this once again:
If you are an Atheist, you are necessarily a biological reductionist. And once you go there, you rule out any semblance of moral agency. And without moral agency, there is no Truth, only opinion.
Reflex is NOT Truth! It is mere mechanics.
In such a case, my thoughts are 100% determined and thus totally irrelevant to Truth.
Because if the IS no transcendent knowledge, if there is only “brain” and no “mind,” I have to ask where this brain comes up with stuff.
And for the Atheist/Materialist the only answer even possible is “personal inputs.” And if the only reason you think like you do is because of the inputs that you have (by chance) encountered, then by definition there IS no Truth! Nothing transcends experience.
I thus have no reason to believe you any more than I do a dog-faced baboon or some yet stranger monster (thanks, Socrates). Even if lots of people agree, that is certainly no sure indicator of Truth!
I am charmed with his doctrine… But I wonder that he does not begin his book with a declaration that a pig or dog-faced baboon or some yet stranger monster which has sensation is the measure of all things; then might he have shown a magnificent contempt for our opinion of him by informing us at the outset that while we were revering him like a god for his wisdom, he was no better than a tadpole.
–Theatetus
So why would you trust your brain to get to Truth? If it is merely an amalgam of past inputs, there is no reason at all to do so! This “thinking” is actually mere reflex. So a dog-faced baboon is every bit as much an arbiter of Truth as you are!
Sure, there is a complexity issue, but there is no fundamental difference. A baboon has senses, too. So yes, there may be a difference in quantity, but certainly not quality. For an Atheist/Reductionist, that is.
Atheism, by definition, cannot lead to Truth. “Data” on Star Trek is fundamentally crippled.