Slim chance for that. Is your ideology totally wish-driven?

Robert:

Just look at his heroes.

He's miserable enough, we'll grant you that. You might get him.

Ho Ho! He'd make a nice little left of center piece for y'all. Buy hey, what choice has he got? Where else do you go when you begin to feel it's time to hedge your bets and God hasn't given you the Grace to seriously study scripture!

joe:

They don't have me....yet...

NC3;

He's married with kids now and an American citizen--he's just growing up and putting away childish things.

What choice does he have? Well, he could become Southern Baptist -- that would be contrarian.

As it happens I've just been reading the collected essays of George Orwell. Now some are, of course, better than others. Some are masterpieces and well worth reading even at this late date.

I'm not ready to concede that Hitchens is the equal of Orwell.

Wyck:

No, he's a wannabe.

He's married with kids now and an American citizen

You can do all of these things without religion.

It's a rare thing not to mature as you get older, though it is done.

NC3;

He's married with kids now and an American citizen--he's just growing up and putting away childish things.
Posted by: oj at August 18, 2005 03:45 PM

Yep, I wish him luck. I'm working on that myself. It's not as easy as you make it seem.

By the way, "they" don't get you. You just stop trying and take the easy way out.

NC3: In fairness, that's part of how "we" get them. We combine ease with good marketing. And great fish.

He is always worth reading, which is a good enough epithet for any hack.

I've just finished the book. The self-indulgent, "aren't I ironic and clever with words" side of him is pure Oxbridge and can be very grating, though as Brit says, he's always worth reading. But he has a long way to go before Orrin's happy ending is in view. He still spills the bile with gusto whenever religion comes up. Now, maybe if we could get his estranged brother to declare for atheism, we's see Christopher on his knees in a flash.

In Orrin's favour, I am struck by how enamoured he is with the word "moral" and how he loves to thunder at the immorality of those who don't share his views. Reminds me of Harry. Like many of the more interesting atheists, his morality appears to be situational and declared ex cathedra. He just assumes we can all see that Palestinian self-determination is a moral good and that the Kurds are children of G-d deserving of much global sacrifice. Once he comes to realize that "no serious person is without contradictions" is as much a Wilde-like conceit as a basis for common political dialogue and that his self-indulgence can be tiresome, he may indeed conclude that he has to make a choice between himself and something else as a source of moral authority, and he is presumably too bright to choose himself with a straight face. Battle of pride brewing here.

Peter:

But the trouble is that few who have encountered the Euthyphro Dilemma can take the idea of an external source (namely God) seriously as a source of morality.

Most settle on something somewhere between an innate sense of right and wrong (or pride and guilt), and what works when you have to live with other people.

Brit:

One never gets to the dilemma without God.

If Orrin's prediction about Hitchens proves correct, I'll by him (Orrin) a case of his favorite beer. Until then, I will always have trouble understanding why the Right embraces a bitter anti-Christian bigot.

Paul:

Because it's funny.

he may indeed conclude that he has to make a choice between himself and something else as a source of moral authority, and he is presumably too bright to choose himself with a straight face.

The choice of "other" is really just a proxy for the self, Peter. How else can you make a moral decision than based upon what you think is right? Following an other's lead with no thought to your own view of morality is moral abdication. Following an other's lead when it align's with your own view of morality is the same as following your own lead.

I guess this charade of mailing yourself the answers through the "other" helps you to claim humility, but can you please explain how it makes a difference?

Robert:

You don't get to decide what's right or it isn't morality, just feelings.

Yeah, his column on JPII was real damned funny.

OJ, that's all we have to work with, just feelings. You can put a crown on your feelings and call it God, but you really haven't gone beyond them.

Robert:

Hmmm. Six billion people, each working things out for themselves and mailing themselves the answers. And the vast majority somehow agree with you on the biggies. Or you with them. Or they with one another. Except all the bad guys, who also worked things out on the basis of what they thought was right, but got it wrong. According to you. Who worked things out for yourself. And then mailed yourself the answers.

...is a puzzlement!

Peter, answer one question for me. Can you name one moral law that you derived from the "other" that you obey even though it violates your conscience?

Robert:

Your conscience is a creation of your societal morality.

Robert:

No, you feel like doing what's best for you. Morality forces you to consider others.

Paul;

Exactly. No one doubts that Ignatz loves Krazy.

Yes, you must take consideration of others, that is not the "other" that I am talking about. Of course one's individual conscience is shaped by one's interaction with others in society. An athiest is no different than a theist in that regard.

