I run luke-warm and cold on the form of entertainment that debating is, I mean a real debate, not the food fights that are the debased form of "presidential debate" invented as a TV spectacle by the Kennedy campaign in 1960 and going generally down hill from that already low point.
No, I mean real debates in the structure of a debate in which the main substance is the presentation of detailed arguments by two sides on a fixed question. It can be fun and sometimes mildly informative but as a means of substantial engagement on an issue, it generally barely skims the surface and is more successful in presenting stage craft than informed argument. At best they are extended battling TED talks which might count as an even more degraded form, a shorter, more superficial mono-debate in which everything is as much of a set-up job as the presenter of one wants to make it. Generally they want to rig it more than Plato set it up for his Socrates. They aren't any way to form an informed opinion or adopt a difficult position on a complex issue - though their questions often pretend that's what the exercise does. No, for that you have to read books and follow up by reading what the arguments in them are based in and to think about them. Let's not forget thinking, though debates and TED style intellectualism do so often. And the result is often not fast or entirely unambiguous.
Which is, actually, my central point here as I'll argue in a minute.
Yesterday I listened to a debate between the Evangelical Christian apologist, brilliant intellectual and a man who I have profound disagreements with, William Lane Craig and the Yale Ethicist Shelly Kagan on the question of whether or not God is necessary for morality.
Both men are highly trained philosophers and a lot of the argument depended heavily on some very complex, technical aspects of formal, academic philosophy. I think it's largely due to the clear fact that Craig is a highly experienced and excellent debater that he made far more points than Kagan who seemed to get tied up less in philosophical complexity than the scientists who Craig often debates. But I also think it's because Kagan, an atheist had the inferior position to defend.
The first thing I thought while listening to Craig addressing Kagan's typical baroque, highly technical and hardly invulnerable assertion of how deterministic, materialistic atheism could generate moral positions that had some universal application in reality* - real enough to prevent the kinds of atrocities that the 20th century atheist-scientistic regimes which, no doubt, always hover over this question - was that the atheist attempt is doomed to utter futility in real life.
It is too complex for more than a few specialists in that area of philosophy to understand the arguments of someone like Shelly Kagan - the mass of humanity in which any moral action and refraining from immoral action will have to find the only reality that matters would never be likely to understand or be effected by such an "ethicist's" systems for constructing morality.
If theology can often get too complex to explain to most people, the kind of quasi-utilitarian claims and arguments that someone like Kagan makes which must meet the requirements of, among other things, Darwinian natural selection (which is a universal acid against any kind of moral protection against genocidal violence), materialist determinism (Kagan's position of having determinism compatible with free-will is, frankly, absurd) and a myriad of other a priori requirements of a good, Yale-based atheist-materialist-scientistic philospher to maintain their respectability means that any such system of morality will be as vulnerable to rejection as it is absurdly and impractically inapplicable in real life. It is an ivory tower system which may as well exist in a closed display case like the one Edward Albee made the center of his absurdist play, Tiny Alice.
I'll give you this passage discussing Kagan's disagreement with his fellow ethicists from that helpful source, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy in the article on the already abstruse topic, "Doing vs. Allowing Harm."
Even if Rachels were correct that Smith’s and Jones’s behavior is morally equivalent, we may not be able to infer the moral equivalence of killing and letting die in general (where other things are equal) from this. Shelly Kagan argues that this inference assumes that “if a factor has genuine moral relevance, then for any pair of cases, where the given factor varies while others are held constant, the cases in that pair will differ in moral status” (Kagan 1988). He claims, moreover, that this assumes the Additive Assumption, the view that “the status of the act is the net balance or sum which is the result of adding up the separate positive and negative effects of the individual factors” (Kagan 1988, 259). He raises several objections to the Additive Assumption. Firstly, one might describe a pair of cases that are exactly alike except that one is a killing and the other a letting die, where the first intuitively seems far worse than the second. If this pair of cases is as good as Rachels’ pair, then either the inference is valid in both cases—to prove the contradiction that killing is both worse and not worse than letting die—or it is invalid in both cases. Secondly, one might raise the rhetorical question: why addition—rather than, say, multiplication or some other function? Similarly, Kamm (1996, 2007) defends a Principle of Contextual Interaction according to which a property can behave differently in one context than another.
Just which would be killer do they suspect is going to wade through the arguments and sort out the conflicting opinions of experts about such things as "additive assumption" before they decide whether or not to kill someone?
And I think that is guaranteed to be the result of any atheist attempt to reconstruct something that we would generally concede to comprise superior moral behavior. Ineffective impotence that will always, in real life, favor the depraved.
That huge deal made by atheists in arguing this question, of whether or not such morality is possible without God, of those dear old atheist professors who are beloved figures of kindness and such people do exist, but life proves that in the wider real world to count on that is unrealistic and absurd.
