This one seems to be making the rounds on the Intertubes. It may not be particularly philosophically deep, but it is seemingly popular. I'm not about to make a video response as the authors solicit, although this guy's video response ends on a charming note. So I'll do a written response instead.
1. What kind of evidence would it take for you to believe in God? Not what would be a good start, but what evidence would actually convince you? And when we say "God," we're talking about a mind which is all-loving, all-powerful (meaning he can do everything but what is logically contradictory), all-knowing, and eternal.
Notice the rhetorical twist in the question: "We Christians can't seem to convince you atheists of the existence of God. So instead, please try to convince yourselves." Sorry; it doesn't work that way; this isn't Moot Court. As proponents of the claim that God exists, you bear the burden of proof. What that proof might be, I haven't a clue. Maybe such evidence exists; I haven't seen any after forty years of life but then again, I don't know what you've got to offer. So hit me with your best shot.
2. Is there anything I can do that would convince you that God exists? Like, could any argument we could make have the potential to sway you?
See my answer to question #1, above. One thing I'd suggest you do before trying is to see if your new, wonderful argument is really new and wonderful. And sorry, chances are that it isn't. In fact, chances are good that your argument is some variant of either the ontological argument or the cosmological argument, and I find neither to be convincing.
3. If you realized that an all-loving God existed, would you desire to have a relationship with Him? If you said "yes" to that question, would you want to have a relationship with Him just to get into heaven or for some other reason?
An all-loving God would be a nice friend to have for all sorts of reasons, the best reason being to enjoy and reciprocate the love and friendship offered. Now, note that according to your definition, God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving. As such, an all-loving, omnibenevolent God would put everyone into eternal paradise and bliss in the afterlife, regardless of whether they were sinners, apostates, or whatnot. So if an all-loving God existed (as you've defined Him), I wouldn't be worried about getting in to heaven at all; that God would put me in Heaven no matter what because He loves me the same way He loves you.
4. Have you ever met a Christian that lives their life in such a way that it is clear that they believe in an all-loving God? (Onscreen disclaimer: "I am not insinuating that only Christians can be moral") Meaning they live a life that is impressively kind, loving, and selfless.
Yes, I have met and known and in some cases formed warm friendships with many Christians whose kindness, capacity for love, and selflessness have impressed me and touched me deeply on an emotional level. Those friendships have deeply enriched my life. Similarly, I've met and been morally impressed by people who identify as Jewish, atheist, agnostic, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, or in the case of my favorite roommate from college, Zoroastrian. I do not think one's religiosity has any more relationship with one's moral worth than does one's shoe size.
5. Has the presence or lack of presence of such a person had any impact on your atheism?
None whatsoever. My love for my friends, and their love for me, does not change the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever to justify or even inspire belief in the supernatural, any more than such love (or the lack of such love) would change the speed of light or the force of gravity. The universe is utterly and absolutely indifferent to your feelings about it. God either exists or does not exist, regardless of whether Christians are good people or bad people.
Showing posts with label Philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Philosophy. Show all posts
November 11, 2010
October 5, 2010
Fundamental Questions
While we in the USA take our democracy-within-a-republic very much for granted, we should not. It only takes a look across the Atlantic to our allies, trading partners, and friends in Europe to see people who look and act very much like us, but who nevertheless periodically confront much more fundamental questions about what good government is than we do. Here, we argue about marginal tax rates, marginal differences in expansion of government involvement in the health care system, and make noises about our debt but never really do much about it. Many of the social issues we confront and clash about are, in the grand scheme of things, really only so much noise. We aren't confronting basic issues like whether the government should nationalize every industry with 50 or more employers. We don't address questions like whether the military should provide police services. We have a very broad, very deep consensus in favor of our federalized republican form of government. In Europe and elsewhere, these kinds of issues are still in play.
I was reminded of this after reading a Portuguese blogbuddy celebrate the centennial of the proclamation of the Republic of Portugal today. One hundred years ago today, the purportedly constitutional monarchy fell and democratic rule became the government of Portugal. I say "purportedly" because an earlier King had imposed what was effectively a dictatorship within the framework of that Constitutional scheme, which resulted in his assassination. The Portuguese have the good taste to not celebrate the anniversary of the assassination but rather of the subsequent proclamation of a republican form of government as the worthwhile date to commemorate.* Now, because the author of this blog is a lawyer, he celebrated the holiday with a question -- was it worth it?
In response to the post, I took the time to educate myself about the events of the last century in his nation -- this is the sort of thing I think Wikipedia is good for -- and found an erratic history, one of republican government displacing monarchy, then collapsing into a quasi-fascism, then being usurped by military governments, and only within my lifetime returning to a parliamentary democracy in line with the bulk of Europe. Looking at Portugal's economic history, it appears that its degree of economic prosperity has roughly coincided with the degree of freedom afforded its people during the last century. The Portuguese were always industrialized and compared with global nations never impoverished, but they've done much better for themselves under republican forms of government than the authoritarian alternatives that were tried. This hardly strikes me as a coincidence but I'm prejudiced in that regard.
On my counterpart's blog, I argued (with the aid of a translation tool since I have no Portuguese myself) that in broad terms, a form of government founded upon the rule of law will necessarily trend towards a republican form of government and away from an authoritarian model. I also argued that a government founded upon popular rule will eventually reach a republican level (which I did not define there as meaning "representative democracy" but that's what I meant) because anarcho-capitalism and direct democracy are simply too inefficient to provide for effective government and therefore even autonomous individuals who find themselves in such an environment will eventually come around to the idea that they need a government with teeth. I'm borrowing heavily from both Nozick and Rawls here, but that brings me to my question for the morning, one which all you political theory junkies out there will enjoy. And I mean both of you.
My premise asks that you assume a large body of self-governing people who are dedicated to the idea of the rule of law. Is it inevitable that such people will choose a form of government that incorporates a substantial amount of representative democracy? Or could they rationally, and consistent with their dedication to the rule of law, adopt an authoritarian form of government? I know that democratic means have resulted in fascist military governments in multiple places during the 20th century (Portugal among them), so what lesson can we take from that -- did those elections represent a real choice by the voters or was there some sort of departure from the peoples' commitment to the rule of law?
It might also be the case that we do not have enough data points in history to plot a curve here -- meaningful self-government is a relatively new phenomenon in human history, after all.
Ultimately, it seems to me not, although I wonder if I must resort to special pleading when considering the cases of Germany and Italy in the 1930's, or if those can be written off as extreme points in the inevitable cycle of right-versus-left power shifts that will take place within a democratic system in response to fluctuating internal economic and external diplomatic conditions. I certainly hope that the rule of law leads to meaningful self-government, and I can't think of a way it wouldn't (eventually), but I've not poured enough brainpower into the issue to be satisfied that this is necessarily the case -- and the example of the rise of fascism in the 20th century suggests to me that I might be wrong.
* Touchingly, it looks to me like the most significant national holiday of Portugal celebrates the nation's greatest poet, Luís Vaz de Camões. Nothing like that here -- July 4 is a fine day to celebrate for our political history, but we have no holidays dedicated to the arts and our Portuguese friends have set an example that we ought to consider following.
I was reminded of this after reading a Portuguese blogbuddy celebrate the centennial of the proclamation of the Republic of Portugal today. One hundred years ago today, the purportedly constitutional monarchy fell and democratic rule became the government of Portugal. I say "purportedly" because an earlier King had imposed what was effectively a dictatorship within the framework of that Constitutional scheme, which resulted in his assassination. The Portuguese have the good taste to not celebrate the anniversary of the assassination but rather of the subsequent proclamation of a republican form of government as the worthwhile date to commemorate.* Now, because the author of this blog is a lawyer, he celebrated the holiday with a question -- was it worth it?
In response to the post, I took the time to educate myself about the events of the last century in his nation -- this is the sort of thing I think Wikipedia is good for -- and found an erratic history, one of republican government displacing monarchy, then collapsing into a quasi-fascism, then being usurped by military governments, and only within my lifetime returning to a parliamentary democracy in line with the bulk of Europe. Looking at Portugal's economic history, it appears that its degree of economic prosperity has roughly coincided with the degree of freedom afforded its people during the last century. The Portuguese were always industrialized and compared with global nations never impoverished, but they've done much better for themselves under republican forms of government than the authoritarian alternatives that were tried. This hardly strikes me as a coincidence but I'm prejudiced in that regard.
On my counterpart's blog, I argued (with the aid of a translation tool since I have no Portuguese myself) that in broad terms, a form of government founded upon the rule of law will necessarily trend towards a republican form of government and away from an authoritarian model. I also argued that a government founded upon popular rule will eventually reach a republican level (which I did not define there as meaning "representative democracy" but that's what I meant) because anarcho-capitalism and direct democracy are simply too inefficient to provide for effective government and therefore even autonomous individuals who find themselves in such an environment will eventually come around to the idea that they need a government with teeth. I'm borrowing heavily from both Nozick and Rawls here, but that brings me to my question for the morning, one which all you political theory junkies out there will enjoy. And I mean both of you.
My premise asks that you assume a large body of self-governing people who are dedicated to the idea of the rule of law. Is it inevitable that such people will choose a form of government that incorporates a substantial amount of representative democracy? Or could they rationally, and consistent with their dedication to the rule of law, adopt an authoritarian form of government? I know that democratic means have resulted in fascist military governments in multiple places during the 20th century (Portugal among them), so what lesson can we take from that -- did those elections represent a real choice by the voters or was there some sort of departure from the peoples' commitment to the rule of law?
It might also be the case that we do not have enough data points in history to plot a curve here -- meaningful self-government is a relatively new phenomenon in human history, after all.
Ultimately, it seems to me not, although I wonder if I must resort to special pleading when considering the cases of Germany and Italy in the 1930's, or if those can be written off as extreme points in the inevitable cycle of right-versus-left power shifts that will take place within a democratic system in response to fluctuating internal economic and external diplomatic conditions. I certainly hope that the rule of law leads to meaningful self-government, and I can't think of a way it wouldn't (eventually), but I've not poured enough brainpower into the issue to be satisfied that this is necessarily the case -- and the example of the rise of fascism in the 20th century suggests to me that I might be wrong.
* Touchingly, it looks to me like the most significant national holiday of Portugal celebrates the nation's greatest poet, Luís Vaz de Camões. Nothing like that here -- July 4 is a fine day to celebrate for our political history, but we have no holidays dedicated to the arts and our Portuguese friends have set an example that we ought to consider following.
