I agree. Also, what I think I see in metaphysics reasoning is likewise prone to subjectivity. Is God ‘simple’ or not, or can libertarian free will coexist with an omniscient deity… What I’ve encountered in broader discussions of these and more suggests that one’s theological / faith beliefs seems to affect how one believes the in ultimate correctness of a particular proposition, within groups of professional philosophers and theologians. That’s not to suggest that metaphysical pondering is not useful or non-productive, just that the subjects are very hard, like pinning jello to a wall.
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I did grow up in the church, and there wasn’t anything that led me down the path of disbelief. As I grew into adulthood I just realized I no longer believed, and that it’s really hard to make yourself believe in something you don’t believe in. There was a very short transition where I thought everyone in church probably viewed belief like I did, as something unimportant and only useful for having something to discuss at church. Then came the quick realization that other people really did have a belief that I just didn’t have.
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That’s what I see too. As I said earlier, I base my worldview on things I believe, not on things I don’t believe. Some of those beliefs and worldviews are subjective. As I have discussed with others, I view morality as subjective. There are many atheists who disagree with me, and they push for an objective morality.
First, I fully admit that God/s could exist and that I could be completely wrong on that point. I take a pragmatic approach to reality in that if it appears to be real then I accept it as real. I do tend to lean towards a positivist position where I need compelling evidence in order to believe in something.
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I see. For about of my life. I guess now over half of it I have kind of felt like I’m just forced to believe. As in I just have the faith even though I don’t have any particular reason for it. I feel there is no scientific or historical evidence to believe in the supernatural including any god such as El/Yahweh anymore or less than to believe in Thor. I also don’t have any particular fear of death. My
Greatest fear of dying is dying before I have set up enough things in action to secure financial freedom for my fiancee and cats. If I died , as I was dying my biggest fear would be will my money make it to my fiancee or will my family keep it or something and what about my cats….. I don’t know anyone who cares for their cats as much as I care for mine. I mean I know they exist, and I have some friends who do but none really around here or my family that keeps their cats indoor and spends times with them. I spend about 90 minutes- 120. But also I explicitly don’t believe in hell. So it’s not some pascal wager.
So while I don’t think God is real, I just feel he is so strongly that it’s just the position I hold. I feel like I don’t have any rational reason to believe but that I am just forced to anyways. Not really sure how to express.
But was hoping to find some books or podcasts , regardless if it’s scientifically driven or just experiences. Want to see more of the language and thoughts around it being teased out.
Which makes a category error by not noticing that there are two types of claimants, and the standard monotheist just denies the divine status of one of those types.
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I don’t know how you went from:
- The god of classical theism is not equivalent to the god described in the bible
to:
- The god of classical theism exists
and I’m not sure I want to know. Such precipitousness might be contagious.
Then Feser has misaimed his argument, and it fails as a result. The category error is his (and yours), as is the lack of intellectual rigour.
s/Bible/Shabaka/p
The eight-word Wiccan Rede
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Strong atheism is virtually indistinguishable from fundamentalist religion. In fact, I’d argue that strong atheism actually requires a kind of fundamentalist faith in order to be sustained.
I recently had a long debate with a friend of mine — he’s an atheist. Interestingly, we didn’t even talk about God directly. Instead, we discussed the evidence for the existence of the soul: data and arguments suggesting that consciousness may not be purely material. We talked about qualia, subjective experiences, and phenomena like paradoxical and terminal lucidity — the latter being far more common than most people think, as shown in this study.
Terminal lucidity is particularly compelling because it points toward the possibility of a non-material and independent consciousness — something that persists even when the brain is severely damaged.
And do you know what his answer was? Literally this:
“Yes, but if it is taken as an axiom that the soul does not exist, all these theories fall apart.”
That’s what he texted me on WhatsApp yesterday at 6:52 PM.
Do you see the issue? An axiom. Why on earth would someone take as an axiom that “souls don’t exist, and everything is reducible to matter”? The answer, it seems, is that he wants to believe that souls don’t exist.
And I’ll be damned if I know why. I’ll be damned forever if I understand why anyone would want to believe that someone like Richard Huckle and someone like Saint Maximilian Kolbe ultimately meet the same fate — utter annihilation.
To maintain that axiom, he’s willing to dismiss or ignore any evidence that could, if not definitively prove, at least strongly support the idea that consciousness has a non-material aspect. He doesn’t want it to be true, so he’s willing to believe in his axiom even when confronted with real-world phenomena that contradict it.
That kind of mindset is absolutely no different from the kind you find in religious fundamentalists — take Young Earth Creationists, for example. The only difference is that at least the fundamentalist is putting blind faith in something meaningful. Strong atheism, by contrast, is blind faith in meaninglessness, in nihilism.
Now, I know many materialists claim not to be nihilists — but frankly, I don’t care how oxymoronic people are willing to be. Materialism, when taken seriously, does imply nihilism. And because strong atheism is grounded in materialism, it becomes dependent on that foundation — and is willing to dismiss any evidence that threatens it.
