The Folly Of Trying To Come Up With A Rationalistic Framing To Reliably Produce Decency - Why I A Still A Christian Post 2

If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself
and take up his cross daily and follow me.
For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.
What profit is there for one to gain the whole world
yet lose or forfeit himself?  Luke 9: 23-25

Perhaps what is good is simply whatever is to my advantage, to the advantage of my group, party, class, race, or even to the advantage of my business or trade union.  It is not a question of individual or collective selfishness?  Some biologists and etnologists do in fact try to persuade us that for human beings, as for animals, any sort of altruism or love is merely the supreme form of biologically inherited self-interest.  And, after all, philosophers have continually asked where we are to find the criteria to judge the interests lying behind all knowledge -how we are to distinguish between what is true and what is illusory, what is objective and what is subjective, what is acceptable and what is reprehensible.

So the question remains:  How are we to lay down priorities and preferences on a purely rational basis?  Purely philosophical arguments to establish essential values have not come up with anything conclusive.  They have never got beyond problematical generalizations, which all tend to break down precisely in those exceptional circumstances where people do act in a way that is by no means to their own advantage or for their own personal happiness, but in a way which may involve a sacrifice: even, in an extreme case, the sacrifice of life itself.

I might have included this with the portion from Kung's Why I Am Still A Christian last time but I wanted to use it to illustrate the validity of the point that secularism, science, aka "natural philosophy" even generalized secular and quasi-religious philosophy cannot come up with what "we can rely on" to produce a decent society and world, what we can really, fully hold on to as durable, absolute moral positions that we can use in exactly those cases when we really don't want to act against our perceived self-interest for the benefit of others, or even the lives of others or, in the case of our controlling elite, the preservation of life on Earth itself.  Or in deciding when it is valid to legally force people to not just do what they figure is in their own best interest, individually or extended into their family or other wider grouping.  

Although Hans Kung didn't say it, one of the biggest problems with any quest to use rational philosophy to come up with such moral absolutes as revealed religion finds it no problem to assert is that their framing is ill chosen to find them.  That revealed religion has problems in that regard often founders on their failure to admit the inevitable imperfection of our view of revelation and insisting on that imperfect assertion of it no matter what evils come from it.  That is especially an issue in regard to institutional religion, but the rationalistic attempt to use reason, logic, most stupidly of all, some of our more imprecise branches of physical science, shows that as an intellectual holding, the attempt to use the worst tools instead of those that are just imperfect is sheer foolishness.

In regard to the incapacity of secular philosophy to do that, I've pointed out before, I. F. Stone observed when commenting on Socrates in Plato's set-up job ran circles around a shoe-maker, that the shoe maker could make a pair of shoes while the entire 2400 year tradition of Socratic philosophy had never come up with even one universal truth.  Adding scientific method to that has not seemed to improve their odds of getting to one. And morals are hardly the easiest aspect of philosophical inquiry to find them in.  

I will also point out that the various modern attempts to replace revealed religion with formal philosophy, the various and uniformly idiotic schemes of utilitarianism, the modern field of ethics which seems to have turned back to the eugenicist and Nazi projects of drawing up lists of those it is desirable to kill, something which you can do and not only keep but flourish in a modern, university based philosophy department almost eighty years after the largest of the modern scientifically conducted genocides was revealed to the world, only one of a myriad of the 20th centuries modern genocides that outdo past ones.

Yet science is to be considered sacrosanct even though it is among those fields which, by mutual agreement from the start, excludes any considerations of moral consequences in real life.  Similar points could be made about other areas of life which have, by mutual agreement, been freed from moral consequences but which do not suffer nearly as much as religion does when the not only predictable but permitted evils that come from them create catastrophes with huge pain and many dead.  Commerce, business, the law (where contracts, almighty and explicitly written or, as the judicial practice has it, by "implied consent" favors the liars and crooks and, in the fullness of time, those who get people killed in large numbers for their profit, something that allowed "justice" Gorsuch to say that a trucker owed it to his company to freeze to death on the job and then, with that on the Senate hearing record, to be elevated to the Supreme Court.

The critics of moral outrage are mighty peculiar when it comes to which institutions they declare worthy of death and those they have no problem with, especially those critics of moral outrage who have been credentialed by universities and colleges and have a financial stake in such science, such commerce, such business and such law. It is among the rarest things for an economist to note that truth which was made apparent to Paul that love of money is the root of all evil, something which the most devoted of all to his sayings about sex, women in churches, etc. never seem to much pay any mind to.  The love of money is certainly not discouraged by secularism any more than the most corrupt of ecclesiastical institutions, that secularism has no such sayings and its not only accommodation to professional amorality but its institution of all of those bastions banning moral consideration and its full and complete maintenance of them - the Churches, from the early modern era when it overcame the many Biblical condemnations of usury accommodated themselves to the secular world - the foremost forces of amorality never get the condemnation of academia or the scribblers, directors, producers of show-biz (our actual educators) even as the condemnation of organized religion - like shooting ducks in a gallery - is about as guaranteed a movie evergreen as the Blacklist.