September 29, 2010
Probate to Pangloss
My firm's probate practice requires us to frequently deal with people who are facing death. Sometimes it’s their own, sometimes it’s a loved one’s; sometimes the death is in the future and sometimes it is in the immediate past. One of the ways that I’ve seen survivors of the recently-deceased deal with their grief is to note that the decedent’s “quality of life” was low prior to death, and to take solace in the fact that they are now released from an uncomfortable existence.
Does that have any meaning other than “they were in a lot of pain”? Surely, “quality of life” means more than freedom from pain; a bedridden patient on morphine feels no pain but that is obviously not a desirable existence. At best, it is less bad than one in which one is both bedridden and stricken with pain. From this, we can see that being bedridden is something incompatible with a high-quality life, whether or not pain is a factor.
Put another way, what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for that state of existence called “happiness”? This topic came up recently on an e-mail discussion group and a pretty extensive list resulted. I augment, condense, and re-prioritize the list somewhat here to try and put all of the qualitatively similar items together. If you had all of these things, would you consider yourself happy?
I have difficulty imagining an existence in which I possessed everything on this list which would be unacceptable to me for some reason. The next step, then, is to take a measure of what’s on that list.
The first thing that strikes me about the list is how much of it is founded upon social interaction. The bulk of these criteria for a high-quality life appear to be predicated upon the ability to communicate and meaningfully interact with other people. Happiness seems inherently tied up with one’s relationship with other human beings. Perhaps I’m just that much of an extrovert, but a solitary life does not seem to be one in which happiness is possible. At most, solitude can be tolerated – but it normally cannot lead to real happiness.
It’s not necessarily easy to quantify these things – do you live in a society that rates “4” or a “9” on the “ten-point liberty-meter”? – and some of these criteria are abstract and ill-defined through my lawyer-like reliance on the concept of “reasonability.” What you think of as a reasonable amount of access to entertainment might seem parsimonious to me. A sufficient amount of money to get all this is obviously (and in my formulation, explicitly) a necessary condition, but there is clearly a point beyond which additional money becomes superfluous. By using a weasel-word like “reasonable,” I know I'm being inexact and imprecise, but please forgive me for that, because this sort of exercise is inevitably and inherently inexact and imprecise.
And, this looks like a generally inter-dependent set of criteria. A “boost up” in one area will probably assist in another; a “drag down” in one area will probably impact another. One can acquire financial means from a good job which results from a good education and a substantial network of social and family contacts, which in turn opens up travel and entertainment possibilities not previously available as well as greater access to health care, personal security, and political empowerment. Without personal security, though, the risk of property loss can be high enough that one’s financial means, even if otherwise good, are imperiled. It doesn’t matter how much money you make if someone else is just going to steal it.
Finally, it strikes me that a lot of this list is framed, or at least frame-able, in negative terms – we’re talking about the absence of hunger, the absence of crime, the absence of sickness, the absence of solitude, the absence of repression. Only in personal improvement and in the pleasure of giving to others are truly affirmative activities to be found; the rest of it might legitimately be seen as keeping the wolves at bay. But without finding some kind of self-identified and affirmative purpose to one’s life, it doesn’t seem possible to me to be truly happy.
Now, I’ve tried to frame these criteria in a timeless sort of manner, so that they might be a useful index to measure things in historical time. It’s clear that, at least in the industrialized western world, we have longer, faster, more productive, and more pleasure-filled lives now than at any point in the historical past – but are we happier today than our ancestors were? I have to say that looking at the list, yes, we do. We have more and better food than ever before; more and better health care than ever before; more and better education than ever before; we are wealthier as a society than ever before (at least, when averaging out for the ups and downs of economic cycles, which is not always easy to do while we’re still in a “down” phase of that cycle). And there are simply more of us around than ever before, which means we have more opportunities for social interactions than before (including more opportunities to make enemies upon whom we might revenge ourselves).
While it’s not been without significant costs, if my list is correct, then our modern, technologically-advanced society indeed does make us happier than the generations who have preceded us – and we can reasonably anticipate that our descendants will be even happier still.
Does that have any meaning other than “they were in a lot of pain”? Surely, “quality of life” means more than freedom from pain; a bedridden patient on morphine feels no pain but that is obviously not a desirable existence. At best, it is less bad than one in which one is both bedridden and stricken with pain. From this, we can see that being bedridden is something incompatible with a high-quality life, whether or not pain is a factor.
Put another way, what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for that state of existence called “happiness”? This topic came up recently on an e-mail discussion group and a pretty extensive list resulted. I augment, condense, and re-prioritize the list somewhat here to try and put all of the qualitatively similar items together. If you had all of these things, would you consider yourself happy?
- Loving relationships with others, including the formation of a family unit of one’s own choosing.
- The personal liberty to act, speak, and believe as one chooses (provided one does not unreasonably harm others in one’s actions) and sufficient political empowerment so as to meaningfully participate in society, without fear of governmental retribution.
- A functioning, pain-free body, with affordable and readily-available health care in the event that one’s health diminishes, and a painless, dignified end to life.
- Meaningful ability to improve oneself by way of pursuing educational, intellectual, personal, and professional goals.
- A healthy environment, including clean air and water, access to unspoiled and beautiful natural areas, and availability of a variety of nutritious and pleasurable foods.
- Safety and security from violence to one’s person and retention of one’s possessions, and confidence in the same for oneself and others.
- Means sufficient to not impose anxiety about the financial impact of every decision in life, obtained through some form of socially useful, non-abusive employment.
- Access to travel, entertainment, and similar sorts of personal pleasures in reasonable quantity and quality -- perhaps including the giving of good things to others such as one’s family and friends or to charity.
- Revenge against one’s enemies. (That one is a joke, and not an original one, either.)
I have difficulty imagining an existence in which I possessed everything on this list which would be unacceptable to me for some reason. The next step, then, is to take a measure of what’s on that list.
The first thing that strikes me about the list is how much of it is founded upon social interaction. The bulk of these criteria for a high-quality life appear to be predicated upon the ability to communicate and meaningfully interact with other people. Happiness seems inherently tied up with one’s relationship with other human beings. Perhaps I’m just that much of an extrovert, but a solitary life does not seem to be one in which happiness is possible. At most, solitude can be tolerated – but it normally cannot lead to real happiness.
It’s not necessarily easy to quantify these things – do you live in a society that rates “4” or a “9” on the “ten-point liberty-meter”? – and some of these criteria are abstract and ill-defined through my lawyer-like reliance on the concept of “reasonability.” What you think of as a reasonable amount of access to entertainment might seem parsimonious to me. A sufficient amount of money to get all this is obviously (and in my formulation, explicitly) a necessary condition, but there is clearly a point beyond which additional money becomes superfluous. By using a weasel-word like “reasonable,” I know I'm being inexact and imprecise, but please forgive me for that, because this sort of exercise is inevitably and inherently inexact and imprecise.
And, this looks like a generally inter-dependent set of criteria. A “boost up” in one area will probably assist in another; a “drag down” in one area will probably impact another. One can acquire financial means from a good job which results from a good education and a substantial network of social and family contacts, which in turn opens up travel and entertainment possibilities not previously available as well as greater access to health care, personal security, and political empowerment. Without personal security, though, the risk of property loss can be high enough that one’s financial means, even if otherwise good, are imperiled. It doesn’t matter how much money you make if someone else is just going to steal it.
Finally, it strikes me that a lot of this list is framed, or at least frame-able, in negative terms – we’re talking about the absence of hunger, the absence of crime, the absence of sickness, the absence of solitude, the absence of repression. Only in personal improvement and in the pleasure of giving to others are truly affirmative activities to be found; the rest of it might legitimately be seen as keeping the wolves at bay. But without finding some kind of self-identified and affirmative purpose to one’s life, it doesn’t seem possible to me to be truly happy.
Now, I’ve tried to frame these criteria in a timeless sort of manner, so that they might be a useful index to measure things in historical time. It’s clear that, at least in the industrialized western world, we have longer, faster, more productive, and more pleasure-filled lives now than at any point in the historical past – but are we happier today than our ancestors were? I have to say that looking at the list, yes, we do. We have more and better food than ever before; more and better health care than ever before; more and better education than ever before; we are wealthier as a society than ever before (at least, when averaging out for the ups and downs of economic cycles, which is not always easy to do while we’re still in a “down” phase of that cycle). And there are simply more of us around than ever before, which means we have more opportunities for social interactions than before (including more opportunities to make enemies upon whom we might revenge ourselves).
While it’s not been without significant costs, if my list is correct, then our modern, technologically-advanced society indeed does make us happier than the generations who have preceded us – and we can reasonably anticipate that our descendants will be even happier still.
Labels:
Death,
Ethics and Morality,
History,
Philosophy
September 20, 2010
Angels And Kiwis: A Little Help Please
I've never seen an angel. I have seen pictures of angels in art, but not an actual entity that matches or even approximates the description of angels in art and myth. I know people who claim to have seen and interacted with angels and according to some polls, a reasonably large number of people express belief that angels actually exist. I do not believe that they are telling me the truth. Most charitably, I believe they have deluded themselves into thinking a prosaic experience involved angels. But even if I were to grant that these people were honestly self-deluded, I would still disbelieve the truth of the matter asserted, which is the existence of angels. A tale of a phenomenon attributed to angelic activity would inspire me to mentally search for any possible alternative explanation that was even remotely more plausible than the one proffered.
Indeed, even if it turns out to be the case angels have an objective reality that I have simply missed out on, and you have had a direct, personal experience with an angel that was not a hallucination, chances are pretty good that you won't condemn me very much for not believing in angels and that you would agree that without more evidence than someone else's say-so, I am within the realm of reasonable behavior to disbelieve in angels.
For some people, angels are every bit as real as New Zealand. I've never been to or seen New Zealand; I have no direct, personal knowledge of New Zealand. I know people who claim to have seen and been in New Zealand and even met people who claim to have been born and lived there for a time. But I have no way of knowing if they are telling me the truth about their experiences. It is not difficult to seek out news from New Zealand on the internet, but it's not hard to find things that aren't true on the internet, either. I have seen pictures of what purports to be New Zealand in movies, photographs, and on maps. But I have no way of knowing if those images were not of some other place and simply part of a massive conspiracy on the part of others to convince me that there is such a place as New Zealand. Nevertheless, I have not the slightest doubt that other people are telling me the truth and that New Zealand really, objectively exists.
