Imaginative Conservative imagines its own versions of Christianity, freedom, and logic.

 https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/03/libertarians-and-religion.html

Does God underwrite our freedom, or undermine it?

Look at Leviticus where there's numerous victimless laws being classified as sins. Look at the New Testament where Jesus defends Mosaic law while being a cult leader.

There are thousands of self-styled “libertarians” who would argue the latter. They actively oppose the religious commitments of most social conservatives, many of them convinced that materialism is the best metaphysical home for what we might call “libertarian values”—individual rights, freedom and personal responsibility, reason, and moral realism.

Yeah, because physicalism entails looking at the world as it is and noticing that much of the laws that people espouse are based on some type of incongruety. Ignoring that people are individuals with no real debt to each other and no real hive mind linking them, trying to say that people are responsible for the actions of others, be it gun control or slave ery reparations on the left or border controls being argued on every media sensationalism about the off-chance an undocumented immigrant kills a citizen or "abortion survivors" being used to argue for abortion bans.

Under physicalism, there is less fat to consider based solely on the human mind that is often feebled by numerous flaws, one type of fat being moralistic prohibitions on vice or things falsely categorized as murder or theft.

Ayn Rand was a leading apostle of this view.

Normally pointing out a false equivalence of words (not false equivalence of ignorance with evidence or hobbies with worship) in discussing apologetics can be semantics, but this is a blatant example in this false equivalency given that apostle isn't even the right word. Apsotles where the closest followers of Jesus, they weren't really thinkers in their own right, at most adding their own minor questions and commentaries, secondary to Jesus. Ayn Rand however was a definitive trendsetter by her attitude alone. If we must allow Christians to make everything in some way a part of their framework, we should at least have some standards and call Ayn Rand a Sadducee.

An ardent defender of individual rights, free markets, and small government, she was an equally ardent opponent of most forms of state coercion. She was also a committed atheist who insisted that “capitalism and altruism are incompatible, they are philosophical opposites.”

You can't even find an actual atheist quote from her, you can't even pretend for your own premise that Christianity ties with Liberty? You just outright link a disdain for sacrifice with atheism? I can stop here, this alone would be evidence that Christianity isn't Libetrarian because mockery of altruism is equated with atheism. Take in the parts about Jesus saying to love other people, sell your stuff, and spend your whole life in some type of poverty converting others, and its clear that Libertarianism and Christianity only link together because both are superficially liked by American conservatism.

The Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, though by no means as rock-ribbed an atheist as Rand, agreed that free enterprise and Christianity were irreconcilable.

Sir, if the some of the most ardent, developed, and pure type of Capitalism are telling you that Christianity is incompatable, you should probably listen to them.

Many secular libertarians hold that if there is a divine arbiter who will judge our actions, then one can’t fully enjoy the freedom, say, to consume pornography and illegal drugs, and engage in promiscuous sex.

Yeah, Onanism is condemned, sexual "immorality" is condemned by the church.

https://www.gotquestions.org/sexual-immorality.html

Philosopher Thomas Nagel made the point well when he admitted, “I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.”

Thomas Nagel is the only atheist philosopher to exist? 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_atheist_philosophers

https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/mj6ch8/atheistic_philosophers_of_religion/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/atheism-agnosticism/

Daniel Dennett can't have criticisms because supposedly Thomas Nagel wasn't biased in calling his friends intelligent or that these "intelligent" friends couldn't have made a miscalculation?

Hell, Nagel isn't even the best atheist, asserting that life has to serve some nebulous purpose more than actually being able to exist in its own nature, effectively asserting that somehow context matters more than content, for some reason.

http://www.thecritique.com/articles/60-years-on-academic-atheist-philosophers-then-now/#:~:text=To%20take%20just,to%20any%20religion

Additionally, these are just two books he wrote, it's unlikely that these are the ultimate summation of his points, assuming of course he's the be all end all of atheism for any reason beyond appeal to motivation is convenient for you.

But the impression that atheism or materialism is an accomplished host for libertarian values is mistaken. Individual rights, freedom and individual responsibility, reason, and moral realism: none of these make much sense if reality is ultimately blind matter in motion, if, as Carl Sagan said, “the cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.”

And this applies to other forms of morality, like socialism and Christinity. Do you want to wallow? because if you do you'll get bored and start thinking about what hypothetically works for morality. Not objective, but neither is humanity, so it doesn't really have to be.