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Back at perhaps was just past the high-water mark of the new atheist fad of the OO's one of the major scientific celebrities of that, Sean Carroll got some of the other brite lites of the new atheism together to, among other things, once and for all provide a rational, naturalistic basis for something like morality.  A number of those involved were exactly from that effort to come up with a biological, Darwinian explanation of what "morality" was and why we, you know, really should do to others at least what we might, kinda want them to do to us, if they were in a position to screw us or, maybe, others. I won't go far into the several philosophers present except that Dennett made a real ass of himself when he said they should just call things what they really weren't and figure that was good enough to fool the rubes.   He fell far after early in his career when he had the attention of someone like Jospeh Weizenbaum. The others, especially one author who, I guess, was let in on the philosophy ticket,  just mouthed the nonsense of evo-psy, weren't much more impressive.

The science Kung was talking about was that threadbare attempt to pretend the doctrine of natural selection didn't mean what the eugenicists and scientific racists and, yes, the Nazis said it meant, to kill the other so the killer survivors benefit from erasing them from society, from the Volk, from the future of the species. In the post-WWII era that is denied to be the case despite Darwin, himself, supporting such ideas within his scientific work and those ideas permeating the scientific as well as popular literature of natural selection.  Kung almost certainly meant the daffy idea of Hamiltonian "altruism" that attempted to dispose of the problem of extreme self-disadvantageous self-sacrifice which turned personal sacrifice for someone else into an act of genetic selfishness on behalf of genes.  

The claim was that the behavior was based in genes, there for the perpetuation and expansion of a specific gene or genes in the population.  Though if that's true you have to wonder why it is so rare in behavior, almost absent from view instead of being among the most typical behavior patterns in all species.  All species, this many billions of years into the evolution of current life having the same chance to exhibit such behavior instead of its most notable novelty even among human beings and our far more morals exhibiting fellow vertebrates. The idea is little more than a PR cover-job at the start and an attempt to rescue natural selection from anything that might indicate it doesn't really exist - true believers can't tolerate disconfirming evidence. If it is intellectually necessary to ameliorate the epic repudiation of the Golden Rule that Darwinism is, as an explanation of disconfirming observed behavior then, certainly, it must be more generally necessary to explain why we haven't all, all sentient, behaving creatures, not killed ourselves off in the Hobbesian war of all against all that Marx correctly noted was the intellectual foundation of natural selection, something you can imagine making Brit-imperialist aristocrats such as Darwin's primary audience somewhat tumescent.

And the biological effort at the atheist hootenanny turned out to be an easily defeated futility.  As the biologists at Camp Carroll fumbled and generally demonstrated their philosophical incompetence, Sean Carroll's fellow physicist, probably the most illustrious scientist present, Mr. "Bad Religion" himself, Steve Weinberg, using the atheist's own favorite tools tore their arguments to shreds saying that he could see no higher basis for morality than what he concluded was in the best interest of his family and his university department, that what he though was best for them (and so himself) was what he though determined his best course of action.  Of course HE didn't see any trouble with that, especially that late in his career, at the top of his professional life, he like your typical tenured university contented head of cattle, he had his and he was good with that. The others couldn't lay a glove on him over that.  Their framing had nothing in it that could overcome that most typical of all atheist lines, "why should I believe it?"  It isn't only religon that that line works on, it works with any proposals that atheists, even those alleged to be reliable science, come up with as well.  Indeed, as you get farther away from the directly observable of simplest of physical entities in science, what led Weinberg to quip "If you've seen one electron, you've seen them all," the more you'll find even what are to be taken as rigorously held scientific articles of faith are vulnerable to that refusal to believe if they don't want to.  That it was the "bad religion" guy who said it, a man who has worked all his life in a science which has produced nuclear weapons but who figures he knows from "bad" and his fellow rationalists had no answer for it reminds me of who Lucifer said he was in Paradise Lost, the one who says no.

There is absolutely no important or lesser aspect of moral behavior which is not entirely too complex to treat in that way.  It is the pretense of Western philosophy and the science of which it is merely a specialized method of, that we can arrive at ideas which will automatically and of necessity be universally adopted or at least which one with sufficient preparation must, of necessity automatically adopt. That is simply an illusory notion, there is nothing automatic about it, it relies on the most basic act of human will. You have to just say yes to something.

Even the most basic and universal of mathematical and, from there, even the most everyday of common occurrences, the act of believing them rests on choices made very early, most of the most crucial of those made so remotely in childhood we don't remember making the choice to believe our experience and the conclusions we drew from them. All further mathematical learning is built on that choice to believe the primitive ideas of numbers and measurement and which are accepted as true by necessity because they are in accord with what we have already accepted.  The farther we get in the lines of inferences from those, the less reliable our conclusions tend to get and the more vulnerable to non-acceptance by others. Mathematics has the most rigorous human methods of testing new claims made within it but those logical masterworks deal with the most abstract AND NON PYSICAL of all entities which knowably reside only in our minds.  The best methods of science mimic that but, dealing with far more complex realities, far more complex objects as even the simplest of physical objects are, they cannot match mathematics in that regard.  