So -- angels are fiction, New Zealand is reality. I have no personal, direct experience with either. This seems to be a very reasonable way of dealing with the world. What is qualitatively different about my experience of angels as opposed to my experience of New Zealand?
If my use of "angels" as an example offends you because you believe in angels, substitute "fire-breathing dragons" in their place. The point is, it is eminently reasonable to disbelieve in angels and eminently reasonable to believe in New Zealand. Why is that the case instead of the converse or some other combination of those two states of belief?
I have an instinctual grasp of the qualitative difference between a belief in angels and a belief in New Zealand. But I find I have trouble articulating that difference. It's not simply that I trust the New Zealand advocates and mistrust the angelic advocates. It can't be my personal experience; I have no more experience, memory, or other direct sense data about New Zealand than I do about angels. Some of it has to do with references to New Zealand that I can find in source material that I deem to be authoritative, but again, this is obviously insufficient to justify reliance on or prefer one kind of reference (an atlas) as opposed to another (the Bible).
It has to do more with an understanding of the diversity and wealth of different source material supporting the proposition that New Zealand exists as opposed to the source material supporting the proposition that angels exist. I read an atlas, and it tells me that both Florida and New Zealand exist. I have had direct, personal experience with Florida; I've been there, lived there, and have memories of direct sense data accumulated with respect to Florida. This correlates strongly with similar claims made by other people about Florida; their stories seem very similar to my own memories and sensations. Because some of these people and some of these references are congruent with experiences I have had, I give them a presumption of veracity which I do not with those whose experiences are deeply incongruent with reality as I know it to be, like claims about angels.
This strikes me as at best a partial explanation. People I otherwise trust and even rely upon believe in angels and make reference to their existence. Women report to me that childbirth is uncomfortable, often to the point of being painful. I believe these women, but not only do I lack experience with which to verify or correlate their claims, as a male, I can never acquire such experience. I could, in theory, travel to New Zealand and experience it for myself, assuming that it exists. Even if I undergo gender reassignment surgery, the accident of my being born biologically male means that I will never have the experience necessary to directly verify a claim that giving birth is painful. But again, there is something about the quality of the claim that would make it unreasonable for me to disbelieve in the pain of childbirth which is different from a claim that there are fire-breathing dragons alive somewhere on Earth right now.
What I have difficulty articulating right now are philosophically robust qualitative differentiations between claims which are reasonable and those which are unreasonable. Something is not reasonable simply because I say it is, it is not reasonable simply because my instincts tell me it is so. There must be some principled way to differentiate between a reasonable and unreasonable claim; I find that I lack the training or language to accurately describe what I'm getting at.
Indeed, even if it turns out to be the case angels have an objective reality that I have simply missed out on, and you have had a direct, personal experience with an angel that was not a hallucination, chances are pretty good that you won't condemn me very much for not believing in angels and that you would agree that without more evidence than someone else's say-so, I am within the realm of reasonable behavior to disbelieve in angels.
For some people, angels are every bit as real as New Zealand. I've never been to or seen New Zealand; I have no direct, personal knowledge of New Zealand. I know people who claim to have seen and been in New Zealand and even met people who claim to have been born and lived there for a time. But I have no way of knowing if they are telling me the truth about their experiences. It is not difficult to seek out news from New Zealand on the internet, but it's not hard to find things that aren't true on the internet, either. I have seen pictures of what purports to be New Zealand in movies, photographs, and on maps. But I have no way of knowing if those images were not of some other place and simply part of a massive conspiracy on the part of others to convince me that there is such a place as New Zealand. Nevertheless, I have not the slightest doubt that other people are telling me the truth and that New Zealand really, objectively exists.
So -- angels are fiction, New Zealand is reality. I have no personal, direct experience with either. This seems to be a very reasonable way of dealing with the world. What is qualitatively different about my experience of angels as opposed to my experience of New Zealand?
If my use of "angels" as an example offends you because you believe in angels, substitute "fire-breathing dragons" in their place. The point is, it is eminently reasonable to disbelieve in angels and eminently reasonable to believe in New Zealand. Why is that the case instead of the converse or some other combination of those two states of belief?
I have an instinctual grasp of the qualitative difference between a belief in angels and a belief in New Zealand. But I find I have trouble articulating that difference. It's not simply that I trust the New Zealand advocates and mistrust the angelic advocates. It can't be my personal experience; I have no more experience, memory, or other direct sense data about New Zealand than I do about angels. Some of it has to do with references to New Zealand that I can find in source material that I deem to be authoritative, but again, this is obviously insufficient to justify reliance on or prefer one kind of reference (an atlas) as opposed to another (the Bible).
It has to do more with an understanding of the diversity and wealth of different source material supporting the proposition that New Zealand exists as opposed to the source material supporting the proposition that angels exist. I read an atlas, and it tells me that both Florida and New Zealand exist. I have had direct, personal experience with Florida; I've been there, lived there, and have memories of direct sense data accumulated with respect to Florida. This correlates strongly with similar claims made by other people about Florida; their stories seem very similar to my own memories and sensations. Because some of these people and some of these references are congruent with experiences I have had, I give them a presumption of veracity which I do not with those whose experiences are deeply incongruent with reality as I know it to be, like claims about angels.
This strikes me as at best a partial explanation. People I otherwise trust and even rely upon believe in angels and make reference to their existence. Women report to me that childbirth is uncomfortable, often to the point of being painful. I believe these women, but not only do I lack experience with which to verify or correlate their claims, as a male, I can never acquire such experience. I could, in theory, travel to New Zealand and experience it for myself, assuming that it exists. Even if I undergo gender reassignment surgery, the accident of my being born biologically male means that I will never have the experience necessary to directly verify a claim that giving birth is painful. But again, there is something about the quality of the claim that would make it unreasonable for me to disbelieve in the pain of childbirth which is different from a claim that there are fire-breathing dragons alive somewhere on Earth right now.
What I have difficulty articulating right now are philosophically robust qualitative differentiations between claims which are reasonable and those which are unreasonable. Something is not reasonable simply because I say it is, it is not reasonable simply because my instincts tell me it is so. There must be some principled way to differentiate between a reasonable and unreasonable claim; I find that I lack the training or language to accurately describe what I'm getting at.
Labels:
Philosophy
July 23, 2010
A Libertarian Solution To A Public Problem
This is why I'm not a pure libertarian; at some point, privatizing everything becomes absurd.
Pay & Sit by Fabian Brunsing
Pay & Sit by Fabian Brunsing
Labels:
Philosophy,
Unimportant but Mildly Amusing
May 15, 2010
Ravi Zacharias' Six Questions Answered!
At The Atheist Experience, I find a set of six 'questions' from Ravi Zacharias, an evangelical Christian apologist. Matt D. at Atheist Experience does a fine job on his own behalf and I commend his thoughts on the issues Zacharias raises to you. But I'm also offering my own stab at them, one that I hope is somewhat briefer while still being thoughtful enough to be meaningful.
The rest of Zacharias' "questions" are really arguments:
And for the fifteen thousandth time, Hitler was not an atheist.
Boiled down to its essence, Zacharias basically argues with his six questions as follows: "Existence without God would be a horrifying absurdity, therefore, God must exist." I can't think of any facet of that proposition which can be intellectually redeemed.
1. If there is no God, “the big questions” remain unanswered, so how do we answer the following questions: Where did everything come from, and why is there something rather than nothing? Why is there conscious, intelligent life on this planet, and is there any meaning to this life? Does human history lead anywhere, or is it all in vain since death is merely the end? How do you come to understand good and evil, right and wrong without a transcendent signifier? If these concepts are merely social constructions, or human opinions, where do we look to determine what is good or bad, right or wrong? If you are content within an atheistic worldview, what circumstances would serve to make you open to other answers?Zacharias pumps a lot of questions into this single question. Fortunately, all of them are susceptible of brief answers:
- Where did everything come from? Science doesn't know yet. And that's OK.
- Why is there something rather than nothing? Science doesn't know yet. And that's OK.
- Why is there conscious, intelligent life on this planet? Because it evolved here.
- Is there any meaning to this life? The question implies the word "transcendent" as a modified to the word "meaning" and the answer is no, there is not. There is only the meaning that we pick for ourselves. If the modifier is "objective," then yes, there is -- the transmission and propagation of the chemical sequences known as "genes" within the deoxyribonucleic acid embedded within our cells.
- Does human history lead anywhere, or is it all in vain since death is merely the end? False choice. Death is not necessarily the end of the human experience. Nor does death as the terminal experience of human existence (whether individual or collective) necessarily deprive that existence of meaning.
- How do you come to understand good and evil, right and wrong without a transcendent signifier? Through reason, empathy, and experience.
- If these concepts are merely social constructions, or human opinions, where do we look to determine what is good or bad, right or wrong? See the immediately previous answer.
- If you are content within an atheistic worldview, what circumstances would serve to make you open to other answers? (Query as to the grammar here; an "atheistic worldview" is not a question, but I understand what he's getting at -- what would make an atheist previously comfortable with his atheism question it?) Substantial evidence of the existence of an interventionist supernatural entity, viz. a prayer-induced spontaneous regrowth of an amputated human limb.
The rest of Zacharias' "questions" are really arguments:
2. If we reject the existence of God, we are left with a crisis of meaning, so why don’t we see more atheists taking their worldview more seriously like Jean Paul Sartre, or Friedrich Nietzsche, or Michel Foucault? These three atheists recognized that in the absence of God, there was no transcendent meaning beyond one’s own self-interests, pleasures, or tastes. The experience of atheistic meaninglessness is recorded in Sartre’s book Nausea. Without God, these three thinkers, among others, show us a world of just stuff, thrown out into space and time, going nowhere, meaning nothing.Existentialism requires that you explain and justify your own existence on your own terms and not resort to hiding behind fictions like a supernatural overlord. It seems natural that you would sneer at existentialism if you do not possess such a justification for yourself and your actions. If, on the one hand, an atheistic world view necessarily has as its only transcencent meaning other than "one’s own self-interests, pleasures, or tastes" then ultimately the justification for why one does action "X" is either the atheistic answer "because it pleased me to do so," or the theistic answer "because I believed that it pleased God that I do so," which ultimately is really the same thing as the atheistic answer because the theist takes pleasure in pleasing God. And who says that there aren't a lot of atheists who take the existentialists seriously? Understanding existentialism, at any level of sophistication, does not require that one become joyless.
