> Interestingly, if you look at the history, literalism/fundamentalism didn't arise until well after the Enlightenment. Literalism is best understood as an over-exaggerated response to the challenge posed to "easy" Christianity by the advancement of science.

I refuse to accept the idea that, say, 9th century monks or 15th century inquisitors did not believe the bible to be literally true. I accept, of course, that much of today's literalism is unthinking, childish backlash against scientific knowledge. However, literalism has always been around and was simply assumed prior to the enlightenment.

>Also, I was not stating my own beliefs, I was merely arguing that the OP presented few arguments which would be challenging to a Christian.

God's devil's advocate. Gotcha. What are your beliefs and why do you not find the arguments you present to be compelling?

> Christians don't believe that all beliefs require evidence.

Of course they don't, they'd have to believe something else if they did. They might have to be gasp agnostic or atheist.

> Telling them that faith-based beliefs "ought" to require evidence is merely an assertion of your own evidentialism;

That isn't what I'm doing. What I'm doing is suggesting that beliefs that are based on evidence are much more likely to be true than those that aren't. The Christian response which you are echoing here is, "I don't care what is more likely to be true, I care about believing in Christianity no matter how unlikely it may be."

> Responsible Christians, of which I know many, would not dispute that your hypothetical is plausible; they would simply say it isnot what they believe. Their belief is not based on plausibility, it is based on faith.

And it is this belief based on nothing but faith that is of absolutely no value. One can have faith in anything. There are an infinite number of things one can believe in. There is only one method for us to determine what we ought to believe in, via evidence. The only other way for us to know what we ought to believe is from supernatural inspiration of some kind. Of course, all the mutually incompatible religions that have ever existed have laid claim on divine inspiration. What to do???

> That number is higher than I would have thought. I guess the great majority of wackadoodle evangelicals happen to live in America. Even in America, something like 80% identify as Christian, so there are still quite a lot of non-YEC Christians.

Something just occurred to me. What right do you have of calling anyone a wackadoodle evangelical? Their faith is just as valid (or invalid) as any "responsible" Christian.

> I'm not sure what you mean here. I don't recall claiming that Christianity should get any credit for discovering natural selection.

I'm suggesting that Christians do not get any credit for accepting evolution. The power of evidence has shaken the foundations of the Christian faith. This was pushed onto Christianity from the outside.

>The point is that you can only justify this with an appeal to evidentialism, just as the Christian can only justify their belief with an appeal to God. You've only gotten back to where you started.

I reject your assertion that evidence is no better than faith as simply false.

> People who believe in miracles would dispute the assertion that they have never been shown to happen. The Catholic Church believes itself to hold a vast library of evidence of miracles. This is how they decide who gets to be a saint.

>Again, you and I think this is bunk, but it is not logically inconsistent for a Christian to believe it.

I disagree. Given that every mutually incompatible religion lays claims to miraculous events and given that all supposedly miraculous events that have ever been put forward have failed to maintain their divine luster in the hard light of rational examination, it is absolutely illogical for a Christian (or a person of any other religion) to believe in miracles. The best we can say is that there are unproven claims of miracles.

What's more, the entire subject of miracles completely belies your notion that the religious accept their religion on faith. Miracles, if they exist, must necessarily be the work of God (which God depends largely on which religion you were brought up to believe in). Miracles, as you pointed out, are used by various religions as evidence of God's existence. The only reason faith comes into play when discussing miracles is because there is not one single miracle that we know for a fact has happened and that cannot be denied. If there were even one miracle that was undeniably the work of the Christian God, then what choice would anyone have but to accept Christianity? People would be foolish not to.

>I'm not sure. If he is omnipotent then he can tell a lie. If he is omnibenevolent then he would tell a lie if circumstances were such that telling the lie did more good than telling the truth. I'm not sure if this situation could ever actually occur. I'm not sure if it's logically inconsistent with Christian beliefs for God to tell a lie. However, their faith is that he doesn't.

You evaded the point I was making and I think you realize that. My question what if the Christian God exists but is lying about the entire story. What if there is a pantheon of Gods competing for man's attention and the Christian God made a power play to gain dominance over the other gods?

The problem with faith is that this scenario is exactly as plausible as the entirety of the Christian religion. There is no good reason to believe Christianity over this bizarre pantheon of backstabbing deities. There's no good reason to believe Christianity over Islam or Hinduism. The only thing the religious have is a desire to believe and a desire to believe has clearly shown an ability to convince people that they should believe. Only those who value evidence and are open to any possibility have any shot at determining the truth about the world.

> They believe in him without a reason, as previously discussed.

Exactly. What other claim is there that people believe without reason? If someone came to us and declared that they believed the world was flat, we'd (rightly) think they were being irrational and may attempt to correct them by providing them the evidence that suggests otherwise. You're suggesting that religious belief (which is a truth claim about the universe) should not be held to this same standard. Why?

> Christians believe Jesus to be eternal. Only his physical form was temporal.

>This is not about what I personally believe. It is about whether the OP's points are strong arguments. Christians believe that "The Word" is eternal, so it existed prior to the Abrahamic religions. Again, this is a faith.

You dodged the question. It doesn't matter if Jesus (or "the word" whatever that means) always existed, what matters is that Christians haven't always existed. During this pre-abrahamic religion state of the world, when people had absolutely no concept of the tyrannical warrior god of Judea, where did they get their morals? Surely not from other Gods since the Abrahamic religions are clearly monotheistic religions and would preclude other gods from existing in the first place.

My point is that your rebuttals to the OP's points are weak and this is but one example of that. If Christians suggest that morality comes only from God, then morality could not have existed prior to human knowledge of God's existence. So how is it that humans survived these brutal, amoral millennia when there could not have been a single act of kindness?

> What I meant here is that evolutionary biology can tell us how humans behave and why they behave that way, but it is inherently incapable of telling us how they ought to behave. There is, and can be, no reasoning from biology to "ought."

I submit that this statement is simply false. I'll simply point you to The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris as this is exactly what he spends three hundred or so pages arguing against.

>No. I'm saying that you can tell an evolution-story to support any position. People frequently do. But without some sort of testable prediction and reproducible experiment, a consistent evidentialist would reject many of these stories.

Not having the answer to a question does not mean that any answer is of equal value.

>If Gaussian field theory is a product of natural selection, then everything is.

That's a non-answer.

> All I'm saying is that this doesn't strike me as a productive argument for his non-existence.

It's a productive argument against part of His existence.

Overview of the Week's Blog Posts

>Skepticism about free will has become ever more prominent. If one browses the popular science section of any large bookshop or flicks through recent popular science magazines, one is likely to come across some books or articles arguing that free will is an illusion: a left-over from an outmoded, pre-scientific way of thinking that has no place in modern science. The authors typically cite some influential neuroscientific studies that appear to undermine the idea of free will by showing that human actions are caused not by our intentional mental states, but by physical processes in the brain and body. More broadly, if everything in the universe is governed by the laws of physics, and our actions are part of that universe, then how could those actions be free? This line of reasoning, in turn, puts pressure on our traditional notions of responsibility. How could it make sense to hold anyone responsible for their actions if those actions weren’t done out of this person’s own free will?
>
>Such skepticism about free will is not yet the mainstream view among the general public. Nor is it the mainstream view among academic philosophers, the majority of whom are “free-will compatibilists”: proponents of the thesis that free will – perhaps after some definitional tweaking – is compatible with a law-governed, even deterministic universe. But free-will skepticism is on the rise, as illustrated by Sam Harris’s best-selling book, Free Will (2012). Many free-will skeptics have a noble moral motive, alongside their scientific motivation: they find the present criminal justice systems in many countries unjust and wish to argue for criminal justice reform. But one can certainly agree on the need for an overhaul of our criminal justice systems and advocate a more rehabilitative and less retributivist approach, while still thinking that it is a philosophical mistake to throw the notion of free will out of the window. Moreover, the idea of free will is central to our human self-understanding as agents, independently of its relevance to criminal justice. How, for instance, could we genuinely deliberate about which course of action to take – say, when we choose a job, a partner, or a political cause we wish to endorse – if we didn’t take ourselves to be free in making this choice?
>
>In my book, Why Free Will is Real (Harvard University Press, 2019), I offer a new defence of free will against the growing skepticism. Crucially, I do not proceed by denying science or watering down the definition of free will. Rather, my aim is to show that if we understand the lessons of a scientific worldview correctly, the idea of free will – in a fairly robust sense – is not just consistent with such a worldview but supported by it. In short, I argue that there is a naturalistic case for free will.
>
>In this series of blog posts, I will first describe what I take to be the main challenges for free will from a scientifically informed perspective and then explain what my strategy is for answering those challenges. And I will illustrate this strategy by zooming in on the most widely discussed challenge, namely the challenge from determinism. Of course, I will only be able to sketch some key ideas relatively informally; more detailed and precise arguments can be found in the book itself, as well as in some of my earlier articles (available on my webpage).

