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.
ping to 100
LOL, I like the imagery.
I would call it a universally human moral. No one would come out publicly to support child rape. Why? Because it is rejected by society. Why is it rejected by society? I think that’s clear.
No, it's not clear. In the materialist world run by determinism, there is no reason not to rape the children. You simply borrow the morality from the "bearded man in the sky" because you can explain why it is wrong to rape children. Nor can the rapist be held responsible for raping children because his actions were not his but simply a chain of causality since the beginning of time. A philopsophy clearly at odds with conservatism and individual responsibility by the way.
I don’t believe in moral absolutes which float around in the air and are always true in every single case at every point in time.
Your beliefs are your own but you are having a helluva time explaining why raping children is always wrong. Remember in the beginning of our discussion you agreed that raping children was always wrong, even when survival was at stake. Why?
I do believe that our history as a social animal has ingrained in our society a sense of respect and compassion which we use to define morals - collectively and universally in the sense that an astounding majority of individuals agree to the same basic moral code despite their religious creed.
Well, there you go. Society, Soviet Union style, decided killing millions to further the aims of the state was a moral act. Why were they wrong? Society, Khmer Rouge style, decided exactly the same thing. Their prime directive isn't the same as yours. What makes your society correct and theirs incorrect?
Religion does not dictate our morals.
Right, the "the bearded guy in the sky" does. Thou shalt not murder. Not hard to understand that command but incredibly hard for the atheistic determinist to both explain and hold accountable the murderers.
Bottom line, the difference is the atheist wants freedom from something; the theist wants freedom for something. That is a huge psychological difference.
Absent free will my friend we can not be morally responsible folks.
You have what in known as a conundrum but if it is any consolation you are not alone, the world has plenty of atheistic determinist's who can't logically connect an absence of free will with a moral self, Dawkins versus Quinn (Or Massacre At Atheist Gulch). Those two propositions are totally illogical.
Good luck!
Yet, I cannot expect a supporter of atheism to see that any more than I can expect a non-Christian to see the Kingdom of God.
Unless you are born again, you cannot even see the Kingdom of God.
See #72. I didn't feel a need to refute his strawman.
Allow me to repeat myself - IMO moral systems are not merely a meme. That's not to say it isn't a meme, which I understand to mean a unit of culture. Obviously morality is that but it is more. Some units of culture like money are pure social inventions. Morality isn't pure social invention. I think morality is based on values of innate human nature.
What do you mean "it works better": for whom? Nazism worked pretty good for the Nazis,
In fact I don't think it did. For example, oppression of the Jews caused many German scientists to emigrate to the US. These scientists invented the atom bomb which would certainly have defeated Germany had the European war lasted a little longer.
But you're missing a key point. Moral systems should be weighed by the totality of their effects. Do you think Germans were happy under the Nazis or Russians et al under the Communists? I don't.
An in principle test of "works better" could go like this: if well-informed people can choose between two cultures where all else is equal except for the moral systems, which do they choose? That "all else equal" part keeps it from being a sure-fire practical test, but we can often get close enough. Was the function of the Berlin Wall to keep Westerners out or East Germans in?
[There are an infinite number of others which are more likely to be true] makes little sense to me...
Yes I had in mind the variations you mention and more. I can see how I confused you though. Where it says "more likely to be true" I had read "just as likely to be true."
I will try to be clearer. If your criterion is Truth, you are doomed to fail because Real Truth is unknowable. My suggestion is to settle for always trying to make things better but knowing someitmes you may mess up. People are fallible and irrational. Error is unavoidable. Your logic was wrong or there were unintended ill effects or criteria that worked so well in the past don't any more. But errors can be corrected and even good situations can be improved. I think that's what we should aim for.
Good is what makes people better off and evil is what makes them worse off.
When we feel we ought to do some things and not other things, is that obligation real? ...
The feeling that you're obliged to do A but not B is real. I think we can agree on that. It's part of that innate, objective human nature I talked about. We want to get along with others, it's normal.
But I think the answers to the rest of your questions are unknowable. Tell me what test I can do to decide if I have some real moral duty to the universe? Maybe someday it will be possible for us to answer the question. Maybe we'll discover the universe has a real moral rule. But maybe not. I can't say.
