"The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values" by Sam Harris - Page 2 - Religion, God, and Theology

VeeDDzz` · 05-31-2012, 12:26 AM

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Originally Posted by Aaron W.

This is non-sequitur. All you're doing here is voting on morality and trying to ignore the moral views of the 1%.

I hope you realize that you're essentially taking a variant of Harris' position, which was shown quite clearly to fail.

How am I trying to ignore the moral views of the 1%?

Do you consider the 1% of views of morality - by mentally ill people - as representative of the overall population?

If you want 100% objective truth to anything, then you're not talking about science anymore - you're talking about: the impossible.

P.S. This is my position. Whether or not it aligns with someone else (Harris or whoever) is completely irrelevant to me, so please try to avoid grouping or categorising my views in the future if you can - as this can be greatly misleading. Political historians love doing this. You wouldn't happen to be one of those?

smrk2 · 05-31-2012, 12:49 AM

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Originally Posted by Aaron W.

Something like "without God, non-arbitrary objective morality does not exist."

Does Craig address this directly? I think the challenge for Craig is to say whether God can overturn the morality of any act; for example, can God make rape a morally splendid thing to do? If he can't, it seems to follow that rape is God-independently immoral, which looks like God-independent non-arbitrary objective morality to me.

Aaron W. · 05-31-2012, 01:15 AM

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Originally Posted by VeeDDzz`

How am I trying to ignore the moral views of the 1%?

You said:

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If there is no objectivity in morality then why does 99% of the population avoid killing, cooking and eating their children?

Objectivity has something to do with independence of the perspective of populations (either individuals or groups) and you're talking about something that sounds like 99% objectivity. This doesn't work at all.

What I really think you're doing is re-defining "objectivity" to mean something like "agreement of the vast majority" -- which isn't really the same thing.

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Do you consider the 1% of views of morality - by mentally ill people - as representative of the overall population?

Basically by definition, 1% is not representative of the overall population. As noted above, representing the overall population isn't the standard that is in use.

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If you want 100% objective truth to anything, then you're not talking about science anymore - you're talking about: the impossible.

"Objective truth" is a different conversation. Furthermore, objective truth is not impossible. Again, I think you're using words differently.

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P.S. This is my position. Whether or not it aligns with someone else (Harris or whoever) is completely irrelevant to me, so please try to avoid grouping or categorising my views in the future if you can - as this can be greatly misleading.

It may be irrelevant to you, but that doesn't make it irrelevant. It's sometimes misleading, but it's also sometimes accurate and useful.

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Political historians love doing this. You wouldn't happen to be one of those?

I'm a mathematician.

Aaron W. · 05-31-2012, 01:20 AM

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Originally Posted by smrk2

Does Craig address this directly?

I have no idea. I don't follow Craig very closely.

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I think the challenge for Craig is to say whether God can overturn the morality of any act; for example, can God make rape a morally splendid thing to do? If he can't, it seems to follow that rape is God-independently immoral, which looks like God-independent non-arbitrary objective morality to me.

That sounds a lot like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthyphro_dilemma

asdfasdf32 · 05-31-2012, 01:30 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by smrk2

Does Craig address this directly? I think the challenge for Craig is to say whether God can overturn the morality of any act; for example, can God make rape a morally splendid thing to do? If he can't, it seems to follow that rape is God-independently immoral, which looks like God-independent non-arbitrary objective morality to me.

Craig supports the divine command theory which basically means God can do whatever he wants and anything humans do while commanded by God is moral.

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Originally Posted by William Lane Craig

According to the version of divine command ethics which I’ve defended, our moral duties are constituted by the commands of a holy and loving God. Since God doesn’t issue commands to Himself, He has no moral duties to fulfill. He is certainly not subject to the same moral obligations and prohibitions that we are. For example, I have no right to take an innocent life. For me to do so would be murder. But God has no such prohibition. He can give and take life as He chooses. We all recognize this when we accuse some authority who presumes to take life as “playing God.” Human authorities arrogate to themselves rights which belong only to God. God is under no obligation whatsoever to extend my life for another second. If He wanted to strike me dead right now, that’s His prerogative.

