08.24.09

Common ordinary morality?

Posted in ethics, Evolution, Kant at 2:35 pm by nemo

The discussion of evolution and ethics is an ironic challenge to human intelligence, with the inexorable conclusion that we don’t have the facts required to produce a theory of ethics or its evolution.
To see the point it is worth considering Kant’s discussion of ‘common ordinary morality’ beginning in his Grundlagen.
He claims to be only trying to explicate that already built in morality. Perhaps he failed. But his point is remarkable: how we act, and how we understand how we act are not the same. The former must have evolved somehow, but how would we say if we can’t quite specify what it is.
Here the Darwinians go astray and get nowhere. At least Kant has an ethical agent, with a will, and a faculty of reason. And Kant has a system whereby the temporal/spatial context of the ‘will’ to do that ethical action is mediated with the space/time framework, etc: transcendental idealism (neither transcendental nor an idealism).

Darwinians clutch at straws with the sole property, altruism, whereby to derive a single virtue mechanically, with no further discussion of agents, will, morality in general, or anything else that is sensible.
It is a clear case of trying to use oversimplifications on problems their would be solvers are unable to really comprehend.

It is thus illegitimate for such people to claim a monopoly on all such knowledge, or to dismiss morality because it doesn’t fit into nineteenth century scientism.
The science community needs to do something here, and stop their pretentious bluff to the effect that they have already solved this problem.

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‘Morality doesn’t equal God’

Posted in ethics, Evolution, Kant, Science & Religion at 2:03 pm by nemo

Morality doesn’t equal God

The Darwin faithful are on the attack against Wright, whose confusions over evolution and morality are still not kosher with the Darwinian literalists.
Myers relieves himself of some Nietzschean impatience:

Nope, says I. First, there is no moral law: the universe is a nasty, heartless place where most things wouldn’t mind killing you if you let them. No one is compelled to be nice; you or anyone could go on a murder spree, and all that is stopping you is your self-interest (it is very destructive to your personal bliss to knock down your social support system) and the self-interest of others, who would try to stop you. There is nothing ‘out there’ that imposes morality on you, other than local, temporary conditions, a lot of social enculturation, and probably a bit of genetic hardwiring that you’ve inherited from ancestors who lived under similar conditions.

Actually, the above is not true, and potentially disastrous as a general public belief; or else misposed around the idea of a ‘moral law’, from Moses to Kant.
Beyond that the ‘ethical’ dimension of the universe, totally invisible to Darwinists, is all-pervasive for those who care to look.
The truth is that we are barely intelligent enough to withstand the stupid smarts of Nietzsche, let alone resolve the tantalizing fragments of Kant and his transcendental idealism, which mediates the idea of freedom (the real point of morality) with that of Newtonian causality.

It is an interesting trap for redutionists: to assert that there is no moral law. Where is the proof?

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08.07.09

Don’t be intimidated by Darwin thugs like Sam Harris

Posted in ethics, Evolution at 2:02 pm by nemo

The strange case of Sam Harris

I find this article by Sam Harris, discussed yesterday, genuinely shocking, because it shows how the current regime will make intelligent people (like Harris, supposedly) stupid via the obsessive education in Darwinian fundamentalism. Such people are dangerous, far more so than a pleasant fool like Collins.
Harris should know better, and probably does know better, but the key to his celebrity is ‘new atheism straight’ and a juicy taget like Francis Collins is too much to pass up.
don’t be intimidated by these Darwin characters, who deserve the title ‘thugs’ when they start trashing people’s desperate efforts to rescue morality from Darwinian stupidity.
Dangerous because they give unlimited sanction to Darwin thuggery based on the highest motives.

Reading this essay on Collins you end by scratching your head. Collins may be confused, but he is surely less so than Darwin idiots like Sam Harris, who seem to have lost all perspective on what they are saying and doing.
Trashing an attempt to compensate for Darwinism severe limits on the evolution of ethics shows that Harris has achieved the final state of Darwinian stupidity and is oblivious to the outcome.

Collins’ formulation is not mine, but a close look shows an near miss on a Kantian view of ethics.
Darwinists are too far gone to grasp their flatlander view of their own subject. We don’t have to hybridize science and religion to do it right, but at least, in a Kantian vein, we can see that plain scientific realism simply cannot produce an understanding of ethics, let alone its evolution.

Don’t be intimidated by Darwin thugs like Sam Harris: hang loose outside of the Darwinian/religious false alternatives.

