Nice quote

From a comment on Butterflies And Wheels
But religion is filled with contradictions like this. The reason there are contradictions, of course, is that there is no god, and the belief that there is collides with reality. That more people don’t notice this is, I believe, because recognising self-deception would, for many, completely destroy the world of meaning they have created to protect themselves from suffering and death, even when that world is already in the process of collapsing. It is much better, I think, to face serious illness in the way that you do, without illusions. That way, at least, as my wife said, you can learn things about yourself you never knew. Fooling yourself with goddy dreams is, after all, to refuse to learn anything at all.

Sums thing up nicely I think.

God & Morality? An alternative account

(Part 1)

In describing an alternative account of the relationship between God and morality, Wielenberg notes that the rejection of the Control Thesis and the Dependency Thesis raises some questions:

"If the Dependency Thesis is false, then there are some true ethical claims whose truth is not due to some act of will on the part of God. What then makes these ethical claims true? If the Control Thesis is false, then there are some logically consistent ethical claims that not even God could make true. Why is God unable to make such claims true? Is this inability consistent with God's omnipotence?."

The claim that some ethical truths are necessary truths provides us with a view that provides answers to these questions, according to Wielenberg.

"Consider for instance, the claim that suffering is intrinsically evil. I suggest that this ethical claim is true, and, furthermore, that it is a necessary truth...Just as there is no possible universe in which 2 + 2 = 5, there is no possible universe in which suffering is not intrinsically evil. Suffering is bad in virtue of its intrinsic nature - and this is true in every possible universe."

I suppose someone could object that suffering can lead to some kind of "good", similar to Hick's response to the problem of evil above. Whilst this may be the case, I'm not sure that this disposes of the intrinsic evil of suffering, as Wielenberg might say, but rather provide an explanation or excuse for it's existence - on this view suffering is still evil.
Wielenberg continues:

"This is a view that can be accepted by atheist and theist alike. With respect to the nature of what makes these ethical claims true? my answer is that it is the same sort of thing that makes other necessary truths true - namely, the essential nature of the entities that those claims are about."

Those who hold to a presuppositionalists position might believe that this is some kind of admission that God is, after all, the architect of morality. Presuppositionalists seem thus far unable to justify that claim (and in fact, the claims appear somewhat incoherent to me), and therefore I think we can ignore this possible response for now.
After describing further how necessary ethical truths could/would relate to God and His omnipotence - "He is unable to render them false because they simply cannot be rendered false; as necessary truths, they have but one possible truth value - true. It is widely held that omnipotence does not include the ability to do what is impossible." Wielenberg continues that not all ethical truths are necessary:

"I do not mean to suggest that all ethical truths are necessarily true. Indeed, it is clear that many ethical truths are contingent truths. For instance suppose that I promise to meet you for lunch on a certain occasion. Also suppose that on the occasion in question I have no sufficiently weighty reason not to keep my promise. It follows that I am obligated to meet you for lunch. This is an ethical truth, yet it is a contingent truth. I might not have promised to meet you in the first place; indeed, I might not have been born at al. In either case the ethical claim in question would have been false. But it seems to me that contingent ethical truths like these are always partly grounded in some necessary ethical truth (or truths)."

So, on Wielenberg's account, contingent ethical truths are dependant on necessary ethical truths. He sees the necessary truths as "part of the furniture of the universe." and if God were to exist, they are not dependant upon His will or rendered true by Him.
Wielenberg illustrates that this is consistent with the view that God, if He exists, has some role to play:

"That this is so may be seen by considering a familiar kind of case involving humans. Suppose a friend of yours does a huge favour for you. He is happy to do you the favour, but notes (correctly) that 'you owe me one'. A few weeks later, we may suppose, your friend calls you and informs you that he really needs to borrow your car for the day. You have no pressing need for the car yourself and your friend gently reminds you of the favor he did for you. It is plausible to suppose that, under these circumstances, you have a moral obligation to loan your friend your car for the day. In this case, your friend's request to borrow the car has imposed an obligation on you that you would not otherwise have had...The system of morality itself licenses this sort of thing under certain circumstances. This case suggests another possible relationship between God and ethics."

The next post will cover Wielenberg's discussion of God as Divine Commander...

God as the origin of the universe...

God is often held to be the ultimate explanation for the existence of the universe. Various reasons are given for this, such as the various cosmological (Kalam, First Cause etc) and design (fine tuning etc) arguments.

I don't think these arguments are sufficient to convince a skeptic. They may (and seemingly do) sound very convincing to those who are already committed to a belief in a God or Gods, but that is only to be expected. As far as classical theology is concerned (and the more mundane beliefs of Christians, Muslims, Jews) the God they believe in already is the explanation for the universe existing. All these arguments are doing is highlighting what they already understand to be true.

