20 shirts, 20 comments

Originally posted at Vox Popoli. I created a few more links.

The 20 coolest atheist t-shirts according to the Daily Telegraph:

1) Zeus to Reason

Because the Cult of Reason turned out so well the last time.

2) Distrusted minority

When raising consciousness backfires.

3) What would Dawkins do?

If The God Delusion is a reliable indicator, string a few irrelevant anecdotes together and call it science.

4) Atheist wine club

Correction: whine club.

5) Which day did God make all the fossils?

It depends. Are you talking about Eoanthropus dawsoni or Hesperopithecus haroldcookii?

6) No one has been stoned to death by atheists

Because atheists prefer starving people to death, shooting people to death, gassing people to death, and beating people to death with shovels.

7) God works in mysterious ways

This is how Christians know you have not read the Bible.

8) Dawkins&Dennett&Harris&Hitchens

Snippy&Phony&Screwy&Silly. The four intellectual dwarves of atheism.

9) Born OK The First Time

A successful entry does not dictate a successful exit.

10) Atheists do it unsupervised

And unmarried and childless. And not very often.

11) Atheists have morals too

A morality of one is not a functional moral system.

12) Don't pray in my school, and I won't think in your church

It's not your school. And who the Hell are you to tell anyone else what to do or where to do it?

13) Imaginary friend

Now explain the other 93 percent.

14) Sleep with an atheist

Add to your STD collection.

15) Science, Dawkins, Rock&Roll

Social life as sausage fest.

16) iFraud

Because irritating Christians, Jews, and Muslims just isn't enough.

17) Roman Lions

Arguably not the best way to demonstrate that atheists do not harbor the desire to kill vast quantities of innocent people.

18) Separation of church and state

Amen.

19) Wait, what?

Dinosaur rodeo rocks!

20) Darwin is my homeboy

Charles Darwin is dead. In another 150 years, Darwinism will be too. [I think half that time is sufficient.]

Euthyphro's Dilemma Revisited

Socrates and Euthyphro meet outside the food court. As they wait in line for gyros they strike up the following conversation.

Socrates: Is what is moral commanded by God because it is moral?

Euthyphro: This is certainly the case.

S: And we are obligated to obey God because He truly relates to us the moral law?

E: You have put your finger precisely on it.

S: If God merely intermediates between man and the moral law, could we not discern the law for ourselves, bypassing, as it were, the middle man?

E: Heaven forbid! These things are too lofty for us!

S: Too lofty for us to receive directly, but not too lofty when passed from hand-to-hand? If God truly relates these things to us surely they are not tarnished in transmission.

E: I would hope not. [PE contemplates] Perhaps God is required to comprehend the source. If we were to approach it directly we would not perceive it rightly, or we would be consumed by its holiness.

S: You may have something there, but two things worry me if this state of affairs obtain.

E: And they are...?

S: First, is it conceivable that what we call God is subject to a superior holiness? Second, does this holiness approve of our offering worship to its messenger rather than itself?

E: This cannot be! God, by definition, is the Supreme Being and what is supreme serves no master.

S: But we have arrived here by mutual agreement, and we have found that God is not God.

[Standing just behind them is William who has overheard the conversation. He interjects...]

William: Excuse me. May I add a thought of my own at this point?

E & S: Please do.

W: What is this superior holiness that God intermediates for us, to which He is beholden?

S: The Good.

W: What is it's nature?

S: As far as I can tell it is an eternal and universal set of moral relations.

W: Is it a thing or an abstraction?

S: An abstraction, a principle.

W: And this abstract set moral relations bind us as well as God?

S: I would think so.

W: It follows then that all things are obliged to adhere to this eternal and universal set of moral relations. Is that your understanding?

S: It is.

W: Do you see this ant crawling up the table leg?

S: I see it.

W: If all things are obliged, is this ant obliged?

S: I don't know much about ants, but I doubt if ants are under any obligation.

W: How about the table itself?

S: Certainly not.

W: So not all things are bound by this superior holiness?

S: No, not all things, but all sentient beings.

W: A helpful clarification, but it raises a question. If there were no sentient beings, if the world were populated only by ants, would there be anything under obligation?

S: I suppose not.

W: And if there were no sentient beings, a set of moral relations would be meaningless, perhaps impossible?