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08.06.09

The strange case of Sam Harris

Posted in ethics, Evolution, New Age at 3:16 pm by nemo

The Strange Case of Francis Collins

I have frequently been critical of Francis Collins, and find the attempt to create a hybrid Christian Darwinism to be incoherent. But the current witchhunt against him by the New Atheists is entirely alarming, and the obsessive efforts of Sam Harris, of all people, in this direction are a head-scratcher.
Harris, who is a closet New Ager, with beliefs he put in writing on non-dual Vedanta in his End of Faith, ought to know better than to start putting Collins into a New Atheist inquisition.
The contradictions in Harris’ position are either severe confusion on his part, or else a deception brought on by the unexpected success of his atheism promotion, reqjuiring him to change his story and/or downplay his New Age/Buddhist (or whatever they are) beliefs.
The addiction to public attention spawned by a bestseller is easy grounds to conveniently downplay one’s real or previous beliefs to play to the gallery.
However, Harris has failed to get away with it.
Now, how is it that a student of non-dual Vedanta is having so much difficulty with Collins’ moral beliefs?
Here is Harris’ inqjuisitorial case against Collins:

Here is how Collins, as a scientist and educator, currently summarizes his understanding of the universe for the general public (what follows are a series of slides, presented in order, from a lecture that Collins gave at the University of California, Berkeley in 2008):

Slide 1
Almighty God, who is not limited in space or time, created a universe 13.7 billion years ago with its parameters precisely tuned to allow the development of complexity over long periods of time.

Slide 2
God’s plan included the mechanism of evolution to create the marvelous diversity of living things on our planet. Most especially, that creative plan included human beings.

Slide 3
After evolution had prepared a sufficiently advanced “house” (the human brain), God gifted humanity with the knowledge of good and evil (the Moral Law), with free will, and with an immortal soul.

Slide 4
We humans use our free will to break the moral law, leading to our estrangement from God. For Christians, Jesus is the solution to that estrangement.

Slide 5
If the Moral Law is just a side effect of evolution, then there is no such thing as good or evil. It’s all an illusion. We’ve been hoodwinked. Are any of us, especially the strong atheists, really prepared to live our lives within that worldview?

I find these views to be not fully coherent. However, they express perfectly the gaping hole in Darwinism whereby the question of evolution and ethics fails to find a proper account, instead giving us the extreme reductionist scenarios of group selection/kin selection, scenarios that make no sense and fail to expicate moral judgment in all its complexity.
So, if Collins, as a Darwinist, sees the problem here with his own beliefs, it is not surprising that he should move to create a hybrid to resolve the problem.

What I find strange is that Sam Harris should start obsessing over Darwian fundamentalism here. Surely a man as intelligent as Harris, with a background in New Age religion, must realize the limitations of Darwinian theory on the question of ethics.
Harris is acting stupidly here, and his position is hard to fathom.

I have recommended several times that the style of Collins’ moral argument might be clarified by a Kantian discourse on science and freedom, along with the various components of his moral theories.

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08.01.09

Booknotes: Neiman’s Moral Clarity

Posted in Booknotes, ethics at 12:34 pm by nemo

world, not be determined by it’Susan Neiman talks to spiked about the death of philosophy, the need for moral reasoning, and how the Enlightenment taught us to live without absolute certainty.

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07.27.09

Evolution and ethics, Darwinian confusion

Posted in ethics, Evolution at 1:14 pm by nemo

Harris’ attempt to criticize Collins for his beliefs on evolution and ethics are the height of Darwinian naivete. I am not endorsing Collins’ views, but at leat he can see that the domain of scientism is unable to explicate the complexities of ethics.
If we examine the eonic effect it becomes clear immediately that the evolution needed to bring about man, man as he is, is going to be far more complicated than what current Darwinian fundamentalism can consider

Evolution and ethics, at close range

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07.17.09

Who is more confused, Collins or the Darwin fanatics?

Posted in ethics, Evolution at 6:42 pm by nemo

Francis Collins and the God of the Gaps

I fear that Collins bungled his case here. But the problem is acute for Darwinists. To say that sociobiology explains the evolution of altruism, after considering hypothetical scenarios with worker ants shows that biologists are completely out in left field, and, worse, don’t realize it, and can’t get their heads out of the hole.
So slinging the charge of ‘god in gaps’ belief is a bit off the mark.

