Thread by @EveKeneinan

This is the difference between atheists who are actual professional philosophers and online pop atheists.

This is what a reasonable discourse sounds like.

So, since there is no prima facie case that belief in God in unreasonable or irrational, nor even a sophisticated case—there is NO CASE that is conclusive, the MOST one can argue is that the atheism is the most reasonable position.

It isn’t but that is the most one could argue.

You can see how much a sham the atheist demanding proof is by the way that radical leftists do the same thing with biological sex. “There’s no evidence.”

Since almost everyone believes in God and in the reality of male and female, we get caught flat-footed.

What do you even SAY to a person who flat-out denies the reality of biological sex? Where would you even BEGIN that argument?

Such a person either literally does not know what they are saying or they are SO FAR down a postmodern rabbit hole that they actually think EVERYTHING IS JUST LANGUAGE.

I would probably be NICE if we could change reality, JUST BY TALKING ABOUT IT DIFFERENTLY, but it doesn’t work that way.

The OTHER postmodern rabbithole is “everything is power relations.”

The truth is “everything can be analyzed in terms of power relations.” That doesn’t mean “everything is power relations.” That second part is obviously false.

Power relations are like language in that way. They are omni-present, so they make good candidates for “the one thing” to reduce everything else to, like Marx’s class conflict or Freud’s sexual neurosis.

You can’t talk about anything without using language, so you can always try to REDUCE everything to language.

The sophists got this in 500 B.C.

You can’t think about anything without using thought. Thinking involves though. Wow. Shocker.

But about 200 years of philosophers wanted to get “So everything IS thought” out of “whenever we think of anything, thought is involved, because we’re thinking .”

“Everything is thought.” “Everything is atoms in the void.” “Everything is social construction.” “Everything is psychological mechanisms.” “Everything is political power struggles.” “Everything is vibrating strings.”

These ideas don’t work.

There is a sense in which all creation is ONE, but it is complexly articulated SYSTEM. It may be ONE SYSTEM but nature and reality are pretty complex.

The system that we call ‘reality’ or ‘creation’ needs to be understood in a systems analysis sort of way. It has systems at every level. Political realities are not physics realities, nor reducible to them.

I respect natural science as investigating key aspects of physical reality. But that’s not nearly the only things we need knowledge about. What we most need, I think, is a correct philosophical anthropology.

We REJECTED the Cartesian dualist picture of man as THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE—as rightly ridiculous, but we now have no picture at all. Are we the ghost? Are we persons with absolute rights? Or are we the machines, just animals here for a while to die?

Lately there was an idiotic thing written by an emasculated man at Harvard who was publicly confession he had joined with some of his male classmates discussing the hotness of the women in their classes.

He was very ashamed of this.

Why would a healthy male be ashamed of finding women attractive?

Because he is failing to treat them like autonomous disembodied Kantian pure subjects.

Because our philosophical anthropology is screwed up. We literally DO NOT KNOW WHAT WE ARE.

Are we “autonomous Kantian subjects”? Do we REALLY BELIEVE—as Kant had to—that our bodies have NOTHING TO DO WITH WHO WE ARE?

Do we even WANT that to be true? Kant had a HORROR of bodily urges, especially sexual ones. They threatened his AUTONOMY.

The Enlightenment went to war with HUMAN NATURE when the went to war with the whole past Western tradition.

They weren’t just rejecting some bad ideas Aristotle had about physics (although quite good for Aristotle’s day) … they were rejecting EVERYTHING.

Idiots.

When you throw out all the accumulated wisdom of your civilization in the conceit that you can re-build everything from the ground up, you don’t know how, but you have a method and you’ll improvise—you are going to blunder around through war and crisis until you relearn.