The rules will
be simple. He can argue from any basis he
chooses, and I will confine myself entirely
to science. For we have reached the state
where Shermer's tired, out-of-date, utterly
mediocre science is far in arrears of the
best, most open scientific thinkers --
actually, we reached that point sixty years
ago when eminent physicists like Einstein,
Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg and Erwin
Schrodinger applied quantum theory to deep
spiritual questions. The arrogance of
skeptics is both high-handed and rusty. It
is high-handed because they lump brilliant
speculative thinkers into one black box
known as woo woo. It is rusty because
Shermer doesn't even bother to keep up with
the latest findings in neuroscience,
medicine, genetics, physics, and
evolutionary biology. All of these fields
have opened fascinating new ground for
speculation and imagination. But the king of
pooh-pooh is too busy chasing down imaginary
woo woo.
Skeptics feel that they have won the high
ground in matters concerning consciousness,
mind, the origins of life, evolutionary
theory, and brain science. This is far from
the case. What they cling to is nineteenth-
century materialism, packaged with a
screeching hysteria about God and religion
that is so passé it has become quaint. To
suggest that Darwinian theory is incomplete
and full of unproven hypotheses, causes
Shermer, who takes Darwin as purely as a
fundamentalist takes scripture, to see God
everywhere in the enemy camp.
How silly.
Shermer is a former Christian fundamentalist
who is now a fundamentalist about
materialism; fundamentalists must have an
absolute to believe in. Thus he forces
himself into a corner, declaring that all
spirituality is bogus, that the sense of
self is an illusion, that the soul is ipso
facto a fraud, that mind has no existence
except in the brain, that intelligence
emerged only when evolution, guided by
random mutations, developed the cerebral
cortex, that nothing invisible can be real
compared to solid objects, and that any
thought which ventures beyond the five
senses for evidence must be dismissed
without question.
I won't go into detail about the absurdity
of such rigid thinking. However, the impulse
behind dogmatic materialism seems intended
to flatten one's opponents so thoroughly
that through scorn and arrogance they must
admit defeat, conceding that science is the
complete refutation of all preceding
religion, spirituality, psychology, myth,
and philosophy -- in other words, any mode
of gaining knowledge that arch materialism
doesn't countenance.
I've baited
this post with a few barbs to see if Shermer
can be goaded into an actual public debate.
I have avoided his and his follower's
underhanded methods, whereby an opponent is
attacked ad hominem as an idiot, moron, and
other choice epithets that in his world are
the mainstays of rational argument. And the
point of such a debate? To further public
knowledge about the actual frontiers of
science, which has always depended on
wonder, awe, imagination, and speculation.
Petty science of the Shermer brand scorns
such things, but the greatest discoveries
have been anchored on them.
If you are tempted to think that I have
taken the weaker side and that materialism
long ago won this debate, let me end with a
piece of utterly nonsensical woo woo:
"Nobody understands how decisions are made
or how imagination is set free. What
consciousness consists of, or how it should
be defined, is equally puzzling. Despite the
marvelous success of neuroscience in the
past century, we seem as far from
understanding cognitive processes as we were
a century ago."
That isn't a quote from "one of those people
who believe in spirituality, ghosts, and so
on." It's from Sir John Maddox, former
editor-in-chief of the renowned scientific
journal Nature, writing in 1999. I can't
wait for Shermer to call him an idiot and a
moron. Don't worry, he won't. He'll find an
artful way of slithering to higher ground
where all the other skeptics are huddled.
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