If morality is just convention...
It's not just convention as I thought I'd made clear in my first post to you on the thread.
But that isn't the whole story. 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 know what you mean exactly. Certainly law should not work gratuitously against morality. But not every moral precept should be encoded as law, some cannot be and law serves other purposes aside from morality.
Cheers!
Van Til expresses this essential point most excellently, Dr. Eckleburg! Among other things, God is the ground of all being. The world is the way it is because its fundamental order was established by God in the Beginning. The Logos is God's Word, and it is not jibberish. By His Word, God created the world from nothing, and sustains it in good order to this day and forever.
This answers Leibniz's two great questions: "Why are things the way they are, and not some other way?" It also answers his other great question: "Why is there something, why not nothing at all?" (Because God wills it.)
Scientists must assume uniformities in nature; otherwise science has nothing to do. The fact that there is science at all is tacit proof of the existence of God.
I gladly stand corrected on the excerpt you quoted. :^)
Thank you so much for writing!
The above is most definitely the consequence of metaphysical naturalist a/k/a scientific materialist doctrine. If all that there is is merely matter in its motions according to the physical laws; if there is no soul, nor even a mind (because these are immaterial things) -- if all the mind is is an epiphenomenon of the brain's neural activity which, being an epiphenomenon is incapable of causing anything -- then how could anyone ever be responsible for anything? Where do we find room or root for moral questions?
UndauntedR does point to an interesting significant fact: that the moral law really does appear to be universal, since peoples of all times and cultures appear to know about it; and the form it takes is strikingly uniform cross-culturally and in all time periods. (C.S. Lewis ably demonstrates this insight in an appendix to The Abolition of Man IIRC.)
But such recognition actually undercuts UndauntedR's allegation that morality is whatever a human society declares it to be. Ultimately, morality is rooted in human nature, or human souls if you will (the existence of which some scientists deny), not in human societies. But only those societies are good and just which are constituted by individual human souls that follow the moral law.
Thanks for your great post, jwalsh07!
Forgive me edsheppa, but it seems to me that you have no moral duty "to the universe"; your moral duty is owed to God -- who made you, and endued you with your human nature, making you in His image, and thus endowing you with reason and free will.
There is a "test" for this, BTW. But that test is not given in "this world"....
I'm very much enjoying your exchange of ideas with Diamond! Thank you for writing!
Hi edsheppa! The above statement reduces morality to utility. Yet the moral law requires us to "do the right thing," regardless of utilitarian considerations. In a nutshell: The moral law says it is better to do the right thing even if it costs us, than to do the wrong thing and benefit from the wrong. Selfish people will tend to act for their own benefit regardless of considerations of how others may be harmed by their actions. Such behavior is justly condemned as immoral. A good and just society must condemn such behavior or the society would not long remain either good or just.
I stand chastened. You got me. Immediately when I read that phrase of Voegelin's I realized that I had forgotten my Cornelius Van Til!:^)
I think the atheist believes that there is no human freedom unless a man can get “free” of God. Now a person like me, a believer in God, believes there is neither freedom nor reason — or sanity — without God. So you see, there is no way that a common ground can exist between the atheist and the theist such that any agreement could ever be reached, and not just on the question of God, but probably on any question at all.
I was going to post something by Van Til but Dr. Eckleburg beat me to it:^)
Thanks for a great, great post, betty boop.
Cordially,
Thank you so much for your kind words Diamond! I’m just glad to be able to get this stuff “off my chest” on a thread that deals with Richard Dawkins.... :^) It just seems so fitting.
Hedonism becomes the default lifestyle.
Why? Do people who believe in a god have so little self-control, such a lack of an innate moral compass, that they would be come hedonists if convinced their god was not real? Is the only thing keeping a god-believer in line his belief in that god? If so, it would seem that the atheist is morally superior, since his moral sense is self-determined.
Without immortality, life is meaningless and absurd.
On the contrary, the knowledge that life is finite and that there is no afterlife imbues this life with all the deep, poignant meaning that brief pleasures generally bring.
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