Tag Archives: Ontological Foundations of Morality

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How well do young people reason about morality?

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First, let’s take a look at this post by an atheist philosopher who explains his view on morality. (H/T Reason to Stand)

Here’s his conclusion:

I conclude that morality is largely superfluous in daily life, so its removal – once the initial shock had subsided – would at worst make no difference in the world. (I happen to believe – or just hope? – that its removal would make the world a better place, that is, more to our individual and collective liking. That would constitute an argument for amorality that has more going for it than simply conceptual housekeeping. But the thesis – call it ‘The Joy of Amorality’ – is an empirical one, so I would rely on more than just philosophy to defend it.)

A helpful analogy, at least for the atheist, is sin. Even though words like ‘sinful’ and ‘evil’ come naturally to the tongue as a description of, say, child-molesting, they do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God and hence the whole religious superstructure that would include such categories as sin and evil. Just so, I now maintain, nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality. Yet, as with the non-existence of God, we human beings can still discover plenty of completely-naturally-explainable internal resources for motivating certain preferences. Thus, enough of us are sufficiently averse to the molesting of children, and would likely continue to be so if fully informed, to put it on the books as prohibited and punishable by our society.

Now what would happen if the entire education system were secularized by people like that philosopher?

Consider this post from secular-leftist evolutionist David Brooks in the New York Times. (H/T Uncommon Descent)

Excerpt:

During the summer of 2008, the eminent Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith led a research team that conducted in-depth interviews with 230 young adults from across America. The interviews were part of a larger study that Smith, Kari Christoffersen, Hilary Davidson, Patricia Snell Herzog and others have been conducting on the state of America’s youth.

Smith and company asked about the young people’s moral lives, and the results are depressing.

[…]The interviewers asked open-ended questions about right and wrong, moral dilemmas and the meaning of life. In the rambling answers, which Smith and company recount in a new book, “Lost in Transition,” you see the young people groping to say anything sensible on these matters. But they just don’t have the categories or vocabulary to do so.

When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot.

“Not many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked,” Smith and his co-authors write. When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner. “I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often,” is how one interviewee put it.

The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. “It’s personal,” the respondents typically said. “It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?”

Recognize that view? Yes, that’s moral relativism – that’s the atheist view of morality. That is the system of morality that is rationally grounded by the worldview of atheism.

Who said this?

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, or any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference… DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.

Richard Dawkins said it. That’s the morality of atheists.

Hey – let’s be clear. If the universe is an accident like Dawkins says it is, there’s no objective way we ought to act. That’s it. Right and wrong are just personal preferences for atheists – do whatever makes you feel good. And you know what? Evil makes some people feel very good. A christian theist has the worldview to say that slavery is wrong. All an atheist can say is “slavery is wrong for me“. Or an atheist can say “slavery is wrong for them in that period and in that place“. And why would they say that? The only reason an atheist can give for expressing preferences is because it makes them feel good. That’s atheist “morality”.

Commentary

MUST-READ: Follow up post by Michael Egnor on the New Atheism

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Remember my last post about the responses of atheist PZ Meyers to Michael Egnor’s eight questions for the New Atheists?

Well, some other “New Atheists” have responded and he decided to write a new post about one of the funniest ones.

The New Atheist in question answers the questions, but first he attacks Egnor for not allowing comments to the blog post, for being Roman Catholic, for being close-minded(?), and so on.

He then writes this:

The only “doctrine” inherent in “New Atheism” is a desire to observe a secular society and evidentialist arguments…Critical thinking is not conclusion and that’s where Egnor gets everything wrong.

In other words, he doesn’t have any answers to the questions!

Lest you think I am kidding, I will show his answers.

First, let’s review the questions:

  1. Why is there anything?
  2. What caused the Universe?
  3. Why is there regularity (Law) in nature?
  4. Of the Four Causes in nature proposed by Aristotle (material, formal, efficient, and final), which of them are real? Do final causes exist?
  5. Why do we have subjective experience, and not merely objective existence?
  6. Why is the human mind intentional, in the technical philosophical sense of aboutness, which is the referral to something besides itself?
  7. Does Moral Law exist in itself, or is it an artifact of nature (natural selection, etc.)
  8. Why is there evil?

And now his answers:

I don’t know. Let’s use the scientific method and critical thinking to continue to try to figure it out and let’s leave religious presuppositions out of policy decisions so we don’t create legal inequality between belivers [sic] and non-believers.

That’s it. He only gave one answer. To all eight questions! He gave the same answer to all eight questions. “I don’t know”. My guess about his “policy” comments is that he is basically concerned that a majority of morality-enabled voters might put legal brakes on his selfish pursuit of happiness. E.g. – by passing laws defending the unborn or laws defending traditional marriage or laws protecting religious liberty, etc.

Anyway, if you want something funny to read, then you should definitely read this post. The funniest stuff is Egnor’s response to the New Atheist, and you have to click through to read that. I guarantee you will fall off your chair laughing. You readers think *I* am snarky and mean. You think *I* make fun of atheists for not being able to ground morality. Ha! Wait till you read Egnor. I’m *nice*.

We all need to get used to dealing with atheists this way. We need to bring their scientific, philosophical and moral deficiencies to the surface for all to see. And we must use questions to do it.

Atheists oppose science and evidence

Theists support science and evidence

Commentary

Michael Egnor asks atheist P.Z. Meyers about the New Atheism worldview

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First, I should say that if you don’t know who P.Z. Myers is, you should know that he is an incredibly arrogant and vulgar internet atheist. He is very popular on the Internet with atheists because of his foaming-at-the-mouth, howling-at-the-moon ranting against intelligent design, theism in general and Christianity in particular.

