Right Reason

There’s a difference between being educated and being indoctrinated. According to our old friend John Loftus, the latter is what those brainwashing institutions also known as “Bible Colleges” do. Speaking of his own experience, he says, “When I went to Bible College I was not educated. I was indoctrinated. While other believers will protest that their Christian college was different, I wonder if that’s true.”

Even if you’ve been to Bible College and you’re pretty sure you got an education and not an indoctrination, be warned: Loftus doubts you. However, there is one place where John is prepared to say that indoctrinating isn’t going on – John Brown University. Over there, students are getting an education. What’s the difference there? What is Dan Lambert at John Brown U doing that counts as an education and stops the class from falling into an indoctrination setting. It’s elementary really:

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I recently installed a new “Most Popular Posts” widget in the sidebar. It measures popularity by pageviews, not by the number of comments. The trouble is, it only started measuring a few days ago when I installed it, so the posts currently showing as the most popular are really only the most popular posts iver the last few days – namely the newest posts. However, in my WordPress control panel – the one you can’t see – it lists the posts that got the most attention over the last year. The most visited post was my anouncement that William Lane Craig had debated Christopher Hitchens and that the mp3 was available online – only to have to later point out that it was not going to be online after all due to copyright issues. After that one, here are the posts that were visited the most:

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As I mentioned recently, while I’ll still comment on any issues that grab my attention, I’m turning my blogging attention more towards areas that will be related to the book project on the moral argument for theism (although the podcast will remain as diverse as ever). I’m trying to arrange my reading and academic-time-investment around that project as well. It’s easy to get distracted with such eclectic interests in theology and philosophy and I already have an attention span like a goldfish!

I’ve gone through the books on my wishlist at Amazon and the Book Depository (that awesome bookstore with free worldwide shipping) – see the buttons in the sidebar to the right, and I’ve had a big cull. I’ve slashed and burned, removing everything that would not certainly contribute to that project. So any book on those lists would add to this work in progress.

I’m just saying, is all.

Like many brilliant minds, Nicholas Wolterstorff goes awry in his criticism of divine command ethics.

Since I entertain a divine command theory of ethics (although I admit to being somewhat open minded about exactly what type is the correct one), I am sensitive to when that theory is dismissed in ways that seem to me to be unfair. In reading Nicholas Woltersorff’s recent masterful work Justice: Rights and Wrongs all was going well – with the usual level of disagreement a philosophy graduate expects when reading a philosopher writing on contentious issues – well, that is, until I got to the section on divine command ethics.

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Let it never be said that I think all hockey stick graphs are wrong. This one is actually genuine! This is what traffic at the blog looked like over the last year (this doesn’t take into account people who access the podcast via the iTunes store).

Well, genuine apart from the dirty great hockey stick in it! Traffic at the blog has been rising steadily over 2009, and then at the end of October/beginning of November I reduced my hours at work and started spending a day each week focusing on blogging (among other things). If the upsurge in traffic beginning in November is anything to go by, then this has certainly made a difference.

It’s encouraging to see that the blog’s (and podcast’s!) popularity has continued to grow. I want to thank everyone who visits, comments, heckles and participates here at Say hello to my Little Friend, and may you have a blessed and prosperous 2010!

Happy new year. 🙂

EDIT: On a similar note, Halfdone’s rankings for December 2009 are out, and Say Hello to my Little Friend remains unchanged at 5th overall.

Looking over recent census based statitstics on religion, I note that there are some deniers out there. Those deniers at statistics new Zealand claim that affiliation with Christian demoninations is on the decline, and there is a rise in numbers of those willing to change their identification from “other” to “no religion.” What a pack of deniers. Clearly they are anti-science.

But my say-so isn’t going to cut it I fear. I need… a graph! People believe graphs. But there’s one problem… all this pesky data lying around. What if people find it? They might become diners too, and we can’t have that. Then I struck on a brilliant idea. I gathered up all this data and emailed it off to East Anglia’s Hadley Climatic Research Centre. I hear they’re great at making stuff up number crunching.

