Is God Necessary…Response #1
In response to my post Is God Necessary for Moral Decisions? my friend Steve listed a series of challenges to my theses. As I suspect that each of his points could begin a discussion of its own, I will post my responses as individual posts rather than in the original comment thread.
[Steve's response #1]
You CLEARLY do not understand evolution. The fly, the octopus, and the human all have working eyes, and yet all three of them are VASTLY different. I point this out to refute two of your assertions: a) that the universe is necessarily deterministic; and b) that Zindler’s appeals to freedom are unfounded.
[Mark's response]
I did not assert that the universe is deterministic; I said that Zindler’s position presupposes an impersonal, mechanistic universe whereby everything that is has been produced by cause and effect operating within time and chance. Without a creator/sustainer you can have nothing but a machine. Newton brought in the idea that the universe is like a machine, but still kept a machine Builder/Maintenance man. Darwin’s theory supposedly eliminated that guy’s job, so all you’re left with is the machine. Machines do not have freedom, so I maintain that Zindler has no basis upon which to bring freedom into his system. He is importing a concept that cannot exist in his universe.
I don’t understand the appeal to variegated eyes. Specialization and differentiation are not antithetical to mechanistic, impersonal evolution. And they do not correlate to moral freedom.
If we are to have freedom at any point, then we have to open the universe to some kind of personalism. Zindler’s atheism does not allow for this, yet he wants to maintain the freedom.
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January 27th, 2005 at 6:23 pm
Your use of the word “machine” reveals the same thing as your lack of understanding of my example of eyes. In the former, the concept of a machine brings with it the concepts of repetition and predictability; in the latter, the eyes of those three creatures all evolved along very different paths. My point is that evolution can take MANY different paths to achieve the same goal.
Zindler’s atheism (like my theism) absolutely does not prohibit personalism. Personalities are the manifestation of highly developed brains, and require the existence of no god to justify their presence.
January 29th, 2005 at 12:59 pm
Steve, there’s something I don’t understand. Mark has argued that, according to Zindler, highly developed brains are produced by cause and effect along with time and chance. No matter how “developed” a brain is, it will process information in a regular way based on these factors. In other words, if you have (hypothetically) 500 brains that were all the result of the same cause and effect and time and chance, you would see all 500 make the same choices (given the same information, environments, etc). Of course, we see variation because no two brains were caused by exactly the same factors. Hence, we have “personalities” - but these are really just variations. And even these variations will behave in a regular way.
But you seem to be arguing that highly developed brains lead to the ability to make value judgments and choices that are irregular (and hence, are “free”), even when all contributing factors (time, chance, cause, effect) are accounted for. Can you explain?
January 29th, 2005 at 7:20 pm
Sentience is more complicated than you give it credit for, Greg.
January 29th, 2005 at 11:28 pm
Greg, to address your problem simply, do some research into genetic programming and neural-net AI. It’s the same principle as you described and yet its results are also as you describe. It takes a lot of time to figure out in the more complex of programs exactly what caused a program to choose as it did… if you scale that complexity to the level of human sentience, well, only God could determine what and why you do the things you do.
January 30th, 2005 at 8:57 pm
Steve, you regularly assert that certain things (Canaanite genocide, for instance) are “just plain wrong,” although you offer no reason other than your own intuition as to why they (or anything) would be “wrong” or “right.”
Therefore, I will assert that I cannot accept that all of human personality and will is merely and completely the result of a highly complex computer program. If I truly believed that, I would contemplate suicide. My personality, my consciousness, my will, my emotions….everything I experience…points me to a “beyond” that has a reason for being.
January 30th, 2005 at 10:36 pm
Just to play the devil’s advocate, couldn’t I basically say that “good” is an instinctual phenomenon that desires for the species to be productive and fruitful. So anything contrary to that is not “good”. It seems to me anyways that the morality question would be sufficiently answered by this in context of the original essay and Steve’s Caananite genocide comment.
January 31st, 2005 at 3:05 am
I would still contend that “good for survival” does not in any way adequately account for all that humans consider good and true and beautiful. There is something that happens when I hear a Mozart concerto or see branches against a winter sky that can not be explained by “survival of the species.”
And I confess, as I did above, that I would not want to live in a world where it were actually true that all we turned out to be is just very highly evolved machines.
January 31st, 2005 at 9:17 am
I think you’re right, but in the context of the specific material you’re refuting… it seems to me anyways that’s the general context of good.
By the way, I see you’ve got MMJ under “the music” section — how long you been a fan? I discovered them late last year.
January 31st, 2005 at 5:00 pm
AC - I’ve know about My Morning Jacket for about a year also. Someone sent me a sampler disc with some of their stuff. They are an aquired taste (I have to hit skip if my wife is in the car) but I think its my Neil Young background that got me into them at first.
January 31st, 2005 at 6:26 pm
Mark, blow your brains out if you want (no, not really!), but it won’t change the fact that you haven’t raised a single point I haven’t already addressed. “Good” is either: 1) survival, 2) sociological evolution, or 3) an aberrant evolutionary trend that might disappear with the evolutionary descendents of humans, as in the case of Mozart and Picasso. If you’ll allow me to channel just a tad bit of Marx, the Canaanite genocide was wrong because of economics.
As I’ve said before, I’m not compelled to explain emotion, since emotion only ever serves to promote the well-being of the individual or the community; but if I must, then I’ll say that emotion is probably leftover evolutionary junk that promoted survival on both the individual and group levels among a lower class of humanoids that lacked higher-order brain function.
January 31st, 2005 at 7:41 pm
How terribly cold and hopeless that universe is.
January 31st, 2005 at 8:22 pm
Your refutation of my argument is that you don’t like my argument? Okay…
February 1st, 2005 at 9:08 am
I’d say his refutation is that such an argument is unnatural - even for you. He’s got as much of a point as you do. This argument is about what morality is - is it some kind of bunk or is it something imprinted in us by God? In the end you have to throw morality out completely or embrace God.
I think one of the problems is that in discussing morality (or moral imperatives) we confuse it with sociology (or social imperatives) (sociology may be the wrong word). Sociology is ulimately a subset of morality because morality is concerned more with who you are in yourself. When you live a perfect morality, a perfect sociology occurs naturally. Sociology does not give you a perfect morality — it gives you something like Liberterianism: people have a standard for interacting but are otherwise free to do whatever they want in isolation or as agreed among individuals.
And Liberterianism seems to be exactly the kind of thing that Zindler is driving to. Zindler isn’t talking about morality — he doesn’t believe in it; he’s thrown out the bunk. He’s talking about sociology.