediately into self-contradiction and paradox; it is false. Except of course to the Atheist, who doesn’t use such restrictive, absolute, logical constructs.
Atheists use logic that is inverted. Because there is no grounding, no absolute basis for their thoughts, then their thoughts are free to be selected in favor of the perpetuation of their worldview dogma. In other words, it is the opposite of rational, it is rationalized.