Some readers have asked me to comment on the extracts from Dinesh D’Souza’s new book, Life After Death: The Evidence currently appearing on National Review Online. The first one’s here, the second here.
I confess I can’t find much to say. To judge from the extracts — and of course, if this is the kind of thing that interests you, you should read the whole book — D’Souza seems to lean heavily on arguments of the type:
- Science currently has no explanation for X. (In the extracts, X = moral behavior).
- Therefore we must go to religion for explanations.
The overall schema there is contrary to an empirical style of thinking, which would prefer:
- Science currently has no explanation for X.
- Therefore we must press on with our investigations in hope of finding an explanation.
The empirical style is, though, a minority taste. As I say in, ahem, my own book, pp. 147-148:
The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.
Scientific objectivity is a freakish, unnatural, and unpopular mode of thought, restricted to small cliques whom the generality of citizens regard with dislike and mistrust. Just as religious thinking emerges naturally and effortlessly from the everyday workings of the human brain, so scientific thinking has to struggle against the grain of our mental natures. There is a modest literature on this topic: Lewis Wolpert’s The Unnatural Nature of Science (2000) and Alan Cromer’s Uncommon Sense: The Heretical Nature of Science (1995) are the books known to me, though I’m sure there are more. There is fiction, too: in Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s 1960 sci-fi bestseller A Canticle for Leibowitz, the scientists are hunted down and killed … then later declared saints by the Catholic Church.
When the magical (I wish this to be so: therefore it is so!) and the religious (We are all one! Brotherhood of man! The universe loves us!) and the social (This is what all good citizens believe! If you believe otherwise you are a BAD PERSON!) and the personal (That bastard didn’t show me the respect I’m entitled to!) all come together, the mighty psychic forces unleashed can be irresistible — ask Larry Summers or James Watson.
The greatest obstacle to calm, rational, evidence-based thinking about human nature, is human nature. Pessimism doesn’t come easily. You have to struggle your way towards it.
In any case, aside from employing a schema that empirically-minded people will reject, D’Souza seems not to fully understand the science he is talking about. To judge from these extracts, he is not aware of, for example, evolutionary game theory. It’s possible he covers the topic elsewhere in his book. I’m only commenting here on the extracts, as I’ve been asked to do.
Christian apologists seem to think that morality is their trump card. How on earth could such behavior have appeared, if it were not implanted in us by a supernatural agent? Yet in fact the card is a weak one. There are all sorts of plausible explanations for moral behavior on naturalistic grounds. We don’t know which one is correct, but there is no reason — there is never a reason! — for empirical inquirers to throw up their hands and say: “Heck, there is no way we shall ever explain this — best hand it off to the priests.”
My advice to the Christian apologists would be to give up on morality, which likely will not be a “gap” (as in, “God of the”) for much longer, and concentrate on consciousness, where we are much further from understanding.
Like they will take my advice!
I won’t be reading D’Souza’s book myself. Life’s too short (except, presumably, in the Hereafter). I have, though, just got a review copy of Nick Wade’s new book >The Faith Instinct, which comes out next week. I’ll be posting a review of that somewhere, also next week.
Pingback: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » Goodness!
“The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal.” And, list-making.
I haven’t read D’Souza’s book either–I hadn’t heard of it till this post–but isn’t he overlooking the fact that science once had no explanation for a lot of things that are now perfectly explicable by virtue of empirical thinking? The fact that we don’t have a non-magical explanation for a particular phenomenon at present doesn’t mean we won’t have one in the future.
D’Souza’s reasoning is full of mistakes. It’s not worth it to go and list all of them, but the biggest mistake is that he supposes both more and less than he needs to. He supposes an afterlife with cosmic justice, where what he really needs to suppose is a human belief in an afterlife with cosmic justice, a belief which we know exists in some societies and not in others, whereas each of those societies has some moral code. (And that fact in itself seems to falsify his whole hypothesis.) But once he (unnecessarily) supposes cosmic justice itself, he would also need to suppose a mechanism by which people come to know it. So he would need to suppose some form of revelation as well, which would presumably require some Revealer. So he’s using a metaphysical sledgehammer to hit an empirical thumbtack.
