I think your first paragraph is spot on. And why do people do that?
I also agree that your second paragraph is the logical conclusion of a materialist starting point - that is, the physical universe is all there is. There is really no other conclusion from that starting point.
But that leaves us with no free will (automatons don't decide anything).
It leaves us without love. (Real love is choosing to do what's best for the other person, and we can't choose. And even what we feel as love is just neurons and biochemicals doing canned mechanistic responses.)
It leaves is with no morals. (When a rock falls off a cliff, you don't say that it should have fallen differently, or not fallen at all. We don't think morals apply to mere material objects that are merely obeying the laws of physics, no matter how complex they are.)
It leaves us with no truth. (Our brains evolved to get a good enough answer fast enough, not to discover truth in any absolute, platonic sense. And when we "think", we're just letting those neurons do what they're wired to do, without knowing all the bugs in the hardware.)
But we also have years of experience of what it means to live as a human being. We experience choosing, loving, knowing that some things are right and others are wrong, and discovering truth. We know, via first-hand experience of living, that "complex automatons" does not adequately describe human life.
It's kind of like putting on a t-shirt backwards. It covers all the places that need covering, but it just doesn't fit. And no matter how you try to move it around and re-arrange it, it still doesn't fit. In the same way, the logical conclusions of the materialist starting point don't fit our experience of what it is to live as human beings.
This leaves us with two possible responses. The first is that, out of random chance, the universe has created complex automatons that have the experience of being (and the desire to be) more than automatons - to be genuinely personal, rather than just the impersonal plus complexity. Those perceptions are wrong, and those desires will forever be unfulfilled. It would be cruel, except that the universe doesn't have motivations, and to to call it cruel is a category error.
The second possibility is that the materialist starting point is mistaken - that there is more than merely matter and the laws of physics. This is what I believe. More strongly, I believe that our experience of living as humans is evidence that the materialist starting point is mistaken.
When the Bible says that God made man in His own image, it is saying something about this 21st-century argument. It is saying that there was a first there was personal, not impersonal, and that God (someone, not just something) created humans to also be someone, not just something. And therefore, our experience of being personal rather than impersonal is in line with what has always been.
There's indeed no free will (basic physics tells us that, can be also experienced directly via LSD or meditation), but to see if there's consciousness just inflict pain onto yourself.
All this being said it's pretty clear why would humans, or any other apes, or any other species, have morals - to reduce the pain/suffering that them and others receive.
If we cannot trust our experience of free will then we cannot trust our experience of anything and there is no such thing as "basic physics". After all, basic physics requires that there be a physical world we can observe in such a way as to make true statements about it. If we cannot trust interior observations about choosing freely between alternatives then we certainly cannot trust exterior observations that are mediated through imperfect senses.
Furthermore, if there is no free will there is no morality, since all things are determined and you cannot do otherwise than what you do. (There is no morality involved in the bouncing of a cue ball off of a pool table wall).
> After all, basic physics requires that there be a physical world we can observe in such a way as to make true statements about it.
But that's the point of confusing free will with consciousness. You can experience something (that's the hot stove argument), and inference is perfectly possible for even today's computer algorithms to do (which are certainly not free). Even something as common as a virtual memory system deciding which pages to swap makes predictions/inference based on what it has seen in the past.
Morality is still a thing, much like there are worse and better paging algorithms. Think of it as mental models of how things work, much like the rest of science. In this view morality is a study of how things/consciousnesses feel.
Edit: another way to look at morality as a science is like this: assume most people genuinely don't want to cause suffering of others, and especially of themselves. But they can still cause harm by being simply wrong.
how does basic physics tells us there is no free will? That is generally an argument about hard determinism which could be argued is invalidated by The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
Randomness does not yield freedom. A robot connected to a truly random source (like a decaying radioactive substance) is no more free than a fully deterministic x86 chip.
Sorry but that is exactly what I meant: the world is a) either deterministic or b) partially deterministic and partially random (for example quantum), and in either of these cases there's no way you can construct free will agents.
Arguably the b) version is not simple physics, but that's what I meant.
I don't think it's a given that love, truth, and morals can't exist on top of a materialistic universe. When I download a cat picture from the internet I know it's just a lot of electrical impulses interacting, but this doesn't stop me from seeing the cat.
I also agree that your second paragraph is the logical conclusion of a materialist starting point - that is, the physical universe is all there is. There is really no other conclusion from that starting point.
But that leaves us with no free will (automatons don't decide anything).
It leaves us without love. (Real love is choosing to do what's best for the other person, and we can't choose. And even what we feel as love is just neurons and biochemicals doing canned mechanistic responses.)
It leaves is with no morals. (When a rock falls off a cliff, you don't say that it should have fallen differently, or not fallen at all. We don't think morals apply to mere material objects that are merely obeying the laws of physics, no matter how complex they are.)
It leaves us with no truth. (Our brains evolved to get a good enough answer fast enough, not to discover truth in any absolute, platonic sense. And when we "think", we're just letting those neurons do what they're wired to do, without knowing all the bugs in the hardware.)
But we also have years of experience of what it means to live as a human being. We experience choosing, loving, knowing that some things are right and others are wrong, and discovering truth. We know, via first-hand experience of living, that "complex automatons" does not adequately describe human life.
It's kind of like putting on a t-shirt backwards. It covers all the places that need covering, but it just doesn't fit. And no matter how you try to move it around and re-arrange it, it still doesn't fit. In the same way, the logical conclusions of the materialist starting point don't fit our experience of what it is to live as human beings.
This leaves us with two possible responses. The first is that, out of random chance, the universe has created complex automatons that have the experience of being (and the desire to be) more than automatons - to be genuinely personal, rather than just the impersonal plus complexity. Those perceptions are wrong, and those desires will forever be unfulfilled. It would be cruel, except that the universe doesn't have motivations, and to to call it cruel is a category error.
The second possibility is that the materialist starting point is mistaken - that there is more than merely matter and the laws of physics. This is what I believe. More strongly, I believe that our experience of living as humans is evidence that the materialist starting point is mistaken.
When the Bible says that God made man in His own image, it is saying something about this 21st-century argument. It is saying that there was a first there was personal, not impersonal, and that God (someone, not just something) created humans to also be someone, not just something. And therefore, our experience of being personal rather than impersonal is in line with what has always been.