Posted on 10/20/2006 8:52:20 PM PDT by SirLinksalot
Let's all stop beating Basil's car
Ask people why they support the death penalty or prolonged incarceration for serious crimes, and the reasons they give will usually involve retribution. There may be passing mention of deterrence or rehabilitation, but the surrounding rhetoric gives the game away. People want to kill a criminal as payback for the horrible things he did. Or they want to give "satisfaction' to the victims of the crime or their relatives. An especially warped and disgusting application of the flawed concept of retribution is Christian crucifixion as "atonement' for "sin'.
Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software.
Basil Fawlty, British television's hotelier from hell created by the immortal John Cleese, was at the end of his tether when his car broke down and wouldn't start. He gave it fair warning, counted to three, gave it one more chance, and then acted. "Right! I warned you. You've had this coming to you!" He got out of the car, seized a tree branch and set about thrashing the car within an inch of its life. Of course we laugh at his irrationality. Instead of beating the car, we would investigate the problem. Is the carburettor flooded? Are the sparking plugs or distributor points damp? Has it simply run out of gas? Why do we not react in the same way to a defective man: a murderer, say, or a rapist? Why don't we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Basil Fawlty? Or at King Xerxes who, in 480 BC, sentenced the rough sea to 300 lashes for wrecking his bridge of ships? Isn't the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component? Or a defective upbringing? Defective education? Defective genes?
Concepts like blame and responsibility are bandied about freely where human wrongdoers are concerned. When a child robs an old lady, should we blame the child himself or his parents? Or his school? Negligent social workers? In a court of law, feeble-mindedness is an accepted defence, as is insanity. Diminished responsibility is argued by the defence lawyer, who may also try to absolve his client of blame by pointing to his unhappy childhood, abuse by his father, or even unpropitious genes (not, so far as I am aware, unpropitious planetary conjunctions, though it wouldn't surprise me).
But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment. Don't judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?
Why is it that we humans find it almost impossible to accept such conclusions? Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing? Presumably because mental constructs like blame and responsibility, indeed evil and good, are built into our brains by millennia of Darwinian evolution. Assigning blame and responsibility is an aspect of the useful fiction of intentional agents that we construct in our brains as a means of short-cutting a truer analysis of what is going on in the world in which we have to live. My dangerous idea is that we shall eventually grow out of all this and even learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Basil Fawlty when he beats his car. But I fear it is unlikely that I shall ever reach that level of enlightenment.
How do you square this with Genesis and John, hosepipe? Don't forget, John speaks of the Logos "in the beginning," "Who was God, and was with God."
IOW, God is eternal. But that doesn't make His creation eternal.
This reminds me of the argument that is presented against ID/creation. If IDers/creationists can't tell where the Intelligent designer/God came from, then they have nothing valid to say. Yet a naturalist cannot even tell where the universe came from, so ends up being in a similar postiion, yet expects to have others accept what he says as valid and needing no other support but the evidence of the world itself that we see.
If the same standard were applied to both sides of the issue, then there would be the situation where niether point of veiw is valid, or the naturalist would be forced to concede that the IDers/creationists have something after all.
Or maybe we just want to stay alive and want dangerous animals removed from society. Has this goof been quizzing 10-year-olds?
Lord God, is Dawkins really so dim as to be unaware of the irrationality of his reductionist materialism?
Pathetic, really - reminds me of Bobby Fischer or the Unabomber.
Sounds more like 4 year olds. sheesh.
Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software.
And sometimes if it's broken beyond repair, you scrap it. He doesn't follow through with his own "reasoning" (and I use the term loosely).
You're right, it's got nothing to do with *getting back*, although sometimes there is that satisfaction that goes along with it, but plain and simple, it's protecting people. You eliminate the cancer so the patient can survive.
Easy question.. The bible is written for and by/thru created beings.. For created beings to understand i.e. US.... About Genesis some scholars translate the Hebrew word "created" in that book in some places to be the re-creation.. or therefore re-modeling and not creation.. implying that there could have been something "here" before.. i.e. dinosaurs, like that.. Before WHAT?.. I don't know, it don't say.. Maybe the "devil" destroyed the place as he seems to be willing to do even these days..
About Revelation.. much of revelation is metaphor.. There is much to learn of and about in this life.. Where the earth came from don't be high on the list of essentials.. I'm not saying there was a "society of creatures" before revelation chapter one.. but there could easily have been..
The Universe "always was" is indeed possible and should in my estimation should be on the list of possibilities.. Whats strange is that it is not..