One aspect of D’Souza’s bad reasoning is worth looking at, though, because he makes the same mistake that’s habitually made by bloggers at Secular Right. He accepts “morality” (which he defines basically as private conscience) as a “given”; he ignores any problem with the word, as if all morality were 21st-century upper-middle-class American morality – what people at Secular Right charmingly call “the Golden Rule”.
But let’s take Nietzsche’s advice and consider the wide variation in moralities in D’Souza sense, i.e., in private consciences. Could all these really be explained by the supposition of a single cosmic justice as D’Souza suggests? Of course not. How could D’Souza’s cosmic justice explain a Nazi SS officer’s feelings of moral guilt at letting a Jew escape? Similarly with D’Souza’s conception of “altruism”: consider the Nazi who altruistically devotes his life to the Final Solution.
Thus D’Souza makes the same mistake in reasoning about morality as do certain contributors to Secular Right. And the mistake was diagnosed by Nietzsche over a century ago. That’s Nietzsche, N-I-E-T-Z-S-C-H-E. Check him out, guys.
By the way, there’s a significant misunderstanding of D’Souza’s argument in this post. He’s not denying that evolution can explain moral behavior. He freely admits that it sometimes can. He claims that it can’t explain moral cognition. That is, believing that some behavior is “the right thing to do”.
@ Aaron,
When you allude to the mistakes of SR contributors wrt moral reasoning, i.e. that they take morality as a given (given by Nature I assume), where in Nietzsche’s work would I find his criticism of that idea?
Well, there are many people–not necessarily anyone posting at this blog–who find it convenient to believe that “moral cognition” and “self-interest” or “self-gratification” are one and the same. Witness Hemingway’s famously stupid remark about how “moral is what you feel good after.” I spent enough time consulting with law enforcement to know that your average rapist, bank robber, and murderer feel pretty good about the crimes they’ve committed. Their only regret is getting caught and having to suffer the legal consequences of their actions.
#3: But of course he *is* denying that there can be a naturalistic explanation of moral behavior. Upstream from behavior are concepts — brain processes, to the best of our understanding. If **those** can’t be explained, neither can the behavior. I instinctually, when writing at speed, take the behavior to be prior; but that is highly arguable, & has indeed been argued for a millennium or three… One can’t say everything.
“D’Souza seems to lean heavily on arguments of the type:
Science currently has no explanation for X. (In the extracts, X = moral behavior).
Therefore we must go to religion for explanations.”
Not at all. D’Sousa counters the secularist argument, Science currently has no explanation for X (where X is the existence of God, or the Resurrection, or the afterlife); therefore X is malarkey.
@Aaron
But of course the feeling that some behavior is “the right thing to do” is precisely what motivates us to to actually behave in that manner. Moral cognition or sensibility is a necessary (though not sufficient) cause of moral behavior. It is hard to see how D’Souza can credit evolution with producing a behavior, yet deny that it could produce an essential component.
The universe is supposed to endure for trillions of years before it ultimately dies of thermodynamic “heat death”. I wonder what are all the souls are going to be DOING as they “live” on for trillions of years, and what will happen to them when the universe itself poops out.
>>”Science currently has no explanation for X.”
You have to accept the reality these there exists a huge class of questions for which science will never and can never have any answers.
“Should we kill all left-handed people at birth?” is not a question which science can offer any real help with.
Other examples include “Should we travel to the moon, or to Mars?”.
In general science is great at answering questions of the “how do we” type, and useless at answering questions of the “what should we do” sort. It can help you reach your goals but it cannot help you set them.
>>”There are all sorts of plausible explanations for moral behavior on naturalistic grounds.”
Even if that it true, there is no scientific answer to the question – “What sort of behavior should we consider to be morally right”.
The commenter above who suggested a crash course in Nietzsche was on the money. Nothing being said at the Secular Right is actually very new, in spite of the breathless “cutting edge of science” mumbo jumbo, and some of it has already been debunked in the past.
Derb has a poor response here. After D’Souza explicitly anticipates a “god of the gaps” characterization of his argument, Derb…makes a “god of the gaps” characterization of his argument and ignores all that D’Souza says about it. Derb’s preferred empiricism response is something that D’Souza addresses directly in his excerpts; pity that Derb didn’t seem to notice.
