Hey guys, I am sharing few excerpts from different writers for a good debate. Plz give your view point and any other arguments to support your point. Thanks 1) According to a consistent Naturalism any notion of god must be excluded, but its more than that: any notion of good and evil, right and wrong, love and hate, etc., must also be treated as mythical. At best they are nothing more than helpful categories of thought, but categories with no existence (or ontology) of their own. Life would then be essentially meaningless since its ultimate goal is mere survival, a goal wholly unattainable in a world where death is guaranteed. 2) The trouble for the Naturalist comes into play when one considers the event of human thought. Since thoughts are events, all of our thoughts should be fully explainable in mechanistic terms, and not according to a person’s free-agency. But any thought which is not guided by what is “true” but guided rather by mechanistic, physical necessity is not rational. Hence, Naturalism, philosophically speaking, slits its own throat. 3)Victor Reppert, piggy-backing off the ideas put forth in the book, “Miracles,” by C.S. Lewis, which gave a well-articulated criticism of naturalism, gave the following syllogism to help summarize the argument: No belief is rationally inferred if it can be fully explained in terms of non-rational causes. If materialism is true, then all beliefs can be fully explained in terms of non-rational causes. Therefore, if materialism is true, then no belief is rationally inferred. If any thesis entails the conclusion that no belief is rationally inferred, then it should be rejected and its denial accepted. Therefore materialism should be rejected and its denial accepted. Reppert continues, “Explaining how a person, as a matter of personal history, came to believe something in a rational way is critical to understanding that person as a rational agent.” Naturalism unwittingly denies such an explanation. In essence, naturalism is a philosophy of existence which precludes human beings from being truly free, rational agents. The very power of reasoning which they use to levy arguments against God is the very power which gives witness to an “intellectual” source for reason in general. Rational inference is the ultimate elephant in the room during most atheist debates. 4)Professor Haldane of Oxford University said concerning the logical conclusion of a strict naturalism: “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true … and hence I have no reason to suppose that my brain to be composed of atoms.” Kashif N Chaudhry Caeser Ali Khan Zaeem Zia Ali Zaidi Nadeem H. Zaidi Khurram Zaki
Posted on: Mon, 14 Apr 2014 14:53:06 +0000
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