The Rest of the Blog Post(s)

Use the link from the OP to find the rest of the blog post summarized above as well as the remaining blog posts from Christian List throughout the week.

The Podcast Version

You can listen to Christian List discuss their book Why Free Will Is Real on the New Books in Philosophy podcast here: https://newbooksnetwork.com/christian-list-why-free-will-is-real-harvard-up-2019/

I wish I could tell you that all you need to do is to stop believing in God and suddenly things will become much clearer. Unfortunately, this is not really the case.

Think of the God idea as a piece of malware, which is running on the computer of your brain. It's malware because it takes up your resources to do something that isn't beneficial to you. Once upon a time you installed the Loving Parents And Social Circle software, and it asked you to install the God program as part of it. You clicked OK at the time, but now you've figured out it's malware, and you need to find a way to get rid of the malware, but you don't want to uninstall the Loving Parents And Social Circle software too.

This is a very touchy process and I can't guarantee you'll be successful. Some people give up and simply decide to go without the Loving Parents And Social Circle software, because the licensing requirements are just too restrictive. I don't recommend this path. Even if the requirements are pretty rough, it's good software.

But here's the kick that no one tells you: by getting rid of the malware, you don't just suddenly have an awesome computer you can use for anything. You have to find and download lots of other software now. Getting rid of the malware was just the beginning, and now the real work begins. You're already way behind people who got rid of their malware ages ago, or maybe never had it to begin with. You need to play catch-up.

Here's the good news: most people, once they've finally gotten rid of the malware, wake up the next day and get really excited about all the new things their computer can potentially do, and they find themselves staying up all night downloading and running new stuff. There's a burst of energy that comes with suddenly finding all these free resources.

Maybe there's some old software sitting there that you never really used, and now you can run it much better than you did before. That was the case with me, and this was the software I ran. Then I started downloading more and more and more. Now I feel like my speeds are better than most and about as fast as the people I find interesting to talk to.

[1/2]

This a longer thing I wrote elsewhere once. I've done some reading on the subject, and still am, but here's what I've gathered:

To begin to address this, we first need to start with when Christian churches began facing membership problems, from a purely American perspective.

American Mainline Protestants first started to decline in the 1970s. Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans and similar “old guard” Protestant sects started losing members. In 1975, about 13% of the US population claimed affiliated with these denominations, whereas that number would shrink to about 8.7% in the year 2000. In contrast, conservative Evangelical sects either held steady if not outright grew over the same time period. This trend lasted so long that religious sociologist Dean Kelly would pen his popular work exploring this phenomenon, Why Conservative Churches Are Growing (1972).

It was largely accepted for a multitude of years that, from what the data was telling us, if churches wanted to “fend off” secularization they would need to adopt a conservative theological or cultural posture - something the Mainline Protestant sects lacked.
Here’s what Kelly wrote in 1978:

>Though many people-and even some social scientists and scholars of religion- are not aware of the curious contrasts in membership trends that occurred during the past decade, no one has come up with a satisfactory explanation of (1) why it happened to these particular religious bodies and (2) why it happened at this particular time in history.

What has Kelly’s answer to the mystery of some denominations falling while others grew? In a word: “Seriousness.” As he wrote in the same year:

>One of the most cogent criticisms of Why Conservative Churches Are Growingis that which contends that a particular class-linked mode of religious behavior has been taken as the norm and all others subordinated to it (i.e., the religious style of lower-class sect-members). The implication of the critic is that this is an unfair comparison; that Episcopalians are just as religious as Adventists, albeit they show it in a different and less demonstrative way. In the eyes of God, that may be true, since only He knows the inner devotion of the heart. But to any outward observer, there is no comparison. In the double tithe, the time spent, the efforts made, the witnessing overtures to non-members, the constant preoccupation with the faith, the average Adventist so far out-shines the average Episcopalian that they are not even in the same category of magnitude. If this is indeed the case, it suggests that religious behavior is actually more intensive (and extensive) among lower-class people (or at least among religious groups attracting such people), and that is a significant datum in itself.
…
>If ecumenical churches feel that they are as serious about what they believe as fundamentalists are, then it behoves them to find appropriate ways to exercise and communicate that seriousness. Why should the devil have all the good tunes?

Kelly’s argument that “strictness” kept a church going seemed true until only somewhat recently, as now conservative Evangelical sects have started to face the same kind of membership issues as their Mainline counterparts. Yet, for many decades, that theologically conservative posture was thought to be the cure to getting people back to church on Sunday morning.

Mainline Protestants were not the only group to lose members starting in the 70s, however. Beginning in the same decade, a wide variety of other membership-based groups or organizations also reported a loss of members, such as the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Kiwanis, Freemasons, Lion’s Clubs, and so on. American sociologist Robert Putnam, in his landmark 2000 work Bowling Alone: The collapse and revival of American community, found such trends in a variety of other areas as well, such as participation in bowling leagues (hence the title of his book) participation in political activities, or other social activities. Putnam’s research focused on “social capital,” and its decline in the American post-war period. As one review of his book summarizes:

>The data strongly indicate that declines in trust, interest in public affairs, newspaper reading, and religious attendance are due almost entirely to generational replacement, as what Tom Brokaw called the "Greatest Generation" is gradually replaced by more self-interested and materialistic Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers. Putnam argues that the unifying effects of World War II are an important explanation of why the "civic generation" was different from either its predecessors or successors, and he blames television in large part for declining levels of civic engagement in successor generations. The share of households with TVs rose from 10% to 90% in the 1950s. Viewing time has risen, along with viewing choices and the number of homes with multiple sets, so people watch TV alone instead of as a family.

>Some of the most convincing evidence Putnam presents on why civic engagement has declined comes from time diaries, in which randomly selected persons report in detail how they spend their time. The sheer amount of time Americans spend watching TV (3 to 4 hours per day on average) must crowd out time for informal socializing with friends and family, and for group activities and volunteering. Time diaries rule out one explanation popular among journalists and other casual observers, an alleged drop in "free time." Working hours have risen very little, and time on housework and child care has fallen, leading to an average gain of 6 hours of "free time" between 1965 and 1995, the period when most measures of social capital experienced steady declines. People are simply spending their time in more individualized and self-interested ways than before.

>free will by definition requires the possibility of choosing the wrong thing or making a bad choice. and those people who always choose good of their own free will, they exist, but they all live in heaven.

There are many things that human beings cannot do. We cannot fly unassisted or travel faster than the speed of light. However, we are never tempted to say that this restrictions on our ability somehow infringe upon our free will. Even though our possible actions are restricted by a set of parameters, we are still free within those parameters - free will does not require infinite choice.

Given this, it is logically possible that God could have created beings that such that they would always freely choose the good. That is, that these beings would have only innocent inclinations - what Kant called holy will.

>if he interfered then he has compromised our freedom to choose the wrong thing and thus we would not have free will.

Why does having free will necessarily require the ability to harm others? Couldn't God, being omnipotent, have created a world in which people who chose evil harmed only themselves through their actions, and not been able to cause innocents to suffer. I fail to see how this would in any way impinge on those agents' free will.

Clearly, this is not the world we live in. We live in a world in which those who choose evil can inflict harm on others, which seems to suggest that either God does not have the capacity to do this (in which case he is not omnipotent) or does not have the inclination to (in which case he is not omnibenevolent).

>if we choose to live in the material world, suffering and death are unavoidable. it is our choice to live in this world that is the bad choice we have made.

In what way do we choose to live in this world? I'm sorry, but this seems utterly nonsensical to me. We are simply born into the material world; there is no choice involved.

>if you choose to jump off a building, is gravity responsible for your injuries?

Of course not. In that case it is your choice that caused the suffering. However, there are plenty of cases where the free choice of moral agents is in no way responsible for the suffering caused. This is the definition of natural evil.

For example, in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, rescue efforts were hampered by rain. If not for that rain, it is surely possible that a few more people might have been pulled from the wreckage. Even assuming that the WTC attacks happened because of the perpetrators exercising their free will, there's no reason for God to have made the situation worse by hampering rescue efforts. Surely God could have simply not sent this rain, or made it not rain, without infringing on anyone's free will.

>wasn't sure of your exact argument for libertarian free will so haven't replied to that.

I certainly don't have an argument for libertarian free will. I do have an argument against it, but it's not really something I can sum up in a short reddit post. If you're interested, I'd encourage you to read Sam Harris' excellent book Free Will. As I said in my first post, the free will defense does require libertarian free will and that's not something I think exists, so for me the argument really does stop there.

Thanks for the response. I hoped for a little repartee.

>But there's also a difference between, say, the example you gave of a dragon and these Christian accounts.