Before the final result was produced, there were a number of emails sent around between collaborators who were to produce the final version of the graph. I liked what I heard. Mick Kelly said:

Hmmm, I’m concerned by the possibility that we might be going through a longer – 10 year – period of relatively stable numbers beyond what you might expect from temporary backsliding as people go through University etc. Speculation, but if I see this as a possibility then others might also. Anyway, I’ll maybe cut the last few points off the curve before I give the talk again as that’s trending down as a result of the end effects and the recent “heathen-esqe” years.

Smooth move! I was hoping that some of the others might come to the party to massage the data and make sure that it gives the result that I want people to believe right result. I was not disappointed. Phil Jones had just the thing, right before the final diagram was produced:

Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that off to Glenn either later today or first thing tomorrow. I’ve just completed Mike’s trick of adding in the real number of Christians to each series for the last 10 years (ie from 2000 onwards) to hide the decline. We wouldn’t want anyone to notice the decline. That would be bad.

Bad indeed! Now instead of a decline in the Christian percentage, we have scientific proof that we’re heading for a revival! Oh, I suppose you’ll want to see the graph. After all, there’s no proof without a graph. So here it is:

Where are the deniers now?

Recently I posted a blog entry on the difference between ethical naturalism and ethical non-naturalism (explaining that the former of which is not the same thing as metaphysical naturalism). I also indicated there that not everyone shares the same understanding of what “naturalism” really refers to, and I explained what I think. In brief, I think the most helpful way to distinguish between ethical naturalism and ethical non-naturalism is as follows: In non-naturalism, moral “goodness” is a basic quality, not constituted by anything other than itself, not defined in terms of any non-moral facts, and not caused by any descriptive state of affairs. If any of these conditions (or anything relevantly like them) are met, then the view in question is a species of ethical naturalism. Yet another way of putting this is to say that ethical non-naturalism affirms the existence of sui generis, irreducible, brute moral facts. Stated differently yet again, according to ethical naturalism, the true claim “X is morally wrong” has a truthmaking set of true statements that do not use moral terms like “wrong” or “right.”

I entertain a divine command theory of ethics, and I think that one of a couple of versions of the theory (or anything that is similar to these versions) is the most plausible version. According to those versions, either: a) God’s willing or commanding that we do or not do an action causes that action to be morally right or morally wrong, or b) The property of being morally right or morally wrong just is (i.e. is identical with) the property of being morally right or morally wrong.

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Today (what’s left of it) or tomorrow I’ll post the blog entry that I referred to last time, where I discuss an issue related to ethical naturalism/non naturalism and theologically grounded ethics.

For now, however, I want to let you know what to expect in the subject matter of this blog. On the whole it won’t change of course, and any time something interesting and current rears its head or gets my attention in the subject areas that I tend to write on, I’ll blog on it. As I’ve mentioned in the past however, I’ve started gradually chipping away at a book project on the moral argument for theism. It’s more productive time-wise to blog on things that I’m currently working on, so the dominant themes you can expect to see popping up at this blog as I work my way through the blog are the ones that I will be including in this project.

At this early stage obviously the final table of contents is subject to change, but the book will start out in the history of philosophy and historical theology, covering historical versions of the moral argument (e.g. Aquinas, Locke, Kant, C. S. Lewis then contemporary writers). It will look at the way that detractors of the moral argument have treated those versions of the argument, and whether or not those treatments stand up to scrutiny.  Next, I look at the work of sceptics who I will regard as hostile witnesses for the moral argument; moral nihilists like Nietzsche and J. L. Mackie and (very arguably) David Hume (along with my former lecturer and PhD co-supervisor, Dr Charles Pigden). These men do/did not argue for theism, but do give reasons for thinking that metaphysical naturalism requires the nonexistence of moral facts. I will use this as a springboard into an explicit defence of the moral argument that really has not been made in the literature as far as I can tell; one that draws on the burgeoning 20th century literature on meta-ethics. I’m not yet sure if I will include an extended discussion of divine command and natural law ethics.

The order in which this stuff appears at the blog will not likely reflect the order given above. So while you can still expect to the same old subjects (and perhaps all new ones!), a general theme revolving around the combination of philosophy of religion, history of philosophy and meta-ethics is going to be somewhat dominant for the foreseeabe future. Incidently, recent (and future) discussion surrounding ethical naturalism has arisen for precisely this reason.