3. If people don’t believe in God, the historical results are horrific, so how do we deal with the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot who saw religion as the problem and worked to eradicate it? Countless millions lost their lives under these godless regimes, regimes more influenced by Nietzsche’s concept of the ubermensch (superman) than they were by transcendent morality.If people do believe in God, the historical results are also horrific. If you are going to lay some of (but not all of) the genocides of the twentieth century at the feet of atheism, then you must answer for a dozen or so Crusades launched by Christianity, dozens if not hundreds of jihads launched by Islam, hundreds of pre-Nazi pogroms against Jews across Europe, the riots of religion that separated Pakistan and Bangladesh from India, the Wars of the European Reformation, and debatably, the massive extermination partially unwittingly perpetrated on Native Americans by European conquerors, most of whom were motivated by the desire to spread Christianity to the New World. Violence and death are at least as much the result of the presence of religion as its absence.
And for the fifteen thousandth time, Hitler was not an atheist.
4. If there is no God, the problems of evil and suffering are in no way solved, so where is the hope of redemption, or meaning for those who suffer? Suffering is just as tragic, if not more so, without God because there is no hope of it being rendered meaningful or transcendent, redemptive or redeemable, since no interventions in this life or reparations in an afterlife are possible. It might be true that there is no God to blame now, but neither is there a God to reach out to for strength, transcendent meaning, or comfort. There is only madness and confusion in the face of suffering and evil.This "question" presupposes that God is benevolent. If what you are concerned with is succor from suffering, then a malicious or even an indifferent deity is probably worse than no deity at all. And if what you are concerned with is succor from suffering, merely wanting a deity to provide that succor does not mean that such a deity really exists. I would like it very much if Santa Claus really did give toys and presents to good little boys and girls all over the world on Christmas Day. How marvelous that would be! But wanting it to be true does not make it so. In the original article, Matt D. points out also that succor is available from other people, and that the existence of suffering in a theistic universe raises questions about the true benevolence of God, which are also points worth considering.
5. If there is no God, we lose the very standard by which we critique religions and religious people, so whose opinion matters most? Whose voice will be heard? Whose tastes or preferences will be honored? In the long run, human tastes and opinions have no more weight than we give them, and who are we to give them meaning anyway? Who is to say that lying, or cheating or adultery or child molestation are wrong — really wrong? Where do those standards come from? Sure, our societies might make these things “illegal” and impose penalties or consequences for things that are not socially acceptable, but human cultures have at various times legally or socially disapproved of everything from believing in God to believing the world revolves around the sun; from slavery, to interracial marriage, from polygamy to monogamy. Human taste, opinion law and culture are hardly dependable arbiters of Truth.This is simply another way of rephrasing Zacharias' earlier question, "How do you come to understand good and evil, right and wrong without a transcendent signifier?" My answer remains the same: through reason, empathy, and experience. I'll also add that religion (which is not necessarily the same thing as belief in God in this context) has been uses as the justification for every one of the historical evils Zacharias mentions in his question, and indeed more than that. Religion, therefore, is at least as much a perpetrator of evil as a force to ameliorate it. God's existence (distinguished from religion) does not resolve the problem of evil, either, because we are left with Epicurus' quatrain about God and evil:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then He is not omnipotent. Is He able, but not willing? Then He is malevolent. Is He both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is He neither able nor willing? Then why call Him God?To be sure, Epicurus is a way of rephrasing the classic issue of the problem of evil, but at least in this argument, Zacharias has not dealt with that issue in any meaningful way.
6. If there is no God, we don’t make sense, so how do we explain human longings and desire for the transcendent? How do we even explain human questions for meaning and purpose, or inner thoughts like, why I am so unfulfilled or empty? Why do I hunger for the spiritual? How do we deal with these questions if nothing can exist beyond the material world? Atheists, particularly atheistic scientists go way beyond their scientific training when they depart from the “how” questions to prognosticating about the “why” questions. Even terms like “natural selection” seems a misuse of words, since only an intelligent being can assess options and choose. How do we get laws out of luck, or predictable processes out of brute chance? If all that makes us different from animals is learning and altruism, why do the brutish still widely outnumber the wise in our world?This question is packed to the gills with false premises. Even if there is no God, human beings make plenty of sense when understood for what they are: animals which are the current product of an ongoing process of evolution which has produced a confluence of self-awareness, tool-building, logical thought, long-term memory, and opposable digits as traits assisting survival of the organism. Like many apologists do, Zacharias again confuse the desired answer to a question with its premise. His desire for a transcendent purpose to life (which exists, or does not, independent of his desire for it to exist) is universalized, incorrectly; his lack of ability to imagine a world without such a transcendent purpose is universalized, incorrectly; his failure to discern that human existence, while perhaps more complex than that of a "lower" animal, is really no different than that of any other species of social animal, is universalized, incorrectly. Indeed, Zacharias presumes that free choice exists, which is a far from certain proposition and one of which I have grown increasingly dubious.
Boiled down to its essence, Zacharias basically argues with his six questions as follows: "Existence without God would be a horrifying absurdity, therefore, God must exist." I can't think of any facet of that proposition which can be intellectually redeemed.
Labels:
Atheism,
Ethics and Morality,
Evolution,
History,
Link Love,
Philosophy,
Religion
April 14, 2010
Betting Against An Unknowable Infinity
Hat tip to Common Sense Atheism.
Labels:
Atheism,
Philosophy,
Religion
March 18, 2010
Aristotle's Hedonic Salad
A longstanding philosophical disagreement I have with some is that there is a difference between happiness and pleasure. Today, I got a good wrinkle on that debate.
I was asked whether I get more pleasure from my writing, from reading, or from watching football on television. The context was mainly my interlocutor's observation that when he watches a football game, he generally finds it only moderately entertaining, and he observes that I seem to get a lot of pleasure out of it. He was curious as to why he and I responded differently to the same thing, and even more curious about how he could find some way of measuring the degree to which our responses differed.
My answer was a bit off-the-cuff and called back on a concept I originally learned way back in high school when I took a philosophy class through the local junior college. In the context of discussing utilitarianism, the professor had suggested that one way of looking at "the good" which utilitarian ethics are supposed to maximize would be to say that pleasure is good and pain is bad. So, how then to measure pleasure and pain and thus evaluate whether a particular action was moral or not? This isn't something you can quantify, right?
Well, let us posit that pleasure can be quantified. My old philosophy professor suggested that the appropriate name for a unit of pleasure would be a "hedon." So my response to the question about how pleasurable I found watching football to be was that if reading a regular book would generate ten hedons per hour, watching a football game would generate fifteen hedons per hour, and reading a really good book would generate thirty hedons per hour.
From there, we played with this intellectual vanity a little bit and suggested that there are quite a few activities that generate diminishing rates of hedonic production. My friend observed that I seemed to like watching about one football game a day, but that I grew somewhat impatient and pensive during a second game; my response to a second game in a row was similar to his response to the first game. Thus, diminishing returns -- the first game generates a lot of hedons, the second game, not as many. This was eventually reduced to the idea of "saturation," meaning that we had varying appetites for the activity in question.
Now, yet another participant in the conversation pointed out that things he liked to do were not things that he considered pleasurable at all. For instance, some of his hobbies cause him to endure some degree of physical pain. Thus, the concept of the "anti-hedon" was worked into the conversation, as was teasing out the implication that a pleasurable activity, when its benefits and burdens are weighed, is really something that has a "net hedon production." Presumably, the pleasure that this fellow gets from his activities outweighs the pains, so by doing them, he achieves a net gain of hedons.
And of course, the generation of hedons may create as a byproduct a certain number of anti-hedons, such as the pain endured by a mountain climber over the course of climbing the mountain, which the climber calculates as less than the pleasure that will be gained by reaching the summit. Certain activities involve very little effort or cost to generate hedons, such as the initial example of watching a football game on TV -- the main cost of that activity is an opportunity cost because you could be doing something else with those three hours instead of watching sports on TV.
We briefly amused ourselves with the idea that this could create an entire hedonic calculus, by which the hedons and anti-hedons of a particular activity could be weighed and the curves of diminishing returns would lead to an economically-computed action plan resulting in the achievement of an Epicurean ideal state. I think there is something to this, as I explore below.
So, after dealing with a sidebar about whether Epicureanism is about maximizing pleasure or whether it's really about minimizing pain, we returned to the question of mixed activities and evaluating net pleasure or net pain. Our friend whose hobbies require him to endure pain resisted the idea of a hedonic calculus to his decision to do these things, intimating that his hobby generated very little pleasure at all and suggesting that indeed, his hobbies produced a net hedonic loss.
Why, then, would he do them? These are hobbies we're talking about here, not work or government-compelled duties or any other sort of obligation. He suggested that reducing a decision to do something to a question of whether it generates more pleasure than it does pain is to look through a lens that conceals more than it reveals. But that doesn't take us away from the question that maybe my friend is a masochist?
While that's possible, I think what's really going on is that it is insufficient to quantify pleasure and pain. Pleasures and pains are also qualitatively different from one another. The pleasure of sex is qualitatively different from the pleasure of achieving a difficult task, and both of these are qualitatively different than the pleasure of receiving praise. The physical pleasure-pain spectrum for my friend's activity is negative, but if the analysis is made along the achievement spectrum, my friend is able to defer seeking a reward for long enough that he will endure both physical pain and short-term frustration of learning how to do something, in exchange for the long-term satisfaction of achieving the difficult goal of succeeding and learning.
Now, perhaps for the masochist, pain is simply another qualitatively distinguishable form of pleasure. If that is the case, then the masochist seems to be dysfunctional because pursuit of the qualitative "pleasure" generated by enduring suffering must necessarily negate and even outweigh a different sort of pleasure. This eventually descends into a paradox in which negating hedons generates new hedons -- or perhaps not, if one "flavor" of hedon is converted into a different "flavor" through the psychological process of masochism.
Now, none of this really answered the initial question of why it is that my friend doesn't like football as much as I do. But I think the larger point is that this provides an objective, or nearly-objective, platform from which happiness can be defined as a function of pleasure, without descending into the sort of sybaritic vision of life that seems unsatisfying when considered in the abstract -- after all, if pleasure could be generated by direct electric stimulation of the brain, why wouldn't we all become wireheads? But it seems obvious that most people would reject such an existence if given a choice.
All this talk of quantifying and qualitatively classifying pleasure led me to think that happiness might be defined as a hedonistic salad. There are many different kinds of pleasures in life, as well as different kinds of burdens and pains. They have to be balanced against one another. A well-lived life is one that has a range of different kinds of pleasures, likely ones which are generated by qualitatively different activities, each of which is quantitatively done to the point where the subject activity begins to produce diminishing returns. Each person's individual happiness is a function of her ability to measure her net generation of multiple varieties of hedons through a variety of activities.
