The eternal and the infantile

To the proposal of eternal life with the loving Father the Freudian atheist objects with the ad hominem sounding retort that it is to wish to return to infantile bliss.

To that objection, one might reply: surely this is a scientifically testable thesis, so how would you test it? I have an idea: look for someone who surely did not experience infantile bliss yet does wish to experience eternal life in union with the loving Father. If the Freudian atheist is correct, then no such person exists, for the only plausible cause of such a wish is the memory of having experienced something like it in the past.

Has this experiment been conducted? No? If not, then why does the Freudian atheist pontificate so confidently?

What would happen if we found an individual who most definitely did not experience anything like infantile bliss yet desires eternal happiness. Would the Freudian, ala Popper, simply admit that their (as in "her" or "his") claim was false?

No, they would recast their claim, but this time no longer dress it up like science. They would say that it is childish to desire eternal bliss. This new claim is more like the statement, which Alaistir McGrath is so fond of mentioning, that "democracy is better than fascism," than it is like something said by a scientist. That is, such a claim that can neither be proven nor disproven via the scientific method, yet it can be reasonable and argued for and against (actually, this statement seems to me to be more like "fascism is better than democracy," but that's beside the point I'm making now).

Now that the newly dressed, no longer Freudian, atheistic criticism is now dressed in the language of philosophy rather than science, it no longer has recourse to a pseudo-scientific ad hominem. Now we can talk about the relation between the desire for eternal happiness and those desires had by a mature adult.

And in defense of the desire for eternal bliss I would pose the following quasi-rhetorical questions: Isn't it also an adult desire to be happy and loved? Isn't such a disposition the mark of a healthy person? Why not want more of the most important thing (or one of the most important things) in life?

response to friend who suggested that the self is a democracy of neural parts

This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level. No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies. None of them thinks about the whole as such. And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist). None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well? And why not parts of these parts, et...

what is an organism?

How about defining it as an instance of functional complexity? And treating the list of properties as following necessarily from this definition? Okay, this is very diamond-in-the-rough (or perhaps zirconium...) but here goes my thoughts on the matter: (Complexity) Many diverse parts (functional) acting for the sake of the whole I think I need to add something like "not as the instrument of another" or something like that. Given that they act together as one whole and given entropy, etc., the organism will need to posses more order than its surroundings (homeostasis). It will therefore need to take in energy (nutrition), which it will use to sustain its readiness to interact with its environment so as to preserve its own being (homeostasis again?), but which will eventually break down (death), so that in order for that life form to continue it will need to duplicate itself (reproduction), which, upon occurring, will involve both development (growth) to maturity and...

If the universe is eternal and determinism is true, then...

...in that case it would be possible in principle to retrodict the past ad infinitum. The present would either contain an infinite amount of information or the universe would be cyclical, albeit (methinks) in a manner analogous to the plot of the Lorenz attractor.

The Human Question

Search This Blog