Category Archives: Religion

Philosophy, Reason, Religion

The Failbox Of Moral Absolutism

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My inspiration for this particular blog is gleaned, unhappily, from a NephilimFree video. For those languishing in sweet ignorance, NephilimFree is a Youtube creationist who closely resembles something you might find hunkered under a stone. And for those about to accuse me of cheap adhom, don’t worry – the man would be as stupid and worrying if he looked like Brad Pitt and AronRa strapped together. It’s just so . . . so classic that he looks like everyone’s stereotypical image of the pale, overweight religious fundamentalist.

He made a brief allusion to moral absolutism whilst en route to some cataclysmically balls conclusion about evolution, offering it as a brief proof of God. His argument, and indeed the arguments of all moral absolutists are similar, went like this:

“We know it is evil to rape a baby. But how do we know? This inherent evilness must come from somewhere, it has to have been provided ERGO GOD DID IT HE BLOODY DID THA KNOWS”

Now, I may often make babyrape jokes, so I just want to assure you that I wasn’t making that example for lulz – his words, not mine.

The basic tenet of moral absolutism, (or moral objectivism\objectivity) henceforth referred to as MA to save me a great deal of tedium, is that certain things are universally known to be good or bad. To everyone. Popular examples are rape and murder. We all KNOW it’s wrong. William Lane Craig, that spectacularly fatuous but annoyingly eloquent apologist, made a similar argument when debating with the then atheist Anthony Flew.

This argument is, I need scarcely point out, the supremest ass.

For a start, NephilimFree fails to take into account that, whilst the majority of people would certainly regard the rape of a baby as morally repugnant, some people would not. Namely the people who go around raping babies in the first place. And this is completely ignoring hypothetical situations where the rape of a baby would save a great many people (I freely confess being unable to think of many such situations, but say you have a man who takes 20 people hostage and demands a baby to rape in exchange for the safe release of his hostages . . . is babyrape then still immutably wrong? How many people would have to die before the rape of one baby is outweighed by multiple murders? And so on.)

The world is not as starkly black and white as MA-ists would have us believe. There are clear trends that show what actions are, by and large, considered to be good or bad by humanity in general – but there is no standard, no consensus, no one list of good and bad that every single person could agree on. The shades of grey number into the practically infinite. The trouble is that MA-ists tend to – in fact, are quite naturally compelled to – see the moral compass from atop their own cultural magnet. Nephilim and WLC, to take my two examples, are both American Christians living in the hallowed grounds of the Western civilised world. I’m sure they would recoil in horror if lectured about the scarification rites of various tribal cultures and groups, which are by my standards barbaric. I’m sure they would be repelled, as I am, by the ritual cutting of Muslim children’s heads during Ashura. I would take such acts to be considered immoral more or less across the board, outside  the cultures that practice them – but there is no absolutism here. The people that perform such ritual incisement and scarification are not isolated sociopaths, they are merely operating from a different perspective that they consider to be entirely justified. Note that I’m not condoning such things in the slightest, just demonstrating that what we may call barbaric child abuse is a way of life to a large number of people.

Of course, I have to wonder how Nephilim and WLC regard circumcision. Personally, I find it abhorrent – the mutilation of a child’s genitals, against their will, in the name of some unprovable deity. I often wonder how the nation (whichever nation, mine is the UK) would react if news surfaced of some religious cult who, inspired by their scriptures, ritualistically cut off the left earlobe of all newborn boys. I imagine there would be outrage. However, circumcision is carried out en masse, every day, every minute – the forced removal of part of someone’s body. The only authority it has is antiquity, and of course that argument would lead us back to treating women like possessions (unless you’re in a religion where you already DO treat them like possessions, which saves time) and enslaving people who have a different skin pigmentation. Authority is no kind of argument, and it seems the only defence circumcision has – claims that it significantly improves health are bogus. The decision should lie with the individual, unforced by external pressure.

If two of the largest religions in the world practice genital mutilation, how can there be moral absolutism?