No, alas, they are exactly the same. They rely on eye witness (personal anecdote) testimony and have no evidence. Again, if there WAS evidence you (they) would be the first in history to show it. Additionally, you might want to theologically think about your stance on evidence and whether or not there is any. If a god provided evidence of its existence, wouldn't that remove our free will that christians so desperately defend by compelling us to believe? (By the way, you might want to hear what Sam has to say about Free Will)

>you can look at those who have been willing to die for their faith

This doesn't make a thing true. Those who follow Allah say this exact same thing before they blow themselves up on the crowed Israeli bus. The stronger you say your faith is, the faster I walk the other way in fear for my safety. There's no telling where ardent faith leads. Oh yeah, the Crusades for one. 9/11 for another. I'm pretty sure the female genital mutilation crowd is willing to die for their faith too. How about those parents who let their children die of easily cured maladies because they'd rather pray for help to come? I'll bet they're pretty strong in their faith.

Which leads me to...

> insincere or just deluded?

I think the majority of those who profess a belief in supernatural woo-woo actually believe it. True charlatans are rare but exist nonetheless. The easy way to spot a charlatan is the request for money. "God made the universe but you need to give 'til it hurts 'cause he's out of money." Therefore, to answer your either/or question, woo-woo believers are deluded. You know there's a famous book with a title you might recognize, The God Delusion. The clue is in the title.

Since you finished with a question, allow me the same privilege.

Do you care if your beliefs are true?

*Edit: Hyperlinked to The God Delusion by Sir Richard Dawkins. Thought for sure you'd want more details.

The fact that people get their moral feelings from the culture in which they're raise does not imply that all cultures have the best possible moral code. Just the opposite, human moral codes have often been based on ignorance, superstition, a natural inclination to distrust those who are different, and indoctrination at the hands of the rich and powerful.

Despite this, humans do have natural evolutionary feelings of empathy and compassion which were and are necessary for our species to cooperate and persist. We are a communal species and we survive by working together and by caring both for our young and for one another. You can see the same thing in any herd animal species. We've learned to see a wide range of emotions and empathetic reactions in animals which 50 years ago most people would have considered preposterous because they were "just animals".

The great thing about humans is that with the advance of scientific knowledge we can learn that under our skin we are all the same. We can build on our collective knowledge and improve our philosophy of ethics and morality because we are learning creatures and not simply base, instinctual creatures with no capacity for higher thought.

Here are some other people's ideas on the matter.
Sam Harris
This is a lecture about his new book, which you can get on Amazon for about $3.50. If you're really interested, I think $3-$6 is a pretty cheap price for a book on the subject by a renowned and respected mind.
Here's the link to his lecture about the book.
Science Can Answer Moral Questions

Here's a discussion between Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins titled, Who Says Science has Nothing to Say About Morality?

Here's a wiki page about secular ethics.



It's very, very interesting stuff and there's always more to learn.

Hello, and welcome to the club!

The four people considered the "founding fathers" of "New Atheism" are also known as "The 4 Horsemen," and they are:

• Richard Dawkins is a biologist specializing in evolution and public awareness of science, especially atheism. Books: The God Delusion and many other good books on biology, evolution, science, atheism and so on.
  
• Daniel Dennett is a philosopher. His best known book is Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.
  
• Christopher Hitchens is a journalist, author and amazingly competent debater. His best-known atheist work is God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
  
• Sam Harris is a neuroscientist with philosophical leanings. His best-known book is The End of Faith. Another interesting one is The Moral Landscape, where he tries to show how morality can be studied by science.
  
  ----
  
  Here are more people who have gotten respect in the world of atheism, in no particular order:
  
  
• Carl Sagan, meanwhile deceased popular science educator to the masses. Though he never took up the banner of atheism, he tried to make people aware of the benefits of science and the folly of superstition, including religions. Look for his videos on YouTube!
  
• Victor Stenger, physicist. God: The Failed Hypothesis. He's a competent philosopher and I enjoyed watching him tear William Lane Craig to pieces in a debate once.
  
• Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist. A bit of a modern-day Sagan, he's more of a scientist in his message than an atheist.
  
• Dan Barker, former evangelical preacher. Goes around telling people how he lost his faith. He's also written a book, Godless.
  
• Matt Dillahunty, host of the radio show The Atheist Experience where he does live telephone debates with callers. Quick on his feet and very knowledgeable on his former faith.
  
• Richard Carrier, historical scholar active on The Secular Web and author of Sense and Goodness Without God, a defense of Metaphysical Naturalism. He's working hard to raise awareness for the historical theory that Jesus never actually existed.
  
• ZOMGItsCriss, hot looking atheist activist on YouTube. Don't let her good looks fool you: She's a very smart cookie. And she's funny, too. Well worth a look even if not only for the obvious reasons.
  
  ----
  
  You'll find a few more atheist authors on my book page and even more in the book and video recommendations in the /r/atheism FAQ.
  
  

i would recommend free will by sam harris, which is brief and unusually lucid for a work of philosophy - you could read this in an afternoon. his take is that free will as it is commonly conceived is an illusion, and that we need to come to terms with how free our will is not in order to become effective decision-makers.

freedom evolves by dan dennett is more technical and dense, but tries to make a compatibilist case that, though our actions are physically determined, we still have freedom in a meaningful way; i.e. the kind you are talking about.

reading about free will will surely blow your mind, even if it doesn't change your mind :)

Yup, that's exactly right. The American alt-right is very secular, and it's attachment to Christianity is less about Christ and more about seeing Christianity as a cultural corner-store of Western society, regardless of whether or not we should "believe" in Jesus. A lot of the far-right activity in Europe seems similar in their quest to preserve "Christian values" (and this seems to be also the case for Quebec, with it's negative treatment of Muslim and Jewish religious rights, as Quebec, while being very secular, wants to preserve Catholicism anyway as a part of it's "cultural heritage"). A fascinating development has been seeing the American alt-right split over religion, with people like Richard Spencer following a more secular notion of religion (Spencer favors establishing some sort of quasi-pagan religion in his white utopia, but not because he actually believes in paganism), while others really (like Nick Fuentes) want to establish some sort of theocracy.

And we can see this tie of the growing rise of a secular right in the States by analyzing the demographics of who voted for Trump. There was an article published in Aero just the other day about this which I'll quote at length because it's important and has some data points:

>It is true that in a choice between Trump and the progressive Left, most of the religious Right held their nose and chose Trump. But the voter base that propelled Trump’s meteoric rise to power – the faction of the Republican electorate that forced Trump to be the only viable alternative to Hillary Clinton, as it were – is overwhelmingly the secularized portion of the Republican coalition. This is an important nuance that is often missed by the mainstream coverage of Trump’s relationship with conservative voters across the country: Trump’s core constituency is disproportionately comprised of Republican voters who tell pollsters that they seldom or never go to church.
>
>The narrative about the religious Right’s disproportionate support for Trump isn’t wrong, per se, but it’s incomplete: Republican voters who regularly report church attendance were significantly more likely to support mainstream candidates like Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Ben Carson in the primary, and were uninterested in supporting Trump until the general election. But Trump’s base is largely comprised of the Republican voters who no longer regularly attend religious services.
>
>Tim Carney, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who recently published a book documenting this phenomenon, writes:
>
>We broke down Republican primary voters by church attendance. Among the most frequent attenders—those going more than once a week—Trump got about 32 percent of the vote. Trump also got a minority of those who simply go once a week. Among those who reported going “a few times a year,” Trump got about half. He got an easy majority (55 percent) of those Republicans who “seldom” attend, and a full 62 percent of those who never attend. That is, every step down in church attendance brought a step up in Trump support, and vice versa. The most frequent attenders were half as likely to support Trump as were the least frequent attenders…the GOP electorate has secularized, and [that secularization] helped Trump win the GOP nomination.

This goes to show that the secularization thesis some tout (the more secular a society becomes, the more it embraces metropolitanism, the more tolerant it gets, etc.) isn't right. The Rationalist community also goes to show that pure "rationality" can bring you to some very odd places.

I normally avoid discussion religion and atheism outside of /r/atheism, but I wanted to respond to your comment because I think it's missing the point of why atheists tend to make these statements.

The point the atheists are trying to make when they bring up certain passages is not to deny that there is good content mixed in with the bad, or to argue about whether the bible on the whole has more good vs bad content. The real argument is that if you read the bible you find plenty of both, and that when people try to claim it is an infallibly good book, it simply isn't true. Atheists do not believe the bible is the divine word of God, and pointing out the many contradictions in the bible (various facts, historical inconsistencies and contradicting moral directives) is just one way of providing evidence of this. When we hear people claiming that other people should "read and follow the bible", we ask "which part?" as a way of reminding them of the problems inherent to their suggestion.

