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Ethics is a human invention. It sprung not from the will of a divine commander, nor coalesced from pure reason, but was a cultural technology concocted by our distant ancestors to solve the problems inherent in social living.
But somewhere between its invention and today, ethics has become warped. We allowed the original function of ethics to be forgotten. Instead we took the presumed commands of a divine will or the abstract strictures of pure reason to be the roots of ethics, and constructed distorted moral systems in their spirit, forgetting the core purpose of ethics.
Today, we ought to return to the fundamental questions of how to solve the problems of social living, including problems both familiar and remote to our ancestors. We ought to propose new solutions that directly address these problems, that are unburdened by fallacious justificatory frameworks or the maladapted moralities of our distant past.
the ideal god is magical enough to make him interesting and worthy of our special attention as something that could just about be real. But not so magical as to be utter nonsense!
science and the popular media are not always a good mix.
can God create a container that He cannot fill?
On the face of it, this would seem to create what appears to be a paradox. If God is omnipotent, then it would seem to follow that He could create a container (such as a yacht) of any size-even one that would be so big that He could not fill it (even given an infinite supply of created bitches). However, His omnipotence would also seem to entail that He could fill any container, no matter how big. After all, He could just create enough things to fill the container.
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One potential way out of this problem is to play games with the notion of infinity. Presumably the largest container that God could create would be infinite in size. Presumably the largest number and volume of things (such as bitches) that God could create would also be infinite. Leibniz, in his Theodicy, writes “and infinity, that is to say, the accumulation of an infinite number of substances, is, properly speaking, not a whole any more than the infinite number itself, whereof one cannot say whether it is even or uneven.” Stealing from Leibniz, perhaps it could be said that when talking about an infinite yacht and an infinite number of bitches it would not be possible to say whether it is full or not. Of course, this seems vaguely (or not so vaguely) unsatisfying.
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the idea of an ability to create an object so big that He cannot fill it seems to involve an absurdity. After all, if God could create a hollow object of X size and Y interior volume, then it would seem that He could simply create an object marginally smaller than X with a volume of Y. Thus, the question is actually asking “could God create an object and not be able to create a smaller object (or objects) that would fill the larger object” and the answer would seem to be “no.” After all, objects have volumes and sizes, but so big that it cannot be filled does not seem to be a legitimate property that God could just give to an object. Rather, this property is a relational property between the object and all other things that exist or could exist. Thus, the supposition that God can create objects entails that He can fill any object He creates.
"[On miracles supposedly being existence for a good god] Suppose that the evil-god hypothesis is true. This malignant being may not want us to know of his existence. In fact, it may help him maximize evil if he deceives us about his true character. An evil and omnipotent being will have no difficulty duping human beings into believing he is good. Taking on a ‘good’ guise, he might appear in one corner of the world, revealing himself in religious experiences and performing miracles in response to prayers, and perhaps also giving instructions regarding what his followers should believe. He might then do the same in another part of the globe, with the exception that the instructions he leaves regarding what should be believed contradict what he has said elsewhere. Our evil being could then stand back and watch the inevitable conflict develop between communities to whom he has now misleadingly revealed himself, each utterly convinced by their own stock of miracles and religious experiences that the one true all-good god is on their side. Here we have a recipe for ceaseless conflict, violence and suffering."
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Following on the Problem of Good (past post):
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One may still raise this objection: ‘But surely nothing could be worse than hell as traditionally conceived? Why doesn’t an evil god just send us straight to hell? ’ However, as already noted, a mirror puzzle faces those who believe in a good god. Given that a heavenly environment would be profoundly more joyful than this, why doesn’t a good god send us straight to heaven? Why are so many of us allowed to go through such appalling suffering here?...
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Darwinism implies that there is and can be no direction in life's history. All change is a function of randomly appearing new variations (mutations) that are then sifted by the opportunistic mechanism of natural selection. Although new variations are not uncaused, they do not appear according to need. As Darwin himself argued, to think otherwise is to illicitly bring in a directing God. The late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould used to pun that the arrival of the human species was entirely an accident brought on by our lucky stars—a comet that hit the earth 65 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs and allowing for the rise of mammals
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philosophy today tends to be very secular, and there is a lot of sympathy for the claims of the so-called New Atheists—Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens—that if you are a Darwinian, then you ought to be at least an agnostic, if not an outright atheist.
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The study found no difference in the ethical behavior of believers and nonbelievers. But participants who saw God as compassionate were more likely to cheat than those who believed in an angry, punitive God.
Probably more important than whether you believe in a God is the type of God you believe in - from a behavioural point of view, at least.
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believers in a judgemental god are more likely to support the death penalty, and are more likely to suffer mental ill health. Back in 2006, Gary Jensen (a criminologist at Vanderbildt University) showed that so-called 'passionate dualism' - i.e. religious worldview characterised by intense beliefs in a clash between good and evil - is a major cause of homicide.
