I’ve said before that I think arriving at an objective moral system is within our power, though we certainly haven’t come close to one yet. To arrive at such a system, we have to factor out whatever cultural biases we might have. Much of any moral system stems from the value intrinsic in life itself. In the first installment of my On Guard critique, I responded to William Lane Craig’s claim that without a god, life has no value:
Life as we have defined it includes 1) any ordered entity 2) which takes in energy and transforms it to do work, 3) such as growth, development, and healing, 4) in order to reproduce and 5) adapt and change in response to the environment and other stimuli. Life is reasonably rare throughout the universe (though not necessarily vanishingly so) and is the only vehicle for intelligence of which we are aware. For these two reasons, life is worth preserving. Therefore, actions which foster the growth of life in general should be considered moral. Acts that cause life to decline or to perish are immoral.
Clearly, that argument is incomplete. If our moral system is to be objective it must apply universally. If we encounter alien life, it should seem equally reasonable to them. If there is a conscious creator, it should be equally reasonable to that deity. If we should christen a SkyNet, it should find this moral system valid. Continue reading…
It’s been a while since I really delved into purely philosophical waters here on Radical Rationalist and when that happens I start to get very self-conscious about using the adjective ‘radical’. Today I feel like the best way to remedy the feeling is to set out one of the two most radical (I think) philosophical positions I hold: that religion, in any guise, is innately immoral.
There are several issues I want to deal with right at the start. The first is that in making this argument I refuse to use specific individuals or historical events. Too often, people in my position point to these kinds of specific examples in an effort to demonstrate the larger point. This approach is pointless and self-defeating. Pointless because specific examples are just that. They can easily be dismissed as the misapplication of whatever teaching that the event is being used to refute. Plus, under the best circumstances, it would only function to demonstrate the immorality of one specific doctrine, rather than the idea of religious faith as a whole. The tendency is self-defeating because any sufficiently large group of people or sufficiently long period of history will contain examples of people behaving badly. If I should point to the Crusades, my opponent could point to the French Revolution. If I point to Osama bin Laden, they can point to the Unabomber. That kind of back-and-forth bickering doesn’t move the debate at all, in any direction. Continue reading…
What I will claim right now is this: Religion is the necessary prerequisite for the plurality of human conflict throughout history. That is to say, religion has caused more wars than any other cause of conflict (land, money, oil, raw materials, revenge, whatever). That is the claim. If Doc Dickson feels the need to refute that, he can go ahead and try. [...]
We cannot be held morally responsible for the highly improbable. Where we must own up to our complicity in decline is in those instances in which we caused the decline to be probable, more probable or even likely, whether directly or through the foreseeable acts of others, rational or irrational, moral or immoral. [...]
