Consider all. Test All. Hold on to the good.

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Shameless, Guiltless Morality

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Is it possible?

My premises. A successful society is one in which:

  1. It is easiest to do good. Doing good is encouraged.
  2. Doing bad is discouraged.
  3. Discouraging, penalizing, frowning upon, or shaming an act causes pain for those who fall short of the ideal.

Psalm 85: You, LORD, showed favor to your land;

you restored the fortunes of Jacob.

2 You forgave the iniquity of your people

and covered all their sins.[b]

3 You set aside all your wrath

and turned from your fierce anger.

4 Restore us again, God our Savior,

and put away your displeasure toward us.

5 Will you be angry with us forever?

Will you prolong your anger through all generations?

6 Will you not revive us again,

that your people may rejoice in you?

7 Show us your unfailing love, LORD,

and grant us your salvation.

8 I will listen to what God the LORD says;

he promises peace to his people, his faithful servants—

but let them not turn to folly.

9 Surely his salvation is near those who fear him,

that his glory may dwell in our land.

10 Love and faithfulness meet together;

righteousness and peace kiss each other.

11 Faithfulness springs forth from the earth,

and righteousness looks down from heaven.

12 The LORD will indeed give what is good,

and our land will yield its harvest.

13 Righteousness goes before him

and prepares the way for his steps.

NKJV: 10 Mercy and truth have met together;

Righteousness and peace have kissed.

11 Truth shall spring out of the earth,

And righteousness shall look down from heaven.

NASB: 10(Q)Lovingkindness and truth have met together;

(R)Righteousness and peace have kissed each other.

11Truth (S)springs from the earth,

And righteousness looks down from heaven.

ESV: 10(Q) Steadfast love and faithfulness meet;

(R) righteousness and peace kiss each other.

That’s Just, Like, Your Opinion, Man

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The Big Lebowski — The Dude — undeniably excels at rolling with the punches. His rhetorical acumen, however, could use some work, as in a classic moment (27:54) when, true to form, he resorts in frustration to the lazy rertort: “Well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.” I take no pleasure in taking exception to The Dude, but this rejoinder fails as a defeater no matter how you spin it. What exactly is supposed to be the point? It appears to be a non sequitur. The sun is larger than the moon. Well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man. On the most literal reading, his words simply fail to constitute a rejoinder. They are, perhaps, an acknowledgment, but in no wise a counterclaim. It’s like responding, “Well, those are just, like, words denoting a proposition, man.” “True. Thanks for noticing. And?” An “opinion” is, most simply, a belief or judgment. To state an opinion is to say, “I believe this to be true.” I can well imagine the claimant responding to The Dude with bewilderment: “Uh, yeah, it’s my opinion. That’s why I said it. Thanks for stating the obvious. So, it’s my opinion, and…?” Commonly, though, to call a belief or judgment an opinion is to identify it as a belief whose grounds are insufficient to warrant certainty or knowledge. Here, Lebowski’s rejoinder has a point, it’s just implicit. just enthymetic. The missing premise is, I require you to be certain of whatever you claim in order for me to entertain it. You are not certain. I dismiss your claim. Just as it was for Descartes, this is a highly demanding standard. We are truly certain of very little. is required Perhaps the Dude’s rejoinder can be granted more salience bite by attending to the emphasis. Perhaps The Dude’s point is, “Well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.” On this reading, perhaps the intent is akin to that most deservedly infamous retort of all: “Well, that’s just, like, true for you (i.e. not for me).”So, we’ve got three potential reads on Lewbowski’s rejoinder: 1) It is Cartesian style skepticism. 2) It is Postmodern relativism. Fallacy of distraction?

The Jefferson Bible Remnants

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Thomas Jefferson famously took a razor and glue to the New Testament, preserving moral teaching and inspiring tales from the life of Jesus and excising most everything else. His Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth is a kind of highlight reel from a particular editorial stance. The approach of many skeptics is the opposite. Their Bible seems to be only the snippets Jefferson discarded; Jefferson’s Remnants. Whatever is challenging or potentially offensive is all she wrote.  In Jefferson’s case, The new atheists have a revived an oft repeated strategy in debates about God. It’s not new. I saw it used to great effect by Michael Tooley in 1993, while Sam Harris was still. Bible constructed and judged on its most difficult passages alone.

