Friendly Atheism

[Belacqua]

The primacy of existence is false independent of anyone's ideas to the contrary.  

 
(This is a typo that's supposed to say "true" instead of "false".....? Or maybe I'm confused....?)

That's a fancy way of saying that wishing doesn't make things so, i.e.,  Consciousness is metaphysically passive.

I'm on board with most of this. I see no reason to doubt that there is stuff "out there." Things exist independent of me, don't need my consciousness, will continue to exist when I'm gone, etc.

I think I'd dissent, though, on the idea that consciousness is passive. I don't think we evolved to perceive the world passively. Our sense organs receive input (e.g. light or sound) passively, but our minds edit and interpret all of that before we are even aware of it. This had evolutionary advantage in that we automatically picked out from the environment the things that were more important for us. 

As a simple example, when you meet a friend you are far more aware of his face than of his thigh. His thigh is bigger, so if consciousness were passive it would loom larger in our awareness. But the face contains the information we are interested in, so we focus on that and pretty much ignore the thigh. 

This doesn't mean that thighs don't exist, or that our minds "create" stuff in the world. Just that our relationship to that stuff isn't passive. 

Those who hold that the subject of consciousness holds primacy over its objects, such as every version of theism I've ever heard about, reverse this relationship. 

This I'm not seeing yet.....

In what way does every version of theism hold that consciousness is primary? Is it because God is said to be conscious? I don't understand. 

They hold that consciousness has primacy over existence, the subject holds primacy over its objects. Therefore they hold that in essence, wishing does make it so, e.g., "If ye have the faith (a type of conscious activity) of a mustard seed, ye can say to the mountain (an object) move from there to over there and the mountain will move and nothing will be impossible to you."  Matthew 17:20.

The idea that faith, or prayer, can perform acts on objects is doubtful, I agree. But I don't see why mental stuff influencing matter would mean that consciousness is primary over existence. 

It doesn't seem right to me that in every case if X can influence or change Y, then X is in some way has "primacy" over Y. 

If your kids scream loudly enough, they can make you do something. But in what way do they have "primacy" over you? Not temporal primacy, because of course you came before your kids. There may be a power struggle, in which there are different winners at different times, but how does this establish some kind of metaphysical "primacy"? 

Objects are objects, and ESP, telekinesis, etc., are myths. That's fair. But I don't get the rest of the metaphysical claims here......