Anyway, Myers is interviewed by Michael Egnor, a neurosurgeon and professor of pediatrics, who appeared in the movie “Expelled”. He asks P.Z. Myers questions about the New Atheism, then comments on Myers’ answers. (H/T ECM)

Here are the questions:

  1. Why is there anything?
  2. What caused the Universe?
  3. Why is there regularity (Law) in nature?
  4. Of the Four Causes in nature proposed by Aristotle (material, formal, efficient, and final), which of them are real? Do final causes exist?
  5. Why do we have subjective experience, and not merely objective existence?
  6. Why is the human mind intentional, in the technical philosophical sense of aboutness, which is the referral to something besides itself?
  7. Does Moral Law exist in itself, or is it an artifact of nature (natural selection, etc.)
  8. Why is there evil?

Myers’ answers are short and betray an incredible ignorance of the philosophical issues.

Here’s TWO of the eight answers and Egnor’s responses:

1) Why is there anything?

Myers: 
 Nothing is unstable.

Egnor: “Nothing” is not unstable. Nothing is not stable. Nothing is not metastable, nor hypostable, nor quasi-stable. Nothing is nothing. Nothing has no properties. “Nothing is unstable” is gibberish. Hence its central place in New Atheist atheology. If by “nothing” Myers is referring to the emergence of matter by quantum fluctuations (today’s trendy New Atheist evasion of theism), I observe that a quantum field isn’t “nothing.” A quantum field is very much something, in need of explanation. A quantum field gives rise to particles, not to itself. You have to explain the existence of the quantum field. Nice try. The question “why is there anything” is fundamental. The classical theist answer is that God’s essence is His existence, and He is the ground of existence. Note that God (as understood classically) does not need explanation or cause. The uncaused nature of God is demonstrated, not stipulated, by classical theism (see Aristotle’s Prime Mover argument and Aquinas’ First, Second, and Third Ways). Furthermore, the Prime Mover argument (Aquinas’ First Way) demonstrates that God’s existence is necessary even if the universe was eternal and had no beginning; His existence is necessary for existence of the universe at every moment. New Atheists don’t understand the question, don’t understand the terminology, and don’t understand their own rudimentary logical contradictions. New Atheist ignorance doesn’t mean that classical theism is true; it merely means that New Atheism has nothing to say. But I sort of suspected that.

2) What caused the Universe?

Myers: Nothing caused it.

Egnor: “Nothing” doesn’t cause anything. Nothing is absence of existence. Nothing has no agency. “Nothing caused…” is an oxymoron.

Let’s look at coherent answers to the question. The basic cosmological argument is this: 1) Whatever begins to exist is caused by another 2) the Universe began to exist 3) The Universe was caused by another. Modus ponens. Something that begins to exist cannot cause itself, because that would mean that it was prior to itself, which is nonsense.

The universe began to exist 13.75 ± 0.17 billion years ago. So another caused it. The universe is nature, so its cause is super-nature-al (sometimes the hyphens and the last ‘e’ are omitted). The supernatural cause of the universe is an insight provided by science and reason. Denial of a supernatural cause of the universe is denial of science (Big Bang Cosmology) and reason (elementary logic).

Let’s consider the alternatives:

1) Perhaps the universe was caused by a quantum fluctuation, a black hole, fecundity of a multiverse, ad nauseum (vide supra). But then the causation problem just shifts to the quantum field or the black hole or the multiverse. What caused the quantum field, or the maternal black hole, or the whole damn multiverse itself? You can’t change the subject.

2) Perhaps the word “cause” doesn’t apply to the universe at all. Perhaps the universe is a Kantian noumenon, not a phenomenon, and it’s not subject to the rules that govern the things we perceive (this was Kant’s gambit against the Cosmological Argument).

But if this is true, then the principle of sufficient reason is invalid. The principle of sufficient reason, for you New Atheists, is the principle that anything that happens does so for a reason. It’s the proposition that everything that begins to exist has a cause. If you deny the principle of sufficient reason to elide the inference to theism, then there is nothing wrong with asserting that lesser things in the universe (e.g. rabbits, hominids) popped into existence for no reason as well. If the whole shebang doesn’t need reason, no thing needs a reason. You can invoke “it’s uncaused” anytime. If you can shuck the principle of sufficient reason for the existence of the universe, you sure as hell can shuck the principle of sufficient reason for origin of species. POP. The universe exists. POP. Primordial prokaryotes exist. No need for OOL research. POP. Trilobites exist. No need for “natural selection” when you’ve got “uncaused existence.” POP. Whales exist. POP. Man exists. New Atheist creationism, with no need for God. No need for any explanations. Stuff just POPs into existence. POP POP POP. No need for evolutionary biologists.

If the universe doesn’t need a cause, no part of it needs a cause. Denial of the principle of sufficient reason is denial of logic, science, and history, all of it. Any surprise that New Atheists invoke it? They’d rather invoke nonsense than admit the obvious: there is a Cause.

I like to blog on the scientific research and the scientific evidence, but I still think that it is important to understand philosophical concepts like intentionality, final causes and the ontological foundations of morality. That’s table stakes for a comprehensive worldview. Science only provides you with experimental confirmation for premises in logically valid arguments. You can’t prove anything without an argument. And that requires at least some knowledge of logic and analytical philosophy.

You might also like to read the survey I gave some of the atheists I know and their horrible answers that show what atheists really think about truth and morality.

Atheists oppose science and evidence

Theists support science and evidence