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Can the worldview of naturalism rationally ground mind, meaning and morality?

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J. Warner Wallace, author of “Cold Case Christianity”, explains why it can’t.

Here’s just one of the three troubles with naturalism:

Morality

If naturalism is true, morality is nothing more than a matter of opinion. All of us, as humans, have simply come to embrace those cultural or personal mores that best promote the survival of the species. There is no transcendent, objective moral truth. Instead, cultures merely embrace the values and moral principles that “work” for them and have resulted in the flourishing of their particular people group. If this is the case, one group of evolved humans has no business trying to tell another evolved group what is truly right or wrong from a moral perspective. After all, each group has successfully arrived at their particular level of development by embracing their own accepted moral standards. Arguments over which moral truths provide for greater human flourishing are simply subjective disagreements; there is no transcendent, objective standard that can adjudicate such disagreements from a naturalistic perspective.

Click the link to read the other two!

It is fun to put naturalists on the defensive. I think that the most odd thing about naturalism is that they think that all moral statements are true or false depending on personal preferences. For example, slavery. Whether to own slaves or not is really the slave owner’s choice, on naturalism. Some societies in some places and times allow it, and others don’t. Naturalism has nothing at all to say about which view is correct, because there is no design for humans on naturalism – no way we ought to be. Every view is as good as any other, because there is no one to decide.

The justification for moral values and duties is important because the justification is what helps us to do the right thing when it involves self-sacrifice and self-denial. Anybody can be good when it’s easy. Being good when it’s hard takes rationality, and naturalists don’t have that in their worldview. When a naturalists says “I’m a good person without God”, you have to understand that they are making that statement as a statement of preference. On their view, there is nothing right or wrong with anything, as a matter of fact. They have determined themselves what counts as good, and they are in compliance with their own arbitrary preferences. That’s what they mean by “I’m good”.

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Feminist Nancy Pelosi pushes national daycare program

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CNS News reports on it.

Excerpt:

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told a gathering in Cleveland that childcare for all should be the next “pillar” of American government and “the president comes close in his budget when he says ‘preschool for all’ because we have a situation of children learning, parents earning.”

[…]“What we have to do and not necessarily as, shall we say, as transformative as Social Security and Medicare and the Affordable Care Act for everybody– but I think very important to our country is to have affordable quality childcare for all of America’s children. If we are going to unleash all that women have to offer we have to really get to this point.”

[…]“Now, the president comes close in his budget when he says ‘preschool for all’ because we have a situation of children learning, parents earning.”

With respect to children, the goals are feminism are simple. Force women to act like men. Women have to be encouraged not to marry and then raise their young children. Or, if they do have children, then the children must be taken away so that they keep working and paying taxes to the smart people in government. The one thing that is not permitted by the ideology of feminism is for a man to go to work and for a woman to stay home and attend to her young children. Having a mother stay home with the children is better for them,  according to science, but it’s not something that feminists like Nancy Pelosi support.

I think another one of the reasons why they don’t support it is that they don’t like the idea that some women make the choice to get married to a man who can protect and provide, and some don’t. They think “how can I make those women equal, so that no one is honored or shamed for choosing wisely?” And the solution is to have the government raise all the children. The woman who chose wisely has a husband who works for $80,000 in income. The government takes half of it and gives it to the single mother who didn’t bother to choose a good man. Both sets of children end up in government-run day care, and everyone is equal. Isn’t that a good idea? To make it easier for women to not have to care about finding and keeping a good man? Well, people on the left do think it’s a good idea.

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Tsarnaev family received $100,000 in welfare, food stamps and other benefits

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The Boston Herald reports. (H/T Ari)

Excerpt:

The Tsarnaev family, including the suspected terrorists and their parents, benefited from more than $100,000 in taxpayer-funded assistance — a bonanza ranging from cash and food stamps to Section 8 housing from 2002 to 2012, the Herald has learned.

“The breadth of the benefits the family was receiving was stunning,” said a person with knowledge of documents handed over to a legislative committee today.

The state has handed over more than 500 documents to the 11-member House Post Audit and Oversight Committee, which today met for the first time and plans to call in officials from the Department of Transitional Assistance to testify.

Transitional assistance officials also told the Herald tonight that the agency was conducting its own investigation into whether Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s family ever notified the DTA about his extended trip to Russia, and has since expanded its probe to include a full history of the benefits received by the entire Tsarnaev family.

Arthur Brooks has done some work on seeing what makes people happy, and he concluded that “earned success” is much better for an individual than dependency on government, even if the person has the same amount of wealth either way.

Take a look:

It turns out that making everyone equal by handing redistributing wealth from those who work to those who don’t doesn’t really make everyone equally happy. Maybe if the Tsarnaevs had to work to an their success by serving their fellow man in the private sector, they would not be so miserable. It cannot be good for people to be dependent on the government. It doesn’t make them grateful. It doesn’t make them good citizens. It doesn’t make them care about their neighbors. Capitalism and the dignity of labor do that.