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Re: Morals Without Religion

Posted: Tue Feb 28, 2012 7:44 pm
by Dexter
ant wrote: Michael Ruse, for starters, get's it right re Dawkins, Hitch, etc:
Let me say that I believe the new atheists do the side of science a grave disservice. I will defend to the death the right of them to say what they do – as one who is English-born one of the things I admire most about the USA is the First Amendment. But I think first that these people do a disservice to scholarship. Their treatment of the religious viewpoint is pathetic to the point of non-being. Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion would fail any introductory philosophy or religion course. Proudly he criticizes that whereof he knows nothing. As I have said elsewhere, for the first time in my life, I felt sorry for the ontological argument. If we criticized gene theory with as little knowledge as Dawkins has of religion and philosophy, he would be rightly indignant. (He was just this when, thirty years ago, Mary Midgeley went after the selfish gene concept without the slightest knowledge of genetics.) Conversely, I am indignant at the poor quality of the argumentation in Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and all of the others in that group
I see insults, still waiting for the sophisticated arguments.

The response seems to be, until you read a bunch of theologians that no one cares about except other theologians, you're not allowed to talk about religion.

Re: Morals Without Religion

Posted: Tue Feb 28, 2012 8:47 pm
by ant
Admittedly, the subtitle he or his editor chose for the book ("How Religion Poisons Everything") created confusion about the size of his target.

I think that was a poor choice of words that probably was intentional on Hitch's part to sell his book.
Those words can only help perpetuate the warfare climate that currently exists between the "new atheists" and religion, specifically Christianity.
Hitch knows what he said and did so for a reason.

I can agree with what you wrote regarding his additional thoughts on religion. If a guy like Hitch were my neighbor, he'd have no problems with me, nor I with him.

Re: Morals Without Religion

Posted: Tue Feb 28, 2012 9:40 pm
by ant
It's the institutionalization of ideas.
Much like science institutionalized as scientism.

Re: Morals Without Religion

Posted: Tue Feb 28, 2012 10:11 pm
by ant
I said altruism is well-documented in many animal species.

There's a big difference between Bonobo Monkeys picking flees off each other, sharing sticks as tools, etc. etc.
Objective morals such as love, justice, etc are beyond flee picking and have been and always shall be agreed upon universally.. If morals develop over time simply as a byproduct of evolution, or whatever socio-biological origin you subscribe them to, then that would mean that they are subject to change at a later time provided its a means of simply benefiting the herd. So, given nuclear war setting us back a 1000 years with a handful of survivors buying for survival, I'd be free to resort to rape, theft, murder of you and your loved ones for the sake of survival - all bets would be off, anything would go and you'd be okay with this moral adjustment. No longer would you see any wrong with my killing your offspring and sharing my seed with your partner. No objective morals - no foul committed. We are nothing more than animals negotiating survival.

Because morals are entirely an evolutionary product unique to our species, that would mean if rape or child abuse was admissible on Neptune, that would be understandable to an atheist. Rape and child abuse have no foundations other than what is advantageous to a species. So rape and child abuse is okay in that context. That is the viewpoint of naturalists.

I say the origin of objective values is transcendental. To attack the source of this claim is to commit a genetic fallacy:

"One of the simplest of personal attacks is genetic fallacy - a type of argument in which an attempt is made to prove a conclusion is false by condemning the source of that conclusion. Such arguments are fallacious because how an idea originates is irrelevant to its viability"

Re: Morals Without Religion

Posted: Tue Feb 28, 2012 10:29 pm
by ant
Religious ideas are always subjective. Our cultural ideals or shared meanings of moral "truth" should be based on something more objective. Is this what Sam Harris argues?
This is more red herring mumbo-jumbo.
It does nothing to address the issue currently being discussed.

Atheists really have no foundation to set their values. We are just animals. Morals are all relative. :roll:

If rape helps a tribe in the Congo flourish and become the dominant tribe, then that's okay - it's understandable. There is nothing wrong with it because it's all relative.
It's impossible to find anything to respect about that. To say that our morals should be the morals adhered to in the animal kingdom is speciesm.

Why are our morals better than a male lion's? They are not. It's all relative.
A lion doesn't kill or commit rape because it's an animal.
And neither do humans - it's all relative.

horse crap.

Re: Morals Without Religion

Posted: Tue Feb 28, 2012 10:33 pm
by ant
You mentioned that people cannot be moral without religion in their lives. Seriously
Show me where I said that, please.
As a matter of fact, I said it was silly to think that.

I think you're arguing with an imaginary religious bigot.
Seriously now :lol: :lol: Too funny!

Re: Morals Without Religion

Posted: Tue Feb 28, 2012 11:28 pm
by DWill
geo wrote: I'm sure Hitchens does a much better job explaining "private and optional" but to me they both come down to separation of church and state. Privately held beliefs are meaningful to an individual, but one can't transplant that meaning to others. Optional means freedom of religion, meaning that religious beliefs are one's own business, never imposed by the state or by any group. This would take us to Dawkins' idea that religious indoctrination amounts to child abuse, but personally I think he's on thin ice here.

Again, this comes down to the difference between subjective and objective. Religious ideas are always subjective. Our cultural ideals or shared meanings of moral "truth" should be based on something more objective. Is this what Sam Harris argues?
I don't recall that he glossed these words, but I don't own the book so can't check. But I agree that church/state separation is a good thumbnail. To it I would add that that culturally, there would be a peace of sorts, an agree-to-disagree. This becomes really hard to maintain when one religion or another wants to barge into the public sphere to affect policy, as happened in the U.S. beginning in the 80's. That, and then the manifestations of Islamic extremism, produced the new assertiveness of atheism early in the last decade. It was a necessary corrective, I think. It did become an anger against religion in general, though, as if anything at all with the name of religion must be contaminated.