We recognize there is plenty of good in the bible, but that there is obviously bad stuff too. We do not believe it is the inspired divine word of God, rather we generally think it is just a very interesting collection of ideas and stories put together by ancient authors. If the original 'good book' was really just written by ancient men as an attempt to provide a moral guide for their people, why shouldn't we as modern men come up with new versions of morality to live by today; ones that aren't internally and externally inconsistent, and which reflect the vast amount of knowledge we've gained in the interim? Ones that remove ideas about sexism, racism, and homophobia?

To sum up, when it comes to morality, many atheists are in the secular humanist camp - basically the idea is that as modern, self-reflecting, philosophical, intelligent humans we should define what is moral in a modern context, rather than relying on cultural traditions forged in ancient history, from a book that clearly has a large number of moral and factual contradictions throughout it. If you're at all interested to see one view of what this modern reanalysis of morals might look like, I'd highly recommend The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris.

Yes, you can choose to believe something that you don't have evidence for. From a previous discussion on this issue:

Belief formation is under our conscious control just as much as flexing our muscles is under our control. That there exist some things you can't choose to believe is no more interesting than the fact that there exist ways you can't bend your elbow. Your inability to do whatever you want with your joints doesn't make them any less under your voluntary control. So when you or others object, "Uh, I can't believe that 1+1=3, or that the sky is red, or ..." it's not a real objection at all, it's just noise, and it gets tiring.

We all choose to believe things on scant or absent evidence all the time. Scientists call these "hypotheses". We form the belief that this person has the mental state of disliking us by one choice of words or one insignificant scowl. We form a multitude of beliefs about the other drivers on the road ("That guy is an asshole!" and all that entails) because of one minor interaction in traffic. We form the belief that our loved one is sad or bored based on a simple sigh. None of this is even remotely convincing evidence, which is many times proved by the simple act of continuing the investigation, or even just thinking about things more. But that doesn't make the belief illusory: it was a real belief, it was a real propositional truth claim that we chose to accept even at the time it arose. It didn't just happen to us, and anyone who meditates or prays knows full well that the mind itself is something that we can control and direct just as we can our own muscles.

The very idea of "convincing evidence" is a misnomer. There are a wide variety of standards of evidence that we apply throughout our lives. Juries are here another good example: the standard of evidence in a criminal trial is "beyond a reasonable doubt" but the standard of evidence in a civil trial is much lower, just "the preponderance of the evidence". And in our own lives we often apply far more lax standards of evidence, though we rarely make them explicit, they're often something like "Not logically impossible" or "At least some evidence for it." Scientists often begin with a belief that they hold simply because "the world is more elegant that way" and then form hypotheses and design experiments to prove what they already believe. The belief precedes the evidence.

There is not a thinking person on this planet who is "convinced" of every proposition they hold to the be true. We all hold beliefs that we aren't convinced of by any evidence, and it will take you only the tiniest bit of introspection to find such beliefs in your own life. You still choose to hold those beliefs. You may hold them weakly, and you may choose them arbitrarily, but they are beliefs and you do hold them.

Some particular cases worth pointing out: you probably believe that you and other humans have free will, despite the evidence to the contrary. You probably hold many beliefs about ethics and what constitutes ethical behavior, despite the inability of evidence to apply to those beliefs. If you recognize the reality of these beliefs and the voluntary control you exercise over them, then you should likewise recognize that you can apply such voluntary control over your beliefs about the existence of God. If "God exists" seems to fall into the bucket of "Things I can't choose to believe, like 1+1=3" then that's a different discussion to have.

> Q: How could science guide us on the moral landscape?

> Harris: Insofar as we can understand human wellbeing, we will understand the conditions that best secure it. Some are obvious, of course. Positive social emotions like compassion and empathy are generally good for us, and we want to encourage them. But do we know how to most reliably raise children to care about the suffering of other people? I’m not sure we do. Are there genes that make certain people more compassionate than others? What social systems and institutions could maximize our sense of connectedness to the rest of humanity? These questions have answers, and only a science of morality could deliver them.
-- Sam Harris

This is a HUGE , HUGE, concept to talk about and neither of us are going to get to far on it in this thread.

Sam Harris' excellent book "The moral landscape" does a wonderful job of laying out the foundations of human morality without a supernatural bent: (http://www.amazon.com/The-Moral-Landscape-Science-Determine/dp/B006W3YQTK/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335301465&sr=1-1)

>That doesn't seem right. Why do we then cause suffering for conscious creatures and call it moral? For example, the imprisonment of criminals. That causes suffering to them. Actually we would say it is immoral not to imprison them

It is true that sometime the most moral actions require suffering of others. (Self defense is but one example.) Actually in Harris' book, he also takes on seemingly problematic topics like sado-maschosism. (People deriving personal pleasure from hurting others.) At first glance, it seems as if someone who doesn't believe in god could NOT say "It is objectively wrong to do this."

However, harris lays out a wonderful case of why that isn't true, and he does a MUCH better job than I ever can here. Actually, for a great example of a debate on this matter, there is a 10 part youtube debate with Christian apologist William lane Craig and Yale philosophy professor Shelly Kagan:

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqZ5azg8mlg)

I HIGHLY, HIGHLY recommend watching this debate as both men are very skilled in their respective positions and both sides are laid out beautifully.

It is called "Is god necessary for morality?"

Because the book mentioned relates to the topic being discussed by technothrasher and ojfrown. It is not uncommon for one person on Reddit to recommend a book he himself, or herself, has found relevant to a topic being discussed and feels the other person might find interesting as well.

Since you appear to think Sam Harris is just "some random guy", I'll add a little biographical material:

>Sam Harris is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, and The Moral Landscape. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction.
>
>Mr. Harris' writing has been published in over fifteen languages. He and his work have been discussed in Newsweek, TIME, The New York Times, Scientific American, Nature, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. His writing has appeared in Newsweek, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Economist, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere.
>
>Mr. Harris is a Co-Founder and CEO of Project Reason, a nonprofit foundation devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society. He received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA.

Should you wish to learn more about the book, see The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values.

Some people are willing to read the works of authors who might have opinions that differ from their own.

> The idea that the mind is in some way non-physical.

The mind is a product and an element of the physical brain. It may not be concretely tangible (i.e., you can't hold a mind), but that does not mean it is not a part of the physical universe. Physics explains the mind quite well, actually. The neurons in our brain are developed in compliance to the laws of physics and biology, the neurochemicals in our brain are physical substances, and the electric currents in our brains that communicate signals between neurons operate in compliance to the laws of physics.

Evolution also provides insight into the development of consciousness. While, sure, humans are the only terrestrial species with advanced enough consciousness to develop religious and philosophical ideas, we know now that many animals have forms of consciousness and proto-consciousness like what we would expect if humans evolved consciousness from simple origins. The mind is perfectly explainable through naturalistic sciences, and our naturalistic model of human consciousness makes predictions that are falsifiable.

I'd suggest reading Steven Pinker's How The Mind Works. Here's a talk he gave on the book. I'd also suggest his The Stuff of Thought, The Language Instinct, and The Blank Slate.

I'd also suggest Sam Harris' The Moral Landscape. While it's main thrust is to show how science can inform morality, it offers some pretty decent layperson explanation of consciousness, and it is written by an accomplished neuroscientist (whatever your opinion on his religious works may be). His pamphlet-esque Free Will also covers some good ground here.

> All able-bodied humans are born with the ability to learn language.

Not at all true. You can be able-bodied and learning disabled. There was a nonverbal autistic student at my middle school years ago who ran track. Trivial point, but still incorrect.

> I would argue humans also have a Spiritual Acquisition Device.

I would argue that this argument is SAD. (pun; sorry.)

You're positing a massively complex hypothetical neurological infrastructure to link human brains to a divine alternate universe or dimension that has never been shown to exist. Not only has this neural uplink never been observed, but it is entirely unnecessary, as neuroscientists and psychologists have a perfectly functional, testable model of consciousness without it. You're adding a new element to that model that is functionally redundant and untestable. Occam's Razor would trim away your entire posited element out of extraneousness and convolution.

> Yes, but according to Clark families could escape this Poverty Trap by having their children marrying up.

Muhammad is the perfect example for this. He married Siti Khadijah who was already very rich and well known in Quraysh tribe. I do agree that this thing could happen, but the chance is slim nowadays. In Indonesia, can we classify the phenomenon of Indonesian girls marry bule as an effort to escape Poverty Trap? Since yeah, Chinese rarely want to marry pribumi if not prohibited by the family. Worst thing happens to the lowest caste of Indian (Dalit), they are the untouchable. Every time I read news about them, my heart breaks and I can hear its cracking sound.

> I haven't read any of his book. What do you recommend?

Free Will:
http://www.amazon.com/Free-Will-Sam-Harris/dp/1451683405

You''re trying to equate someones personal respect (in my case) for other people to me being forced to do something for a religion... that's not the case. There is no Muslim morality when you get down to it, Sam Harris might be able to explain it better to you than I can.

