theophilus

and all this shows is that you still don't grasp the argument. Objectivity does not refer to the specific standards of any given system but the standard upon which the system attempts to operate.

theophilus

and all this shows is that you are not quite as erudite as you imagine.

Unless you can provide transcripts or other citations that prove your assertion, I'd have to assume that they were denying the ability of atheists to establish an objective basis for morals.

You guys want to carp about how the bible condones slavery and genocide but you can't establish anything but subjectivity to support your contention that these things are wrong.

theophilus

This answer, of course (as well as the question itself), begs the question.
To ask of answer the question, one must know what "good." You cannot simply import the concept into your argument and use it to justify your position.
All your examples are pragmatic; pragmatism is not objective.

theophilus

This doesn't help. Where did empathy come from?

theophilus

Furthermore, no two brains are exactly alike, so patterns in my brain may be different from patterns in your brain; who is to say which is correct?

Wiploc

I'm tellin' you said that. And I'm gonna go look up "erudite" right now, you hear!


Of course. I'll try it again: ... and furthermore, I often hear William Lane Craig and other Christians argue with a straight face that there isn't a thing IN THIS WORLD wrong with rape. Sheesh.


Neither can you. You keep pointing out that we can't. You say it as if you can. But you can't. Don't keep implying that you can when you can't. You should switch to another line of argument unless you can explain morality.

I request that you put up or shut up: Either explain morality or admit that you can't.
crc

Family Man

Evolution. Those who developed empathy for others more easily banded and worked together, and were more successful.

Spenser

Theo seems to be avoiding answering the concept of natural selection for morals...

Family Man

What Theo wants is for us to explain exactly what chemical reactions occur in our brains that cause us to feel empathy. Without that level of detail, Theo will persist with his God of the Gaps argument.

rainbow walking

Wow Mike,
That was a reasoned and different approach. I’m surprised no one has taken you to task on this. I guess everyone’s busy focusing in on Theophilus. Mind if I jump in here and test your hypothesis?

mike: Absolute morality stems from imperative desire for autonomy/freedom.

rw: Doesn’t continued existence come first? After all, we have evidence of folks selling themselves into servitude to continue theirs and their families existence.

mike: Imperative autonomy/freedom interacts in interesting ways with ignorance of the future (innocent until proven guilty).

rw: Isn’t autonomy a descriptive value assignment of a specific state of existence? What do you mean by “imperative” in this context? I agree that ignorance of the future can be an anxiety producing factor, but societal stability can sooth the savage beast while science advances our predictive abilities with each new advance. I fail to see how imperative desire for autonomy and ignorance of the future accounts for a standard of measuring value assignment any more than the imperative desire to survive and progress would.

mike: Autonomy/freedom allows all to become what they will. An irrepressible drive toward autonomy/freedom is evident in even (especially) the most oppressive societies. In free societies a drive toward freedom is a given.

rw: Is any society completely free? What about economic and political bondage created by free societies that favor one class distinction over another? An irrepressible drive towards domination also becomes evident within free societies. It occurs among classes, political machines, corporations, religions and between the individual and the society in which he lives.

mike: In oppressive societies, an underlying drive for freedom is the impetus for the oppression (else why oppress?). The irreducible purpose for justice is to preserve freedom/autonomy (all other types of false justice eventually fail because of the bubbling desire for freedom that is being oppressed) ie. when one person infringes on the freedom of another, justice is invoked--any other use of oppressive force runs counter to the original purpose for the existence of such force.

rw: In an ideal society perhaps. Men, in societies that preserve the appearance of freedom, struggle to wrestle the machinery of state to their advantage.

mike: However, even only using justice to take autonomy/freedom from some in order to preserve autonomy/freedom in others creates an inevitible tension between the original impetus for justice (ignorance of the future)and the autonomy/freedom of the offender since although we may know s/he has offended we do not know if s/he will offend again.

rw: But justice is not based on an ignorance of the future. It’s based on consequentialist ethics. I.e. all infractions must be met with some type of prohibitive consequence as a message to other would be criminal. (I assume you are referring to criminal justice). It’s all about preserving the status quo. Now it might be argued that the preservation of the status quo could be construed as a fear of future undesirable change.

mike: Yet we desire to protect our own autonomy/freedom against the offender. So ultimately, we all become theoretical offenders in that in order to believe in the concept of freedom (that we naturally crave while in ignorance)

rw: Well, I’m not sure if you’re referring to criminal justice or military justice against rebellion here, but it sounds like you’re speaking of criminal justice…or maybe not? But I think you have the cart before the horse in our common goal of preserving freedom. The reason we crave freedom, relative to ignorance of the future, is our conviction that we ultimately know what is best for ourselves and how to respond in future crisis. Not that we don’t look to our societal institutions in times of crisis but we prefer not to have oppressive legislation enacted to account for future possible crisis when other methods will suffice. All free societies tend to lean towards the conservative while giving lip service to progressiveness.

mike: we must theoretically either take away freedom or have it taken away.

rw: And the final arbiter residing beneath our desire for freedom is our drive to exist. Ultimately, no matter how you slice it or dice it, it becomes a might makes right world. We like to dress it up and prance it around with religious and politically correct terminology, but we know when the curtain rises we’re going to fight like hades to win. This doesn’t change when you invoke a god. Such invocation just shifts the emphasis of might from an oppressive minority to an oppressive sovereign god with the religious elite calling the shots.

mike: None of us know what anyone else will do, so we cannot really obtain universal freedom (especially from cognitive tension or fear) without contradicting the principles of freedom (by not allowing the possibility that someone else may use their freedom to take our freedom). Such an impasse should result in widespread cognitive paralysis, but it does not. Why? Because of a widespread belief in an all knowing Mediator.

rw: Sorry Mike, I have to call you on this one. People do not live in fear of slavery as much as they do of out right death. When a society falls under the spell of an oppressive regime the people are oppressed by the fear and threat of death if they rebel. It is, and always will be, a might makes right world. Some societies learn, for a season, that the constituency has the greatest might…but, as I said, conservatism tends to whittle away the constituency’s conviction of power until all that’s left is the Emperor’s invisible cloths. It is fear of death that swings like a pendulum beneath the surface of the subtle threats that challenge the constituency’s convictions until they are no longer capable of resistance. Many such societies have gone on to last for thousands of years, (the far eastern dynasties, for example), devolving into feudal serfdoms while the constituency languished in fear of their lives and accepted their fate and learned to live with it. You’d be surprised what man will endure to preserve his existence…in the hope of tomorrow being a brighter day.

