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A recent post on this site commented on the oxymoronic nature of the phrase, “A Catholic for abortion.” Is the phrase, “A moral atheist” equally oxymoronic. Can atheists be moral? I think the obvious answer is yes. There is nothing contradictory about a person living a moral lifestyle and yet not believe in God. I am certain there are many atheists who live moral lives. The important question is not whether or not an athiest can be moral, but is there any grounding for that morality. Tom Gilson, at Thinking Christian has been discussing that question in a couple of recent blog posts. I don’t think morality can be grounded if there is no God.

An important question which needs to be answered is - Exactly what do we mean when we say that a thing (like morality) is grounded. Tom has an excellent explanation of this concept which I’ll reproduce here:

An answer to the question, “I don’t believe D moral duty or value applies to me, and I want you to tell me why I should. You might have some instrumental or pragmatic reasons for me to practice D, or you may tell me D is ‘what we customarily do in our culture,’ but I don’t know why D should be considered good in itself, or why I should take it on as a value or duty of my own.”

A proper ground for morals would be something that, if true and if understood by the subject (the questioner, in this case) to be true, would provide sufficient reason for the subject to change his or her mind about the goodness of the behavior, value, or duty in question. It would explain how said behavior, value or duty actually is good in itself; not merely instrumental, pragmatic, or customary.

It would do so by reference to some condition of reality that can bear the weight placed upon it. For example, if it is suggested that D is good because it contributes to reproductive fitness, then reproductive fitness’s goodness would have to be good in itself (or based on something else that is good in itself).

Yes, there are moral atheists. But if there is no God, morality has no grounding.

In a recent post, I linked to the first three articles provided by the Christ on Campus Initiative designed for college students addressing intellectual and cultural issues from a historical Christian perspective. The latest article is now available, A Christian Perspective on Islam.

HT: Between Two Worlds

Father Thomas D. Williams points out, in this article, the oxymoronic nature of the phrase, “Catholics for Abortion.” The phrase just doesn’t work, similar to the phrase, “Muslims for Polytheism.” Since Muslims are monotheists by definition, such a phrase is nonsensical. Similarly, to be Catholic is to be pro-life.

The Father’s words were prompted by Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s claim on Meet the Press that she was defending the right for a woman to have an abortion as an “ardent, practicing Catholic.” Several Catholic clerics have responded to such a claim. Father Williams explains:

People — including apparently some “ardent” Catholics — seem to forget how central the pro-life issue is to Catholic morality and why that is so. We are not quibbling here about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It is no exaggeration to say that the inviolability and sacredness of innocent human life is to Catholic morality what the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is to Catholic dogma. Both are not only non-negotiable; they are foundational. I would challenge Speaker Pelosi to come up with any moral question on which the Church has expressed itself with greater clarity than on the intrinsic evil of abortion.

Further explaining the Catholic stance on abortion, he states:

Some people think that when Catholics compare abortion to slavery or to Nazi anti-Semitism they are engaging in hyperbole. They couldn’t be more wrong. Abortion is not only the greatest social injustice of our century; it is arguably the greatest social injustice of all time. Abortion circumscribes an entire class of human beings (the unborn) as non-citizens, excluded from the basic rights and protections accorded to all other human beings. In this way abortion mimics the great moral tragedies of all time, which always began with the denigration of an entire class of people as unworthy of life or freedom.

The evil of abortion is compounded by the magnitude of the problem. Though completely reliable statistics are unavailable, conservative estimates place the number of legal abortions performed worldwide each year at 25-30 million, a figure that alone makes abortion a social problem of staggering proportions. “Humanity today offers us a truly alarming spectacle,” wrote Pope John Paul in his 1995 encyclical letter Evangelium Vitae, “if we consider not only how extensively attacks on life are spreading but also their unheard of numerical proportion.” The legal, systematic elimination of the most vulnerable members of society is the most heinous crime known to man. To fail to oppose it is to make oneself complicit in it.

Williams continues:

The most disturbing element of Speaker Pelosi’s comments, however, was not her historical fudging, her disingenuous misrepresentation of Catholic moral teaching or her implicit adoption of cafeteria Catholicism. It was her insouciant dismissal of the moral significance of abortion. She said that in the end, it didn’t matter when life begins anyway. Her exact words were: “The point is, is that it [when life begins] shouldn’t have an impact on the woman’s right to choose.” (emphasis mine)

That kind of morality worries me a great deal.

The Christ on Campus Initiative is a ministry…

… created for the purpose of preparing and circulating literature for college and university students, addressing an array of important intellectual and practical issues from an evangelical Christian perspective.

Top evangelical scholars are recruited to write articles which are…

… intellectually rigorous, culturally relevant, persuasive in argument and faithful to historic, evangelical Christianity.

