Yahweh: Moral Monster?

Acquitted.

The God Debate.

New Covenant Church will be hosting a debate between Dinesh D'Souza, the author of "Why is Christianity Great," and Michael Shermer, editor of the Skeptic magazine, on April 19th.

The two have met previously. Here is Michael Shermer's site, which has videos of a prior debate.

Fresno atheist blogger, "Calladus," has some information on the debate.

Dinesh D'Souza's site has a video of his debate with Christopher Hitchens.

Looks interesting.

Worth Watching.

This is an hour and half talk by Tim Keller that in a conversation, non-didactic, nonpolemical way tanks the most common objections of the New Atheists to religious belief. Keller is the author of The Reason for God, which describes his thoughts on the objections to religion offered by the upscale New York liberals to whom he ministers.

The interesting thing in this presentation is the different tone and the vastly broader knowledge base that Keller brings to his presentation than is found in the writings of the New Atheists. For example, while Keller is familiar with Kant and Polanyi, it became clear from reading Christopher Hitchens' "God is Not Great" that Hitchens hadn't a clue about what it was that Aquinas actually wrote.

Also interesting is just how bad and cliched were some of the questions from the atheist and philosophy majors. It was clear that these students had come prepared with opinions and very little knowledge apart from what they had been told or felt. Keller's common response was to politely and gently point out that the students needed to do their homework, which, frankly, is something that Undergraduates ought to be told.

Also, Keller touts Richard Bauckham's "Jesus and the Eyewitnesses" - a book that takes the "revolutionary" position that the Gospels are what they claim to be: eye-witness accounts of Jesus' ministry, Passion and Resurrection - as threatening to overturn the conventional wisdom that the Gospels are essentially mythical concoctions.




Happy Easter!

Russell v. Coppleston.

Worth Reading.

Actions and no Reactions.

Steven Pinker has an essay on the "Geneology of Morals." Pinker seems to be arguing that the human tendency to "moralize" about different issues is a side-effect of the unique and complicated "wiring" of the human brain. Such "moralizing", according to Pinker, says very little about objective reality, is beset with structural problems and runs a distant second best to objective reasoning with "moralizing."

Pinker writes:

Far from debunking morality, then, the science of the moral sense can advance it, by allowing us to see through the illusions that evolution and culture have saddled us with and to focus on goals we can share and defend. As Anton Chekhov wrote, “Man will become better when you show him what he is like.”

It is so very strange that everyone else has a problem with the hardwired constraints of the human brain when it comes to moral issues, but not scientists like Pinker, for whom description is prescription and "is" really is "ought."

Mark Shea disembowels Pinker's great leap of faith:

This one explains why Mother Teresa is actually evil and "good" and "evil" are pure materialist ephiphenomena (except when they are given transcendant value by materialists in support of their favorite cause). So, for instance, a life devoted to caring for the least of these in service to Christ is just the outworking of genetics, wind and weather. There's no actual "God" there to serve. But if you question Darwinian Mythos, then you are famously insane, stupid or Evil, according to Dawkins. And "Evil" does not mean, "in violation of a system of order my brain chemistry has imposed on the cosmos". It means "evil"--and you should probably have your children taken away as child-abuse victims.

Ultimately, if there is no external source of morality to appeal to, then why should we agree with any of Pinker's "oughts." Perhaps, a differen set of "is's" really determine the "true" "oughts." "Is's" like genocide, slavery and imperialism have far more of a claim to describe "true" human nature, than fantasy's like the "Golden Rule."

Update: Ramesh Ponnuru points out that the "trolley problem", offered by Pinker as an example of the inscrutably problematic nature of human moral reasoning is not much of a proble:

I'm a little surprised at the comment about moral philosophers. It would of course be impossible to come up with a distinction that justifies the different responses and would satisfy all moral philosophers. But it doesn't seem so hard to come up with something "coherent" in the everyday sense of that word. In the switch-the-track case, you're not causing anyone's death as a means to the end of saving other lives. In the fat-man case, you are. I understand that there are moral philosophies that deny the importance of this type of distinction, but there doesn't seem to be anything incoherent about it.