I'm talking about God, the other that theists claim we must derive our morality from. Since very few of us have ever spoken directly to Him, if anyone, trying to figure out what this other wants us to do is pretty much an ad-hoc, subjective exercise. And amazingly (not really) the answers that these subjective exercises return are surprisingly similar to the answers that the person's conscience would have settled upon without this appeal to the other.

So tell me how it is different?

Robert:

Can you name one that you worked out all by yourself? Surely you are getting close to tautology there. How can a moral law be at odds with conscience in the general abstract? You have to posit a situation, which usually involves conflicts between one or more moral laws, not a conflict between morality and conscience. I presume you are talking about the old "do we kill and eat our pal to save us all?" kind of conundrum. There are about, oh I'd say a million books of theology and moral philosophy on that.

BTW, how come you guys who are generally so keen to tout natural selection and the evolution of morality through biological determinism are the same ones who so fiercely defend the sanctity and authority of your individual consciences?

Robert:

There's no difference in your behavior if you conform to how the Bible tells you God wants you to behave or you get the word directly from him.

Peter:

What's amusing is how eagerly they jettison Darwinism in order to assure us that they can arrive at Judeo-Christian morality on their own.

Judeo-Christian morality, or any morality recieved from any religious authority, is part of 'what works when people have to live together'.

What we object to is the idea that moral laws really must, or indeed conceivably can, come from some external all-powerful Deity. It doesn't make sense...unless you've got a convincing answer to the Euthyphro Dilemma that I've never encountered.

Brit:

yes, a system that works so that people can live together is a moral goal, not a natural one. It is imposed from without.

Different question. Wherever morality comes from, it can't be God.

Morality can only come from without, so it has to be God.

If God says these things are right because they are right, we don't need God. If these things are only right because God said so, who cares what God thinks?

Brit:

We do. Cultures that don't care don't do the right thing.

The answer to Euthyphro's Dilemma is rather simple, that's whgy I assumed you weren't really posing it: kill him and take his wallet.

If you're asking me if I ever made a moral decision in a vacuum, no, but that's not what I'm talking about. Morality is all about how people interact with each other, moral decisions have to be made in the context of one's experiences with other people. But in the end each individual has to make a personal decision on how he will act, as societal interactions aren't the same for everyone, and don't always present easy, obvious choices.

Again, let's focus on the two conceptions of "other" that we are talking about. The "without" that Orrin refers to is society, other people. It is that other which imposes the need for morality. It doesn't come from the sky, from the great beyond of eternity, but from the here and now of personal engagement with the world.

The conscience works (to the extent that it does work) precisely because it is the product of a deterministic process of selection. You are making a false correlation of "individual" and conscience, as if the conscience was the voice of the individual's ego. It is the opposite, the conscious is that part of the psyche that tempers the individual's tendency towards self interest and makes communal life possible.

So why should a person who has developed a moral outlook through a learning process involving his conscience and his experiences interacting with society act against that outlook because of some sacred taxt that purports to hold the absolute truth?

Brit;

I guess that is one answer. The other has to do with the nature of religious knowledge and experience, and the inability to solve that kind of dilemna with logic alone. I appreciate that you are terrified of letting go of your strict objective rationalism lest you end up abandoning reason altogether and start practicing voodoo (or feng shui), but that is the way it works, Doubting Thomas. "Follow My Way" puts it nicely and many an orthodox Jew will tell you that the truths of the Talmud and Torah are revealed by following them, not being logically persuaded by them. Of course, people who believe this are the sort who see "the problem of evil" as a wrong-headed distraction from the "problem of good".

Robert:

No, the interaction is quite definitely not between two people making rational decisions, for the rational action is to benefit yourself at the other's expense. There is a third Someone in the interaction requiring you to treat each other a certain way or to not be moral.

Robert:

Let's not make up definitions here. Morality is not just all about "how people interact with each other". The first four Commandments have little to do with other people. You may not like or respect them, but that doesn't mean you can change the meaning of words to reflect that.

You know, I've read the rest of your post several times now and, seriously, I'm getting the impression your problem with objective morality is that is is inconsistent with fitness and natural selection rather than with any idea of a free or independent conscience. So how do you explain the Islamists? Don't you ever wonder why we're so maddeningly slow to evolve away from religion and why we seem to head for decline when we do?

Peter:

I didn't say that following the lead of moral rulers or scriptures or Commandments was an invalid way of getting your moral rules.

