If there is nothing beyond the material universe, judgments of right and wrong are no more informative than pan-hoots.
says “news” at Uncommon Descent. Well, I have no idea what a pan-hoot is, but presumably it is a not-informative thing.
Denyse (I assume it is she) writes this as her very odd (to my mind) response to a piece of very old news (11 years old!) – some rather touching thoughts by David Attenborough reported in the Sydney Morning Herald (not that “news” gives a primary citation):
It might seem unusual that so many of his viewers insist on an Edenic worldview when Attenborough has spent 50 years showing them something very different indeed. Even more unusual, and not a little frustrating for Attenborough, is that viewers reject, often aggressively, his expositions on evolution in favour of Creationism.
“It is something I get frequent letters about,” he says. “They always start with sweet reasonableness, you know, ‘We love your programs, isn’t nature marvellous’, and so on. But they always go on to say, ‘We do wonder why it is that you don’t give credit to the almighty God who created each one of these species individually.’
“My response,” he says, “is that when Creationists talk about God creating every individual species as a separate act, they always instance hummingbirds, or orchids, sunflowers and beautiful things. But I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, [a worm] that’s going to make him blind. And [I ask them], ‘Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child’s eyeball? Because that doesn’t seem to me to coincide with a God who’s full of mercy’.”
It’s a very good question. It’s not an argument against Design (as it is often implied to be) its a simple question:, IF we found evidence parasitic worms were designed, why would we identify their designer with an all-merciful God?
But Denyse does not attempt to answer it. Instead we have this very odd assertion that “if the boy is just an evolved primate” that there would be “nothing noteworthy about his fate” – that somehow, failing to conclude that a Designer designed the worm logically entails not finding anything noteworthy about the child whose blindness is caused by it.
Because, apparently, “judgements of right and wrong are no more informative than pan-hoots” unless there is “something beyond the material world”.
Why? If a worm can result from material causation, why can’t moral judgements? Sure, Denyse doesn’t accept the former, by why assume that someone who does, must somehow logically reject the latter? Why should a material human being not be as concerned about the fall of a sparrow – or the blinding of a boy – as a deity from “beyond the material world”?
Along those same lines, I return excess change given by store clerks. When my kids were present I made a point of talking about it. Both of my kids have worked in restaurants and as a result, tip far more generously than is expected.
There’s far more to morality than avoiding rule-breaking. Good people are proactive.
I think that matter is not what it needs to be for materialism/naturalism to have any validity at all.
Sorry I didn´t understood your answer.
So you went back to the pub because of your conscience. And how that works? Did the conscience told you go back? Could you do something is against what your conscience says? If you do what happens?
Here’s the passage from Ryle I was thinking of yesterday:
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Novelists, dramatists, and biographers have always been satisfied to exhibit people’s motives, thoughts, perturbations, and habits by describing their doings, sayings, and imaginings, their grimaces, gestures and tones of voice. In concentrating on what Jane Austen concentrated on, psychologists began to find that these were, after all, the stuff and not mere trappings of their subjects. They have, of course, continued to suffer the unnecessary qualms of anxiety, lest this diversion of psychology from the task of describing the ghostly might not commit it to tasks of describing the merely mechanical. But the influence of the bogy of mechanism has for a century been dwindling because, among other reasons, during this period the biological sciences have established their title of ‘sciences’. The Newtonian system is no longer the sole paradigm of natural science. Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine. He might, after all, be a sort of animal, namely, a higher mammal. There has yet to be ventured the hazardous leap to the hypothesis that perhaps he is a man. (The Concept of Mind, p. 328.)
More is different.
Perhaps you should write Mr Hawking a letter? Explain to him what matter is and why you know better then he?
Can you do something against what Jesus says? If you do, what happens?
I see two parallel errors.
On, by theists, is unwarranted dualism.
The other, by computer scientists, that they are (always) just ten years or so away from AI.
It’s a bit like fusion power. Always within sight, but always on the horizon.
The difficulty of emulating brains, rather than suggesting that brains have a non-physical component, suggests that evolution is still smarter than we are, and that brains could be at least as hard to emulate as life is hard to originate.
It’s not that things aren’t physical; it’s that the configuration is hard, and there’s no known shortcuts.
Vague. What do you think it needs to be for naturalism to have any validity at all?
I think we’ve really hit paydirt here. William. This is where the rift lies.
Please explain what you mean by this because I think it is critical to the difference between what you think that I and some others think, and what we do think – and possibly help us to understand what you think.
And a specific question: if a libertarian “soul” can move a muscle, is it a force, and if it is a force, in what sense is not a “material” force?
Or to put it even more simply: what is the difference, in your view, between a material and an immaterial force?
*high five*
Blas,
I’m sure you know what it feels like to experience the sensation of ‘conscience’, of ‘wanting to do the right thing’, or negative sensations such as ‘guilt’. Do you think atheists somehow experience human-ness in a different way to you? People sometimes reify this – the ‘still, small, voice’, the angel/devil on your shoulder. But to me it’s just a sensation, a feeling. Like love or nostalgia or sorrow.
Of course you could. You tend to feel guilty. It’s part-learned, but the capacity to experience guilt or the warmth of ‘doing the right thing’ are probably innate. No, I don’t know the genetic basis, before you ask. I don’t think there’s a gene for paying your bar bill, or any such caricature of genetic determinism. The specific things one feels guilty or warm about, probably a bit more on the environmental side.
How much nature, how much nurture, and how much immediately circumstantial, is near-impossible to untangle. But it’s a real sensation, which atheists don’t just abandon simply because they don’t think God is pushing their buttons. If you really want to know to what extent guilt can be learned, ask a Catholic.