Category Archives: Polemics

Polemics

Tangling with an atheist commenter on the grounding of morality

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An atheist named Moo went after commenter Mary in the comments to this post. So I decided to step in.

Moo wrote this:

Marriage is not about God. I am personally married, with 3 children and do not believe in the existence of a personal deity. You need to broaden your view of the world as most of the world does not believe the same as you do. Tolerance is a virtue that too many people underestimate. Your views of the topic should have any impact on the lives of people and their right to marry. This is an arrogant position as you assume that you have some moral authority.

Then I wrote this:

Are you tolerant of Mary’s view? Does Mary have a right to vote for policies like traditional marriage? Why is it “intolerant” when Mary thinks she’s right, and yet not “intolerant” when you think you’re right? Is Mary wrong? If you think so, then why aren’t you “intolerant”, according to your definition of intolerance? Where does this moral obligation to be tolerant come from, on atheism? To whom is the duty owed?

More important, let’s cut to the chase. My view is that atheists cannot ground morality rationally. If you disagree, you tell me where moral rules come from on your view, what is the means of existence of moral rules and moral obligations, and why should humans treat moral obligations as meaningful and prescriptive when it goes against their self-interest. Where does the free will necessary for moral choices come from? Why should an atheist sacrifice their live to save someone else – e.g. – by hiding Jews in Nazi Germany? Why is it rational, on atheism? Why is it rational for an atheist to do anything other than to pursue pleasure in this life? What else is there other than pleasure in an accidental universe than can be the motive for action?

Atheism is the negation of meaningful morality. (That’s my contention – it’s the denial of morality)

The statement “I am an atheist” is equivalent to saying “Morality is illusory”. Dawkins should have called his book “The Morality Delusion”, because morality is a delusion if atheism is true.

Then Moo wrote this:

Yes, I am tolerant of Mary’s views when they do not infringe on the rights of others. If Mary believes that her marriage requires a commitment to god then this is fine. Nobody other than her immediate family are impacted. A gay couple, atheist couple, whatever couple should not be impacted or offended.

As for morals, you have made a common mistake of tightly coupling these with faith. Morals have been around longer that religion, is evident (to a lesser extent) in the animal kingdom.

You seem to be implying that religious people are more moral than agnostic. Is that right? There is no need going into the evolutionary reasons for morals as i am sure that you will dispute the credibility of the scientist and science. Something for another debate ;-)

Then I wrote this:

What do you mean by the word tolerate? Please define tolerance and explain why supporting traditional procreative marriage is intolerant but supporting the re-definition of marriage to include any arrangement between any number of people, animals and anything else is tolerant. Why is Mary intolerant because she holds to a different definition than you do, but you’re tolerant and you hold to a different definition (“anything goes”) than she does?

I need you to answer my questions about morality, or I will assume that you think morality is illusory and there is no such thing as right or wrong. And no such thing as human rights. If that is true, then I will delete every comment you make that mentions morality or human rights. Either ground morality and human rights in your worldview or stop using moral language. Answer the questions. Ground the notion of morality or stop asserting how Mary ought to be.Ground the notion of rights on atheism or stop telling Mary that her ideas of morality violate other people’s rights.

Then Anon wrote this: (he’s smarter than I am, so he gets to the point faster)

Again, what is your view of the kind of relationship promoted by the like of NAMBLA?

Then I asked Moo to answer the question Anon asked:

Can you give Anon a direct answer on NAMBLA. Moral or immoral? And don’t forget to answer my questions about how you ground moral values, moral duties, free will, moral accountability, motivation for self-sacrifical morality, and ultimate significance of moral decisions. I want this all explained within the worldview of atheism. How does that all work on atheism?

Where do “rights” come from on atheism. Name a right and explain to me how it exists in reality. Where does it come from, on atheism? If you can’t ground it, then what do you mean by using the word?

Concepts like rights and morality and free will have no being in atheism. They don’t exist objectively. They’re not rationally grounded by an accidental, purely material, universe. You think you are referring to something real, but you won’t be able to explain those concepts. They are theistic concepts.

Then Mary wrote this:

Moo, on what basis do you say that impacting the rights of others (e.g. children) is immoral?

Then Moo wrote this:

The largest basis would be my upbringing. The values that were instilled in me by my parents, life experience, such as travelling extensively and living in other countries with a variety of cultural norms. I think that this is true for most people no matter what their beliefs are. You might want to acquaint yourself with “The Evolution of Morality” by Richard Joyce as it describes that the morals/values that we have are not contrary to other evolutionary factors. They are not a negative, in fact they are the things that have allows the human species to populate this world and flourish more than any other creature.

The specific issue I have with NAMBLA and generally people who could be deemed as “predators” is that they are impacting on the lives of others without their consent. There is a grey area around “what is the age of consent”, however I do not have firm position on that as I would have to do more personal research if this was of interest.

And I wrote this:

1) If the moral standards are valid depending on “how I was raised” then in what sense is racism wrong if that’s how the racist was raised. Or, to put it more bluntly, isn’t it true that on your view NOTHING is right or wrong, people are just fed a bunch of customs depending on the culture of the time and place they were born into – which is ARBITRARY. And on atheism, morality is just ARBITRARY CUSTOMS, like driving on the left or right side of the road. “How I was raised”.