Mike: Being in ignorance, our only hope for cognitive, emotional, and actual freedom is to ultimately place justice in the hands of an all knowing being.

rw: I disagree entirely Mike. The only way out of ignorance is via science. Man is his own best and only hope.

mike: A widespread belief in God becomes necessary, then, to keep a society that tends toward freedom running smoothly.

rw: That hasn’t been the case historically, Mike. It has always been some type of religious order that keeps the peace under oppressive regimes. Even Soviet Russia depicted worship of the State as a type of religion while decrying all others. A widespread belief in God is the marching drum of a conservatist driven, religious order preceding the eventual diminishment of human rights and freedoms until the constituency is no longer able to organize any serious resistance. Men are driven to dominate, Mike. We dominate our ecosystem, lower life forms and one another in an attempt to preserve our lives and enhance our position in the social order. It’s a verifiable fact. The safest surest route for man is to develop his science to dominate the properties of matter, increasing man’s freedom of choices without restricting those he’s already earned. No political or religious answer exists, or ever will, that can resolve his ignorance of the future and extend his life span. It was man’s imagination that brought him out of the caves and it is from his imagination his science has evolved.

Mike: So how do we explain this impetus for belief,

rw: It is a product of our genetics that compels us to create an answer to those forces of nature most pressuring us as a threat to our existence. It allows us to justify cowardice, acceptance of slavery and death without a whimper, murder for profit, oppression and genocide.

Mike: this interaction between a desire to be free and our own ignorance?

rw: We inherited it.

Mike: Two possibilities come to mind: there is a God who desires both our freedom and our belief, and has thus arranged this state of affairs; or random mutation has somehow "selected" a need for belief in order to compensate for a system otherwise gone awry (an unexplained development of a taste for freedom in ignorant creatures) that might otherwise threaten the cognitive breakdown of the species.

rw: I go with the latter but not with the description. Naturally, being a theist, you are going to cast the natural path in the worst possible light. We have outgrown our need for belief but haven’t come to the full realization of that fact yet. It served us when we were without a solid scientific basis and were just stuttering along in blind chance, occasionally making a connection between two events and deriving another piece of the puzzle. Once man reaches a certain point in his science current religious belief will dwindle away the way all previous religious beliefs have. The truth is Mike, we don’t need a god to explain belief nor to achieve equilibrium between our desire to be free and our ignorance of our fate. We have some outstanding natural morals instilled in us at conception that drive and compel us along…and we often just plain get lucky.

Mike: The problem with the second view is that the development of a belief in God must necessarily come after a realization of an impasse--so why would such an impasse ever have been adaptive in the first place?

rw: A casual look at the expanse of man’s history will reveal that there have been long periods of stasis, and in every case there was some type or form of religious order lurking in the background. It will also be noticed that science began to break the grip of religiously generated belief at each point where a new age ushered in. I think you’ve misplaced your causative agency here. Social evolution allows for natural selection of that which prevents an impasse. Right now there is an evolutionary battle over the domination of ideas: science or religion.

Mike: There is no logical evolutionary explanation for a paradoxical cognitive existence (this by the way was what Lewis was getting at: why would we so universally want to be something that we [biologically] so obviously are not; unless such a desire stemmed from an aspect of ourselves that transcended our biology [spirituality]).

rw: The paradoxical came from religion, not from natural selection. Nature is naturally selecting away from the last vestiges of religion today. Lewis was wrong on all counts. Evolution is entirely about changing, which is equivalent to being something we currently are not. Religious belief is about sustaining the ruling elite status quo and thus prohibiting change. Of the two, which do you think will fade completely out of the gene pool?

Mike: Ask yourselves this question: If you were a God that wished to be in relationship with your people, how best might you ensure that they seek you out?

rw: Why would such a being want to be in a relationship with mortal beings? This creature is described as immortal. He has no experiential knowledge of what it means to struggle for existence and we have no experiential knowledge of what it means not to. Where’s the impetus for a relationship?

Mike: You could impose your presence on them suddenly, but perhaps that would result in a cognitive breakdown as well. Hmmm...perhaps you could try giving them a paradoxical cognitive existence: a drive for freedom plus a profound ignorance of the future. This paradox would provide an impetus for a gradual, but inevitable drawing of your people toward you. So that by degrees they become cognitively prepared for your otherwise overwhelming presence.

rw: Then man’s science will lead him to god.

Mike: That we are ignorant of the future is self-evident,
rw: That we are not so ignorant today as we once were is even more obvious.

Mike: so to believe in God we simply have to ask ourselves one question: Do I have an inexplicable desire to be free? If your answer is no, then let me place you in a cage for a few years and see if your opinion changes.

rw: That last closing statement just negated your entire argument Mike. Why threaten with a cage? Is that the best religion and belief in god can do to convert people? Convince them they are ignorant, want to be free and then threaten them with a cage for a few years if they refuse your idea of freedom?