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In Al Mohler’s latest blog entry, Modernity, Madness, and Morals, he uses a recent Minette Marrin article in the London Times discussing a secular form of ethics called rational choice theory. According to this theory of ethics, which has features of a social contract theory, a person decides what is the correct course of action based on a rational choice. Mohler summarizes:

More recently, moral philosophers have settled on a more clearly secular theory of morality — rational choice theory. According to rational choice theory, people tend to settle on a moral code that fits their needs and leads, or is likely to lead, to their desired outcomes. In other words, individuals make a rational choice. A young woman might make a rational choice not to engage in premarital sex because she does not want to harm her reputation or opportunities or marriage. A young man might not shoplift because it would harm his chances of advancement. Rational choice theorists argue that their theory can explain virtually any human behavior, including moral choice.

As Marrin laments, and Mohler agrees, such a theory fails as an adequate theory upon which a society can base morality and ethics. Mohler uses the analogy of two boys, the first of which does well and receives positive reinforcement for his “good” decisions. The second receives no such reinforcement. Mohler observes:

The second boy has no experience of similar controls. He does not expect life to go better for him if he behaves well. He may lack parents who would even teach him how to behave, much less reward him when he obeys and punish him when he disobeys. Instead, he learns that cutting corners, breaking rules, flaunting his misbehavior, and playing the part of the “bad” boy works for him. He gets more attention (even if negative attention) and gains the respect of his peer structure by misbehavior.

Marrin astutely observes:

Morality depends on having something to lose. It isn’t just a matter of learning right from wrong, least of all in a post-religious society. Morality is socially constructed. I will respect your property and your person because I want you to respect mine. We both have something to lose. One does not have to be educated in political philosophy to understand that ancient deal. But if I have neither property nor respect from anyone, what’s in the deal for me?

Rational-choice theory certainly explains much of our behavior, but it is incapable of providing a firm basis of morality. This is the first of Mohler’s observations. The second is since much of our behavior may be explained by rational choice, humility should be embraced by all Christians who think they’re “good.” Much of our good behavior may be readily explained simply on the basis of rational choice. There is no place for pride. Mohler concludes thusly:

The rational choice theorist has little or nothing to say to the boys and young men of Minette Marrin’s concern. The Christian church does have something to say — the liberating truth of the Gospel. But in order to be heard, we had better first be humbled by the honest recognition that we are not as “good” as we like to think. We are all delinquents — every last one of us.

Over at Scriptorium, you will find a couple of posts worth reading by two of my favorite comtemporary philosophers, J. P. Moreland and John Mark Reynolds.

Reynolds discusses a contemporary issue, personal vs. non-personal causation, from a Greek Classical perspective in this post, Before Socrates: the Tension between Personal and Impersonal Causes. In this excerpt, he argues that Christianity brought about a resolution of the tension present in the works of the philosophers of Greek antiquity:

The coming of Christ was, therefore, good news for science and philosophy.

The Christian church would eventually fill the gap between the two extremes of Greek thought. Christian theology, with a God outside of nature, would allow for both natural and personal cosmic cause. Some things could be recognized as divine action, the creation of life for example. Other things, such as the cycle of seasons, could be given natural explanations in the context of an overarching divine purpose. Only Plato and Aristotle would come close to grasping this elegant solution. As we shall see, neither fully grasped it and only with the coming of Christianity were the necessary philosophical distinctions to be made. Christianity allowed for the final birth of a truly modern science.

Moreland has a post on Human Persons and Equal Rights. In it, he discusses how that only the Judeo-Christian view of humans as being made in the image of God can adequately ground human rights. Naturalism (and belly-buttons, among other things) cannot. Here’s the beginning lines:

It is a cherished belief of most people that human beings simply as such have equal value and rights and that they have significantly greater value than animals. However, this claim is difficult if not impossible to justify given a naturalist worldview. For many naturalists, the best, perhaps only, way to justify the belief that all humans have equal and unique value simply as such is in light of the metaphysical grounding of the Judeo-Christian doctrine of the image of God. Such a view depicts humans as substances (a particular thing like a dog that is a simple, indivisible unity of parts and attributes at a time, that remains the same through change, and that has a nature (being a human, being a carbon atom, being a dog) that provides an answer to the question “What kind of thing is this particular object?”)…

J. P. Moreland has recently posted on Human Persons and the Self in which he briefly presents evidence for the existence of a unified, simple self. He then argues that naturalism cannot account for such a self and that the self is better accounted for by the Christian teaching that we are made in the image of God. I find his arguments compelling that…

… the self is a simple, indivisible, unified I that remains the same through change, for example, as the body changes or as memories, personality, conscious experiences come and go and become different.

David Brooks, in a N.Y. Times opinion piece The Neural Buddhists, anticipating a new direction in the supposed science vs. religion wars (I say supposed because science and religion need and should not be understood in such a way), thinks that a major shift in the culture wars is coming:

… My guess is that the atheism debate is going to be a sideshow. The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going end up challenging faith in the Bible.