Libertarians may be surprised to learn that these core values—if not the entire repertoire of libertarian ideas—makes far more sense in a theistic milieu.

If even true, it's certainly not one from any existing religion.

But they need not take my word for it. The history of the West supports this view, as do the arguments of leading materialist intellectuals.

Conservatives need to learn that the West is not special. It has long since relegated if not abandoned freedom for nationalism or socialism. The enlightenment is dead and the West killed it. And these "leading" materialist intellectuals aren't Gods. Intellectuals are intellectuals because they find evidence. It's the evidence that ultimately counts, not whose mouth it comes from. Intellectuals are meant to (and certainly do) automate the process of thought, not determine it.

No Individual Rights

I already explained how individual rights are a better hypothetical moral system than the rest.

Historically, the very idea of human rights and the related idea of equality emerged over many centuries in a theistic and specifically Christian culture.

This is piggybacking. The idea that because Christianity recognizes individual culpability it is somehow responsible for people on their own taking idea of individualism further than judgment.

In the West, major milestones include the Magna Carta (1215), the English Bill of Rights (1689), the Declaration of Independence (1776), and the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights (1791).

These documents are not Christian, neither in themselves nor being mentioned in the Bible. The Declaration of Independence was written by the guy who edited miracles out of the Old Testament because at most he was a deist.

A specific anthropology emerges from these documents with greater and greater clarity. Human beings are made in the image of God, and as such, should be accorded special rights and dignity manifested in law.

Actually read the damn book that supposedly proves Christianity, and find that these dignities are entirely conditional on being Good Christians. Go back to the Bill of rights and see that the first one says not to give religion priority. This article is somehow long and entirely simplistic.

The most widely known articulation of the idea for Americans is the Declaration of Independence, penned by Thomas Jefferson (a theistic rationalist rather than an orthodox Christian) working together with several other founders. Jefferson believed that human equality and rights were truths knowable by natural reason; nevertheless, he anchors individual rights and equality squarely in theology: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

A. Again, deist, not theist.

B. Self-evident, as in themselves. Sounds like the Bible is tacked on.

And so far this all seems to be predicated on the notion that if an idea is never tried in history then it is false. As if the phrase theoretical doesn't exist or that truth value is different from application.

Jefferson originally wrote “sacred and undeniable,” but Benjamin Franklin replaced the phrase with “self-evident.” The original may have been better. Though the truths Jefferson enumerated may be self-evident to an unfallen reason capable of seeing the natural law clearly, our ordinary apprehension of this truth is nothing like our perception of the truths of logic or mathematics. On the contrary, most people at most times and places not only failed to realize but positively denied that individuals were equal in value and dignity. Jefferson’s is an extraordinary claim, and seems to contradict the plain testimony of the senses. Some people are smart. Others are dull. Some are strong. Others are weak. Some are virtuous. Others are vicious. Even if one perceived the truth about man, it’s hard to see how the notion of equality could be systematically maintained without a theological presupposition.

It's called equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome, we discuss this about affirmative action. And this is assuming that physical qualities are what determines worth, which ignores why Eugenics isn't considered a science (i.e. there is nothing making physical qualities worthwhile outside of human preference, including preference for longer lifespans).

Of course, there has been a long and mostly fruitless search over the last couple of centuries for another basis for rights. Yet even the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), who studiously avoided the “G” word, nevertheless drew on the work of French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, a tacit admission that they could find no other stable ground from which to stage a campaign for universal human rights.

And what parts of his work did they take? Did they take theism? Or did they take some type of argument for objective morality that was used to argue for a deity? You know, argument from morality and such the thing that assumes morality couldn't exist because it has a solid foundation in truth value.

At the same time, libertarians go right on affirming Jefferson’s claim, and this includes many who don’t believe in God. Ayn Rand wrote that “man, every man, is an end in himself and not a mere means to the ends of others.” 

Again, you're acting like someone making a claim has some type of monopoly on it, even when other people make the claim on their own reasoning.

We may quibble with the exact construction—strictly speaking, only God is an end himself, and God is our chief end as well. But is there any doubt that in saying this Rand, however improbably, was groping toward the truth? Surely our fellow human beings should be treated as ends—as intrinsically valuable—not as mere means to our preferred ends.