I’ve taken a quick look at the first three articles. They appear to be excellent resources, not only for college students, but for any interested parties. The articles are:

Do Christians Have a Worldview? by Graham Cole

Jesus of Nazareth: How Historians Can Know Him and Why it Matters by Craig L. Blomberg

I Believe in Nature: An Exploration of Naturalism and the Biblical Worldview by Kirsten Birkett

HT: Justin Taylor

In my last post, I provided some reasons for preferring substance dualism over physicalism. Today, I give a couple of more reasons and then conclude by commenting on some objections to substance dualism.

In addition to the split-brain thought experiment, there is another observation in favor of dualism. I have the property of being possibly disembodied, but my body does not have that same property. Therefore, I am not identical to my body. According to Leibniz’s law, which I referenced in a previous post, we must reject physicalism in favor of dualism.

Additionally, the reality of free will requires that we are more than just our bodies. If physicalism is true, our bodies, and therefore, our brains are physical objects which behave by natural laws and inputs. Such processes lead to determinism and rules out free choices. If free will is not an illusion, then I am more than a physical body and brain. I am also an immaterial mental substance which freely chooses my actions.

In conclusion, I will briefly address two objections to substance dualism.

Objection 1: Ockham’s razor states that entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity. Why should one posit two substances when one will do?

Answer: The key phrase in this context is beyond necessity. One substance will not do. The explanatory power and scope of physicalism is far weaker than that of dualism. Therefore, according to Ockham, we should favor two entities rather than one.

Objection 2: The mind-body interaction problem. We have no understanding of how an immaterial and a material substance can interact, therefore they cannot interact.

Answer: This objection commits the fallacy of an argument from ignorance, arguing that because one is ignorant of or cannot understand how a thing can happen it cannot happen. If one requires a scientific explanation of how such a thing can happen, one will be waiting for a long time. Since science only deals with the material and physical, it is, by nature, incapable of answering such a question. As with Newton’s gravitational laws, which were initially rejected by some because no known mechanism could account for action at a distance, the evidence in favor of dualism is strong and the interaction problem is not a reason to reject dualism in favor of physicalism.

(Much credit must be given to the work of J. P. Moreland for the ideas presented in this series. I would highly recommend his book, Body & Soul, for anyone with further interest in this subject. He also has recently published a book on a related topic, Consciousness and the Existence of God, which, although not primarily addressing substance dualism, does provide further food for thought. I am presently working my way through this book.)

In my previous posts, I have shown that mental properties and physical properties are not identical. This would at least establish that property dualism is true. However, there is good reason to go further and also believe that substance dualism is true. It is not just that the physical brain has two kinds of properties (property dualism), but humans possess a body and an immaterial soul which possess their respective kinds of properties.

The split-brain thought experiment illustrates that no amount of information about my body or my consciousness will tell anyone where I am. Let us suppose that person 1’s brain is split in ½, with ½ of his brain placed into a body (person 2) and the other ½ into another body (person 3). Suppose that persons 2 and 3 both have all of person 1’s memories and personality traits.

Where is person 1? It could be that person 1 was annihilated and two new people came into existence. It could be that person 1 is now person 2, and person 3 is a mental double. It could be that person 1 is now person 3, and person 2 is a mental double. It won’t work to split person 1 in half and end up with ½ persons.

The end result is that although we know where person 1’s brain and body are, we have no idea where person 1 is. Yet, if the physicalist view were correct, we would. No amount of information can answer the question of where person 1 is. So, there is more to person 1 than just his brain, body, or even personality traits, memories, and conscious life.

Next, more reasons to believe that substance dualism is true.

Michael Novak, at the First Things blog, has a post called Atheism and Evil. There are two points, in particular, he raises that are worth repeating. The first is that atheists are sometimes blind to the fact that an atheistic worldview does nothing to make evil more bearable or bring comfort to the troubled soul (which doesn’t even exist on an atheistic worldview):

Could it possibly improve things to believe that the long pain of human evolution was set in motion by chance alone? The atheist view of the world is actually rather bleaker than that of Jews and Christians: Suffering under the weight of evil is meaningless, and so is any struggle against evil. Everything in the atheist’s world begins and ends in randomness and chance.

Actually, evil does not even exist according to the tenets of atheism. There is no absolute standard of good by which to judge certain things evil.

Second, Novak waxes eloquent in briefly presenting a form of the free will defense. He states:

A world in which liberty can flower must be a world of laws, regularities, and probabilities, but also a world of contingency, happenstance, serendipity, surprise, and suspense. All the stuff of a good story depends on creation being not just a world of iron logic and inflexible arithmetic, but also a world of immense crisscrossing variation and “blooming, buzzing profusion…”

In such a world, there cannot be human freedom without the possibility of falling away from the good. Various forms of refusal and irresponsibility, and even the surrender of reason to spontaneity and passion, must with some high probability come into play. “If men were angels,” such probabilities might be nonexistent. But men are not angels, and therefore a free republic, built for men as they are, must be built for those who sometimes sin…

From what we know of the world we live in, the Creator, it would seem, was no utopian, and his purpose was not to make a world solely for human pleasure, painlessness, and comfort. The world instead provides a tapestry of human experience, times of joy and times of trial—even a vale of sorrows—in which the golden thread of history is liberty.