What that implies is that God has the right to take the lives of the Canaanites when He sees fit. How long they live and when they die is up to Him.

So the problem isn’t that God ended the Canaanites’ lives. The problem is that He commanded the Israeli soldiers to end them. Isn’t that like commanding someone to commit murder? No, it’s not. Rather, since our moral duties are determined by God’s commands, it is commanding someone to do something which, in the absence of a divine command, would have been murder. The act was morally obligatory for the Israeli soldiers in virtue of God’s command, even though, had they undertaken it on their on initiative, it would have been wrong.

On divine command theory, then, God has the right to command an act, which, in the absence of a divine command, would have been sin, but which is now morally obligatory in virtue of that command.

http://www.reasonablefaith.org/slaug...#ixzz1wQFEfKXg

VeeDDzz` · 05-31-2012, 01:32 AM

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Originally Posted by Aaron W.

You said:
Objectivity has something to do with independence of the perspective of populations (either individuals or groups) and you're talking about something that sounds like 99% objectivity. This doesn't work at all.

What I really think you're doing is re-defining "objectivity" to mean something like "agreement of the vast majority" -- which isn't really the same thing.

We're talking about morality here, not rocks or galaxies. How else do you propose we measure the objectivity of this construct then by social science methods; followed by harder-science methods (agreement of the vast majority -> investigation of the chemical processes in the brain that cause this agreement).

In science there is no such thing as 100% objective or true; particularly when it comes to social constructs or constructs that are entirely mind-dependent - like morality. You're trying to apply a standard of evidence to the measurement of morality, that is completely inapplicable to it.

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Originally Posted by Aaron W.

Furthermore, objective truth is not impossible.

Depends on what you're measuring.

smrk2 · 05-31-2012, 01:44 AM

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Originally Posted by Aaron W.

That sounds a lot like this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthyphro_dilemma

Yeah, I can't say that I've read any contemporary scholarship from the theistic point of view on neutralizing this dilemma, but it's a challenge.

smrk2 · 05-31-2012, 01:57 AM

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Originally Posted by asdfasdf32

Craig supports the divine command theory which basically means God can do whatever he wants and anything he commands humans to do is moral.

I think Aaron's point was that to call something like divine command theory 'subjective' is word play (as it treats God as 'subject'); along those lines it seems that calling it 'objective' is also word play (as there's no space between God's commands and what is 'objective').

Doggg · 05-31-2012, 02:12 AM

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Here's a DEBATE between Sam Harris and William Lane Craig. Harris owns Craig. It's a bloodbath. Craig seems to panic during his rebuttals. The debate is about whether God is needed for humans to have objective moral values. You can get a good sense of what is in Harris' book by watching this debate. It's really good.

I seem to remember watching a debate between Harris and Craig where Harris spent 90% of the debate time attacking christianity, the bible, and the christian idea of hell, while Craig look flustered because his opp refused to debate on the actual topic of the debate. If it was a debate about biblical morals, Harris no doubt would have won, but alas, it wasn't.

I also seem to recall a student trying to embarrass Craig by asking him some profane question or another about how God appeared to him in a dream and told him to tell Craig that God likes homosexual marriage as much as traditional marriage. Guffaws all around. Harris giving the guy a thumbs up and winking at him.

Harris showed himself to be juvenile, puerile and crass. So much for his post-christian morality.

You can keep it.

smrk2 · 05-31-2012, 02:19 AM

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Originally Posted by Doggg

Harris showed himself to be juvenile, puerile and crass. So much for his post-christian morality.

You can keep it.

If it makes you feel any better, some atheists acknowledge that Harris might not have the goods to debate Craig, possibly not on the substance of the issues and certainly not on the technicalities of philosophical debating. But that doesn't mean anything about "post-christian" morality, just that Craig is more of a professional and he should be debated by professional philosophers not dabblers.

