Instead of D’Souza talking about the “Anthropic Principle”, or the teleological argument from design, D’Souza needs to just focus on the existence of Rationality and the immaterial laws of logic and just concentrate on that.

If he did, he would win the debate hands down.

Atheism has no answer at all.

ColtsFan on October 25, 2007 at 6:24 PM

This article also provides helpful information on why there are Theistic pre-conditions for knowledge.

ColtsFan on October 25, 2007 at 6:27 PM

D’Souza: just stay on track and focus on Rationality and Logic. There are theistic arguments that do work.

ColtsFan on October 25, 2007 at 6:32 PM

I’m listening — Hitchens is detailing how the fascists of the 30s were Catholics. I’m an atheist, but I just wish I could ask him if he could name a human institution or organization that has not obused it’s power?
Bad Penny on October 25, 2007 at 6:33 PM

Excellent point.

The Bible teaches in Romans 3:23 that “all have sinned and have fallen short of the glory of God.”

Allahpundit’s cynicism and skepticism about human nature (which I share with him concerning our mutually shared belief in the right wing-leaning political philosophy) coheres philosophically best with Biblical Christianity and not with secular humanism, which produces (as Allah himself already knows) more left wingers than Allah clones.

And I say, “Allah clones” in the most charitable, good-natured sense because there are tons of us Christian theists who highly respect the informed, knowledgable Internet posts of Allahpundit himself.

ColtsFan on October 25, 2007 at 6:41 PM

Hey! Haven’t seen you here in a while.

Weight of Glory on October 25, 2007 at 6:57 PM

It is Football season…

:-)

By the way, your Houston Texans are a great team. I see them as a playoff-caliber team. The problem is they are in the toughest division of the NFL.

Tennessee and Jacksonville are playoff-bound teams as well.

ColtsFan on October 25, 2007 at 7:00 PM

MB4 on October 25, 2007 at 8:51 PM

Am I correct in understanding that your position views the nature of morality to be based or rooted in sociology (”social ties”) or mere human sentiment (”sympathy”) or human convention (”education”)?

If that is correct, how would you solve the problem of the Reformer’s Dilemna?

ColtsFan on October 25, 2007 at 9:10 PM

With all due respect to any religious members present, Hitchens wiped the floor with that hyperventilating bible-thumper!

thejackal on October 25, 2007 at 9:22 PM

Hitchens is a scholar. He is well-read.

I just respectfully disagree with your view simply because Hitchens’ entire presentation was based on the fallacy of arguing ad hominem argument.

I am not denying I will listen to Hitchens in the future.

But logical fallacies should be avoided because they convey error, not truth.

ColtsFan on October 25, 2007 at 9:33 PM

If all else fails, hit it with a big hammer.
- Murphy

MB4 on October 25, 2007 at 9:33 PM

I will try this interesting solution for problems encountered at work…

:-)

ColtsFan on October 25, 2007 at 9:38 PM

I don’t as I don’t know what the hell kind of “logic” he is talking about. I can not follow his “logic”. His “logic” is very uncoordinated. He does use quite a few “two-bit” words though.

MB4 on October 25, 2007 at 9:48 PM

Sorry for the confusion.

To simplify:

if morality can be reduced to the non-moral, then you are left with something fundamentally and radically different from your starting point.

ColtsFan on October 25, 2007 at 9:52 PM

I am not trying to reduce morality to the non-moral.

Okay. Thanks for the clarification.

If one does what one thinks is right because that is what his conscience (assuming he has one, of course) tells him is right, that is morality.

Q: is what is in your conscience universally true or relativistic in nature? (that is, “contingently true”)

If some one does something because he thinks that God will reward him if he does it or God will punish him if he does not, that is not morality, that is greed and fear.

MB4 on October 25, 2007 at 9:59 PM

That is not how Christian theism defines the nature of morality.

ColtsFan on October 25, 2007 at 10:02 PM

I think D’souza made a very good point (it seemed as though he thought it up on the spot as I had never heard it) when talking about the ‘evolution of morality’. He said that if morality is something that has evolved, why then do we need laws at all? We would have evolved to the point that we could not be immoral. People are still immoral and will continue to be. . . therefore you can not possibly conclude that morality is a trait that would have evolved without the influence of religion.