The latest developments in neuroscience and cognitive science, according to Brooks, will lead to a diminishing of the battles between theists and hard core mateiralists and an increased conflict between particular religious claims (such as those of Christians) and some “squishy” spirituality he descirbes as Neural Buddhism. Although he does not make it clear, he seems to indicate scientists are willing to admit that non-material entities are real and exist, but only if it is maintained that they arise from purely material entities:

The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development… Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.

This new spirituality is of course nothing like the God of Christian theism, which leads to Brooks’ assertion that a new form of cultural battle is forming between theists and science. This God of neuroscience…

… can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

The battle with militant atheists will no longer be the central battle for Christians. Instead, they will have to battle this new-agey, eastern-like, transcendental unkowable entity which emerges from the brain’s neural network.

I’m not sure if Brooks is right or not. In one sense, it would be considered a small victory is non-physical entities are accepted into science’s ontology. On the other hand, the God which is allowed in is not significantly different than there being no God at all. If Christianity is faced with the task of defending its particular truth claims against such a vague deity, I am comfortable that it will be well equipped to meet the challenge. Christianity is unique among all world religions in that it is grounded in historical events, such as the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, which make or break its claim to truth. While this new development might be more troublesome to other religious traditions, not so with Christianity.

I’ve just finished Angus Menuge’s excellent book Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science. I began the book with the ambitious goal of providing reviews of each chapter as I read. This lasted for a couple of chapters. The book is much more rigorously philosophical than many books which are intended for a more popular audience. I found it increasingly difficult to summarize a chapter’s worth of philosophical argument in a quick blog post. So… you’ll just have to read it yourself. It was quite good though and I think he is successful in applying many of the principles of intelligent design as used in the physical and biological sciences to rationality and the mind.

John DePoe states in his Amazon review of the book:

Angus Menuge has written an excellent book defending the concept of “agency” against the most challenging arguments raised by contemporary materialists. Menuge shows that the Christian worldview gives an account of human agency that is not available to the most sophisticated accounts materialism. For example, Menuge engages Dan Dennett, Paul Churchland, Jerry Fodor, and other key figures in contemporary philosophy of mind. The criticisms Menuge brings to light show the breaking points in leading theories of mind. I read this book as a philosophy graduate student taking a philosophy of mind seminar, and I found that Menuge’s criticisms and scholarship can run with the best of them. His carefully documented work of scholarship was a valuable tool for me as a student even in graduate school.

But Menuge’s book is not just a piece of critical scholarship. He also advances some constructive theories that explain crucial features of human agents. A theistic worldview provides tools for maintaining a robust theory of personal agency that are unavailable to materialists, which Menuge brings into focus with rigorous logic and clarity.

I received an email a few weeks ago from Marc who asked if I would be willing to answer two main points which ID critics cite when attempting to label ID as unscientific. Today, I’ll take a look at one of the two, that is, “Isn’t ID internally inconsistent because it invokes the existence of something even more complex to explain the complexity of life on earth?” This is an objection that Dawkins refers to in his book The God Delusion. No explanatory advance is made in such a case as now one would be left with an even more complex entity needing explanation.

William Lane Craig addresses this issue in his evaluation of the Dawkins’ central argument of his book which can be found here. Here are a couple of take home points in answering this objection.

First of all, this objection cannot be fully answered without considering how one is to weigh competing explanations for a phenomenon. This is not a simple question and has been the subject of much philosophical reflection. It is implied in this objection that simplicity is the most important criteria. However, there are other important criteria which must be weighed, such as, explanatory power, explanatory scope, and so on.

Second, if one grants that simplicity is the most important criteria in this case, the objection contains a fatal flaw in its assumption that a divine designer (I must interject that ID as a scientific endeavor does not identify the designer as a divine being, but many understand the designer to be divine, and the objection implies the designer is divine.) is an equally complex or more complex entity than the universe. Craig states:

As an unembodied mind, God is a remarkably simple entity. As a non-physical entity, a mind is not composed of parts, and its salient properties, like self-consciousness, rationality, and volition, are essential to it. In contrast to the contingent and variegated universe with all its inexplicable quantities and constants, a divine mind is startlingly simple. Certainly such a mind may have complex ideas—it may be thinking, for example, of the infinitesimal calculus—, but the mind itself is a remarkably simple entity.

So, this objection confuses a mind’s ideas, which may be complex, with a mind itself, which is a simple entity. Therefore, the objection fails since an advance in simplicity is acheived by positing a divine mind.

One of the most controversial aspects of the recent movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is the attention given to the alleged link between Darwinism and the Holocaust. I think that this link is legitimate. No one that I’ve heard, including those interviewed in Expelled, actually believe that all Darwinists are Nazis or that Darwinism inevitably leads to such horrific deeds such as those perpetrated by Hitler. In fact, this point is made clear in the movie. Berlinski, in Expelled, rightly points out that Darwinism was not a sufficient condition for the Nazi atrocities, but it was a necessary one.