2) Why is the population of this world by humans good, on your view? What makes humans so special, on your view, compared to any other creature who should “populate the world”? Explain where humans get their objective moral value compared to trees and snakes and maggots. And make sure that when you pick your criteria, that it isn’t just your opinion. It has to be objective – i.e. real.

3) Why is it wrong to impact the lives of others without their consent, objectively? Is that just your opinion? Is it how you were raised? How about the opinions of another atheist, like STALIN, who killed 100 million innocent people because it was his opinion and how he was raised. Why are you right and why is he wrong, on atheism?

And this is why I believe atheists think that morality is illusory on atheism. If they act nice, it’s because they are “aping” Christian morals that dominate the culture in this time and place. To find out what atheists are really like, go to North Korea and other communist nations, and look at what goes on there. That’s atheist morality. Nothing is really wrong or right – it’s just how you were raised. And that’s why Christians like William Wilberforce tried to stop slavery while atheists today kill unborn children and advocate for same-sex marriage to avoid being inconvenienced in the pursuit of sexual pleasure. They only think they think is “wrong” is that you’re making them feel bad for their selfish hedonism.

There is no self-sacrificial morality on atheism – just selfish hedonism. They are trying to have a good time before they die and to avoid feeling bad about their immoral actions. And that’s why they go along with any evil rather than fight it – because there is no right and wrong objectively on atheism. They want to use the force of law to stop you from making them feel bad as they redefine marriage in a way that denies children either a mother or a father. That’s atheist “morality”. Seek pleasure, and to hell with children’s right to life and children’s right to a mother AND a father. All that matters to atheists is that the strong are happy – who cares about the weak. It’s survival of the fittest – that’s atheist morality.

More about atheistic concepts of morality

Some debates on God and morality

Polemics

Can you evolve working legs by changing working fins into useless stumps?

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Consider this piece of taxpayer-funded “research” that appeared in the prestigious journal Nature (H/T ECM), and you will know everything you need to know about Darwinism, and whether it is science or mythology.

Excerpt:

The loss of genes that guide the development of fins may help to explain how fish evolved into four-limbed vertebrates, according to a study.

Marie-Andrée Akimenko of the University of Ottawa in Canada and her colleagues may now be able to explain how our ancestors lost their fins: they have discovered a family of genes that code for the proteins that make up fins’ rigid fibres. The actinodin (and) genes are present in the laboratory model zebrafish and in ancient fish, but not in four-legged vertebrates (tetrapods), the team report today in the journal Nature. What’s more, the researchers found that dampening the expression of and genes in zebrafish also disrupts the expression of genes that regulate the growth of limbs and the number of digits in other animals.

These results hint that the loss of and genes is linked to the change from fins to limbs.

[…]But a causal connection is not certain. “The real question is: did we lose these genes because we lost the use of fins, or did we lose fins because we lost the genes?” says Denis Duboule, an evolutionary developmental biologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). “The problem is that when it’s an evolutionary question, you can’t do the experiment.”

You know what? You can’t do the experiment on the evolution of invisible pink unicorns, either. But you might be able to get your taxpayer-funded speculations about how invisible pink unicorns may have evolved published in Nature, as long as it somehow bashes the idea of intelligent design. To be able to explain evolution, you don’t actually have to test anything in an experiment… you just have to tell a fetching just-so story that may have happened. And then it gets published in the prestigious journal Nature. Because you arrived at the right conclusion, and that’s what matters. That’s science.

The Ottawa Citizen explains more about what the intelligent scientists designed using purposeful, non-random interventions during their lab experiments.

Excerpt:

This is a tough one to understand. How could a fish just grow legs? It mystifies us, and so this part of evolutionary theory is a common target for cheap attacks from creationists. Therefore, it’s extremely valuable that a scientist has now found a way in which a genetic tweaking makes a zebrafish embryo stop growing fins, and start growing an appendage that looks like a leg. If she can tweak a gene in the lab, maybe one of the many mutations that pop up in nature could do the same.

[…]To learn what a gene does, one method is to add a chemical that temporarily stops it from working, and see what happens to the animal. Akimenko’s team “knocked down” two of the four actinotrichia genes in a zebrafish embryo, and found that the fish appeared to stop growing fins.

Instead, it began growing features that look like the “buds” (or embryonic beginnings) of legs.

[…]Akimenko was using a chemical which doesn’t destroy the gene, but only stuns it for a short period, leaving the animal’s DNA intact. It’s like a chemical Taser. After three or four days the gene wakes up and does its normal job, and the fish embryo goes back to growing fins.

Got that? Non-functional “buds” are an important discovery for explaining how legs evolved from fins. Experimenter intervention producing an evolutionary dead-end is hailed as a masterful proof of evolution. Don’t even ask about whether non-functional buds convey an evolutionary advantage. Research that confirms Darwinism doesn’t need to be an actual factual account of what really happened. It doesn’t need to be testable or repeatable.