No, humanism is shit, as I have observed on this subreddit. Humanity isn't inherently good, and a lot of our "worth" is tied into believing that observation and distortion make people worthwhile somehow.

The question is not whether we should be treated as ends or merely as means, or whether atheists can discern this truth. The question is, in what view of reality does such an assertion make sense? As it happens, leading materialist philosophers have been saying for decades, not merely that individuals don’t have rights, but that individuals as we imagine them don’t even exist.

Well genetics is blatantly obvious, so if these "leading" materialists can't grasp that, they're wrong. And yet again, there's more of this assertion that ideas are monopolized. That iterations don't exist. That everything this author doesn't like is smeared and can't be absolved without some dead Jewish heretic.

For instance, the father of behaviorism, B.F. Skinner, saw it as the job of psychology to get rid of the vulgar belief in individual men and women. “Autonomous man has been constructed from our ignorance,” he wrote in a book tellingly titled Beyond Freedom and Dignity, “…and as our understanding increases, the very stuff of which he is composed vanishes… To man qua man we readily say good riddance. Only by dispossessing him can we turn to the real causes of human behavior. Only then can we turn from the inferred to the observed, from the miraculous to the natural, from the inaccessible to the manipulable.”

Pointing out that human beings are the products of their environment doesn't permit communism. If anything, there's already too many things dampening free will, so why should equally unfree people have any right to myself than I do? Additionally, this is assuming that no one can be smart because they didn't choose to be, which is arguing about circumstance than the actual nature of humanity. Essentially, Skinner's ideas of "control is good because people don't control themselves" is a "like produces like" argument on the level of homeopathy.

Additionally this article's point is "if materialism is true, then libertarianism isn't!" Which is an appeal to consequences.

This sounds crazy. After all, surely we experience—we know—our own existence as distinct individuals as much as we know anything. (That’s the valid core of Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, whatever philosophical abuses it may otherwise have inspired.) But for the consistent materialist, unified human agents with their own causal powers are so much nonsense. The logic, if not the premise, is unimpeachable. If reality is nothing but blind matter in motion, what sense does it make to talk about individual persons, let alone individual rights?

Again, the fact that we are individuals with our own perceptions, minds, bodies, and property. This being outside of our design is admittedly sad, but not really enough to justify communism or statism or anything. As I've said earlier, you can take two equal cabinets and break one without damaging the other, and humans are very distinct.

No Freedom or Responsibility

How is an decrease in responsibility not an increase in the ability to act? You can call this a crude form of freedom, but's closer to freedom than anything else.

And if we are not individual human agents, then clearly we can’t enjoy anything like freedom or individual responsibility. Leading materialists consistently say as much.

Well again, we still have mouths to speak. We can act. At most there are some impediments to doing so without the influence of the external world, nothing really assigning a debt to authoritarianism (like, say, Original Sin).

In his book Why I’m Not a Christian, Bertrand Russell, one of the twentieth century’s leading philosophers, put it plainly: When a man acts in ways that annoy us we wish to think him wicked, and we refuse to face the fact that his annoying behavior is the result of antecedent causes which, if you follow them long enough, will take you beyond the moment of his birth and therefore to events for which he cannot be held responsible by any stretch of the imagination.

As I said he's using a lack of responsibility to permit something. And this works in reverse as well. If someone has been stabbed, they can stab back since that is a factor. Essentially, a secular basis for "Do unto others" or "your right to swing your fist ends at my face" that works without the need for a deity.

For the materialist, you, or rather “you,” are simply the sum of features determined by physics and chemistry, along with environmental factors beyond your control. Nature, nurture, and nothing else.

Yeah, and those are very well documented and supported. Is this an appeal to consequence that, at most, says that murder is not bad rather than obligatory?

This is no small problem for the libertarian outlook. Our choices, if they are free, cannot be entirely determined by forces outside our control. We can all agree that we are shaped by our biological constitution and upbringing; but if human beings truly have the capacity for what philosophers call libertarian freedom, then sometimes we must be able to choose between alternatives and not merely seem to do so.

Now he's using equivocation, trying to say libertarianism the political philosophy doesn't work if libertarianism the view on free will doesn't.

Again, the lack of myself to make truly free decisions doesn't equate to someone else having legitimate authority over me.

