We’re approaching the point where it’s going to be superfluous for Christian apologists or Christian philosophers to dismantle atheism, for the way in which some atheists go about defending atheism is so self-destructive to their cause that there’s little left for a Christian critic to say. Case in point:
Paul Pardi says:
This argument has teeth only if we first assume that “moral laws” exists outside of whatever beliefs and practices have been developed by evolutionary processes and are things that beliefs must correspond to. Objectivity and a moral statement being “lawful” need not entail this. Suppose humans believe the following to be a moral law: it is wrong to treat people as means. On evolution, what might make this a moral law just is the fact that humans believe (consciously or unconsciously) that this practice is conducive to survival (and the belief is a product of evolutionary processes including social and environmental programming). Objectivity does need to be any broader than the idea that the belief is shared and publicly analyzable and it’s can be considered a law only to the extent that it continues to be a practice humans believe to be conducive to survival. Over time, evolution may rewire our brains such that this is no longer considered to be valuable for survival and it would cease to be a moral law. That doesn’t seem to have any impact on the value or force of what we call a moral law today.
To say that on evolution, our moral beliefs and practices wouldn’t track truth assumes what it’s seems to want to prove: that moral laws are something outside of the human mind that beliefs must correspond to. Given the enormous fluidity of the moral code across generations and cultures, there seems to be little reason to believe that.
Related:
ReplyDelete“[I]t seems highly probable that humankind, like all other living species, will continue to evolve, perhaps with human assistance. It is quite possible, even likely in my opinion, that forms of life endowed with mental faculties greatly superior to ours will one day arise, whether from the human twig or from some other branch of the evolutionary tree. To those beings, our rationalizations will look as rudimentary as the mental processes that guided the making of tools by the first hominids would look to us.” –Christian De Duve, “Mysteries of Life: Is There “Something Else”?” pp.346-359 in The Nature of Nature: Examining the Role of Naturalism in Science, ed. Bruce L. Gordon and William A. Dembski (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2011), pp.355-356.
If that's the case, then what reason do we have for believing that the rationalizations for atheism are true?
"Over time, evolution may rewire our brains such that this is no longer considered to be valuable for survival and it would cease to be a moral law."
ReplyDeleteMaybe Hitler was morally right, when he bulldozing human bodies into pits. Who can really say.
Or perhaps killing human babies in the wombs will continue to develop in even better methods, than using a a vacuum to suck the brains from the baby's head.
I may be missing the quotes point here, but it's what hit me as I read it and thought about atheism.
Have a great week in the truth of our Lord. He is the Resurrection and the Life!