There can only be moral absolutism in small groups – probably the only way you could get a handful of people who would take identical stances on every single moral issue you could raise. Of course, I’m not talking only about things like rape, murder and mutilation. I’m talking about the little things, decisions on whether or not to lie\go home early from work\not do something you were told to do, and so on. I’m sure Neph would say that only the big issues matter, but if you’re talking about MA then you can’t have it just for the major issues. It’s not as if these absolute morals break down once you get into pettier concerns of lying and cheating. If one thing is absolutely right or wrong, everything has to be. So out of 100 people, 100 might agree that babyrape is wrong – but 26 might think it’s ok to steal to provide money for medicine (and 4 of them think it’s ok to steal just to provide money for themselves). 14 might think it’s ok to cheat on their partner. A further 7 might think homosexuals are sinful. 32 might have no problem with circumcision. And for every person who is ok with such a stance, you might have people who take the opposing view whilst doing something themselves that others consider to be immoral. And so on, and on, and on. The Pope, ensconced within his fortress of deceit, thinks that homosexuality is objectively wrong – and this man is the head of the Catholic church. Nice going, guys.

At best, there are trends. Some of the trends are stronger and more widespread, but none are immutable. I cannot think of a single thing that everyone would agree on as being completely and universally bad, something from which moral absolutism could be derived. I put this question to my girlfriend, and she suggested “Destroying the world?” Sadly I can imagine that you’d easily find someone to do it, if they had the chance.

Philosophy, Reason, Religion, Science

A Debate With A Vague God Enthusiast

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Haven’t blogged for a bit, so I’m storming back with a long one. In addition to that, I have a larger than average blog post for your delectation.

My girlfriend and her friend ended up talking about God, and my name got mentioned – presumably because I’m just that awesome. My GF, as someone who’s pretty much had her faiths eroded by my niggling arguments (“Shall we get some wine? Also, why would an all-powerful God allow evil to occur?”) wanted her friend to talk to me on the subject. She prepared a short argument and I emailed her my response.

Something I wasn’t aware of until after I’d emailed her was that she is, apparently, very stubborn and will never let go of her beliefs. Which renders debate more or less meaningless, but hey – who knows?

 

“What is sense? Why can’t open minded thoughts help you accept a possibility of a greater power/energy source named as god?”

I think my GF gave you the wrong impression of my perspective on this issue. I accept the POSSIBILITY of God, or a higher power, simply because it would be scientifically hypocritical to state with certainty that it could NOT exist. Until every iota of the universe has been catalogued, which is almost certainly something we will never do, we cannot posture with certainty on such matters. To state something CANNOT exist is a faith-based position, albeit anthetical to faith IN a God, and as such is a position not often adopted by intellectuals.

So, I can accept the possibility. But with a complete lack of any positive proof, there is no point considering it further. An inability to disprove something is not adequate proof FOR it, otherwise you would have to give equal credence to absolutely every unfalsifiable hypothesis anyone ever makes. Along with your concept of God, you’d have to grant the equal chance of everyone else’s concept of God, along with all supernatural claims. This is without even going into the logical paradoxii that arguments for God tend to invoke, which I’ll go into a bit later..

“Why can’t there be a god?”

I’d need to know more detail about your concept of God to answer this. However, in general, God creates more questions than it answers. Simply using God as a catch-all answer to the mysteries of the universe is unrealistic, because you then have to explain God. You end up with paradoxii of omnipotence, problems of free will, problems of omnicognisance. So tell me more about your perception of God – is it conscious? Insensate? Does it have a specific purpose? What powers does it possess? Is it immortal/eternal/invincible? Is it limited in any sense?

Until I have more detail, though, the simple answer is there COULD be a God – but it’s so vastly unlikely, so internally inconsistent and contradictory by most human accounts, that there’s no point in pursuing it. As we on the internet say, pictures or it didn’t happen. The onus of proof is ALWAYS on the other side to substantiate God – NOT on me to disprove.

“By opening your mind and thoughts you accept possibilities, by accepting possibilities you become more knowledgeable, and by being more knowledgeable you are naturally more intelligent.”

