Thoughts on a conversation with secular humanists (A first post of many)

A friend of mine and I were in downtown Lincoln, NE, last Friday night (as been our pseudo-ritual this summer), where there is a particular street preacher who we occasionally have discussions with. Evidently, over the course of the past year, the Lincoln Secular Humanists have taken it upon themselves to stand on the opposite street corner with signs that say things like "Good Morals Don't Come from the Bible," "Humanists Don't Blow Up Buildings," and my personal favorite, "Honk for Tolerance." Words and their actual meanings aside, the most interesting part of the night was a conversation James and I had with two humanists on the nature and existence of morals.

At one point, we wondered where they thought their morals came from, to which they replied, "our parents," who got them from their parents, etc. They insisted that they were not relativists, yet some form of moral relativism, while not guaranteed in such a system, is eminently possible (and, I would argue, probable). Eventually, they shifted their position slightly and said we should refrain from doing certain things (like random killings, torturing babies for fun, etc.) because they either are illegal or, more generally, they would prevent the continuation of the species. These are generally true descriptions of the way the world is. If I abide by the law, I will refrain from committing all sorts of heinous acts and I will help to continue the existence of the human race (if only by refraining from taking members out of it). These are true facts, though they say nothing as to whether or not I am a "good" person, because they do not define goodness, only legally acceptable things. Further, they offer no account of the value, or oughtness, implicit in the statement "murder is wrong," for instance. Why is murder wrong, and not simply illegal? Why is the continuation of the human race considered a "good" thing? Invariably, it seems to me that this eventually, in one form or another, regresses to a statement of "because I/we said so," without ever addressing the real question of moral content. If a society exists in which murder is not necessarily wrong, but allowed in certain circumstances, we begin to tread relativistic waters. And yet the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), among others, endorses a universal morality.

In his book, "A Christan Manifesto," Francis Schaeffer points out that "Humanism, with its lack of any final base for values or law, always leads to chaos. It then naturally leads to some form of authoritarianism to control the chaos." I do not think it's difficult to see why this would be true, if man is indeed the measure of all things. How dangerous is that idea! One sometimes hates always bagging on Nazi Germany, but it's just such a good example of what can go wrong when we take our prescriptives for morality and behavior from societal codes: chaos and authoritarianism.

Note that, regardless of what they thought we were saying, we never once accused them of being immoral people. No properly functioning Christian would accuse a humanist of being completely amoral. Of course, everyone is capable of immoral behavior; that's not the issue. We merely pointed out that they cannot account for a moral order in the world. They may certainly point to laws and parental directives, but that is to simply skirt the issue of the existence of a universal moral order.

As I continue to pursue a career in academia, I am constantly reminded (and disheartened) at the pervasiveness of secular humanism in the academy, both among my fellow graduate students as well as my professors. As such, I am anticipating an ongoing series of thoughts on conversations I have with my fellow students and others on this subject. I'll doubtless post on other topics, as well, but this is a theme (along with the more general theme of the intersection of Christianity and the academy) that I will continue to explore, especially as I have a chance to attend the C.S. Lewis Foundation's National Faculty Forum, entitled "The Crisis of the University: Religion and the Future of the Academy," this fall.

Plantinga on Dawkins: "The Dawkins Confusion"

I just thought I'd pass along an interesting article over at Christianity Today by Alvin Plantinga (one of the preeminent Christian philosophers working today) on the ideas of Richard Dawkins, noted atheist and the author of books such as "The God Delusion."

Plantinga's conclusion is, interestingly enough, that

People like Dawkins hold that there is a conflict between science and religion because they think there is a conflict between evolution and theism; the truth of the matter, however, is that the conflict is between science and naturalism, not between science and belief in God.

Just War Theory...and then some

Today I went to a speaker who talked about "Just War Theory in the Contemporary World". Maj. Kevin Cutright was the speaker, he is currently teaching philosophy at the United States Military Academy, West Point, NY; he earned his undergraduate in international relations and earned his graduate degree in philosophy at Vanderbilt. I ended up going to lunch with him, his wife and son, the head of the philosophy dept. at USD, a retiring philosophy teacher who taught on ethics and philosophy, and the former student government association president for USD. Needless to say I was pretty stoked to have the head of the philosophy dept. to my left and a philosophy teacher from West Point to my right and be eating lunch with them. But here is a brief overview of my understanding of Just War Theory:

