Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau;
Mock on, mock on; ’tis all in vain!
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again.And every sand becomes a gem
Reflected in the beams divine;
Blown back they blind the mocking eye,
But still in Israel’s paths they shine.The Atoms of Democritus
And Newton’s Particles of Light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore,
Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright.
In light of coming across a review recently posted on Albert Mohler’s blog of Daniel Dennett’s book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, I thought I’d take a chance to post an audio file of Dennett’s lecture he gave as a philosophy colloquium here at FSU last semester. It is a large file and of pretty poor quality. For some reason, every few minutes you can hear the whirring of my iPod, and since I made the mistake of leaning the iPod against my notebook, you can also occasionally hear my frantic scribbling of notes (it was my first attempt at recording). It is in wav format because I cannot convert it to mp3 without losing significant quality. Nevertheless, it is audible and worth listening to if you are interested. It can be downloaded here.
This just in! You can go here and watch the entire 65 minute intelligent design video Unlocking the Mystery of Life online for free! The video is very well done and has interviews with all the ID bigshots (Dembski, Johnson, Behe, Meyer, etc.). You must watch it.
Greg Koukl, of Stand To Reason, examines social contract theory as a ground for morality in the latest issue of Solid Ground. In this view, morality is simply a social arrangement to secure peace and prosperity. Right is determined by concensus. The entire article is enlightening, however, the take home points are summed up in this series of questions to ask someone who advances this idea.
1. Ask how does this contract or arrangement work? Who sets the rules? What makes the rules binding?
2. On what grounds could one condemn racism, imperialism, or even genocide in other cultures (or his own)?
3. Where do moral reformers fit into the system?
4. Is there a difference between what is legal and what is good? If so, how is this accounted for?
5. Is it wrong to break the contract? If so, why?
These questions expose the fundamental flaws in this conventionalist view of morality. As asserted in my last post, the only true ground for morality and human rights is one rooted in a Christian worldview.
Edward Feser, a contributor to Right Reason, discusses this very issue in an article in Crisis Magazine. In my last post, I discussed the ethics of embryonic stem cell research and the concept of good government. Feser’s article once again focuses our attention on the foundation of Western morals and human rights.
Feser asserts, and I agree, that without a Judeo-Christian foundation, human rights crumble. As our culture becomes more and more secular, we lose the firm footing provided by the biblical view of man. Human’s have rights only because they are persons created in the image of a personal God.
The idea that a human being per se has an inherent dignity began with the Jews. It is well-known that the ancient Israelites were unique in insisting that their God was not merely one tribal deity among others, but was the very Creator of the universe in whose image all men were made.
What is perhaps less widely realized is that this distinctive metaphysical conception of God served as the foundation of a distinctive moral outlook. For given that every human being reflects the image of God Himself, it follows that every human being has a worth that surpasses that of anything else in creation, and that every human being is, in this respect, of equal worth. Moreover, this God—being an omniscient Lawgiver—commands all men to act in a manner consistent with their unique status, and will hold those accountable who fail to do so. The Jewish conception of God has, accordingly, often been described as an “ethical monotheismâ€: No arid philosophical abstraction, it calls on men to change their behavior toward each other as well as their opinions about the nature of the divine.
Christianity inherited this universal moral interpretation of monotheism from the Jews and carried it further. So important are human beings in God’s plan that God Himself condescended to become one of them in the person of Jesus Christ, suffered the indignity of death on the cross to pay the penalty for their sins, and was raised from the dead to guarantee for them the possibility of eternal life. These doctrines of the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection elevated human dignity to the greatest conceivable limit, as evidenced by the manner in which the Church worked out their implications over the centuries.
Feser traces the impact this view has had on the way humans treat other persons throughout history. He points out the unquestionable influence Christian ethics had on the founders of our country and the political theorists of the day. He then exposes naturalism, utilitarianism, social-contract theory, and other substitutes for an ethic grounded in the God of the bible as each ultimately failing to provide the grounding necessary for human rights. I close with a few more thoughts from his article, which is worth reading in its entirety:
It should be emphasized that nothing said here is meant to imply that the irreligious cannot believe in human dignity, justice, and rights…It does seem, though, that where those institutions exist outside the West, they have either been imposed by the West, or imported from it on the basis of their perceived economic benefits.
The idea that all human beings as such have an inherent dignity—and that this entails a doctrine of objectively valid, absolute, and universal human rights—seems to exist only in the Judeo-Christian West, and the moral (as opposed to economic or political) pressure other societies might feel to conform to this idea seems to come only from the West. Those who value these ideals, even if they are not personally religious, would seem therefore to have an interest in the continued health of the Judeo-Christian tradition; for whatever basis this or that individual person might have for endorsing these values, it is not at all clear that they can be maintained at the societal and global levels in the absence of that tradition.
Yesterday, I read a couple of letters to the editor in the USA Today. These letters (I am presuming) were not written by experts, so I am not assuming that they represent the best arguments for embryonic stem cell research (ESCR). However, they do seem to represent the views of our secular society. The two editorials were posted under the headline, “Faith getting in the way of “good government”. This depiction of “faith” once again attempts to marginalize Christians and keep their voice out of public life.