Aaron W. · 05-31-2012, 02:31 AM

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Originally Posted by VeeDDzz`

We're talking about morality here, not rocks or galaxies. How else do you propose we measure the objectivity of this construct then by social science methods; followed by harder-science methods (agreement of the vast majority -> investigation of the chemical processes in the brain that cause this agreement).

I'm not proposing any particular process. I'm making the claim that what you're doing doesn't accurately describe "objective morality".

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In science there is no such thing as 100% objective or true

The fact that you keep coming back to something like this keeps me thinking that you're really unclear about what you're talking about.

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Depends on what you're measuring.

In other words, there are some thing for which objective truth not impossible.

Aaron W. · 05-31-2012, 02:53 AM

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Originally Posted by smrk2

I think Aaron's point was that to call something like divine command theory 'subjective' is word play (as it treats God as 'subject'); along those lines it seems that calling it 'objective' is also word play (as there's no space between God's commands and what is 'objective').

Part of the problem is that we often try to think of subjective and objective as being negations of each other (if it's not subjective, then it's objective, and vice versa), but we also have definitions for subjective and objective that aren't negations of each other. Specifically, sometimes we think of objective as meaning "measurable" instead of simply "not subjective."

A useful analogy for this is to think about a meter. We have an objective standard for what a meter is (the distance that light travels in a vacuum in a certain time interval). In this sense of objective, we really mean measurable. How can this be understood as subjective? The definition of a meter is subject to the conventions established by the international system of measures (look up meter on wikipedia if you care). That seems to make this a subjective measure because it refers back to the opinions (or declarations) a certain collection of people. A meter is not really defined in some fundamental sense, like the speed of light being fundamentally defined by nature.

This is the sort of game that is being played with objective/subjective morality with respect to God. When the theists talk about objective morality from God, they're talking about it in a manner that is similar to the speed of light. It's somehow a fundamental fact about the universe. But the word game is to make God into a person so that they try to make it subjective (in the same way that a meter is subjective).

VeeDDzz` · 05-31-2012, 03:27 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Aaron W.

I'm not proposing any particular process. I'm making the claim that what you're doing doesn't accurately describe "objective morality".

What would accurately describe objective morality? if not the majority agreement of individuals cross-culturally? followed by a pinpointing of chemical processes responsible for said agreement?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Aaron W.

In other words, there are some thing for which objective truth not impossible.

Depends on what you're measuring because different things require different standards of evidence. A metaphysics professor could easily demand a standard of evidence so high that even something considered fundamentally true such as: 1+1 = 2 would not meet the requirements (for instance, many thought experiments show that there is even a chance that everything we think we know is false - e.g.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat.) This is one of countless such thought experiments which has a possibility of being true, and all you need is a minor possibility to make any statement of objectivity 99.9999% true.

Hence, scientists make sure to avoid ever making a claim on anything being 100% objectively true. It's only true to the point that your standard of evidence demands.

As for morality, you're trying to apply a standard of evidence to the measurement of morality that is completely inapplicable.

gg911gg · 05-31-2012, 04:10 AM

I think objective morality is a nonsensical concept. It's like saying oranges are objectively tasty.

I don't know why any scientist would attempt to prove such nonsense.

I also never understood the jump from God's morals to objective morals, so I don't think theists can somehow more reasonably use that term.

Mr Muck McFold · 05-31-2012, 04:31 AM

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Originally Posted by VeeDDzz`

If there is no objectivity in morality then why does 99% of the population avoid killing, cooking and eating their children?

Clearly there is a thread of objectivity there, whether you want to acknowledge it or not. This objectivity is not only rooted in philosophy, but also in science - oxytocin and mirror neurons primarily (responsible for empathy/morality).

You clearly do not understand what objective morality means, its embarrassing.