One correction: the Eternity does not mean infinite time. It is something more. When God created the Heaven and Earth, He did it at the beginning of time itself. God created time.
Eternity is before the beginning of time, after the end of time and beyond time. This is what the original Greek term means "eis tous aionan ton aionon": "for the ages of ages" or "for the eons of eons".
God may create multiple universes with the their own times and spaces or with other way of arranging them, unimaginable to us, if it pleases Him.
Interesting distinction, but not simple. Does eternal life remain on this side of eternity?
I have a friend who knew (really knew) Hebrew. Probably 30 years ago now, we were discussing Genesis in a Bible study. He told me then that there's a difference in the wording of Gen 1:1 and 1:2. In verse one it's creation of something new, never before created; in verse two, it's a word indicating remaking of something that already existed.
His thoughts were that what happened in between was the fall of Satan/Lucifer, when he was thrown out of heaven. He figures that when that happened; Satan/Lucifer destroyed the earth in an attempt to keep God from creating man so God had to remake, or rebuild it, to be habitable for man.
You've summed up the talking points quite nicely, Alamo-Girl.
I'm not ready to follow you here, hosepipe. A big bang is just as possible as a Universe that always was. To ask what caused the bang is a good start at forming a hypothesis.
Bingo!
How does Dawkins account for his notion of 'malfunction' in the first place? Dysfunction implies that something designed for some purpose is not functioning as it ought to. If my lawnmower won't start it makes sense to say that it's malfunctioning, because it was designed for a purpose. But if in Dawkins' view the human race was not designed for any purpose and is nothing but random concatenations of atoms, themselves nothing but the result of a large series of highly improbable, impersonal accidents, what sense does it make to speak of malfunction? It is incoherent to speak of dsyfunction in some Darwinian sense where a species going extinct is presumably functioning just as 'normally' as a species that is not going extinct.
What is he comparing the universe to when he assumes that there's something wrong with it?
Cordially,
The Nobel committee cited their work especially for lending further confirmation of the big bang model, and for refining the age of the universe. The universe has an age because it had a beginning: Thus the universe is not eternal.
1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its
existence.
2. The universe began to exist.
2.1 Argument based on the impossibility of an
actual infinite.
2.11 An actual infinite cannot exist.
2.12 An infinite temporal regress of
events is an actual infinite.
2.13 Therefore, an infinite temporal
regress of events cannot exist.
2.2 Argument based on the impossibility of
the formation of an actual infinite by
successive addition.
2.21 A collection formed by successive
addition cannot be actually infinite.
2.22 The temporal series of past events
is a collection formed by successive
addition.
2.23 Therefore, the temporal series of
past events cannot be actually
infinite.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause of its
existence.
This proposition assumes some knowledge about terminology, especially the term exist. Would probably be good to untangle that. Etienne Gilson does an excellent job in Being and Some Philosophers untangling the nuances of concepts such as being, existence, and essence.
Isn't it clear that genetically modifying non-human organisms by giving them human genes, or creating human-animal chimeras or hybrids, would be immoral in itself? Why must we accept this as inevitable ("the time is quickly coming" "within our lifetimes")?
I do not want to live in a world with genetically altered, quasi-human "pets, slaves, and others." Can nothing stop this? Or do we have to wait for the Allah-Fubar Jihadists to stop it for us?
Ha. That would be ironic, hey? Allah-Fubar saving us from Humano-Fubar?
And yet, why must it be inevitably immoral?
My guess is if it is in our power to do something, there is a 99% likelihood that someone will try it. There is some kind of inevitability involved in that (akrasia). The more difficult question, however, is not about inevitability. It asks, when anything happens--inevitable or not--whether it ought to have happened, and when it does happen, to insist that it is wrong.
I confess I see something beautiful in Cyrano and it isn't his nose.
If the same standard were applied to both sides of the issue, then there would be the situation where niether point of veiw is valid, or the naturalist would be forced to concede that the IDers/creationists have something after all.
What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander! Great insight, metmom!
Philosophers expend even more energy trying to define words then freepers do on threads debating evolution (several accepted distinctly different definitions...ill-defined) and creation. Thanks the book reference, the content and reviews on amazon look interesting.
Thank you for the clarification, A. Pole! Certainly if God wanted to create multiple universes "with the their own times and spaces or with other way of arranging them," my suspicion is that they would indeed be "unimaginable to us" for we are bound in our own spatiotemporal order. They could be "out there," but for us they would be unknowable -- at least, in this life.
FWIW. Thanks for the great essay/post!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.