I said that the root can't be God.

Moral rules must come from people, either individually or collectively, or they must be inherently right or wrong of themselves. There aren't any other options.

Brit:

They don't though. Our morality was handed down from God.

OJ:

So if God one day said that it was right to commit rape, murder, genocide, and make more episodes of 'Sex and the City', would it be moral to do those things?

If yes, God would no longer be an acceptable source of morality. If no, then rape, murder, genocide and episodes of 'Sex and the City' must be intrinsically wrong, and we don't need God to make it so.

Or can God not change his mind?

Brit:

Yes. If God says that we are not made in His image and have no value then we can feel free to apply Darwinism.

That's not an answer. All you're saying there is that if God withdrew the threat of punishment for acting wrongly, then we could get away with it.

But what if God said that rape and genocide were morally right and we ought to do them as much as possible?

Brit:

No, not the punishment, but the reason for treating each other with dignity.

yes, if there's no God and life is Darwinian then there's nothing wrong with Darwinian societies like Nazi Germany, Darfur, Somalia, etc.

No more chattering with this one and that one. You have seen the vision and "discretion shall preserve thee." No matter what this great one or that learned one thinks or believes; you know, so "be still," remembering that he who can argue on the Truth has not yet heard the Truth. There is nothing to argue about an established fact, it is and that is all. God is, and this is all. Why worry over terms, expressions, this teaching or that teaching? Be still and know. Fear not.

-Walter C. Lanyon

Let's not make up definitions here. Morality is not just all about "how people interact with each other". The first four Commandments have little to do with other people. You may not like or respect them, but that doesn't mean you can change the meaning of words to reflect that.

I'd categorize the first four commandments under the title "piety", not morality. And yes, I'd have to say that morality really has no other applicability as a concept than to how people treat each other. If you were to pass moral judgment on a man who committed murder, should the 1000 rosaries he prayed every week be weighed as a positive in the balance?

You know, I've read the rest of your post several times now and, seriously, I'm getting the impression your problem with objective morality is that is is inconsistent with fitness and natural selection rather than with any idea of a free or independent conscience. So how do you explain the Islamists? Don't you ever wonder why we're so maddeningly slow to evolve away from religion and why we seem to head for decline when we do?

I've said nothing against objective morality. But objective morality is like one of Plato's ideal forms, something that we humans cannot experience. We are left to our subjective devices to figure out what is the best way to go, and can only have faith that the way we choose comes close to that ideal.

How do I explain the Islamists? Evolution is responsible for our consciences, but also for our selfish drives. I never said that evolution makes us all good. Human nature poses a balancing act of selfish and altruistic motives. Each person must struggle with his own motives, and make moral choices along the way. It is the same with societies, which are just the collective resolution of many individual choices. I can't explain why any given society takes one path and not another, I'm not that wise.

But you still are not responding to my initial question. If you grant that individuals have a conscience, and you don't see how moral laws can be in conflict with conscience, then what is gained by going beyond conscience to an outside source? It can only improve the morality of a person if it is able to correct his conscience, and if it never contradicts his conscience then it never improves him. Then the outside source is redundant.

So if you think that Hitchens has a good grasp on morality, then what does he gain by becoming a Catholic? Or a believer of any theistic creed, for that matter?

humans don't "have" a conscience--one is instilled in them.

Hitchens will come to believe in its source.

OJ:

Again, you've failed to answer the question.

If God told us to commit rape and genocide, would it be right to do so?

Brit:

Yes.

When does the instilling happen? At Baptism? First Communion?

No, it's taught.

Taught by who? Does it have to be taught according to the Cathechism of the Holy Church, or can mom & dad teach the ol' Golden Rule by themselves?

Anyone can read the Bible, though they're best off getting guidance and the benefit of several thousand years of learning.

OJ:

Probably the only coherent conclusion.

And also why I believe in morals, but not in the arbitrary whim of a God as the source of them.

Brit:

The only difference is how honest one is with oneself. Belief in absolute morality is belief in God.

It does indeed. If you were honest you'd accept that when you say 'our morals come from God', you really mean 'our morals come from religion'.

I think that's also wrong, but it makes more sense.

I don't believe in absolute morality in the way that you imply - as somehow external, eternal, revealed Truths - but I have moral feelings and opinions, deriving from a number of sources, that I think ought to be applied universally.

Brit:

No, because then religions could adopt any morals they chose to which is the same as having no morality. Morality was revealed, is absolute and does not change.

