To which he answers:the Afore wrote:I’m embarrassed to say that I read Hyrum Lewis, There is a God: How to Respond to Atheism in the Last Days (Springville: CFI, 2017), last week. Why am I embarrassed?
"Putter" really captures the whole thing and I can see his point here with all the toe-dipping into surface ideas he does. The Afore is embarrassed, as he clearly explains, because Lewis says the same predictable things that he does and so what was the point of buying the book and reading it in the first place? The Afore, for instance, already believed prior to encountering Lewis that the Book of Mormon anticipates Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Logical Positivism, and Freud. Lewis writes, for example:The Afore wrote:Because it makes an argument that runs parallel to some things that I continue to putter with.
I must admit that for me, this prophetic anticipation is the most psychologically fascinating of his arguments. What he's really doing, is trying to avoid doing any philosophy. He doesn't need to counter Darwin's arguments if he can establish the Book of Mormon can only be explained by God. Because if the Book of Mormon is true and if it links Darwin to the teachings of anti-Christs, then Darwin is false.Lewis wrote:Two millennia ago, the anti-Christ Korihor (in Alma 30) argued that religion was “the effect of a frenzied mind” (Alma 30:16; an anticipation of Freud)
It goes like this. Joseph Smith wrote a book starring ancient prophets who predict the thought crimes of an array of disbelievers far into the future from their own standpoint, but also in the future from Joseph Smith's standpoint. Because these villains come after Joseph Smith wrote the book, how could he have known what they would teach? Therefore the Book of Mormon must be true, and therefore the ideas in it associated with anti-Christs must be false.
The Afore jumps all over this line of reasoning, suggesting that the Book of Mormon truly saw our day. So I guess to counter the Afore and Lewis, we don't need science or philosophy, we just need to show there is no reason to believe the Book of Mormon predicts modern ideas ahead of Smith's time any more than it reacts to enlightenment ideas prior to Smith. Voltaire was guilty of all of the above, you can substitute one name for five and still be right. But even better, BYU Studies has some fascinating material that suggests just like the prophet Daniel, Joseph Smith is responding to his own circumstances, and not predicting the future.
BYU Studies has an essay called "Effusions of an Enthusiastic Brain", a charge leveled against vision culture in a letter from a random parishioner to a random minister of Smith's time. Concerning the time Joseph Smith lived, the authors write things like:
No reason to think Korihor predicted Freud when, as BYU Studies points out, there was already a long history of "rational religion" discounting "visionary experience" in America that goes back to the Mayflower, and just waiting for Joseph to take the stage. It's surprising that a guy with a Phd in history missed this.BYU Studies wrote:Doctors at times clinically diagnosed visionaries with “religious madness,” one of several “standard medical explanations of mental illness.”
But what a one-trick pony! The Afore doesn't need to know much as long as the Book of Mormon can't be explained. If it can't be explained, then presumably everything he personally believes is right. But in later posts, the Afore does move on to other ideas Lewis has that run parallel to his own, resulting in further instances of the Afore learning nothing, and then bragging about it.
Quoting Lewis doing his own personally favorite thing of creating a strawman of materialism from either thin air (in his case) or in Lewis's case, statements made a hundred years ago and then pinning them on contemporary "atheists" (like the New Atheists) he writes among other things:
This is some major foot shooting. If physicalism is falsified by quantum mechanics and computation, then the world has only changed a little, such that new atheists like Daniel Dennett and Pinker (broadly functionalists) or Stephen Hawkins and Roger Penrose (quantum mystics) have explained consciousness rather than Gilbert Ryle. I mean, if "computation" animates the machine with well-understood ideas under the rubrick of causal closure that we aren't allowed to label as "materialist," who the “F” cares? Even better with the proliferation of neural nets in AI. It looks like Scientific America just recently discovered some YouTube videos I've linked to in the past showing a guy who substitutes human neurons for his software-based neural nets that he puts to the the task of playing the game Doom. If you want to say that the "information" created by neurons is the "ghost" that animates the brain, then fine with me. Dan and Lewis are emptying their chambers on their own toes in the biggest way possible.Lewis wrote:But in our current twenty-first century, post-industrial age, the most crucial component of reality is information — something that is decidedly nonmaterial. The thinking machines (computers) that underlie this new age, while physical, are nothing without the organizing software that makes all of their activity possible... Ryle ridiculed the idea of “ghosts in the machine” while on the very cusp of the new information age in which “ghost-animated” machines would transform the world......In physics, quantum theory...(nuff said)
On the other hand, NOTHING is explained by a physical spirit that is supposedly needed to animate physical body, what the Afore and Lewis were taught in primary, and what they still believe. Yet still, even more nothing is explain by adding another turtle to the stack, "intelligence" to explain the spirit, but which is also a kind of "light" and therefore, physical. Mormons are the only ones I know of who got so thoroughly sucked into the trap of materialism that they have no means of escape. They are left with a regress of new material constructs that sound mystical in order to explain the more familiar constructs that seem ordinary.
And in a final instance, for now, the Afore cites Lewis on God and morality, another parallel idea Dan will learn absolutely nothing about. And then boast about how he didn't learn anything.
Can Dan say that murder results in anything more than than same? Murder temporarily separating a physical spirit from a physical body.Lewis wrote:If humans are mere material, then a murderer is only rearranging matter (the assemblage of atoms we call a human body) in space.
What's Dan's basis? I guarantee you'll never find on Dan's blog nor in Lewis's book anything about the Euthyphro Dilemma, you know, going way back to Plato. That would be the newest idea Dan would ever encounter in his long career of being a "God" influencer. A long, long time ago, critical thinkers realized that God likewise has no basis for moral judgments. And we see that all over the Old Testament where God's chosen people commit their own Holocaust at the behest of Dan Peterson's "man of war" Jehovah, the ante-mortal Christ. The Book of Mormon itself says that God can cease to be God, suggesting that God is in the same position that we are, looking for answers in the material universe that Joseph Smith pronounced as co-existing with God. At least modern atheists appreciate the difficulty of the problem, unlike Dan, who just assumes he has answers to which he doesn't. And he would never, ever, try to explain his alleged basis.the Afore wrote:I visited the former Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald for the first time in the summer of 2015. A naturalistic materialist can oppose such things, of course. She can point out that they cause pain, harm society, and so forth. But can she pronounce them objectively, absolutely, non-metaphorically evil? If so, on what basis?
The one thing we know for sure in all of this, is that Dan Peterson has learned absolutely nothing from the book he bought, and continues to assume that if he can make fun of materialism then God is vindicated and atheists are wrong, even though the kind of materialism he's talking about has more in common with his own faith as a Mormon than it has for any atheist alive today.
Both sides accuse the other of illusion while performing their own version of it.
