Is human all and only matter?

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One of the trends which have captivated the imagination of the new enlightened crowd is the slogan that Human is all matter.Coupled by  the influences of the age , this onliner slogan has been shaped into some kind of an argument for the invalidity of religion as it follows a predictable path. If human being is all and only matter then is nothing beyond that and we know that the matter of human body is an accumulation of hydrocarbons , which when buried decomposes. So a matter has decomposed into the soil and nothing more. So no life after death and so no God and lets join the Dawkins's party which after deeply "absorbing" this argument is chanting "Probably there is no God so lets enjoy".

I don't know how this "Probably" comes into such an apparently solid argument and how much disturbing it is for the faithfuls of Dawkins but the argument is a trivial argument like the rest of the cliches coined and regurgitated against religion . A superficial look into the argument reveals a certain fallacy in the proposition and the argument becomes a non-sequitur.  

For the preposition that "Human being is all and only matter" , it must be true that I am my body. For the sake of easiness , lets say that I am A and my body is B. So according to the proposition , A is B. If A is B or equal to B then all that we say about A shall be true for B as well and all that we say about B shall be true for A as well. Like if you have two match similar match boxes infront of you who match in every aspect then whatever you say about the first match box shall be true for the second match box as well.

There is a famous novel by Franz Kafka titled as "Metamorphosis". In the novel , a fellow one day wakes up and finds himself in the body of a beetle , waving his legs here and there. He accepts the misery and starts his life in the body of a beetle. It is perfectly conceivable on the part of humans to believe that they shall exist even when  his material body will vanish. Humans during the whole coarse of history have been believing in a life hereafter of some kind. Even today , most of the people of the world can conceive of a life in here after of some kind. This conception of life in hereafter comes without the conception of the existence of our  physical bodies in hereafter.

So , i can imagine that i shall exist when my material body shall not exist.The vice versa is unthinkable. So there is atleast one proposition which is true for A and not true for B and the proposition is "A can possibly exist when B does not". As already said that for any two bodies to be identical , all the statements that are true for one should be true for the other as whatever shall be true for one body shall be true for the other body as they are the same thing.  We see that there is atleast one statement that is true for A (me) and untrue for B (my body) so A and B are not identical and so I am not my body only.  We can safely assume from this that Human being is not matter (ie body) only.

Comments

  1. StopS3 December 2012 at 02:32

    "I don't know how this "Probably" comes into such an apparently solid argument"

    "I don't know" is a good start. It should also end here for some ideas.
    "how this "Probably" comes in" quite simple, really. It is grounded in epistemology, where knowledge of the existence of a god is impossible and all that remains is belief, the maybe. As this has never shown to be effective over the last 200,000 years, all we can realistically say is that there probably is no god.
    "an apparently solid argument" Theists don't have a solid argument, or we wouldn't be discussing this, would we? Atheists only react to theists, so where is the argument and by whom?

    Because you are unable to think of something it becomes impossible? "We can safely assume" oh goodness, do you know what "Allusions of Grandeur" are?

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  2. Anonymous31 January 2014 at 21:57

    Great website brother. Simply amazing :)

    ReplyDelete

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