He also misstates the morality existence argument. It isn’t that theists can think of NO way this sense of morality could exist; indeed, D’Souza recognizes a couple of naturalistic responses and summarizes them as well as their flaws. Rather, D’Souza suggests that a “cosmic justice–next world” thesis is more fruitful, at least at first glance, than the current attempts, and that ruling out the supernatural in advance isn’t science, it’s philosophy (and begging the question at that.) Derb doesn’t GET philosophy (which he’s admitted before), and it shows.
Aaron, you’re also mistaken about D’Sousa’s argument. It doesn’t, in fact, hinge on the belief in an afterlife with cosmic justice (at least in these excerpts). His proposed presupposition is that the mere existence of that afterlife is what generates the morality sense. You don’t need to know magnetism theory to be able to use a compass.
Actually, the belief in an afterlife with cosmic justice (even with all the assorted beliefs you ascribe as “hitting a thumbtack with a sledgehammer”) aren’t problems for the supernaturalist. They’ve got a source for those beliefs. They’re problems for the naturalist who has to devise an explanation for their pervasiveness and persistence in spite of their evident evolutionary disadvantage (in which case, citing a few non-afterlife societies isn’t helpful). That’s what the excerpts were about.
Finally, the Nietzsche observation doesn’t help here. That’s only useful if one is trying to determine the content of morality, not the mere presence of the moral sense (which D’Souza is doing). Consider a bright, shining light surrounded by windows. The light filtered through those windows can be all kinds of colors depending on the glass condition (stained, dirty, painted, etc.) You might, with Nietzsche, seriously question whether anyone can really know the color of the light when you see red light while your neighbor sees blue. But in D’Souza’s formulation, the fact that there’s light at all is the key.
@Penry
I wasn’t as clear as I should have been. By moral behavior I mean behavior that you, I, and D’Souza would consider moral, whatever the motivation. Think altruism. Most human parents “naturally” feed their children without thinking about whether it’s the “right thing to do”. That’s what I meant by moral behavior: behavior that we would call moral, not necessarily behavior taken as a result of moral judgment. It’s quite reasonable, to D’Souza, that this behavior was naturally selected for, in humans as in dogs.
@Susan
In the excerpts posted at National Review Online, D’Souza does try to counter the obvious “God of the gaps” objection.
@slarrow
I’d already thought of your objection to my Nietzsche argument myself. My response is that the content of the “cosmic justice” does matter. Suppose cosmic justice rewards what we call evil and punishes what we call good; Satan rules. Would D’Souza’s argument still work? He’d be proposing not just a filter, but an inverter. I don’t think he’d go for that. Well the variation in human morality is so large that for a large number of historically existing societies, their good is pretty much our evil. They don’t just “filter” D’Souza’s cosmic justice, they come pretty close to inverting it.
You’re probably right that I misunderstood him when I said that he’s necessarily (implicitly) assuming human belief in cosmic justice. I admit I didn’t read the excerpts that carefully. But if just the existence of cosmic justice is enough to give us a moral sense even if we’re totally unaware of it, that sounds like pure magic. But I’ll go and re-read that excerpt.
I’ll betcha The Afterlife is crowded with dinosaurs and bacteria.
@Prime
Beyond Good and Evil, §186. He’s talking about Enlightenment moral philosophers, but it applies to some of the contributors and commenters to Secular Right as well.
@Aaron
Actually, when I said that D’Souza was talking about moral agency and not “moral” behavior, I was thinking of the third excerpt, posted at NRO now. Mr. Derbyshire was talking only about the first two. My apologies for saying that he misunderstood D’Souza.
Did any of y’all hear the D’Souza-Medved lovefest on Medved’s radio show earlier this week? I did, and there was no “God of the gaps” in the parts I heard. On the air Dinesh said that 1) modern physics proves there are more than 4 dimensions out there. 2) the physical laws in them are at odds with the Newtonian view of the universe therefore 3) there is an afterlife and physical resurrection of the body.
I’m not kidding.
When some New Age cult leader says “Quantum Physics… Scientists Say… Therefore, if you Believe You Receive!” it’s crapola. When Dinesh says it, it’s still crapola.
I went and re-read that excerpt. D’Souza’s argument is so sloppy that while he’s not explicitly saying that any belief in ultimate justice is required, his argument is so obviously wrong otherwise that that’s the only charitable interpretation. For instance:
Now obviously what matters in the first sentence is whether we believe they’re legislative in some sense. If you don’t interpret his sentence as talking about belief, then it’s obviously false.
