Posted on 10/06/2007 2:38:18 PM PDT by SirLinksalot
Ladies and Gentlemen and All Interested Parties...This is in regards to the previously advertised debate announced here previously.
The audio transcripts of the debate are now available here
The debate featured Professor Richard Dawkins, Fellow of the Royal Society and Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University and Dr. John Lennox (MA, MA, Ph.D., D.Phil., D.Sc.), Reader in Mathematics and Fellow in Mathematics and Philosophy of Science, Green College, University of Oxford.
Dawkins, voted by Europe's Prospect Magazine as one of the world's most important intellectuals, is regarded by many as the spokesman for the "New Atheism." BBC has labeled him "Darwin's Rottweiler." He has written numerous best-sellers, most notable among them, his recent book, The God Delusion. TGD has been on The New York Times List of Best-Sellers for over thirty weeks. It is a no-holds-barred assault on religious faith generally, and Christianity specifically. According to Dawkins, one can deduce atheism from scientific study; indeed, he argues that it is the only viable choice.
Lennox, a popular Christian apologist and scientist, travels widely speaking on the interface between science and religion. Like Dawkins, he has dedicated his career to science, but he has arrived at very different conclusions. "It is the very nature of science that leads me to belief in God," he says. Lennox possesses doctorates from Oxford, Cambridge, and the University of Wales. He has written a response to the notion that Science has exposed the Bible as obscurantist in a book titled God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?. The book will be published this fall.
The Sawi tribespeople considered treachery the highest ideal; the greater the deception in earning the trust of another to betray them in the end, the greater the hero they were. In the account of the betrayal of Jesus, Judas was the hero; the super-Sawi.
In moral relativism, then, there's no difference between the Sawi who consider betrayal and deception high ideals to attain, and Jesus who said that the greatest love one has is to lay down his life for another.
They both can't be right. There has to be some kind of absolute somewhere, not just what society deems *correct* (meaning convenient) at the time.
The atheistic regimes tend to be the most amoral and cause untold human suffering. The Judeo-Christian moral system has given us this country, has effected European history for centuries, provided Israel with the most civil society known in it's age during it's long history.
If morals weren't real and absolute, they wouldn't work so well in providing a safe, prosperous, peaceful society.
You can take that along the whole gamut from the art of Schickelgruber, to various US intelligence services' assessments; but you seem to forget that his actions are highly inconsistent with what the founder of Christianity enjoined.
Not to mention the fact that only other atheists and professional baiters will give you any respect after making that claim.
Cheers!
The same as you, codes of allowed or favored behavior.
... other than what YOU think people are better off with than without?
It's not really what I think, but what people generally think that's important. Don't you agree that people would agree they are better off being able to trust other people not to steal from them or kill them?
And what standard would make your morality better than another agnostic's totally different conception of morality?
Based on their different outcomes of course. It's an empirical question. But I admit it may be hard to infer or discern the difference enough to say a particular one is better than another particular one. That said, one ought to always be looking for improvements.
In terms of civilization, the most successful civilization the world, Rome, was completely immoral from a contemporary point of view.
No, they were not "completely immoral" even from a modern viewpoint. Nor would I consider it the most successful civilization in the world so far, the United Stated is and before us it was the Brits.
Anti-Semitism (especially hostility to Jews, as opposed to the children of Ismael) predates Christianity, as even the Jews seem to have noticed. Ask a Jew sometime about the origin of Purim, or read the end of (IIRC) Psalm 137:
O daughter of Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall he be who requites you with what you have done to us!
Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!
Cheers!
Correct. IMO they're both wrong, or at least not knowably right.
But riddle me this, have the Sawi people amounted to anything? Have their moral system spread? Have they dominated a continent as Christianity did Europe? Would an outsider, say a Chinese, prefer to live amongst the Sawi or in Christian Europe?
I think it's obviously, objectively clear, that taken as a package deal, the Christian moral system is superior to the Sawi one.
"Based on their different outcomes of course."