The result of this looks more Aristotelean than Epicurean to me. If happiness is a hedonic salad, with just enough, but not too much and not too little of one kind of pleasure (eating) and a similar "just right" kind of another kind of pleasure (education) and the right balance of still a third kind of pleasure (sex), then aren't we really looking at life lived according to what Aristotle called "the golden means"?
The question of why different people take different levels of pleasure out of different activities is not one that I can answer with this bit of intellectual gyration. But I can better define now what happiness means in terms of distinguishing it from and defining it in relation to pleasure.
I was asked whether I get more pleasure from my writing, from reading, or from watching football on television. The context was mainly my interlocutor's observation that when he watches a football game, he generally finds it only moderately entertaining, and he observes that I seem to get a lot of pleasure out of it. He was curious as to why he and I responded differently to the same thing, and even more curious about how he could find some way of measuring the degree to which our responses differed.
My answer was a bit off-the-cuff and called back on a concept I originally learned way back in high school when I took a philosophy class through the local junior college. In the context of discussing utilitarianism, the professor had suggested that one way of looking at "the good" which utilitarian ethics are supposed to maximize would be to say that pleasure is good and pain is bad. So, how then to measure pleasure and pain and thus evaluate whether a particular action was moral or not? This isn't something you can quantify, right?
Well, let us posit that pleasure can be quantified. My old philosophy professor suggested that the appropriate name for a unit of pleasure would be a "hedon." So my response to the question about how pleasurable I found watching football to be was that if reading a regular book would generate ten hedons per hour, watching a football game would generate fifteen hedons per hour, and reading a really good book would generate thirty hedons per hour.
From there, we played with this intellectual vanity a little bit and suggested that there are quite a few activities that generate diminishing rates of hedonic production. My friend observed that I seemed to like watching about one football game a day, but that I grew somewhat impatient and pensive during a second game; my response to a second game in a row was similar to his response to the first game. Thus, diminishing returns -- the first game generates a lot of hedons, the second game, not as many. This was eventually reduced to the idea of "saturation," meaning that we had varying appetites for the activity in question.
Now, yet another participant in the conversation pointed out that things he liked to do were not things that he considered pleasurable at all. For instance, some of his hobbies cause him to endure some degree of physical pain. Thus, the concept of the "anti-hedon" was worked into the conversation, as was teasing out the implication that a pleasurable activity, when its benefits and burdens are weighed, is really something that has a "net hedon production." Presumably, the pleasure that this fellow gets from his activities outweighs the pains, so by doing them, he achieves a net gain of hedons.
And of course, the generation of hedons may create as a byproduct a certain number of anti-hedons, such as the pain endured by a mountain climber over the course of climbing the mountain, which the climber calculates as less than the pleasure that will be gained by reaching the summit. Certain activities involve very little effort or cost to generate hedons, such as the initial example of watching a football game on TV -- the main cost of that activity is an opportunity cost because you could be doing something else with those three hours instead of watching sports on TV.
We briefly amused ourselves with the idea that this could create an entire hedonic calculus, by which the hedons and anti-hedons of a particular activity could be weighed and the curves of diminishing returns would lead to an economically-computed action plan resulting in the achievement of an Epicurean ideal state. I think there is something to this, as I explore below.
So, after dealing with a sidebar about whether Epicureanism is about maximizing pleasure or whether it's really about minimizing pain, we returned to the question of mixed activities and evaluating net pleasure or net pain. Our friend whose hobbies require him to endure pain resisted the idea of a hedonic calculus to his decision to do these things, intimating that his hobby generated very little pleasure at all and suggesting that indeed, his hobbies produced a net hedonic loss.
Why, then, would he do them? These are hobbies we're talking about here, not work or government-compelled duties or any other sort of obligation. He suggested that reducing a decision to do something to a question of whether it generates more pleasure than it does pain is to look through a lens that conceals more than it reveals. But that doesn't take us away from the question that maybe my friend is a masochist?
While that's possible, I think what's really going on is that it is insufficient to quantify pleasure and pain. Pleasures and pains are also qualitatively different from one another. The pleasure of sex is qualitatively different from the pleasure of achieving a difficult task, and both of these are qualitatively different than the pleasure of receiving praise. The physical pleasure-pain spectrum for my friend's activity is negative, but if the analysis is made along the achievement spectrum, my friend is able to defer seeking a reward for long enough that he will endure both physical pain and short-term frustration of learning how to do something, in exchange for the long-term satisfaction of achieving the difficult goal of succeeding and learning.
Now, perhaps for the masochist, pain is simply another qualitatively distinguishable form of pleasure. If that is the case, then the masochist seems to be dysfunctional because pursuit of the qualitative "pleasure" generated by enduring suffering must necessarily negate and even outweigh a different sort of pleasure. This eventually descends into a paradox in which negating hedons generates new hedons -- or perhaps not, if one "flavor" of hedon is converted into a different "flavor" through the psychological process of masochism.
Now, none of this really answered the initial question of why it is that my friend doesn't like football as much as I do. But I think the larger point is that this provides an objective, or nearly-objective, platform from which happiness can be defined as a function of pleasure, without descending into the sort of sybaritic vision of life that seems unsatisfying when considered in the abstract -- after all, if pleasure could be generated by direct electric stimulation of the brain, why wouldn't we all become wireheads? But it seems obvious that most people would reject such an existence if given a choice.
All this talk of quantifying and qualitatively classifying pleasure led me to think that happiness might be defined as a hedonistic salad. There are many different kinds of pleasures in life, as well as different kinds of burdens and pains. They have to be balanced against one another. A well-lived life is one that has a range of different kinds of pleasures, likely ones which are generated by qualitatively different activities, each of which is quantitatively done to the point where the subject activity begins to produce diminishing returns. Each person's individual happiness is a function of her ability to measure her net generation of multiple varieties of hedons through a variety of activities.
The result of this looks more Aristotelean than Epicurean to me. If happiness is a hedonic salad, with just enough, but not too much and not too little of one kind of pleasure (eating) and a similar "just right" kind of another kind of pleasure (education) and the right balance of still a third kind of pleasure (sex), then aren't we really looking at life lived according to what Aristotle called "the golden means"?
The question of why different people take different levels of pleasure out of different activities is not one that I can answer with this bit of intellectual gyration. But I can better define now what happiness means in terms of distinguishing it from and defining it in relation to pleasure.
Labels:
Armchair Psychoanalysis,
Philosophy
March 10, 2010
Another Question About Government
Why, exactly, do we have a bicameral legislature?
Oh, sure, I know it's in the Constitution. But why did the Framers want a bicameral Congress? Nebraska seems to do just fine with a unicameral state legislature. England and the UK do pretty well with an effectively unicameral legislature (the Lords have some power but not much that is meaningful). Indeed, there's lots of countries with a unicameral, or effectively unicameral, legislature -- and like the UK, the executive is chosen from within the ranks of that body, which is what we call a "parliamentary" system of government.
The idea is that there is more deliberation, more compromise, more discussion and thought, if politicians with differing sorts of political incentives considered the same idea. The apocryphal story is of Washington and Jefferson having coffee and arguing over what purpose the Senate fulfilled; Washington compared the Senate to the saucer in which Jefferson poured his coffee to cool it.
But as a practical matter, members of the Senate these days respond to a very similar set of incentives as do members of the House. At the state level, members of a state's lower house respond to functionally identical incentives as to members of the state's upper house -- that's certainly the case here in California, it was certainly the case in Tennessee, and I imagine that's the case in 47 of the remaining 48 states. At the Federal level, individual Senators tend to have a higher profile than individual members of the House, excepting either the most prominent House members (like the Speaker or certain key committee chairs) and those who are currently embroiled in scandal, such as until-very-recently Congressman Eric "tickle fight" Massa.*
Now, if you're a liberal or a progressive or a Democrat or someone who more closely identifies with those labels than their opposites, you're probably thinking that I'm talking about health care reform and why the hell don't the Democrats actually get their acts together and use that overwhelming majority they have. Which is an interesting political question, I'll readily concede. I'm not entirely sure I'm all that upset that things are stalled out the way they are, but I'm also not so sure that if something does pass that it will be all that awful. I think I'm suffering from bogeyman fatigue, and just plain old healthcare talk fatigue on that score.
But what I'm really asking here is a more abstract question. Given the possibility of split partisan control of different houses of the Legislature, in theory we would wind up with a Broder-esque world where leaders of both parties sit down, trade logs, compromise, and try to craft a policy acceptable to a wide majority of people. In practice, we rarely see split control of both houses of a legislature. I've not done much statistical research but it seems that especially at the Federal level, out of the 111 Congresses we've had since the Constitution was first adopted, only 18 have seen split partisan control (that's counting the 107th Congress, which saw the Senate go from effective Republican control on a 50-50 split with the Vice President casting the tiebreaker to effective Democratic control when Jim Jeffords changed his registration to being an independent and started caucusing with the Democrats). When we do, we tend to see that sort of compromise only on "must pass" sorts of laws, like budgets, and the result is a bunch of pork being thrown around at marginal districts to buy votes needed for one side or the other to pass. It makes for interesting political tactics but damn poor political strategy.
Now, the Connecticut Compromise was probably necessary to get the Constitution reported out of the original Convention in 1787. So we keep it for that reason. But the only requirement in the Constitution about the States is that they have a "republican form of government" (note the small "r"). What exactly this means we don't know because that ambiguous phrase isn't defined in the Constitution itself. Obviously involves elections of some kind, and some sort of representative democracy. All of the states have chosen to emulate the Federal pattern of republican governmental structure, which in turn followed Montesquieu's division of the governmental power into executive, legislative, and judicial.
The more I consider California's government, the more I realize just how messed up the structure of the government has become. An incredible amount of power is delegated to very local sorts of governmental units, some of which are incredibly specialized. Water boards hold huge veto power over nearly everything that gets done with land. To the extent that such boards consist of elected members, contested elections are very rare; more often, the boards consist of people appointed by the Governor, who then create regulations (thus legislating) and then decide if people have violated those rules (thus adjudicating). This form of government, in practice, does not strike me as particularly 'republican.' Which isn't to say it's bad, or that the people who do it are bad people. It was pointed out to me today that most of them are simply trying to do a good job and haven't given much thought at all to the political theory underlying their power and the way they exercise it. And that as a practical matter, this is really the only way to do things in a way that gets anything done anyway.
