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Posts Tagged ‘“Nothing”’
“Nothing” versus Non-existence
“Nothing” versus Non-existence
Perhaps the most misunderstood and problematic concept in human history is the meaning of nothing – void, emptiness, vacuum, space.
The ancient Greeks wrestled endlessly with this concept, but they never managed to produce a definition that resolved the issue once and for all. In fact, no clear-cut definition exists to this day in the scientific world. “Nothing” is particularly difficult for scientific materialists because their ideological position of faith (and “faith” is exactly the right word because scientific materialism is effectively a religion) is that only things that have a size (extension, dimensionality) exist. Existence, for a materialist, is revealed by the human senses. It’s all about empiricism – experience, experiment and observation.
A materialist asserts, in effect, that if our senses were sufficiently acute – in particular our vision – we could “see” and detect everything that exists, no matter how small it is. Everything that exists is physical i.e. it is an entity within space and time. It has dimensions. It has one or more of the following attributes: mass, volume, speed, energy, a wavelength, a frequency. All of these attributes are considered to have meaning only in relation to space and time.
If our senses or our physical, scientific equipment can’t in principle detect something then it is, according to scientists, non-sensical to talk of the thing having any kind of existence. A religious entity such as an immaterial and immortal soul that can’t be detected is regarded as superstitious and fanciful nonsense that can’t be taken seriously rationally or logically. Hence, all consistent scientific materialists are atheists. Those scientists who proclaim religious beliefs are fundamentally dishonest and deluded because atheist materialists are absolutely correct that materialism and religion are as mutually exclusive as existence and non-existence. If scientific materialism is true then religion is false. It’s as simple as that. There’s no scope for souls and, without souls, religion is absurd.
In philosophy, materialists and empiricists have waged an intellectual war against the idealists and rationalists.
It’s critical to have a basic understanding of the positions espoused by these four schools of philosophical thinking:
1) Materialism
2) Empiricism
3) Idealism
4) Rationalism
Materialism and empiricism are natural partners and drive modern science. Idealism and rationalism are also natural partners and put mind above matter. Idealists and rationalists have effectively been defeated by science since they have been unable to compete with its remarkable successes and its predictive and transformative abilities.
That’s where Illuminism comes into the picture. Illuminism is absolutely located within the tradition of idealism and rationalism but what Illuminists realised was that they must also lay claim to materialism and empiricism by showing that these are just subsets of idealism and rationalism.
Illuminism asserts that scientific materialism is perfect for studying the PHYSICAL universe – that’s what it’s designed for – but hopeless at addressing any of the big questions relating to life, mind, consciousness, God, souls and afterlife. All the primary questions of existence can be answered only within the idealist and rationalist context. We will have proved this to you by the end of this series of books and we will doso using the only possible tool – mathematics, the queen of the sciences.
Mathematics, unlike science, is not materialistic or empiricist. It is an expression of rationalism par excellence and it also absolutely in the tradition of idealism. The mathematical domain is nothing other than the perfect manifestation of Plato’s realm of perfect Forms: eternal, immutable, flawless Ideas. Is it not a remarkable thing that mathematics (a tool of ultra Platonic rationalism) is the mainstay of science (a materialist and empiricist ideology)? That ought to have set alarm bells ringing in the loudest possible way for scientific materialists and revealed that there was a catastrophic logical defect in their anti-rationalist approach. But it never has. They have simply ignored this question. In fact, it may never have occurred to them. Scientists in general are staggeringly unphilosophically minded – to their extreme detriment.
Excerpt from The God Game
Mike Hockney