We know that the view of “morality is derived through or via stages of evolutionary development” is wrong because it
commits the following logical mistakes:

1.) it reduces an “ought” to an “is”, which is what David Hume was partially reacting to. One can never derive an “moral ought” (”thou shalt not do X”) from a descriptive fact or “is.”
2.) it completely sidesides and ignores the problem of the Reformer’s Dilemna.
3.) it denies the existence of moral absolutes

Below is an interesting article which states the following:

This idea has been around in some form for a long time and goes by a variety of different names, depending upon how it’s nuanced: physicalism, scientism, anti-realism, nominalism, strict empiricism, naturalism, etc. I think it’s safe to say that modern man thinks he believes this. (Shannon) But this man who said knowledge was only available through empirical testing also said he’d been in love many times, and you can’t put love in a test tube. Further, you can’t weigh this empirical knowledge he was referring to. And the more we talked the more it became evident that we couldn’t even discuss the issue without having to employ the very abstract entities he claimed didn’t exist.

By the way, virtually everything we hold to be dear and important to us….cannot be analyzed empirically. If this is true, and if it’s also true that nothing is real that is not available to scientific scrutiny, then nothing truly important to us actually exists.

A recent challenge to the transcendent nature of morality comes from the book The Moral Animal–Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology , by Robert Wright, published by Pantheon Press. I have not read the book, but I have read the review by Sara Lippincott in the September 4 (1994) Book Review section of the LA Times . Lippencott sketches out the arguments for us.

The thesis: “conscience, the seat of our moral sense, evolved as a survival mechanism. When…we feel guilt because we have harmed a sibling, it is because we have thereby imperiled the proliferation of our genes. When we feel guilt because we have harmed someone outside the family circle, it is because we have potentially damaged our own (survival enhancing) status.”

This doesn’t account for guilt we may feel for wantonly mistreating some other animal, which is an immediate problem with this view as an explanation for morality, but let’s ignore that for a moment because something else is more pressing.

If everything about man can be explained in scientific, evolutionary terms, our belief that we’re exploring truth is merely the result of our physical wiring over which we have no control.

This explanation implicitly contains a remarkable claim. It suggests that there is something in us that is self-consciously aware of the process of evolution, that understands what the goal of evolution is–survival of our own species–and instructs us through our conscience to fulfill the optimal conditions for that survival. How do we know that harming a sibling has “imperiled the proliferation of our genes?” Isn’t this a remarkable statement? Nobody even knew what genes were until Gregor Mendel in the latter part of the 19th century.
Consider two cavemen in neighboring villages. One kills the other in cold blood. We’re being asked to believe that he feels guilt because he realizes such an act ultimately undermines his own survival status (How? He didn’t say.) In the rest of the animal kingdom, killing the opposition seems to secure just the opposite.

We think we have a type of transcendent knowledge we call morality, Wright argues. But there’s an explanation for that in evolutionary terms. Something in us knows that conscience is useful for securing the long-term survival of our race. So now to explain away the existence of morality as transcendent knowledge Wright posits the existence of some other kind of transcendent knowledge that creates morality for its own purpose. But this only pushes the problem one generation back. One can then ask, “Where did this force, this law, to always seek the survival of the species come from?” You can’t say it evolved, because that would be begging the question: Where did the impulse to seek your own species’ survival come from? It evolved based on a species seeking its own survival. The argument becomes circular. Wright solves nothing with his amazing claim.

There are more problems with this, of course, and they center around one inescapable observation. If everything about man can be explained in scientific, evolutionary terms, Our belief that we’re exploring truth is merely the result of our physical wiring over which we have no control.

In other words, this kind of physicalism always seems to lead to some kind of determinism: Everything about us is determined by our prior physical states. It’s very hard to argue, then, that there is any truth at all to be known, moral or otherwise.

If the moral element is prior to the behavior, then it can’t be the behavior itself.

Then why should I believe this article? This article purports to tell us something true about the universe, but in the process tells us that our perception of truth is something that is dictated by our genes to “get our genes into the next generation.” This view changes drastically what it means to be moral. It reduces morality to mere survival, to pragmatics. We feel moral urgings because these moral urgings help us to survive better. They have at their core self-preservation in mind. But does self-preservation truly capture what we mean when we say a thing is moral. Indeed many things that fall into the moral category have to do with denying self. But what is this “correct” business?