Elsewhere he says that these standards are “built into our natures”. He calls that a fact. Fine. But I thought this was supposed to be an explanation.
Where I would focus on if D’Souza is Fermi’s Paradox and the Rare Earth Hypothesis.
To me, Fermi’s Paradox is the loudest KLAXON blaring there is a God.
Most atheists are firm, staunch, staggering believers in advanced life on other planets. They fervently hope so, as they (mistakenly) believe this will prove there is no God.
But there is no life on any other planet… instead…..
They have to go back fantasizing they are Luke Skywalker….
@Aaron, I have to disagree with you on what’s so “obviously” sloppy. D’Souza is asserting “each of us has a moral sense” as a fact. The question is: what is the source of that sense? If we take an evolutionary perspective, he claims, it becomes difficult to satisfactorily come up with a source for that sense as well as its survivability given that it seem to go against what helps an individual survive and persist. If, however, we consider that this sense has a source in another realm, then it seems to fit better.
I like analogies, so here’s another one. When people on a dance floor are dancing out of time with the music but in time with each other, something odd is happening. If you find out they’re all listening to the same music in their earpieces, that’s a pretty good explanation. (Oh, and the dancers don’t have to have any particular belief about where their music is coming from; they just have to react to what they hear.)
You say, “Now obviously what matters in the first sentence is whether we believe [these standards are] legislative in some sense.” No, it doesn’t. “Legislative” is descriptive here; he’s saying that it makes no sense to measure our life against these standards if they aren’t telling us what we ought to do. For example, suppose the standard is, “Do not steal”. Is it “obviously what matters” that we believe “do not steal” is a law? Or is it more important that we feel bound to abide by that law where “feeling bound” is detrimental to our own benefit and that of our offspring/genes/whatever naturalistic tendency we have? That’s the situation that D’Souza says that a cosmic justice afterlife helps to satisfactorily explain in a way that competing theories don’t. At least, that seems to be the premise of the rest of his book.
@Aaron, final comment (have to be away from the computer for the rest of the night): on the Nietzsche/content question, I still don’t think it affects D’Souza’s argument on the source. Whether the moral sense comes through intact or inverted, it still has its source in that cosmic realm. (It’s essentially Descartes’ Deceiver that he began his Meditations with.)
As for the claim that it actually is inverted, I think he would have a number of responses available to him for that: denying the claim (no real inversion, show me the diametrically opposed societies, etc.), addressing the claim as one of human fallibility (the funhouse mirror as warped human soul approach), problems of transmitting nontemporal truths to temporal beings, etc. But again, while the problem of competing moral systems is difficult for a supernaturalist, it’s devastating for a naturalist who wants any kind of transcendent moral standard. That’s the guy with a hard row to hoe.
With that, I’m off. Good discussion.
@B. Fotheringay-Phipps
Really? Fermi’s Paradox? Rare Earth Hypothesis? Really? So you and Dinesh BOTH favor the argument from ignorance over all else.
Ask the radio astronomers. SETI estimates, for instance, that with a radio telescope as sensitive as the Arecibo Observatory, Earth’s television and radio broadcasts would only be detectable at distances up to 0.3 light years (see http://setifaq.org/faq.html#1.2.3)
srsly.
@slarrow
On the sloppiness of D’Souza’s argument: yes, he consistently muddles the distinction between “is” and “is believed to be”. Here’s another example (emphasis added):
On the “legislative” – again, it doesn’t matter what cosmic justice is. If we take the legislative metaphor seriously, what matters is what we perceive as the law. If we believe that stealing is illegal, we’ll feel wrong about stealing, even if we’re mistaken and the law against stealing is no longer in effect. If the truth, unknown to us, is that Satan will reward thieves in the afterlife, that’s irrelevant to our feeling that stealing is wrong. D’Souza himself gives the non-explanation that we feel the way we do because it’s “built into our natures”. But why should our various “natures” reflect some single ultimate justice in some other world? We know the answer, of course, but remember that D’Souza is stressing that he does not suppose the existence of a god here.
