Bertrand Russell's Jug

Religion is not the source of morality

Letter to the Evening Standard, 5 July 2015

RE Melanie McDonagh’s article [Comment, June 1], any school that promotes values as uniquely “Christian” is giving their pupils a skewed and very poor understanding of ethics.

For too long we have ring-fenced religious ideas for privileged treatment in schools giving pupils the misleading impression that moral questions always need to be considered through a religious prism. They do not.

Replacing religious education with philosophy and ethics would enable future generations to take a more objective and religiously neutral approach to the consideration of moral and ethical issues.

Young people could still be taught about Christianity and other religious beliefs but not at the expense of all other ways of understanding the world in which they live.

Stephen Evans, National Secular Society

A Manual for Creating Atheists

 

 "Manual for Creating Atheists" by Peter Boghossian.

Football and stamp-collecting.

"Although it is true that 'absence of belief' in supernatural agency is functionally equivalent to 'belief in the absence of supernatural agency', theists concentrate on the latter formulation in order to make atheism a positive as opposed to a privative thesis with regard to theistic-subject-matter-related matters; this is what makes theists think they are in  kind of belief football match, with opposing sets of beliefs vying for our allegiance. What is haappening is that the theists are rushing about the park kicking the ball, but the atheists are not playing. They are not even on the field; they are in the stands, arguing that this particular game should not be taking place at all.

The correct characterisation of the opposition between theism and atheism is therefore this: the theist has existential beliefs, metaphysical beliefs, of a certain distinctive kind; and the atheist does not share them, and therefore does not even begin to enter the domain of discourse in which these beliefs have their life and content. Rather to use a by now familiar simile, but it exactly captures the point - atheism is to theism as not-collecting stamps is to stamp collecting. Not collecting stamps is not a hobby. It says nothing about the non-stamp-collector's other hobbies or interests. It denotes only the open-ended and negative state of not-collecting-stamps. To think of non-stamp-collectors as theists think of atheists, stamp collectors would have to think that non-stamp-collectors  have stamp interests of (so to speak) a positively negative kind; that they share their own obsessions and interests about stamps but in reverse, for example in the form of hating stamps, deliberately doing stamp-related non-stamp-collecting things, and the like."  

from "The God Argument" by A C Grayling.

Through these Godless Eyes

 "You take your faith. I'll take my parachute. See you at the bottom of the cliff"

Herman Philipse on the Incoherence of 'God'.

“How can one meaningfully say that God listens to our prayers, loves us, speaks to us, answers (or does not answer our supplications, etcetera, if God is also assumed to be an incorporeal being? For the stipulation that God is an incorporeal being  annuls the very conditions for meaningfully applying psychological expressions to another entity, to wit, that this entity is able in principle to display forms of bodily behaviour which resemble patterns of human behaviour. In other words, the very attempt to give a meaning and a possible referent to the word ‘God’ as used in theism must fail, because this attempt is incoherent. . .

. . . If this is so, one might object, how are we to explain the fact that the word ‘God’ and sentences such as ‘God loves me’, appear to be used meaningfully in monotheistic language? But explaining this is not difficult. The religious uses of the putative proper name ‘God’ are parasitic upon, and resemble to a large extent, the ordinary uses of proper names and psychological  expressions for human beings. What religious believers fail to notice is that by substituting ‘God’ for an ordinary proper name in sentences such as ‘John loves me’, or ‘Paul will condemn him’, they cancel the conditions for using meaningfully the words ‘loves’ and ‘condemns’.

Monotheistic believers often are vaguely aware that the meaning of words eludes them when they utter sentences containing the word ‘God’. But they misinterpret this fact as symptomatic of the spiritual depth of religious discourse. They think that the profoundly mysterious nature of monotheistic language points to a transcendent reality, which cannot be grasped by us, limited human beings. In this case, however, the impression of profoundness is caused by a mere misuse of language. As Wittgenstein aptly remarked, ‘the problems arising through a misinterpretation of our forms of language have the character of depth.”

Herman Philipse is a professor of philosophy at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. From 1986 until 2003, he taught at Leiden University, where he obtained his doctorate in 1983. 

Matthew Arnold

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

from 'Dover Beach' Sept. 1851

"The word 'God' is used in most cases as by no means a term of science or exact knowledge, but a term of poetry and eloquence, a term thrown out, so to speak, as a not fully grasped object of the speaker's consciousness — a literary term, in short; and mankind mean different things by it as their consciousness differs."

