Right Reason

According to Martin Varsavsky, “nothing much” happens when a society gives up religion. Religion does nothing to maintain social order, does not improve standards of justice, doesn’t help people to be better citizens, and really makes no positive difference on a societal scale. He uses Spain as an example. Now, there’s a certain bias in both the selection and the comparison. Under the dictatorship of Franco, the author says, Spain was a Catholic country, but after “three decades of democracy,” this is no longer the case. It’s easy to see where a comparison like this leads. Religion = tyranny, but freedom tends away from religion. Of course any reader (hopefully) realises straight away that other examples could have been chosen that did not favour this portrayal of history. For example, in the 1930s in the Soviet Union under the atheistic state during the dictatorship of Stalin, it was very risky to be a Christian and religion was viciously suppressed, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union and communism there, Christianity now flourishes by comparison. So of course we’ve got to be careful about how we let the writer’s selective sample sway us.

But back to the main point: Mr Varsavsky’s article is written to assure us that religion is not the backbone of a good society, and that when religion disappears, a society does not turn to chaos or fall apart or anything dreadful.

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Aquinas’ “moral argument” might not be what you expect to find.

Thomas Aquinas is famous for – among other things – his five arguments for Christian theism, arguments called “the five ways” (quinque viae). The first way is the argument from the unmoved mover. The second way is the argument from the first cause (commonly called the cosmological argument). The third way is the argument from contingency and the fifth way is the argument from purpose (not from design, contra Richard Dawkins), namely the teleological argument.

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I mentioned not long ago that I had some contact with Jim Spiegel of Taylor University. Jim kindly offered to have a copy of his new book The Making of an Atheist sent to me, and I’ll be posting a review here. I’m not alone, actually, and a number of really good blogs on Christian apologetics and related subjects will be having their say on the book too. They are as follows:

Do check these blogs out as the book does the “blog tour.”

I saw a comment on Facebook today that prompted a memory of something I have thought previously but not written about. So now I am writing about it. Thanks, Facebook!

A Christian friend of mine told the world that he is about to read a copy of Richard Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion, that well known, aggressive (and often lampooned as philosophically poorly constructed) case against religious belief. Perhaps sensing from the comments being made that my friend was unlikely to be persuaded, an atheist friend of his was quick to advise him that while she did not think highly of Dawkins’ books on atheism, still: “you should at least approach atheism with the openness that Christians tell atheists to approach the Bible with.”

This might sound reasonable to you at first. It just sounds like a person is being asked to be reasonable, right?

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Jim Spiegel recently invited me to check out the blog that he and his wife Amy run.

I’m glad I did. Finding really good, scholarly and yet actually interesting and enjoyable blogs on philosophy, faith and culture and so forth isn’t easy, and this one is definitely a keeper. Check it out.

Jim is a Professor of philosophy at Taylor University.

Alexander Pruss recently presented this “fun argument for dualism” at his blog:

(Premise) Our embodiment is universally seen as funny.

(Premise, justified inductively by 1) Our embodiment is objectively funny.

(Premise) The essence of the funny is incongruity.

(Premise) If materialism is true, there is no incongruity in our embodiment.

(Premise) If materialism is false, then dualism is true.

There is incongruity in our embodiment. (2 and 3)

Materialism is false. (4 and 6)

Dualism is true. (5 and 7)

My reply: Don’t ever do that again, or anything like it.

It seems that some online unbelievers have trouble staying up to date with the fields in which they take themselves to be experts. Take Keith Augustine over at the Internet Infidels for example. He believes that he has the divine command theory of ethics (DCT) all sewn up.

For some reason, divine command ethics is a real stumbling block for its detractors. Mr Augustine, for example, trips up right at the outset when he is merely trying to tell his readers what the theory is. “On DCT the only thing that makes an act morally wrong is that God prohibits doing it, and all that it means to say that torture is wrong is that God prohibits torture.” In fact, one of the very first thing that one learns when becoming acquainted with a divine command theory of ethics is that it is not the view that “X is wrong” has the same meaning (i.e. is semantically equivalent to) “God prohibits X.” To boldly describe a theory like this while telling everyone how silly it is would be a bit like a young earth creationist saying something like “evolution is the theory that humans descended from chimps.” You would immediately be laughed out of town, with the expectation that you will never return.

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This announcement arrived in my inbox today:

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Call For Papers: Religion in the Public Sphere

18th Conference of the European Society of the Philosophy of Religion

Merton College, Oxford, August 26th-29th 2010

Keynote Address: Professor Nicholas Wolterstorff

Speakers: Stephen Clark, Elisabeth Grab-Schmidt, Oddbjorn Leirvik, Michael Moxter, Anne Sofie Roald, Roger Trigg, Henk Vroom, Theo de Witk

The conference will bring together questions in the philosophy of religion with basic issues of political philosophy. Contemporary liberalism often wishes to treat religion as a private matter, and considers religious reasons cannot be ‘public’ reasons. Science is acceptable in the public sphere in a way that religion is not. The Conference will consider how far law, and politics, should give greater recognition to the role of religion in public life. The main conference subtopics are:

• Religion and Law
• Religious Freedom
• Multiculturalism and Pluralism in the Secular Society
• Blasphemy and Offence

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I should be at that conference. In 2008 I graduated with my PhD in philosophy, writing on the subject of religion in the public square. I have a couple of as yet unpublished papers in this subject area that would be ideal for presentations at this conference. As far as I can see, it will not be possible for me to make the trip. Such luxuries are for those who are working in academia (which, as you’ll know, I also wish I was doing). However I am going to submit a paper anyway. If I submit a paper, and it actually gets accepted (no small hurdle for an event like this!), then there exists an almost nonexistent possibility that I will attend. I don’t know how, but it’s still possible (many crazy things are possible). If I do not submit a paper, then there exists no such possibility. So it’s a no brainer.