To take your analogy of the dance floor: again, my Nietzschean objection is that the dancers are in fact radically out of step with each other. Furthermore, each hears a different music, and (contrary to your description) almost each is certain that the music he hears is from the one, true, metaphysically real source (albeit not perfectly transmitted). This source is not necessarily divine, by the way; probably most atheists also believe in such a source. Heather Mac Donald apparently does; John Derbyshire has said that he does not. In any case, the most obvious hypothesis is that there is no single metaphysically real source.
@slarrow
My Nietzschean objection affects D’Souza’s argument drastically. Factually, it seems undeniable. There are some societies where one would feel guilty about embezzling funds to help out a cousin. There are other societies where one would feel guilty about not doing so. Which society represents D’Souza’s cosmic justice? How, specifically, can one explain the guilty conscience of the person in the “unjust” society, who feels guilty when in fact he did what’s cosmically just? And why can’t that same explanation also explain, mutatis mutandis, the good conscience of someone in the “just” society who did act justly?
D’Souza also would have to add all sorts of ad hoc explanations to account for the variation in moralities. Some societies sense this cosmic justice pretty accurately, others sense it inaccurately and even upside-down in many cases. There’s now some ad hoc fun-house mirror that distorts cosmic justice on the way to our social and individual consciences. When you keep adding ad hoc justifications, eventually you can’t keep making your argument with a straight face.
I agree that Nietzsche’s point is “devastating for a naturalist who wants any kind of transcendent moral standard”, if (as with some bloggers at Secular Right) the moral standard the naturalist tries to rationally justify coincidentally just happens to be the “prevailing morality” of his time, in which case he looks suspiciously lucky. It’s not devastating if the naturalist develops a different morality; he can then say, yes, this is natural law, accessible by natural reason, but its content is not at all obvious (just as quantum mechanics is not obvious).
The real objection to D’Souza’s argument is that it is epistemologically self-refuting. If the origin of human morality is a scientifically tractable problem, then there is no reason to believe in D’Souza’s supernatural explanation. If the origin of human morality is a scientifically intractable problem, then there is no reason why we should priviledge D’Souza’s supernatural explanation over any number of alternative supernatural explanations.
Yes Clay, read up on Fermi’s Paradox. I suggest the brilliant book, “Where is Everybody”. After your done, put away your Hasbro light saber, stash the Obi Wan Kenobi cape, garage those models of the Millenium Falcon, and realize you will never be a Jedi….
The process of reaching goals involves establishing goals. Your claim is nonsensical – what you assert science can do necessarily requires doing what you assert science cannot do.
What science is good at is addressing reality. What it’s terrible at doing is propping up incoherence and absurdity, which is why it has nothing to offer proponents of conventional moral systems.
Open letter to D’Souza:
D’Souza’s “argument”, such as it is, in interesting as an example of a form of reasoning that is often useful in small doses (i.e., the early stages of formulating a testable hypothesis), but downright pernicious when taken to metaphysical extremes (i.e., variants of Anselm’s sleight-of-hand.)
There are plenty of “explanations” of the Fermi Paradox some even more insane than yours. 😀
Last night I made an entirely well-intentioned, entirely on-topic comment to this thread. My argument was essentially as follows (cf. http://vacuumenergy.blogspot.com/2009/11/dsouzas-embarassingly-bad-case-for-life.html):
“D’Souza has therefore fallen into a familiar bind for theists. If he admits that a given phenomenon is scientifically tractible, then he undercuts the need for his preferred supernatural explanation. If he admits that a given phenomenon is scientifically intractible, then he makes it impossible to priviledge his preferred supernatural explanation for plausibility over the innumerably many alternative explanations.”
My comment seems to have been squashed. I don’t understand why since another poster making an analagous point (comment #30) had his comment approved. The fact that ad hominem attacks from your readers are being approved (comments #29 and #32) while my serious, respectful, on-topic comment was not approved seems to be a perverse decision.
Your comment policy for comments being unfairly censored is for the author to start his own weblog. Fine. I’ve already done that. I should inform you that my policy for blogs whose authors don’t seem to care about their reader’s opinions is “goodbye forever”.
@Caledonian
>>”The process of reaching goals involves establishing goals.”
Why, yes. Yes, it does. Well done for noticing that.
>>”what you assert science can do necessarily requires doing what you assert science cannot do”
Strictly speaking, that statement is true. But it does not require or even imply SCIENCE doing it. If you’d bothered to address the concrete examples I provided this would have been obvious to you.
