Ethics

The standard argument against free will is that it is incoherent.  It claims that a free agent must either be determined or non-determined.  If the free agent is determined, then it cannot be responsible for its choices.  On the other hand, if it is non-determined, then its choices are random and uncontrolled.  Neither case preserves the notion of responsibility that proponents of free will wish to maintain.  Thus, since there is no sensible way to define free will, it is incoherent. [1]

Note that this is not really an argument against free will, but merely an argument that we cannot talk about free will.  So, if someone were to produce another way of talking about free will the argument is satisfied.

Does ID help us in this case?  It appears so.  If we relabel “determinism” and “non-determinism” as “necessity” and “chance”, ID shows us that there is a third way we might talk about free will. Read More ›

One of the most common objections to design thought is the idea that it is about the improper injection of the alien  supernatural into the world of science. (That is itself based on a strawman misrepresentation of design thought, as was addressed here a few days ago.)

However, there is an underlying root, a common distortion of the origins of modern science, which Nancy Pearcey rebutted in a  2005 sleeper article as headlined, that deserves a UD post of its own.

Let’s clip the article:

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Noticing what Steno did here, that animal rights activist philosopher Peter Singer is moving toward the idea that morality has an objective basis, anti-ID Catholic philosopher Ed Feser responds. Noting that Singer is looking for an “intuitive” basis for morality, he writes,

Moral intuitions track objective moral truth in only a very rough, general, and mutable way. Practically they are useful – that is why nature put them into us – and they might provide a useful heuristic when philosophically investigating this or that specific moral question. But intuition does not ground moral truth, it is not an infallible guide to moral truth, and it should never form the basis of a philosophical argument for a controversial moral position.

But that won’t work. Read More ›

The debate: Does Good Come From God II by Sam Harris vs William Lane Harris 7 April 2011 at Notre Dame is now on YouTube.

Part 1 of 9 – Harris vs Craig – Does Good Come From God Read More ›

“Philosophers are finding fresh meanings in truth, beauty and goodness”, John Cottingham tells us (The Times, June 17, 2006):

ARE VALUES (for example moral values) grounded in something real and objective or are they just a way of talking about whatever we may personally happen to approve of? There has been a remarkable shift in philosophical views about this since I was an undergraduate. Back in the Sixties, when we were all still under the shadow of logical positivism, moral beliefs (“value judgments”, as we often pejoratively called them) were dismissed as subjective — mere expressions of emotion, mere grunts of approval or disapproval. Notions such as goodness were no more than pseudo-properties, masking our personal desires and preferences. Later on, with the rise of postmodernism, even truth became suspect, and was downgraded to no more than an honorific label that a given culture bestows on its favoured assertions.

But it is very striking how the popularity of these subjectivist creeds has faded in more recent times. Relativistic views of truth turned out to be self- defeating; while in ethics, subjectivism ran into a host of logical difficulties and is now on the wane, eclipsed by a growing number of neo-objectivist theories. To everyone’s surprise, the increasing consensus among philosophers today is that some kind of objectivism of truth and of value is correct.

I won’t belabour the way in which this will help design; rather I offer a reflection, based on a true incident, on the – as Cottingham thinks, fading – notion that right and wrong are mere preferences, and that truth is merely propaganda: Read More ›

A friend writes to advise me of a “vicious” review by Scott Atran of Sam Harris’s latest book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values in the most recent issue of National Interest, which – he tells me – otherwise focuses on foreign and defense policy. Atran, an anthropologist connected with U Michigan, doesn’t like Harris anyway, I gather, because the latter wouldn’t dismiss the effects of laboratory research into telepathy and telekinesis. Atran, for his own reasons, doesn’t think that “science” is in any position to determine morality. Harris tells us: “I find reasons for hope” because “moral progress seems to me unmistakable. . . . Consider the degree to which racism in the United States has Read More ›

The opening of  the current version of the Wikipedia article, “Evolution as theory and fact,” (with links and references removed) reads: The statement “evolution is both a theory and a fact” is often seen in biological literature. Evolution is a “theory” in the scientific sense of the term “theory”; it is an established scientific model that explains observations and makes predictions through mechanisms such as natural selection. When scientists say “evolution is a fact”, they are using one of two meanings of the word “fact”. One meaning is empirical: evolution can be observed through changes in allele frequencies or traits of a population over successive generations. Another way “fact” is used is to refer to a certain kind of theory, Read More ›

In response to Thomas Cudworth’s request, these are the five science-religion books that I would recommend, or at least has influenced me the most — and help to explain my distinctive take on ID. You’ll see that some of these are available free on-line. Since my explanations are long-ish. They are located below the fold. 

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LINK About Sam Harris: Adored by secularists, feared by the pious, Sam Harris’ best-selling books argue that religion is ruinous and, worse, stupid — and that questioning religious faith might just save civilization.

For those of you who don’t know, TED is a convention of (usually) world-class thinkers who each give a 15-minute talk about a subject. Many of the people in TED are thought leaders. Some of them, however, get in merely because they have written a popular or controversial book. In one of this year’s TED talks, Sam Harris demonstrated that he has no grasp on the basic concepts of either philosophy or ethics.
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Jeffrey Dahmer: “If it all happens naturalistically, what’s the need for a God? Can’t I set my own rules? Who owns me? I own myself.” [Biography, “Jeffrey Dahmer: The Monster Within,” A&E, 1996.] Naturalists like to stress that you don’t need God or religion to be good. Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins even suggest that leaving God out of the equation actually allows one to be more moral because then our moral acts are authentic, motivated by deep conviction rather than by having a divine gun to our heads. Even so, Dahmer’s logic is compelling. We need some external reference point — God — to justify being good. And that justification is significant in its own right. Without it, we can still Read More ›

Philosopher at Large, Dr. Jerome Ravetz has a fascinating exploration of moral and peer review issues on ClimateGate as “Post-Normal science” at Watts Up With That

. . .
At the end of January 2010 two distinguished scientific institutions shared headlines with Tony Blair over accusations of the dishonest and possibly illegal manipulation of information. Our ‘Himalayan glaciers melting by 2035′ of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is matched by his ‘dodgy dossier’ of Saddam’s fictitious subversions. . . . The parallels are significant and troubling, for on both sides they involve a betrayal of public trust. . . .
Climategate is particularly significant because it cannot be blamed on the well-known malign influences from outside science, be they greedy corporations or an unscrupulous State. This scandal, and the resulting crisis, was created by people within science who can be presumed to have been acting with the best of intentions. Read More ›