Wars, Religious and Not

Nathan Jacobson
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In my recent response to Bill Maher’s Religulous, I made a claim that seems right to me, but of which I’m not sure. In the film, Maher makes the all too common accusation that, “More people have been killed in the name of god than for anything else.” On the face of it, this seems to me obviously incorrect, but my history is far from above reproach. I claimed, alternatively: “Because humans throughout history have been so irredeemably religious, religion has played some role in most human conflict. A small subset of wars have
been waged for distinctly religious motives.” I’m beginning a survey starting in the present and working my way back to test this impression. I’ll classify each war as either a 1) religious war, 2) a nonreligious war, or 3) a mixed war. I’m especially interested to find wars with distinctly Christian motives. I will rely, to start, on conventional wisdom with respect to causes, though conventional wisdom often does not withstand scrutiny. This is a working document and will evolve as I have time. No doubt these classifications will have to be refined.

In
by

I Want To Believe

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/8276756/Alien-life-deemed-impossible-by-analysis-of-500-planets.html
Go Recently, The X-Files returned to the big screen, recalling in its title the famous poster that adorned the walls of Fox Mulder's office during the long running series: "I Want To Believe". In the movie and original series, the show's writers draw parallels between Mulder's credulity with respect to extraterrestrial life and religious people's credulity with respect to God. Of course, as the show progressed, considering Mulder's frequent brushes with nasty alien life forms, his desire to believe hardly required a leap of faith. But in the non-fictional world, the hope that extraterrestrial life is real is increasingly widespread, even though evidence for its existence is not yet forthcoming. I think there are several reasons for this, not the least of which is a desire to believe so. But, don't such desires necessarily prejudice the pursuit of truth? Religious people are often accused of wishful thinking in their belief in God and an afterlife, and now we see in atheologians like Richard Dawkins a similar predisposition towards belief in extraterrestrial life, and in some cases, an evident desire not to believe in the supernatural. As a person of faith, I've often wrestled with whether my judgments regarding the rationality of my beliefs can be accurate when, admittedly, "I want to believe". Pascal, Kant, William James, and many others have approached this question, each from a unique angle. Here, I want to argue that a baseline credulity is necessary for any knowledge whatsoever, and that a disposition towards some kinds of beliefs, like belief in God, is appropriate, as long as it is tempered by other epistemic virtues.

Do No Evil!

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It’s not often that a corporate ethic surfaces in the mainstream, but Google’s maxim, “Do No Evil”, is an exception, no doubt in part because, like Google.com itself, it’s short and sweet. Google’s ethic may seem so obviously self-evident as to induce a smirk, but it’s unusual for a moral imperative to be so significant in a corporation’s self-identity. It brings to mind the kernel of the Hippocratic oath, “Do No Harm”, as well as Ghandi’s applying this simple rule to the complexities of being a googleopoly is not easy. Nonetheless, these rules, as good and important as they are, are noteworthy in part because of how different they are than that other moral maxim, the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

They Know Not What They Do

Nathan Jacobson
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As an empirical matter, it is difficult to deny that there are many who have earnestly sought to know God but have been unable to believe for rational reasons. And yet, by my count, most Christian apologists insist that the earnest seeker who follows the evidence will ultimately be convinced of the reality of God and of his self-revelation in Jesus Christ. In two of his recent podcasts, William Lane Craig addresses this issue: first, in response to a questioner who, by his own account, had honestly investigated the claims of Christianity but could not believe (“Evolution and Skepticism“, Nov 30, 2009); and second, in dealing with the phenomenon of some well-known deconversions (“Questions about ‘Ex-Christians’ and Molinism“, Dec 10, 2009). Though Craig recognizes atheism as a rational position, in these instances, instead of conceding the reality of sincere unbelief, Craig posited the power of self-deception in the first case and of moral failure in the second. I don’t discount the power of moral considerations, including self-deception, in belief formation. Indeed, virtue epistemology has well articulated an extensive catalog of moral obligations relevant to justified belief. Nonetheless, there seem to be cases in which the seeker’s quest has been bona fide and not impeded by an unwillingness to obey God. Kenneth W. Daniels’ spiritual autobiography, Why I Believed, recounts the story of his painful loss of faith in spite of his desperate desire to continue to believe the story that gave his life meaning and animated his vocation as a Christian missionary. If you read his story carefully, it is exceedingly difficult to attribute his deconversion to anything but the sway of arguments as he appraised them. And my experience suggests that his is but one of countless similar stories that are undocumented. But what, then, are we to make of a God whom is believed to have promised that he who seeks, will find Him. If sincere and virtuous unbelief is a reality, it presents a unique challenge to the Christian conception of God as described in the Bible. If trust, and thereby belief, in God and Christ is the eternally decisive matter it is claimed to be, how could a good God hide himself from those who seek him?