OJ is mostly correct here. Religion was something invented by humankind to keep us all from G-d. Religion and G-d have nothing to do with each other. It is only man who put the two together, mostly to wield power over other men (or women).

OJ:

That only brings us back to the dilemma.

The answer remains the same.

And we haven't come up with a satisfactory one.

(which is nothing to worry about. People have been trying and failing to answer the problem since Plato.)

To the contrary, it's a simple bit of sophistry. Explain why the answer is wrong and you answer the"dilemma."

The question is: does God say x is wrong because it is wrong, or is x wrong because God says it is?

You've gone for the latter, which is sensible because the former renders God unnecessary for morality.

The latter, however, commits you to the position that morality depends on the arbitrary whim of a God who could just as easily tell you, or have told you, that it is right to murder your mother.

Perhaps this does satisfy you, but for most people, including me, it is unsatisfactory. Few would murder their mothers even if God told them it was a moral imperative.

Brit:

No, the point is that God doesn't tell us to rape and kill, which is why you can't just kill the philosopher dude. It would violate His nature. Morality isn't arbitrary because God isn't. This is an old bit of sophistry that no one has trouble with answering. It's not a serious point.

If God can't tell us to rape and kill, then raping and killing must be intrinsically wrong.

God could tell us to rape and kill. He doesn't. It would violate His nature. The moral laws He gives us are good because He is good.

Yoiu recognize the existence of God precisely at the moment that you acknowledge morality, which can only come from God, to be necessary and good.

The dilemma is, ironically, a proof of God.

If we did not bring to the examinations of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them.

Instincts have no dignity. It is in quelling them that dignity lies.

OJ is a Platonist, no use arguing with him. The idea of the thing is more real than the thing. Talk about sophistry! This one bit of sophistry has infected people's brains since classical times.

Robert:

what's the thing?

OJ, your pith fetish has undone you this time. Read again, and note the author's name.

To elaborate, I'll give another:
The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys...

Stephen F. Hayward?

And another:
Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war... Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.

Exactly. It's the overcoming of the instincts that demoinstrates our dignity and separates us from mere animals.

Morality as practiced by people is the thing. "Objective Morality" or "God" is the idea of the thing.

You think judgments about the quality of actions are things and you think you aren't a Platonist? Good one...

No, you can't separate morality from it's physical basis, which is human nature. The idea that there is a thing called morality that exists independent of humanity is ridiculous on it's face.

Plato believed that every creature or entity was but an imperfect reflection of it's ideal form. So there was the ideal form of a horse which was more real and more perfect than any individual flesh and blood horse. Which is a totally stupid idea. What makes a horse perfect? Perfect for what? A perfect horse for pulling wagons would be big, strong and obedient. A perfect horse for living on the cold steppes would have long fur, while a perfect horse for living in the Arabian desert would have short hair. Would the perfect idea of a horse have all of these traits simultaneously?

Likewise with morality. You can't separate "thou shalt not kill" from it's application to a set of creatures that can be killed. Does this rule apply to a race of immortal beings? If we evolved as a race whose psychology made the communal social organization the most beneficial for all its members, with all resources shared in commom, would "thou shall not steal" have any moral meaning?

Since he's a Jew by the standards of Jewish tradition, he should become even more traditional than The Society of St. Pius I.

OJ:

"God could tell us to rape and kill. He doesn't. It would violate His nature. The moral laws He gives us are good because He is good."

That statement seems to me to say: "God could make rape and killing morally right, but God couldn’t make rape and killing morally right."

Which is exactly the sort of dilly pickle people always get themselves into when trying to answer this dilemma.

Just to clarify the problem, if you're struggling:

The proposal is that for moral rules to exist, they must have come only from God.

But if that's the case, the moral laws we have must have been made by God on an arbitrary whim.

For example, it must have been a 50/50 decision by God to make rape morally wrong rather than morally right. He could just have easily have made it right.

Why? Because if there was any reason for God to make rape morally wrong, there must be something about rape that makes it instrinsically wrong - there must have been something that swung the decision for God against rape. And if that's the case, then moral rules don't come entirely from God. At most, he just told us what actually is right or wrong. They were right or wrong anyway.

So, if it is not the case that moral laws are just arbitrary, and if it is also not the case that God tells us what's wrong because it is wrong, then we have to conclude that the proposition that moral laws come only from God is false, and they must come from somewhere else.