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Now, a new study by Azim Shariff, at the University of Oregon, and Ara Norenzayan, at the University of British Columbia, have looked at how views of God affect cheating. You may remember Shariff from a pivotal study in 2008 on priming religious concepts and honesty.
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One of the first worries was whether we can be free, given God’s alleged omniscience, which seems to mean He knows what we are going to do before we do it.
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Take yourself back to the time when God expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, for disobeying him and eating from the apple tree. Suppose you travel back in time, and offer your services to Adam and Eve as a defense attorney. What would you say?
I think I'd say this: "Look God, you created everything, including Adam and Eve, the apple tree, and the serpent. You decided what the world was going to be like--- every detail. You are all-powerful and all-knowing. So you knew what the serpent would say to Eve, and what Eve would say to Adam. And you knew how Adam would react. So how can you blame Adam, when you created him just the way he was --- a spineless wuss who would do what his wife told him. If you didn’t want him to eat the apple, you should have created him differently; you should have created someone who would have said, 'Sorry Eve, I cannot disobey God, and you musn’t either'.”
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Now what if God replied: "But Adam was free. He could have eaten the apple, or he could have refrained from eating the apple. It was up to him. It was his choice. He made the wrong choice, so I’m mad at him, and intend to punish him, and all his descendants, including you."
I’d bolster my courage and say, ``Look God, that makes no sense. Adam may have thought to himself: I can eat the apple, or I can not eat the apple. But that thought was an illusion. No finite mortal can do something that God already knows he won’t do. You created Adam with the sense of freedom, but not the reality of freedom. So it is grossly unfair to punish him."
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Sarah Finocchario-Kessler, at the University of Kansas, used data from one such drug trial to see what the effect of religious beliefs (and other psychological factors) was on medication taking.
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One recent study looked at whether people with HIV took their medicine as they were supposed to. Most trials of new drugs monitor this, and it can be done very easily simply using special bottles that record each time they're opened. -
Sarah Finocchario-Kessler, at the University of Kansas, used data from one such drug trial to see what the effect of religious beliefs (and other psychological factors) was on medication taking.
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More shameful than the death itself is the Christian theory that it was necessary. It was necessary because all humans are born in sin. Every tiny baby, too young to have a deed or a thought, is riddled with sin: original sin. Here's Thomas Aquinas:
". . . the original sin of all men was in Adam indeed, as in its principal cause, according to the words of the Apostle (Romans 5:12): "In whom all have sinned": whereas it is in the bodily semen, as in its instrumental cause, since it is by the active power of the semen that original sin together with human nature is transmitted to the child."
Adam (who never existed) bequeathed his "sin" in his bodily semen (charming notion) to all of humanity. That sin, with which every newborn baby is hideously stained (another charming notion), was so terrible that it could be forgiven only through the blood sacrifice of a scapegoat. But no ordinary scapegoat would do. The sin of humanity was so great that the only adequate sacrificial victim was God himself.
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The creator of the universe, sublime inventor of mathematics, of relativistic space-time, of quarks and quanta, of life itself, Almighty God, who reads our every thought and hears our every prayer, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God couldn't think of a better way to forgive us than to have himself tortured and executed. For heaven's sake, if he wanted to forgive us, why didn't he just forgive us? Who, after all, needed to be impressed by the blood and the agony? Nobody but himself.
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THE Saturday Special report last week ('God wants youth') stated that religious groups were determined not to lose a generation to godlessness, especially now with youth gangs in the news.
It also noted that what is at stake is the potential of losing the youth to cynicism, violence and even fanaticism.
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As a society for non-believers, the Humanist Society (Singapore) disagrees.
The reality in societies everywhere is that there is no difference between non-believing youth and the religious youth in their propensity towards violence. There are actually higher levels of violence among those who identify themselves as 'religious' or 'faithful'.
As for cynicism, there is certainly no correlation between non-belief and a cynical attitude. Many non-believers are involved in the world around them, trying to make it a more humane, compassionate place. - 2 more annotation(s)...
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many a theologian who make the traditional arguments for God’s existence: the cosmological argument (prime mover, first cause), the teleological argument (the universe’s order and design), the ontological argument (if it is logically possible for God to exist then God exists), the anthropic argument (the fine-tuned characteristics of nature), the moral argument (awareness of right and wrong), and others. These are all reasons to believe if you already believe; if you do not already believe these reasons ring hollow and have been refuted by philosophers from David Hume to Daniel Dennett.
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Deepak believes that the weirdness of the quantum world (such as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle) can be linked to certain mysteries of the macro world (such as consciousness). This supposition is based on the work of the tandem team of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff, whose theory of quantum consciousness has generated much heat but little light in scientific circles.
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