Frankly I think nudity laws are stupid, and repressive. I think it's silly a man can be topless and a woman cannot, if some African ladies told me it was repressive I couldn't walk around topless I would agree with them. However if I wanted to walk around topless, there are cities and places I can go to where the law is actually ok with me walking around topless/nude. You better bet that if these Muslim women tried to walk around not in full body cover anywhere there would be a shit storm coming right at them.

I think that like most things there is a time and a place for everything, and if they chose to wear these full body and face covering clothes that would even be ok, if it wasn't in conjunction with all the other things that oppress these women. If it was "These women are treated as equal but out of respect for their religion wear these garments" fine, but any religion that is based around keeping women down and glorifying men is clearly not acting in the women best interest, and anything stemming from it is going to be put in a negative light regardless.

I'm not familiar with that author, but this book by Bellah is a good one:
http://www.amazon.com/Religion-Human-Evolution-Paleolithic-Axial/dp/0674061438/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_3

Also The Robert Bellah Reader. As a 'romantic' scholar of religion who is also an atheist I really like his work.

Happy reading!

Edit, paragraphs. :)

> the left was tearing western society apart . . . That was what was causing the breakup of familys leading to the decay of moral values.

My fear is that you are basing your belief in this on evidence about the same quality as that found in Zeitgeist (terrible documentary debunked by atheists and the religious alike: See Reasonable Doubts podcast from a decade ago for an example http://podbay.fm/show/266671828/e/1267818099?autostart=1)

In fact, societies with the lowest rate of religiosity (also very left of center) are some of the most stable, happy, and flourishing in the world. This to me means that lack of religious faith and the sort of moral values that lead to stable families and flourishing societies are totally compatible.

See the book The Nonreligious: Understanding Secular People and Society below for a good overview.

https://www.amazon.com/Nonreligious-Understanding-Secular-People-Societies/dp/0199924945

On a more personal level, I have been an atheist for about 15 years, am a happy father and husband, hold down a stable job that lets me contribute to charity each year, and although I may have moral disagreements with you, I'll bet that fundamentally we have many of the same aims. I hope to be an example of an "atheist lifestyle" with relatively high rates of happiness, flourishing, and compassion.

Do you think that my life is really a degenerate path into clown world? And would you consider that maybe you are wrong about some of your beliefs as you were in the Zeitgeist documentary?

Seriously?! Not one person mentioned Renato Rosaldo's Culture and Truth?! It was probably one of the most important books of the 20th century. Rosaldo and his late wife really changed the way ethnographic work was conducted and presented.

While I am a huge fan of Geertz, I recommend reading Victor Turner's The Ritual Process. I am currently re-reading it, and it is not hard to see how the books was truly ahead of its time. Turner may not be as seductive as a writer as Geertz, but his insights are just as amazing.

And for a pretty fun, but slightly out-dated, ethnography Anne Allison's Nightwork is a sick book. It is an ethnography about Japanese salarymen and hostesses.

There are good explanations for why thousands of people would testify to miracles in group settings..dealing with basic human psychology, group dynamics, memory contamination, etc. People can whip themselves up into a euphoric frenzy, interpreting mundane events as supernatural ones, especially when "primed" to do so by those surrounding them or a charismatic leader..and the simple act of sharing memories with others can literally alter the memory of your audience. People literally borrow memories from one another without realizing it. For more on this and other strange phenomena about human psychology, check out The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us

As for the question of believing in miracles on the basis of stories, I highly recommend this book which I think makes a very powerful case against believing in things like the resurrection on the basis of testimony. And if Christians do want to believe it after reading this book, they will be forced to accept that they have an inconsistent standard of evidence, since they dismiss claims from competing/incompatible religions that are much better attested and have a much more reliable chain of evidence.

Congratulations! I know what a big step that is, as I've been in the same boat. Books are the best way to become informed. Check out books by:

• Christopher Hitchens - God Is Not Great & The Portable Atheist
  
  
• Stephen Hawking - The Grand Design & A Briefer History of Time
  
  
• Richard Dawkins - The Greatest Show on Earth
  
  
• Carl Sagan - The Demon Haunted World
  
  
• Sam Harris - The Moral Landscape & The End of Faith
  
  
• Richard Panek - The 4 Percent Universe
  
  
• Robert Ingersoll - Some Mistakes of Moses
  
  
• Viktor Frankl - Man's Search for Meaning
  
  
• Sean Caroll - The Making of the Fittest
  
  
• Spencer Wells - Deep Ancestry
  
  
• Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Infidel
  
  
• Alan Watts - The Way of Zen
  
  Also check out the video series Why I am no longer a creationist.
  
  The more you know, the more confident you will be.

Removed comment posted by /u/bdw9000 at 07/14/14 04:55:11:

> For a more substantive challenge, I'd recommend these:
>
> A specific case against believing in the resurrection (and miracles in general): http://www.amazon.com/Atheism-And-Case-Against-Christ/dp/1616145811/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1405313666&sr=8-1&keywords=atheism+mccormick
>
> A general case against theism/religion: http://www.amazon.com/Atheism-Case-Against-Skeptics-Bookshelf/dp/087975124X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1405313634&sr=8-1&keywords=atheism+smith

... in response to submission What's a good book promoting atheism? I've tried a few common suggestions, and they haven't impressed me. posted by /u/UnlikelySoccerStar at 06/29/14 05:47:55:

> So, I realized that all my experience with atheist apologetics so far has been in the context of Christian apologetic works. Author brings up argument A, refutes it. I'm looking to give the other sides arguments a chance on it's own terms.
>
>
> The thing is, I've tried a few already. I read a good chunk of 'God is not Great' by Christopher Hitchens and a decent chunk of "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins. In both instances I gave up, because I found the arguments being presented to be easily defeated, and after a hundred pages I hadn't encountered anything new or interesting.
>
>
> So I'm asking for something a little different. I'm pretty burnt out on the whole 'New Atheism' movement, so I'd prefer a book that approaches the problem from a historical or philosophical angle.
>
>
> Thanks and hope you are all doing well.

I would recommend reading "Free Will" by Sam Harris. Really fascinating stuff, completely changed how I think about a lot of things. It's a pretty quick read, and he keeps it relatively easy to understand.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1451683405

Yes, I agree and advances in Neuroscience point to that conclusion as well. I admit though, determinism was/is a hard pill for me to swallow. The philosphical debate over the concept (or illusion) of free will is an interesting topic to me, and one that I am still not sure about.

If you are more interested in the topic I would recommend the Sam Harris' short new book called Free Will, or you can check out this video lecture where he basically paraphrases it (I originally found it on /r/Documentaries) . He spends a lot of time discussing how the deterministic conclusion is inevitable, and then goes on to argue why this doesn't strip all meaning from our lives (determinism vs fatalism).

Free will being an illusion doesn't mean you can't change - you can do something today (read a book, go out and meet someone, meditate) that will change your life. But, because free will is an illusion, you don't know why you may choose to do that "something"...it's all a result of causes and conditions that stretch back to before you were born. But what you do today becomes part of causes and conditions that shape tomorrow.

I suggest reading Sam Harris' "Free Will" - or, watching this YouTube video. Free will being an illusion does not mean your future is set in stone regardless of what you do/don't do...Sam Harris explains it well: it simply means what you do/don't do is a result of previous causes and conditions.

edit - fixed link.

Yes, I don't believe however that moral-good is any sort of divine or supernatural concept, but merely a set of constructs by which we can minimize human suffering and maximize happiness.

What do you think?

Edit: The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris describes pretty much what I am describing but in much greater detail and clarity.

>For instance, nobody desires to be a true sociopath (ie: physically and chemically cannot feel good or evil), and those who are true sociopaths... well... many do not function well in society. Like it or not, what God defines as good... really is good

That is not a sociopath. Sociopaths lack empathy, but they may be acutely aware of societal norms. Jon Ronson just wrote a book about socio/psychopaths. I would suggest you read up on the Euthyphro dilemma. We can debate all day about the meaning of "good", but the god in the bible is not it. Condoning rape, commanding genocide, condemning though crime, those are the acts of the god of the bible. Those are not in any way good. If you want to know a little more about modern views of morality you should read up on the evolutionary causes of morality. Sam Harris wrote a very good book about it recently

>How much evil should God get rid of divinely?

Well, none of it according to the bible. Isiah 45:6-7 (Young's literal translation but you can look it up in whichever version you like)

>So that they know from the rising of the sun, And from the west, that there is none besides Me, I [am] Jehovah, and there is none else, Forming light, and preparing darkness, Making peace, and preparing evil, I [am] Jehovah, doing all these things.'

