Right Reason

On Monday the 6th of September I spoke at the University of Auckland on The New Atheists, Science and Morality. The talk is like a live presentation version of a podcast on Sam Harris and morality that I did a while back, with some updates and variations.

Jachin over at the Explaining the Bible website took some really good video footage of the talk, so whether you were there or not, you get to watch it in high quality:

The new atheism, science & morality with Glenn Peoples 6 September 2010 from E†B: ExplainingTheBible.com on Vimeo.

Philosophers who defend theism by making use of the classical arguments or some variation thereof (like the cosmological argument, the teleological and fine tuning arguments and the moral argument) have always been realistic about what each of these arguments, if sound, establishes. The cosmological argument establishes that the universe has a cause with certain features (the features of being spaceless, timeless and if Bill Craig is right, personal). The teleological argument, if sound, establishes that there is a creator with intelligent intentions. The arguments are obviously and intentionally limited in scope, so it makes no sense to complain that one of them doesn’t establish, say, the Apostles’ Creed. This is a point sometimes lost on apologists for atheism. Richard Dawkins, for example, complained that the cosmological argument doesn’t also tell us that the one true God has the properties of omniscience, omnipotence, creativity, mercy and so on. But the answer to this complaint, as Bill Craig duly noted, is a rather obvious “so what”?

I was prompted by a recent comment by a visitor to have another look at what I take to be a related and more recent line of argument against traditional arguments for theism, this time an argument by Stephen Law (I was prompted further still when Stephen Law joined in the discussion himself). In his original and enjoyable article “the evil-god challenge,” Law explains:

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Hey everyone, my host has gotten a new, bigger and more powerful server. This site is about to be moved over to the new server. Anything you post int he next 24 hours may be lost, so it’s probably best to wait a day before posting anything.

Public Lecture: The New Atheism, Science and Morality

As you know (and a number of you have very kindly supported me in the endeavour), shortly I’ll be flying off to Oxford for a conference at which I’ll be speaking (more on that another time). When I get back I have a couple of speaking engagements lined up in Auckland before returning home to Dunedin. Here’s one of them.

The New Atheists, that outspoken motley crew full of passion and godlessness (a description I rather suspect they’d appreciate and endorse), have little time for the view that the existence of moral truths is correctly explained with reference to God as the moral lawgiver. That view, says Sam Harris, is downright dangerous in our day and age. Instead, we should think of moral facts as being scientific facts, facts revealed to us by neuroscience as it describes the human brain and its ability to produce the experience of either happiness or suffering. With this argument in hand, many might think that the New Atheists have latched on to a way of preserving genuine moral truths in a world without God.

But have they? In this public lecture I’ll explain how Dr Harris presents his view, and I will also explain the fundamental moral issues that his account overlooks altogether. Far from being an explanation of morality that makes God redundant, what the New Atheists really have in Harris’s account is a model of morality that lacks foundations unless God is re-introduced as the lawgiver who decides which states of affairs we ought to be trying to bring about in the first place.

Date: Monday the 6th of September 2010, 7pm

Place: University of Auckland, Library Basement 15

EDIT: HERE is the Facebook page for this event.

“Is God the Source of Morality?”
Is it rational to ground right and wrong in commands issued by God?
Matthew Flannagan (left, affirmative) vs Raymond Bradley (right, negative)
University of Auckland, 2^nd of August 2010

Few subjects in philosophy are more interesting to me than the meta-ethical question of what makes any moral claims true. My particular area of interest is the question of whether or not moral facts can be grounded in a purely naturalistic view of reality. The topic of this debate therefore grabbed my interest as soon as it was announced – and this was in no small part due to the fact that one of the debate participants was my good friend Matthew Flannagan, who blogs at MandM. What follows is my summary and review of that debate. As someone with no duty whatsoever to not take a side in the debate, I’ll comment on the arguments as they unfold throughout the debate rather like one commentating a live boxing match. And now the opening bell rings.

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My current lunch time reading project is the 2007 book by Nancey Murphy and Warren Brown, Did My Neurons Make Me Do It? Philosophical and Neurobiological Perspectives on Moral Responsibility and Free Will (Oxford University Press). Although I’ve only just broached the first chapter, I can already tell that I’m really going to enjoy it immensely, and from time to time I might share some of the really good bits as I work my way through it.

The book is basically a defence of the view that there is a plausible physicalist conception of the mind that is compatible with moral responsibility and free will, but along the way you end up getting a great introduction to the position in philosophy of mind called nonreductive physicalism.

Like the authors, I’m a physicalist. I’m not a mind-body dualist like a large number of my Christian peers who believe that we are a combination of two very different and (potentially) independent substances: intelligent, conscious souls, and mundane matter. An observation really leapt off the pages at me today. I can so easily relate to this observation, because I sometimes observe my Christian peers who are mind-body dualists struggle with the idea of physicalism for just this reason.

Mary Midgley characterised physicalism like this:

If certain confusions result from Descartes’ having sliced human beings down the middle, many feel that the best cure is just to drop the immaterial half altogether … The philosophers who favour this programme are known as Physicalists.¹

I suppose technically someone who does this is a physicalist, since he will have to say that people are made only of physical stuff, but I would hate to think that anyone would assume that because I am a physicalist I am committed to this view. In a Cartesian view (i.e the view of Descartes) The mind is the true self, the seat of all consciousness, the marker of personal identity, the active ingredient in the person whereas the body is passive, unnecessary and more of a machine than anything else. Any decent variety of physicalism (and certainly nonreductive physicalism) is not just dualism with the soul removed. Radical dualism and physicalism have very basically different views not just on the nature of the mind, but also on the capacity of the body. If we were to just accept the Cartesian view of the body with the soul stripped away, we would be left with nothing but a machine, something like a zombie – which (although incredibly cool in it’s own way) is nothing like what your average physicalist is likely to believe in.

To use another analogy, I’m reminded of the words of Nursie on Blackadder II when she recounted the birth of Queen Elizabeth I:

Out you popped, out of your mummie’s tumkin and everybody shouting, ‘It’s a boy, it’s a boy!’ And somebody said, ‘But it hasn’t got a winkle!’ And then I said, ‘A boy without a winkle? God be praised, it’s a miracle. A boy without a winkle!’ And then Sir Thomas More pointed out that a boy without a winkle is a girl, and everyone was really disappointed.

It’s obvious what’s wrong here. A girl isn’t just a boy with a missing penis. Every DNA molecule [EDIT: this should read “every cell“] of a girl’s body is different from that of a boy. Remember, physicalists don’t just reject the dualistic view of the mind. They also reject the dualistic view of the body, and physicalism is not just dualism minus the soul.