Thursday, January 29, 2009

No Choice

It is becoming increasingly clear to me that people are very disinclined to be objective, and are driven or motivated by appetites that are never satiated.
Truthfully, I wonder how it can be said that anyone is objective about anything. Every decision made is influenced by something other than the cold, hard facts.
This is not to say that we all decide in accordance with our desires. Sometimes the evidence to the contrary or extenuating circumstances supply our better judgment with sufficient reason to withstand our predisposition.
But, our predisposed tastes and wants are considered and, upon a matter that leaves any room open for debate we will hold tenaciously to our bias despite any amount of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Which leads me to wonder about claims of objectivity from everybody from news reporters to historians to atheists to apologists.
Personally, I want everything I believe to be true. I am not disinterested when I weigh the evidence.
Disregarding the recent theatrics of Hitchens, Dawkins and Harris, and disregarding the admittedly more reasoned, but still biased replies of Zacharias, McDowell and Johnson, the question of God remains a strict choice, if you maintain objectivity.
Either you must accept the concept of God that consistently defeats any attempts to explain it entirely, or you must accept the concept of materialism that has no answer to the ultimate question of origin.
(Now, I do say that materialism is defeated by its own premise. It will not brook the possibility of the unexplainable, yet they have still to offer a scientific explanation for the beginning, and furthermore are mystified that you would ask such a question.)
But the choice of the matter remains, that you must accept the concept of God that you cannot explain or that you must accept that there is a beginning hopelessly shrouded in riddle but free from intelligent design.
I have considered what it would be like to be a materialistic atheist after the manner of Nietzsche.
I should be completely cut off from all moorings, without the slightest taint of prejudice in any matter, should have no bent for good or evil. They should have no standard to which to appeal. They should have no more sympathy for the hunted Jew than for the cockroach cringing in the shadow of a raised shoe.
But, (and this is telling) with the exception of clinical sociopathy, modern materialists all appeal to an idea, however nebulous, of good and bad.
Genocide, bad.
Why?
Strictly materialistically and mathematically speaking, I don't believe it can be proven that the death of a few hundred thousand people, even a few million in the over-crowded regions of India or Haiti would be detrimental to the larger population.
The dilemma presented them is an agonizing one, and does not contribute to overall mental peace and sanity. They are torn between an inherent recognition that there are taboos and their creed which demands that there are none.
They maintain they hold a higher standard of morality than believers in any god or God because they are truly altruistic and not doing good out of fear of judgment, but they cannot logically do this because there is no standard of morality.
Evil men are happier than the atheist. They have made a choice and are not nagged by the impossible effort of trying to pretend that there is none.
Atheists would tell you that there is no choice. This is the reason they refuse to engage with ID advocates, because ID advocates propose a weighing of the evidence.
Illogical, they say, because the supernatural has no weight. There is nothing to be weighed. Acknowledging the existence of a possible different option pulls the cornerstone from their entire philosophical structure.
The debate cannot be entered into.
In their self-imposed vacuum, their opposition to ID in schools and universities is not based on preference for one view above the other. They don't believe that there is another view.
But why the rhetoric? Why the anger at a God who does not exist?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Zooooommmmm!

Rae Ryan said...

over or under?

Anonymous said...

Over