It is an irony of the materialist-atheist faith of scientism that the most complete logical certainty is available only for non-physical, unobservable objects of no provable objective existence. Science merely buys us a little bit of safety in SOME of what scientists claim to have discovered EXCLUSIVELY ABOUT THE NATURAL WORLD, most reliably on the simplest and most observable of phenomena with rapidly decreasing certainty as the complexity of its treated phenomena increases.  And they do that in no small part by excluding many aspects of experienced phenomena and, infinitely more so, experienced life.  Most crucial to this argument, they exclude all moral considerations from their method and, especially, what you need to arrive at reliable moral absolutes, especially when those are going to be found hard or unwelcomed and so denied. Those are available no where except from a supernatural source.  And on them rest any hope for decent social interactions, decent communities, decent countries and a decent life for all of us or, as our science and technology increases our powers to do evil in a most imminent of truths, all of us.

I mentioned last time that I've specialized in skepticism over the secular notion of absolute speech and, especially, press freedom but I've also specialized in attacking the doctrine of natural selection. One of my more enjoyably written posts in that tearing Richard Dawkin's faux ethological presentation of Hamiltonian altruism to shreds, as well.  I've never had anyone, from blog rats, alleged science PhD's to professional biologists to neo-atheist mathematicians refute a single point in my attack. Yet it is probably the most famous of all such lines of bilge, I'm sure still taught as science in universities, the peppered-moth of the mid-1970s.  And I've also attacked its expression among others, Hamilton, himself, E.O. Wilson who, very late in his professional life repudiated the idea when his most public fame was based on his own extension of it, others in the evo-psy that was novel when Kung wrote his book but which has already passed the stage of putrescence that is entirely predictable when you try to mix the dodgy at best science of evolution with the even worse pseudo-science of psychology.

Perhaps what Kung lays out in his point about the epic indecisiveness of Western (and other) philosophies in morality can stand-in for the choice many have seen in whether or not you ultimately support a "Greek," that is Platonic Socratic procedure in thinking about things or if you admit what might be a more Hebrew religious conclusion that you are not going to get there out of reasoning, logic, even by formal empircal observation especially as that is hemmed in by the scientific restriction of what can be measured accurately and which must leave out such ideas as God and morality.

In the end what you end up believing you are to do and so have more of a chance of doing it is a choice to believe that you have to rise above your own self-interest.  Conventionally, in the typical academically taught crouch of ass covering, I'd usually say perhaps but I don't see any other choice in how you can frame the issues that can get you to that end on anything like a reliable basis.  

As seen above, even the secular, scientific ersatz and phony stand-in for absolute morality has to deform "altruism," so notably unselfish under an unbiased observation of the act, into "selfishness" it begs the Darwinian question that is at the basis of natural selection, from the start of the inquiry, that all is a matter of self-interest, if not on the part of organisms than in a just-so story about selfish-genes being behind it all. I am so disgusted with the pseudo-scientific attempt to replace revealed morality that I don't even particularly like the word "altruism" given its Comtean implications.  If modernism is a failed project, the entire effort to replace revealed morality with some ersatz, would be sociological-sciency-Millsian substitute is an even bigger flop.

And if having social, political, legal good instead of evil is the goal, it is all an intellectual fairy-tale.  All of that is at something taken as an intellectually elite level, hardly the level that your typical person with dangerously thuggish tendencies is likely to even try to start navigating.  Would the minor Ivy League product Trump do it?  Would his fellow major Ivy League product Peter Navarro?  To have an important impact within human societies, human politics and so law, the conduct of us as nations and as a world-wide species, a reliable basis from a far simpler framing is the only thing that will work.  Get that wrong, as, in fact, the secular U.S.Constitution did from the start, it won't produce what it needs to.  And that isn't merely the fault of the uneducated, the plebs, the "great unwashed" the "masses."  As the eugenicists, the scientific racists, the elite of fascist, Nazi and Communist criminal regimes and their pale shadows in the faltering liberal democracies prove, the educational and intellectual patina that such talk comprises masks only what is, at its basic level, the same thugishness.  

If Sean Carroll's weekend elite university-faculty, atheist camperee couldn't come up with something better, the skin-heads, MAGA's, those vulnerable to "Christian nationalism," etc. all around the world won't use anything that complex in coming up with a reason as to why they shouldn't do to others exactly what they don't want done to them, anyway.

They have to believe that they are to do to others as they would have done to them because God says so. If that isn't the predominant belief among People, if show-biz or hate-talk media (on behalf of their amoral sponsors) or the decadent ersatz-intellectuals, atheists who choose not to believe talk them out of that, then not only is egalitarian democracy doomed, so is even its shoddy imitation of liberal democracy.  Media liberals won't tell you that, academic liberals won't, would be "civil society" backer George Soros won't tell you that, but I just did.