The like is ad hominem. You’re still claiming. Still pretending to an epistemological high ground. Atheists are at least as moral as Christians (who do not own philosophy to say the least) which is a very low bar. They don’t have to justify being enlightened. Emergence is of complexity by evolution. Not magic. I am happy, desperate to believe that the Pericope Adulterae, despite being bodged on after four centuries, is full on divinity at work in the fully human. That Jesus short circuited human moral evolution. He’s still waiting for us to react.
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It isn’t a question of “who owns philosophy” … I’m simply refusing to join with those particular atheists who have disowned it. (And that is likely only a very vocal minority, I’m sure). And if you are implying that philosophy is “a low bar”, it makes you sound a bit like that, though I rather think I just failed to understand most of the rest of your reply.
Maybe … just maybe you’re “one out of two” on that observation, but given how little of your last post I understood I think I probably fail your particular ranking methods perhaps on both counts!
Where have I claimed otherwise?
The failure to communicate is entirely mine Mervin. It’s Christian morality that’s the low bar. As I plainly said. Not philosophy. What’s philosophy got to do with morality? It’s all ethos and pathos with a smidgen of logos. The terrified mahout riding the crazed elephant. As Hume rightly identified three centuries ago. Solomon probably did too.
It’s implicit. Either they’re as moral as Christians because God does it magically through them despite their denials or you know something else because you’re a Christian that even I as another don’t. Something that makes Christians morally superior despite no statistical trace. Like healing, ID, any supernatural goings on whatsoever (you know, the demonic). Apart from incarnation of course.
Atheists may well be more moral than Christians, that is not what is the point. The point is that without some transcendent point of reference, some objective standard of what is it isn’t “good”, one that exists above and outside all cultures, peoples, and which indeed exists entirely apart from the natural evolutionary process from which morality is believed to have emerged, then every moral instinct and inclination is simply an instinct.
You mentioned earlier, I believe, that one doesn’t need to believe in God to recognize “kindness”. Quite true. But here is the point: Nazis believed in kindness. They knew it when they saw it. They were as able to recognize what “kindness” was as well as you or I. And they probably felt the same moral imperative and instinct of showing kindness to some people as we all feel. They simply didn’t believe certain people were deserving of “kindness.”
To borrow Dawkins’ words, their evolutionary process has given them two instincts: one toward altruism, and one towards xenophobia. and as a culture, their society “constructed” a certain moral code based in all this evolved instincts, one where certain people, especially of their own family, tribe, or race, ought to be shown kindness, and one where outsiders deserved extermination.
Now here is the point… unless you are willing to posit some external, transcendent, absolute, objective standard of right and wrong, then the Nazis had just as much right to construct their moral system from what evolution gave them as you do.. You may not like their moral standards. Fine. They, presumably, would not have liked yours. You may not approve of their morality… they would not have approved of yours. You may find their morality abhorrent, they would have found yours to be so as well.
If there is an overarching, transcendent, objective, absolute Moral code, one that exists independently of all human societies, we can judge certain societies as having “better” or “worse” moral standards in any given point. And by better or worse, these are meaningful, objective words.
But absent any such transcendent or overarching standard, you cannot say that Nazi morality was “wrong”, you can merely say you find it “distasteful”. The Nazis had as much right for their society to construct their morality as any other society has to invent theirs. And short of any objective standard, no morality can be “better” or “worse” than another.
To borrow from the master…
Everyone is indignant when he hears the Germans define justice as that which is to the interest of the Third Reich. But it is not always remembered that this indignation is perfectly groundless if we ourselves regard morality as a subjective sentiment to be altered at will. Unless there is some objective standard of good, over-arching Germans, Japanese and ourselves alike whether any of us obey it or no, then of course the Germans are as competent to create their ideology as we are to create ours. If ‘good’ and ‘better’ are terms deriving their sole meaning from the ideology of each people, then of course ideologies themselves cannot be better or worse than one another. Unless the measuring rod is independent of the things measured, we can do no measuring. For the same reason it is useless to compare the moral ideas of one age with those of another: progress and decadence are alike meaningless words.
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OK chaps, Mervin and Daniel both. You BOTH have given me pause. That last post is excellent Daniel, enemy mine. If Dawkins goes no further, then his moral development, his moral PHILOSOPHY, is stunted, strangled at birth. You are therefore right. And I apologize unreservedly, especially to Daniel for my moral disability. I’ll edit this later, but wanted to say that. Don’t go thinking that I’m letting external transcendence in though! Apart from by incarnation and the Spirit of course…
If Dawkins, the voice of evolution, is saying that in a pitiless, meaningless cosmos there is no way of assessing morality, then he’s wrong. But that’s him. Not evolution. If he appears to be saying that all morality is equal and not even that some is more equal than other, then he’s wrong. Qualitatively AND quantitatively wrong. He’s missing emergence. 30 odd years ago a Liverpool university academic I forget criticized Skinner’s reductionist behaviourism by saying that a rat isn’t a running cucumber. I.e. there is a hierarchy of emergent being; energy, mineral, plant, animal, consciousness, and the leaps are progressively, incalculably exponential, factorial in terms of complexity. That happens within morality. The biological and cultural evolution of morality. The basis of morality is biological but we all but transcend that culturally.
