Hanging by a Thread
It would seem that our notion of the Best Possible World is hanging by a very insubstantial thread.
Give me one irreducible entity and I will logically 'construct' for you a world, and not just any world, but the best of all possible worlds.
Given the existence of just one immaterial object, immaterialism is the logical consequence. If this fact speaks more to the fragility of materialism than it does to the robustness of immaterialism, well, so be it. It will suffice for our purpose which has to do with what used to be called salvation.
I am equating materiality with atomicity, or with physicality. Physics would hardly be physics if it did not have a very restricted and exclusive ontology. The existence of its objects is to be determined purely by means of physical experiments.
Am I going to show you an immaterial object? No. One can only present indirect evidence. But please note that the same is true for material objects. Just showing you a chair is not showing you a material object. Among other things, I would first have to prove that you are not dreaming, and the fact is that no one really even knows how to do that.
[note added 6/14] [Our perception of a chair is a bundle of decidedly immaterial universal qualities.]
I can show you words and numbers. I can show you, by way of the Internet, that virtually everyone who has explored words and numbers agrees that they are irreducible in all but the most trivial of senses.
Why then is not every philosopher an avowed immaterialist? If they were, they would have already constructed this web site, and the rest would have been history. Someone has to be the first in modern history to demand a coherent reality [and get a hearing]. This necessarily entails cosmology, and philosophers, since at least the time of Darwin, are expected to leave cosmology to the scientists. Any trespass on that territory is not taken lightly.
The idea of a coherent cosmos has simply fallen through the political and logistic cracks of academia. That is until the Internet has come along to drastically alter the logistics of presenting and communicating new ideas. Am I holding my breath for the world to beat a path to this web site? As long as that possibility exists, there will be ample motivation for more than a few of us to be in this business. A dozen people knowing the truth and using the Internet can easily take this world away from the materialists: like taking candy from a baby.
5/30/02