"To pass from a Christianity relying on its miracles to a Christianity relying on its natural truth is a great change. It can only be brought about by those whose attachment to Christianity is such, that they cannot part with it, and yet cannot but deal with it sincerely."

from 'Literature & Dogma' 1873

An Ignostic Argument

The Kalam Cosmological Argument attracts a lot of attention from faithists and sceptics alike because of its superficial simplicity. Here is the case for ignosticism presented in similar format:-

1. The statement that an immaterial, timeless 'something' exists is without discernible meaning.

2. God is a 'something' defined by theists as having the properties of immateriality and timelessness.

3. Conclusion; the statement "God exists" has no discernible meaning.

-oOo-

See also:-

Debunking the Kalam Cosmological Argument

Rebuttal of the Kalam Cosmological Argument

The Counter Kalam Cosmolgical Argument

Militancy

It is possible to be a militant antitheist, as was Christopher Hitchens. It is no more possible to be a militant atheist than it is to be a militant non-stamp collector. ~ A C Grayling

Early doubts

"Concerning the gods I cannot know either that they exist or that they do not exist, or what form they might have, for there is much to prevent one's knowing: the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of man's life." ~ Protagoras 5 BCE.

The Counter Kalam Cosmological Argument.

Peter Millican on the KCA

Peter Millican is Gilbert Ryle Fellow and Professor of Philosophy at Hertford College, University of Oxford. His primary interests include the philosophy of David Hume, philosophy of religion, philosophy of language, epistemology, and moral philosophy.

(Interesting side-note
In 2008 and 2009 some Republican commentators advanced claims that US President Barack Obama's autobiography, Dreams from My Father was written or ghost-written by Bill Ayers. In a series of articles in American Thinker and WorldNetDaily, author Jack Cashill claimed that his own analysis of the book showed Ayers' writing style, and backed this up citing analyses by American researchers using Millican's Signature software. In late October 2008, shortly before the US Presidential election, US Congressman Chris Cannon and his brother-in-law attempted to hire Millican to prove Ayers' authorship using computer analysis. Millican refused after they would not assure him in advance that his results would be published regardless of the outcome.After some analysis Millican later criticized the claim, saying variously that he had "found no evidence for Cashill's ghostwriting hypothesis", that it was "unlikely"and that he felt "totally confident that it is false".)

WLC - Artful Dodger

Humanists & the Golden Rule

WLC - The Artful Dodger

Supernaturalism

"One reason that belief in the supernatural remains widespread, despite its negligibility, is that, as discussed earlier, it cannot be proven wrong, and the epistemological insulation provided by its inaccessibility is accorded the weight of evidence despite the fact that it carries no evidential weight at all. The supernatural remains logically possible, and thus an option for belief, only because it is not susceptible to confirmation or disconfirmation on the basis of evidence. But this status is permanent--the metaphysical status of supernaturalism as at most a logical possibility will never change. To become more than a logical possibility, supernaturalism must be confirmed with unequivocal empirical evidence, and such confirmation would only demonstrate that this newly verified aspect of reality had all along never been supernatural at all, but rather a natural phenomenon which just awaited an appropriate scientific test. Supernaturalists have not succeeded in providing such a test, but the naturalist has all the time in the world, and is prepared to give the supernaturalist all the time in the world, to make the attempt. In the meantime, the philosophical naturalist can point to the constantly expanding success of science in explaining what once were thought intractable mysteries or fixed categories of experience and reality." ~ Barbara Forrest, "Methodological Naturalism and Philosophical Naturalism: Clarifying the Connection" (2000)

Advanced Circular Reasoning

'Comfortable myths'

Why there is something rather than nothing 2

The finite, infinite and eternal  

by Peter Lynds

Abstract

Many believe that the deep question of “why is there something rather than nothing?” is

unanswerable. The universe just is and no further explanation for its existence is

possible. In this paper I explain why this question must have an answer, and why that

answer must establish that physical existence is inescapable and necessary. Based on the

conclusion that if the universe is eternal rather than having a beginning some finite time

in the past, the universe has to exist rather than not because its possible non-existence is

never an option, such an explanation is put forward. As a logical extension of only an

eternal universe being capable of providing an answer to the question of why there is

something rather than nothing, the argument necessitates that the universe must be

eternal. The consequences of this conclusion for cosmology are then briefly discussed.

A link to the full 9 page paper and discussion can be found here.

Debunking the Kalam Cosmological argument of William Lane Craig

Nice video.

The Meaning of Life

Carl Sagan, 1934 -1996

“The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is then determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life's meaning. We long for a Parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.” ~ Carl Sagan