> assume you might be thinking bout some of the experiments that show we can observe what decision a person will make before they are conscious of the decision

Not at all, although I'm familiar with those as well. Rather, there's demonstrable evidence that you have no free agency in exercising your mind to bring about specific conscious thought on demand. Further, that your biology and your environment are the driving forces that shape your nuerodevelopment, neither of which you have any command of. Thus, by extension, 'you' are the product of concurrent and prior processes that you do not control.

To return to your example,

>Did the neurons that make up my mind not weigh the options and produce an answer on their own?

Yes, and chose an answer based on the sum of your experiences that you had no true free agency in experiencing, and neither did your ancestor's whose biology you share that informed that conclusion.


See: Sam Harris on Free Will, for a deep dive into this topic. Essay Book Lecture

I recommend Why I Believed: Reflections of a Former Missionary. It documents the process of someone who was way more Christian than I ever was coming to grips with his increasing doubts. I like it because it is very sympathetic to the believer's position, I felt like he 'got me'. While I like Dawkins and the other suggestions, they are writing from another planet.

My other under-suggested favorite is Atheism And The Case Against Christ.

The God Debates: A 21st Century Guide for Atheists and Believers

http://www.amazon.com/God-Debates-Atheists-Believers-Everyone/dp/1444336428

Actually, this is a great book for both of you.

---------------------------------------------

If he's hard into philosophy:

The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God by J. L. Mackie
http://www.amazon.com/Miracle-Theism-Arguments-Against-Existence/dp/019824682X/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1302906893&sr=1-4Mackie

The Impossibility of God / The Improbablity of God by Micheal Martin (and others)
http://www.amazon.com/Impossibility-God-Michael-Martin/dp/1591021200/ref=pd_sim_b_25
http://www.amazon.com/Improbability-God-Michael-Martin/dp/1591023815/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_b

The Six Ways of Atheism: New Logical Disproofs of the Existence of God
http://www.amazon.com/Six-Ways-Atheism-Disproofs-Existence/dp/0954395662/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1302907259&sr=1-1

---------------------------------------------

I am a psychonaut AND a hard determinist.

In my experience, most of the emotional upset we seem to encounter when thinking about determinism is that we feel powerless, as if all power resided in choice. Yet, merely being alive as a human, with human capacities and human capabilities is awesome power already!! It is true that you may never become an Einstein, owing to your environmental and biological history, but you will also likely never become a Hitler.

More to the point, the illusion of choice is persistent-- indeed we probably evolved that apprehension as some sort of psychological stress-release mechanism simultaneously with our abilities of higher thinking and reflection. If you like, you can pretend that you have choice, knowing that what you actually "choose" will quite likely not bring you into a terribly atrocious place, relative to other humans, provided that you are already fairly mentally sound and sufficiently ethical.

I recommend Sam Harris's very short book on Free Will as a basic introduction to determinism, including why a lack of free will does not remove our ability to hold persons responsible for their actions, from a harm-reduction perspective, even though it is entirely senseless to judge their soul or spirit in any moralistic sense thereby.

I am not really qualified to represent a scientific explanation of altruism. However, I have read books and some research done. We take care of disabled people because humans have evolved empathy and sympathy. This fits into our evolution as a social species. Our species was stronger with these traits and it benefited our over all survival, or it probably would have evolved away. Sure a blind man may not be useful for physical jobs and required care and attention, however they tend to have usefulness anyways in some cases. Blind people can still teach for example. Evolution doesn't have anything that contradicts taking care of cripples or people who would seem to put a disadvantage to our resources.

The moral landscape goes into good lengths to apply science to moral values.

Consciousness is...tricky. From what I've studied, all we are really confident in saying about it now is that it's entirely dependent on the brain. If you change the brain, it directly effects consciousness. How consciousness, a non-physical entity, can arise from exclusively physical attributes is still under discussion. What Dennett is offering in the video is a re-characterization of the entire discussion. People seem to be looking for a "real" magic trick to explain consciousness. Dennett is making the case that just as there really is no "real" magic, there's only illusions to make you believe there's magic, that there's no "real" magic to consciousness. It's an illusion, in a non-deceptive sense. Consciousness is what happens when the extremely complex systems in your brain interact in the way they do.

If you want some books to read about the mind and brain, check out Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (NY Times Bestseller List 2011) and Connectome by Sebastian Seung. Kaheman will change the way you think about the way you think. He outlines the to "systems" that operated the way you think, and then outlines the biases he's discovered that causes the way you think to be wrong. Connectome outlines the processes of the brain and how the brain is wired to give a somewhat speculative look into Connectome science (mapping all the neurons in the brain and their connections to eachother) and makes claims that once we do this we will better understand the brain and consciousness because the physical structure of the brain is hypothesized to matter a great deal.

As a moderately related point to consciousness, you may want to ask that if consciousness is dependent on the brain, what does that mean for free-will. You should check out Free Will by Sam Harris. It's extremly short--more of an essay. Then look at what Dennett says about free-will. They very strongly disagree, and Sam has said that he hopes to sit down with Dennett and discuss it. When that happens it will be really interesting, and worth having at least a small background on the issue.

There is a great argument for the scientifically based idea that we do not have free will. Mark Balaguer and Sam Harris both have books that discuss this from a neurological stand point. Very good reading.

Sam Harris: Free Will

Mark Balaguer: Free Will

Sam Harris has written a shot but excellent book on the topic of "free will" and how it relates to our current understanding of neuroscience. It is called, oddly enough, Free Will

I found Grace Davie 's book very useful. It's a great starting point https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sociology-Religion-Critical-Agenda/dp/1849205876

Sure.

Sam Harris has a great book on it in which he references some great studies.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Books/Free-Will-Sam-Harris/1451683405

Here are links to a few studies.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/310/5745/116

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797616641943

http://selfpace.uconn.edu/class/ccs/Libet1985UcsCerebralInitiative.pdf

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810008001311?via%3Dihub

https://academic.oup.com/brain/article-abstract/106/3/623/271932/TIME-OF-CONSCIOUS-INTENTION-TO-ACT-IN-RELATION-TO?redirectedFrom=fulltext

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4747633/

There are others, but these are a good start!

Sam Harris - Free Will

Also, his presentation of the same content.

Both are excellent! He talks a little bit about a proof for determinism (however, I find it caters to people who already accept determinism). He also debunks the idea that determinism is incompatible with ethics/law.

You might want to have a look at Sam Harris' new book : http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Landscape-Science-Determine-Values/dp/1439171211

I have not read it nor had I read anything by Sam Harris, but I have heard good things about the book and will likely read it in the future. It seems to in line with the topic at hand.

Edit : On the prisoner's dilemma. You might want to read up on evolutionary stable strategies : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy

An ESS is more or less the prisoner's dilemma expanded to explain behaviours within a population.

NukeThePope often suggests this book:

https://nukeexcathedra.jottit.com/2011-03-09%3A_book_review%3A_sense_%26_goodness_without_god

Not exactly 'how to be successful' but it is about morality

some other suggestions:

http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Landscape-Science-Determine-Values/dp/1439171211?tag=dudugo-20

http://www.amazon.com/Practical-Ethics-Peter-Singer/dp/0521707684/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1315260344&sr=8-2


http://www.amazon.com/Demon-Haunted-World-Science-Candle-Dark/dp/0345409469

(not about morality, but it will help you to avoid being gullible, which would help with the success thing)

Thank you very much. I haven't studied this subject very deeply, but I know that there are writers who cover it far more eloquently and convincingly than I. Much of my current thinking on this comes from Sam Harris, especially his books on free will and morality. Both are fascinating and extremely well argued, in my opinion.

Currently reading The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris.

Very good read so far, although it's mostly focused on morality and not so much God. Definitely a thumbs up and recommended though.

As promised here's a short list of sources. If you need/would like more, let me know!

First off is Sam Harris - he's a well-respect author on the subject, possessing a degree in Philosophy and a Ph.D in Neuroscience:

Book link

Youtube video of him speaking on the subject

Next is an article from Scientific American.

Jerry Coyne

That last article links to a few more articles with similar conclusions!

Enjoy!!

Read anthropology, if that hasn't been part of your reading already. It's much more useful than a lot of the new age shit out there. Here are three great books about it.

• Portals: Opening Doorways to Other Realities Through the Senses by Lynne Hume
  
• Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession by I.M. Lewis
  
• The Shaman: Voyages of the Soul, Trance, Ecstasy and Healing from Siberia to the Amazon by Piers Vitebsky

There was a study like this 40 years ago too.

You know what turned out to actually be the difference? Birth rates. The anti-birth-control-brigade make more Christians by doing the horizontal tango than liberal sorts do. All those jokes about Quiverfulls trying to win the culture war by reproducing? Yup.

Here's an example: The Amish have 7 kids per family on average. 85% (that is, 6 of 7) stay Amish. That means their numbers triple every generation. Surprise, surprise, they're also the fastest growing denomination in the US!