Determined Compatibilists

Nathan Jacobson
Go The most exasperating and disconsolate impasse in the history of philosophy is, for me, the standoff between compatibilists and incompatibilists. As one who takes reason to be the indispensable means of our understanding, this apparent conflict of intuitions undermines the role of reason as a toolset to which we can mutually appeal in discovering truth. The intuition in dispute in this case is not as basic as the principle of sufficient reason or the law of non-contradiction, but it is close. If it were more tangential, this apparent divergence of intuitions would be less alarming. But, the incompatibilist intuition, at least, is felt as an analytic and necessary truth. Describing a proposition he considered not just improbable but "unbelievable", C.S. Lewis once wrote: "the act of believing [that] is one that my mind simply will not perform. I cannot force my thought into that shape..." For many an incompatibilist, compatibilism is on that order. It is inconceivable. And yet, for their part, compatibilists seem to regard it as perfectly coherent, determinism being entirely amenable to our sense of ourselves as free and morally responsible beings. I find myself wondering an impolite question. Do compatibilists in fact have such an intuition? Or, is compatibilism an antinomy, a forced conciliation entailed by two non-negotiable theses with little or no inherent coherence? On the basis of compatibilistic argumentation itself, there is reason to suspect that it is. Some compatibilists admit as much, conceding that the conjunction of determinism and moral responsibility is paradoxical, a mystery. Other compatibilists are determined to persuade us that not only is compatibilism intuitionally coherent, but that only determinism preserves moral responsibility, and to boot, it engenders compassion where indeterminism does not. For them, deterministic freedom is the only kind "worth wanting". By attending closely to several articulations of compatibilism, I hope to give reason to think that the incompatibilist intuition is not as unevenly distributed a deliverance of reason as one might have feared.

Will Power and Predictability

Go The most unrelenting and debilitating deficiency of the Libertarian account1 of agency is its inability to explain the inner workings of the very will it insists upon. Robert Kane has called this issue the question of “intelligibility.” He claims priority for this issue, suggesting that often Libertarian arguments for supplementary theses, such as the incompatibility of determinism and freedom, are largely derailed because lurking in the back of the compatibilist’s mind is the conviction that the concept of Libertarian Agency (LA) is incoherent anyway. The compatibilist generally believes that LA is, at the least, “essentially mysterious or terminally obscure.”2 Kane argues, then, that the Libertarian project will falter as long as it fails to provide an intelligible analysis of the will itself. The alleged unintelligibility of LA springs from its insistence that free acts are undetermined. Given an exactly similar set of desires, reasons, impulses, and deliberations, a free agent has the capacity to choose either of several alternatives. But, if none of these factors are determinative, it is difficult to see how the agent’s free choice is anything but a fluke. Can we conceive of an action that is rational, intentional, and voluntary and yet neither determined nor random? Roderick Chisolm asks this very thing. “Our conception of action should be neither deterministic nor indeterministic. Is there any other possibility?”3 One version of this problem points out our apparent ability to assign probabilities to the actions of persons individually and as groups based on factors external to the will. Sociologists, for example, might predict with accuracy that 90 of 100 school children will cry when the animal crackers are depleted. But if a person’s will is undetermined by such factors, the children should just as easily have been able to receive the news with a stiff upper lip. There should be no such predictability.4