Interestingly, debating with strong atheists has helped me gain a clearer understanding of the nature of Hell and damnation. It’s not a punishment inflicted by God. Rather, it’s a condition that people impose on themselves. There are souls who are genuinely repelled by the idea of God and a meaningful existence. Forcing such a person into God’s presence in the afterlife would be pure torment.
Of course, I’m praying for my friend — a lot — and I trust that God will find a way to reach him and soften his heart. I wouldn’t be praying if I didn’t believe that God’s grace can transform even the hardest heart. But his current state is not a good one. It’s one thing to disbelieve; it’s another thing entirely to construct an entire worldview — a system of belief — around the rejection of God and all forms of spirituality.
Quoting Dr. Bruce Greyson Transcript: NDE Researcher Dr. Bruce Greyson’s Interview on The Broken Brain Podcast – The Singju Post on Terminal Lucidity:
“I should say that the near-death experience is not the only example of this. There’s something called terminal lucidity, in which people who have advanced dementia, like Alzheimer’s disease, and haven’t been able to communicate for years — who don’t recognize their family — suddenly become completely lucid again in the hours or sometimes days before they die. They carry on coherent conversations and recognize people again.
And the family gets very excited, thinking, ‘Oh, they’re recovering.’ But of course, the brain cannot recover from something like that, and they end up dying shortly thereafter. And we have no medical explanation for how that can be.”
TL;DR:
Strong atheism is a form of faith — and one of the most rigidly fundamentalist forms at that.
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Why do you describe it as a fundamentalist religion and/or faith? What is the fundamentalist part adding to the description?
If someone said extraterrestrial aliens don’t, would you also say this is a fundamentalist reilgion? If someone said a species of large bipedal ape that wanders the forests of the Pacific Northwest doesn’t exist, do consider that a fundamentalist faith?
Weird things happen, therefore an immaterial soul? I don’t find that very convincing.
Why don’t people want to believe that there’s a large bipedal apes species that wanders the backcountry in the Pacific Northwest?
The willingness to disregard any fact that contradicts a materialist worldview and a materialist undThe willingness to disregard any fact that contradicts a materialist worldview and a materialist understanding of consciousness. When he said that for him the non existence of soul is axiomatic (therefore there is nothing that can happen that can make him change his mind, no matter how much it goes against materialism) it’s very much an example of fundamentalism. At the very least such phenomena should make one much more cautious when he describes the nature of consciousness and/or the existence of souls. I don’t think that one can be rigidly materialistic in 2026 with all the knowledge we have, in fact he recognized that these facts go against materialism but he also said that he is not willing to consider what those facts might imply because he takes the non existence of souls and the meaninglessness of life as an axiomatic truth which cannot be challenged by actual phenomena, this is 100% a behavior that we find in religious fundamentalists. They are just on the opposite end of the spectrum but there is a degree of blind faith and and indifference/hostility to evidences going against their “axioms” in both cases (religious fundamentalism and strong atheism), it’s only what is the recipient of their faith that is different.
T_aquaticus:
Weird things happen, therefore an immaterial soul? I don’t find that very convincing.
It’s not just a question of weird things, the thing is that in those instances people’s consciousness behave in a way that it’s not a compatible with the rigidly reductionist view. It’s far from just “weird.
I don’t think it’s the same thing as discussing the spiritual nature of consciousness, and there are no scientists who believe in the extravagant creature you mention. There are no scientists who believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster either, as far as I can tell. The nature of consciousness is another thing entirely, and there are scientists who have studied these phenomena for decades, the problem is that they are swept under the rug because they happen to go against the predominant paradigm . But it’s certainly something very different from an invisible dragon in my garage.
'The clouds cleared': what terminal lucidity teaches us about life, death and dementia | Dementia | The Guardian : “Dr Sam Parnia, a British critical care physician and pulmonologist who has been working in the US for 15 years, is associate professor of medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York. He is leading a study for Eldadah. “If you talk to hospice nurses and palliative care doctors, they all know about this,” he says of terminal/paradoxical lucidity. “But no one’s ever studied it properly because no one ever thought anyone would take it seriously enough. So what I wanted to do is to help move this into the scientific realm.”
In other words, there are actual phenomena (and in my view, terminal lucidity is an even stronger case for the existence of the soul than near-death experiences) that contradict materialist assumptions — and yet they are largely ignored or glossed over. That doesn’t make the phenomena any less real, nor does it diminish the seriousness of the challenge they pose to materialism and reductionism.
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What facts are those?
How so?
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I have posted them earlier. There are scientists who have been studying these phenomena for decades for a reason.
I don’t see how they point to an immaterial soul.
So, in other words, you think these phenomena are perfectly compatible with materialism — even though the very researchers who study them say there’s no medical explanation for them? Because if consciousness were purely material and entirely dependent on the brain, these things simply shouldn’t be possible.