The consistent materialist cannot countenance such freedom. Bertrand Russell understood this, so he bit the bullet and denied that human beings had either freedom or responsibility.

A consistent physicalist can say that some things are preferable than others, especially when preferences are determined more by cause and effect than arbitrary human will.

No Reliable Reason

Guess we can't have trials no more, because we aren't superhuman we can't observe stuff that happens.

Libertarians also tend to have confidence in the ability of human reason to attain the truth. They believe that empirical evidence and right reason can show that property rights, economic freedom, and limited government are better for human flourishing than are command economies in which there is no private property and the state is in charge of everything. They think that intellectually honest people, when presented with these arguments, should be persuaded, and should adjust their opinions and behavior accordingly. “Liberalism and capitalism,” wrote Ludwig von Mises, “address themselves to the cool, well-balanced mind. They proceed by strict logic, eliminating any appeal to the emotions.”

Yeah, the evidence against this usually calls for some type of reform based more on practice (refraining from pillaging other countries) rather than ideology (respecting other countries' private property rights or refraining from "exploitation").

To make and follow arguments, we must be able to understand the relationship between evidence and argument, the inferential link between premises in an argument, and the conclusions that follow from those premises. But what is an inference or an entailment relation between propositions? Clearly neither is an object of the senses, like dandelions or red pandas. We see dinosaur fossils with our eyes; but we infer the prior existence of dinosaurs with our minds. We understand that if all men are mortal and Plato is a man, then Plato is mortal. When we consider this argument, we’re not observing the world around us. We’re perceiving logical relations between propositions. To speak in the language of many worlds, the argument would hold in any possible world.

Analysis isn't fake under physicalism, we just recognize that it's the human recollection of something else based on the evidence. And Plato died because he himself was unable to live forever, not necessarily because he was a man.

We know dinosaurs roamed the Earth because there is evidence of their skeletons found in ways that are similar to how animals roamed the Earth, and a lack of evidence of some type of tampering like Satan hiding the bones.

Also, logic is based on mathematics, which itself reflects the world. Logic exists like a reflection in the mirror. It doesn't truly exist, but it does display stuff.

It’s the difference between purely historical and historical-logical statements. That Columbus sailed the ocean blue is a state of affairs that obtained sometime in 1492. In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue is an English formulation of a true proposition about history affirming that state of affairs. But when we conclude that Plato is mortal, we are certain that if the propositions that form the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true. Unless such mundane inferences are possible and reliable, we could have little or no knowledge. Yet all this is problematic for the materialist.

This is like saying something doesn't exist because a child drew a picture of it.

Also, the point about Plato ignores the difference between valid logic and sound logic. Valid logic is the real use of logic in a correct way. Sound logic is when valid logic is used for something that is demonstrably true. Plato is not here. Plato is a man. If Plato wasn't a fabrication, then he is dead. Hence, Plato is mortal is sound logic.

In his classic book Miracles, C.S. Lewis’s puts it this way: All possible knowledge…depends on the validity of reasoning. If the feeling of certainty which we express by words like must be and therefore and since is a real perception of how things outside our own minds really “must” be, well and good. But if this certainty is merely a feeling in our own minds and not a genuine insight into realities beyond them—if it merely represents the way our minds happen to work—then we can have no knowledge. Unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true.

Yeah, there's still some type of stimulus making us perceive A instead of B. Even if it is an illusion it is an illusion making something specific instead of specifically something else.

Also, this point seems close to Solipisism, so any physicalist argument against it will address Lewis's point. If not, then Libertarianism will likely be predicated on Solipisism, that people who don't truly exist beyond me have no authority over me.

If materialism is true, there can’t be such mental activities, since everything must have some non-rational, and non-purposive, physical cause. And we have no reason to think that such causes would provide us with a way of inferring correctly from a ground to a consequent (as Lewis puts it).

Again, logic is often mathematical. And this is all observed within the human mind, a set of neurons getting activated.

Many materialists believe they have arrived at their view of reality by looking at the evidence and following sound reasoning. More consistent and thoroughgoing materialists see a problem. Lewis quotes famous naturalist J.B.S. Haldane to this effect. “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain,” said Haldane, “I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true…and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.”

What are those atoms actually doing? They're forming neurons that aren't accurate by themselves but can be vindicated by evidence.