Accepting possibilities is fine. It’s what drives scientific endeavour and progress. But you don’t actually become more knowledgeable until you have proved these possibilities as something workable. There’s some famous quote, I think from Richard Dawkins, which is more or less “Be open-minded, but not so open that your brain falls out.” Wondering how things work and having a spirit of enquiry keeps discovery constant; however, that is no reason to hang on to the impossible or the unworkable. The historical precedent is that poorly understood natural phenomena attributed to the supernatural (for example, the various cultural pantheons to whom natural forces and processes were attributed via individual deities, as opposed to monotheism where a single entity controls everything – this seems to be what you’re postulating) eventually become explained by scientific means. The age of simply hypothesising something which sounds about right is long gone. The age of empiricism demands proof, repeatable observation, before a possibility becomes workable. Otherwise the whole thing simply collapses in disarray under the weight of countless “possibilities” which can only be accepted because they cannot be completely disproved.

That is the nature of science, of course. It operates on inductive reasoning, on extending an assumption from a necessarily limited sample group. However, deductive reasoning – which begins from an axiomatic statement and is thus considered to be more reliable than inductive logic – is never grounded in the real world. Only logical and mathematical constructs can be axiomatic. A famous deduction is “All are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrates is mortal.” However, this deduction relies on inductive empiricism for its axiom. The only way of looking at the world and the universe is by the scientific method; only abstracts, like logic and maths (human constructions) produce axiomatically true results – and these results are definitionally divorced from the real world.

“Where did the first energy source come from?”

We’re working on it 🙂

We don’t know. The origins of the universe are pretty trippy to consider. However, given the aforementioned historical precedent of supernatural explanations being superceded, it’s reasonable to assume that we will eventually know – and not knowing NOW doesn’t mean we will NEVER know. Also, not knowing the origins of the universe is comparatively simple when compared to using God as an explanation and then trying to work out how God created itself, or all the other attendant problems with using God to explain anything.

“Do humans have any energy source beyond physics? Why? Why not?”

If human beings have an energy source beyond physics it’s pointless to even speculate as it necessarily wouldn’t be something we could even detect. If we could detect it, it would be an aspect of known physical laws and not metaphysical or supernatural in nature. So, no, humans do not have an energy source beyond physics because the question doesn’t have any actual meaning – you’re asking to verify something which definitionally, as soon as it is verified, STOPS being beyond physics.

“Bear in mind that without self-evidence there is none. With no evidence, you rely on belief. Therefore proof is belief. If belief is your source of proof why can’t you believe in god and use belief as proof.” (I nearly pooped myself when I read that argument.)

That’s a little too much of a logical leap though. Proof is NOT belief. Proof is proof. Belief implies some kind of dependence on the believer for continuation, and gravity doesn’t care if you believe in it or not. Scientists don’t rely on belief or faith, and neither do the things the scientific method discovers.
Your argument dictates that, if belief is a proof, EVERYTHING is real and possible. Jeremy, the unicorn inside Jupiter who controls gravity (but only in this solar system) is real because I have belief in him – and thus proof. And, of course, the concept of God that I believe in that forces all possible Gods to NOT exist (including yours) must be real, because I have belief.

Belief is not the source of proof for scientists, or for me. Repeatable, observable testing and evidence is proof. Proof that is consistent with all previously gathered research. Using belief as proof not only invites a great deal of confusion, it’s demonstrably untrue, and it indicates a lack of any REAL proof for claims. If your proof is belief, you are admitting that you have no concrete evidence on which to go on.

 

So now, we wait . . .

Religion

Christian Apologetics – 1 Peter 3:15

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In a recent video on the subject of Christian Apologetics, young master Noah (AKA Veritas48) commented that, “as an apologist, we like to quote 1 Peter 3:15.”

It’s worth noting what 1 Peter 3:15 actually says:

  • But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear. (King James Version.)
  • But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect. (New International Version.)
  • But sanctify in your hearts Christ as Lord: being ready always to give answer to every man that asketh you a reason concerning the hope that is in you, yet with meekness and fear. (American Standard Version.)
  • And so on.

It’s interesting that the attributes of how Christians are supposed to comport themselves changes. Fear vs. respect… big difference, but what doens’t change is “be ready,” and “be prepared.”

This is about having the information and being ready to respond with it if someone asks. “I just thought I’d share something with you,” is not covered by 1 Peter 3:15. “Athiests, come debate me,” is not covered by 1 Peter 3:15.

Christians shouldn’t start fights, even intellectuals. And unless someone is overtly standing in front of you, asking you explicitly for an explanation… you should remain silent.

A further crique of apologetics. They are antagonists.