If you polarize the philosophies of war you end up with either the view that war is never justified in any circumstance or that war is always justified in every circumstance. Just War Theory, on a very basic level, states that at times war is justified and at others war is not justified. I find that this theory, though I truly don't know everything about it, is coherent and fits with reality and experience. What's interesting is that if you do believe this then you must acknowledge that:
1) Not every idea and action is equal to another.
2) Right and Wrong are based on standard.
3) Justice is not a convention of society.
4) All human beings have an equal inherent value (Every human being has certain rights...maybe intrinsic value is a better wording)

World War II is a prime example of a Just War. Hitler was had ideas that we say are logically incoherent and violate human rights. His ideas and actions were bad. He believed that not all humans were equal and we saw this played out in his belief in Nietzsche's idea of the Ubermensch or Superman. If every idea/action were equal, then we were not justified in going to war against Germany.
One might say: Nazi Germany was wrong because they violated basic human rights. I agree that happened, but why is that wrong? If those actions are wrong, why are they wrong and where does the idea of right and wrong come from? And if an idea/action is right or wrong must there not be a standard by which to judge what is right and wrong? "If," as Ravi Zacharias puts it, "there is a moral law, must there not, then, be a moral law giver?" Where do we get our standard for morality (right and wrong)? If right and wrong, or Justice, is a convention of society then who's society is correct? How can I say that Nazi Germany was wrong? Because there is a standard of right and wrong, and of Justice.
To sum up, I believe that our moral law comes from God. God's moral nature (Because God is completely good) shows us what is good or bad, right or wrong, just or unjust. God, by is own nature, is the moral standard. Because God is the moral standard and we are made in the image of God, we can understand why what Nazi Germany did to people was wrong and how their actions violated basic human rights: They not only went against God's moral nature but violated beings that contained the image of God.

I know this is a little sporadic, but hopefully you understand what I'm saying...and if not, then please question me...or do anyway.
Jordan

Knowledge

My posts are different (at least so far) than Jordan's. I don't know if this will always be the case (well, we're different people, so it probably will), but maybe not always thematically.

At any rate, I'm currently studying a book called Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, by J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig. The title fits the book perfectly, so I won't go into a detailed description. Instead, over the course of the next several months, I plan to slowly post my notes and thoughts about what I'm reading.

I'm currently mired in the study of epistemology, which the book breaks into five chapters:

• Knowledge and Rationality
• The Problem of Skepticism
• The Structure of Justification
• Theories of Truth and Postmodernism
• Religious Epistemology

I think I'm going to find all of this pretty fascinating. I am in the early stages of the "Knowledge" part of the chapter on knowledge and rationality, and would like to impart some of what I'm learning to the blogosphere. So here we go.

There are (approximately) three types of knowledge:

1. Knowledge by acquaintance (e.g., "I know the ball in front of me.")
2. Know-how (e.g., "I know how to play golf.")
3. Propositional knowledge, where someone knows that P, where P is a proposition (e.g., "I know that Ronald Reagan was a Republican president.")

Of the most interest to philosophers (at least in the study of epistemology) is the third. Since the time of the ancient Greek philosophers, people in and outside philosophy have offered definitions for propositional knowledge. Plato offered (though he did not completely endorse) what has come to be known as the standard definition of (propositional) knowledge: knowledge is justified true belief (or JTB), sometimes called the tripartite definition. This makes sense, by and large. To know something, one must believe it to be true, it must be true, and you must be justified in that belief (i.e., have a good reason for believing it). While these are fairly obviously necessary conditions, Edmund Gettier showed in 1963 and they are not sufficient. He constructed what are now called Gettier-type counterexamples to the JTB definition. Unfortunately, it's late, so I am going to leave you hanging without an example, but they are on the Interweb.

More later.

Telos

As long as we're into Greek words on this blog, telos comes from the Greek word for "purpose." Teleology, then, is the philosophical study of design, purpose, directive principle, or finality in nature or human creations.

I find it interesting to consider purpose, not just as an abstract thing, but as something we need to understand. Do our lives have purpose? One Southern Californian pastor wrote a book about living life with purpose. What is the purpose of the church? Of government? Of the different types of relationships? How has naturalism destroyed our culture's belief that we have a purpose?

It seems to me that everyone would like their lives to be meaningful, to count for something, to have a purpose. I would even argue that, even though he was mentally ill, that guy who caused all that trouble on the campus of Va Tech last week lacked purpose in life. I think the lack of purpose does that to people -- it destroys them, destroys their humanness.

Of course, that doesn't mean we have a purpose, or that any institutions or relationships have an intrinsic purpose.

But what do you think? Does life have a purpose? Do institutions and relationships have purpose? I'm not asking how we might know what that purpose is. But does it have a purpose?

More later.