I find myself a bit puzzled by some of the out-and-out naturalist positions. For example the one quoted here: Teilhard and the Question of Life's Suffering: An Excerpt from Rediscovering Teilhard's Fire (SJU Press, 2010; Kathleen Duffy, Editor) :: John Haught :: Global Spiral: "Loyal Rue, a philosopher who exemplifies very well what I mean by an evolutionary naturalist, even seems to suggest that scientists should be careful about letting the rest of us in on the discovery that our religions are adaptive illusions. If we all find out tomorrow what is really going on we might too precipitously dispose of our religious beliefs and sacred theodicies. In that case we would be deprived of one of the human traits that have allowed our genes to survive for so many thousands of years. If we expose our religions as the lies they really are, humanity might go extinc"
You see, my puzzlement is why, on a naturalistic account, we should care? If the genes can't stand too much reality, then they are clearly unfit ...
And anyway, taking this standpoint, why should we value the survival of human beings -or anything really? Surely that sense that it would be 'good' for 'us' to survive is just another survival mechanism which actually has no value except if it helps genes to be passed on. And if it doesn't, so what?
I really can't see where the moral imperative to 'save the humans' comes from in this world view or what its force can possibly be aside from a preference which may (or may not) be shared.
16 December 2010
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I've been watching the TV series 'Foundation'. I read the books about 50 years ago (I know!) but scarcely now remember anything...
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I've just had an article published on emergingchurch.info. It's an adaptation of some of my book, but I thought I'd share it and...
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4 comments:
Yes, that is the biggest problem I see with it, and it is one that atheists seem to have most difficulty in understanding. If you ask them about it, they insist on answering a quite different question, and tends to say that atheists gan be just as moral as religious believers, and believers don't have a monopoly on morality etc. The question they always evade is why one should be moral, or think that anything has value. It seems to be the anthrpomorphization of evolution, which makes it anything but "scientific".
Absolutely right, Steve. It's that Western Atheism is still largely 'parasitic' on the Christendom host it was hatched into, particularly having been formed by the rather Moralistic and Deistic 17th century forms. So it's standard apologetics wrt Christians are still aimed at an immediately post-Enlightenment version as if morality were the most important (defining) thing about 'religion' that they feel they have to 'measure up' to.
One of the reasons I recommend Gray's Straw Dogs is that there we have an atheist who recognises the difficulty and tries to work with it and does about the best job that can be done, I suspect.
I haven't read that, but will look out for it.
I took the liberty of posting an extract from your blog piece in a few newsgroups, Christian and atheists (atheists like to engage in polemics in Christian groups).
I wanted to see if someone could answer the question.
One simply engaged in ad hominems -- said you obviously hadn't read anything on the subject, and that an hour's reading would put you right. When I pointed out that that didn't answer the question, but was merely an ad hominmen argument, he smugly asserted that I didn't know what ad hominem meant.
The one who seemed most likely to produce an interesting discussion eventually came round to saying:
>Why does anything have value?
And I responded:
Well, that's the core question, isn't it?
So we seem to have come full circle.
Andii Bowsher's question may be summarised as "Why, in a naturalistic worldview, does anything have value?"
And his response was to ask why does anything have value in any worldview.
Evasion is the name of the game.
I've now written something about this in my blog here Theodicy of naturalists | Khanya. I'd be interested in your comments.
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