My view of Harris' thesis in The Moral Landscape is that our values or morals (more or less synonymous for him) do need to be based on what we can objectively determine, so I think you're right. He says that because this is so, science and values are not separate. Science has a place in setting values. He uses 'science' both specifically--as in neuroscience--and generally, as in simply using reason. To a large extent, morals actually have been determined objectively, as they tend to be based on what produces human flourishing. As we learn more about specific sciences (neuroscience being his bias), he thinks we can become more sure of of true morals. Needless to say, morality for him has nothing to do with traditional prohibitions such as the one against homosexuality.

Re: Morals Without Religion

Posted: Tue Feb 28, 2012 11:51 pm
by DWill
Robert Tulip wrote: It is fine to advocate pluralism and respect for difference. Indeed any rejection of pluralism involves an arrogant assertion of intolerance. But this involves a fine point – in respecting others we also have to respect ourselves, and our own capacity to discern right from wrong and true from false. If others can ignore our views as ‘optional’, where do we draw the line? Acceptance of scientific facts should not be seen as optional – claims are either true, false or uncertain. And there are moral views that are held universally by all sane people.
But Robert, if you are really going to respect difference, uphold tolerance, there must be something to be tolerant toward, and if this is not possibly a rather major thing, then tolerance has little meaning. What I'm getting at is that we must, indeed, accept the right to exist of ideas and attitudes far from our own. That is the difficult thing about pluralism. We engage in a dance of sorts, casting a wary eye at times on others to make sure they aren't stepping over boundaries, as would be the case with creationism invading public schools or--God forbid--Rick Santorum being elected president.
Hitchens’ real agenda here is to denigrate religious views as insane, confining them to the private madhouse of church where they do not impinge on anyone else. As soon as we say a claim is optional we assert it has no evidence or truth content, and is mere sentimental fantasy. That seems to me far too harsh an assessment of religious ideas, as it dismisses their symbolic and archetypal meaning along with their literal uncertainty.
You're making Hitchens out to be the kind of relativist he probably would have disliked. His claim is specific: Religion must be optional and private. He says nothing about all truth claims being merely relative or something we all need to recognize as somehow valid to their believers, which is an impossible mental act, anyway. The sense of 'optional' appears to relate to geo's idea of chosen without any compulsion., though I know you disagree with that.

Re: Morals Without Religion

Posted: Wed Feb 29, 2012 12:07 am
by DWill
ant wrote: Atheists really have no foundation to set their values. We are just animals. Morals are all relative. :roll:

If rape helps a tribe in the Congo flourish and become the dominant tribe, then that's okay - it's understandable. There is nothing wrong with it because it's all relative.
It's impossible to find anything to respect about that. To say that our morals should be the morals adhered to in the animal kingdom is speciesm.

Why are our morals better than a male lion's? They are not. It's all relative.
A lion doesn't kill or commit rape because it's an animal.
And neither do humans - it's all relative.

horse crap.
You seem to use a set notion of what atheists are going to believe. With the statement above on cultural relativism, you're far off the mark. Each atheist writer I've read says 'baloney' to the argument that we need to respect a given cultural/religious practice because it has a function in the society. You can't imagine any of these guys defending the Indian caste system, men 'marrying' children, or honor killing, can you?

When you scoff at the notion that morality could have evolved, I perceive you as scoffing at evolution itself. If you make an effort, you can see evolution via natural selection as something so marvelous and amazing that attributing morality to it is something one is happy to do. There is this notion of 'merely' evolution or 'merely a physical process' that I don't understand. R. Dawkins is great at showing us how stupendous that all is.

Re: Morals Without Religion

Posted: Wed Feb 29, 2012 2:34 am
by ant
You can't imagine any of these guys defending the Indian caste system, men 'marrying' children, or honor killing, can you?
That is up to them to make a clear distinction between humans as moral agents and animals. They have not insofar as their primary claim that morals are a product of a species' evolution.
Further, I do not believe that I have made the claim that morals can not progress over time. Socio cultural relativism can not base its moral development on anything other than evolution. It has no base for morality. That is not to say that evolution itself is bogus.


We need to consider what some of the greater scientific minds have asserted regarding morality and a base for it.

Einstein, in discussing science and religion in Berlin in 1930 said that human sense of beauty and our religious instinct are "tributary forms in helping the reasoning faculty towards its highest achievements. You are right in speaking of the moral foundations of science, but you cannot turn round and speak of the scientific foundations of morality."

Additionally, Einstein pointed out that science cannot form a base for morality: "Every attempt to reduce ethics to a scientific formulae must fail"

Richard Feynman agreed with Einstein's view:

"Even the greatest forces and abilities don't seem to carry any clear instructions on how to use them. As an example, the great accumulation of understanding as to how the physical world behaves only convinces one that this behavior has a kind of meaninglessness about it. The sciences DO NOT directly teach good or bad...,Ethical values lie outside the scientific realm"

It is not surprising to see the resident atheists resorting to scientism to find explanations for everything, including morals. There is a blatant denial on their part to acknowledge objective morals. The weak attempts to explain "altruism" as a catch-all world for morals is a diversion which ultimately leads to a genetic fallacy when attempting to explain the origin of altruism in general.

I'll go with Einstein and Fenynman, both of which realized that looking to science to explain ethics/ morals is to expect the impossible.