Well, in that case, I don’t know what to tell you. If someone behaves exactly as one would expect if immaterial souls were real — and that still doesn’t count as evidence pointing in that direction — then honestly, there’s not much more I can say.
If you believe these phenomena are perfectly compatible with materialism, be my guest — but the fact remains: there are scientists who were materialists and changed their minds after studying these cases in depth.
Take Dr. Bruce Greyson, for example. He’s Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia — he knows a thing or two about this field. In his interview on The Broken Brain Podcast(transcript available here), he discusses near-death experiences and other anomalous phenomena that seriously challenge the materialist framework.
And he’s not alone. If experts like Greyson — after decades of research — reach conclusions that suggest the reductionist model of consciousness is insufficient, that should at least raise serious questions. At the very least, this demonstrates that the materialist model of consciousness has serious and unresolved problems — problems that must be addressed if the model is to remain scientifically respectable. Because once falsifiability is removed, we’re no longer talking about science; we’re dealing with dogma.
If one claims that consciousness is merely a problem byproduct of brain activity, then the observable facts should consistently support that claim. If they don’t — and we’re forced to dismiss or ignore contradictory evidence to preserve the theory — then that claim ceases to be a scientific hypothesis and becomes an unfalsifiable belief.
And it should be clear that Greyson is not a dogmatic believer, he believe that death is not the end but he doesn’t believe in any religion as far as I can tell. But he indeed refuses what he calls “the materialist dogma”.
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I am saying that not understanding how something specifically works is not evidence for the immaterial or supernatural. What you are describing is just bad logic.
Then I would suggest presenting the evidence and demonstrating how it leads to those conclusions. As of now, it seems that all you have is an argument from ignorance.
This isn’t an argument from ignorance — and I’ve never claimed that these phenomena prove the afterlife beyond a shadow of a doubt. What I am claiming is that they stand in direct contradiction to the materialist/reductionist framework.
If materialists assert that consciousness is merely a byproduct of brain activity, then it’s their responsibility to explain why real people, with real conscious experiences, sometimes behave in ways that are not compatible with that view.
An argument from ignorance is something else entirely. What I’m doing is pointing out that these phenomena are incompatible with the assumptions of materialism — which is ultimately a philosophical position disguised as science. Materialists have long since hijacked the authority of science to push a worldview that often lacks empirical accountability.
If their reductionist assumptions about consciousness are truly scientific, then they should be able to confront and explain the existence of actual, well-documented phenomena that contradict those assumptions. Otherwise, what they’re defending isn’t science.
If materialism is truly based on scientific evidence, then it must be falsifiable — which means it should be able to account for why certain phenomena occur in direct contradiction (because this is what we are talking about) to its core assumptions And if it can’t do that, then at the very least its limits should be acknowledged.
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For context, I am a theist so believe in immaterial realities. But to be fair to @T_aquaticus , I read the posted article on terminal lucidity and to say that science has NO medical explanation is a little misleading. The article does say that the phenomenon has not been well studied by science and that increasing research is now being devoted to study the neurophysiology of such events because that hasn’t been done before. So a scientific explanation is currently lacking because scientific data are currently lacking, not because materialist explanations have been proven false.
For the record, there are also “monism” soul believers within Christianity (which also seems to be the prevalent Hebrew position) which means the “soul” or “spirit” of a person or whatever you want to call it, is dependent on physical matter (i.e. embodiment). As I understand the monism position, this doesn’t mean that consciousness is fully reducible to individual neurons firing, rather that consciousness may be an emergent property. But, I’m not fully up on all the debates on types of ‘souls” in theology so don’t really have a firm view…just know there’s a lot of debate and discussion around souls, the brain, and consciousness..
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You haven’t presented anything that contradicts the materialist/reductionist framework. All you have offered is:
“So, in other words, you think these phenomena are perfectly compatible with materialism — even though the very researchers who study them say there’s no medical explanation for them?”
That’s an argument from ignorance.
How do you determine when people are not behaving in ways compatible with materialism?
You haven’t demonstrated this, other than to just assert it without any evidence.
“I don’t know” is a perfectly fine scientific answer.
I’m not saying materialism has been proven false. What I’m saying is that the behavior of these patients appears to be more compatible with the existence of a form of consciousness that isn’t inextricably tied to the brain.
If materialism is correct, then I believe it should eventually be able to account for these experiences — to explain why, and how, they can still be understood within a materialist framework.
A failure to do so would mean something, wouldn’t it? Otherwise, we’re no longer talking about a scientific — and therefore falsifiable — worldview. We’re talking about materialist dogma disguised as science.
There have been many documented cases like this — they’ve been studied, and I don’t see how they can be reconciled with a materialist framework. Perhaps materialists will one day be able to explain how such things are possible, but they can’t hide indefinitely behind the “we don’t know” excuse.
If you claim that consciousness is merely a byproduct of brain activity, then the data needs to consistently support that claim. If it doesn’t, the burden is on you to either revise the model or acknowledge its limitations.
That’s all I’m saying.