Tag Archives: Free Will

Polemics

Does prominent atheist Michael Ruse think that morality is real or illusory?

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Here’s a column from the radically-leftist UK Guardian by evolutionist Michael Ruse. (H/T Evolution News)

Excerpt:

God is dead, so why should I be good? The answer is that there are no grounds whatsoever for being good. There is no celestial headmaster who is going to give you six (or six billion, billion, billion) of the best if you are bad. Morality is flimflam.

[…]Morality is just a matter of emotions, like liking ice cream and sex and hating toothache and marking student papers. But it is, and has to be, a funny kind of emotion. It has to pretend that it is not that at all! If we thought that morality was no more than liking or not liking spinach, then pretty quickly it would break down.

[…]So morality has to come across as something that is more than emotion. It has to appear to be objective, even though really it is subjective.

[…]Now you know that morality is an illusion put in place by your genes to make you a social cooperator, what’s to stop you behaving like an ancient Roman? Well, nothing in an objective sense.

So what morality is, objectively, is a bad feeling you get as a result of biological evolution and social pressure. It’s just a feeling. An illusion.

But Ruse says that you have to pretend it’s real, or else we’ll all live like barbarians. But if morality is nonsense, then what REASON is there not to act like a barbarian individually as long as you can get away with it? Let the other fools who believe in God be honest. You do what you like in order to be happy in the few years you have to live – just don’t get caught and punished for breaking the arbitrary fashions of the culture in your time and place.

On atheism, your life, the lives of all other organisms, and the life of stars that provide heat and light to planets, will end eventually die in the heat death of the universe. In the end, it will not matter what we do, the universe will still end up cold, dark and inert.

So let’s re-cap the FACTS about Ruse’s atheistic worldview.

  • Are humans worth more (objectively) than cockroaches on atheism? The answer is no.
  • Is there any way humans ought to behave (objectively) on atheism? The answer is no.
  • Is there any purpose to life (objectively) on atheism? The answer is no.
  • Is there an objective standard of right and wrong on atheism? The answer is no.
  • Is discourse on what is “right” and “wrong” meaningful on atheism? The answer is no.
  • Is there free will so people can make moral choices on atheism? The answer is no.
  • Is there any reason to sacrifice your happiness for others on atheism? The answer is no.

Atheism is the worldview of people who want to escape from morality. They pre-suppose materialism in order to 1) fit in with the educated class and/or 2) justify immoral hedonism. Later, atheists invent pious myths to put up a fig leaf of moral virtue, e.g. – vegetarianism, yoga, recycling, voting for universal health care, etc. That’s atheism. There is no intellectual content to it. It’s not based on arguments and evidence. It’s just a long-running tantrum against parental/church authority, covered over with faddish causes to whitewash the absurdity of life without God.

My posts on why atheism cannot ground morality rationally are here.

Commentary

Friday night links: the origin of evil, spirituality vs. theology

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The origin of evil, from Wes at Reason to Stand.

Excerpt:

There is a big difference between 1a) God choosing to actualize (or create) a world where in evil is possible and 1b) further choosing to sustain it’s order in spite of the free choice to sin and perform evil by free (in a limited capacity) causal agents and 2) God’s being the direct cause of all that happens in the world such that all things that happen do so as a direct result of his will.

Religion and spirituality, from Alisha at Far Above Rubies.

Excerpt:

I understand the folks who don’t want to be called “religious” since it often has negative connotations tied to the word. Others, though, are “spiritual” simply because they don’t want to commit to any one faith tradition. They want it all. The problem with this I’ve found, is to everything in practice becomes very little, if nothing. I once dated a guy in college who I labeled a “Christian-Muslim-Buddhist-Everything”. Although he was raised Baptist, he had fallen away from any church, and chose to cherry-pick through what he deemed the best of them all. And the strange thing is, although he thought Jesus was awesome, he never actually read the Gospels. He respected the Koran, but never attended a mosque or read more than a few Hadiths. While trying to claim it all, he did nothing and believed very little. Needless to say, the relationship fizzled out pretty quickly.

Happy Friday!

Fine, if you want to read something funny, then Drew has this post (with original drawings) from his younger brother.

Commentary

MUST-READ: What’s the difference between science and scientism?

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Here’s an article by Edward Feser at Public Discourse. (H/T via ECM)

What is scientism?

Scientism is the view that all real knowledge is scientific knowledge—that there is no rational, objective form of inquiry that is not a branch of science. There is at least a whiff of scientism in the thinking of those who dismiss ethical objections to cloning or embryonic stem cell research as inherently “anti-science.” There is considerably more than a whiff of it in the work of New Atheist writers like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who allege that because religion has no scientific foundation (or so they claim) it “therefore” has no rational foundation at all.

What’s wrong with scientism?

Despite its adherents’ pose of rationality, scientism has a serious problem: it is either self-refuting or trivial. Take the first horn of this dilemma. The claim that scientism is true is not itself a scientific claim, not something that can be established using scientific methods. Indeed, that science is even a rational form of inquiry (let alone the only rational form of inquiry) is not something that can be established scientifically. For scientific inquiry itself rests on a number of philosophical assumptions: that there is an objective world external to the minds of scientists; that this world is governed by causal regularities; that the human intellect can uncover and accurately describe these regularities; and so forth. Since science presupposes these things, it cannot attempt to justify them without arguing in a circle. And if it cannot even establish that it is a reliable form of inquiry, it can hardly establish that it is the only reliable form. Both tasks would require “getting outside” science altogether and discovering from that extra-scientific vantage point that science conveys an accurate picture of reality—and in the case of scientism, that only science does so.

What else is wrong with scientism?

The irony is that the very practice of science itself, which involves the formulation of hypotheses, the weighing of evidence, the invention of technical concepts and vocabularies, the construction of chains of reasoning, and so forth—all mental activities saturated with meaning and purpose—falls on the “subjective,” “manifest image” side of scientism’s divide rather than the “objective,” “scientific image” side. Human thought and action, including the thoughts and actions of scientists, is of its nature irreducible to the meaningless, purposeless motions of particles and the like. Some thinkers committed to scientism realize this, but conclude that the lesson to draw is not that scientism is mistaken, but that human thought and action are themselves fictions. According to this radical position—known as “eliminative materialism” since it entails eliminating the very concept of the mind altogether instead of trying to reduce mind to matter—what is true of human beings is only what can be put in the technical jargon of physics, chemistry, neuroscience and the like. There is no such thing as “thinking,” “believing,” “desiring,” “meaning,” etc.; there is only the firing of neurons, the secretion of hormones, the twitching of muscles, and other such physiological events.

Scientism can’t even ground our own experience of 1st-person consciousness.