To address each of these arguments in turn would take many books (and has), and so I'm not going to do that in this blog entry.

What I'll try to make clear is why I think God as explanation hypothesis fail.

God is a terrible explanation!
By that I mean either we're relying upon vague unknowns, more so than the most speculative scientific hypothesis. If Eternal Chaotic Inflation relies upon assumptions concerning physical conditions far beyond that which is conceivably observable, how much more so an immaterial, timeless being?
If String Theory is able to explain almost anything due to the degrees of freedom inherent in it's formulation, again, how much more so the God hypothesis?
God, as an infinitely complex being, doesn't seem to be much of an explanation for a finitely complex universe (as Hume's Philo observed, why not stop the regress at the universe), and positing a simple God (as many theologians do) seems to introduce even more mystery and our explanation becomes akin to:
"There exists a necessary, nonphysical, simple, largely incomprehensible
something-or-other that created the universe and
has no external explanation."
As Weilenberg [1] notes, it's not clear that this is even a theistic hypothesis.

There are various other arguments which show that God, as traditionally conceived, cannot exist. An agent seems to require being temporal, yet God is conceived of as atemporal. To have a mind and think seems to require a distinct location, yet God is conceived of as omnipresent. The list goes on.

So, while I understand there are difficulties with the current scientific hypothesis concerning the origin of the universe, as far as I can tell the issues with postulating God as classically conceived are far greater, and so while I'm not signing on to a particular explanation for the origins and am holding out for further evidence to help sort things out, I feel that the "God Hypothesis" is far and away less probable and plausible an alternative, and therefore I don't tend to consider it as a serious contender.

Hopefully the above is at least somewhat clear as to my position.

[1] Dawkins' Gambit, Hume's Aroma and God's Simplicity. Erik Weilenberg, Philsophia Christi Vol. 11, No. 1 2009

Genesis scientifically validated?

I quite often hear that science confirms the creation story as told in Genesis 1, and that this is evidence that the story was inspired by God. After all, how could a person from the bronze age (Moses, as traditionally claimed) know about the big bang, evolution etc.
When this claim is investigated, however, it seems it falls to pieces.
The Genesis creation myth only bears a very slight passing resemblance to modern cosmology. When this is pointed out to theists, they often claim that those parts which don't match are mere poetic language, and in no way undermine the miraculous concordance with current science.

I don't buy it.

When we look at the actual account of creation we see some of the problems it has when compared with what science tells us:

• The firmament separating the waters above from the waters below is a solid structure.


• There are waters above the firmament (causing the blue sky, as I understand it)


• Having waters above and waters below, and a solid structure separating them implies strongly a flat earth.


• The Genesis account has plants (including flowering plants) created prior to the Sun, Moon and Stars.


• The Sun is created after the Earth.


• The stars are created after the Earth.


• The Sun and the Moon are created at the same time.


• The Moon is is a source of light.


• The Sun, Moon and stars are embedded within the firmament.


• Flowering plants are created prior to animals.


• Birds are created prior to other land animals.


• Man was created after all of the other animals.

Now, each and every one of these can be (and has been) rationalised away.None of these post-hoc rationalisations is successful, as far as I can tell.

The account could be scientifically accurate and still contain poetic language. I think we can all imagine how that might read.
All of the concepts required - distance, time, were available. Sure science shows us a universe vastly different to that conceived by those in the ANE, but could God not have found a way to communicate this to the author? If not it seems God has something of a communications problem.

I'm sure there are numerous other rationalisations one can make to try to resolve the conflict between Genesis and science. Some "deeper" reading can perhaps be made. Or perhaps we accept Genesis as wholly metaphorical in nature, telling us "who" rather than how, when etc. These also seem to fail, as other creation myths are open to the same sort of re-interpretation and rationalisation.

On the whole, and in the absence of an argument which dispels these issues, I take it that Genesis 1 is a creation myth, much like the Enûma Eliš. I'm sure with a bit of effort other creation myths could also be rationalised to fit the science, and the results would look very similar to that carried out for Genesis 1.

I can't see any criteria by which to differentiate them, and therefore I don't.

Playing the mystery card...

Philosopher Stephen Law is in the process of writing a book on "intellectual Black Holes". He put up a draft of the first Chapter here

Part 1 and part 2 of the introduction can also be read there.

Can "science" investigate the "supernatural"?

On Ophelia Benson's blog a recent post on scientifically measuring God elicited this comment from philosopher Russell Blackford:

"n principle, we can get evidence for or against the existence of a goddy entity in just the same way as we get evidence of very small entities (quarks), very distant entities (neutron stars), or entities that existed only in the distant past (trilobites). If these entities interact with the world of the senses and leave traces in some reasonably consistent way, we can infer their existence. If they fail to act as predicted, we can infer their non-existence and look for a better hpothesis. We could easily have evidence for or against the existence of certain gods, ghosts, or ghouls.

