materialism – TheCommonAtheist

Science and Religion—The Errant Arguments on Abortion

Can one be pro-choice and anti abortion?

When does life begin and when does a fetus become human? The current arguments on abortion are faulty because they begin with the errant assumptions of physicalism—that consciousness is an emergent property of matter.

I’ve seen as many arguments as I can imagine—a fetus is just a clump of cells, or a baby is not a human (or even alive) until certain levels of brain activity and viability are achieved, but is this true? When does real life begin?

The idea that certain parts must develop (even to the point of extremes) that an embryo is not really a baby, alive, or even human yet is in error. A body is not made of parts like a car, but grows from within. In fact, an embryo has the code, yet has has no parts. Those are arbitrary demarcations for our understanding only. But a baby isn’t made of parts. That’s not the nature of any organism—only our scientific way of looking at them. There is a big difference between assemblage and growth. We are the same creature as the zygote, in a different phase of replication. The code is the creature that links it to consciousness.

Neurons are not parts. Cells are not parts. They are the inner structure created through self similarity, or cell division. You could easily say the fully grown human is still the original zygote. It is the same entity and code, just with more inner structure, more complexity. The human being is still the zygote. And the multiple cells are the inner differentiation of the original entity. We are the exact same original throughout. We were not assembled by bringing parts together. We are the original entity.

Life begins before conception and therefore, during conception and after it. It is a process, a continuum.

Abortion arguments on both sides are based on the assumptions that life begins through biology, but idealism clearly shows that biology begins with life—that we are not the emergence consciousness but “in-consciousness”. We are a process of replication where birth and death may seem like points on a page, but really contains the entire book.

The whole abortion argument is based on the physicalist paradigm, which is false—that consciousness is an emergent property of matter, though it is the other way around. It seems there are 2 camps on this issue and herein lies the real argument—taking responsibility for your actions or not—and the arguments are built from both sides on this responsibility.

Scientism and Materialism—The Glove in the Hand of Atheism

New Atheism has been largely built on the back of materialist/physicalist scientific views of reality the past 150 years. What will become of that when that model runs out of defenses, and more so, has become more idealist than it will admit?

The materialist world we live in (cars, money, secular ethics, waste) is a direct descendant of the scientific adoption of materialism—one produced the other. If you hate the consumer world of getting the gadgets, pillaging nature, then when you’re dead your dead, you can thank science for rejecting idealism without evidence for that claim.

But that is about to change

If you want to change the world we’ll have to adopt a more complete approach to the actual discoveries of the materialist world that gave atheism a leg to stand on. But what has physics discovered in its quest to prove materialism true? Idealism.

Multiple lines of reasoning from divergent discoveries converge into idealism. Materialism is currently adding more suppositions, more miracles to their theoretical demands. The latest is this —“hidden-variable theories—the proposals to provide explanations of quantum mechanical phenomena through the introduction of unobservable, hypothetical entities. Ie; metaphysics. This is coming from multiple fronts.

So what will become of atheism? Idealism requires no god but supposes consciousness is the primal, fundamental property that precedes all others. The switch on and in the near future there will be a metaphysical lean in the science of pure materialism, which is already idealism with the belief that it’s not.

Discoveries in physics have undeniably mimicked idealism for decades, yet the commitment to materialism held its ground in spite of the obvious.

Imagining Reality

4 centuries ago religion determined the perimeters science had to work with—the birth of materialism changed the course of reality.

The difference between our imagination and reality may not be a significant difference. Since the particles we’re made of are in fact, imagery, or the non-existent material in nature. You too in fact are imagined without any stand alone reality.

Imagination is a self bounding, self limiting system. Your own imagination is limited by what you think is real, or possible, as well as being able to imagine what another has imagined. In the imaginative world there is no distinction between the metaphorical and the literal. Nearly all scientific discovery is preceded by imagination, then discarded as an arbitrary bit of byproduct and turned into an equation. But it precedes the equation and is fundamental to it! It is not however, the equation.

Myths are true stories that preceded a separation in the 1600’s between literal and metaphorical. That division is subject to the rise of literalism, a relatively new phenomenon.

To now rely solely on logic and reason is to examine a hypothesis in another closed system, verifying conclusions in the same system as they are hypothesized, which is a form of circular reasoning. Using logic to prove logic is a fallacy as backwards as using the Bible to prove the Bible. This is how science continues to think in christian logic.

So what are we to do? Materialism cannot validate itself, nor can physics validate it through measuring. It does however, validate idealism and imagination. Imaginary particles that have qualia without quantity.

Materialism (physicalism) is internally contradictory. It defines matter in a way that is not commensurate with mind, then tries to explain mind in turns of matter. Materialism defines matter as purely quantitative then tries to explain the qualities of experience in terms of quantities and measurements that don’t exist prior to such qualities.

We never come in contact with purely quantitative matter. Matter under materialism is a theoretical abstraction. It is not a fact of experience but a theoretical abstraction that may likely not exist in any form.

Who makes the theoretical abstraction? The minds of materialist. The abstraction of purely quantitative matter yet is the product of a mind. It exists only in the mind that creates it. Once it has created it, that same materialist mind then tries to reduce itself to it. That is the contradiction of materialism that has not produced a shred of evidence for emergence.