Notice also that no explanation is given about how the bud-enabled fish developed the ability to breathe oxygen, consume and digest food on land, or modify their excretory system to avoid losing water. None of that is necessary – because none of it is testable. It’s not about finding the truth, it’s about telling a story. A story that contradicts the idea that God exists, that there is objective right and wrong, and one day we will be held accountable for our priorities and decisions. And that’s why this is taxpayer-funded research that is published in Nature.

Is this science? Or religion?

Polemics

John Lennox on the god-of-the-gaps and the progress of science

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The god-of-the-gaps fallacy is a charge made by naturalists against theists.

First, some introduction. Naturalists believe that every effect in the universe has a material cause. Theists believe that it is possible that God, who is not material, can cause effects in nature. Theists think that these effects are detectable because the creating/designing capabilities of material causes are insufficient to explain certain effects either deductively (creating out of nothing) or probabilistically because of the limits of time and space available for material processes to act within (biological information). The naturalist thinks that all effects in nature have physical causes, the theist things that some effects in nature are caused by non-material causes.

In the past, some effects in nature were thought to be caused by God but later were found to be the result of natural (material) processes, often through the scientific method. Because the trend has been to explain these “gaps” in our knowledge with material causes, the naturalist now assumes that every effect in nature will be found to have natural causes. Even discontinuities in nature that are real, like the Big Bang, the fine-tuning, the origin of biological information, etc. are now assumed to have material causes, even though the progress of science has made these effects MORE DIFFICULT to explain with natural causes. The naturalist calls any attempt to attribute an effect in nature to a Creator/Designer a “god-of-the-gaps” fallacy, because the naturalist points to the past and asserts that a natural material cause will eventually be found for whatever gaps we have in nature.

But suppose a material explanation of every effect in nature could be found. Does that mean that there is no role for God anywhere?

Glenn Peoples writes:

Let’s imagine that the following is true: God does not intervene in the world. Once upon a time people who were more ignorant than we are thought that gods, angels, demons, spooks or spiritual forces lurked behind everything that we didn’t have a handy natural explanation for. But in fact, this is all god of the gaps reasoning, and God doesn’t intervene in nature at all. Never. There is a true natural account for everything that goes on in the universe that we know of.

If you don’t think that’s true, relax. We’re imagining, OK? I don’t think that the above is true, since I’m one of those crazy people who thinks that at least some miracles have taken place. But let’s suppose that the above account were true. Here’s where things take a step off the cliff of logic. Take the above account, and then add the following statement: “Therefore, since God isn’t required to explain any phenomenon, we have no need of the God hypothesis at all, and we have as good as shown that he need not be thought to exist.” God, some have said, can now be treated as a redundant hypothesis that explains nothing at all. Nothing.

And then Glenn cites John Lennox:

Science has been spectacularly successful in probing the nature of the physical universe and elucidating the mechanisms by which the universe works. Scientific research has also led to the eradication of many horrific diseases, and raised hopes of eliminating many more. And scientific investigation has had another effect in a completely different direction: it has served to relieve a lot of people from superstitious fears. For instance, people need no longer think that an eclipse of the moon is caused by some frightful daemon, which they have to placate. For all of these and myriad other things we should be very grateful.

But in some quarters the very success of science has also led to the idea that, because we can understand the mechanisms of the universe without bringing in God, we can safely conclude that there was no God who designed and created the universe in the first place. However, such reasoning involves a common logical fallacy, which we can illustrate as follows.

Take a Ford motor car. It is conceivable that someone from a remote part of the world, who was seeing one for the first time and who knew nothing about modern engineering, might imagine that there is a god (Mr Ford) inside the engine, making it go. He might further imagine that when the engine ran sweetly it was because Mr Ford inside the engine liked him, and when it refused to go it was because Mr Ford did not like him. Of course, if he were subsequently to study engineering and take the engine to pieces, he would discover that there is no Mr Ford inside it. Neither would it take much intelligence for him to see that he did not need to introduce Mister Ford as an explanation for its working. His grasp of the impersonal principles of internal combustion would be altogether enough to explain how the engine works. So far, so good. But if he then decided that his understanding of the principles of how the engine works made it impossible to believe in the existence of Mr Ford who designed the engine in the first place, this would be patently false – in philosophical terminology he would be committing a category mistake. Had there never been a Mr Ford to design the mechanisms, none would exist for him to understand.

It is likewise a category mistake to suppose that our understanding of the impersonal principles according to which the universe works makes it either unnecessary or impossible to believe in the existence of a personal creator who designed, made, and upholds the universe. In other words, we should not confuse the mechanisms by which the universe works either with its cause or its upholder.

John C. Lennox, God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? (Oxford: Lion, 2007), 43-44.

I’m with Glenn – I think that God is a real agent who exists in time subsequent to Creation just like you and I. He can cause effects in nature like you and I, the same way that you and I can – by using our immaterial minds to affect the natural world freely. But even if everything has a mechanistic explanation – which I don’t for a minute agree with – that still would not rule out an intelligence acting to bring the entire universe into being fine-tuned for complex life, with certain potentialities that would unfold over time.