04.02.08
Berlinski in Washington/moral agents
He seemed very taken with the idea that if you reject God you are left without a final arbiter for questions about morality. As I’ve written before at this blog, my own view is that clear thinking about moral issues can not begin until the idea of God as moral arbiter is discarded. So I was not too impressed with that little argument.
Kant said as much, insisting on the autonomy of the moral agent. But can science deal with the idea of freedom in the context of its causal universalism?
Some quotes from Berlinski book: Here are some excerpts from Berlinski’s book:
the great German mathematician David Hilbert affirmed in an address given in 1930, “We must know, we will know.”
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Shortly after Hilbert delivered his address, Kurt Godel demonstrated that mathematics was inherently incomplete. If science in the twentieth century has demonstrated anything, it is that there are limits to what we can know.
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Darwin’s theory of evolution…may be grasped by anyone in an afternoon, and often is. A week suffices to make a man a specialist.
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historian Richard Weikart, who in his admirable treatise, From Darwin to Hitler makes clear what anyone capable of reading the Germans sources already knew: A sinister current of influence ran form Darwin’s theory of evolution to Hitler’s policy of extermination.
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Darwinian biologists are very often persuaded that there is a conspiracy to make them look foolish. In this they are correct.
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Computer simulations of Darwinian evolution fail when they are honest and succeed only when they are not….What these computer experiment do reveal is a principle far more penetrating than any that Darwin ever offered: There is a sucker born every minute.
http://www.uncommondescent.com/culture/agnostics-vs-atheists-devils-delusion-now-available-at-amazon/
James said,
April 6, 2008 at 5:32 pm
“He seemed very taken with the idea that if you reject God you are left without a final arbiter for questions about morality.”
I watched the CSPAN event. His point was that reductionist metaphysics offer a poorer foundation for ethics than theism and that the New Atheists haven’t intelligently addressed these issues. He made it clear that he wasn’t endorsing revealed religious ethical doctrines.