Tom Gilson has an excellent discussion of the issue in his post: Darwin-Nazi Link: Fundamentally Wrongheaded? He responds to a charge that this whole linkage is unimportant. He raises a few major points:

1. It is important not to ignore this link because it is important to learn from history. He suggests that the potential for similar consequences are present in a number of contemporary issues.

2. It’s not quite true that there is only a historical link and no philosophical link from Darwin to Hitler.
a. Naturalistic Darwinism, if taken to be the sole explanation for all of life, erases all ethical requirements.
b. There is an ontological implication in Darwinism: humans are the same kind of thing as animals.

Hitler treated humans like animals; Darwinism says that’s what we are.

3. Ideas matter. They have consequences.

4. Influencers certainly can be blamed for the actions of others that follow. In this case, Darwin opened an ideological or ethical door which would not otherwise have been opened.

Here is Angus Menuge’s powerpoint presentation for his recent debate with P.Z. Meyers. It is titled, “Does Neuroscience Leave Room for God?” It is a nice resource with some interesting quotes pertaining to the subject. Among them is this one which causes one to question the materialistic commitment of many modern scientists:

“[A] rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.” - William James, The Will to Believe.

HT: Dangerous Idea

I have just finished reading the first two books of Francis Schaeffer’s Trilogy, The God Who is There and Escape from Reason, and I am over halfway through the third, He is There and He is not Silent. Schaeffer presents a powerful presuppositional apologetic for the truth of Christianity. I can’t believe I haven’t read these before.

J.P. Moreland’s latest blog, Recalcitrant Facts and the Image of God, reminded me of much of the content of these books. A recalcitrant fact is a fact that is “obstinately uncooperative, hard to handle or deal with.” From a naturalistic worldview, there are a number of such facts, some of which, according to Moreland are…

… consciousness, the self, free will, equal rights and dignity, rational abilities, the nature and cures of depression, and sexuality.

Schaeffer makes similar claims about the world in his works and asserts that the teachings of orthodox Christianity provide the only framework from which they can be consistently understood:

There is no other sufficient philosophical answer than the one I have outlined… There is only one philosophy, one religion, that fills this need in all the world’s thought, whether the East, the West, the ancient, the modern, the new, the old. Only one fills the philosophical need of existence, of Being (and later Schaeffer argues of morality), and it is the Judeo-Christian God - not just an abstract concept, but rather that this God is really there. He exists. There is no other answer.

There are certain facts about the world in which we live that only make sense from a Christian worldview. This is what Moreland and Schaeffer are both claiming in similar ways. Moreland states:

The Christian offers a challenge to other worldviews—particularly, naturalism and postmodernism: Show that you have a better explanation for these features than Christianity does (with its doctrine of the image of God), or show that these features are not actually real, even though they seem to be.

I’ve just finished reading and small, but insightful, booklet by Francis Schaeffer called Art and the Bible. Over the past 10 years or so, I’ve developed a love and appreciation for art and have made it a goal of mine to visit as many of the major (and lesser known) art museums of the world as possible. In Art and the Bible, Schaeffer first presents a summary of scriptural teaching on art and argues for its place in modern Christian life. In the second part of the book, he seeks to develop a Christian perspective on art. I found his remarks quite helpful and thought I would provide here his eleven distinct perspectives from which a Christian should evaluate or judge a work of art (not limited to only visual arts). In the booklet, Schaeffer, of course, provides much more clarifying content.

1. A work of art has a value in itself. It is to be enjoyed as a work of art.
2. Art forms add strength to the world view which shows through, no matter what the world view is or whether the world view is true or false. The effect of any proposition, whether true or false is hightened if expressed in art.
3. In all forms of writing both poetry and prose, it makes a tremendous difference whether there is a continuity or a discontinuity with the normal definitions of words in normal syntax. Totally abstract art alienates the viewer from the painter.
4. The fact that something is a work of art does not make it sacred.
5. There are four basic standards by which art is to be judged:
a. Technical excellence (the use of color, form, balance, texture, handling of lines, unity of the canvas, etc).
b. Validity (whether an artist is honest to himself and his worldview).
c. Intellectual content, the world view which comes through.
d. The integration of content and vehicle (correlation between the style and the content).
6. Art forms can be used for any type of message from pure fantasy to detailed history.
7. Styles of art form change and there is nothing wrong with this.
8. One must distinguish between style and message. (There is no such thing as a goldy style or an ungodly style).
9. The Christian world view can be divided into a major theme and a minor theme. The minor theme is the abnormality of the revolting world. The major theme is the meaningfulness and purposefulness of life.
10. Christian art is by no means always religious art, that is, art which deals with religious themes.
11. Every artist has the problem of making an individual work of art and, as well, building up a total body of work.