What we can’t do is make progress when the believers in these things claim that they exist but that they act capriciously, or deliberately act so as to elude us, and so on. If someone wants to go on believing in goddy or ghostly entities using these resorts, we can’t prove otherwise, but we can be very suspicious about what is really motivating them.

I don’t understand what’s so difficult about this. I’ve been abused on my own blog for pointing out that this is how it works, and have had a vendetta conducted against me across the internet by one person for saying it. But it’s perfectly logical. There seems to be a head-in-the-sand dogmatism around regarding the in-principle immunity of religion to scientific scepticism, and most of it seems to be coming from the people you’d least expect."

While it seems to be that many/most of the theists I've interacted with on the interwebs would not accept this stance as legitimate, I don't see on what grounds they're able to claim this is the case *sigh*

God and Morality: God as the source of ethics

Having participated in a some discussions of ethics, and specifically Divine Command theories recently (see here and here), I thought I'd write a brief outline of an argument against those theories which I recently read.

The details are from Erik Wielenberg's book "Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe". The argument is presented as Chapter 2, titled "God and morality".

Wielenberg starts out providing 2 thesis which he claims constitute the "God as the source of ethics" argument.

Control Thesis: Every logically consistent ethical claim, E, is such that God could make E true.
Dependency Thesis: Every true ethical claim is true in virtue of some act of will on the part of God.

From these he derives a strong and weak position in favour of the argument, the strong position being the acceptance of both the Control Thesis and the Dependency Thesis, the weak position being the acceptance of the Dependency Thesis alone. Though the general argument relies only upon the Dependency Thesis, Wielenberg includes the Control Thesis because acceptance of it suggests acceptance of the Dependency Thesis. Also, according to Wielenberg, demonstrating the Control Thesis as false is important in understanding properly the relationship between God and ethical truth.

After briefly pointing out the self-contradictory nature of theistic arguments about the valueless nature of the universe should God not exist, summarised in the statement "Without God there would be no value in the universe - and think how horrible that would be!", Wielenberg sets out to show that the strong position fails by demonstrating the Control Thesis as false.

Weilenberg does this in two ways. The first is demonstrating the ridiculous and strange results of accepting the Control Thesis. He uses an example:

"Imagine a contest in which the prize is omnipotence. There are two competitors in this contest. The first competitor hopes to win the prize and use his omnipotence for his own selfish, nefarious purposes. He plans to slaughter most of humanity and force the rest to live in excrement pits where they will work themselves to death as his slaves and be subject to torture at his hand for his amusement. As it happens, the second competitor wins the contest and becomes omnipotent. It seems clear that the worst has happened - a thoroughly vicious being has become all-powerful and the world in on the verge of being plunged into evil. Fortunately this does not happen. This is because the first use to which the winner puts his newly acquired omnipotence is to change certain ethical facts. He makes it the case that the slaughter of innocents is fantastically good, that undeserved suffering is just, and that a human life devoted to serving him has the greatest possible amount of internal meaning. He also makes it the case that he himself is a morally perfect being. He does this not by changing the nature of his character (his desires, motives, goals, and so on are just the same as before), but rather by changing the nature of moral perfection. He then implements his now fantastically good and just plan. He slaughters most of the humans, throws the rest into the pits, and so on. But because he changed the ethical facts first, the story has a happy ending. All is for the best. The film version of this scenario would leave you grinning like a fool as you left the theatre."

Noting that this scenario seems wrong, that power is exercised within an ethical framework, not to create it, Wielenberg admits that theists could accept the strange conclusions, and simply claim that is the way things are. This leads us to Wielenberg's second critique of the Control Thesis.

The problem of evil is used by Wielenberg as evidence against the Control Hypothesis. He illustrates proposals from Plantinga (the free will defense) and Hick (vale of soul-making). Each of these proposals of dealing with the problem of evil, Wielenberg generalises as:

"There is some thing, G, such that (a) G is a great good and (b) it may be (or is) the case that God cannot introduce G into the world without also permitting some evil in the world. Therefore, God may be (or is) justified in permitting some evil in the world."

Wielenberg notes that both of these proposals rely on the assumption that there are ethical facts which God has no control over. Freely chosen good/right action being greater than determined good/right action in Plantinga's case, and that it is better to grow towards "goodness"/"rightness" rather than being initially good/right in the case of Hick. Were the Control Thesis maintained, God would be able to modify ethics such that the previous relations no longer held, and therefore the proposals for the problem of evil are incompatible with the Control Thesis.
This implies that a theist accepting these solutions to the (logical) problem of evil would need to reject the Control Thesis. Wielenberg (correctly I feel) assumes that any reasonable theist would do so, and so the Control Thesis is shown to fail.

