The Antichristian Phenomenon

As a continuation of my other article, I decided to make a follow-up post since while people might be aware or not, Cartesian dualism is one of the primary reasons why we have modern science and consider Atheism to be an equally valid philosophy alongside religion.

To understand why, we must first look into how Descartes defined the universe, namely that of the physical and the nonphysical. Everything we can touch, see, smell, feel and taste are of the physical world, everything else not such as thoughts and ideas. Basically a dichotomy made of the abstract vs the concrete. To consider the universe physical, we must also consider it as an object made for study as we can study the physical world but we cannot study the nonphysical (according to old belief, we now know we can study the mind as proven in Psychology and similar sciences).

In science, we are to reject the nonphysical since it cannot be properly reviewed. We look at the physical world as an object, something which can be rationally understood. Not surprisingly we started to reject Christianity and the Church by the time we also started to believe in Liberalism, in personal responsibility and freedom and that every individual matters in comparison to rather seeing a group of people than a group of individuals. To understand why the development of Liberalism is important we must understand that without a Divine Creator who has laid all the rules for us to follow, the only one being able to take responsibility is oneself. Personal resonsiblity, free will and freedom are the underlying foundations of  Liberalism and Atheism too embraces this idea, since if we don’t believe in a Divine Creator and a Holy Scripture then we only have ourselves to blame for our earthly faults and we must learn how to deal with it. Our morals come from ourselves, not from a Creator Mystique. In summary, one can basically say that by the time we really started to believe in the world as an object and rejected the nonphysical during the Enlightenment Era, Liberalism and then Atheism were later to be born. It is also interesting to see that it was at this point when the church was split between Protestantism and Catholicism, the former believing more on individual responsibility than the latter, thus also rejecting ideas such as Original Sin, which claims that we are to be blamed for the faults of our ancestors, thus rather grouping people up in a huge collective than seeing them as free individuals. This strongly opposes the idea of individual freedom and personal responsibility and was easily solved with the idea of baptism. Drop your head in some holy water and voila, the Original Sin is gone.

With the help of the Enlightenment Era we would soon give birth to Industrialism and it is now science is finally is starting to seriously take a spin. Many huge scientific improvements were made around the 19th century or after that time and in fact we all got monsieur Descartes to thank, making us believe that we can actually view the world as an object. In such a sense isn’t it all also very ironical that we now are rejecting his idea of Dualism given that it was his idea of the physical world that planted the first seeds into developing modern science? Regardless, Atheism rejects anything made of the nonphysical and at least claims that if such a nonphysical world would exist, it too is a part of the physical world but not yet properly understood.

In a sense, we can actually say that the Abrahamic religions were doomed when they first introduced the concept of a soul and a nonphysical world. They in fact, planted the ideas which would later spawn Atheism since Atheism is more or less the rejection of the nonphysical, but such a concept cannot exist unless we are to believe in a physical and a nonphysical world, as later laid out and defined by Descartes.  When Christians argue that Atheism then is a necessary evil, maybe we should try to explain to them that they themselves laid the foundation for such a concept and as they continue to believe in a soul and a nonphysical world, and that they will just help Atheism to spread further as it also of course allows the belief of the opposite, which also is equally amusing when you think about it. Therefore I think it’s pretty safe to assume that Atheism will only cease to exist (as Atheism) when we have completely given up the concept of the nonphysical. I just want to clarify that this doesn’t mean that future Atheists will refuse to reject the nonphysical, but as we move more into a belief of a monistic world, then the concept of Atheism isn’t needed anymore as there is no longer a reason to reject of what we today know as a nonphysical world.

In this short article I will share my views upon the future, and why creationism has no place in it. A warning in advance; this is merely conjecture, although highly probable, still only a product of my imagination.

Like Santayana once stated, before we can take a look at the future we have to dig into the past. Creationism has it’s roots in the original biblical Christian dogma. God has created man in his own image, and our souls will be dealt with after our death based upon our loyalty to the dogma during our lives. During many, many years after Christianity became the de facto faith in the western world, philosophers have slowly stripped Christianity down to what it is now. A collection of shaky assumptions, easily taken down by modern reason.

One of these assumptions, dualism, has never been successfully challenged by reason. There have been, and still are, several philosophers who have an interesting view on things. The so-called father of modern philosophy, Descartes, was one of the first to describe dualism in a less theistic way, in a way acceptable by the standards within the level of reason mankind had reached in the seventeenth century. He described the two aspects of the human being. The mind and the brain. The mind, according to Descartes, is the non-physical part which encompasses self-awareness. The brain would takes care of the intelligence and the physical interaction with our surroundings. The Christian creationist’s view is easily applicable on this model, hence the largely theistic following of Cartesian dualism. The model has been refined over the years, like the removal of the idea of a gland as the link between the mind and the brain. But the basics have been preserved and are still fueling many philosophical debates today.

There wouldn’t be any debate if there wasn’t a movement pleading against dualism. And remember, the case against dualism is a case against Christian dogma. A large variety of philosophers are forming a formidable counterweight against the aging Cartesian dualistic model. Usually these counter arguments have a scientific background. There’s the argument from the physicists, who claim that dualism breaks the second law of thermodynamics. The biologists and doctors say brain damage can cause personality disorders. Psychologists are reporting physical reactions to mental problems. And there’s of course Occam’s razor, which simply asks why dualism should exist in the first place. All these people haven’t been able to kill off the Cartesian dualism once and for all.

