I guess so?
Presently, "don't know" seems to be the honest response, the only honest response, at least as far as any comprehensive understanding goes. — jorndoe

I think that would have been OK 80 years ago, or even 50 years ago, but it would seem that at this point in time, with all the advances that have been made in various fields, an atheist should have something to say, at least in principle, about how their brains produce their minds. There should at least be a hint of an answer by now. So, I think the "don't know" answer has become a problem.

Typically, the response is a bit like that of idealism: mind is instead just assumed to be irreducibly basic, and so not explainable in terms of anything else in the first place. — jorndoe

Yes, by not positing the existence of matter, the idealist avoids the whole mind/body problem. Like I said earlier, I don't know any atheists that are idealists, though. I guess it's possible to be an atheist idealist, but I think idealism has theistic implications. But yes, an atheist idealist would not have to explain how brains produce consciousness because the atheist idealist doesn't believe that brains exist as anything other than ideas.

With theism, there's that vague "supernatural" or "magical" type undertone as well, which could be raised to explain anything, and thus explains nothing.

Well, theistic idealism does not have to explain the mind-body problem because it asserts there are no bodies. Traditional theism (bodies and souls existing) just kicks the explanation for consciousness up a level: matter produces consciousness because God does it somehow. That's not a good explanation, but if time goes on, and 100 years from now physicalist atheists still can't solve the mind/body problem, the "God did it" hypothesis is going to be taken more seriously.

Levine's explanatory gap / Chalmers' consciousness conundrum seems to stuff a wedge in between either explaining the other (which isn't a contradiction, but rather a gap), yet that's not related to theism in particular. — jorndoe

Well, as I said, if enough time goes by and the atheist materialist/physicalist project of explaining everything in terms of matter/energy is still struggling with an explanation for how brains produce minds, people will start turning to other explanations, and "God does it" will be one of them.

Just asserting that we can't acquire more understanding (say, in some sort of "physicalistic" terms), even in principle, won't do. — jorndoe

But if it's true that physicalism can't, in principle, explain something as fundamental as minds/consciousness, it's going to take a hit epistemically, and the competitor theories of reality (dualism/idealism), which have theistic implications, are going to get a bump from physicalism's failure.

The Debate was closed (I guess it's because I won :razz: ), so I thought I would pick up where 180 and I left off. — 3017amen

We don't need to guess because I was the one who closed it. It was closed due to your failure to provide an argument to support your proposition that atheism is illogical despite the insistence of the person you were debating. I closed it when you finally stopped responding to his requests.

I also don't understand why this thread was needed to pick up where you and 180 left off, considering I left the thread open for two additional days (at 180's request actually) for you to respond and you didn't. As it appears, you were given the floor, with all others specifically excluded, to make your case, but when directly challenged, you quit speaking, had the lights turned off and the thread closed, and then opened up another thread in which to hold court.

I say this with some annoyance because I do have other things to do than accommodate requests from posters and have my time wasted. I'm sure many others would have taken the special consideration they were provided more conscientiously, as opposed to your flippant response and now this thread.

In any event, you, more than any one else, has been afforded adequate opportunity to state all that you wished to state on this subject, so you should have no objection to it being closed.

Worst debate ever!