"But 'ats not the point, innit?" as my British friend might say after he'd had a beer or two. The point is, we're promised a republican form of government and what we get is a surplus of high-level legislature for no particular reason other than that's how the Feds do it, and little effective benefit in the quality of the resulting lawmaking product. And we're given a tremendous amount of actual, everyday exercise of governmental power in these quasi-executive specialty agencies that do not coordinate with one another to work towards a broad policy goal and over which the public has at best only highly indirect control. Maybe the system actually works in practice but as California's example (and Illinois is right behind us) demonstrates, too much of this has led to hyperpluralism, hyperdelegation, and hyperspending with few checks and balances to tame the beast.
With the endgame, that we see now, of the beast consuming all available resources, growing large and unwieldy, and then finding that there are no more resources to consume and going into agonizing throes of starvation. One of the symptoms of those starvation pangs is when people start seriously examining some facetious suggestions which I made nearly a year ago, right here on this very blog.
A unicameral legislature in Sacramento is not the immediate answer to the question of what to do about the state being twenty-six billion dollars in debt. And unless the state government breaks free from corruption, it might actually make things worse. But if a unicameral legislature were sufficiently large, it might be difficult to buy enough votes to get any particular idea through it. The House of Representatives, at 435 members, is probably too small compared to the number and magnitude of issues it handles to avoid being a tempting and achievable target for corruption. But if a unicameral California legislature had something like twice that many members, maybe that would dilute voting strength and thus the ability to engage in purchase ("rental" seems like a better word when you think about it) of a politician for a special interest, and create small enough districts that a high level of personal accountability to voters could be re-achieved.
I'm just thinking outside the box here -- but why don't we do this? I'm sure there would be a significant downside to this. The expense, for one, but frankly, that's actually not that hard or large a problem to solve. What I want to focus on is what kinds of political behavior and policy outputs we might expect from a 900-member unicameral legislature as opposed to the 80-40 bicameral legislature we have. Political theorists, have at it and tell me what you think.
* When Glenn Beck says he's sorry he wasted your time, your time has indeed been well and truly wasted.
Oh, sure, I know it's in the Constitution. But why did the Framers want a bicameral Congress? Nebraska seems to do just fine with a unicameral state legislature. England and the UK do pretty well with an effectively unicameral legislature (the Lords have some power but not much that is meaningful). Indeed, there's lots of countries with a unicameral, or effectively unicameral, legislature -- and like the UK, the executive is chosen from within the ranks of that body, which is what we call a "parliamentary" system of government.
The idea is that there is more deliberation, more compromise, more discussion and thought, if politicians with differing sorts of political incentives considered the same idea. The apocryphal story is of Washington and Jefferson having coffee and arguing over what purpose the Senate fulfilled; Washington compared the Senate to the saucer in which Jefferson poured his coffee to cool it.
But as a practical matter, members of the Senate these days respond to a very similar set of incentives as do members of the House. At the state level, members of a state's lower house respond to functionally identical incentives as to members of the state's upper house -- that's certainly the case here in California, it was certainly the case in Tennessee, and I imagine that's the case in 47 of the remaining 48 states. At the Federal level, individual Senators tend to have a higher profile than individual members of the House, excepting either the most prominent House members (like the Speaker or certain key committee chairs) and those who are currently embroiled in scandal, such as until-very-recently Congressman Eric "tickle fight" Massa.*
Now, if you're a liberal or a progressive or a Democrat or someone who more closely identifies with those labels than their opposites, you're probably thinking that I'm talking about health care reform and why the hell don't the Democrats actually get their acts together and use that overwhelming majority they have. Which is an interesting political question, I'll readily concede. I'm not entirely sure I'm all that upset that things are stalled out the way they are, but I'm also not so sure that if something does pass that it will be all that awful. I think I'm suffering from bogeyman fatigue, and just plain old healthcare talk fatigue on that score.
But what I'm really asking here is a more abstract question. Given the possibility of split partisan control of different houses of the Legislature, in theory we would wind up with a Broder-esque world where leaders of both parties sit down, trade logs, compromise, and try to craft a policy acceptable to a wide majority of people. In practice, we rarely see split control of both houses of a legislature. I've not done much statistical research but it seems that especially at the Federal level, out of the 111 Congresses we've had since the Constitution was first adopted, only 18 have seen split partisan control (that's counting the 107th Congress, which saw the Senate go from effective Republican control on a 50-50 split with the Vice President casting the tiebreaker to effective Democratic control when Jim Jeffords changed his registration to being an independent and started caucusing with the Democrats). When we do, we tend to see that sort of compromise only on "must pass" sorts of laws, like budgets, and the result is a bunch of pork being thrown around at marginal districts to buy votes needed for one side or the other to pass. It makes for interesting political tactics but damn poor political strategy.
Now, the Connecticut Compromise was probably necessary to get the Constitution reported out of the original Convention in 1787. So we keep it for that reason. But the only requirement in the Constitution about the States is that they have a "republican form of government" (note the small "r"). What exactly this means we don't know because that ambiguous phrase isn't defined in the Constitution itself. Obviously involves elections of some kind, and some sort of representative democracy. All of the states have chosen to emulate the Federal pattern of republican governmental structure, which in turn followed Montesquieu's division of the governmental power into executive, legislative, and judicial.
The more I consider California's government, the more I realize just how messed up the structure of the government has become. An incredible amount of power is delegated to very local sorts of governmental units, some of which are incredibly specialized. Water boards hold huge veto power over nearly everything that gets done with land. To the extent that such boards consist of elected members, contested elections are very rare; more often, the boards consist of people appointed by the Governor, who then create regulations (thus legislating) and then decide if people have violated those rules (thus adjudicating). This form of government, in practice, does not strike me as particularly 'republican.' Which isn't to say it's bad, or that the people who do it are bad people. It was pointed out to me today that most of them are simply trying to do a good job and haven't given much thought at all to the political theory underlying their power and the way they exercise it. And that as a practical matter, this is really the only way to do things in a way that gets anything done anyway.
"But 'ats not the point, innit?" as my British friend might say after he'd had a beer or two. The point is, we're promised a republican form of government and what we get is a surplus of high-level legislature for no particular reason other than that's how the Feds do it, and little effective benefit in the quality of the resulting lawmaking product. And we're given a tremendous amount of actual, everyday exercise of governmental power in these quasi-executive specialty agencies that do not coordinate with one another to work towards a broad policy goal and over which the public has at best only highly indirect control. Maybe the system actually works in practice but as California's example (and Illinois is right behind us) demonstrates, too much of this has led to hyperpluralism, hyperdelegation, and hyperspending with few checks and balances to tame the beast.
With the endgame, that we see now, of the beast consuming all available resources, growing large and unwieldy, and then finding that there are no more resources to consume and going into agonizing throes of starvation. One of the symptoms of those starvation pangs is when people start seriously examining some facetious suggestions which I made nearly a year ago, right here on this very blog.
A unicameral legislature in Sacramento is not the immediate answer to the question of what to do about the state being twenty-six billion dollars in debt. And unless the state government breaks free from corruption, it might actually make things worse. But if a unicameral legislature were sufficiently large, it might be difficult to buy enough votes to get any particular idea through it. The House of Representatives, at 435 members, is probably too small compared to the number and magnitude of issues it handles to avoid being a tempting and achievable target for corruption. But if a unicameral California legislature had something like twice that many members, maybe that would dilute voting strength and thus the ability to engage in purchase ("rental" seems like a better word when you think about it) of a politician for a special interest, and create small enough districts that a high level of personal accountability to voters could be re-achieved.
I'm just thinking outside the box here -- but why don't we do this? I'm sure there would be a significant downside to this. The expense, for one, but frankly, that's actually not that hard or large a problem to solve. What I want to focus on is what kinds of political behavior and policy outputs we might expect from a 900-member unicameral legislature as opposed to the 80-40 bicameral legislature we have. Political theorists, have at it and tell me what you think.
* When Glenn Beck says he's sorry he wasted your time, your time has indeed been well and truly wasted.
Labels:
California,
Constitutional Law,
Government,
Philosophy,
Scandal
February 18, 2010
Am I Just Phrasing The Concept Badly?
To call something an inherent good is to say, at some level, that an intellectual examination of a moral value has reached a stopping point. But it is certainly possible to at least try to explain why something is held to be an inherent moral good. One could argue in terms of consequence -- to give money to charity is morally good because it relieves another human being's suffering, and the lack of suffering is to be morally preferred to suffering. Or one could argue in terms of reciprocal duty -- to give money to charity is morally good because were one to be in a position to have to rely on charity, one would prefer that others had made donations so that the charity could be effective. Maybe I've picked a bad example here -- perhaps I should be examining why the lack of suffering is morally preferable to the presence of suffering, or why I should care about a hypothetical role-reversal situation. But even so, you can get at least a shadow of an idea from these two explanations about why giving to charity is a moral good.
What's the point of that concept? I've noticed that whenever I get into a discussion with an apologist, I am never, ever told that worshiping Jehovah is an inherently moral thing to do. Nor will the apologist ever react to my contention that his or her claims are based on the idea that worship or belief are inherently morally good. Instead, the apologist usually (at least to my impression) winds up tied in knots trying to explain why things which are obviously morally bad are, in fact, morally good so as to avoid the undesirable result of concluding that [pick one or more: Jehovah, Allah, Jesus, the Bible, religion, faith] are sometimes morally bad.
Am I just not expressing myself well? Is the concept of "inherent moral worth of belief" too obscure or too abstract an idea? Or has it just been a coincidence that dozens of apologists over the years have been so concerned about responding to other parts my arguments that they've let this one fly by? That seems unlikely.
Well, I want to take on that point directly. Believers -- do you contend that worship and/or belief, by itself and with all other factors of human behavior being equal, elevates the moral worth of the believer? If so, can you offer up at least some idea of why that should be the case?
What's the point of that concept? I've noticed that whenever I get into a discussion with an apologist, I am never, ever told that worshiping Jehovah is an inherently moral thing to do. Nor will the apologist ever react to my contention that his or her claims are based on the idea that worship or belief are inherently morally good. Instead, the apologist usually (at least to my impression) winds up tied in knots trying to explain why things which are obviously morally bad are, in fact, morally good so as to avoid the undesirable result of concluding that [pick one or more: Jehovah, Allah, Jesus, the Bible, religion, faith] are sometimes morally bad.
