{"id":90,"date":"2007-05-07T19:49:00","date_gmt":"2007-05-07T23:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/?p=90"},"modified":"2021-07-29T14:49:48","modified_gmt":"2021-07-29T19:49:48","slug":"four-difficulties-for-materialism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/2007\/05\/four-difficulties-for-materialism\/","title":{"rendered":"Four Difficulties for Materialism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/townhall.com\/columnists\/frankpastore\/2007\/05\/06\/why-atheism-fails--the-four-big-bangs-n1419462\">a nice short piece<\/a> by Frank Pastore. It&#8217;s entitled &#8220;Why Atheism Fails: The Four Big Bangs&#8221;. The four problems, posed somewhat more precisely than Pastore himself does, are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>How did the universe come about given that it&#8217;s non-eternal?<\/li>\n<li>How could life have emerged from non-living matter?<\/li>\n<li>How could mind and self-consciousness have emerged from matter?<\/li>\n<li>How could there be objective good and evil if materialism is true?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Though Pastore doesn&#8217;t develop any of these questions in much detail, these are all good questions. And materialists have yet to spell out convincing answers to them. Indeed, it is quite unclear that they <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">can <\/span>do so within the constraints of their metaphysics. Of course, some materialists will simply deny the presuppositions of the questions. Some, for example, will deny the existence of objective good and evil. Others will deny the existence of self-conscious minds. Others will insist on the eternity of the physical universe (or of some sort of physical meta-verse). The first two moves carry a heavy burden because of their radical departure from common sense. The last one is sheer speculation. Whether there is a physical meta-verse is not something that any conceivable empirical data is going to be able to confirm.<\/p>\n<p>Pastore does fall into the common conflation of atheism and materialism. Technically speaking, one can be an atheist without being a materialist. (The converse is not true, however, since no standard account of God allows God to be a material being.) Pastore&#8217;s conflation is understandable, however, because a great many (if not most) atheists are materialists.<\/p>\n<p>PS. Some of the comments on Pastore&#8217;s article are amusing, but I wouldn&#8217;t put much stock in most of them. Anyone who thinks these problems are easily and painlessly solved by materialists has at best a superficial understanding of the difficulties. Likewise, anyone who thinks that a non-materialist worldview like theism doesn&#8217;t face some difficult problems needs to read up on some of the standard objections.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s a nice short piece by Frank Pastore. It&#8217;s entitled &#8220;Why Atheism Fails: The Four Big Bangs&#8221;. The four problems, posed somewhat more precisely than Pastore himself does, are: How did the universe come about given that it&#8217;s non-eternal? How could life have emerged from non-living matter? How could mind and self-consciousness have emerged from\u2026 <span class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/2007\/05\/four-difficulties-for-materialism\/\">Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-90","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":635,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90\/revisions\/635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alanrhoda.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}