We find the same worry in Charles Darwin.

He started the study of evolution. Very important and impressive, but people studied it after he passed. He is not the sole authority on evolution, why should be an authority on anything else?

“With me the horrid doubt always arises,” he confessed, “whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”

And here the author seems to be conflating a lack of reason to believe with outright ad hominem. Essentially, nothing can be proven because of the arguer instead of flaws within the argument itself.

For Lewis, the “cardinal difficulty of naturalism” (what we’re calling materialism) emerges from the lack of causal tools in the materialist toolkit. If materialism were true, then beliefs, purposes and inferences either wouldn’t exist or wouldn’t have any obvious power to transmit truth and so wouldn’t give us real knowledge of the world.

Yes, evidence wouldn't exist because we couldn't make connections with it. Physicalism is false because humanity can't speculate on it. Seriously, this is like saying stuff can't exist outside of human perception.

Lewis’s argument is more intuitive than precise. For analytical rigor, there is no substitute for Alvin Plantinga’s formulation. Plantinga first presented his “evolutionary argument against naturalism” (EAAN) in 1991, but he has continued to refine it in several publications since then. He offers what he hopes is the “official and final” version in his insightful 2011 book Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, & Naturalism.

And I'm supposed to trust it when you don't even describe it?

https://reasonandmeaning.com/2020/03/05/critique-of-reformed-epistemology/#:~:text=other%20common%20criticisms%20of%20Plantinga's,of%20God%3B%20that%20it%20is

https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/31401/what-are-the-problems-with-plantingas-evolutionary-argument-against-naturalism

https://stephenlaw.blogspot.com/2012/12/plantingas-evolutionary-argument.html

https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/boqcoo/a_brief_critique_of_the_evolutionary_argument/

https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/584fbd/an_argument_against_plantingas_eaan/

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Alvin_Plantinga

https://philarchive.org/archive/HENDTE

While Lewis focused on our reason, Plantinga focuses on our cognitive faculties in general, “those faculties, or powers, or processes that produce beliefs or knowledge in us.” These include memory, perception, intuitions about logical and mathematical truths, and perhaps other faculties such as our ability to discern the thoughts and feelings of others, our knowledge of moral truths and the existence of God. The EAAN concerns these faculties, which we assume are generally reliable over the range of ordinary subjects. For instance, we assume that we can know certain foundational logical and mathematical truths, draw conclusions for certain types of scientific evidence, and perceive the world around us.

And for what reason can we not?

The first premise of the argument is what Plantinga calls “Darwin’s doubt.” This is the idea that Darwinian evolution by itself seems inadequate to produce generally reliable cognitive faculties. The doubt is expressed, not just by Darwin and J.B.S. Haldane, as we saw above, but also by materialists and atheists such as Nietzsche, Thomas Nagel, Barry Stroud, and Patricia Churchland.

Is this going to be ad hominem again?

Churchland’s formulation is surely the most colorful: Boiled down to essentials, a nervous system enables the organism to succeed in the four F’s: feeding, fleeing, fighting and reproducing. The principle chore of nervous systems is to get the body parts where they should be in order that the organism may survive… Improvements in sensorimotor control confer an evolutionary advantage: a fancier style of representing is advantageous so long as it is geared to the organism’s way of life and enhances the organism’s chances of survival. Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.

Yeah this is ad hominem again. Mixed in the type of thinking that produces the "the formation of the universe is improbable, and improbable is no different from impossible, ergo God!"

Darwinian evolution, without any help from theism, can “select” for survival enhancing behavior, not for true beliefs. Any particular behavior is compatible with countless different beliefs. Natural selection can preserve the behavior. It is blind to the belief. Any true belief selected would be happenstance.

That's a false dichotomy. It would priotize truth more than anything since it's more evolutionarily advantageous that knowing there is a predator eating you will inspire you to fight back and knowing that an apple is nutritious will inspire you to eat it. At most, there will be side effect of overthinking and paredolia, like shoehorning God into everything, that can be identified and excised from thought. Hell, it's also assuming stuff doesn't exist because people can't see it. And again, ad hominem.

