Posted on 11/30/2002 7:42:38 AM PST by A. Pole
Luke 18
The Rich Ruler
18A certain ruler asked him, "Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?"
19"Why do you call me good?" Jesus answered. "No one is good--except God alone. 20You know the commandments: 'Do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not give false testimony, honor your father and mother.'[2] "
21"All these I have kept since I was a boy," he said.
22When Jesus heard this, he said to him, "You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."
23When he heard this, he became very sad, because he was a man of great wealth. 24Jesus looked at him and said, "How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! 25Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."
26Those who heard this asked, "Who then can be saved?"
27Jesus replied, "What is impossible with men is possible with God."
28Peter said to him, "We have left all we had to follow you!"
29"I tell you the truth," Jesus said to them, "no one who has left home or wife or brothers or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God 30will fail to receive many times as much in this age and, in the age to come, eternal life."
After my last post I briefly regretted adding "aware" to the list of our qualities that put us at the apex of the known universe for the same reason you focused on it (rather than the nest two listed: "capable" and "accomplished"). Awareness has no value by itself, but it's unique to our species and at the root of our capability leading to our accomplishments.
I admired the way you prefaced the brevity of an explanation above as a, "…thumbnail sketch of what ought to take a serious philosopher at least a thick volume to closely reason and explore" It's a challenge to illustrate these ideas without sounding like some kind of geek, ether an academic nerd or a Star Trek conventioneer who's never had a girlfriend. The 359 word comparison of our cognition to that behind a spider's web is interesting to some, but it's a complete miss direction. It's not our cognition but our accomplishments that put us at the apex of the universe as we know it.
Briefly going back to the spider example, if the hive reached out to manage the environment and life of a planet, construct diverse cities, tunnel through mountains and stretch to the moon to create a civilization millions of times more intricate, dynamic and "progressive" (in the universal sense) than anything seen since intercellular biology (perhaps even exceeding that), then I think we'd be sharing that apex. But in order for that to happen, those spiders would need extraordinary awareness/intelligence, language, government and philosophy. Hmm… we've come full circle back to the value of "awareness".
I think I've qualified the claim that we're at the apex with a phrase like "as far as we know" more than once. To keep this succinct, I don't think that it needs repeating each time it's restated. And if something greater than humanity's one day discovered, it'll at least put a tremor through both our ideologies.
I'd be interested to know if you have any further challenges to this concept of a natural model for defining the objective of good. I've never had the opportunity to defend it to even to this degree. I think that I've batted back each of your challenges pretty convincingly, but their may still be some obvious loose ends.
The concept's more or less taken from Objectivism, but I get bored with the tedium and precision demanded by Objectivists, and prefer to hang out closer to the real world. But when I promote it here, It usually just rolls past the interests of others or they get frustrated and evade the issue in various ways.
I look forward to replying to you, perhaps this evening. I have to get some work done now. Thanks for an interesting and civil discussion.
No. China has been "civilized" for thousands of years. Today, right now, Chinese children born with Down's Syndrome are still suffocated in the delivery room and then tossed in the trash. As you may remember, China is currently an atheist state. The diffenrence between America (a Christian nation) and China (a pagan/atheist nation) can be well-understood by the fact that we have a Special Olympics and they don't. Maybe you could tell me--with your 'obvious' megawattage of brainpower, why children with Down's Syndrome shouldn't be suffocated at birth.
Oh, and by the way, it didn't take long for the atheists to start hurling "you're stupid"-type insults, did it?
Exactly.
If you are an atheist, then there is no such thing as good or evil. There are only physical phenomena contextualized by human experience. And because humans experience the same physical phenomena differently, morals are relative to the experiencer. Ergo, moral relativism.
So, when atheists ask 'if God is good, why is there evil in the world?', they are poaching on our turf.
Let me ask you a question--can there be disagreements between rational men?
We'd probably find that severely disabled babies are quietly executed in most of the world today, perhaps in the West not too long ago. I suspect that we don't do it because we're an instinctively compassionate people (like the rest of the world), but unlike the rest of the world, we can afford them. No doubt Christianity's promotion of the value of human life also has a substantial role.
I'm not an Objectivist, but I think most Objectivists would admit to narrow or rare instances where rational self interests conflict beyond what can be managed by a proper government. They won't admit to that conflict within Objectivist principle's though, absent some kind of rare and unanticipated emergency situation.
Nevertheless, I suspect rational men will disagree much less severely than men who've devoted themselves to separate evangelical religions.
I'll lose the attitude if you will.
Can you give a morally relevant example of that? (Beyond homosexuality which is a relatively narrow ethical debate in this context.) If not, your claim that atheists can't define good and evil is unsupportable.
Seems like a fair question. In short, it's like my profile says that "I lean strongly toward objectivism".
I don’t' know how many Objectivist there are in the US, perhaps 25,000. There are probably several times that many more who are highly influenced but it, but since Objectivism is defined as the philosophy of Ayn Rand, we can't really call ourselves Objectivists if we have any significant differences with its principles (as I understand to be the case).
With me I disagree with the concept of tabula rasa, the gold standard and Rand's propensity to label that which is simply wrong as "evil", specifically the Catholic Church.
