The Reason and Science Society and Evangelical Union are getting together on Monday to discuss why they believe what they do about God and related things during RSS’ regular meeting time. Any and all are welcome to come and listen and join in the discussion.
Three University of Auckland students representing each club (including this blog’s Madeleine Flannagan speaking for Evangelical Union) will speak for 5 mins each, followed by a group discussion on the issues raised.
What: “Why I am (not) an atheist”
Format: Panel with Q&A
When: 5-7pm, Monday 3 October 2011
Where: Case Room 2 OGGB (Owen G Glen Building)
Cost: Free
Tags: Evangelical Union · Events · Reason and Science Society13 Comments
A common objection to belief in the God of the Bible is that a good, kind, and loving deity would never command the wholesale slaughter of nations. In the tradition of his popular Is God a Moral Monster?, Paul Copan teams up with Matthew Flannagan to tackle some of the most confusing and uncomfortable passages of Scripture. Together they help the Christian and nonbeliever alike understand the biblical, theological, philosophical, and ethical implications of Old Testament warfare passages.
Can we throw rotten tomatos at the speakers we don’t like?
PS I reckon Maddy is pretty cool so she won’t be my target.
And then Jesus said, “Praise me, praise me, praise my holy name. The rest is bullshit. Amen.”
There hasn’t been much debate on in the comments section of this blog for a while. I reckon you need a post that really polarises your views and forces them to comment. Might make things a bit more exciting.
So??
Hi! I’m glad you didn’t throw tomatoes at me Dicky! or were you not there?
No there hasn’t been much activity. Matt and I have been just flat out too busy to write anything. Life is insane at the moment. We’re working on it.
No tomatoes were there to be thrown. Someone could have thrown chocolate brownie but it was too good to waste throwing at people.
As much as polarising sounds fun – as I explained in my talk today – I don’t like to build barriers on issues that are of no ultimate concern for me.
Matt, I must admit I didn’t have an answer for you when you asked why I could pay attention to the innate morality we’re supposed to have hard-wired, but not the alleged “god-spot” which is also supposedly hard-wired. But I thought back to my evo psych class and from an evo psych perspective it’s easy to answer. But you need to understand, I wasn’t trying to argue that some hard-wired feature of the brain implies something absolute about morality – only that it tells us something that’s normative across all (or most) humans. Anyhow, probably this is not new to you, but some features evolve not in response to evolutionary pressure, but just as a kind of evolutionary byproduct (this is controversial…some evolutionists think that pretty much everything was selected for. Many others disagree). There are a number of interesting theories on why the propensity for humans to believe in God (which, from the brief description Maddy gave about her own feelings, might be a totally different system to the one that led her to believe) which argue it can be quite easily explained as a byproduct of several other features of human cognition, which means there’s no reason to think it might be there as a result of, say, supernatural intervention (was that where you were going?). As for moral cognition, I’m not worried whether it’s there as a by-product, or not – all I know is, we have it, and humans will get along better if they all follow it. Probably.
Should I give some references to articles about human propensity toward belief in God? I’d have to dig them up from my old class notes…
Ben, yes I am familar with some of the theories of evolutionary pscyology regarding God. There have been quite a few good responses to the kind of skeptical conclusions you draw.
“Maddy gave about her own feelings, might be a totally different system to the one that led her to believe) which argue it can be quite easily explained as a byproduct of several other features of human cognition, which means there’s no reason to think it might be there as a result of, say, supernatural intervention (was that where you were going?).”
One can say the same thing about moral beliefs (in fact Nihilists do say this) one can explain humans propensity to form moral beliefs without appealing to the truth of those beliefs. All thats needed for humans to survive is that they believe certain non adapative behavours are moral and feel obligated to refrain from them. The truth or falsity of these beliefs contributes nothing as far as I can tell.
Suppose for example we are not under any obligation to refrain from non adaptive behavour, or suppose in fact we are required to engage in such behavour. Falsely believing we are obligated to do so will still be adaptive. What matters is the belief not its truth or falsity.
Hence one can explain moral cognition without requiring moral beliefs be true.
So if the fact you can explain why people have a propensity to believe in God, without appealing to God means religious cognition of the sort Madeleine describes is unreliable. Then the same argument entails that human moral cognition is unreliable. On these grounds one has as much reason to trust ones religious beliefs as one does ones moral beliefs on these grounds.
Both you and KJ however appealed to moral beliefs in your talks. So I submit your position is incoherent.You reject peoples religious experiences as unreliable and yet propose arguments which assume that your own moral intiutions are reliable. Despite the fact that reasons you give for rejecting religious experience apply with equal force to moral beliefs.