I think you would enjoy Sam Harris's book, Free Will. It confirms and explores many of the insights you have had, and provides a good deal of interesting evidence from cognitive neuroscience to support your suspicion that our brains operate deterministically.

Thanks for the reply. If you liked that essay, you may find Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape interesting. Also, the author of the essay has a number of other writings(on diverse topics) available on his homepage: http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/

As Ryan T. Cragun, the sociologist and statistician who was interviewed on Mormon stories points out in How to Defeat Religion in 10 Easy Steps: Toolkit for Secular Activists, if you are really serious about effectivley removing the social influence of religion from politics and public institutions on a massive scale then the only option you have in a liberal democracy is to support the development of a social democracy. The surest way to diminish the popular appeal of religion to the masses is not to preach logic and reason, which always has a tiny audience, but to provide the sufficiently generous minimum background of social security within which logic and reason are more likely to flourish, and, far more crucially, appeals to otherworldly insurances diminish. It's a 100% proven, consistent fact proven by every example which has ever existed. Otherwise you just end up with secularists and atheists being a perpetually tiny sliver of the population who amount to as socially disparaged hobby group.

There's a popular book called "Til Faith Do Us Part" that has a bibliography that would probably be useful to you: http://www.amazon.com/Til-Faith-Part-Interfaith-Transforming/dp/0199873747

> Calling him a "demon child" and "fucked up" just reeks of insensitivity to me. The kid has problems and should probably be institutionalized, but let's not bash him.

The bottom line is that all bad behavior is the result of deterministic processes in the brain over which we have no control. Despite the profound subjective impression we have that we're in control of our own actions, from a logical and scientific perspective, the notion of free will is untenable. If you were to swap places with Jeffrey Dahmer, atom for atom, you would do everything he did. You'd have every thought he did, ever impulse, his exact ability/inability to resist various impulses, etc.

Doesn't stop me from wanted to slap the shit out of this kid when I see stuff like this, but that's an emotional reaction. And it doesn't mean he shouldn't be institutionalized, if we have no way of fixing someone like him. But it does mean that the notion of "punishment" for punishment's sake is nonsensical.

I'll say no. A big influence on this way of thinking comes from Free Will by Sam Harris. These intoxicated individuals did not chose their genes, their upbringing, and they have no control over what thoughts occur to them (just like any other person). Thoughts and decisions simply arise unauthored from their minds. Those who make the "right" decisions are just lucky, ultimately. I think we should show more compassion to those who make the "wrong" decisions and try to help them in what ways we can.

>the best use of religion is a moral compass and morality and humility should remain the core beliefs. Core beliefs should never change.

Core beliefs should always be up for reevaluation and change. This is what makes religion so harmful, that is unable to change and adapt to new modes of thought but rather forces people to accept it's views in the face of contradictory evidence or new ideas.

And I don't think religion should be, or is really, a moral compass for individuals. I think we bring our own ideas of morality to religion and this is why there is cherry picking in Christianity from biblical passages. A good book to read is Sam Harris' The Moral Landscape

Yes, I did. There is no such thing as free will. You merely experience the illusion of free will, when in reality your brain is making decisions that are inevitable given the electro-chemical pathway contained within it and the outside stimuli you experience. You do not have free will.

edit: http://www.amazon.com/Free-Will-Sam-Harris/dp/1451683405

> Most religions are intricately tied to the belief in a higher power.

Depending on how you define religion, that might be true. However, sociologists who study religion note that rave culture, such as Burning Man, include all the elements of religion and it's adherents talk about the religious nature of the rave experience. The same is true of followers of jam bands. The more sociologist study the behavioral elements of religious expression, the more they see religion in what would not normally be considered religious events if one holds to the preconception that religion must be about beliefs in higher powers.

A sociological and anthropological standard is that a sociological construct is what it's participants claim it is. When guys who spend their lives building cars say that the race track is their cathedral, then sociologists need to take it seriously and examine the race track in terms of it's religious importance.

This is why many sociologists are starting to discount the idea that religion is really a stand alone category. Human beings have an uncanny ability to make just about anything sacred.

http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Religion-Routledge-Advances-Sociology/dp/0415552508

Free will may not be as "free" as we once thought it was. For example, there is a major correlation with rates of violence dropping with the reduction of lead usage. Lead makes people more violent regardless of their "free will". There is also an essay written by neuroscientist Sam Harris called Free Will where he talks about this same subject stating that something as simple as what you are for breakfast can have an impact on your "free will" that day. So like I said, free will isn't as free as we think it is maybe.

Rave as a religion. Here's a book and here's another book written on the subject. Pretty interesting stuff!

Free will (in the sense that you and I know it) doesn't exist.

If you're into philosophy, I'd highly recommend Sam Harris's book on the matter. He has a knack for conveying complex ideas simply.

I'll preface this by saying that it is not entirely clear what, precisely, your question is. So let me restate your question as I see it.

Science is an enormously successful endeavor. Using the scientific method we can, with high degrees of precision, mathematically describe certain aspects of reality using deterministic equations - e.g. the motion of a cannonball shot across a battlefield. To say that the motion of the cannonball is deterministic is to say that if we know the location and velocity of the cannonball at any given time, then using the equations and assuming no interfering factors, we can infer its location and velocity at any other time. This clearly works for some aspects of reality; might it work for all aspects of reality? In particular, might it work in describing the behavior of a human being? And, if so, would that not then suggest that we do not have freedom of the will?

This is more or less what Sam Harris argues in his book, Free Will, that if determinism is true, i.e. if all aspects of reality are governed by these deterministic equations, then we do not have free will.

There are at least two things I would want to say in reply to this. First, it is far from obvious that all aspects of reality are governed by deterministic equations. Actually, I would want to say that no aspects of reality are governed by equations. Rather, these equations describe what we observe - they do not cause what we observe nor do they govern the thing being observed. When Newton tells us, for example, that the force acting on an object is equal to its mass times its acceleration, i.e. F = ma, this is a mathematical description of a phenomena we observe. It does not tell us what is causing that force, or if it will always hold, or why such a relationship exists in the first place.

Second, I think that higher scientific education, in my experience anyways, is all backwards. If you are thrown into a physics or chemistry class in college, you will immediately come face to face with many equations - equations of motion, rates of chemical reaction, electromagnetic equations, thermodynamic equations, quantum mechanical equations etc. The impression is that these equations are true, and that reality abides by them. But, as I say, this is backwards. Instead, we should begin by studying the motion of cannonballs, how magnets generate fields, specific chemical reactions, converting steam into work using a turbine, electrons going through a slit, etc. and then attempt to develop a mathematical theory which accurately describes the phenomena we observe. When things are done in this order, we are immediately faced with the reality that those equations only work in very limited and often idealized conditions. This, for me anyway, immediately removes any serious thoughts that all of reality might be deterministic.

> Science can actually supply the moral content by measuring what people do or like or whatever

Doesn't sound like you read the book. Go read it. It's pretty interesting even if you wouldn't agree, he's a good writer.

Even though your understanding of how choice works is correct, the conclusion that follows (life is "worthless") is false. You seem to be keen on explaining your depression with the fact that you have considered how choice works... but I feel like there's an underlying cause you didn't mention. You even hinted at this in your closing line (major factor means there are other factors at play).

I know this is /r/philosophy and not /r/psychology, but heck, I'm going to say it anyway: you might want to reconsider what the real reason is for your depression instead of (arrogantly) assuming that the "no-choice" life isn't good enough for you.

We do make choices, by the way. Every choice may be a culmination of past experiences and events but that doesn't mean there's not a lot to choose from. Introspection, reflection, meditation and creation can change us within the constraints of a formulaic universe.

Edit: Taking a risk here in /r/philosophy by suggesting this, but here goes: you might be interested in Sam Harris' "Free Will": Amazon link (I'd recommend getting it at The Book Depository alas, it's out of stock there).

My feelings are similar to yours. Harris' book really crystallized the thoughts I always had on the subject, and made it easier to practice acceptance and non-judgement.

People do not have free will. Science is accumulating evidence to back up the theory every day. Famous neuroscientists even write books about it.

http://www.amazon.com/Free-Will-Sam-Harris/dp/1451683405

We are all slaves to genetics, saying he voluntarily did anything is... impossible. I read somewhere that if humans have free will, our brains would be the ONLY thing in the entire universe that breaks the known laws of physics. Or... our brains do follow the laws of physics, and we do not have free will.

But sure, lets go with the idea that our brains rose above physics, sure the kid made the choice on his own.

> You can freely choose to either pick the fork up or not. It is not predetermined and you can freely chose.

I (and neuroscience in general) am saying no, that's not true. Whether or not you pick up the fork is nothing you have any control over. You think you "make a choice" - but you are following your programming. You and I are simply machines. We are doing exactly what we are programmed to do by our biology and our set of experiences, and nothing more. It's causal. Every choice you make is not just influenced by determined things that ultimately happened outside your body, but 100% decided by them.

