Right now I am reading "The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values" by Sam Harris.

I think this is a must read for Atheists. For too long have skeptics placed a divide between science and objective moral values. Theists have taken advantage of this time and time again in debates. Theists will posit that objective moral values have to come from God otherwise they are subjective and relative to the whims of society. I'm only one chapter in but Sam has already done quite a bit to chip away of that notion.

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 only have a cursory understanding of the material of the book right now but I thought I would make the thread now anyway so that maybe some of you can start to read it and we can discuss it as we read.

Here's an excerpt from the book that sums up its premise.

"While the argument I make in this book is bound to be controversial, it rests on a very simple premise: human well-being entirely depends on events in the world and on states of the human brain. Consequently, there must be scientific truths to be known about it. A more detailed understanding of these truths will force us to draw clear distinctions between different ways of living in society with one another, judging some to be better or worse, more or less true to the facts, and more or less ethical.

I am not suggesting that we are guaranteed to resolve every moral controversy through science. Differences of opinion will remain--but opinions will increasingly constrained by facts. And it is important to realize that our inability to answer a questions says nothing about whether the question itself has an answer."

Here's Richard Dawkins' review of the book.

"Beautifully written as they were (the elegance of his prose is a distilled blend of honesty and clarity) there was little in Sam Harris's previous books that couldn't have been written by any of his fellow "horsemen" of the "new atheism." This book is different, though every bit as readable as the other two. I was one of those who had unthinkingly bought into the hectoring myth that science can say nothing about morals. To my surprise, The Moral Landscape has changed all that for me. It should change it for philosophers too. Philosophers of mind have already discovered that they can't duck the study of neuroscience, and the best of them have raised their game as a result. Sam Harris shows that the same should be true of moral philosophers, and it will turn their world exhilaratingly upside down. As for religion, and the preposterous idea that we need God to be good, nobody wields a sharper bayonet than Sam Harris." --Richard Dawkins

This thread should reduce your enthusiasm

Thanks for the link. Should be a fun read.

I'm nearing the end of the book, I'd agree it's a very good read, especially for atheists to help defend a secular morality, and for believers to educate them on how morality without god works. I think the comparison between "well being" and health is an excellent illustrative tool to get the message across.

Talk of objective morality from theists is pretty hilarious though, since a brief examination of any given group shows you that their "divinely directed" take on what is right and wrong varies widely between members and remarkably, God's aims tend to align closely to any particular individual's personal goals.

In fact given how flexibly these allegedly objective morals are interepreted by theists I have never felt the need to try to produce a different "atheist" objective code. I'm not even sure that there is anything intrinsically superior about an absolutely objective standard, if such a thing actually exists.

This thread wins so much.

I've been reading it, mostly out of curiosity about all the flak he got about it. And there's quite a bit Joker. I don't think the book is horrific but I don't think its great.

I'd suggest looking into Alonzo Fyfes' blog at Atheist Ethicist. Desire Utililitarianism or desirism might interest you if you are interested in this. There's a book too.

jokerthief, not only am I a little surprised to hear you say this, but I am just as much disappointed. Did you actually watch the debate from start to finish? Even your fellow atheist would agree that William Lane Craig won the debate. Please see below.

http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=15243

Conclusion

"As usual, Craig’s superior framing, scholarship and debate skills ‘won’ the debate for him. On the other hand, there is another sense in which atheists always have an advantage in such debates. Everybody knows standard Christian positions, but many have never heard even the New Atheist’s standard critiques of religion and theistic morality yet. So exposure to both perspectives is likely to benefit atheist’s intellectual cause more than the Christian’s."

I haven't read this book and I don't intend to. The idea of discovering "objective morality" through science is so absurd and easy to deconstruct that it's not even worth my time (assuming time could be said to have value, which is of course absurd).

Atheists and theists, when will you admit defeat? You've made some nice tries, but the universe continues to laugh at you. Religion has failed. Rationalism has failed. All truth is tautology. You are trapped inside a mind and there is no escape. There is nothing that can't be deconstructed except nothing, and this is the only truth. To quote Osho: "God is dead, now Zen is the only living truth." May the Force be with you...

Craig disagrees:

http://www.reasonablefaith.org/sam-h...oral-landscape
http://www.reasonablefaith.org/the-sam-harris-debate

2 parts

http://www.reasonablefaith.org/sam-h...ues-and-duties

From above:

Does anyone disagree with his rationale here, i.e. that theistic morality is necessarily a subjective one?

Every now and then you're funny, but this above is just pseudo-controversial crap.

Unless I'm mistaken, that's not what that quote is talking about as a whole. I think you're reading a bit out of context. The quote is more about rejecting Craig's viewpoint that "without God, objective morality does not exist."

But here's the relevant part:

The only thing that's going on is a bit of word play. If you take "subjective" morality to be relative to a particular "subject" (entity of some sort), then sure you can say (as the author says) that it's "a type of subjective morality." The word play here happens to relate to whether it makes sense to call "God" a "person" (or "persons"). So it's possible to claim that this is a massive error on the viewpoint of morality, but it would be a hollow victory. The use of "God" in this context doesn't really work with calling God a person. (In fact, I would guess that Craig's emphasis on "human opinion" is simply to reflect that word game.)

You can take this further into the idea of an "objective truth." A statement is an "objective truth" if the truth value is independent of the person thinking it (I think the phrase is "mind-independent"). But insofar as theologically, God sustains the universe and everything that is depends upon him, you can say that "truth" depends on "God's mind" and try to call it a "subjective truth" as a result. So nothing useful is established, except for the fact that you're just playing meaningless word games.

If one wanted to get closer to the meaning of Craig's position, it would be something like "without God, non-arbitrary objective morality does not exist." This addresses the concern about the monkey morality and at least conveys a piece of the idea that morality is transcendent upon the universe (it sits above humanity, rather than originating from humanity), but then one can continue the game and challenge whether God's moral opinion is "arbitrary" (based on personal whim, and God is once again a person).

This restatement would also get closer to Sam Harris' work and errors, in that Harris claims that science can be used to generate a non-arbitrary morality based on objective measures of "well-being." As it is argued in the other thread, he fails quite miserably at doing this.

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).

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I'm a mathematician.

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

That sounds a lot like this:

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

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.

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.
Depends on what you're measuring.

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.

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').

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.

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.