04.06.08

James comment, Berlinski, ethics and reductionism

Posted in Philosophy, Science & Religion at 6:18 pm by nemo

James on Berlinski/moral agents

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.

I am sorry I missed it. Berlinski is right. However, the religious (or Christian) foundation for ethics is a kind of stop-gap meassure.
I must say it, Kant outlined the difficulty (and I won’t claim that he solved it, after all, Schopenhauer impatiently rejected his approach) perfectly, if you can grapple with such a complicated discourse and literature of commentaries. It seems that this approach is simply beyond the capacity of current science culture.
If you stand just by and by the Kantian discourse, taken all in all (more than just Kant 101 courses in the Metaphysical Foundations), without the false polemical defenses, i.e. taken ‘neat’ in all its historical chronicle, scholarly and otherwise, the whole dimension of the issue will suddenly stand out in its mystery, next to the tragic fact that cultural life still lacks the intelligence to handle the issue. Hence the religious propaganda systems that simply carry people through the jungle here with mythological substitutes that, nonetheless, do express the gist of the ethical nature of man.

Permalink