Is Christianity Good for the World? Hitchens debate...

[chezlaw]

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I don't disagree with that. But the way we have come to decide to apply that empathy to the development of morality is something else. The natural Empathy gives us an instict to treat people local to us well. Most local to an individual is himself. Then his family. Then his clan. Then his tribe or nation. Where did we get the idea that our most local morality "should" be applied equally to groups less local or outside our own? It certainly hasn't come easy for us to do so.

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I don't think the concept of locality can be the important one as there's no way we can be wired to know whose local. Its far more likely to be familiarity, and mostly at a young age i.e. we empathise with the sort of people we interact with when we are growing up.

Increasingly that's a larger and more diverse group.

chez

[chezlaw]

No, the problem is we started with:

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even if god exists and someonehow that means ought exists and the bible is as god wishes it to be, it doesn't follow that we ought to do what it says in the bible.


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from which we can get

1. god exists
2. oughts exist
3. the bible is as god wishes

from which its a mistake to conclude

4. we ought to do it
or more explicitly
4a. we ought to do what is says we ought to do in the bible

NotReady just pulled that out of his hat. I'd rather he tried to justify it then guess why he thinks it was in his hat.

chez

[luckyme]

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Can I chip in a bit with the neuroscience? I read that a recent study showed the same area of the brain reacting when performing altruistic actions as when dealing with speech. Is appears altrusitic acts have been evolved in us for a very long time, much longer than we've been concious (and religious I guess) - this did surprise the researchers. I'll provide the link if I can remember where I saw it.

I think we only accept a theoretical universal empathy because we simply don't have the capacity to care about billions of other humans.

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when we reach the stage of intelligence to 'put ourselves in others shoes' could be the start of empathy. A octopus watches another octopus solve a puzzle and can then apply the technique itself. That seems to be an early part of this evolving me-they melding that occurs to a greater and greater degree in social animals such as mammal groups.

The neuroscience report I read on empathy in animals was along the lines of 'feeling their pain'. I won't look for the link since the effect of that is available from observation of their actions, the neuro was just a mechanical confirmation.

luckyme

[Archon_Wing]

[using quick reply]

I don't know how one can refer to an absolute moral standard when referring to Christianity. There are so many sects of it, each with differing viewpoints on different issues. And some of the issues are quite important. If there is an absolute standard they can't all be right, can they? Which would I listen to?

[Taraz]

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[using quick reply]

I don't know how one can refer to an absolute moral standard when referring to Christianity. There are so many sects of it, each with differing viewpoints on different issues. And some of the issues are quite important. If there is an absolute standard they can't all be right, can they? Which would I listen to?

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Yeah, I was asking this question too. I think it's an important question, but it took me a while to realize that isn't the claim that NotReady was making in this thread. He was simply saying that if God doesn't exist, then morality doesn't exist. Even if everyone gets most questions of morality wrong, it's being argued that there would be no right or wrong without a God.

[Archon_Wing]

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[ QUOTE ]
[using quick reply]

I don't know how one can refer to an absolute moral standard when referring to Christianity. There are so many sects of it, each with differing viewpoints on different issues. And some of the issues are quite important. If there is an absolute standard they can't all be right, can they? Which would I listen to?

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Yeah, I was asking this question too. I think it's an important question, but it took me a while to realize that isn't the claim that NotReady was making in this thread. He was simply saying that if God doesn't exist, then morality doesn't exist. Even if everyone gets most questions of morality wrong, it's being argued that there would be no right or wrong without a God.

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Ah, must have missed it, although I wasn't really replying to NotReady, more my reaction to skimming the article in the beginning. Although, I think that even if there was absolute right and wrong via God, it's all meaningless if we don't know it is, and nothing we do would matter. It's like saying that there's an optimal way of playing poker if you saw your opponents hole cards, but you can't we just have to make use of reason and logic. Although to complete this analogy we'd have a bunch of people screaming behind you that they know what the hole cards are and they are all screaming different things.

[Taraz]

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Ah, must have missed it, although I wasn't really replying to NotReady, more my reaction to skimming the article in the beginning. Although, I think that even if there was absolute right and wrong via God, it's all meaningless if we don't know it is, and nothing we do would matter. It's like saying that there's an optimal way of playing poker if you saw your opponents hole cards, but you can't we just have to make use of reason and logic. Although to complete this analogy we'd have a bunch of people screaming behind you that they know what the hole cards are and they are all screaming different things.

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Exactly. Having a universal moral law is practically irrelevant if there is no way of verifying it.

[Silent A]

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If you recall what Wilson said in the Hitchens debate, his main concern was to get H. to justify morality, not to prove God's existence from the moral argument. That's what I thought was where Wilson pinned H. down and what H. evaded. That idea is present in Lewis - the idea that if there is no absolute standard for morality the whole concept of morality is bogus.

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Funny, this is the exact reason why I though Wilson "lost", because he kept harping on about this, seemingly oblivious to the fact that Hitchens didn't think his morality needed to be "justified" at all, it's just a brute fact of nature.

[NotReady]

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NotReady just pulled that out of his hat. I'd rather he tried to justify it then guess why he thinks it was in his hat.


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I didn't say that we ought to because the Bible says it. One of the premises is that the Bible is as God wants it to be. Get it?

[luckyme]

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Exactly. Having a universal moral law is practically irrelevant if there is no way of verifying it.

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From the other side, a universal moral law that correctly identifies all the butterfly effects in every conceivable situation would take up more concept space than the universe could contain. By time you typed in all the settings of the conditions in the situation you want to check on, the heat death of the universe would be here.

If we just ask the god-voice in our head, "should I give him the $100 or not" or "should I strap on the bomb" or "fire the gay bastrd" and we allow that god knows all the variables involved instantly. Where does he get the answer?
If morality were absolute, he'd just look them up in his superlist and we could imagine bypassing god and just look at the list for answers. If he could chose different answers then obviously we're not talking about absolute morality but about an 'absolute decider' like the president on war.

That last part seems to overlap what you're saying.

No matter if there were a non-christian librarian god with an infinite look-up list of absolute moral rulings, or a christian god that decides what is moral on the fly, we are still left with using a relative morality approach locally here and certainly christians are.

luckyme