Darwinists are turning into a kind of inquisition, without grasp of the issues, ready to pass judgment for the sin of confusion in the face of biological confusion.
If morality could not have evolved, it doesn’t follow that God exists. It only follows that Darwin’s theory is false. We cannot say whether morality evolved, or even what morality is. It is likely that it evolved! But not in a manner we understand.
These arguments have a false focus: before speaking of morality, you need a self. How could a self evolve?

Collins’s religious views may nevertheless be of some interest. The primary argument in his book The Language of God is what he calls the Moral Law (his capitalization). In Collins’s view, morality could not have evolved; therefore God exists. Specifically, Collins argues that morality can be found only among humans. The moral code transcends culture, he says, and therefore must be inborn. He notes that humans are often altruistic, by which he means truly altruistic in the sense of never expecting return on their altruistic investment. He briefly notes the arguments of sociobiologists to the effect that altruism can provide indirect benefit to the altruist and uses infanticide among monkeys to demonstrate that monkeys are not altruistic. He observes that worker ants are altruistic (maybe that should have been in quotation marks) because they have the same genes as the queen but dismisses the possibility that altruism among humans could have a genetic basis.

Now Collins may be right, but telling us that monkeys commit infanticide and neglecting to tell us that humans also commit infanticide is cherry-picking data in the worst way.

In short, the case that altruism or morality could have evolved is strong, and Collins makes no serious effort to refute it. He goes on to tell us that the “Moral Law shone its bright white light into the recesses of [his] childish atheism” and concludes, with no logical or convincing argument, that his God must be a theist god as opposed to a deist god. Collins drew his conclusions, according to his own testimony, after having read Mere Christianity, by C. S. Lewis, when he was 27.

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07.16.09

The myths of revelation and the actual perception of ‘eonic’ evolution

Posted in ethics, Evolution, History, Kant, The Eonic Effect at 4:26 pm by nemo

Two comments on The Eonic Effect and the Emergence of Values in History/Evolution

James said,
July 16, 2009 at 3:51 pm
No doubt about it, but I was backing up your point that neither side gives us any insight into our moral sense.

James said,
July 16, 2009 at 3:58 pm
…and I can sympathize with the desperation of religionists when they are confronted with reductionist theories.

Although the ‘eonic effect’ solves the problem, it doesn’t either provide a neat scheme of ethics. We see a system operating at a high level of abstraction, beyond human intelligence.
We distinguish macro-action and micro-action, which here can be seen in the fantastic ‘macro-action’ we can detect behind the historical interval of Axial Israel. Unfortunately the creation of the Bible is micro-action, a secondary process. Our great source of ‘revelation’ is nonesuch, but a deeper process beyond our own creativity.
The next great correlation is the realm of German Classical philosophy 2400 years later.
The point here is that the action producing ethics as an action of divine revelation has been completely misunderstood: the filter of micro-action.
As we stand back and gaze over the millennia since the Neolithic the eonic effect shows the intersection with a mysterious realm of values. But these emerge often in parallel worlds in different ways. It does not show itself in any simple fashion. It just shows itself!
At the very end we seem to get a hint for mere monkeys: the Kantian system of ethics (among other things characteristic of the modern transformation), as though this was telling us that our morality understanding is to be a function of our own self-understanding once we evolve to a higher level of intelligence.

I recommend a long and thorough study of the eonic effect, to get a feel for the way this problem works itself out, with the antique saga of the Old Testament rapidly passing into our rear view mirror.
But we will bungle our future with Nietzschean stupidity?

Our history shows us emergent values, and these include the great strain of modern liberalism, and freedom discourse. A close study shows us, then, something more complex that idiot myths of Moses figures and tablets of the law.
It is confusing because our ‘common moral understanding’ is already present in our body/mind combinations, and has been there all along, since the Paleolithic. It acts through us, but we can’t easily understand it completely.
Clearly Kant’s ethical system shows how you start to get mental overload as you try just one set of facets of that.

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Kant, ethics, and ‘common ordinary morality’

Posted in atheism, ethics, Evolution at 1:30 pm by nemo

Do Atheists Borrow Religion’s Morality?

These proponents of religious morality are overconfidernt of their position. I see no reason, in principle, why atheism can’t be as moral as anything else. But, historically, it didn’t work that way, and, what is more, figures like Nietzsche misled immense numbers of secularists into thinking that morality was finished when Christianity was finished (if it was/is finished??).
Standing up to Nietzsche seems beyond the capacity of most secularists/atheists, and his perspective, which is false, is the background music to discussions of religion and morality.

