Posted on 05/20/2002 12:53:27 PM PDT by rpage3
See source for details....
Yup -- it says that murder works for them. And in the atheist/evolutionary world, if it works, then it must be OK. It's the only moral judgement an evolution-only model of objective reality can support.
If evolution says it works, Ayn Rand certainly has no grounds for calling it wrong.
Of course the fact that she nevertheless called it wrong, says a lot about Ayn Rand's tendency to place her emotional desires above reason (flatly contradicting her own first principle). I say that because only an unwillingness to look can possibly explain her failure to see the logical consequences of her claims.
A rather passive sort of function, I suppose. It would also require a designer with a rather perverse sense of humor in order to suppose that worm food was our main intended function ;)
Yes. The concepts of "normal funtioning" and dysfunction in your example only make sense in terms of a personal, theistic scheme.
Not really. As I said before, dysfunction is as much a matter of definition as anything else. Once the concepts of adaptive versus maladaptive behaviors is fleshed out, functional versus dysfunctional behaviors will follow in short order.
In the atheistic scheme it is not even coherent to describe a person as wicked, much less view the problem of evil as a problem, or to see it as a problem that the moral person gets hit by a bus.
In the sense that "wicked" has a formal definition and a colloquial meaning, it's not particularly incoherent for the non-believer to employ those terms in conversation. You don't have a monopoly on vocabulary, I think ;)
As far as it being a problem when good people die in senseless accidents, it happens. I don't demand an "explanation", as I'm perfectly willing to accept that there may be none.
The problem of evil is only a problem to theists.
As much as it amuses me to think otherwise, people will still do bad things even if theism died out tomorrow, although I know that's not what you meant.
I can bootstrap a pretty good working definition of evil also, I think. As much as you want to propose that a system not based on claims of universal morality would have no response to an Eichmann, I must point out that the real Eichmann rose to power with the tacit complicity of an entire population, in a world where it is generally accepted that morality exists external to ourselves. What good are claims to universal truth if nobody pays attention? What good are claims to universal truth if nobody believes them or cares about them?
In the end, the real Eichmann did what he did in a world based on universal morality. Six million Jews died at the hands of the Nazis, and where was universal truth to save them?
No, "our society" supports abortion because the fetus is considered less than fully human. Face it: Enough people have settled on viability outside the womb as being close enough to what makes the most sense to them, that it has withstood all attempts to overthrow it. Even though the extreme pro-life camp (life begins at conception) is much larger & more vocal than the extreme pro-choice camp (life begins at or later than birth). The mainstream pro-choice camp is merely trying to preserve the status quo at viability.A moral code that led to poverty, death, destruction, & degradation, would have no legitimate claim to anyone's allegiance.
That's where you are wrong. Our society supports abortion (which is in fact "death and destruction") and is a primary reason why people of european descent are have a negative population growth rate - and will cease to exist in a few hundred years (or sooner) unless this trend is reversed. Your thesis is thus disproved by prima facie facts.
So abortion revolves around the practical question of when the life of a person begins, not how much we should cherish a person's life once the practical consensus (or compromise) agrees it has begun.
Now why doesn't that surprise me? =:-)I am not an Ayn Rand fan. ... I'll take Jesus over Ayn thank you very much.
VERY long term thinking!I look at morality as placing the individual's long-term interests over the individual's short-term interests.
9/11 Firemen?
I must say I was rather disturbed by the FDNY saga. Didn't they realize they would never be able to do any real good in time before the building they were in collapsed, killing them and their intended rescuees? They MUST have assumed the building would hold for an hour or two. I cannot believe their commanders would have sent them up there if they knew they only had 1/2 hour to climb up 60 floors, douse a fire enough to open up a passageway past the wreckage, and climb back down 60 floors.
Anyway, regarding the general case of people putting their lives on the line as part of their standard job description: First, these people train constantly to try to minimize their risks. Would you sign up for a job where you knew that suicide was inevitable? Probably not, unless times were desperate indeed.
Secondly, these people do know that there is that risk, and they accept that they will cause themselves to die if the situation calls for it. Even here they are trying to maximize their values and those of the people they love. Even if that includes society in general.