“As for moral cognition, I’m not worried whether it’s there as a by-product, or not – all I know is, we have it, and humans will get along better if they all follow it. Probably.”
Wether your worried or not is not the question, the question is your rationally justified in the moral claims you made or not and wether one can plausibly say they are true.
Your response here does not address this instead it states we are simply “better off” believing these things. There are two problems with this.
First, if by “better off” you mean morally better off then your argument is circular. You defend moral beliefs by appealing to moral judgements. On the other hand if you mean a prudential sense of better of, so that you mean its in our interests then I am skeptical the justification works, I don’t think ( from an atheist standpoint) everyone is better off if everyone believes in morality. My self interest is actually enhanced if everyone else acts morally towards me and I myself am free to violate moral rules when its in my interest to do so.
Second, even if there is a practical justification for accepting moral beliefs I think you undercut this in your talk. Because in your talk you stated how you did not accept pragmatic justifications of this sort for religious beliefs, you mentioned explictly how the fact there were pragmatic justifications for believing in God did not justify continuing to believe if the belief was not rationally justified.
Thats why I suggested you and JK were being selective skeptics. It seems to me you demand a standard of proof of religious claims that you do not apply to the moral claims you use to object to religious claims.
If its just that you like certian moral claims or they are pragmatic to you and you accept them, then all your argument really is that you converted to a different irrational and false perspective for emotional and prudential reasons. This seems to make your stance at best hypocritical and at worst incoherent.
>“Both you and KJ however appealed to moral beliefs in your talks. So I submit your position is incoherent.You reject peoples religious experiences as unreliable and yet propose arguments which assume that your own moral intiutions are reliable. Despite the fact that reasons you give for rejecting religious experience apply with equal force to moral beliefs.”
The difference I see between moral beliefs and belief in god(s) is that morality need not appeal to anything beyond the human experience. If morality is only contained in human thought (as I believe it is) then I do not think that diminishes the value of it. It is a valuable tool for living in cohesive societies, so it has a pragmatic value to it and does not need to appeal to an external reality. Belief in the supernatural however, is a belief in something external, so if that belief is only within the mind then its value is diminished greatly.
>”Second, even if there is a practical justification for accepting moral beliefs I think you undercut this in your talk. Because in your talk you stated how you did not accept pragmatic justifications of this sort for religious beliefs, you mentioned explictly how the fact there were pragmatic justifications for believing in God did not justify continuing to believe if the belief was not rationally justified.”
I don’t recall personally saying anything along these lines and I don’t remember what Ben said exactly. In fact I think for some people religion is probably quite useful, not so for me. The sort of people I’m thinking of are the ones that tend to pose such questions to atheists as “Why don’t you go around killing, stealing and raping if there is no God?”, if belief in God is the only thing seemingly preventing such people from doing the aforementioned ‘activities’, then the last thing I would want is for them to stop believing. I don’t really see a pragmatic reason for accepting a religious claim that couldn’t be fulfilled by some other belief or social organisation.
1) Pragmatic justification for religious belief:
I don’t know whether I criticised pragmatic justification for religious belief, for its own sake, or not. I did emphasize that I felt it was wrong to adopt some religious belief, just because I wanted to, if that led me to doing things that harmed people – like, for instance, condemning homosexuality.
2) As I said on my last post on here, “I wasn’t trying to argue that some hard-wired feature of the brain implies something absolute about morality – only that it tells us something that’s normative across all (or most) humans”. In other words, I was never trying to make any claims about “moral facts”. The claim is that our moral cognition is adaptive, and that, in this case, it is adaptive because it makes us “better off” in some way.
3) I did indeed mean “prudentially better off”, certainly not “morally better off”. I think you are right that not everyone is better off if everyone believes in moral values like equality and fairness, but I think it remains true that humans on average or aggregate are somehow “better off”.
4) I will concede that my argument does have to assume a preference for pleasure against suffering, or at least some kind similar-ish consequentialist or utilitarian preference. Consequently, when I make a moral claim such as “you ought not arbitrarily believe in Christianity if that leads you to cause others’ suffering”, or for that matter, “you ought not arbitrarily believe in atheism if that leads you to cause others’ suffering”, what I say only really holds weight for people who also like pleasure, or dislike suffering, or who also attach some kind of moral value to suffering or pleasure. I’m OK with that, and I don’t think it makes anything in what I’ve said inconsistent.
Perhaps I should have said “normal” rather than “normative”.
Getting the word out is the best thing always, although its evident there is yhwh, people still want to deny it, im sure you will prove them right.