Metaphysical-Physicalism.

[John D. Brey]

Again, you misunderstood all my points.

A novel testable prediction is where you say: "I see that reality has certain properties, and I hypothesize a working conceptual model for why it has these properties. If my model is accurate, then I predict that if we do this new experiment, that no one has ever done before, we will see these specific results for the first time." If the results bear out, this is good evidence that the model is an accurate understanding of reality.

. . . It's the "novelty" of the prediction I keep coming back to. Part and parcel of the novelty of the prediction is that no one else, out of thousands, or millions, of people, saw the need for the novel hypothesis. Ergo, it's not a necessary hypothesis at all. Ala its novelty. But rather, something in the hypothesizer causes him to look at things creatures have looked at a trillion times over billions of years and say: "You know what, I think I intuit, or deduce, something that no mind outside of mine, of all the trillions that have existed in the vast course of life's evolution, ever thought to think about. And if I'm correct, in my deduction, then the world is potentially not exactly as it presents itself to us through our natural means of perception. It's not exactly, what people think it is.". . If this was a natural process, everyone would do it; when in truth only one in a million does it and does it well.

When people like Einstein, Popper, and more recently, Professor Joseph Henrich, examine how, why, and who, does this strange hypothesizing, they all, every one of them, Popper, Einstein, and Henrich (all agnostics or atheists), tell us that the seminal hypotheses, and deductions, come, oddly enough, from raging religious thinkers, such that only the experimental proofs, and the ancillary science, sometimes comes from agnostics and irreligious persons. All the true seminal ideas come out of mythological ideas ----like the sun being greater than the earth, and thus the center of all things in relation to earth and the sun. Or the New Testament idea, seized on by Immanuel Kant, one of Einstein's greatest mentors, that the world we experience is only a phantom or phantasm of reality as it exists as potential in the mind of God.

This has never been done for a god. Ever. That was my point, along with my point that you don't understand the scientific method at all, and you reaffirmed both. Pointing at the wor[l]d and attributing it to a creator is in fact only the hypothesis, not the evidence.

The world is the evidence, and God is the so-called novel idea about why the world exists with all the design-characteristics and qualities it appears to have. We see a world clearly full of design, that no animal or creature mind designed. So we hypothesize a non-human, non-mammalian, designer or creator.

How do we test that God-hypothesis? Uh . . . there's a world. Yes? It has design. Yes? Order. Yes? Order and design imply a designer even as creatures imply a creator. Yes? ------[tapping lightly on Alexander's forehead with his knuckles] . . . Hello! Is anyone home? Do you kinda see where this is heading?

The next step, which takes this idea out of the realm of philosophy, speculation, and imagination, is to make and confirm a novel testable prediction: "If god is the creator of the universe, then we should look at or test this heretofore unexamined aspect of reality that no one has ever done before, and see this specific result." If you could do this, then you would have evidence. Then it would be scientific.

Ok. The novel, testable, prediction, held by a majority of theistic Western men, is that the Bible is written by God, through men, expressing God's will and purpose.

Four thousand years ago, this Bible, transcribed through a desert nomad, to a small tribe of desert nomads, said that through the lineage of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, not only would all the world be greatly blessed, but through this line---which would never be destroyed or eliminate through the course of history ---would come "Messiah" the savior of the world.

That novel prediction, in that text, was written almost two-thousand years before a man, that your's truly, and probably your neighbors on either side of your house, believe is Messiah, the savior of the world, came into being. Jesus of Nazareth was born two-thousand years after the prediction that through Abraham, who was a small desert tribe at the time of writing, would come Messiah. Now, four-thousand years Abraham's day, two-thousand years after Jesus' day, not only are there still members of Abraham's line scattered throughout the world, but many of them still consider themselves "Israel" as they did in Moses' day, while Jesus of Nazareth, come through Abraham's line, is thought to be Messiah, and the savior of the world, by billions of your neighbors on planet earth this 3rd of September in the year our Lord, 2021. I mean we're talking one hellacious conspiracy here taking place over four-thousand years of history.

The Jew is the emblem of eternity. He whom neither slaughter nor torture could destroy; he whom neither fire nor sword, nor inquisition was able to wipe off the face of the earth; he who was the first to produce the oracles of God; he who has been for so long a time guardian of prophecy, and who has transmitted it to the rest of the world – his nation cannot be destroyed. The Jew is as everlasting as eternity itself.

Tolstoy.

There is no greater drama in human record than the sight of a few Christians, scorned or oppressed by a succession of emperors, bearing all trials with a fierce tenacity, multiplying quietly, building order while their enemies generated chaos, fighting the sword with the word, brutality with hope, and at last defeating the strongest state that history has known. Caesar and Christ had met in the arena, and Christ had won.

Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, Vol. 3, p. 65.

If art is the organization of materials, the Roman Catholic Church is among the most imposing masterpieces of history. Through nineteen centuries [now twenty], each heavy with crisis, she has held her faithful together, following them with her ministrations to the ends of the earth, forming their minds, molding their morals, encouraging their fertility, solemnizing their marriages, consoling their bereavements, lifting their momentary lives into eternal drama, harvesting their gifts, surviving every heresy and revolt, and patiently building again every broken support of her power. How did this majestic institution grow?

Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, Vol. 5, p.44.

If we want to explain these aspects of brains and psychology as they appear in modern societies, we need to understand the origins and spread of high rates of literacy---when and why did most people start reading? . . . It began late in 1517, just after Halloween, in the small German charter town of Wittenberg. A monk and professor named Martin Luther had produced his famous Ninety-Five Theses. . . Luther's Ninety-Five Theses marked the eruption of the Protestant Reformation. . . Embedded deep in Protestantism is the notion that individuals should develop a personal relationship with God and Jesus. To accomplish this, both men and women needed to read and interpret the sacred scripture ---the Bible ----for themselves, and not rely primarily on the authority of supposed experts, priests, or institutional authorities like the Church. . . Protestantism spread from Wittenberg like the ripples created by tossing a stone in a pond. . . Thus we can take proximity to ground zero of the Reformation ---Wittenberg ---as a cause of . . . raised literacy and schooling in its wake.

Joseph Henrich, Chair of the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, The WEIRDest People in the World, p. 8-9.
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When we add to the words of the historian Will Durant, and the philosopher Tolstoy, and the Harvard Professor of Evolutionary Biology, Joseph Henrich, the historical fact that all the great founders of modern science, Kepler, Newton, Copernicus, et.al., were all devout, bible-thumping, Christians, we know why the modern Darwinist bristles the moment you imply that evolutionary change isn't based on "random" mutations. For without historical randomness, scientific randomness, the true history, source, and evolution, of modern science, must be taken seriously, as, well, the true source, heritage, heredity, of modern science.

The fact, history, truth, of modern science are so unknown by today's arm-chair scientists and agnostic neo-Darwinists, only because of their misplaced belief in random mutations as the source of meaningful evolutionary change. Neo-Darwinism's belief in the design power of random mutation implies that all true heredity, source, evolution, history, can be ignored by the modern agnostic. His truth comes through random means that can utterly ignore all that came before since random mutation is as good as design in his or her mind. His truth, in its glorious randomness, is uncoupled from the truth of hereditary transmission, so that only this elevation of the power of random chance (mutation) can account for how thinking men and women today can be so divorced from the true heritage, source, and transmission of modern science. They can be this so long as they hold to the possibility that real, fundamental, change, can occur randomly, thereby ignoring the truth of history, hereditary transmission, and cultural evolution. They bristle at the argument that randomness can't lead to profound design, because if they don't, they must submit their own epistemology to its cultural, historical, actual, heritage, which, in the West, is Judeo/Christian to the core, a core, they never liked and probably never will.

Take away the lie of randomness (design can come randomly, through random mutations) as the primary source for evolutionary change, design, order, and the neo-Darwinist of today will have to take the truth of history, theology, cultural evolution, seriously, which won't bode well for them, since they're living in Candy-land, a fool's paradise, built on the shifting sand of an epistemological fallacy of biblical proportions.

We believe random mutation is wildly overemphasized as a source of hereditary variation. Mutations, genetic changes in live organisms, are inducible; this can be done by X-ray radiation or by addition of mutagenic chemicals to food. Many ways to induce mutations are known but none lead to new organisms. Mutation accumulation does not lead to new species or even to new organs or new tissue. . . as was pointed out early by Hermann J. Muller (1890-1967), the Nobel prizewinner who showed X-rays to be mutagenic in fruit flies, 99.9 percent of the mutations are deleterious. Even professional evolutionary biologists are hard put to find mutations, experimentally induced or spontaneous, that lead in a positive way to evolutionary change.

Lynn Margulis, a member of the National Academy of Science and recipient of the 1999 Presidential Medal of Science.​

Neo-Darwinism is a mutation, a random account of reality, history, science, that's 99.9 percent worthless, and will lead to no real, lasting, evolutionary change in thought, history, or science. It's a random mutation, leapt upon by poor souls seeking refuge not from a corrupt, sick and dying world, in the arms of the Savior, but who seek salvation from the Savior, in the sick, corrupt, mutation, that is neo-Darwinistic thought.

"Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling. Calling oh sinner, come home."

Will L. Thompson.​

John