You may imagine that when you get hungry, you decide that you want to satisfy it. Based on this decision, you choose to go to the refrigerator to search for left-overs, and then opt for the taco soup. But the very idea of beliefs as causes of events in the physical world is problematic for the materialist. The reductive materialist will say that beliefs are really just electro-chemical events or neurophysical structures in the brain that are correlated with certain behaviors. The non-reductive materialist may recognize that beliefs have different properties than electro-chemical structures—for instance, the latter aren’t “about” anything as beliefs are. But he must still maintain that such beliefs are determined by an underlying physical structure. The physical structure causes the beliefs. The beliefs don’t cause the physical structure.

Are you implying that the food is there because I was hungry instead of me or someone else gathering and putting it there?

On second thought it sounds like you're conflating the feeling of hunger with the idea of hunger, which aren't the same because the notion of something isn't always the thing itself; a picture of you isn't you. Thinking and emotion might relate to each other but they are still distinct. People act to satisfy wants, and make observations if they want to satisfy curiosity. At most, this produces appeals to emotion, which people know to excize.

Plantinga, unlike Lewis, cashes out his argument in probabilistic rather than deductive terms. I’ll avoid the technical details, but the basic argument is easy enough to grasp: The probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable, given materialism and Darwinian evolution, is low. Or, less precisely: If you think clearly and carefully about the implications of Darwinian evolution and materialism, you will see that, if they were jointly true, you should be skeptical about the reliability of your cognitive faculties, and thus, skeptical about your reasons for believing that Darwinian evolution and materialism are jointly true. Still less precisely and more briefly, If materialism and Darwinian evolution are true, then our cognitive faculties probably aren’t reliable.

This is an appeal to probability, not even based on an actual low probability but because evolution isn't supposed to guarantee thinking, which two paragraphs ago I explained was dubious.

I hypothesize that this mentality of the world as inherently unabashedly false out mere imperfections (which I've seen at least twice at this point) stems more from a subliminal bias caused by the rampant regurgitation of the paranoid Christian need for salvation rather than actual epistemology, that because they hear the words fallen, sinful, worldly so much that when there's something a little bit messy before clearing the air, they immediately jump to it being bad because they already have been told by preachers to repent all the time. Granted stupidity explains this as much.

It's acting like our senses are not only unreliable but incapable of being right. At most this entails agnosticism and epistemological nihilism more than anything else, especially since the explanations of Christianity, without evidence, are hypothetical and logic without any basis in the real world is hypothetical and circular, if not solely persuasive to the mind he lambasts as unreliable and has to consider to be unreliable even in his own framework due to giving credence lies, dreams usually feeling real, and people following other religions having the same convictions as Christians.

The temptation at this point is to object that it’s more rational to trust our cognitive faculties rather than the outcome of some highfalutin skeptical argument. I agree, but that misses the point. The point is that the implications of the materialist hypothesis are contradicted by what we know and trust about our cognitive faculties.

This is another false dichotomy.

The other common objection is that true beliefs should confer a survival advantage, and so natural selection could select for them. But this objection doesn’t survive a cursory analysis of the situation.

No by the point of evolution (which Richard Lenski shown in bacteria) is that organisms survive by adapting to evolutionary pressures in the environment. Accurately identifying at least the most important parts of these pressures (maybe even the unimportant parts to help discern between the beneficial, harmful, and neutral/safe from predators) is entirely in line with this for animals that make decisions.

Think about how we are supposed to have arisen according to the Darwinian story under its materialist interpretation. By some unknown combination of chemistry and dumb luck, a reproducing organism emerges on a suitable planet.

Yeah, that's called abiogenesis? You haven't heard of it? you haven't even heard of AnswersInGenesis's attempts at smearing it?

And again, the creationist argument that evolution is random as in senseless rather than random as in arbitrary. Yeah, there's no real purpose in the world being the way it is. Doesn't change that there's an order to it.

(To avoid what philosophers refer to as skeptical self-reference problems, let’s posit a separate world similar to our own.)

I think these problems might apply more to considering life or consciousness different from our own, because what you're doing now sounds like if it actually mattered, then it would be apples to oranges.

For several billion years, single celled bacterial organisms populate that planet. Eventually more complex, multicellular organisms emerge.

There are bacteria now, and eukaryote evolution is a thing.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK9841/#:~:text=The%20hypothesis%20that%20eukaryotic%20cells,bacteria%20living%20in%20large%20cells.