Since Catholic moral teaching from time immemorable has held that one may not do evil to bring about good, and this insight apparently coincides with the majority of the world's moral intuition, one might think that (a) human moral reasoning is possible or (b) people are "wired" to reach intuitive but correct answers to moral problems.

It seems like the affinity of moral intution and religious teachings is only a problem if someone wants an excuse to do things that they really know are immoral or inhuman.

Pitching book sales to the choir

Jeremy Lott discusses why Christopher's deeply flawed book can sell so well.

The review is worthwhile if only to reminesce about the pasting that Hitchens took at the hands of Doug Wilson, wherein Wilson observed:

After this many installments, I now feel comfortable in asserting that I have posed this question to you from every point of the compass and have not yet received anything that approaches the semblance of an answer. On this question I am tempted to quote Wyatt Earp from the film Tombstone—"You gonna do something or just stand there and bleed?"—but I think I'll pass. Earp was not very much like the Good Samaritan.

What a great line.

"My hope is that the movie will bomb, and Hollywood will have to go back to less alluring efforts to corrupt the young."

One thing about being a reflexive and tribal anti-anti-Catholic is that it seems to keep one on the side of true humanity and reason.

Hence, Tom Smith writes about the real problem with the atheistic agit-prop in Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass (in theatres everywhere!) - it's a fascist fable.

Fascist in the sense of the Nazi scheme of supplanting Christianity with pagan nature fables and the occult. Smith writes:

I think his invocation of fascist themes and memes is probably unconscious. It is just that similar jobs tend to call forth similar tools. The European fascists generally and the Nazis in particular very much wanted to cut off the influence and ultimately destroy the Judeo-Christian God and the Church in particular. They had political reasons for wanting this, but also ideological and (weirdly) religious reasons. Not all of the Nazis were devotes of the occult, but many of them were, and the ones who were not very much understood the importance and power of building a fascist mythos which could motivate and inspire people. To put together their ideology, the Nazis pulled out of the great cesspool of European ideas a lot of nasty things that would have been much better left alone, but among them was the idea that Christianity, which they saw as nothing more than a kind of Judaism, severed people from their inner Nature spirit, their pagan, let's run through the woods naked sort of thing. When Pullman has the Church taking children to camps to sever them from their daemons -- their animal- embodied-soul-mates that every whole person in his alternative universe has -- he is just parroting in kid lit form the old canard you could have picked up in a hundred disreputable places in Bavaria or Vienna in the 1930's.

Smith's point about the occult in Pullman is interesting in light of Umberto Eco's observations that I posted yesterday:

The existing religions just aren't big enough: we demand something more from God than the existing depictions in the Christian faith can provide. So we revert to the occult. The so-called occult sciences do not ever reveal any genuine secret: they only promise that there is something secret that explains and justifies everything. The great advantage of this is that it allows each person to fill up the empty secret "container" with his or her own fears and hopes.

Read Smith's post. It has some gems including a nod to G.K. Chesterton and this keen observation:

Catholics used to complain that anti-Catholicism was the Antisemitism of the intellectuals, but this was before the intellectuals went back to antisemitism.

Sad, but true.

Worth Reading - An Agnostic on Christmas.

Walking Together posts Umberto Eco's thoughts on Christmas and the poverty of the modern alternative to faith.

Read the whole thing, but there are things that caught my eye.

For example, I've always considered the execrable Da Vinci Code to be a poor man's Foucalt's Pendelum (by Eco), so I thought that this was amusing:

The "death of God", or at least the dying of the Christian God, has been accompanied by the birth of a plethora of new idols. They have multiplied like bacteria on the corpse of the Christian Church -- from strange pagan cults and sects to the silly, sub-Christian superstitions of The Da Vinci Code.

It is amazing how many people take that book literally, and think it is true. Admittedly, Dan Brown, its author, has created a legion of zealous followers who believe that Jesus wasn't crucified: he married Mary Magdalene, became the King of France, and started his own version of the order of Freemasons. Many of the people who now go to the Louvre are there only to look at the Mona Lisa, solely and simply because it is at the centre of Dan Brown's book.

