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C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man purports to be a book specifically about public education, but its central concerns are broadly political, religious, and philosophical. In the best of the book's three essays, "Men Without Chests," Lewis trains his laser-sharp wit on a mid- century English high school text, considering the ramifications of teaching British students to believe in idle relativism, and to reject "the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kinds of things we are." Lewis calls this doctrine the "Tao," and he spends much of the book explaining why society needs a sense of objective values. The Abolition of Man speaks with astonishing freshness to contemporary debates about morality. ~ Amazon.com
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In its own words: "Ars Disputandi is the first online journal for the philosophy of religion. It publishes refereed articles, literature surveys and discussion notes, as well as book reviews and bibliographies. Unlike traditional journals, it will not appear in issues; papers that are accepted will be immediately published online. AD does not aim to be a rival to established philosophy of religion paper journals, but to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and arguments. AD is concerned to promote research and discussion of issues in the philosophy of religion by providing for the fast publication of contributions to ongoing debates."
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In its own words:
"While run-on sentences, comma splices, split infinitives, and other
such grammatical minutiae may rarely make appearances in the best of
our nation’s dailies and weeklies, and a small but growing class of
press watchdogs help to correct errors of fact (pointing out bias,
factual omissions, and distortions), a more perilous corruption lurks
under the clean surface of the printed page: specious reasoning." ... "Our contemporary political discourse is, to put it
bluntly, a mess. As a population we simply are not trained in the basic
logical, rhetorical, and analytic tools necessary to navigate the swamp
of contemporary politics." ... "Logical analysis should be a first line of defense
against the hijacking of our political discourse by cynical
manipulators. Even without knowing the truth of the premises of an
argument, one can determine whether or not the conclusion is justified
by these premises. Sadly, as we will have ample opportunity to show in
detail, many editorialists cannot even pass such a basic and
fundamental test. This transforms their editorials from opinions that
are worth taking seriously into mere nonsense and empty assertions. As we say, we are speaking 'validity to power' — not truth as the phrase usually runs, but validity."
Man's Unconquerable Mind (Columbia University Press: 1954).
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There are many naïve people all over the world – some of them scientists – who believe that all problems, sooner or later, will be solved by Science. The word Science itself has become a vague reassuring noise, with a very ill defined meaning and a powerful emotional charge: It is now applied to all sorts of unsuitable subjects and used as a cover for careless and incomplete thinking in dozens of fields. But even taking Science at the most sensible of its definitions, we must acknowledge that it is as unperfect as all other activities of the human mind.
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"This blog is about faith & culture and features the musings of Jim and Amy Spiegel (and occasional special guests of whom we are fond or at least don’t despise). Each month we post, in some form or another, on theology, philosophy, current events, books, film, and music. Read at your own pace and pleasure. Interact with us. Floss daily. Jim Spiegel holds a PhD from Michigan State and is a professor of philosophy at Taylor University. He is the author of several books, a popular speaker, and a self-produced musician."
Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein (Penguin Group: Feb 2009), 320 pages.
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A groundbreaking discussion of how we can apply the new science of choice architecture to nudge people toward decisions that will improve their lives by making them healthier, wealthier, and more free. Yes, there is such a thing as common sense—and thank goodness for that. At least that's this reader's reaction to Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's Nudge, an engaging and insightful tour through the evidence that most human beings don't make decisions in the way often characterized (some would say caricatured) in elementary economics textbooks, along with a rich array of suggestions for enabling many of us to make better choices, both for ourselves and for society. ~ Benjamin M. Friedman of The New York Times
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What happens when the immovable object of faith meets the irresistible force of sophisticated unbelief? Too often, says Dr. Jerry Gill, the believer either retreats out of earshot, saying that faith is "better felt than told," or he tries to build a "foolproof" logical system too airtight even for God. This book suggests a third option: risking an open-minded "dialogue" with challenges to faith, examining presuppositions on both sides and acknowledging valid contributions of other views while maintaining responsible religious commitment. "As I understand it, a dialogical posture is one that takes the matters
of religious reality and truth so seriously as to require extreme
openness to and growth toward them, as well as radical sincerity and
commitment to them. Thus, all sides and aspects of an issue must be
explored with humble thoroughness, and whatever is deemed worthy of
commitment must be incorporated into one's life with integrity." ~ Quote
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I've realized I have a problem with writing this blog, apart from lack of time and a general aversion to the genre. What should I write about? The natural impulse is to write about what I'm thinking about, what I'm working on. But there are two reasons against this: (i) I don't want to write poor formulations of ideas that need a lot more space and time to formulate well, and (ii) I don't want to put my new ideas into the blogosphere where they can become anybody's property but mine. So I need to write about something less central to my intellectual concerns--but that just isn't very appealing. I end up writing about things that have caught my fancy recently or that I think might be helpful to people (boring!). Or else I just talk about tennis, which is fine by me but not perhaps of interest to most readers of this "intellectual" blog.
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In our after hours discussions, my good friend Andy and I keep circling back to the Moral Argument for God, in part because of Andy's fustration with theists who think it obvious that without God, objective morality cannot be grounded. After all, nontheists have offered a multitude of proposals for objective morality apart from God. The moral relativism that typified Modernism and atheism for much of the twentieth century is nowadays less a given, and though nontheists are divided about whether morality is objective, those who argue that it is cannot be simply ignored or dismissed. Michael Martin raises this very objection to William Lane Craig's rendition of the Moral Argument in his critique of the Craig/Flew debate. "In order to show that atheistic morality necessarily is subjective, it must be shown that all attempts to ground objective morality on a non-theistic basis fail."1 Martin is surely correct, insofar as the philosophical argument goes, but given the time constraints of a debate, Craig's placing the onus of proposing such a theory on his opponent is probably defensible. And perhaps that burden of proof applies more generally, since historically relativism and subjectivism have been advanced along polytheistic, pantheistic, or atheistic lines, whereas monotheism has consistently assumed that morality is objective, Euthyphro notwithstanding. As luck would have it, Andy is happy to shoulder that burden and propose such a moral theory. Following the lead of Shelly Kagan, he argues that Kantianism fits the bill. Andy's goal is modest: to sketch a plausible and objective ethical theory that makes no reference to God and, in so doing, to negate the presumption that theism is uniquely able to ground objective moral truths. I am far from being able to defend a fully developed metaethics of my own, but it seems to me that Kant's ethics are, in the first place, something less than a metaethical theory, and secondly, not so easily torn from the theistic fabric into which he wove them. A caveat is in order. I am at the beginning of the long journey required to fully understand the nuances and implications of Kant and the vast literature in his wake. I beg mercy for any obvious misunderstandings that follow.
Kai Nielsen (Prometheus Books: September 2005), 245 pages.
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The indeterminacy of the modern concept of God has made the distinction between belief and unbelief increasingly problematic. Both the complexity of the religious response and the variety of skeptical philosophies preclude simplistic definitions of what constitutes belief in God. Making the discussion even more difficult are assertions by fundamentalists who dismiss the philosophical perplexities of religious claims as unreal pseudo-problems. Atheism & Philosophy is a detailed study of these and other issues vital to our understanding of atheism, agnosticism, and religious belief. Philosopher Kai Nielsen develops a coherent and integrated approach to the discussion of what it means to be an atheist. In chapters such as "How is Atheism to be Characterized?", "Does God Exist?: Reflections on Disbelief," "Agnosticism," "Religion and Commitment," and "The Primacy of Philosophical Theology," Nielsen defends atheism in a way that answers to contemporary concerns. ~ Product Description