Secular scumbags

JASON STREITFELD SAID:

“Apparently you're not interested in understanding or faithfully representing what I've written.”

I answered you on your own grounds. You said that Rhology was “scum.” That’s a value judgment. But you also said that morality is a process of negotiation. Yet you didn’t negotiate with Rhology over the propriety of your epithet.

You also like to hurl epithets like “fascist.” Yet, by your own definition of morality, fascism is a social convention. A social contract. So there’s nothing wrong with fascism if we apply your own definition of morality to the phenomenon of fascism.

For example, you said:

“That’s easy. Authority is granted by convention, of course. The most rationally conceived authority is one most adapted to the needs of the community and most adaptive to the demands of reason. Morality is all a matter of justification, after all. So, a moral authority is a person or body of persons whose decisions on moral questions are respected within a community.”

i) But Nazi German satisfied those conditions—for Germans. That was their social contract.

ii) And while we're on the subject, how can a social contract define what rights we have? After all, a process of negotiation assumes at the outset that we have a right to enter into contractual negotiations. That right can’t derive from social contract theory. For human rights or civil rights would be a result of such negotiations, and not a presupposition thereof.

“I've explained what morality is.”

Indeed you did. And I simply used some concrete examples like the Third Reich, Double Indemnity, and The Godfather to illustrate the cash-value of your explanation.

“How it is objective.”

Indeed you did. This is how you attempt to explain objective morality:

“Now, listen. I will explain what an objective moral authority is. In so doing, it should be clear why your argument is bankrupt on two fronts: first, because you wrongly accuse atheists of lacking objective moral authority; second, because you wrongly claim to have an objective moral authority of your own. See, I’m about to turn your argument upside down. Ready?”

Ready.

“The term ‘objective’ refers to that which can be observed and measured by anybody (in theory, of course), and not what is only available for a single person. Of course, people react differently to objective events, and no matter how similar people’s experiences tend to be, there is often some small difference in what they observe and measure. Yet, in so far as something is theoretically available to be observed and measured, we call it ‘objective,’ even if our observations and measurements are not always exactly the same. Often we have to negotiate an understanding of objective events, because our experiences aren’t always exactly the same. In this way, objectivity can be established through discourse.”

Unfortunately for you, there are some basic problems with this explanation:

i) We can observe an event, but the rightness or wrongness of an event is unobservable. Moral properties are not empirical properties. We can observe a bank robbery, but the bank robbery doesn’t look or sound or smell or taste or feel right or wrong.

ii) What metric to you use to measure morality? What units of measurement do you employ? Is morality measured in liters or meters?

Is something wrong because is has more liters/meters of wrongness or fewer meters/liters of wrongness? How do you empirically measure the immorality of murder—assuming you think that murder is wrong?

Here’s another definition you gave: “Morality is a process of deciding what is best for humanity and civilization.”

i) Of course, this begs the question since you first need to derive and justify the concept of “best” before you can apply it to a concrete situation.

ii) You also beg the question of what humanity and civilization even matters. Why assume that what is good for humanity is good? Is what is good for Stalin good?

Why, on your grounds, should humanity exist, survive, and prosper?

Here you give it another try:

“Justice, beauty, truth, rights . . . these are human values. We all have them because we have working human brains and because we are actively involved in the world around us.”

How does that distinguish the mass murderer from the philanthropist? Stalin had a working human brain. And he was actively involved in the world around him. Very active!

“I've explained why notions of ‘God’ are meaningless, and why they cannot be used to justify any moral arguments.”

Indeed you did. You appealed to “theological noncognitivism,” which is just a warmed over version of the long discredited school of logical positivism.

You also claim that “The term ‘supernatural’ is meant to refer to that which cannot be observed or comprehended in any rational way. The supernatural cannot possibly be understood. Ever. By anyone.”

“Theologians for ages have known that the term ‘God’ is defined in a way that is impossible to understand. By recognizing the lack of coherence here, I am only pointing out what religious believers through the ages have willingly acknowledged. They have claimed that the inability to understand the meaning of the term ‘God’ is one of the main reasons why God must be embraced as a matter of faith.”

i) I notice that you don’t actually quote any theologians to that effect. What theologians have you actually read? List some names and titles to document your sweeping claim.

ii) At best, your claim would only apply to the apophatic tradition. But many theologians are not apophatic theologians. For example, Francis Turretin, in the Institutes of Elenctic Theology, spends a lot of time carefully defining the divine attributes.

Or, to take a modern example, Kathrin Rogers, in Perfect Being Theology, devotes several chapters to carefully defining certain divine attributes.

Therefore, you historical claim is demonstrably ignorant and demonstrably false.

iii) But let’s take a specific case. Take the conventional definition of divine omnipotence: God can instantiate any compossible state of affairs.

Try to explain how that concept is either unintelligible or incoherent.

“I have not expressed any dogmatic allegiance to any texts, not even the Humanist Manifesto, contrary to your suggestion.”

i) You were dismissing Biblical ethics on the mere grounds that it’s contained in a book. An old book. “It's just a collection of really old stories.”

Are you now modifying your original objection?

Christians don’t believe in Biblical ethics because it’s contained in a book. A book is just an information storage and retrieval mechanism.

ii) You also object to Biblical ethics because it’s “old.” But how is that germane to your own definition of morality? An old social convention would be just as valid or invalid as a new social convention. What makes it valid is not the age of the convention, but its conventional acceptance.

“By the way, you are totally misreading the point about ‘selfish’ genes. The point is that human altruism can be explained as the product of natural selection, as the result of genes that are not interested in our own well-being, but which just go about replicating themselves as much as possible. That does not mean that human beings are all scumbags.”

Several problems:

i) Dawkins says that human beings are reducible to bacteria. Cellular colonies of bacteria. Question: does a bacterium have rights? Does a colony of bacteria have rights?

ii) He also says we’re blindly programmed robots. Question: do blindly programmed robots have rights?

iii) To “justify” altruism by appealing to natural selection commits the naturalistic fallacy. Morality is not about what is, but what ought to be. Even if our sense of altruism is a product of natural selection, that’s a descriptive statement, not a normative statement.

iv) Moreover, once we become aware of our evolutionary conditioning, we’re in a position to resist our evolutionary conditioning. It only works if we’re unaware of it. Like someone who’s been brainwashed. The moment he becomes conscious of the fact that he’s been brainwashed, the programming breaks down.

So you have yet to explain why we should be altruistic. Selfish genes won’t do the trick.

“You say atheism cannot account for abstractions. Sure it can, and we can talk about abstractions without postulating any non-physical realm.”

i) Sure about that? Do you even know what an abstract object is?

Take possible worlds. At one point you say “There are also some laws which apply to any possible world in which certain conditions are met.”

What is your point of reference? For you, the real world is all there is, and the real world is physical.

So where do possible worlds come from? Not from the real world, since a possible world is a way the real world might have been, but isn’t. A possible world is a world apart from the real world. An unexemplified possibility. Unexemplified in space and time. It doesn't exist in the actual world.

The real world is a possible world which has been instantiated in time and space.

ii) Or what about infinite sets, like the Mandelbrot set. In what does that inhere? Not in the human mind, since the human mind is finite.

Yet a set must include all its members. A set is a given totality. To what physical structure does the Mandelbrot set correspond?

We can represent the Mandelbrot set, but that’s not the same thing. A representation of something is not the thing-in-itself.

Likewise, we can define or formulate the Mandelbrot set, but that’s not the same thing as the thing-in-itself.