The obvious and simple answer here lies in the work of Kant, whose ethics in and of itself may or may not function (it has been attacked ad infinitum by such as Rorty et al.) as hoped, but whose strategy in broad strokes points to the likely resolution of the question of ethics, in a way that neither the atheist (in the case of the New Atheists, not atheists in general) nor the religionist can manage.
However, confusion arises here: Kant is not a moral prophet, but a philosopher probing a possible way to clarify or understand ‘common ordinary morality’, that is, attempting a descriptive discourse of morality as we find it.
Where does this come from? To say evolution seems the right response, as long as it is not Darwinian evolution. Darwinism tries to fake an ethical behaviorism based usually on pseudo-altruism generated by natural selection.
But that is not morality. Positivistic science, please note beyond the silence of Darwinists on this point, cannot allow an ethics in principle, since such a thing requires free will, which science forbids.
In fact, the task proposed by Kant is merely a broad indication of something we can’t complete, since we don’t understand our own moral behavior, and neither religious nor scientific approaches have succeeded in describing, let alone explaining the ‘common ordinary morality’ that arises in man, in a complex interaction between innate and social determinants.

Atheists who wish to estabish a moral foundation have an ally in Kant, whose incomplete formulation remains the most significant, but they must be clear how they deal with that phantom Nietzsche whose seeming destruction of morality surely confirms the fears of religionists in the moral pretenses of atheism.

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Atheists, religion, and morality

Posted in ethics, Science & Religion at 12:59 pm by nemo

Do Atheists Borrow Religion’s Morality?

This article raises some important questions, but finally misses the point. What is Religion’s Morality? Which religion is being referred to?

If we restrict the question to Christianity, then what morality is proposes by Christianity? It is not use saying that Moses received the ten commandments on Mt. Sinai! Please, no longer believable.
So the reality is that ‘religion’, apparently, meaning Christianity (and Judaism) have no believable source of morality.

This does not let atheists off the hook, and while it is probably true that atheists can develop foundations for morality as good as or better than those of religion the fact remains that they have not done so, and have made their position seem untenable to religionists by adopting Darwinian substitutes.
To claim Darwinism as the source of morality via natural selection has actually made the religious objection to atheist morality cogent.

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07.09.09

Kant, virtue and happiness

Posted in ethics, Kant at 4:48 pm by nemo

Comment on Kant, freedom, science and modernity

dandy said,
July 8, 2009 at 10:24 pm ·
“This is significant feedback: noone can understand what is being pointed to: the discrete freedom sequence, or more simply the double birth of democracy, according to a complex pattern of emergentise. As we study the eonic effect a whole series of strange things like this appear. That’s all I meant.
Hucklebird’s statements aren’t really the point. I was pointing to the way in which the emergence of freedom shows a complex structure across world history. That’s pretty good competition with the drama of revelation, so-called foisted on Axial Age Israel.”

It is not clear from what you assert here what is your own opinion on the subject of happiness, a topic that claims considerable attention from Kant in his writings about ethics, and has everything to do with the question of freedom in the individual.
Is happiness a diversion in your opinion? Is it valueless?

You seem to be changing the subject, but for those unfamiliar with Kant let me say that one aspect of his ethical discourse is the later speculative rational theology discoursing on the relationship of virtue and happiness.
At this point many, especially secular, students of Kant get uncomfortable with the implications of what he is saying, or not saying, as he is a bit tight-lipped it seems. And just here I can’t quite elucidate the full complexity of his thinking, but what I can do is give you my own brief sketch to grasp perhaps the basic issue (and this may not be Kant’s philosophy).
Kant points to a drastic hidden flaw in naturalistic ethics, one that few would think a flaw at all.
In my version (not Kant), merely as a sketch of one of multiple thought lines, the point is that projects of virture can’t easily be realized in real time. So the question confronts us: why bother? Why not maximize evil in a universe created as though by devils like a casino where none can win, but a few can prevail until destruction by death.
Is virtue forever doomed, as in a Darwinian universe?

In less drastic language, Kant tends to think in terms of virtue and happiness, and ask if the two can be achieved at once or in the end unified. He thinks not, and considers that there must a larger universe of discourse or experience where the two can be given some realization. Many problems arise here, because Kant’s thinking is very much about an ethics that doesn’t think in terms of rewards, which complicates his point. Best to go to the discourses that deal with that, beyond my quick sketch.