Now, having dealt with the Control Thesis and by extension the strong position, Wielenberg moves on to the weak position, and the Dependency Thesis.
According to Wielenberg, it is a common theistic strategy to respond to these kinds of objections by maintaining that due to some part of God's essential nature being to have a certain type of character (to be loving, for example), there are some things such that making them good or right is incompatible with this essential nature. This entails the obvious rejection of the Control Thesis, though continued acceptance of the Dependency Thesis.

Wielenberg notes that the Dependency Thesis claims that nothing distinct from God is intrinsically good or evil, and claims that this is problematic due to some things distinct from God being intrinsically good and/or evil. In doing this he uses an argument from Chisholm's "The Problem of the Criterion":

Chisolm's topic in that book is epistemology, and he suggests that if we must choose whether to accept some philosophical principle about knowledge or to accept some obvious truth such as that I know I have hands, we should accept the obvious truth. Similarly, it seems to me that if we must choose between the Dependency Thesis and the claim that pain is intrinsically evil or that falling in love is intrinsically good, it is the Dependency Thesis that should go. An epistemology that leads to the conclusion that individuals cannot know that they have hands should be rejected; similarly, a metaphysics that leads to the conclusion that falling in love is not intrinsically good, or that pain is not intrinsically evil, should be rejected.".

Wielenberg quotes approvingly from Neilsen:

"God or no God, the torturing of innocents is vile. More generally, even if we can make nothing of the concept of God, we can readily come to appreciate...that, if anything is evil, inflicting or tolerating unnecessary and pointless suffering is evil, especially when something can be done about it...Can't we be more confident about this than we can about any abstract or general philosophical point we might make in ethical theory?"

Having made the point that some things are intrinsically right (wrong), Wielenberg concludes that the Dependency Thesis should also be rejected:

"If this is correct, then God as the source of ethics argument, because it is based on the claim that the Dependency Thesis is necessarily true, fails."

Having demonstrated that both the Control Thesis and the Dependency Thesis fail, Wielenberg concludes that the "God as the source of ethics" argument also fails.

Following this, he begins to show an alternative account of the relationship between God and ethics, which I'll cover in a subsequent post...

World View?

During a long and tedious attempt to pry a believers reasoning for belief in the immaterial here, the blog owner stated:

"I originally asked your to defend your world view and as yet you cannot. You have been on this blog for over 2 years and it has always been my world view. Man up mate and answer."

Well, apart from the fact that I've defended my "world view" on his blog, though perhaps not in direct enough manner for my acuser. I figured I'd post this to keep him quiet.

So, what is my world view?
I'd describe myself as a provisional naturalist. As far as I can tell, there seem to be no good reasons to believe in the "immaterial", the "supernatural", what have you, and so, after considering the arguments and evidence which I've found, by no means an exhaustive list, I reject the claims that there exists a "supernatural" realm apart from this reality, that there is an immaterial God, etc.

So, what is meant by "Natural" and "Supernatural"?
These have, I think, proven difficult to nail down, with each term often being taken as the negation of the other - the supernatural is that which is not natural.
The definition I'm going to go with here comes courtesy of Richard Carrier:

"In short, I argue 'naturalism' means, in the simplest terms, that every mental thing is entirely caused by fundamentally nonmental things, and is entirely dependent on nonmental things for its existence. Therefore, 'supernaturalism' means that at least some mental things cannot be reduced to nonmental things.

Now, I'm not saying that I know, for certain, that this is the case, or that this is an apriori assumption that ensures that I need to rationalise away or ignore evidence which goes against this position. It's simply that I'm unacquainted with any convincing evidence that fundamentally things are non-mental. This position seems to be a reasonable and conservative one to hold to at present, pending further evidence.

Now, I've been accused of being closed to any evidence which would disconfirm this position, due to what I feel are reasonable requirements on reasons and evidence. Apparently, asking for some objective or intersubjective reasons is unreasonable and closed minded. This is ridiculous. As Fishman states:

The crucial question is not, Is it science? or Is it supernatural?, but rather, Is there any good reason to believe that claim X is true? Whether the entities or phenomena posited by claim X are defined as ‘natural’ or ‘supernatural’ is irrelevant to the scientific status of the claim. If the fundamental aim of science is the pursuit of truth - to uncover, to the extent that humans are capable, the nature of reality - then science should go wherever the evidence leads. If the evidence were to strongly suggest the existence of supernatural phenomena, then so be it.

That sounds pretty good to me.

So, while this is not an indepth defence of my world view (which often run to book length), it's a start.