During all those eons, the blind process of natural selection is culling random genetic mutations,

Again, the creationist mischaracterization. Evolution isn't "blind" in the sense that it's chaotic and without rules, just that there's no real end goal. And it isn't the one killing, it's just the reason predators can kill prey animals at the rate they do. Blaming that on evolution is gun control logic.

preserving organisms in populations with slight survival advantages over their kin.

Using the word kin to apply to subspecies and separate species seems a bit stretched.

Survival-enhancing behaviors are preserved, while survival-diminishing behaviors are not. Such organisms lack beliefs and consciousness.

And again he acts like there can only be one iteration of a thing. 

Three and a half billion years into the story, many animal phyla arrive on the scene, and somewhere near the last page of this cosmic book, beliefs begin to emerge in a few creatures from certain neurophysical structures or events that are either caused by or correlated with survival-enhancing behaviors.

What, your admitted oversimplification sounds stupid? Especially when you ignore the evolution of the human mind?

How confident would you be that this blind process—which it must be if materialism is true—would produce not just survival-enhancing beliefs, but true beliefs, especially abstract scientific and philosophical beliefs such as Darwinian Theory and materialism?

Twice I've explained how getting things right would help evolutionarily, you can look for the times the word predator was in this article because I could explain it with the same metaphor. Hell, there's tool use, the ability to use something as a tool is probably why abstraction was evolutionarily advantageous.

Recall that the number of false beliefs compatible with survival-enhancing behavior is immeasurably greater than the number of true survival-enhancing beliefs.

When has that been established here? So far it seems like it was mere "the human mind is a product of evolution and thus unreliable" as a bait and switch. How did we get to "most human beliefs are wrong"?

The process might give rise to a true belief by sheer luck, but it’s much more likely to give rise to survival-enhancing behavior correlated with wildly false beliefs.

The only way this works is if eating sugar was considered healthy so they kept eating sugar, and this taste for sugar predates the ability to on mass levels produce it, so it was around when food was scarce and people needed calories to find something nutritious. So basically the only "false beliefs rewarded" seem to be oversimplification or circumstances that were different until something changed them.

This is why consistent materialists such as Patricia Churchland conclude that truth definitely takes the hindmost.

And now you're jumping from "the human mind doesn't prioritize truth" to "the human mind needs Jesus or it will devolve into chaos!"

In his recent book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, Alex Rosenberg goes so far as to argue that beliefs and thoughts aren’t really about anything at all. “The notion that thoughts are about stuff is illusory,” he argues. “Think of each input/output neural circuit as a single still photo. Now, put together a huge number of input/output circuits in the right way. None of them is about anything; each is just an input/output circuit firing or not.” An implication of his argument, of course, is that his book isn’t about anything either.

I think the argument can be better described as "it's more about depictions than substance" which, again, doesn't make the mind actually wrong so much as not the sole determiner of things.

If I believe that Jen left at half past nine, then my belief is about something, namely, it’s about Jen’s leaving at half past nine. If beliefs are just circuits firing, however, then it makes no sense to say that they are about anything.

Well technically it's more accurate to say that the circuits are representing something. Which has been displayed.

https://www.livescience.com/16190-movies-reconstructed-brain-activity.html

The atheist libertarian who wants to maintain fealty to reason and true belief is in a real conceptual thicket, whether he realizes it or not.

Why are you adding in old words that aren't used anymore when you end a section? At most it makes look it up in the dictionary? You're not cool just because your time has passed. The future is now old man.

No Moral Truth

Again, hypotheticals are good enough if we want to enforce policies that make us happy.

Spend a few hours in the libertarian blogosphere, or reading libertarian icons such as Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, and it will be obvious that these thinkers, even when they use utilitarian arguments, are moral realists, that is, they believe that moral standards are “out there,” are real things, and not merely our subjective feelings about things. These thinkers believe it truly is wrong for a person or a government to forcibly confiscate the private property of another, not merely that it feels wrong to them. They believe that it is wrong to coerce a person to do something he finds repugnant. They believe that coercion should be limited to preventing people from killing and molesting others. They believe governments should have strictly limited powers. This may not be a complete ethical system, but it is clearly moral realism.

Yeah, and these principles can be better hypotheticals than socialism. The worse they could be is weaker than moral nihilism, and second place isn't too bad, especially since morality, as can be measured, is more about human needs than anything actually shown to be real.