S: I'd have to think that through, but is sounds plausible.

W: Likewise, would not Good itself would be meaningless or impossible?

S: [exhibiting consternation] Mmmmm...

W: Can we conclude that an abstract set of moral relations cannot exist in a vacuum; that at least one sentient being is required for goodness and obligation to have any meaning whatsoever? Can we further conclude that these abstractions cannot precede a being, but must emanate from a being that sets them and imposes obligation upon all beings including himself? Can we ultimately conclude that such a being cannot be distinct from Good but is the source of Good, or, simply stated, is Good Itself. You ask, "Is what is moral commanded by God because it is moral?" But now surely you see that what is moral can only be what God commands.

S: [continued consternation] You have given me food for thought.

E: Thank you William, but I must tell you that I was just about to make this same point myself.

W: Sorry for stepping on your toes Euthyphro. [The conversation hits a lull, the three men are looking around. Williams continues after a sigh.] Is the service here always so exceedingly slow?

S: Euthyphro, coming here was your idea. What gives?

E: Hey, I've always used the drive-thru!

Euthyphro for Dummies

"Consider this: Is the pious being loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is being loved by the gods?"

When Euthyphro's dilemma is discussed by people like Julian Baggini (by way of Cyberkitten) or even TruthSeeker (by way of Kevin Parry) are they expounding or confounding Plato? Have they discovered a fatal flaw in a God-based system of ethics? Have they pulled the rug out from under traditional religious beliefs?

Baggini says,

"To my mind, the Euthypryo dilemma is a very powerful argument against the idea that God is required for morality. Indeed, it goes further and shows that God cannot be the source of morality without morality becoming something arbitrary."

To my mind, Baggini, from this auspicious start proceeds in circles and gets nowhere, but stirs up a lot of dust doing so. We can come back to Baggini, but for now I want to turn our focus on TruthSeeker. TruthSeeker poses the dilemma to Heather on the pretext of engaging in some intellectual discussion (albeit unrelated to the topic at hand), so I'm not sure what TruthSeeker thinks other than that Heather showed "a total lack of understanding of Euthyphro's dilemma". So I ask TruthSeeker to enlighten us about that here in a forum dedicated to the topic. After that I'd like to know if there has been any advance in philosophy in the intervening 2,400 years on the nature of the good or did Plato write the last word on it?

Near the end of the dialogue, Socrates has become frustrated in his attempt to learn from Euthyphro the nature of the pious and impious and in despair says, "So we must investigate again from the beginning what piety is, as I shall not willingly give up before I learn this." (15c)

I'm with Socrates. TruthSeeker (and everyone else), the floor is yours.

Proofs of God's Non-Existence

Are there disproofs of God's existence? I shutter to think. (Maybe that's my problem.) Tell me how I can know that God does not exist.

Cartoon: Modified

Modified from the version posted by Kevin. My sincere apologies to the fine original artist at atheistcartoons.com

The Progression of Democracy

From Bondage to Spiritual Faith
From Spiritual Faith to Great Courage
From Great Courage to Liberty
From Liberty to Abundance
From Abundance to Complacency
From Complacency to Apathy
From Apathy to Dependency
From Dependency back to Bondage

-Anon.

[Guess that means we're about due for another period of Spiritual Faith.]

Darwin's Doubt Redux

[Like a fly repeated battering itself against a window, I'm revisiting the topic of the dubious assumption that naturalistic evolution gives us good reason to think our beliefs are true.]

"With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?"

- Charles Darwin, in a letter to William Graham (Down, July 3, 1881), in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin (London: John Murray, 1887), Volume 1, pp. 315-16.

Darwin was no intellectual slouch. If this "horrid doubt" could have been resolved simply by testing our convictions (or more generally, our cognitive faculties from whence our convictions spring) to determine their trustworthiness then why should Darwin have this concern? There are at least two reason why Darwin's doubt can't be addressed by testing. First, and most obviously, it begs the question, since it calls on us to assume the soundness of our cognitive faculties so they may adequately serve to judge the soundness of those self-same cognitive faculties. Second, testing our convictions does not address the core issue which is not the trustworthiness of our convictions per se, but rather their trustworthiness given Darwin's hypothesis of naturalism, operating within the confines of his evolutionary theory.