The process of reaching Mars does require us to decide that we want to go to Mars. But “science”, properly understood, cannot tell us whether we ought to want to go there.
Science is a tool, much like a hammer, a scalpel, or a computer. Tools are things we use to help us to accomplish goals. We don’t consult our hammer, scalpel, or computer for answers of the “what sort of society do I want to live in” variety.
Interesting, so we “ought” or “ought not” do this or that and need to be told so?
Did you ever decide about anything for yourself without being directed toward the “right thing”?
>>”Interesting, so we “ought” or “ought not” do this or that and need to be told so?”
IS English your second language? Your question is nonsensical and displays zero understanding of what I actually said.
We spend our lives constantly deciding what things we “ought” to do. Ought I press “Submit” on this comment, for instance. It does not reqire or imply some sort of “outside direction”.
If the word “ought” confuses you, substitute “should” for it.
What is the scientific answer to the question “Should we go to Mars”?
No difference, it still looks like you are asking for “someone” (or some “tradition”) to help you decide what you shoud do and are (rightfully) complaining that science does not help you on this.
>>”No difference, it still looks like you are asking for “someone” (or some “tradition”) to help you decide what you shoud do and are (rightfully) complaining that science does not help you on this.”
I’m not “complaining, you ninny. I’m addressing the question being raised here and pointing out there there exists an entire class of questions* which science cannot answer. Perhaps you “ought” to read the post.
And if things “look” that way to you, you’re long overdue for a trip to your optometrist. It takes a special kind of stupid to read what I wrote as a plea for “help” in deciding.
*(Questions which you’re avoiding in your desire to have some whole different debate about how we do answer those questions.)
Derb
>>”Science currently has no explanation for X.
Therefore we must press on with our investigations in hope of finding an explanation.”
>>”Scientific objectivity is a freakish, unnatural, and unpopular mode of thought”
If the question is of the sort “Should we kill all the Jews?”, no amount of “presssing on” will ever or can ever lead science to arrive at an answer. The real problem with scientific objectivity is that it is of very little utility when it comes to addressing most real world issues.
>>“Heck, there is no way we shall ever explain this — best hand it off to the priests.”
The fantasy here is that “explaining” a thing is always an activity of immense value. But if we could scientifically explain why Hitler thought and acted as he did … so what? Who cares? What follows from the explanation?
I agree with the posters above that science, at least so far, cannot be the source of moral judgments. Science tells us what is, not what ought. Even if you could use evolutionary psychology to show why people have the moral views that they do, that would not prove that those moral views are TRUE. The fact that not everybody has the same moral views would seem to me to be the nail in the coffin of the naturalistic fallacy.
However, I agree that D’Souza is wrong, too. The fact that we have moral views doesn’t prove that there is a God. I think that evolutionary psychology can indeed show why many common views are held. I watched a debate between D’Souza and Hitchens on Christianity, and D’Souza said several things that were quite silly. For instance, he claimed that evolutionary psychology can’t explain altruism. Has he read anything written in the past 20 years?
It’s too bad. D’Souza is a great political writer. I just wish he got off the religious kick.
I have no clue what people mean by tagging moral concepts and propositions as “true.” I think this is just misuse of language. In any given human community, some things are commonly regarded as good; but there is not much agreement between communities. Plenty of highly advanced communities — ancient Athens, for one — have been just fine with infanticide, for instance.
That’s because there is no answer. Entire human communities would be just fine with killing all Jews. When Adolf Eichmann was arrested in 1960 the leading (government-owned) newspaper in Saudi Arabia ran a headline saying ARREST OF EICHMANN, WHO HAD THE HONOR OF KILLING 6m JEWS. Still today, I am sure a large minority of Arabs, possibly a majority, would be happy to see mass killing of Jews. You and I would say they are wrong; but then, they would say the same about us.
Your absolute morality is just a fiction. People here think X and Y are good; people over there think they are bad. Why this difference of opinion exists, we don’t know; but there is a reasonable hope that biology will tell us. Which belief is “truer” is, however, an empty question, as if one were to ask which belief is bluer.
“Strictly speaking, that statement is true. But it does not require or even imply SCIENCE doing it. If you’d bothered to address the concrete examples I provided this would have been obvious to you.