One way I think of such things is in terms of computers. Does the universe keep records. Do moral choices register anywhere.
Consider this example, a real one from many years ago as I passed through the new age movement: a strong vegetarian who wished to do without leather shoes in addition to his dietary renunciations. Further, such a person would swear solemnly not to regress confronted with the difficulties that arise at once.
For that is hard to bring about. Try it, with the funds of an unemployed person with no resources (basically a secular Buddhist monk) try to find shoes that fit the requirements (rich people of course can find expensive solutions here)
Where will a man with little money find shoes with no leather? Often there is something to be had, cheaply. But basically such an ethical choice almost requires renunciation of a full spectrum of social activity. With the junk shoes at low cost available in that category you would have a hard time finding a decent job: who is this with such shoes, the employer will ask. And your friends will soon be former friends.

The full tale can be elaborated in many ways. But its core is actual history, someone I met years ago. I always wondered at such a person and learned a lot.

Ordinary jerk-off Americans are total slobs, destined to perish no doubt, and in the majority would laugh at such a thing, but such people are more than frequent in Indian religious traditions. The dilemma is very real for those on the path of enlightenment and led to the traditions of world renunciation, for this and other reasons.
Americans might think of this question the next time they guzzle a big Mac.

The point is suddenly obvious: such a project of virtue will provoke immense unhappiness, and will, taken to a logical conclusion, lead probably to the destruction of the virtuous one, or at least to marginal existence in society.
So we see already a good example of the dilemma.
So the question lurks to haunt us: does the universe keep records? Does it remember the gestures of the virtuous who perish in the attempt?
We don’t know. But with this example Kant’s rational ethics/theology might suddenly come to life.
We don’t actually live in the Complete Hell darwinists and nihilists would have us live in. so the secular rejection of Kant’s thinking here is not a foregone conclusion. Nota bene. The evidence for Complete Hell is not conclusive.

I have a funny story about this. I recall Tipler’s famous;y idiotic but brilliantly provocative book on the Omega Point.
He put the question most aptly: can the universe maintain records of the physical totality of a human being (otherwise laughably called ‘resurrection’ body, a term best dropped) Thirty years ago we would have said no, and laughed, but now all of a sudden the data sets involved don’t seem so preposterous. I don’t know, but maybe give it another thirty years.

So at that point, and for many other better reasons, it suddenly seems as if the stock of Kant’s quixotic thinking on virtue and happiness rises again.

Lots to say here, Danny. Many give the blog readers some references to the literature here???

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06.16.09

Common ordinary morality

Posted in ethics, Evolution at 3:14 pm by nemo

Comment on Ethics and Freedom
Kant’s ethics is really several things. The first issue is the nature of freedom, the second the derivation of ethical principles from reason. The latter is very controversial, and yet I think that Kant’s ethics is merely incomplete. There is something like an unfinished building about the effort.

In any case, the challenge from Kant, and his ethics is a challenge, is to specify what human morality is. Note that he is claiming only to provide a propadaeutic to what is given: common ordinary morality, thence an evolved morality. Note that biologists cannot specify what this morality is.

dandy said,
June 16, 2009 at 2:33 pm ·
“This commentary is interesting, and shows you are struggling with the complexities of Kant’s ethical theory, which can be very hard to understand, and, in the minds of some fool hardy souls, very easy to reject.
The point (if I understand your comment) is that Kant wishes to derive categorical imperatives by pure rationality alone. This has often been criticized, but the overall line of attack is brilliant, despite its incomplete character. The point then is that empirical observations can’t derive these moral laws which arrive ‘a priori’.”

The notion of morality implies an absolute manner of conduct necessitated in regard to our actions. We can make insufficient generalizations regarding what constitutes legitimate or illegitimate action, such as the generalization about stealing to be a bad thing to do in whatever culture we find ourselves, however primitive or developed, as Newton made a generalization about the principle of equality of action and reaction, but to derive moral principles absolutely as *LAWS* would require something more then implicationable induction from experience. In fact we can never arrive there by induction from experience, that’s the whole point. We do arrive there by going to the core issue underlying those considerations while looking at a man’s freedom to act.

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05.28.09

Animals can tell right from wrong?