Am I just not expressing myself well? Is the concept of "inherent moral worth of belief" too obscure or too abstract an idea? Or has it just been a coincidence that dozens of apologists over the years have been so concerned about responding to other parts my arguments that they've let this one fly by? That seems unlikely.
Well, I want to take on that point directly. Believers -- do you contend that worship and/or belief, by itself and with all other factors of human behavior being equal, elevates the moral worth of the believer? If so, can you offer up at least some idea of why that should be the case?
Labels:
Ethics and Morality,
Philosophy,
Religion
February 8, 2010
Best Bad Guys In Science Fiction
I had a brief but potentially interesting discussion with a fellow Super Bowl partier last night, a guy who is more than a little bit of a leftist.HIM: "The Colts, man, they're really good but have no personality. They're like the Borg."
ME: "Are the Borg the best bad guys in science fiction ever?"
HIM: "Oh, yeah. They're the ultimate capitalists."
ME: "Funny you should say that. On the other side, they can hate the Borg because they're the ultimate socialists."
HIM: "Well, they think that, but they don't understand what socialism and capitalism really are."
I think I have a pretty good idea of what capitalism and socialism are. And I've got to think my friend was wrong. Perhaps he was thinking about the Borg as competing against the Federation and the Klingon Empire and such, and heartlessly assimilating the best they had to offer so as to expand and make everything like themselves. But I was thinking about the unsentimental destruction of the individual, ruthlessly taking everything each individual member has to offer and forcefully adding it to the collective.
Labels:
Philosophy,
Writing
January 31, 2010
Why I Hate The Culture Wars
The American culture wars strike me as astonishingly silly and yet deeply scary at the same time. It's hard to say what recent volley is more bothersome to me.
Could it be people who are getting The Diary Of Anne Frank pulled from school curricula because of its sexually explicit content?
Or could it be people who are getting the dictionary pulled from classrooms because of its sexually explicit content?
Or maybe bigots who want to literally criminalize homosexuality here in the United States, based on a tortured reading of the Bible?
Or could it be my elected representatives, who really ought to know better, unthinkingly saying that he's being "inclusive" when he proclaims his jurisdictions to be a "Christian city"? (Lots of details here.)
All of this "culture war" nonsense seems to be predominantly powered by a simplistic, aggressively evangelical, and intolerant brand of Christianity. Well, not all of it. There's also Glenn Beck leading his Beckhead minions to decry fundamental principles of law. Hey, Glenn Beck -- what you're criticizing in that segment is what lawyers have been doing since 1066! It's not anything new and it didn't start with Roscoe Pound!*
I have a number of friends who are not religious or, among those who are religious, who somehow manage to not be frickin' insane about it and respect that other people might want to live their lives in different ways than them. It is absolutely beyond me why anyone would want to reach in to my house or your house or anyone else's house and tell them how to live their lives or what books to read or what religion they ought to publicly subscribe to.
I guess it's useful to be roused out of my shell and realize that indeed there are lots and lots and lots of people out there who look out at the world and in particular our own nation and see something very, very different than I do. I may be getting a little bit too complacent, having found people with whom I have surrounded myself who do not demand that others conform in lockstep to their social example. I had thought that tolerance for other peoples' choices and ideas and personal decisions was part of what it was to be a free people.
Godsdamn it, why can't people just learn to mind their own business? That goes in both directions, but the aggression seems to be coming from the right rather than the left.
* If you want to criticize Roscoe Pound and his influence over American legal education, go right ahead. Pound didn't invent the idea of case law analysis; he formalized a method of studying law through case law analysis that had been going on for clerks who were "reading the law" in private tutelage or Inns of Court for hundreds of years in the Anglo-American legal system, and that's pretty well above criticism. What you could criticize Pound for is his exposition of indeterminacy as the inevitable result of the vicissitudes of political power as the foundational exponent of both statutory law and a politicized judicial nomination process. But that doesn't make for a particularly good sound bite because pretty much only lawyers and political scientists even know what the previous sentence means.
Could it be people who are getting The Diary Of Anne Frank pulled from school curricula because of its sexually explicit content?
Or could it be people who are getting the dictionary pulled from classrooms because of its sexually explicit content?
Or maybe bigots who want to literally criminalize homosexuality here in the United States, based on a tortured reading of the Bible?
Or could it be my elected representatives, who really ought to know better, unthinkingly saying that he's being "inclusive" when he proclaims his jurisdictions to be a "Christian city"? (Lots of details here.)
All of this "culture war" nonsense seems to be predominantly powered by a simplistic, aggressively evangelical, and intolerant brand of Christianity. Well, not all of it. There's also Glenn Beck leading his Beckhead minions to decry fundamental principles of law. Hey, Glenn Beck -- what you're criticizing in that segment is what lawyers have been doing since 1066! It's not anything new and it didn't start with Roscoe Pound!*
I have a number of friends who are not religious or, among those who are religious, who somehow manage to not be frickin' insane about it and respect that other people might want to live their lives in different ways than them. It is absolutely beyond me why anyone would want to reach in to my house or your house or anyone else's house and tell them how to live their lives or what books to read or what religion they ought to publicly subscribe to.
I guess it's useful to be roused out of my shell and realize that indeed there are lots and lots and lots of people out there who look out at the world and in particular our own nation and see something very, very different than I do. I may be getting a little bit too complacent, having found people with whom I have surrounded myself who do not demand that others conform in lockstep to their social example. I had thought that tolerance for other peoples' choices and ideas and personal decisions was part of what it was to be a free people.
Godsdamn it, why can't people just learn to mind their own business? That goes in both directions, but the aggression seems to be coming from the right rather than the left.
* If you want to criticize Roscoe Pound and his influence over American legal education, go right ahead. Pound didn't invent the idea of case law analysis; he formalized a method of studying law through case law analysis that had been going on for clerks who were "reading the law" in private tutelage or Inns of Court for hundreds of years in the Anglo-American legal system, and that's pretty well above criticism. What you could criticize Pound for is his exposition of indeterminacy as the inevitable result of the vicissitudes of political power as the foundational exponent of both statutory law and a politicized judicial nomination process. But that doesn't make for a particularly good sound bite because pretty much only lawyers and political scientists even know what the previous sentence means.
Labels:
Domestic Politics,
Ethics and Morality,
Law,
Local Politics,
Philosophy
January 25, 2010
Curious George, Interpreted By Werner Herzog
Quite possibly the funniest thing I've seen in weeks:
"Ziss should giff you a dim view of human potential." That, folks, is unalloyed comedy gold. Hat tip to Edge of the American West.
Dialogue With Apologists Always Reach This Point
My latest apologist interloquitor and I are starting to narrow down the issues somewhat in a dialogue aiming to tease out the real moral lessons of the Bible. We've agreed to cross-post our responses, and I'm concerned that stand-alone posts without context will be confusing to a third-party reader, so I provide a summary of the discussion so far first, and then my latest entry into the discussion. I've jumped most of it because I know there are some Readers here with no appetite for this sort of thing. If you are not one of them, please read on.
Labels:
Atheism,
Ethics and Morality,
Link Love,
Philosophy,
Religion
January 21, 2010
The Massacre Of Moab
In my now-famous post Top Ten Worst Bible Stories, I singled out the Massacre of the Midianites in Deuteronomy 7:1-6 and Numbers 31:1-18 for particular criticism. It is, in fact, a story of genocide, the bloodthirsty and unprovoked annihalation of a people who had done nothing that we can look at today as having been even remotely morally equivalent to what they suffered at the hands of Jehovah's followers.
An intrepid, intelligent, and earnest apologist has taken on my challenge to offer a justification for this story. I suggest that if you have interest in this exchange, you read his apology for it first, and then come back to the balance of this very long analysis, that appears below after the jump.
An intrepid, intelligent, and earnest apologist has taken on my challenge to offer a justification for this story. I suggest that if you have interest in this exchange, you read his apology for it first, and then come back to the balance of this very long analysis, that appears below after the jump.
January 7, 2010
Making Ignorant Choices
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: We all make choices based on incomplete information, all the time, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing. One's choice of religion is usually not a choice at all and is certainly based on incomplete information. That goes for atheists, too. There's also an amusing video from the Daily Show embedded in the essay.
Labels:
Ethics and Morality,
News,
Philosophy,
Religion
October 20, 2009
Hugh Hewitt's Faith
I'm driving home after an enormously stressful day at work. My conservative buddy calls me up on the way, so I pull over and take the call. (Unlike Maria Shriver, I'm ready to concede that the no-cell-phone-while-driving law applies to me.) He tells me that he's listening to this really interesting interview with his man Hugh Hewitt and my man Richard Dawkins. I try and find it myself, but the station my buddy is listening to in Los Angeles is just not coming in very clearly up here north of the Santa Susannas.
But it turns out that there is a transcript of the interview available online. And it is mostly a very good interview indeed. I have to take what I know of the personality of both men and infer when they are being humorous with one another -- like when Dawkins complains that he feels like he's being cross-examined by a lawyer, and Hewitt responds that he is a lawyer, and Dawkins makes a big show of complaining about that. I assumed that they were joshing with one another, although it's possible that they weren't because swords had been drawn at that point.
The bulk of the interview, appropriately enough, is about evolution and the evidence for it. Only towards the end does Hewitt take on Dawkins' atheism, and then it gets a little bit ugly and less intelligent. Frankly, on both sides, for a while, when Hewitt tried to argue that Dawkins unfairly dismisses contemporaneous evidence of Jesus' divinity and miracle-working -- a subject upon which I have recently done quite a lot of research myself, so Hewitt looks to me to be making an attack on a false premise. Which does not excuse Dawkins from taking the bait and reacting badly to it.
But the better exchange between the two came towards the end, when the subject of suffering and imperfections in the world were discussed. Dawkins has the easier position, I think -- a world without an intelligent designer does not need to apologize for the existence of suffering; suffering is a byproduct of natural selection which inherently requires competition for scarce resources resulting in harm to individuals. Hewitt, however, argues that suffering and imperfections (for instance, flaws in the human eye like the blind spot and image inversion) may be part of a design to the universe that is orders of magnitude more subtle than the simplistically beneficent designer that Dawkins might have hoped for:
Now, here's where there is some real interesting stuff going on. Hewitt's position (which I disagree with) is relatively sophisticated -- the soul is infinite, or has infinite potential, but cannot grow and mature and become fully-realized without suffering of some kind. And, just because we might want the creator to have designed the universe in such a way as to have minimized suffering does not mean that the creator necessarily is that way. These are intelligent and worthwhile points -- assuming that one concedes a) the existence of a creator in the first place and b) the existence of souls in at least human beings. Hewitt also has no trouble conceding evolution and the idea of an old Earth; he is not married to the idea of Biblical literalism, which strikes me as a smart thing for a believer to do -- understand the history and allegory of the holy book, and use it as a tool from which one can extract moral guidance and advice for how to live one's life.
