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.
This is the sense in which I am using the term (from here)
Main Entry: val·ueThe source is inconsequential from the point of view of my account. It is merely enough that these values are. (And I assume you agree that they do.)
...
7 : something (as a principle or quality) intrinsically valuable or desirable
(I can hear it now. :>)
However, we are here at this point in history. Where would we be if Judeo-Christian influence were excised from history?
We would be dead.
Who is happier than the Christian? Who faces adversity with as much strength as the Christian? Who produces as much goodness according to the God-given good fruit of faith as the Christian? Who wishes bounty for all the world and who wishes every man to know this very same joy and comfort and assurance?
The Buddhist.
The way I see it, it's because you have made a philosophical/religious commitment to a particular view. You know The Truth. Unless my account fits within your view, it is not only false but inconsistent and incoherent. So for example, it isn't enough for me to point out that people have innate values, a fact which I'm sure you agree with, I must also explain the origin of these values or else any conclusion I draw from the existence of those values is invalid.
Basically we have different and incompatible opinions about what constitutes an explanation. I am perfectly happy with one that is, for want of a better word, incomplete and potentially (even probably) false if it can be used reliably. You are not satisfied unless the explanation is a complete ontological claim.
The Buddhist doesn't care about the rest of humanity. He cares about getting himself into the zone of nothingness he thinks awaits him.
Only the Christian believes he is instructed to "be fruitful and multiply" and to actually spread the good news of the Gospel to all men.
"So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it." -- Isaiah 55:11
The Buddhist can's say that. He doesn't even want to.
The Buddhist believes the world is an uncomfortable place from which he seeks to escape. The Buddhist disdains the body and the material world.
The Christian knows that "for God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son..." (John 3:16)
The body and the world are what we are given by God to make something of. If we have faith in Jesus Christ, what we will make of our body and the world is something which will glorify God.
And we will enjoy Him forever.
No I am not saying that at all, disrgr. What I am saying is that being rational entails an appreciation of ratio. Ratio -- reason -- always involves a comparison of one thing to a standard; that is, to another more deeply-rooted, universal thing. Understanding takes root in this process, and only in this process.
Take for example the physical laws. They are the more deeply rooted things against which observations of phenomena are compared, such that the phenomena they describe can be comprehended and understood. Not to mention, this is the process that constitutes the knowledge by which future predictions can be more or less reliably made.
This is the level of the problem I'd most like to engage.
Other than that, let me just add that God is not "the god of the gaps." God is so fundamental, that "if He did not exist, it would be necessary to create Him."
If you can figure out what I just said, and it rings a bell somewhere, I hope you'll give it some further thought, and then ring my bell sometime soon.
best wishes, bb
But of course, people who cannot live with uncertainty do create God in their own image. All you have to do is look around at all the incompatible versions of God that infest this website. Gods that think poor people should be driven from public places, gods that think Mexicans “don’t assimilate, they contaminate,” gods that think it would be a good idea to nuke Mecca, gods that give scriptures to individuals on gold tablets but take them back before the rest of us can see them, ditto for stone tablets.
By your standards it is irrational to look for regularities in the universe that all people who look can see, but rational to trust personal revelations that divide people, and lead to wars and schisms.
This is just crying out for one of my favorite quotes from The Abolition of Man:
The Innovator is trying to get a conclusion in the imperative mood out of premisses in the indicative mood: and though he continues trying to all eternity he cannot succeed, for the thing is impossible.
It is part of a larger passage:
At this point the Innovator may ask why, after all, selfishness should be more 'rational' or 'intelligent' than altruism. The question is welcome. If by Reason we mean the process actually employed by Gaius and Titius when engaged in debunking (that is, the connecting by inference of propositions, ultimately derived from sense data, with further propositions), then the answer must be that a refusal to sacrifice oneself is no more rational than a consent to do so. And no less rational. Neither choice is rational—or irrational—at all. From propositions about fact alone no practical conclusion can ever be drawn. This will preserve society cannot lead to do this except by the mediation of society ought to be preserved. This will cost you your life cannot lead directly to do not do this: it can lead to it only through a felt desire or an acknowledged duty of self-preservation. The Innovator is trying to get a conclusion in the imperative mood out of premisses in the indicative mood: and though he continues trying to all eternity he cannot succeed, for the thing is impossible. We must therefore either extend the word Reason to include what our ancestors called Practical Reason and confess that judgements such as society ought to be preserved (though they can support themselves by no reason of the sort that Gaius and Titius demand) are not mere sentiments but are rationality itself; or else we must give up at once, and for ever, the attempt to find a core of 'rational' value behind all the sentiments we have debunked. The Innovator will not take the first alternative, for practical principles known to all men by Reason are simply the Tao which he has set out to supersede. He is more likely to give up the quest for a 'rational' core and to hunt for some other ground even more 'basic' and 'realistic'.