Posted in ethics, Evolution at 3:19 pm by nemo

Animals can tell right from wrong
I find the material here interesting, and if it were from any other source than Darwinian scientists I would even be enthusiastic, but since it is from Darwinists a full red alert takes effect immediately.
Part of the problem is the title here: it is obvious that animals can’t tell right from wrong, so why say so, and why distract from the interesting evidence given with this tricky summary-title? Answer: slapping man down and destroying his ethical sense is the grudge match of scientism which knows it can’t resolve ethical issues, evolutionary or normative, and hence wants to make sure man isn’t really ethical at all.
Unfair?

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01.04.09

The atheist and morality

Posted in ethics, Evolution, Philosophy at 8:03 pm by nemo

Today’s post: Atheists and morality, on

Atheists have moral reflections too
by Sue Blackmore
Reposted from: Dawkins site

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/04/religion-atheism-radio4-bbc

Blackmore raises some perfectly valid points, but some distinctions should be made here. We might distinguish
atheists in general
atheists who are Darwinists/Dawkins followers, and/or adopt Darwinian views of the evolution of ethics
[many other possibilities, e.g. atheists who are Nietzscheans, vs atheists who are Kantians, or Buddhists, or .....etc...]

A confusion in many religious traditionalists over the nature of ethics suggests a careful reading of Kant might be helpful. Kant, who is no atheist (and not a standard theist), makes it clear that morality demands autonomy, and theistic authoritarianism is actually taken to be completely antagonistic to ethics. So in one sense atheists have an edge here!
So atheists, considering the framework of Kant, have a very strong defense against the charge that atheists due to their lack of religion are somehow deprived of morality. It ain’t so. It is worth reading Kant’s Groundwork (or skim the work to start and read a commentary, Kant’s obscurity gets to be a problem), his first work on ethics, to note that Kant’s aim is to assist the ordinary man, and his common ordinary morality. Kant attempts, whether successfully or not, to evoke this inherent morality already present in man. This morality is something we observe in action, and sense, and can’t put our finger on. Whatever it is, it is present in atheists almost by definition, as members of the species homo sapiens. Kant’s effort is to try and elucidate this built in morality. It is a classic and profound effort, but one that many have rejected, offering nothing in its place (and, no, Nietzsche didn’t produce much insight here). But note that universal aggreement is elusive on this.

And my second point is that this ‘common ordinary morality’ can suffer confusions as we reflect on it (as if we reflect on language and get confused, although we can automatically speak perfect grammar in a native language, the analogy is not perfect) or for other reasons.
Here, I must say it, Darwinism and scientific reductionism has introduced just such a confusion, or a whole series of them. The Just So Stories of ethical evolution via kin/group selection scenarios are a set of fallacies, and they have, in any case, never defined or explicated, as Kant attempted, morality as we see it in action.
Scientists refuse to grant what Kant considers fundamental (and these issues are the real core of his thinking, more even than his oftern challenged categorical imperative), which is that the ethical actor has a will, that can decide between alternatives, and, more controversially, that he does so according to a rational set of decision procedures, called hypothetical or categorical imperatives.
Note that Kant strains to accept the causal framework of Newton, and then turns around and suggests how transcendental idealism can reconcile this with the action of free will.
Scientists who reduce ethics to causal mechanics, obstinately and compulsively, just don’t get it, and confuse the whole question of ethics.
In any case, an atheist who is not a Darwinist (whose case remains obscure), will usually show some clear variant of this common ordinary morality. The case of the Darwinist, to a close look, will not be an exception, save for the distortions created by his scientism.

It should be said that this is a shaky argument, in some ways. Do all men agree on this ordinary common morality? Clearly not! So what is its essence? How could we speak of it? Kant tried to suggest one approach. It has been attacked so many times, but still refloatates due to its cogency. (The latest attack seems to be Kauffman’s misguised critique in Reinventing The Sacred)
I think the question is the real challenge to ideas of evolution, what to say of philosophy. No known theory of evolution can really address this, and the current concealed nihilism of the trained scientist (competing with his built in common ordianary morality) constantly misses the point, and ends up in the reductionist pseudo-explanations of the type suggested by natural selection.

