After speaking with believers for some time, I’m often asked So where does morality come from? Why be compelled to be good without belief in God? Some times the questioner is genuinely naïve and cannot understand how I can function without belief in a god; other times the questioner believes he has stumbled on a fatal flaw to my worldview: while I may have valid points about epistemology or faith, naturalism fails at explaining ethics.

Of course, I respond with: So you have me to believe that without belief in God, you would kill, rape, enslave and torture others with impunity? If so, please by all means continue to believe. But if not, sophistry doesn’t make an argument.

There are numerous other objections to the claim that belief in God or religion provides a foundation to morality that I won’t tear into (it’s likely we’ll hit into them in the comments section), but instead, I’d like to explain that I do have an answer (So where does morality come from?), and while it may not be satisfactory for some, I think it provides a basis for a naturalist system of ethics.

Radio Lab has provided a superb synthesis of several scientific explorations into morality. While I’m sure most have heard of these thought experiments before, the neuroscience behind them is brilliantly conveyed in only an hour. Of course, it’s only a brief overview of a hefty subject. You can hear an .mp3 of it here.

And while you’re at it, you didn’t hear it from me, but someone’s leaked The Atheist’s Bible (.pdf)!

I. Prologue

Plato once wrote a text called The Republic, and it is commonly used today as an introductory text to political thought. It’s a heavy analogue, where a man says to Socrates, ‘What do you think of this?’ and Socrates says, ‘Well, this is what I think…’ and continues for eight or so pages. Then, another man says to Socrates, ‘What do you think of this other thing?’ and Socrates continues. And so it goes.

There are ten chapters, ten books, of this, and it’s very difficult to read. It delves into all manner of politics and social theory, how the heavens are arranged and how humans should be, but the last book, the last piece of ten, is strangely enough, on poetry. Eric Havelock’s amazing Preface to Plato makes clear that since this stands so far out from the rest of the book, that this chapter made people so uncomfortable, that for hundreds of years, a small piece was usually inserted in the margins of the chapter, going along the lines of, ‘It is unclear that this is part of The Republic’. In fact, some printers were convinced that this was not the work of Plato, and did not publish this last chapter, this 10th book.

What Plato said was that in the ideal society, far more nuanced than a mere utopia, there would be no poetry. This was not a totalitarian demand for the elimination of art; far from it. A far more plausible interpretation of what Plato meant is a matter of Homer and his antecedents. In Plato’s analogue of The Republic, in this last chapter, what Plato asks us to think of a society heavily indebted to the poet/leader. Has there ever been a moment in time where a John Wayne was a poet?

There has been, and everyone knows who he is. His name is five letters long. It’s easy.

Continue reading The 10th Book: Reason and Un-Reason

You can find few people quoted and mis-quoted as often as Einstein on the internet. He was the catalyst who divided an age for us. His brillance began a galactic morph from a fixed, clock-work universe to one dynamic and shifting, and in so doing forever changed science and life on planet earth. No wonder people are quick to stand up Einstein and put words in his mouth — a ventrilaquist’s dummy for their rhetoric. And because of this, it is increasingly important to talk about what Einstein really said and meant, reviving the real person and letting him speak for himself.

Continue reading Einstein and the Mind of God

I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism. (Albert Einstein)

This is the second and final post of my two (and a half) part series on naturalism, and why I reject the existence of the supernatural. My atheism, my unbelief (or disbelief, or rejection, if you will) of the existence of the Christian (or any other, for that matter) god is the result of my naturalistic worldview, specifically, the end result of accepting the scientific method, then methodological naturalism, and then philosophical naturalism. This post is a bit long, but I’ve tried to keep it straightforward in its presentation. I hope you enjoy!

Continue reading Naturalism, pt. II

Drunkentune has done a good job articulating his own naturalism. I thought it might be interesting to hear from a renouned pyschist and reluctant Noble laureate on the matter. I’ve posted here a Google educational video of some interviews of this interesting man, his contributions to physics, and his view of how life ought to be lived [49 mins]:

Continue reading RP Feynman Interview

Sometimes I try to tell stories in a roundabout fashion in attempts to explain what I mean. This is one of them.

Continue reading Naturalism, An Intermission

When Confucius entered the Grand Temple, he asked about everything. Someone said, ‘Who said Confucius is a master of ritual? He enters the Grand Temple and asks about everything!’
Confucius, hearing this, said, ‘This is the ritual.’ (Analects, 3:15)

Religion – belief in a supernatural entity inhabiting a supernatural (non-natural), transcendent dimension of reality – is either epistemologically justifiable or unjustifiable. The alternative to naturalism is supernaturalism; for supernaturalism it is naturalism. If one is incorrect, the other must be correct. This is a two-part series on why I chose to follow naturalism both methodologically and philosophically. I hope to stay out of a convoluted argument, and instead I intend to show a bit of candor about what I believe, and why.

Continue reading Naturalism, pt. I

Some time ago, we didn’t know where we came from. We didn’t know how things worked. We had to protect ourselves from the unexplained. There were options available to us, early on. We could either keep things the way they were and maintain the village or … suffer exile. Today we see exile as a way to find what the world is really like (i.e. The Beach); these people – us – thought exile was impossible: we couldn’t survive, and if we somehow did, we couldn’t pull it off to actually live on our own. Tradition would hold us together. Even if we could survive, as it went, we would have to rely on the village. Socrates could choose between death and exile, and chose Coniine. Just yesterday, the 18th century, crimes were punishable by either death or exile.

Exile: thrown out into the maelstrom; chaos. With exile, we wouldn’t be able to cope, and would be reduced to less-than-human. We would be cut off from the world, for outside of the community – the village – there was no support system. England’s criminals were first shipped to Georgia, then to Australia, forced into exile halfway across the Earth. We had the sense that outside of the community was so frightening as to be like death, for exile was a death of sorts. The outside of the village was darkness.

Continue reading A Brief History

I stumbled upon a Nova program entitled “What About God?” on Google Video which details students from conservative Christian backgrounds encountering evolutionary theory at Wheaton College, a conservative Christian university in the Midwest: watch it here [PBS/Nova | 54 min]. If you watch this program with very human eyes, it will give some keen insight into the issues at stake for Christians concerning evolutionary theory.

Continue reading Faith Struggling with Evolution

In comment #44 of the short post Me Arguing With No One In Particular, Dave Armstrong asserted several things about many atheists. To form a comprehensive and linear argument, I have moved his first assertion back a bit, but will cover it in time. My original comments are italicized, and at the end, I provide more perplexing claims by Dave Armstrong. I’ve had to scour my old textbooks, and borrow another from the library to come up with a comprehensive answer that I think and hope will satisfy Dave Armstrong’s search for the truth.

May philaletheia on all sides be reached in time.

Continue reading Red Dust