I believe that with some minor extensions of the idea of enlightened self interests, Objectivism is not longer the antithesis of altruism, but encompasses the principle promoted by many Christians that one achieves personal happiness by finding something greater than oneself to live for.
I think Objectivism has great potential, but is not nearly as evolved or complete and as its proponents think it to be, and it's in no way ready to challenge Christianity as a foundation for Western Civilization. (It's hardly ready to be introduced.) I wouldn't recommend it for most people, depending on their age, aptitude and personality. Nevertheless, for 12 years and after a fair amount of reading reflection, and online debate, it's the closest thing to a description of my ideology.
So although I'm not defending Objectivism here, regarding my difference with your statement that atheist can't define good and evil, I'm not aware of "much" in Objectivism that would be different than my position.
Our reason proceeds from our biology. Objective reason does not.
I wholeheartedly agree that that statement is consistent with a Godless reality. In fact, without God, our reason must proceed from our biology... making "objective reason" an oxymoron.
I wholeheartedly agree that that statement is consistent with a Godless reality. In fact, without God, our reason must proceed from our biology... making "objective reason" an oxymoron.
Our reason proceeding from our biology -- subjective reason -- has no bearing on universal truths -- objective reason.
BTW, how can you prove the existance of God and the goodness of God in a Universe where there is no objective reason and everything is subjective?
Before addressing your subsequent comments, I've got to deal with this misconception. Without God in the universe, you have no basis to claim that there are "universal truths."
Premise: There is no God.
Therefore: Because there is no God, human beings are not creations.
Therefore: Because human beings are not creations, human beings must be an accidental product of physics and chemistry.
Therefore: Because human beings are accidental products of physics and chemistry, what we call "reason" is nothing more than a competitive adaptation.
Therefore: Because "reason" is nothing more than a competitive adaptation, it can only apply in the context of human survival (just as other specialized animal behavior applies only to their survival). In other words, Man's "reason" works for him, just like coyote's howling works for coyotes.
Conclusion: Man's conception of "objective reason" applies to the universe in which we live just as much as (and in like manner, and no more than) the coyote's howling.
Please don't feel that I've shortchanged you, or misinterpreted you. Pioneering behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner made a career and founded an entire school of psychology on the above conclusion.
"Scientific materialism embraces hard determinism--i.e. we are nothing but organic mechanisms that respond to physical laws; therefore, there is no real "good" or "evil", only pleasure and pain, weakness and power. The concepts of "good" and "evil" are inherently theological. To wit: in the wild, strong animals kill weak animals. The human analog to this would be, of course, tyranny; the strong hairless apes dominate the weak hairless apes.
The Christian critique is that all men ( and women), regardless of their physical or mental attributes, are equal in the sight of God and have something ineffable inside them that levels the field of humanity. This thing--let's say the soul--is of and from God and is aware of a Law apart from human experience. To try to follow this Law is the objective good (although we all fall short of it and need Grace to come into the presence of God), and to ignore it and disobey it is Sin and evil.
Catholic doctrine is that free moral will exists (although obviously you cannot determine your sex, race and so forth) and that we know the difference between good and evil at some level, and have the free will to choose between the two. Determinism holds that we are nothing more than animals bound to the most recent glandular squirting.
Rand tried to forge a middle ground here, embracing atheism while appropriating the rhetorical appurtenances of Judeo-Christian theism; i.e. "good" and "evil". In her lights, "good" is defined as "reason" and "evil" is defined as non-reason or "evasion". But as I pointed out to Beckett, honest men disagree on what is "reasonable" all the time. If men didn't disagree on what is logical and reasonable, then science and every other field of human inqiry wouldn't exist. So, if there is no "true north" to human reason, then the "good" that Rand holds up as the human ideal is nothing more than a type of intellectually pretentious relativism dressed up in a lab coat.
Rand and her disciples (David Kelley, Binswanger, Uyl) can't afford to take the atheist doctrine of Objectivism to its full conclusion because they end up in hairless-ape land; that wonderful Hobbsean jungle where there is no "Objective" standard of reason or anything else. Just 'might makes right'. In fact, the case could be made that Rand is nothing more than a photonegative of Marx."
BTW, I'm for the gold standard, although any money that settles in a commodity is fine with me.
The fallacy you are committing here is the equation of any uncertainty with total uncertainty. It is similar to the standard creationist debate tactic of pointing to some disagreement about the details of the follil record and arguing that the entire notion of evolution is thereby cast into doubt.
The fact that there are disagreements over scientific conclusions does not change the fact that there is an objective reality upon which these conclusions are ultimately based, or the conclusion that the disagreements ultimately arise from flawed or incomplete detection and analysis thereof. It certainly does not lead to relativism, any more than different measurements of the Earth's oblate spheroidal shape lend credence to the notions that it might actually be flat after all.
At this point, you are sidestepping the fact that there is a rather high degree of order inherent to the laws of physics and chemistry.
(If you want to respond that invoking this point takes us into pantheism rather than atheism, I won't argue too strongly.)
Steve, I consider my conclusion in the aforementioned exercise to be absurd; while the reasoning is sound, it's based on a faulty premise. =]
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