Brit:

No one is confused. You just don't appreciate how sophistic this question is known to be. It's here that you go wrong:

For example, it must have been a 50/50 decision by God to make rape morally wrong rather than morally right. He could just have easily have made it right.

Why? Because if there was any reason for God to make rape morally wrong, there must be something about rape that makes it instrinsically wrong - there must have been something that swung the decision for God against rape.

God forbids rape because He is good and we, as his Creation, reflect some of that goodness, not because rape is intrinsically bad. Indeed, if there is no God there's no moral law against rape nor avything about it that makes it bad.

Your insistence that rape must be bad becomes you, but demonstrates your inherent theism.

The question is plan and simple. It's the attempted answers that as sophistic. They end up being so subtle, so nuanced and complex, that nobody can understand them.

"God forbids rape because he is Good".

You've come back on yourself in a tight circle. That's just the question again:

Is God good because he (correctly) forbids rape (because rape is not good); or is rape not allowed because God said it, and "good" is just defined as "whatever God commands".

All sophistical questions are simple and easy, because they are rigged. The "dilemma" poses only two alternatives and requires a choice between them, but they aren't the alternatives we face in reality.

Forbidding rape isn't correct, it's just the morality that God imposed on us.

It would only be rigged if it falsely offered only two alternatives (a 'false dilemma'), when in fact there were three or more. The sophistry lies in the various tortured attempts over the centuries to portray it as just such a false dilemma.

But it isn't: these really are the only two alternative meaningful understandings of the proposition "morality must come from God".

You've chosen one of them, namely the second horn of the dilemma: things are wrong only because God says they are.

Which means that moral rules are arbitrary, and if God decided tomorrow that rape was right, then it would be right to rape.

Brit;

No, that's the point. Morality must come from a source beyond Man or else men can change it and it is not meaningful. From whence then do we receive morality? God.

Now, no matter what rules God had given us they would be "good" from our perspective. Had God ordered us to kill one another that would be a good within the confines of the system.

In fact, once you pretend God does not exist and attempt to derive morality on your own you quickly arrive at such rules, as with the Holocaust, when Darwinism was applied. If there is no God there was nothing wrong with the Holocaust.

The question you're struggling to get to is why did God give us the moral rules that he did. The answer is that being Good, He gave us rules for behavior towards Him and towards one another that require good.

If a different god had Created the Universe he might well have given us other rules, however, the implication of the story of the Fall is that in order to become a god you have to be good.

All of which is simply a restating of the fact that you have chosen the second horn: things are moral only because God says so. There is nothing inherently immoral about rape, so if God commanded that rape was now a moral imperative, it would be right to commit rape.

Which is fine: that's a perfectly coherent position to hold. But it is not acceptable to most people when you consider the consequences, which is why the initial problem is a dilemma.

For example, if God now said that the random killing of children was morally right, under your understanding, then it would be.

But most people, given this new moral order, would object. They'd say "I'm not going to go to that God for my morals any more. I don't care what he says, there's just something basically, inherently wrong with randomly killing children, and God's made a blooper here."

You, presumably, would set about killing children forthwith. Except that you and I know very well that you wouldn't.

It's no defence to then say "Ah, but God just wouldn't do that, it's not in His nature", because 1) how do you know the mind of God? and 2) it implies that there IS something intrinsically wrong with killing children, which is why God wouldn't do it.

Brit:

It's always acceptable--as soon as y'all convionced yourselves there was no God we started m,urdering children as fast as we could get women pregnant.

That's a different question: it's not about how obedient or disobdedient we are regarding moral rules - after all, Believers sin plenty too - nor is it about interpreting moral rules.

It's about the theological claim that morality must, by definition, come from God.

Your point, if it were true, would merely suggest that we behave immorally when we ignore the teachings of religion.

The dilemma is not a problem for the separate claim that moral rules come from religion.

Same question.

Why are murder, abortion, genocide, homosexuality, etc., wrong?

Because God told us they are.

No God, no right and wrong.

Is that your Last Word on the matter?

It is the Last Word, and the point of the exercise, but not ours:

http://www.brothersjudd.com/blog/archives/026001.html

It's always acceptable--as soon as y'all convionced yourselves there was no God we started m,urdering children as fast as we could get women pregnant.

Who is the "y'all" referred to by your sentence? Abortion became legal under a Supreme Court and political system made up almost exclusively of Judeo-Christian believers.

Yes, it had to be imposed by undemocratic elites. Now democracy is limiting it and will eventually do away with it, though only here, not in secular Europe.