Myself, a complete nontheist, would happily (hah) do my part to defeat the terrorists if I was on Flight 93. 'Course, there they knew they were about to die no matter what they did. But the thought of letting myself be a passive passenger on a kamikaze flight, participating in the murder of thousands, would be unthinkable - even though I'd understand that my own death was imminent.
I love our society, and I love our species. I want humanity to thrive even after my death, just like I want my husband & future children to thrive long after my death.
I believe that virtue consists of having a commitment to the consistent application of one's values, and internalizing that commitment. Applying selfish principles consistently and farsightedly sometimes results in actions & attitudes that can seem rather altruistic on the surface. Or put another way: An act of self-sacrifice can be quite moral to an Objectivist if they see it as an investment in the future, or a "moral cost of living", as it were.
Well, yes and no. "Value" is abstract instead of concrete, just like "mind" is abstract while "brain" is concrete.
Here's an analogy I've been working on: Take 3 pennies. Drop them on the table. What do you see? Four items: Three pennies and one triangle.
So, is the triangle physical? No, it's abstract. Does the triangle exist outside of the pennies? No, without the pennies the triangle wouldn't exist. So, if we drop the pennies into a vat of molten copper, so that the pennies cease to exist as such, what happens to the triangle? Does it fly off to a supernatural triangle storage pile to be used again? No, it ceases to exist just as the pennies themselves ceased to exist.
The triangle is an abstract aspect of the three pennies. And in exactly the same way (but infinitely more complex), the mind is the abstract aspect of a working physical brain. IOW an emergent property.
BTW, I suspect Rand would disagree with me about the triangles. I think she'd say that I was being intrincisist, and the triangle only exists as a concept in our minds. But I don't know, and she's not here to argue the point, so too bad for her! Anyway, here's what Peikoff says about Materialism vs. Idealism:
Now let us apply the principles we have been discussing to two outstanding falsehoods in the history of metaphysics: idealism and materialism.The idealists - figures such as Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Hegel - regard reality as a spiritual dimension transcending and controlling the world of nature, which latter is regarded as deficient, ephemeral, imperfect - in any event, as only partly real. Since "spiritual," in fact, has no meaning other than "pertaining to consciousness," the content of true reality in this view is invariably some function or form of consciousness (e.g., Plato's abstractions, Augustine's God, Hegel's Ideas). This approach amounts to the primacy of consciousness and thus, as Ayn Rand puts it, to the advocacy of consciousness without existence.
...
The more sophisticated versions of idealism rest on technical analyses of the nature of percepts or concepts, ... The unsophisticated but popular version of idealism, which typically upholds a personalized other dimension, is religion. Essential to all versions of the creed, however - and to countless kindred movements - is the belief in the supernatural.
"Supernatural," etymologically, means that which is above or beyond nature. "Nature," in turn, denotes existence viewed from a certain perspective. Nature is existence regarded as a system of interconnected entities governed by law; it is the universe of entities acting and interacting in accordance with their identities. What then is a "super-nature"? It would have to be a form of existence beyond existence; a thing beyond entities; a something beyond identity.
The idea of the "supernatural" is an assault on everything man knows about reality. It is a contradiction of every essential of a rational metaphysics. It represents a rejection of the basic axioms of philosophy....
[Every claim about God] leads to a contradiction of the axiomatic concepts of philosophy. At every point, the notion clashes with the facts of reality and with the preconditions of thought. ...
The point is broader than religion. It is inherent in any advocacy of a transcendent dimension. Any attempt to defend or define the supernatural must necessarily collapse in fallacies. There is no logic that will lead one from the facts of this world to a realm contradicting them....
This does not mean that Objectivists are materialists.
Materialists - men such as Democritus, Hobbes, Marx, Skinner - champion nature but deny the reality or efficacy of consciousness. Consciousness, in this view, is either a myth or a useless byproduct of brain or other motions. In Objectivist terms, this amounts to the advocacy of existence without consciousness. It is the denial of man's faculty of cognition and therefore of all knowledge.