The first letter claims:
By vetoing the bill funding embryonic stem cell research, President Bush let faith get in the way of good science, good medicine and good government.
He is asserting that the rights of a clump of insentient cells are equal to those of thinking, breathing humans. He is saying that it is more important to preserve the possibility of life than to relieve the pain and suffering of millions of lives realized. And he is insisting that the values of the minority should take precedence over the will of the overwhelming majority.
While the president is surely entitled to his opinion about the origins of life, acting on such beliefs should be the stuff of personal religion, not public legislation.
What is good science, good medicine, and good government? There have been many philosophers who have devoted a lifetime to try to describe and prescribe good science and good government. Goodness is a matter of ethics and morality. One’s ethics and morality is shaped by one’s worldview. The Christian worldview entails certain beliefs about ethics and morality, one of which is the inherent value of human life. From a Christian perspective, good goverment, good medicine, and good science are those that uphold the sanctity of life. Apparently, to this letter writer, good public policy is that which the majority wants. This is a legitimate viewpoint to try to defend. It has been called conventionalism, that is, our ethics and morals are determined by what the majority says is moral and good. The fact that the president rejects this viewpoint does not censure his opinion. Nor does it make his opinion “faith” and that of the secularist “fact”. The secularist assumption is just that…an assumption based on a particular worldview and not grounded in science.
Stand To Reason has a list of talking points regarding the ethics of ESCR (HT: CADRE Comments). Are you against stem cell research and cloning? is an excellent two-page explanation of why Christian’s are opposed to ESCR. A simple understanding of this readable piece will prepare anyone to intelligently discuss the issue with secularists.
Here are some highlights which reveal the moral foundation for opposition to ESCR:
Clarify the moral logic of your position. (I’m not against stem cell research…)
“Not unless it kills an innocent human being. Embryonic stem cell research always kills a human being in the embryonic stage when scientists remove the stem cells. Wouldn’t you agree it is wrong to kill one human being to do research on her body to help someone else?â€Clarify that you have compassion for the suffering. “With that said, I think we have to do our best to care for those who have difficult diseases without hurting others in the process. This is why I think we should aggressively fund adult stem cell research (ASCR). It kills no one and has already shown a great ability to help people recover. Recently, a Parkinson’s patient and spinal cord injury patient both testified before a senate subcommittee claiming their adult stem cell treatments had been very effective in improving their conditions. Since embryonic stem cell research is not an option for those who care about human rights, don’t you think we should promote adult stem cell research and leave the embryos alone?â€
Three Key Questions:
Where do we get human embryonic stem cells? We can only derive human embryonic stem cells by killing a human embryo. Removing its stem cells leaves it with no cells from which to build the organs of its body.
What is the embryo? An embryo is a living, whole, human organism (a human being) in the embryonic stage. All the embryo needs to live is a proper environment and adequate nutrition, the very same thing all infants, toddlers, adolescents, and adults need.
Are all human beings valuable or only some? The abolitionist movement, the suffragist movement, the civil rights movement, and current concerns about racism, sexism, and international human rights all require a foundation of natural rights (that humans have in virtue of their human nature) for their force. The Declaration of Independence assumed this view of human rights. In other words, the reason we think racism, sexism, and genocide are wrong is because they set aside a certain group for discrimination or extermination because of some surface difference between us rather than recognizing the underlying similarity that justifies equal treatment. If we want to live consistently (which everyone does), our desire to protect women and African-Americans from sexual and racial discrimination will also lead us to protect human embryos and fetuses from developmental discrimination.
What is faith? If one were to ask a number of people, he would get varying responses. Many might be similar to this one I’ve heard offered.
Faith: Believing what you know isn’t true.
Unfortunately, when a Christian speaks of his faith, or a non-Christian refers to the faith of a Christian this is the definition which is sometimes assumed. Secular culture has successfully compartmentalized Christian faith to mean something other than fact or knowledge. Faith has come to be equated with, at best, “cannot claim any true knowledge”, and to some, “untrue”. Perhaps worse is “true for the person who believes it”, which implies faith gives us no information about what is objectively true.
A better defintion of faith for the Christian is as follows:
Trusting what you have reason to believe is true.
Christian faith is not some blind leap into beliefs which are unsupportable. Faith is trust. Faith is confidence. Perhaps, we would do well to substitute the word confidence for faith whenever we discuss Christianity with others. It might better convey the essence of what we are claiming. The word faith has come to signify less than what it should. I have confidence in Jesus Christ and the message of the Gospel. I have reason to believe that Christianity is true and would be thrilled to explain the evidence for my beliefs to one who asks. Christianity is a source of knowledge and reality, not of irrational beliefs.
I’m pinch-hitting for Jeremy today in posting a poem for poetry Monday. Today’s selection is from C. S. Lewis. I believe this is to be sung to the tune of “Lead us, heavenly Father, lead us”:
Evolutionary Hymn
Lead us, Evolution, lead us
Up the future’s endless stair;
Chop us, change us, prod us, weed us.