Christianity gave us the highest morality emergent from that of the Prophets. Unless my impoverished education is sadly lacking and other cultures produced as good. I’m not aware of any, then or since. The declaration of universal social justice (which is implicitly non-violent) was 27 AD in Nazareth. Secular, modern Western morality where it is more explicitly inclusive and empowering stands on the peerless giant shoulders of the Christian apotheosis of eusociality. If Christianity is due to incarnation, then the source of that is transcendent all the way. If the sublime, timeless morality of the Prophets is by the Spirit, then the source of that is divine.
BUT that is an external, mystical, catalyst of what is already there by evolution. Our moral taste receptors pre-wire us for experience including transcendent stimulus, through the Prophets and other Bible contributors culminating in Jesus and by the Spirit.
Again: Even if it’s ALL by evolution including cultural, with no actual transcendent input as there is no transcendent, Dawkins is wrong.
So far so good?
I’m looping back through the day. Bit uh touchin’ up in the bathroom. Nightmare. Teal gloss vs. powder blue emulsion. Next time I’ll tile everywhere.
If Christianity is not due to incarnation, Dawkins is still wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrongetty wrong. I must read his oeuvre. And go back on his website, where I have had an enjoyable time. I will update.
Oooh! It’s Lewis not Dawkins! Well, not for the first time, Lewis, triple first at Oxford I believe, intellectually stunted generations of Christians with his false dichotomies. His apologetics don’t work any more. And therefore my apologies to Dawkins. I’ll still see what his full atheist (I’m only a Christian one) acolytes say.
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Since I believe in lowercase intelligent design, the fact that there is an absolute moral code based on the character of God is not a problem. It also, more than just incidentally, agrees with scripture when it is referring to God’s image in us and our consciences, by design.
Since I can’t believe that and have no idea what an absolute moral code would look like, I can’t use the lens of a collection of ancient texts to see it. If I did, which I used to, I would. Despite that, I see the most perfectly sublime evolving morality in the Prophets culminating in the Jesus.
I’m sorry you have a deficient view of reality. 
Deficient of those former Biblicist scales, yes ; )
It isn’t helpful to refer to people almost as if they themselves were the epitome of wrongness. And besides - regarding Lewis, there are many here (not to mention the site founder) who owe a substantial spiritual debt to the literary legacy of Lewis. We aren’t “stunted Christians” because of his influence - even if he wasn’t right about every last thing.
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Touched a nerve or two there! And Dawkins is not wrong. And metonymy, synecdoche is very helpful. Dawkins is the devil incarnate round here and a fine torch bearer for evolution. I backtracked and apologized to him here when I realised the quote was from Lewis. We all love Aslan’s daddy, postmodernist and all but if not universalist as Jack was, but his false trichotomy on Jesus as mad, bad or God incarnate is used in the Anglican Alpha Course to this day. He was right about everything apart from that kind of remarkably intellectually stunted argument, which he appears to be using in that WWII apologetic for absolute morality. We’re stunted when we accept such false reasoning without even being aware of it.
According to my late husband, who turned out was psychopathic: “they first do harm and feel nothing. They then do harm and enjoy seeing the pain and suffering of the person or animal harmed. This, he said leads to a disconnect with other conscious beings.”
Not so. I’ll bet more respect is acknowledged for Dawkins around here than say … Ken Ham, or especially Kent Hovind; and even those would never be called devils except when somebody really has their dander up in a “get behind me, Satan, kind of way.” I know I’ve acknowledged Dawkins for his provisions of excellent scientific education on numerous occasions. But with regard to his theology … yeah … I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything praiseworthy in that.
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Dear me Ani99. I hope your life is less problematic now.
You give the Devil his due I realise : )
What is his unpraiseworthy theology? Or anyone else’s praiseworthy one?
Somebody’s ‘a’-theology that believes / says: “there is no existence beyond the empirically sensible/testable, and anybody that claims there could be is delusional. Hard empirical evidence is the only kind of evidence that counts, and only knowledge based on that can be trusted. All other claims or convictions are irrelevant at best, and likely damaging and delusional.”
Types of theologies I aspire to (praise): “Truth matters - and there is an objective truth regardless of how right or wrong I or even all of us are about it. A willingness to knowingly start with premises and the humility to know they are just that - starting points - not proven or even necessarily empirically verified things - and among those premises that I do harbor and treasure for myself: there is a God - a benevolent God who, while beyond our understanding, is yet the ground of all being and is also good - i.e. loving - the very definition of Love. And (now to continue getting specifically Christian) that this God reaches to us in and through the person of Christ known by the Spirit and through testimonies from lives changed by Him and especially those recorded testimonies / teachings about and from Christ in scriptures. And finally that our hope is to be found in the person of Christ.”
That’s an example off the top of my head of the beginnings of good theology.
That is a bit hard to say because I feel the things he told me were too important to keep them to myself. Humane people need to understand how inhumane people operate.
So I have become an activist for social justice and now there is a horde of inhumane people wanting to “make me go away permanently” to put it in their jargon… because they say I am a loose tongued bitch. This is a war that has been waged for more than 20 years now since 2000. But God is on my side.
BUT if the experiments can be made without the proper conditions then they can deny the reality of a non-physical realm of information that is the basis of all material realities. This is the Mind or The Mind of God.
Here is how telepathy is being discredited.