Ayn Rand describes materialists as "mystics of muscle" - "mystics" because, like idealists, they reject the faculty of reason. Man, they hold, is essentially a body without a mind. His conclusions, accordingly, reflect not the objective methodology of reason and logic, but the blind operation of physical factors, such as atomic dances in the cerebrum, glandular squirtings, S-R conditioning, or the tools of production moving in that weird, waltzlike contortion known as the dialectic process.
Despite their implicit mysticism, materialists typically declare that their viewpoint constitutes the only scientific or naturalistic approach to philosophy. The belief in consciousness, they explain, implies supernaturalism. This claim represents a capitulation to idealism. For centuries the idealists maintained that the soul is a divine fragment or mystic ingredient longing to escape the "prison of the flesh"; the idealists invented the false alternative of consciousness versusscience. The materialists simply take over this false alternative, then promote the other side of it. This amounts to rejecting arbitrarily the possibility of a naturalistic view of consciousness.
The facts, however, belie any equation of consciousness with mysticism. Consciousness is an attribute of perceived entities here on earth. It is a faculty possessed under definite conditions by a certain group of living organisms. It is directly observable (by introspection). It has a specific nature, including specific physical organs, and acts accordingly, i.e., lawfully. It has a life-sustaining function: to perceive the facts of nature and thereby enable the organisms that possess it to act successfully. In all this, there is nothing unnatural or supernatural. There is no basis for the suggestion that consciousness is separable from matter, let alone opposed to it, no hint of immortality, no kinship to any alleged transcendent realm.
...
There is no valid reason to reject consciousness or to struggle to reduce it to matter; not if such reduction means the attempt to define it out of existence. Even if, someday, consciousness were to be explained scientifically as a product of physical conditions, this would not alter any observed fact. It would not alter the fact that, given those conditions, the attributes and functions of consciousness are what they are. ...
-- Leonard Piekoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, 1991
Murder works for whom??? It may work temporarily for the current top dog, but it sustains a system whereby that king is constantly in fear of assassination, and the gov't is left without a good succession policy, and I'm sure that atmosphere must lead to terrible policies in general. Not to mention what kind of example that gives for the society at large.
Silverback gorillas know of no other way of doing things, but humans have the possibility of eventually discovering other ways of doing things. It's here that governmental systems compete on the historical stage, and over the long run humanity approaches something like an objective understanding of the best possible governmental system: some kind of representative democracy, limited in power by a strong constitution. I think drastically different forms of government may survive for long periods of time, but only where the populace is mostly ignorant of the alternatives.
I think history confirms this pattern, but it also simply makes sense that a constitutionally limited representative democracy should be more compatible with human nature than any other system.
Very good post. Consciousness has been used by some here as evidence of the supernatural. Others have demanded "proof" that it's a natural phenomenon. Still others have described evolutionists as "naturalists," as if one had to be either that or a super-naturalist. Piekoff sets it all out very clearly.
I said naturalist but meant materialist
As I have stated before, everyone who believes in a religion, evolution, or both; believes in a 'form' of Intelligent Design with the exception of the atheist.
So that means the atheist, by default, believes in the Stupid Designer Theory. Stupidity is lack of intelligence.
The atheist must now use stupidity (lack of intelligence) to explain everything:
Morality, intelligence, the universe, the beginning of life, plant and animal relationship/balance, ect…
The atheist laughs and ridicules the Christian for their beliefs and calls them ignorant. The stupid designer theory is their doorway to enlightenment. It is incumbent upon the atheist and their stupid design theory to explain life:
"For two millennia, the design argument provided an intellectual foundation for much of Western thought. From classical antiquity through the rise of modern science, leading philosophers, theologians, and scientists. From Plato to Aquinas to Newton, maintained that nature manifests the design of a preexistent mind or intelligence. Moreover, for many Western thinkers, the idea that the physical universe reflected the purpose or design of a preexistent mind, a Creator, served to guarantee humanity's own sense of purpose and meaning. Yet today in nearly every academic discipline from law to literary theory, from behavioral science to biology, a thoroughly materialistic understanding of humanity and its place in the universe has come to dominate. Free will, meaning, purpose, and God have become pejorative terms in the academy. Matter has subsumed mind; cosmos replaced Creator."