The act of faith he describes as necessary for the soul to self-actualize is something that sounds like it is quite sophisticated, complex, and most of all, difficult to do in a complete or meaningful way. If he has done it, and found happiness in it, good for him. And I also like that -- at least in this exchange -- neither Hewitt nor Dawkins dumb down their arguments, and indeed they both short-circuit a number of the predicate "baby step" arguments and propositions that I've heard so many tedious times before. They get right to the meat of it.
Now, I think ultimately, the creator that Hewitt is describing ultimately boils down to being a God of the Gaps. Science will eventually whittle that God of the Gaps down to pretty much nothing -- most of the origin story in the book of Genesis, for instance, is reduced to the creation of clever self-replicating chemical processes. But Hewitt's notion of what faith is has intellectual appeal to me because the act of faith is something that seems very difficult to me indeed. It is not as simple or as easy as driving your car down the road and "having faith" that the other driver isn't going to hit you -- an explanation that has been offered to me on more than one occasion by more than one well-intentioned but hopelessly simplistic missionary. It dovetails with other notions that I have about Christianity when practiced well -- it is a difficult and demanding moral code, it requires a strong personal commitment by the Christian, and it is something that one must internalize because wearing it on your sleeve is entirely beside the point of the exercise.
So, it reminds me that there is much about my religious friends I can admire despite not sharing their faith. And at the end of the interview, one is left with the impression that there is some respect between the interviewer and interviewee, which is rare enough that it leave a nice taste in the reader's mouth.
But it turns out that there is a transcript of the interview available online. And it is mostly a very good interview indeed. I have to take what I know of the personality of both men and infer when they are being humorous with one another -- like when Dawkins complains that he feels like he's being cross-examined by a lawyer, and Hewitt responds that he is a lawyer, and Dawkins makes a big show of complaining about that. I assumed that they were joshing with one another, although it's possible that they weren't because swords had been drawn at that point.
The bulk of the interview, appropriately enough, is about evolution and the evidence for it. Only towards the end does Hewitt take on Dawkins' atheism, and then it gets a little bit ugly and less intelligent. Frankly, on both sides, for a while, when Hewitt tried to argue that Dawkins unfairly dismisses contemporaneous evidence of Jesus' divinity and miracle-working -- a subject upon which I have recently done quite a lot of research myself, so Hewitt looks to me to be making an attack on a false premise. Which does not excuse Dawkins from taking the bait and reacting badly to it.
But the better exchange between the two came towards the end, when the subject of suffering and imperfections in the world were discussed. Dawkins has the easier position, I think -- a world without an intelligent designer does not need to apologize for the existence of suffering; suffering is a byproduct of natural selection which inherently requires competition for scarce resources resulting in harm to individuals. Hewitt, however, argues that suffering and imperfections (for instance, flaws in the human eye like the blind spot and image inversion) may be part of a design to the universe that is orders of magnitude more subtle than the simplistically beneficent designer that Dawkins might have hoped for:
HH: Do you read any fiction at all?
RD: Of course.
HH: What’s the most complicated bit of fiction you’ve read? Like War and Peace?
RD: Yeah, what’s your point? What point are you making?
HH: That complexity in design, and counterintuitive steps, et cetera, don’t disprove the idea of genius at work. Genius at work often works through complexity and through misdirection.
RD: I think that what you’re kind of saying is that God made the world look as though it had evolved in order to test our faith, when it didn’t evolve.
HH: No, not test our faith. I’m saying that the world has been made as it is to allow for faith, because if it was made too easy for the simple-minded, it would simply be routine, and everyone would believe, and then there would be no faith.
RD: That would be a pretty unpleasant sort of God. I think, I would say you’re welcome to believe in a kind of God who would do that, but it’s not the kind of God that would appeal to me.
HH: Well, it’s not about what appeals to us, it’s about what is. And you also write that a beneficent designer might, you’d idealistically think, minimize suffering. But not if the soul was infinite, and suffering was necessary for its wisdom.
RD: No, that’s true. I, once again, you’re welcome to that belief, if that’s what you want to believe. There’s a far more parsimonious explanation for suffering, which is natural selection.
Now, here's where there is some real interesting stuff going on. Hewitt's position (which I disagree with) is relatively sophisticated -- the soul is infinite, or has infinite potential, but cannot grow and mature and become fully-realized without suffering of some kind. And, just because we might want the creator to have designed the universe in such a way as to have minimized suffering does not mean that the creator necessarily is that way. These are intelligent and worthwhile points -- assuming that one concedes a) the existence of a creator in the first place and b) the existence of souls in at least human beings. Hewitt also has no trouble conceding evolution and the idea of an old Earth; he is not married to the idea of Biblical literalism, which strikes me as a smart thing for a believer to do -- understand the history and allegory of the holy book, and use it as a tool from which one can extract moral guidance and advice for how to live one's life.
The act of faith he describes as necessary for the soul to self-actualize is something that sounds like it is quite sophisticated, complex, and most of all, difficult to do in a complete or meaningful way. If he has done it, and found happiness in it, good for him. And I also like that -- at least in this exchange -- neither Hewitt nor Dawkins dumb down their arguments, and indeed they both short-circuit a number of the predicate "baby step" arguments and propositions that I've heard so many tedious times before. They get right to the meat of it.
Now, I think ultimately, the creator that Hewitt is describing ultimately boils down to being a God of the Gaps. Science will eventually whittle that God of the Gaps down to pretty much nothing -- most of the origin story in the book of Genesis, for instance, is reduced to the creation of clever self-replicating chemical processes. But Hewitt's notion of what faith is has intellectual appeal to me because the act of faith is something that seems very difficult to me indeed. It is not as simple or as easy as driving your car down the road and "having faith" that the other driver isn't going to hit you -- an explanation that has been offered to me on more than one occasion by more than one well-intentioned but hopelessly simplistic missionary. It dovetails with other notions that I have about Christianity when practiced well -- it is a difficult and demanding moral code, it requires a strong personal commitment by the Christian, and it is something that one must internalize because wearing it on your sleeve is entirely beside the point of the exercise.
So, it reminds me that there is much about my religious friends I can admire despite not sharing their faith. And at the end of the interview, one is left with the impression that there is some respect between the interviewer and interviewee, which is rare enough that it leave a nice taste in the reader's mouth.
Labels:
Atheism,
California,
News,
Philosophy,
Religion
October 17, 2009
All Kinds Of Teh Crazee
For your bemusement on a Saturday, and because you're probably tired by now of Meghan McCain's breasts and wondering whether the saga of Balloon Boy was a hoax, I offer a smörgåsbord of internet-based bizarreness:
Lady Gaga is really the Illuminati flaunting their control over you.
At last! "Scientific" demonstration of Jesus' divinity, proven by the fact that God exists. (Why hadn't that ever occurred to me? Oh, that's right, it's because I've avoided falling into the intellectual rabbit-hole of Platonic meta-idealism.)
Condoleeza Rice shatters the stereotype.
Behold, The Future! Here is what life will be like in the distant year of 2010! Wait, that's not the future, it's right now. Only back then it was the future. Oh, this is getting confusing....
Equally paradoxical, this bordello gives you a discount if you come on a bicycle. I know, I shouldn't work blue because kids could read this. But if you get the double entendre, it wasn't me that polluted your mind.
And finally, a challenge for armchair archaeologists: separate the hoaxes from real artifacts! Hint: consider historical patterns of climate change.
Lady Gaga is really the Illuminati flaunting their control over you.
At last! "Scientific" demonstration of Jesus' divinity, proven by the fact that God exists. (Why hadn't that ever occurred to me? Oh, that's right, it's because I've avoided falling into the intellectual rabbit-hole of Platonic meta-idealism.)
Condoleeza Rice shatters the stereotype.
Behold, The Future! Here is what life will be like in the distant year of 2010! Wait, that's not the future, it's right now. Only back then it was the future. Oh, this is getting confusing....
Equally paradoxical, this bordello gives you a discount if you come on a bicycle. I know, I shouldn't work blue because kids could read this. But if you get the double entendre, it wasn't me that polluted your mind.
And finally, a challenge for armchair archaeologists: separate the hoaxes from real artifacts! Hint: consider historical patterns of climate change.
Labels:
Domestic Politics,
History,
Music,
Philosophy,
Religion,
Sex,
Weirdness
September 11, 2009
What Should He Have Done?
This skit might seem offensive at first glance, but take a moment to think about it before you pronounce it so. Notice that there is never approval of what they know is about to happen:
Ultimately, this is a restatement of the Argument From Evil. Which is actually an ancient argument indeed, first and best articulated by Epicurus:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?
Labels:
Atheism,
Death,
Ethics and Morality,
History,
Philosophy,
Religion,
Terrorism,
Weak Attempt At Humor
June 10, 2009
Life Guided By Fallacies
Techskeptic has a nice thought on what it is to be a "denialist." It is, in essence, an approach to an unpleasant subject guided by the Nirvana fallacy. He writes of those who would deny global warming, but his thought seems to apply to a periennial exchange with which I am more familiar: evolution.
The fossil record does not, upon examination, produce an exactly-as-expected picture of smooth transitions from one form of an organism to another form; there are gaps and few transitions. Therefore, because the evidence is not precisely as evolution would have predicted, evolution is false. Frequently from there, other logical errors come in to play -- since evolution has been "proven" false, creationism is therefore proven true.
One might be surprised, unpleasantly, to learn how often poor logic like this is used in the law. And in a great many other human endeavors. I'd venture to say that for a lot of people, significant portions of their lives are guided by fallacious thinking.
The fossil record does not, upon examination, produce an exactly-as-expected picture of smooth transitions from one form of an organism to another form; there are gaps and few transitions. Therefore, because the evidence is not precisely as evolution would have predicted, evolution is false. Frequently from there, other logical errors come in to play -- since evolution has been "proven" false, creationism is therefore proven true.
One might be surprised, unpleasantly, to learn how often poor logic like this is used in the law. And in a great many other human endeavors. I'd venture to say that for a lot of people, significant portions of their lives are guided by fallacious thinking.
Labels:
Antiscience,
Evolution,
Link Love,
Philosophy,
Science
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