The pianist Arthur Rubinstein was once asked if he believed in God. He said: "No. I don't believe in God. I believe in something greater." Our culture suffers from the same inflationary tendency. The existing religions just aren't big enough: we demand something more from God than the existing depictions in the Christian faith can provide. So we revert to the occult. The so-called occult sciences do not ever reveal any genuine secret: they only promise that there is something secret that explains and justifies everything. The great advantage of this is that it allows each person to fill up the empty secret "container" with his or her own fears and hopes.

Also, the Joyce quote in this paragraph came up yesterday in a book discussion group:

I was raised as a Catholic, and although I have abandoned the Church, this December, as usual, I will be putting together a Christmas crib for my grandson. We'll construct it together - as my father did with me when I was a boy. I have profound respect for the Christian traditions - which, as rituals for coping with death, still make more sense than their purely commercial alternatives.

I think I agree with Joyce's lapsed Catholic hero in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?" The religious celebration of Christmas is at least a clear and coherent absurdity. The commercial celebration is not even that.

The Joyce quote actually goes:

- Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a protestant?
- I said that I had lost faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost selfrespect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent.

There is also this:

- And why were you shocked, Cranly pressed on in the same tone , if you feel sure that our religion is false and that Jesus was not the son of God?
-I am not at all sure of it, Stephen said. He is more like a son of God than a son of Mary.
- And is that why you will not communicate, Cranly asked, because you are not sure of that too, because you feel that the host, too, may be the body and blood of the son of God and not a wafer of bread. And because you fear that it may be?
- Yes, Stephen said quietly, I feel that and I fear it also.

Which ties into Eco's initial point about the superstition of the materialists.

D'Souza v. Hitchens.

I received this link from a mailing list run by Bede.

It is an article by Professor Dan Robinson on his reflections on the debate between Dinesh D'Souza and Christopher Hitchens. Professor Robinson makes some very good points about the irony of Hitchens in using Christian concepts - such as "oppression" - to criticize Christianity. After all, writes Professor Robinson:

"Indeed, beyond the ambit of Christian teaching, what's wrong with oppression? Aristotle was satisfied that, "It is fitting that Hellenes shall rule barbarians." The Jews of the Old Testament railed against the Egyptian oppressors but surely not on the grounds that slavery is always and everywhere a moral wrong. I note this to make clear the unintended irony of Christopher Hitchens's attack on religion as a source of, yes, oppression!"

Professor Robinson also makes some very strong and succinct arguments concerning the illogical positions taken by the "New Atheists."

Well worth the read if you like that kind of thing.

Great Moments in Snark.

I-steve on Christopher Hitchens:

The widespread notion in America that Christopher Hitchens is a Major Thinker is a puzzling one. I have to imagine that much of the reception he gets on this side of the pond is due to the naiveté of us Colonials about British journalists. Hitchens has the Fleet Street knack for being able to churn out publishable prose fast and fluently despite spending a lot of time in fashionable watering holes getting well-watered, in which condition he conducts publicized feuds with other well-watered British personalities. Few American hacks can long function like that. But an ability to type while nursing a hangover does not make Hitchens the second coming of John Stuart Mill.

The post that motivated this observation is from Tom Piatek's blistering essay on Hitchens' "God is Not Great".

Incidently, I like Piatek's response to the conventional atheist cliche about discrepancies between the Gospels:

Hitchens makes much of the fact that there are differences among the four Gospels. Hitchens overstates these differences: the four Gospels are in substantial agreement on the central facts of Jesus’ public ministry. And the differences that do exist are understandable and scarcely suggest that the portrait of Jesus that emerges from the Gospels is unreliable. If four of Hitchens’ friends each set about writing a brief biography of him decades after his death, based on their own memories or the memories of others who had known Hitchens, there would no doubt be differences between their accounts, reflecting the different perspectives and memories of the authors. These differences would not show that Hitchens did not exist, or that the biographies were fabrications or unreliable.

As they say, read the whole thing.

Atheists and their "pocket aces."

Kenneth at Time Immortal has used his recent interaction with a plethora of atheists to reflect on the tendency of atheists to play their "pocket aces" - the atheist equivalent of "a Friday night pick-up line."

It's something I've subliminally noticed before, but Kenneth dissects these atheist tropes - the evil of religion, the flaws in the world, the indoctrination of children - with great skill.