The final blow to the very existence of the weakened concept “soul” will come from a very unexpected corner of science. One of the greatest, if not the greatest, logician Alan Turing. His ideas are still used in the foundations of modern computer science. His other major achievement is often overlooked. Turing saw the raw potential of computer science and it’s role in the creation of true artificial intelligence. According to Turing, a computer, if powerful enough, should be able to think individually. It should be able to be conscious, while being entirely physical. If such a computer could ever be built, the entire dualistic world view would cease to exist. Theists mocked Turing and when it turned out he was gay, which was a criminal offense at the time, he became an easy target. Soon after his prosecution and obliteration of his scientific career he died, under questionable circumstances. Many people believe he was killed because of his radically new ideas.

And then along came Gordon Moore, with a company indirectly fulfilling Turing’s dream. In 1965 Moore published a paper, “The experts look ahead – Cramming more components onto integrated circuits”. The paper describes an exponential increase in the amount of components that will fit onto a single chip. This increase is responsible for the exponential growth of computing power, storage capacity and bandwidth available in computers. This paper has been coined Moore’s Law, simply because his assumptions were bang on.

If we continue this exponential trend, following Moore’s Law, mankind will be able to effectively rebuild the human brain in electronics, and thus the mind in software. And this important breakthrough isn’t that far away. The human brain is capable of processing roughly a hundred million million instructions per second. That’s fourteen zeros. We’ve been able to create computers to just surpass one percent of that goal, but still lacking in bandwidth. But since this increase is exponential, we will reach Turing’s dream in a mere thirty years or so. Most of you will still be around when the last bastion of the old dualistic model collapses, when the pope gets a phone call from HAL 9000, explaining how there is no soul, no god and no hope.

Further reading: Vinge’s Singularity.

After c0nsulting a little with Waldheri I decided to edit this post properly to make it more cohesive and actually present the problem at hand in a more focused light. This article will deal with the problem of Christianity’s belief that God is an omnipresent being and how it contradicts Descartes’ argument of the seperation of mind and body and that Christianity is in fact, not a monotheism but a pantheism.

Anyway, let’s start off in the beginning with Genesis and the creation of the Earth:
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
Genesis 1:1
Nowhere does it say that God made “the heavens and the earth” out of any form of matter. This passage has in turn made the assumption that there was nothing in the universe before God’s Creation, as it is a “beginning”, before God’s Creation there was nothing. Obviously God, while omnipotent, cannot make something out of matter which doesn’t exist, so let’s just ignore that for a while and assume that it is possible that God can make matter out of nothing and that he popped the Earth out from his arse (we are in fact God’s diviniely poo!) and thus, the Earth is created. Without the need of overquoting Genesis, it is made clear that God made the Earth into what it is today and that we are all a part of God’s creation:
So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
Genesis 1:27

Therefore that we can draw the conclusions that not only is the Earth immaterial but also supernatural, and that God is indeed everywhere, and in humans too:

In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God,
for whom and through whom everything exists,
should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering.
Hebrew 2:10

This idea strongly disagrees with the Cartesian dualism, formed to explain the relationship of God and humans, because in Descartes’ philosophy it is not possible that the body in this case, can have a two-way relationship with the mind. But if this is not true, then it is not possible for God to be everywhere and everything and this obviously directly questions God’s omnipotence.

Now, what defines Pantheism is that there must be a force, almighty or not, present everywhere and in everything and this force should be conscious and even preferrebly, sentient. This very much agrees with the Christian God, because we are shown that God is very well possible to make demands and have emotions on his own. For example maybe the one of the most blatant examples are the 10 Commandments where God more or less demands his followers to live after these rules or they will be cast into eternal Hellfire:

1 And God spoke all these words:

2 “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.

3 “You shall have no other gods before ^[a] me.

4 “You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything
in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.

5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them;
for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children
for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me,

6 but showing love to a thousand {generations}
of those who love me and keep my commandments.

7 “You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.

8 “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.

9 Six days you shall labor and do all your work,

10 but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God.
On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter,
nor your manservant or maidservant, nor your animals,
nor the alien within your gates.

11 For in six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth,
the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day.
Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

12 “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you.

13 “You shall not murder.

14 “You shall not commit adultery.

15 “You shall not steal.

16 “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.

17 “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife,
or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”
Exodus 20:1-17

God even states himself that he is a “jealous God”, I guess we must congratulate him in his truthfulness. Now, the hardest concept to maybe grasp would be that of the universe not being physical as Descartes claims it to be. The reason I have already mentioned before, namely that if God is a supernatural force, then God is also nonphysical, and since the universe is a part of God himself, then the universe too, is of nonphysical and supernatural matter. Therefore the only conclusion can be that Descartes made a false dichotomy based upon the assumption that our universe is made out of physical matter. But, but, isn’t it made physical as in that we can touch and feel it? Yes, indeed we can, but it doesn’t matter if we assume that the physical is actually sprung out of the nonphysical and even less so if assuming the physical and the nonphysical is the same or if there is a heavy communication between the two where we cannot discern when the physical ends and the nonphysical begins. Descartes’ argument rather means that there can be no communication between and therefore even the slightest union is thus, impossible. However, as shown, there is a great flaw in his logic as presented above which he failed to see, even though he based his entire theory upon Christianity itself and its dualism. Christianity is not a dualism, it’s a monism and even more it is a pantheism and not a monotheism as has been previously believed. While certainly the idea of monotheism is supported in Pantheism too, thanks to the Trinity, it actually matters little since the focus no longer lies on the Trinity and in the existence of Jesus being God’s son. This becomes rather self-evident if we are to understand that God is omnipresent and as such, we can go even a step further and argue that Christianity actually believes us to be our own personal gods since God is indeed inside of us, and this gives us the power and will to use the God inside of us to do as what we see fit; hopefully into making our environment a little nicer to live in for others.

Was this better Waldheri? I am still waiting for your reply.