I think our convictions (or beliefs) are indeed trustworthy as a result of our having been created by a rational Mind who endowed us with a share of His own rationality. Given a rational Creator and His bestowing of rationality upon humans, it's expected that our beliefs would be by-and-large trustworthy. Does naturalistic evolution likewise lead to trustworthy beliefs? Darwin doubted it. I doubt it. So does noted philospher Alvin Plantinga. He summarizes his argument in the article, "Evolution vs. Naturalism: Why they are like oil and water" from the July/August 2008 issue of Books & Culture.

The first thing to see is that naturalists are also always or almost always materialists: they think human beings are material objects, with no immaterial or spiritual soul, or self....According to materialists, beliefs, along with the rest of mental life, are caused or determined by neurophysiology, by what goes on in the brain and nervous system. Neurophysiology, furthermore, also causes behavior....[What] evolution tells us is that our behavior (perhaps more exactly the behavior of our ancestors) is adaptive; since the members of our species have survived and reproduced, the behavior of our ancestors was conducive, in their environment, to survival and reproduction. Therefore the neurophysiology that caused that behavior was also adaptive; we can sensibly suppose that it is still adaptive. What evolution tells us, therefore, is that our kind of neurophysiology promotes or causes adaptive behavior, the kind of behavior that [results in our] survival and reproduction.

Now this same neurophysiology, according to the materialist, also causes belief. But while evolution, natural selection, rewards adaptive behavior and penalizes maladaptive behavior, it doesn't, as such, care a fig about true belief. As Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the genetic code, writes in The Astonishing Hypothesis, "Our highly developed brains, after all, were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truth, but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive and leave descendents."

...

Consider a frog sitting on a lily pad. A fly passes by; the frog flicks out its tongue to capture it. Perhaps the neurophysiology that causes it to do so, also causes beliefs. As far as survival and reproduction is concerned, it won't matter at all what these beliefs are: if that adaptive neurophysiology causes true belief (e.g., those little black things are good to eat), fine. But if it causes false belief (e.g., if I catch the right one, I'll turn into a prince), that's fine too. Indeed, the neurophysiology in question might cause beliefs that have nothing to do with the creature's current circumstances (as in the case of our dreams); that's also fine, as long as the neurophysiology causes adaptive behavior. All that really matters, as far as survival and reproduction is concerned, is that the neurophysiology cause the right kind of behavior; whether it also causes true belief (rather than false belief) is irrelevant.

...

We must suppose, therefore, that the belief in question is about as likely to be false as to be true; the probability of any particular belief's being true is in the neighborhood of 1/2. But then it is massively unlikely that [one's] cognitive faculties... [would] produce the preponderance of true beliefs over false required by reliability. If I have 1,000 independent beliefs, for example, and the probability of any particular belief's being true is 1/2, then the probability that 3/4 or more of these beliefs are true (certainly a modest enough requirement for reliability) will be less than [10 to the -58th power]. And even if I am running a modest epistemic establishment of only 100 beliefs, the probability that 3/4 of them are true, given that the probability of any one's being true is 1/2, is very low, something like [.000001 to the 7th power].

...

If evolutionary naturalism is true, then the probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable is also very low. And that means that one who accepts evolutionary naturalism has a defeater for the belief that her cognitive faculties are reliable: a reason for giving up that belief, for rejecting it, for no longer holding it. ... No doubt she can't help believing that they are; no doubt she will in fact continue to believe it; but that belief will be irrational. And if she has a defeater for the reliability of her cognitive faculties, she also has a defeater for any belief she takes to be produced by those faculties—which, of course, is all of her beliefs. If she can't trust her cognitive faculties, she has a reason, with respect to each of her beliefs, to give it up. She is therefore enmeshed in a deep and bottomless skepticism. One of her beliefs, however, is her belief in evolutionary naturalism itself; so then she also has a defeater for that belief. Evolutionary naturalism, therefore... [is] self-refuting, self-destructive, shoots itself in the foot. Therefore you can't rationally accept it. For all this argument shows, it may be true; but it is irrational to hold it.

...

The argument isn't an argument for the falsehood of evolutionary naturalism; [or even, may I add, that our cognitive faculties are not, in fact, reliable] it is instead for the conclusion that one cannot rationally believe that proposition. Evolution, therefore, far from supporting naturalism, is incompatible with it, in the sense that you can't rationally believe them both.