That is, at least, the Judeo-Christian story, and I’m sticking to it.

Amy, of Stand to Reason, has an interesting post, New Atheists: Old Arguments…Old Attitude?, in which she points out that the tactics of the New Atheists are not so new after all. She quotes a 1797 work of William Wilberforce describing the atheists of his day:

In our own days, when it is but too clear that infidelity [i.e., skepticism, atheism] increases, it is not in consequence of the reasonings of the infidel writers having been much studied, but from the progress of luxury, and the decay of morals: and, so far as this increase maybe traced at all to the works of skeptical writers, it has been produced, not by argument and discussion, but by sarcasms and points of wit, which have operated on weak minds, or on nominal Christians, by bringing gradually into contempt, opinions which, in their case, had only rested on the basis of blind respect and the prejudices of education. . . . If Revelation were assailed only by reason and argument, it would have little to fear. The literary opposers of Christianity, from Herbert to Hume, have been seldom read. They made some stir in their day: during their brief span of existence they were noisy and noxious; but like the locusts of the east, which for a while obscure the air, and destroy the verdure, they were soon swept away and forgotten.

This just reinforces the adage that there is nothing new under the sun… including athiestic antics.

This CNN iReport video of today’s total solar eclipse was shot by a gentleman in Siberia. This video confirms the scriptural passage which states that the heavens declare the glory of God. Total solar eclipses are rare and wonderful occurrences which don’t just happen on every planet. Gonzalez and Richards, in their book The Privileged Planet, hypothesize that it is no coincidence that our planet is the only planet in the solar system on which total solar eclipses occur. Several factors are involved. First, the moon and the Sun are two of the roundest measured bodies in the Solar system (required for the “perfect” match). The apparent size of both heavenly bodies are almost identical. The Sun is some 400 times farther away from earth as the moon, but it is also some 400 times larger than the moon. The result is that they appear to be the same size from the surface of the earth.

Is this coincidence? Or is it the plan of a designer who designed our planet in such a way as to encourage and enable scientific discovery? Solar eclipses have played an important role in scientific discovery. Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity was confirmed due to a solar eclipse in 1919. Solar eclipses allow the sun’s full corona to be visible to ground-based observers leading to an understanding of the composition of stars. Total solar eclipses have also enabled scientists to understand the Earth’s rate of rotation and its change over time.

It is also interesting to note that the Moon is gradually receding from earth at a rate of 3.82 centimeters per year. At the same time, the Sun’s apparent size is increasing by 6 centimeters per year. These two processes will end total solar eclipses at some time in the future. In the words of Gonzalez and Richards:

This relatively small window of opportunity also happens to coincide with the existence of intelligent life. Put another way, the most habitable place in the Solar System yields the best view of solar eclipses just when observers can best appreciate them.

The total solar eclipse is just one of many scientific findings which support the idea that the Earth is a special place designed for the existence of intelligent rational creatures and for their discovery of the universe in which they live.

Frederica Mathewes-Green has written a post at First Things called When Mother Comes Home. She compares the materialists of the world to the children in the Dr. Seuss childhood storybook, The Cat in the Hat. The kids have watched the cat in the hat, along with thing 1 and thing 2 make a complete mess of the house, when suddenly they notice that Mom has arrived and will walk through the front door immanently. The crisis point of the book arrives here:

Then our fish said, ‘LOOK! LOOK!’ And our fish shook with fear. ‘Your mother is on her way home! Do you hear? Oh, what will she do to us? What will she say? Oh, she will not like it to find us this way!’

Green proposes that the outrage against Intelligent Design is related to the fear the materialists have of “Mother” coming home:

I think that’s how our materialist friends feel when they hear the term “Intelligent Design.” It is essential, indispensable, to believe that Mother is never coming home. Otherwise the things we do might have unanticipated meanings and unforeseen consequences.

For materialists, it’s essential that the material is all there is.

Green closes this comparison with a final quote from The Cat in the Hat and a final observation:

“‘But your mother will come. She will find this big mess! And this mess is so big and so deep and so tall, we can not pick it up. There is no way at all!’”

For those banking on the theory that that this is only a material world, it would be a very uncomfortable thing if Mother were to appear. They were just having fun on a rainy day, assuming that the cake and rake and cup and ball were their toys to play with. But all these bodies we were indulging or starving or tearing apart might turn out to belong to someone else after all. And that is a prospect the materialist cannot bear.