For stagnation is despair:
Groping, guessing, yet progressing,
Lead us nobody knows where.Wrong or justice, joy or sorrow,
In the present what are they
while there’s always jam-tomorrow,
While we tread the onward way?
Never knowing where we’re going,
We can never go astray.To whatever variation
Our posterity may turn
Hairy, squashy, or crustacean,
Bulbous-eyed or square of stern,
Tusked or toothless, mild or ruthless,
Towards that unknown god we yearn.Ask not if it’s god or devil,
Brethren, lest your words imply
Static norms of good and evil
(As in Plato) throned on high;
Such scholastic, inelastic,
Abstract yardsticks we deny.Far too long have sages vainly
Glossed great Nature’s simple text;
He who runs can read it plainly,
‘Goodness = what comes next.’
By evolving, Life is solving
All the questions we perplexed.Oh then! Value means survival-
Value. If our progeny
Spreads and spawns and licks each rival,
That will prove its deity
(Far from pleasant, by our present,
Standards, though it may well be).C S Lewis
One thing that I am ashamed to say I do too little of is reading the newspaper on a regular basis. Having decided to start doing better today, I bought a copy of the Orlando Sentinel while visiting in O-town and came across an editorial entitled “Follow British stem-call model.” There is much in the whole thing that is worthy of comment, but I just want to focus on three sentences coming near the end that illustrate something to look out for whenever discussing stem-cell research or abortion or even intelligent design and science in general - the confusion of science with philosophy disguised as science.
The three sentences go like this:
But [the] religious defining of what constitutes a human being is not informed by science. Without consciousness, a blastocyst of less than 200 cells does not quality as a sentient life any more than, say, dandruff. Hence…in-vitro fertilized eggs…are not human beings.
Can you see the error in his argument? The argument is this: (1) Science says a blastocyst is not conscious, (2) things that are unconscious are not sentient life forms, (3) things that are not sentient life forms are not human beings, (4) therefore: fertilized eggs (’blastocysts’) are not human beings. The problem is that the only scientific fact in the argument is that fertilized eggs lack consciousness, and I’ve never met a pro-lifer who didn’t know this or claimed it was untrue. He then reasons that this lack of consciousness makes for a lack of humanity. But this is a philosophical and not a scientific statement. Does science tell us that a fertilized egg is not a human being, any more than a piece of dandruff? No, science tells us that, unlike a piece of dandruff, a ‘fertilized egg’ is a living thing belonging to the human species which has its own completely unique genetic code that will, when left on its natural course, develop things like consciousness and the like. If anything, the pro-life view is more informed by science than the author’s view. It is just that the author (and he is not alone in this) has chosen, without giving us any reason why to accept this philosophical view, to believe that consciousness is the defining characteristic of human life. (One might well ask him whether a person in a temporary coma has ceased to be a human being)
In talking about free will and moral responsibility, one of the ideas that comes to surface again and again is that what we do is in some way determined by who we are - that is, the type of character we have. Further, some would say that we can only be truly free and morally responsible if what we do flows naturally and determinately from our characters. As an illustration, Martin Luther is famously quoted as saying, after refusing to recant of his published ideas that helped launch the reformation, “Here I stand. I can do no other.” Many think we should here take his statement literally, presuming that he meant that his character and what he believed literally made it impossible for him to recant.
If this is really how our characters affect our decisions, then a regress argument can be developed to show that we are never really free or responsible (Galen Strawson is one well-known defender of this type of argument). Suppose Bob performs some action and it is free because it naturally follows from his character. We may well form the question at this point, ‘But where did his character come from?’ Obviously, if someone or something else were responsible for his character, and his character determines his action, he doesn’t seem truly free. Intuitively, the answer seems to be that his character has been developed by his previous actions and choices. But these choices surely must have been free, and that means that if we look at any particular of those actions, they would have been determined by his character at that point. But where did his character come from at those points? Presumably, by other free actions. But what about those? The infinite regress should be clear.
One way out of the regress is given by Robert Kane. Although Kane concedes that many if not most of our free actions are determined by our characters, he argues that there must be actions that we do at key points in our lives which are not determined by our characters. Rather, these actions were ones for which there were genuine alternative possibilities and which actually contribute to the formation of our characters, which in turn determine certain future actions. These he calls self-forming actions (SFAs).
Philosophically speaking, I am generally inclined to think that for almost all of our morally significant choices we have genuine alternative possibilities, but I agree that our characters at least greatly affect our probabilities to do certain actions and may even limit the number of possibilities we have. I also think there is something to the claim that our actions form our characters and who we are. Reflecting on this has led me from the abstract to the intensely practical, as I realized recently something seemingly obvious and which I had heard many times before, but which never really set in - every single choice I make affects the type of person I am and will become. Thinking of this in times of temptation has greatly helped me recently. We often trick ourselves into thinking that any one individual wrong choice can be quickly and easily atoned for and doesn’t matter much. But the truth is that every single choice we make is important in forming who we are and taking us either further down the path of godliness or further away from it.