In a word, then, there is no reason why an atheist can’t be as moral as anyone else.
But atheists are being systematically coopted by the Dawkins/Harris/Hitchens/New Atheist movement, which is strongly connected, unnecessarily, with Darwinism and scientism, and, one suspects some background reading in Nietzsche (who systematically trashes ethics, and transcendental idealism’s elucidation of the will, replacing ‘will’ with the most vulgar obscenity Nietzsche could think of, the ‘will to power’, what was this fellow thinking? ), and about all that can be said is that people who were atheists before, e.g. Buddhists, need to choose a new label for themselves, because they have no place in this new movement.

Some, it should be said, have always been suspicious Kant was a closet atheist who turned around and reinvented ‘god’ around ethics!
Hard to know who he was!

Scientists have to decide how long they wish to remain frozen in Kant’s classic antinomy: if they wish to do causal science, they will by definition fail to do ethics right. If they wish to do ethics right, they will cease to be scientists.
They can pretend otherwise with pseudo-sciences like Darwinism, but at the end of the game science itself will be discredited.

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11.13.08

Comment on New atheists discrediting themselves?

Posted in ethics at 6:37 pm by nemo

James comment on New atheists discrediting themselves?

James said,
November 13, 2008 at 6:05 pm
The whole “God” debate is completely irrelevant and boring to me and I don’t care for any of the parties involved. My point is that there is a logical contradiction in the marriage of ethics and a mechanistic theory like Darwinism. Harris and his ilk don’t seem to get it. Take a look at Harris’ attack on “free will” in The End of Faith. I’m not calling for some dogmatic belief in “free will,” but he completely dismisses the discourse on this topic as irrelevant. How exactly is he going to discover objective ethical standards while completely repudiating the concept of “free will?”

“In an atheistic world, anyone can hold any position on morality/ethics and any defense for it is purely subjective and because of that any form of morality/ethics will be developed by the majority….which….is essentially democratic anyway, so again, I don’t think they have discredited themselves in anyway..”

I don’t agree. I think we’ve been fooled by theists and Nietzchean/post-modern/Darwinian atheists into believing that there are only two views that we can take on the question of ethics. I think the psychological depth of man is much greater than both sides realize and that they have only succeeded in dumbing down the discussion in this arena. I don’t claim to be able to solve the question of ethics, but I don’t think either side does justice to the depth of this subject.

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Atheists and morality

Posted in ethics at 6:21 pm by nemo

Comment from Brandon, New atheists discrediting themselves

It’s not that they are discrediting themselves, it is merely because their foundation to speak on morals and ethics is very fragile with no absolute guideline. In an atheistic world, anyone can hold any position on morality/ethics and any defense for it is purely subjective and because of that any form of morality/ethics will be developed by the majority….which….is essentially democratic anyway, so again, I don’t think they have discredited themselves in anyway..

The question of ethics is difficult whether one is a theist or atheist, witness Kant, whose ethical philosophy at least has all the right pieces for such a thing: among them a human will!
Perhaps it is not so much that atheists might lack a moral perspective, as that the realm of scientism (the two are getting mixed up because of Dawkins) cannot deal a simple ‘human’ with a will, the prerequisite for any ethical system. The result is an incessant attempt to bring ethical behavior/evolution into the realm of causal explanation.
One can only recommend Kant for a look at the sheer complexity of the issues. The fact is that we are barely able to understand ethics, let alone put it into action.
And yet we do, spontaneously, with better or worse results. But that ‘common ordinary moral consciousness’, which Kant aims only to elucidate or clarity, is there in our everyday behavior, by what evolutionary process, we do not know. That moral consciousness, partially innate, is present in atheists too.

Note: Sometimes Kant is overhyped, perhaps because students read only a few selections from the Foundations in college, perhaps. But the real Kant shows a monumental struggle to get the issues straight, changing his basic terminoloby between Critique 1, the Foundations, Critique 2, Critique 3, and Religion Within The Limits Of Reason. The latter book along with the Metaphysics of Morals is the last stage in that development with distinctionsn finally realized but not present in the earlier texts.
I say that because Kant demonstrates an attempt to climb Everest, perhaps he didn’t make it, but the demonstration of the search for an answer is something we can’t just throw away as current scientists wish to do, with a bit of college Nietzsche and some idiot theory from population genetics as a substitute.
I say this because people recoil from Kant, due to the difficulty of following his reasoning. In a real sense we are not evolved enough to understand our own ethical behavior.
Meanwhile these substitutes from scientism are vulgar substitutes for serious enquiry, let alone science.
Scientists seem oblvious to their position here.

Needless to say the myth of Mt. Sinai isn’t going to help us here.

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