Which puts us back to might makes right - the ultimate ethic of any atheist/agnostic morality.
Yes, that's true. Why don't you actually read the sources about Hitler's plans to persecute Christians -- and then see whether his stated motives were anything like the motives of the persecutors of whom you speak?
Would you assert that Christians are incapable of persecuting Christians?
No, but they can't hold a candle to Stalin and Mao when it comes to persecuting their own.
It seems odd that the deliberate genocide and mass murders by atheists are airily dismissed as "well, I'm not like that, so atheism is untainted" while any evil done by any Christian is held to invalidate all of Christianity.
Or, take a more personal example.
I have seen a number of atheists say of others, "Well, he claimed at one point to be a Christian, so I must accept that, regardless of any other evidence."
But (here on FR) there have been well-known posters who claim to be atheists, who nonetheless disagree with a number of other agnostic/atheist posters in defending Christians. The claim to be an atheist is summarily dismissed as a lie.
Do you have a general principle which allows you to distinguish the two?
Cheers!
However I have a very simple account of morality - people are better off with morality than without. Neither civilization nor society, even tribal ones, would be possible without it. It is the same with many other social institutions, government, markets and the like. Accounting for my own morality is similarly simple, I have been inculcated with it from birth.
Is there an obligation for civilization and society to survive? If so where does it come from? As far as having been inculcated with moral principles from birth, is it just a matter of psychological conditioning, and if it is, then is morality something than can be changed at will, with the right scientific means?
I think there is a real, objective human nature, behavioral traits shared by all, some few abnormal people excepted. Hierarchical social structures is an example. Morality builds upon, or tends to respect, these shared values.
I don't see how a blind, impersonal Darwinian process produces a fixed human nature. And if by abnormal you mean something like dysfunctional, then it doesn't seem to make sense to assign that term to anything produced by a purely physical process that has no goal or purpose. Abnormal compared to what? It makes sense to say that my lawnmower is not functioning as it ought to when it doesn't start, because it was designed with a purpose. But how does an impersonal evolutionary process produce something 'wrong' with itself? How In such a universe is there is any objective basis for assigning a value of "better off" to anything?
Cordially,
Rome lasted a thousand years - the US has made it 230 years and whether we make it to 330 is certainly in doubt. Since survival is the ultimate yardstick for success (especially under a Darwinistic worldview) we have a long, long way to go to be as successful as Rome.
You don't know much about the S&M scene then, do you?
Try reading elsewhere on FR about the Folsom festival in San Francisco -- many people are into their own suffering as a form of sexual gratification.
Nice try, though.
Don't be stupid.
In which post did I say that?
Thanks for the ping!
Exactly the articulate response of someone who can't rebut.
None - you were not bright enough to figure it out.
You post was too stupid to merit a rebuttal. If you want a polite and reasoned response, do not put words in my mouth.
Perhaps I should now apologize for pinging you to this ‘oblique’ thread. The audio is available at the link, so there is some saving value perhaps.
I believe you actually have in mind the film critic for the New Yorker, Pauline Kael,
who reputedly said, in 1972,
"I don't know how Nixon won. No one I know voted for him."
though, apparently, this quote also is not quite accurate:
But riddle me this, have the Sawi people amounted to anything? Have their moral system spread? Have they dominated a continent as Christianity did Europe? Would an outsider, say a Chinese, prefer to live amongst the Sawi or in Christian Europe?
Which sounds like you are treating morality merely as a meme.
That's fine, except that in your own sentence, you are acting whether 'survival' is the only criterion by which to judge any moral system. *IF* that is what you are saying, then if some particular system supplants others, you are obligated to call it "true."
In that case, why exert effort on behalf of *any* system? To borrow the counter-argument to Pascal's dilemma, "Why should I accept *your* belief system? There are an infinite number of others which (as far as I know) are more likely to be true."
And that means we shouldn't even vote for Guiliani, we might as well accept Hillary. Or, for that matter, Ahmadinejad.
Reductio ad absurdum.
Cheers! Cheers!
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