Do you think there's a synergistic relationship between materialism and our economic system? how do you think it might come into being and what does it say about what might lie beyond the materialistic paradigm?
Yes but it is not unique to our system. Communism was worse (1). Any philosophy will be perverted by those in power. It happens with political philosophy, with economic philosophy, with
science, and with religion. The elite foster belief in materialism because they don't want to compete with a higher power for authority. But materialism was instantiated, not by the elites, but by
certain scientists because they hated religion . But the elites will corrupt whatever is handy for their purposes.
Even if a sort of "scientific spirituality" replaced materialism and became prevalent in society, those who are interested in power and control would abuse it to further their personal ambitions. I have seen this happen at a Spiritualist church. The problem is not metaphysics we see science abused also (2). The problem is with human nature and philosophy alone cannot solve the problem. It is absolutely essential for spiritual teachers to refrain from commenting on politics because when they do some people will start claiming opposing political views are not spiritual, are evil, and those who espouse them are also evil people. Demonization of political opponents are is the first step toward atrocities.
Darwinian evolution is the theory that random variation and natural selection led to gradual changes in living organisms over time which produced, from a common ancestor, all the living things alive today and all the living things of the past recorded in the fossil record.
From transcript:
" I personally grant validity to Darwinian Evolution. I think it makes sense. I think the evidence supports it. And there is sufficient evidence out there, not only in the fossil record but in genetic studies..."
and
"They conflate that with another notion for which there is exactly zero evidence. And that is the notion that the mutations at the root of the entire process, the genetic mutations which are quantum events, that they too are random in the sense that they do not have any pattern. They do not reflect any trend, any goal, any telos. We do not know that."
You can't grant Darwinian evolution and deny random variation. Random variation is key to Darwin's theory of evolution, before Darwin incorrectly advocated the creative power of random variation, natural selection was correctly believed to be responsible for preserving species by eliminating defective individuals and not for creating new species.
Furthermore the evidence does not support evolution from a common ancestor by natural selection.
Genetic studies falsify common descent:
The Flawed Evidence for Evolution. Genetic analysis falsifies common descent. An evolutionary tree can be made by comparing the same gene in different organisms, but different genes produce widely divergent trees.
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-flawed-evidence-for-evolution.html
“Ever since Darwin the tree has been the unifying principle for understanding the history of life on Earth,” but because “different genes told contradictory evolutionary stories,” the notion of a tree of life is now quickly becoming a vision of the past — as the article stated “today the project lies in tatters, torn to pieces by an onslaught of negative evidence. Many biologists now argue that the tree concept is obsolete and needs to be discarded,” and as scientists quoted in the article said, “We have no evidence at all that the tree of life is a reality” or the tree is being “annihilated.”
The pattern of fossils is consistent with design not natural selection.
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-cambrian-explosion-is-best.html
Darwinism predicts new phyla should evolve from existing species but the fossil record shows the new phyla appearing without ancestors. This sudden appearance is what one would expect if the new phyla were created by a designing intelligence. There are sufficient fossils of soft bodied animals from before the Cambrian explosion that if the phyla that appeared during the Cambrian explosion had ancestors, fossils of them would have been found.
Darwinism predicts that new phyla will arise as new species repeatedly branch off and diversify until a new species is so different that it merits classification as a new phylum. Therefore there should be many species existing when a new phylum arises. However contrary to these predictions of Darwinism, during the Cambrian explosion, many new phyla arose but there were relatively few species at the time. This dearth of species is exactly what would be expected if the new phyla were created by a designing intelligence.
Darwinism predicts existing phyla should produce new phyla as species branch off and diversify until a new species is so different it merits classification as a new phylum. However no phylum has ever produced a species so different that it could be classified as a new phylum. But this is exactly what we expect from designed objects, cars change each year but do not become airplanes.
Other types of evidence which are claimed to demonstrate macroevolution (large changes such as evolution of a land mammal into a whale) by natural selection are either frauds or examples of microevolution (changes within a species such as we see in different type of dogs) which is not in dispute.
Survival of the fakest. Many of the examples claimed to prove Darwinism (the Miller-Urey primordial soup experiment, the similarity of early embryos in different species, the evolutionary tree, homology in vertebrate limbs, peppered moths evolving a darker color as air pollution darkened tree trunks, Darwin's finches, evolution from apes to humans) are false or misleading.
http://www.discovery.org/articleFiles/PDFs/survivalOfTheFakest.pdf
Newly discovered whale fossil, older than its supposed ancestor species, proves Darwinists rely on flawed logic.
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2014/09/newly-discovered-whale-fossil-older.html
Nature's best evidence for natural selection does not show that natural selection can cause macroevolution.
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2014/09/natures-best-evidence-for-natural.html
More on intelligent design here:
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/p/62014-contents-evidence-for-afterlife.html#articles_by_subject_id
There is no conflict between evidence said to show that memory is stored in the brain and the belief that consciousness is non-physical. Memory could be stored in the brain and also in the spirit. The question is only important to materialists who deny the existence of spirit and need to prove that memories are stored in the brain in order to prove the brain produces consciousness. If you are not a materialist there is no need to prove that memory is only stored in the spirit. We know from reports of NDErs and evidential mediums that
spirits have memory and if the brain also stores memories it does nothing to contradict this evidence.
Regarding the evolution of human intellect and materialism... Materialism is not a necessary stage in our development. The early scientists, those who invented science, all believed that studying nature revealed how God created the world. There is no conflict between theism and science. The conflict is between atheism and theism and was started by the atheists.
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2015/03/video-lecture-by-john-lennox-explains.html
http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2015/05/zack-kopplin-there-is-no-scientific.html
Kopplin explains that the church burned people alive for believing the Earth was round and that the Earth rotated the sun. A myth such as this is sure to move audiences, and is red meat for evolutionists, but it is, nonetheless, a myth. Historians call it the Warfare Thesis myth, but evolutionists won’t stop using it.
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2015/03/video-lecture-by-john-lennox-explains.html
Richard Feynman
God was always invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you're taking away from God; you don't need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven't figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don't believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time — life and death — stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand.
It is a rhetorical trick to force people to choose between science and God. There are many
examples where the progress of science refuted materialist predictions instead of proving them. Furthermore, theism does not deny science and is not diminished by science. Theists believe that God created the natural laws that scientists are so interested in studying. And science itself has provided evidence that this is true in the evidence for the fine tuning of the universe to support life:
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-fine-tuning-of-universe-to-one-part.html
And multiverse theories don't explain it:
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2014/08/multiverse-theories-fail-to-explain-our.html
More here:
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/p/62014-...-afterlife.html#articles_by_subject_cosmology
More on the history of religion and materialism:
http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/04/imagine_a_world095621.html
Notes:
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2015/03/video-lecture-by-john-lennox-explains.html
1)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
“Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened." Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.”
2)
Viktor Frankl:
“If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone.
“I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment; or as the Nazi liked to say, ‘of Blood and Soil.’ I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers [emphasis added].”