And Gould’s expanation: "…a deduction from my knowledge of nature's factuality" is "nature was not constructed as our eventual abode, didn't know we were coming... and doesn't give a ______ about us (speaking metaphorically)." He says he finds such a view "liberating...because we then become free to conduct moral discourse...in our own terms, spared from the delusion that we might read moral truth passively from nature's factuality." It is indeed hard not to draw the conclusion that Gould has read his view about the process of evolution into his own moral position. How does he know that nature was not constructed for us if not from his studies of the natural world? How would he know it doesn't care about us unless somehow he saw this in his studies? Where else might he get such ideas?
”Stephen Gould has a materialist philosophy behind his theory of evolution. He believes that the material universe is all that exists, and that our own consciousness is a chance phenomena and does not come from a Creator. So, for Gould, where else can he draw his views about the meaning of life and what might be moral? His very thinking is a chance product of evolutionary processes that had no design, either to produce man or to give him a mind. Nonetheless, Gould trusts his mind not only to be able to distinguish between science and religion, he is sure that they should not influence one another.”
The stupid designer theory… Sure they might replace the word stupidity with natural selection and random variation, and also include other mechanisms (symbiosis, gene transfer, genetic drift, the action of regulatory genes in development, self-organizational processes, etc.). These mechanisms are just that: mindless material mechanisms that do what they do irrespective of intelligence. To be sure, mechanisms can be programmed by an intelligence. But any such intelligent programming of evolutionary mechanisms is not properly part of evolutionary biology.
No matter what word they choose at the time to describe their stupidity, it must come from a lack of intelligence.
stu·pid·i·ty [stoo pídd tee ] (plural stu·pid·i·ties) noun
1. lack of intelligence: lack of intelligence, perception, or common sense
VERY long term thinking!
How can you call yourself a Christian and spout such nonsense as that? If you do not understand that God's laws are eternal, that they do not change with the wind, then you clearly do not have the vaguest idea of what Christianity is.
Then evolutionists are unreasonable. They see two bones and conclude it is a new species. They see a gap in the fossil record and see evolution. They see a mathematically impossible random event and see certainty.
Wrong. It is a total misrepresentation of the Pope's encyclical. The first thing that you have to realize is the title of the encyclical "TRUTH CANNOT CONTRADICT TRUTH". He is not praising evolution, he is condemning it. He starts: "rather than the theory of evolution, we should speak of several theories of evolution. On the one hand, this plurality has to do with the different explanations advanced for the mechanism of evolution, and on the other, with the various philosophies on which it is based. Hence the existence of materialist, reductionist and spiritualist interpretations. What is to be decided here is the true role of philosophy and, beyond it, of theology." Now, he really goes after Darwinian evolution: "man is "the only creature on earth that God has wanted for its own sake" (No. 24). In other terms, the human individual cannot be subordinated as a pure means or a pure instrument, either to the species or to society; he has value per se. He is a person. With his intellect and his will, he is capable of forming a relationship of communion, solidarity and self-giving with his peers."And now for the final kick at evolution:" " Consequently, theories of evolution which, in accordance with the philosophies inspiring them, consider the spirit as emerging from the forces of living matter or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about man. Nor are they able to ground the dignity of the person. " "
The whole encyclical can be found at: Encyclical
Definition: epiphenomenon, n, a secondary phenomenon accompanying another and caused by it.
See my post above. The Catholic position has been totally misrepresented by the atheists. You should not fall into the trap of believing the theological spoutings of non-believers.
No. The commandment comes from His being the giver of life so no one else has a right to destroy it, to set himself up as Him. God is not arbitrary, men are. The problem with the utilitarian view is that it is subject to "interpretation". For example, to an individual the murder of a certain person may be useful in a utilitarian way. To a society, such as a Communist society, the murder of dissidents may be useful. Utilitarian rules are always subject to "interpretation", God's commandments are not.
No.
Evolutionists like to say that their theory does not extend so far as to use the struggle for life as justification for mass murder, euthanasia, etc.. However Darwin clearly thought so as the following shows:
"I could show fight on natural selection having done and doing more for the progress of civilization than you seem inclined to admit. Remember what risk the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is! The more civilized so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilized races throughout the world." Darwin to Graham, July 3, 1881.
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.