This he will probably feel that he has found in Instinct. The preservation of society, and of the species itself, are ends that do not hang on the precarious thread of Reason: they are given by Instinct. That is why there is no need to argue against the man who does not acknowledge them. We have an instinctive urge to preserve our own species. That is why men ought to work for posterity. We have no instinctive urge to keep promises or to respect individual life: that is why scruples of justice and humanity—in fact the Tao—can be properly swept away when they conflict with our real end, the preservation of the species. That, again, is why the modern situation permits and demands a new sexual morality: the old taboos served some real purpose in helping to preserve the species, but contraceptives have modified this and we can now abandon many of the taboos. For of course sexual desire, being instinctive, is to be gratified whenever it does not conflict with the preservation of the species. It looks, in fact, as if an ethics based on instinct will give the Innovator all he wants and nothing that he does not want.
In reality we have not advanced one step. I will not insist on the point that Instinct is a name for we know not what (to say that migratory birds find their way by instinct is only to say that we do not know how migratory birds find their way), for I think it is here being used in a fairly definite sense, to mean an unreflective or spontaneous impulse widely felt by the members of a given species. In what way does Instinct, thus conceived, help us to find 'real' values? Is it maintained that we must obey Instinct, that we cannot do otherwise? But if so, why are Green Books and the like written? Why this stream of exhortation to drive us where we cannot help going? Why such praise for those who have submitted to the inevitable? Or is it maintained that if we do obey Instinct we shall be happy and satisfied? But the very question we are considering was that of facing death which (so far as the Innovator knows) cuts off every possible satisfaction: and if we have an instinctive desire for the good of posterity then this desire, by the very nature of the case, can never be satisfied, since its aim is achieved, if at all, when we are dead. It looks very much as if the Innovator would have to say not that we must obey Instinct, nor that it will satisfy us to do so, but that we ought to obey it.2
Hedonism denotes that there is nothing more important than the individual’s pleasure and avoidance of pain. It is totally self-centered, and if this temporal life is all there is, then it makes perfect sense. Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow you may die. What a depressing philosophy of life.
A reductionist comes out of the closet. I never would have suspected.
But seriously, you're only half right. Meaning and understanding is, I agree, relational but I don't think it's a tree as you say. Rather it's a web. We understand even the "deepest" things only in their relation to other things, some of which we don't understand consciously at all but do know unconsciously. Very cool.
To answer your charge that we are demanding a "complete" ontological explanation, I acknowledge that an explanation does not have to be exhaustive to be true, but it must be causally adequate.
You have either denied or expressed agnosticism about real moral incumbency, without which there is no such thing as morality. Explaining morality away is no way to explain it. The subjective feelings that you referred to that one ought to A vs. B, if Bertrand Russel is right, are "but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms". Since there are no good and evil atoms, not only does atheism provide no foundation for morality, it destroys rationality itself right along with it because it means that you do not hold to your beliefs because they are true, but rather because of a series of chemical reactions.
As C.S. Lewis said it (#149), "Why this stream of exhortation to drive us where we cannot help going? Why such praise for those who have submitted to the inevitable?" Moral praise and blame in an atheistic universe makes about as much sense as condemnation of the moon for its orbit around the earth.
You say that you have provided a rationally coherent and consistent atheistic account of morality. If so, then you are the first in history that I know of who has solved this problem.
Cordially,
You have neatly illustrated why communication between us is fruitless. You know The Truth, that morality must be grounded on "real moral incumbency" (whatever that is), and therefore any explanation that doesn't include that is no explanation at all.
You're right that people do create God in their own image. It's called idolatry. Do you have something against idolatry?
By your standards it is irrational to look for regularities in the universe that all people who look can see, but rational to trust personal revelations that divide people, and lead to wars and schisms.
What do you have against personal revelations that divide people and lead to wars and schisms?
Cordially,
Nothing actually. Wars are a fine method of population management. Far fewer theological implications than condoms or pills.
.... One of us is confused. Any bets on who?
I'll pick you.
Yep. However, I have through communication with you illicited your implicit denial of moral incumbency, proving that you don't believe that there really are right rules of conduct, which means that whatever you are describing, it is something other than morality because the notion of rules of right conduct without obligation or duty is oxymoronic.
Cordially,
While it is true that the Buddhist strives for enlightenment for himself, a big part of the reason he does so is that this is the best way he can help others.
The Buddhist Eightfold Noble Path, the foundation of Buddhism, demonstrates where your understanding is lacking. Buddhism was begun because Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, was seeking a way to end suffering for others as well as himself.
You are correct, however, in that Buddhists do not proselytize. The Buddhist attitude is not to bludgeon others into believing as we do--there were no Buddhist Inquisition or Crusades--but rather to be welcoming, with the message of "come and see for yourself". The Buddhist believes that the rightness of the Path speaks for itself, and that nothing need be "taken on faith".
Hedonism denotes that there is nothing more important than the individual’s pleasure and avoidance of pain. It is totally self-centered, and if this temporal life is all there is, then it makes perfect sense. Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow you may die. What a depressing philosophy of life.
Then it is not true that atheism must always and everywhere result in hedonism. While a knowledge that there is no life after death most certainly predisposes a person to trying to make the most out of every day, every moment, it just as certainly does not preclude altruism, compassion, and a desire to help one's fellows. If anything, I would say those last three qualities are enhanced in the atheist who wishes others to share in the joy of mindfulness.
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