And just how is it not a complete ethical system? Because it doesn't allow to get hystrionic when gay people kiss or something?

By now, you may be anticipating a pattern. As with individual rights, freedom and responsibility, and reason, moral truths are ill at ease in a materialistic mindset. Michael Ruse and E.O. Wilson spoke for many fellow materialists when they argued that “our belief in morality” is “merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends.” As they go on to say, “In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding…. Ethics is illusory inasmuch as it persuades us that it has an objective reference.”

Yeah, and as you mentioned there are utilitarian arguments for Libertarianism, that get stronger when you realize that morality is meant for protection.

Also, the argument that "other materialists have decreed opposition to morality, so everyone else must as well" is flawed. The problem with morality is that it hinges on the is-ought problem and decides that human disgust is enough to change the nature of something. Addtionally, it's another example of the article's concept monopolization.

On this view, a culture that teaches that it’s good to eat one’s first born child for the fun of it will be displaced by cultures that teach the opposite, since the latter cultural norm is clearly more conducive to survival than the former; but the moral judgment that it’s wrong to eat your firstborn child has no “objective reference.” The claim that it is wrong is either false or nonsensical.

Are you upset that you don't get a catharsis out of them not being incarnates of Satan? Is it not enough to punish them? Do you need to make your hatred of them some type of truth?

The implication for the libertarian is clear. The moral judgment that a culture that protects and celebrates individual rights, freedom, responsibility and reason is morally superior to one that denies these things is also either false or nonsensical. To put it succinctly, if materialism holds, the libertarian credo doesn’t hold water. If, on the other hand, some libertarian moral commitments do hold water, if they are truly about something, then materialism is false.

Both of these are an appeal to consequence.

The status of individual rights, freedom and responsibility, reason, and moral realism are quite different in a theistic context. The point may be obvious, so I won’t belabor it. But let’s sketch the outline. Theism is the idea that ultimate reality is an eternal and self-existent, perfectly transcendent yet fully present, personal God who freely creates everything else. The material and the non-divine spiritual realms are real, but derivative. Biblical theism also maintains that God has created human beings in his image. Each of us, therefore, has an intrinsic dignity, equality, and purpose.

Again, Christians take an idea and say that their own is the real one. Be it that there somehow must be a creator, or that there is a deity, it's always their's, even if they just tacked the Bible onto it rather than prove an actual connection. Although this intrinsic thing definately isn't inalienable since if you disobey the God that makes demands and doubt that the people in the Church aren't mislead at best, then you go to hell.

Freedom flourishes in this framework. God exercises freedom in the purest sense by creating the world without help from anything outside himself. But he has not made a world of automata. God gives his creatures, as St. Thomas said, “the dignity of causality.” And to human beings, his image bearers, he has granted us not just causality, but intelligent agency, rationality, and freedom. Our reason is appropriate to our status as finite embodied creatures; but as image-bearers of the all-knowing Ground of reason, we have a basis to trust in the general reliability of our cognitive faculties.

How is this freedom in any way more than "God is conditionally not sending you to hell, so be grateful"? This is a responsibility, not a freedom.

God has given us a freedom so expansive that we are capable of destroying each other and rejecting him eternally. That same freedom and agency, however, make us responsible for our actions, actions that can be judged in light an eternal and transcendent moral standard.

And I'm supposed to view him as great and merciful instead of comparable to a drunk father giving his toddler a loaded shotgun?

I haven’t argued that either libertarian values or theism is true, or that theists must be libertarians. My argument is more modest: if one affirms the libertarian values described above, then one’s coherent philosophical home is theism, not atheism.

"I haven't argued that people need to be pretty, i just said that ugliness is a sin." That's basically the second half of this paragraph.

With this article, I announce I quit. Unceremonious, yes, but throughout my time responding to Christians I have been all but spat in my face with their insulting stupidity. I have been given arguments that, at the most convincing, amount to "Sure you might think I'm pissing on your leg, but piss is water, and so is rain, ergo, it's actually raining on your leg." Because of that, in spite of me remaining a 6 (maybe a 5 on bad days) on the Dawkins' scale for the existence of any deity, I am firmly an 8 on the notion of a deity coming from religions because they ask for a more involved God with a court and enemies showing a need to follow a moral system on the same if not worse evidence.