In general life unless they lead by an example of moral behavior, their technical explanations coming up with a materialistic basis for their behavior is as likely to be contradictory as it is to be ineffective in having a general effect in the wider world. We shouldn't rely at all on the nice old atheist professor acting morally within his own sphere of experience extending beyond that. Depraved monsters can do that, too, certainly in regard to our own self. But also their extended connections. Even the most evil of Stalinist henchmen or Nazis knew when someone treated THEM well or in ways they, no doubt, felt to be unfair even as they tortured and murdered scores, hundreds and tens of millions And there are even those who were nice to their children and spouses and friends as they murdered thousands at their day jobs. Some of them held university professorships and were, no doubt, popular with at least their favorite students and many were doctors of medicine as they willingly, enthusiastically became figures within the killing industry.
I would guess that for a percentage of such lovable figures, who tested their actions against their a priori commitments to materialism, scientism, Darwinism, atheism, they'd be more likley to give up their morality in favor of some species of materialist depravity. Look at how many of Kagan's fellow atheist-university-based "ethicists" spend much of their time drawing up lists of people it's OK to kill based in the same kind of utilitarian notions. Even the ones who want to be nice to animals.
I wish there were some way to have heard a debate between Craig and my favorite atheist, Richard Lewontin, because I suspect Lewontin has a far deeper understanding of things philosophical than most atheists and, certainly, many of his fellow scientists. . I think he would have appreciated the ambiguities of his position better than even a Kagan did and far more than some of Craig's other atheist debate opponents. The confrontation of him and the biologist Lewis Wolpert was pathetic (Wolpert is a philosophical idiot who gets by on his dotty old professor act) and the one between him and the physics professor Bernard Leikind was even more of an embarrassment for the atheist. Clearly a preparation in post-WWII science doesn't require a high degree skill in logical argument.
One of the most impressive things Lewontin ever did was admit that his atheism is based in his a priori preferences and not in any essential position of science. We all have our own a priori committments on which we base our arguments. Clearly for an "ethicist" of the atheist variety their overriding such committment is to there being no God, their secondary one might, might be in promoting moral behavior. But their prime directive will always be to avoid anything that might imply that God is real or, to their secondary committment, necessary. That has been my general experience of reading, listening to, discussing things in any depth with any atheist who will engage on even the most modest depth on any issues - most of them are atheists on the same basis as sports or pop culture fandom, it doesn't go any deeper than that.
My a priori committment is to do unto others as you would have them do unto you at every level up to and including the commitment to egalitarian democracy and its universal spreading and environmental preservation. I find that God as the source of that is far more likely to produce a good effect in the world than any intellectual construction of an ersatz replacement based on some notion of science. I do fault Craig for missing a great opportunity to point out, in discussing the fact that under the atheist scheme of things in which morality is nothing but an (absurd and self-contradictory) assertion of natural selection and social convention that the Nazis were consistent with their own constructed code of behavior. He seemed to present that as an aberration of the thing Kagan was presenting when their genocideal behavior was founded securely in claims of natural selection as can be found in the entire literature up to and through the Shoah and the other mass killings of the Nazis. The mass murders were a product of the kind of thinking Kagan and his fellow atheist "ethicists" hold as their a priori commitment.
And I don't think the mass murder was, uniformly, an unleashing of a deep and abiding, historically conditioned hatred and love of cruelty. There are instances of death camp commanders punishing sadistic behavior by the guards, even, if my memory serves, of one being ordered to be executed by his commander on the basis of being sadistically cruel while murdering. What is to be made of that is certainly too long for this already long piece. You'd need a long series of books by many scholars to get a grasp of it. What is to be made of mass murderers with a sense of morality and, English doesn't provide any word I know except the totally inappropriate one "kindness" overridden by the "applied biology" of Nazism? You'd get nowhere near understanding of it in a debate though I'll bet the superficial members of the audience would guess they knew what it was all about. For the love of Mike, they would after a TED talk.
* I should point out that with Kagan and the other atheists I've listened to on this topic, they want to have it both ways, of claiming a commitment to the universality of morals while claiming that they have only a social and biological meaning. That, in itself, is a seld-defeating contradiction, which, for the modern atheist, will always be further defeated by one of their ultimate a priori commitments required for maintaining a reputable life in academia.
For anyone to claim such a thing based in natural selection is completely and absolutely absurd because natural selection is an assertion of competition within as well as among species for the personal advantage of individuals. Not even the ridiculous attempts to past various anti-competitive schemes to it can change the basic nature of natural selection. Darwin and his followers repeatedly, over and over again, up till right now argued that it is a struggle for existence which, again in obvious and complete double speak, produced superior individuals, the parents of today's and the futures species.
There is a reason that eugenic inequality has been ascendant since the 1970s, it is because the temporary suppression of such talk after the crimes of the Nazis were exposed was the aberration in an intellectual regime of Darwinism, which was guaranteed to be merely a temporary suspension of that logical conclusion of the theory, Darwinism will ALWAYS produce eugenics and eugenics will, ALWAYS devolve into schemes of who we are to kill. The theme song of Darwinism, if there should ever be one, is the Nazi, Rodgers and Hammerstein style waltz, "Tomorrow Belongs To Me.
No comments:
Post a Comment