Hitchens and his cancer

Christopher Hitchens is the famous Atheist author most people are at least a little familiar with. He has throat cancer and is being treated by the best that science has to offer. In an article about his ordeal I read, "Hitchens is badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste." 

For a man who has spent his career arguing for the impersonality and accidental nature of the Universe how is it, I wonder, he has a "sense of waste." If his theories of the evolved nature of everything are true how can whatever happens be wasteful.

According to the atheists the evolutionary process uses what it needs to advance its impersonal agenda regardless whether that is Chris Hitchens' cancer to kill him or the ant I just stepped on. It is not waste it is evolutionary progress to die for the furtherance of this impersonal process. To evolve is to be - isn't it?

Why Hitchens would now consider his contribution to the advancement of evolution as a waste is beyond me. What's more, I question how his evolved brain even came up with the concept of waste.

If evolution is true there is neither good nor bad nor is there accumulation nor waste. There is only the process of mindless change.

It seems to me, now that Hitchens has begun to confront his own mortality, that he may have begun to reason differently. Perhaps he might be thinking there is purpose in the universe after all. If that is so, then he will have to confront where that "purpose" comes from. It certainly cannot exist in an impersonal evolved place of gases which spontaneously coalesced from a singularity to make him.

Do you suppose he might, like Anthony Flew, at some point admit he was wrong and admit there is a God? Probably not! Hitchens has a lot of what we Christians call pride (I don't know what impersonal evolved beings call it) to overcome and I'm not sure he would do that.

It would be nice if Christ would call him to belief. That event, along with Flew's deathbed conversion, might go a long way toward changing the arrogant thought processes of the evolved elites who run our Universities in a manner which is now excluding as much Christian thought as possible.

We need to pray for Chris Hitchens - whether he likes it or not.

Materialism Out; Spirit In

Long ago I read several books by Ayn Rand in which she proposed "emotions are not the means of cognition." Rand was a "pop" philosopher disdained by the intellectual elites so the only contact most people have had with her is through their high school assignment to read and discuss her book "The Fountain Head."

Objectivism, her philosophy underpinning  her books, and atheism were Rand's springboard to notoriety.  She believed that all a human needed to live the good life was available to him through the evidence of his senses coupled with a strong obedience to the necessary materialistic application of that evidence.

What Rand never dealt with, as I recall, was the animating activity on men by the cascade of chemicals in the brain. By that, I mean, I don't recall reading anything about her dealing with consciousness, or to put it in my simple language: how is it possible for anything or anyone to be self-aware?

Now comes the hint of a new strain of thought prying at the door of the materialistic-evolutionary lock-box. Some are beginning to question the cant of the likes of Rand and Richard Dawkins which is; we think because that's the way we evolved - accept it as fact and move on.

In Section 5, devoted to neuroscience, Staune conscientiously explains that contemporary research is far from being unanimous on a number of key issues, most notably the exact correspondence between neuronal phenomena and mental events, and particularly conscience. He patiently argues that in humans the animating force cannot find expression without neuronal activity, but is not a mere result of such an activity. Boldly he puts forward the possibility that much current rationalist and scientific research offers again acceptable space for a dualistic hypothesis (body and spirit).

My-oh-my! What will science do once it is cornered by popular demand to explain why we are able to think merely because a bunch of chemicals in our brains fire synapses in a particular order? What/Who decides the order of firing from which abstract thought is derived?  In other words can evolution explain why it is I'm able to ask that particular question? I don't think so.

Materialism appears to be increasingly ruined and “passé.” A spiritual and religious alternative, for the moment mostly akin to Platonism (presented in some detail), seems to him the most plausible replacement; in any case divine presence and intervention in one form or another have again become, he maintains, fully plausible. I will not enumerate here the powerful voices adduced by Staune to support his conclusions.

The article the quotes came from here. It is an interesting read.

Hat tip to Remonstrans for pointing me to the article. Read their post - Humor In Unbelief.