It implies that there is some higher standard outside of the morality that he is allegedly explaining, a higher standard of moral conduct that can correct the “moral biases built into us by natural selection.” But it’s precisely this higher moral law that needs explaining and defies naturalistic explanation. Robert Wright doesn’t explain it. He merely offers an explanation for some low order moral conduct that has survival value. And then cavalierly refers to this other morality that enables us to become “a truly moral animal.” He writes, “Go above and beyond the call of smoothly functioning conscience; help those who aren’t likely to help those in return, and do so when nobody’s watching. This is one way to be a truly moral animal.”

Arguably, certain ways of acting may have evolved (I don’t believe this, but I’ll grant this for the sake of argument), but morality is not merely a way of acting. How do I know this? Because there’s an oughtness about behavior that we can feel that actually precedes the behavior itself. It’s not a behavior pattern, but an internal compulsion that compels us to choose certain behaviors–to do what’s right–even though this moral incumbency can be denied or disobeyed. If the moral element is prior to the behavior, then it can’t be the behavior itself.

ColtsFan on October 25, 2007 at 10:14 PM

If so, then there would not be much point in so believing in Heaven and none at all in believing in hell.

MB4 on October 25, 2007 at 10:09 PM

I think we differ on our understanding of heaven, hell, and the motivation for one even desiring to be a Christian follower of the historical figure of Jesus Christ.

ColtsFan on October 25, 2007 at 10:19 PM

No.
I would have to be of little mind and no memory to think that.
MB4 on October 25, 2007 at 10:33 PM

Okay.

My understanding, then, is that your position is that the nature of morality is centered in “mainly human sentiment” that you do not believe is a precept that is universally binding?

Here is my take.

1.) If morality is rooted in your ***MB4*** “human sentiment,” and it is not universally binding as a normative precept, then:

how do you reconcile the logical fallacy of the “is-ought” fallacy?

2.) If the above is your view, how are you able to criticize radical, Left Wing political views which you yourself disagree with? The Left Wing (LW) radical will reply, “MB4, that is your view. LW is our view.”

3.) If the above is your view, how do you reconcile the rational difficulty of your view falling into the logical trap of subjectivism?

4.) How do you propose escaping the Reformer’s Dilemna, which is a logical dilemna that presents itself to ethical views that are rooted in humans, and not in God?

ColtsFan on October 25, 2007 at 10:44 PM

I also was interested to see him paint Islam and
Christianity with the same brush and constantly go back to Islam, when the argument was whether Christianity was the problem or not. Islam is, yes, a plagiarism and major adulteration/conglomeration of Judaism, Christianity, with other stuff thrown in, but this was not what the debate was supposed to be about.

Vanquisher on October 25, 2007 at 10:49 PM

Good point.

Islam has other rational and logical problems.

The Muslim doctrine of Abrogation in the Qur’an is a major difference that separates Christianity from Islam.

Islam denies rationality, and denies logical necessity, and thereby denies the existence of immaterial abstract entities.

When Muslim scholars do their research, in effect, they must “borrow intellectual funds” from another worldview checking account simply because Islam is intellectually bankrupt. It has no funds in the Islamic checking account simply because it denies logical necessity and it denies rationality.

ColtsFan on October 25, 2007 at 10:55 PM

It is very difficult to believe in something that is invisible, the invisible and the non-existant looking so very much alike, and even if a God ever existed, it probably died a long time ago.

You and I both already believe (and practically and pragmatically USE) in the invisible: the immaterial abstract laws of logic.

I am not asking you to move from the unknown to the unknown.

I am asking you to only think about moving from the known (immaterial laws of logic, rationality, the existence of mind-independent moral absolutes) to that which may be unknown for you at the moment.

contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
- Stephen Roberts

In all respect and politeness, your response above will not work for the very same reason this response did not work for atheist Gordon Stein in his debate with Christian theist Greg Bahnsen. As a matter of fact, it backfired.

OK, this was kind of fun. Next time though I get to do the asking all the questions part and you get to do all the answering part!

MB4 on October 25, 2007 at 11:17 PM

I tend to ask questions because I seek logical clarity, and I do not want to misrepresent another person’s intellectual position.

But thank you for taking the time to discuss these issues.

Have a good weekend, my friend.

ColtsFan on October 25, 2007 at 11:25 PM