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Naturalism need not make sense in order to rule

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From a review of Richard Weikart’s The Death of Humanity by Mike Keas at Christian Post:

Many things are striking about Weikart’s powerful treatment of his subject, but I noted, in particular, his discussion of some statements from atheist biologist Richard Dawkins. These statements have a curious, persistent, and revealing inconsistency to them.

Here is Weikart, for example, on a 2007 interview with Dawkins:

[C]onsider how Richard Dawkins responded when Larry Taunton asked in an interview if his rejection of external moral standards meant that Islamic extremists might not be wrong. Dawkins replied, “What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler wasn’t right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question.” Taunton admitted that he was stupefied by Dawkins’s answer — as he should have been. Anyone who thinks that making a moral judgment about Hitler is difficult has lost their moral compass completely and has no business pontificating about any moral issue (or proclaiming that he has discovered the “root of all evil” — which is what he called religion, of course). (p. 80)

So Dawkins thinks we can’t rationally criticize Hitler’s actions. Compare that with his Afterword to a 2007 book, What Is Your Dangerous Idea? Dawkins wrote there: “Nobody wants to be caught agreeing with that monster, even in a single particular.” The moral monster Dawkins referred to was Adolf Hitler. So which is it? On the one hand Dawkins (like all the rational and informed people I know) considers Hitler a moral monster. On the other hand, he proclaims that we can’t rationally criticize Hitler’s genocidal racism.

There’s more. … More.

Sure, there’s more. The main thing to see is the one thing that opponents of naturalism (nature is all there is) persistently miss—and it is their mistake, not the naturalist’s—is that naturalism does not need to make sense. It only needs to be imposed and the naturalist rests content with whatever outcome.

Once people start telling us that our brains are shaped for fitness, not for truth, that mathematics does not correspond to reality (it is just something we evolved) or that there can be non-evidence-based science defending the multiverse (which, of course, gives naturalism a free pass), it’s our own fault if we don’t “get it.”

It’s even more our own fault if we don’t “get” the fact that criminalizing dissent and claims that we evolved to need coercion (free will is a user illusion) are benefits, in the naturalist’s view, not merely features of their approach to science.

One gets weary of people acting shocked when the normal outcome of what their neighbours now believe is visited on them.

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Comments
...naturalism does not need to make sense. It only needs to be imposed and the naturalist rests content with whatever outcome. Illogical AtheismMung
May 3, 2016
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