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DAWKINS ON THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND'S SIDE

11/24/2015

Richard Dawkins recently criticized some U.K. theater chains for refusing to run a Christian ad encouraging prayer. More specifically, he objected “to suppressing the ads on the grounds that they might ‘offend’ people. If anybody is ‘offended’ by something so trivial as a prayer, they deserve to be offended.”

I sometimes wonder if Dawkins says these kind of things mainly to confound his critics. Nevertheless, I think he's right: society has become overly sensitive.

On the other hand, this is not, as the Church's communications director said and as Dawkins himself initially tweeted, a freedom of speech issue. The theater chains are private concerns and have the right to whatever policy they deem appropriate. (They currently do not run ads of a political or religious nature – and so would presumably refuse atheist ones as well.) So the theater chains are free to refuse the ad if they want. But of course anyone who disagrees with their policy also has the right to criticize them.

(Dawkins later retracted his claim that the theaters were violating free speech.)

For more, see here.

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CAN ONE DERIVE AN “OUGHT” FROM AN “IS”?

11/18/2015

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As mentioned in a recent post, many religious believers claim that without God there can be no objective right or wrong. This creates an understandable temptation among atheists to find an alternative basis for objective morality. And because atheists usually look for this alternative in science, they often begin by rejecting the well-known principle that one cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.”

One such atheist is Richard Carrier. He maintains that this principle is “not merely illogical, it's demonstrably false. We get an 'ought' from an 'is' all the time.”

Carrier's basic argument is that there are objective facts about what people desire, as well as objective facts about how to achieve these desires, and that “wherever both are an empirically demonstrated fact, the imperative they entail is [also] an empirically demonstrated fact.” So, for instance, consider the following example:

1. You want your car to run well
2. In order for your car to run well, its oil must be changed with sufficient regularity
3. Therefore, you ought to change your car's oil with sufficient regularity

Here, we have two “is” premises which (we can assume) state empirical facts, and an “ought” conclusion. And since the conclusion is supposedly derived from factual statements, Carrier believes it is “factually true independent of human opinion or belief.” He thinks he has solved the problem and that therefore the principle that one cannot derive an “ought” from an “is” should “never be uttered again.”

Well, sorry, but I'm going to utter it once again: One cannot derive an “ought” from an “is,” and it isn't hard to understand why. In deductive arguments, there cannot be anything in the conclusion that isn't already contained in the premises: All deduction does is “extract” some of the information included in the premises; it cannot add anything new. It follows that if the premises of a valid argument contain no “oughts,” then the conclusion cannot contain any “oughts” either (except in a trivial sense which is discussed in the note below).

And in fact it's easy to see what's wrong with Carrier's argument. That “you ought to change your car's oil with sufficient regularity” only follows if it is also the case that you ought to want your car to run well. In other words, there must already be an “ought” in the premises if the conclusion is to follow. Compare:

1. Manson wants to kill lots of innocent people
2. In order to kill lots of innocent people, one needs weapons
3. Therefore, Manson ought to get weapons

Is the conclusion here “factually true independent of human opinion or belief”? According to Carrier's argument, it is! But who seriously thinks that it is a moral truth that Manson should acquire weapons?

Nor is it difficult to come up with a counter-example to the first argument. Suppose Mary is an extreme environmentalist and disagrees that we ought to want our cars to run at all. Can we demonstrate to Mary the “fact” that you ought to change your car's oil regularly?

No one has ever successfully bridged the is-ought gap. If you want to maintain that there are objective moral truths, you ought to find some other way.

Note:
For anyone who might be interested, the trivial sense in which one can derive a conclusion that contains “ought” from premises that do not is as follows: Given that from p you can conclude p or q, one can validly argue something like,

1. The earth is round
2. Therefore, the earth is round or you ought to go fly a kite.

But this is irrelevant, as it is not a way to derive moral principles (the conclusion is true, but it does not actually say that you should go fly a kite).

The quotations are from Richard Carrier, “Moral Facts Naturally Exist (and Science Could Find Them),” in The End of Christianity, ed. John Loftus, pp. 334-335

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BEN CARSON'S PYRAMID SCHEME

11/12/2015

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Ben Carson has been criticized for his bizarre claim (made in a commencement speech seventeen years ago) that the Egyptian pyramids were used to store grain, and rightly so. But there was something else almost as bizarre about his claim that is actually more telling, and it is something most reports have ignored.

Carson's reason for thinking the pyramids were grain silos, in case you don't know, is simple: the Bible says that Joseph had the Egyptians store enough grain to last them for seven years, and so Carson argues that whatever they used to store it in “would have to be something awfully big, if you stop and think about it. And I don’t think it’d just disappear over the course of time...”

But the other thing Carson said about the pyramids is what I find even more interesting:

‘‘And when you look at the way that the pyramids are made, with many chambers that are hermetically sealed, they’d have to be that way for a reason. And various scientists have said, ‘Well, you know there were alien beings that came down and they had special knowledge and that’s how they were...’ – you know, it doesn’t require an alien being when God is with you.”

Yes, presidential candidate Ben Carson actually thinks that scientists (or at least “various scientists,” which is bad enough) believe that aliens were responsible for the pyramids. That says a lot about how much he understands science.

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RUSH LIMBAUGH ON GOD AND HEAVEN

11/9/2015

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Rush Limbaugh rarely discusses the issue of the validity of religious belief, and a good thing, too. But today he did and, well, you be the judge:

He was talking about an argument made by his father when he, Rush, was a child – an argument that he apparently still finds persuasive today. It goes like this: A loving God, Rush's dad told him, would not have created us with the ability to imagine a place like heaven – or eternal life, for that matter – unless it were real. For, to create beings capable of imagining such a thing if it weren't real would simply be cruel.

(I can't help wondering if he thinks the same thing about hell.)

This is almost as bad as the argument he presents in his book The Way Things Ought to Be – and which I also once heard him make on his show – to demonstrate the reasonableness of belief in God:

“The human mind... is incapable of imagining the size of the universe, its origins, or even where it is. Although some incredibly arrogant scientists believe that they are capable of scientifically unlocking every mystery of the universe and of understanding everything in purely material terms, I believe there are certain things that the mind of man simply cannot discover or ascertain. There are certain things we were not meant to understand, cannot understand, and must accept on faith.” (pp. 153-154, italics in the original)

(I especially like that part about us not knowing where the universe is!)

All of this is funny, of course, but what isn't as funny is how Rush uses his religion to back up his political views. His belief in a creator is, he tells us, his principal reason for denying climate change: “My views on the environment are rooted in my belief in Creation... I don't believe that the earth and her ecosystem are fragile...” (p. 153)

One can certainly have a serious discussion about climate change. However, the religious approach of Rush and his followers is essentially to not even have a discussion, not even look at any evidence, because after all, we already “know” that climate change can't be true! And that's scary.

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DAWKINS ON THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND'S SIDE

CAN ONE DERIVE AN “OUGHT” FROM AN “IS”?

BEN CARSON'S PYRAMID SCHEME

﻿ RUSH LIMBAUGH ON GOD AND HEAVEN

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RUSH LIMBAUGH ON GOD AND HEAVEN