So your reasoning is wrong, but your conclusion is valid because your specific examples were correct?
Sorry, buddy. Your concrete examples are also wrong. And your arrogance in presuming I hadn’t considered them would be astounding if it wasn’t so predictable.
“But “science”, properly understood, cannot tell us whether we ought to want to go there.”
Yes, it can – for any meaningful definition of ‘ought’.
“We don’t consult our hammer, scalpel, or computer for answers of the “what sort of society do I want to live in” variety.”
Trying to use a scalpel to place a nail would be stupid, as would trying to use a hammer to make an incision. Tools must match the problem. We have tools to determine what sort of society we want to live in, as well as tools to determine what sort of society we should *want* to live in.
I think you’re probably right that tagging moral propositions as “true” is rationally unjustifiable, but I don’t think it’s a misuse of language. When a moral realist says, “The Holocaust was morally wrong”, I think I understand what he means, as long as I don’t try to think about it more deeply than I should. Roughly, he’s saying that even if everybody changed their minds tomorrow and decided the Holocaust was morally right, it would still “really” be morally wrong. That’s understandable to me, even though the metaphysics don’t pass the test of Occam’s razor (which doesn’t make them incorrect!).
I think we’re all “naturally” moral realists. When we assert a moral proposition like “the Holocaust was wrong”, we believe for that moment that it’s more than just our own subjective feeling. Some philosophers call this a “blind spot”: moral truth is not metaphysically real, but at the moment when we sincerely affirm a moral proposition we’re unable not to believe that it’s “really” true. I guess I’m back to one of my usual questions to Secular Right: do you want to convince the general population that your moral philosophy is correct? What would be gained by doing so?
@B. Fotheringay-Phipps
Awwww! You’re so sweet to be so concerned for my playtime.
Simply put, we are not in a position to hear or be heard by anyone. Our technology could not find our civilization more than .3 light years away… and the nearest star is 14 times that far. The background noise in the cosmos is such that more than 100 light years away, no davice of any technological refinement could hear us because the noise would overwhelm our involuntary signals. You can argue from authority or ignorance, but you’re not proving anything except your need for a Daddy figure in the sky.
Right Ho Barmy!
Atheists cannot find any thing to counter the Fermi Paradox, and are stuck fervently hoping SETI will discover something. But it is as futile as pushing mollases up a hill with string. Ther eis no other life, anywhere.
That is the thing with atheists. They have a desparate hope to find alien life, because that MUST disprove the existence of God. Just one sign, oh please ET! just one sign! Give the atehists a sign!
But as Fermi noticed, there is no other life in the universe at all-anywhere. We are it. And that rankles the psuedo-Jedi so badly they can’t stand it!
It is almost pysichotic, and certainly pathetic, that atheists cling to a sad hope that someday, someway, alien contact will be made, thus disproving any possible existence of God. But every day that goes by and Klaatu doesn’t appear, that lingering doubt in the atheist’ brain grows stronger. Why could it possibly be true-we are the only intelligent life in the universe? Just us, all alone? Science is certainly moving rapidly to that conclusion independent of Fermi. So where does that leave our non-believer? Why in default mode of course!
Bigfoot! Yes! Bigfoot must exist! He will vanquish this pesky diety for us!
You say, “Scientific objectivity is a freakish, unnatural, and unpopular mode of thought, restricted to small cliques whom the generality of citizens regard with dislike and mistrust.”
I haven’t read D’Souza, but such claims are based on mistaken assumptions.
You must be aware that many good and even great scientists today are religious believers. So clearly, their belief can’t be blamed on a lack of “scientific objectivity.”
To ask why they nevertheless believe is to understand that the existence of God is not a scientific question in the first place. It’s a matter of metaphysics. Quality control among atheists has been shoddy in recent years. Because this fact, once widely known, has apparently never occurred to the most vocal atheists today.
Reality is permeated by what Aristotelians and Thomists know as final causality, a circumstance that leads ineluctably to God. Final causality was never disproved; it was banished by fiat by Enlightenment publicists because of its implications.
You don’t need I.D. to know that God exists. You need merely familiarize yourself with Thomist refinements of Aristotle, which produced the most supple and fruitful way of understanding reality ever known. Without it, science itself and even the possibility of communication is impossible.
Pingback: Secular Right » Heaven For Climate, Hell For Company