Jeremy Sherman Rambles Without a Due Look on Ultimates

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Jeremy Sherman Rambles Without a Due Look on Ultimates · Where is Jeremy Sherman from? · Correspondence of Hans Georg Lundahl: With Jeremy Sherman PhD

Overcoming Science's Addiction to Unexplained Explanations
Understanding Us | 24 April 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAZEFSldFIE

"Then again, 4:35 since God is a supernatural being there isn’t great correspondence. Empirical evidence is 4:41 natural evidence, and God is assumed to be supernatural."

If God isn't the evidence, but what the evidence is about, what is the problem?

"Just posit a supernatural 4:59 being that explains everything, and no one can prove you wrong."

Not really to the point.

Our point is not just that God can explain everything, but that some of the things can be explained by nothing other than God.

Matter and mind being united in man is one of them, especially compared to a Big Bang ideology for the atheist alternative.

Man having language is one of them, especially compared to an Evolutionary ideology saying man and language did not exist 5 million years ago.

"Once we’ve explained how motivation emerged from the matter 10:32 in motion that preceded it, we can reduce our explanations to it."

There is a problem here. You won't ever do that. You have been doing that for decades and without success.

Dito for information.

It's however somewhat unsettling to see how, after all your talk about rejecting unexplained explanations, you are willing to just assume items of Big Picture science like Big Bang Cosmology or Evolution.

"Until then we have to remember 10:40 that motivation is an unexplained force that we’re using in our explanations. The same goes 10:46 for information, effort, interpretation, drives, even function or fittedness, 10:52 and all the other unexplained entities and forces that scientists and philosophers posit."

So are atom, particle, motion, space and time.

There is no such thing as explaning only from explained explanations, since so called primaries are what you explain with.

You can explain turquoise to someone who knows green and blue. It may not help him to immediately imagine turquoise, but it may help him to identify turquoise when he sees it, or it may even trigger a memory of having seen turquoise.

But you cannot explain turquoise, green or blue to a man born blind. It's natural that primaries are left unexplained.

This applies to formal explanation (I explained the "form" or "whatness" pf turquoise), to epistemic explanation (I can reduce proof to what I observe and what I can prove and what others observe and what I can prove from that, but I cannot prove why my observations are to be trusted), and, as obviously, it applies to causal explanation, in which God would be not just a primary, but if correctly assessed by Theists even the primary.

"He knew that his theory was built on unexplained assumptions 11:29 and that the burden was still on scientists to explain them."

On an atheistic view, which was his, this is correct. A theist can explain the drive to survive as coming from God's injunction on the appropriate creation day, but an atheist can't.

Overall, how he formulated it shows his obsession with avoiding a halt, accepting an unexplained in the explanations, an unproven in the proofs, an undefined in the definitions and an uncaused cause.

As for you, what is your motivation for regarding him as a great scientist?

I am assuming you have no actual proof his explanation was right.

"Life and its motivated information-interpreting 12:36 struggle for existence emerges within nothing but simple chemistry."

You are not the brightest bulb in the lamp when it comes to the abiogenesis debate.

You've bought the Atheist propaganda hook line and sinker and swallowed an offer to get monopoly on London Bridge!

Understanding Us

@jeremyshermanPhD

I always enjoy the tone-deaf incurious arrogance of commenters self-pleasuring to their own authority by decreeing from on high who is dumb compared to themselves.

The core question is how did mattering emerge from matter. There are four basic answers. The first three are often blurred by equivocation.

1. Panpsychism: It didn't everything always mattered (to God or to atoms).
2. Eliminativism: It didn't because mattering isn't real. It's just a figment.
3. Mysterianism: We'll never have an answer to that question.
4. Emergentism: Yes, that is the question and the burden is on science to answer it.

I have plenty of encounters with folks who are self-satisfied with those first three answers. I'm friends with a scientist/priest who was chief astronomer to the Vatican and I play in bands with plenty of Christians. I've taught religious psychology and history. I'm familiar with your solution. Everything matters to God who is a mystery. Combination of 1 and 3.

I've also written articles about how scientists who claim that DNA solves it need to heed the question posed by the religious. At least the religious don't fall for #2 which is prevalent among scientists.

Hey, thanks for watching my video!

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@hglundahl

@jeremyshermanPhD Reposting, in case my answer got quickly deleted:

@jeremyshermanPhD First, you are welcome, and thank you for giving me sth to refute, first the video, then your answer to one of my comments.

It's getting to my blog assorted retorts, if you are interested. Join the words, add a dot and the extension for blogspot.

"1. Panpsychism: It didn't everything always mattered (to God or to atoms)."

Panpsychism usually refers to another position.

Namely that atoms have conscience. For me, this is the only coherent position an atheist can hold.

Now, as you use the word, contrary to previous usage, a Christian would actually qualify as a "panpsychist" ... everything that ever existed at a given moment mattered to God, either because it was He Himself, or because it was something He had given existence.

However, because of how the word is usually used prior to you, it involves a heresy Christians reject, and you can get away with grouping part of what the Christians say along with panpsychism classic against other things Christians say (like rejecting the classic version of pansychism) to make Christianity look incoherent. (Or could, if that were what you wanted, a bit further down you seem somewhat less antichristian).

"2. Eliminativism: It didn't because mattering isn't real. It's just a figment."

Does mattering cover information? A figment presupposes a mind that can be (at least momentarily or "with half its mind") fooled.

So, what you have called eliminativism isn't coherent.

"3. Mysterianism: We'll never have an answer to that question."

I agree this is an unsatisfactory answer.

"4. Emergentism: Yes, that is the question and the burden is on science to answer it."

Which it so far hasn't. The hard problem of consciousness is still hard.

Not only that, but it's like imagining that two colours make a shape.

Two coloured lines may make a shape, but a line is in and of itself a shape.

Emergentism is as counterintuitive as two colours, without any reference to shape, creating a shape.

"I'm friends with a scientist/priest who was chief astronomer to the Vatican"

The Jesuit Consolmagno?

"Everything matters to God who is a mystery. Combination of 1 and 3."

Oh, OK, I see, you weren't trying to paint Christianity as self contradictory sorry, you were trying to paint it as a combination.

I would say:
1) you have misstated the question by trying to tie solution 4 to its terms ("how mattering emerges from matter")
2) and you forget that if God is a mystery, it's not mysterious that He was always a mind before He created matter.

So, how mind emerges isn't even a question. God is eternally mind. God creates both matter and other minds, including ours.

If anything is mysterious, it's how He combined mind and matter. Both are substances, distinct from each other, but both seem to be subjects of the same actions or states of mind. E. g. a mind experiences hypnosis and a brain acts in alpha waves or theta waves. A mind decides to talk, and a brainscan discovers activity in Wernicke's and Broca's area.

To a Christian it is clear, both are substances, and yet both are in this life correlated.

"At least the religious don't fall for #2 which is prevalent among scientists."

Thank you for that one. I did not even know #2 was prevalent among scientists, I thought it was #4.