Edit: Here, an actual neuroscientist can describe this better than I can. Or, read the book.

You should check out Sam Harris' short, but insightful, book on Free Will. It might change the way you define and think about it.

Neither do I, it's nonsensical any way you slice it. If you'd like to know more about the arguments against "free will" I'd recommend Sam Harris' new book.

http://www.amazon.com/Free-Will-Sam-Harris/dp/1451683405

Sam Harris (neuroscientist) wrote a book titled "free will" on it.

I'd recommend giving this video of his a watch.

I think people have the hardest time coming to terms with the idea that we may just be on this human ride without any real control.

i'm not asserting anything as fact. just looking for another view.

Can I offer some other choice reads that will make you question your rational decision based on "how it feels" we make decisions rather than how they "actually are made"? We can now do brain studies that show our unconscious brain makes our decisions before our conscious brain is even aware of the choices. We rationalize our decisions based on our emotions, not logic. The beautiful thing is we feel like we are the ones in charge, the 'I", me, you, they, she, he, whomever, but every single person is as predictable as our Earth's rotation around the sun.

Let's see, some interesting books with hundreds if not thousands of sources in them each: Subliminal, Free Will, Incognito to get you started.

Feelings are only feelings, they are an old response before our prefontal cortex made its appearance. Don't let those get in the way of learning about how we work. Sure it feels like the earth is flat, it feels bad when we get rejected, it feels like your conscious mind made that choice to get a burger over the salad, but don't let feelings get in the way of what's actually happening. It's all an illusion, man..

A bit longer, but all are solid suggestions, and although I could add two dozen more, I'm sure others will take up the cause.

• What the dog saw, by Malcolm Gladwell
  
  
• Bad Science, by Ben Goldacre
  
  
• 
  God is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens
  
  
• The Moral Landscape, by Sam Harris
  
  
• The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein
  
  
• Super Freakonomics, by Levitt & Dubner
  
  
• The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan
  
  
• The Case for Mars, by Robert Zubrin
  
  
• The Value of Nothing, by Raj Patel
  
  
  

I would also recommend Michael Martin as well.

Impossibility of God

Atheism: A Philosophical Justification

It's all evolution people who do good things have higher chance of survival.

He is most famous for his work on the philosophy of free will. I don't think he is that great of a philosopher but he defiantly is one.

Please, oh please, let me get this new job

http://www.amazon.com/Free-Will-ebook/dp/B006IDG2T6/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pC_nS_nC?ie=UTF8&colid=3CCTG6CY40C3E&coliid=I1M4XP94S178S4

While we're on Sam Harris, his book The Moral Landscape is an in-depth extension of the ideas he brings up in this talk. It's a fascinating read, in that it is likely to change your mind on a lot of beliefs you have probably held without consideration for much of your life.

Sam Harris comes to mind, as well as plenty of other prominent writers on the topic of Determinism. https://www.amazon.com/Free-Will-Sam-Harris-ebook/dp/B006IDG2T6/

1. The True Believer
   
2. The Denial of Death
   
3. God Is Not Great

Free Will

-Sam Harris

Here is a free lecture about the book's ideas.

Here you can buy it or get it free with a trial of Audible. ;)

Sam Harris wrote a book just about that. It's called "Free will".

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1451683405

If you enjoy those kind of conversations, this might be the best $5.25 you'll ever spend.

If you're a Christian or want to be able to argue against Christianity:

http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/1616145811

Atheism and the Case Against Christ by Matthew McCormick. By far the best book I've ever read concerning Christianity.

True, but a lot of his rise was correlated with falling churchgoing. https://www.amazon.com/Alienated-America-Places-Thrive-Collapse/dp/0062797107

​

There are also some polls that show that churchgoing Trump voters hold more tolerant views on immigration and race than nonchurch going ones

Question 1 [asked by redditor Prom_STar]: What are your thoughts on Sam Harris' idea that we can eventually use neuroscience to quantify human well-being and use that information to empirically evaluate ethics?

Response. Sam Harris has written a new book, a very interesting book, called The Moral Landscape. And he takes on the almost cliché philosophy that science has nothing to say about morality; science can tell us the how of things, science cannot tell us what's good and what's bad. Well, I think maybe Sam's got a point – Sam thinks that you can. And he thinks that neuroscience can actually be used to tell when people are really, really suffering. You do have to make the assumption that what matters is suffering. You do have to make the assumption that the goal of morality is something like to reduce the total amount of suffering; to reduce the amount of suffering in either humans or sentient beings. But once you've done that, once you've accepted that that's your goal in your morality, then science, especially neuroscience, really can tell you when people suffer, when creatures suffer. And so I think he's good a very good point and I strongly recommend the book, The Moral Landscape.

tl;dr. Dawkins believes Sam Harris has a very good point, working under certain assumptions.

Direct Video Link [0:00]

Read The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris. His basic thesis is that there are scientific methods that can determine what is positive or negative for society, and that reason should determine how to view actions that are traditionally vague or "relative" because of religion, tolerance for other cultures, etc. instead of saying, "oh, well those people are different than I am, and no matter their opinion they have a right to live their life as they choose". A moral relativist might say that stoning a woman for adultery in a different culture, although they might disagree, shouldn't be condemned because it's a part of their society and not ours.

*edited, we are actually discussing "moral relativism", rather than "cultural relativism" - cultural relativism is a more positive anthropological methodology that says basically "my art/food/music isn't better than yours"

Read a book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Moral-Landscape-Science-Determine/dp/1439171211

or watch a video:

http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_science_can_show_what_s_right.html

Others have done it way better than I possibly can.

there appears to be some progress in this field

He definitely believes in objective morality. See here.

Sam Harris can help you with this

Read Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape. And for a primer on the topic you can also watch his TED talk.

EDIT: This TED talk on oxytocin in regard to morality is also interesting.

Another FYI:

This is the book he was referring to:

The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values

Sam Harris wrote a book to say fuck you to free will. Pretty interesting read actually.

Sam Harris thinks so. I tend to agree with him keeping in mind that any objective measure is going to be quite fuzzy.

Atheism asserts no absolutes. Fail.

Morality is an interesting topic, upon which theists are uniquely unqualified (ref: crusades, adolph hitler, the current pedophilia scandals, telling Africans not to use condoms, opposing civil rights, opposing feminism, opposing gay rights, opposing emancipation). A well known atheist named Sam Harris has written a whole book about this called The Moral Landscape which addresses the question better than any theist ever has. (Though I don't claim its a complete answer.) These are actually not matters of logic at all, but are currently in the philosophical or early cognitive science phase.

I assure you I don't need to learn anything about philosophy. Though you might need a little remedial on logic.

No ... Read The Moral Landscape by Harris. It might not convince you to side with Harris, but it will certainly make you think.

I haven't read any of these, but there is a Listmania! list on Amazon of experimental philosophy books.

I'm going to try and read Sam Harris' The Moral Landscape sometime over the break, and that might also be up your brother's alley.

This article is not a great jumping off point if you want to understand Harris's position. If you don't want to read his book, Free Will (which is short, compact, and easy to read), this talk summarizes his position. It is about 55 minutes long after which there is a Q&A session.

Why God does not exist:

http://www.amazon.com/Non-Existence-God-Nicholas-Everitt/dp/0415301076

http://www.amazon.com/God-Failed-Hypothesis-Science-Shows/dp/1591026520/

http://www.amazon.com/Impossibility-God-Michael-Martin/dp/1591021200/

http://www.amazon.com/Improbability-God-Michael-Martin/dp/1591023815/

http://www.thesixwaysofatheism.com/

It’s (conveniently) titled “Free Will”. ;)

https://samharris.org/books/free-will/

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1451683405/

Found this on circlebroke2, and I thought I'd help.

Here That pretty much murders the O^3 version many people believe in.

It isn't retarded. Do some background research.

http://youtu.be/KCInjQ4omlA
http://youtu.be/bX8D0yU0pMc
http://youtu.be/C_L-k7KCPPM
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1451683405
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1862078947

Because morality is not determined by the existence or nonexistence of a god. http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Landscape-Science-Determine-Values/dp/1439171211

Don't forget Sam Harris' ideas on morality, which actually helped shape Dawkins' beliefs (see his review of Harris' book on Amazon).

Sorry you ended up incapable of understanding rational logic. Maybe try school again, there are still minor repairs you can make to the gaping holes in your intellect if you're under 30.

Start here.

>Ultimately laws that are seemingly based on morals are based on the concept of protecting innocent civilians

The idea that protecting innocent civilians is a good thing, and that murder, rape, and theft are bad things are all moral judgements, about whether those things are right or wrong. The difference is that these judgements can be justified on the grounds that they promote human well-being. The judgement that same-sex relationships are immoral can only be justified on religious grounds – you can't defend it with any objective facts or observations of the physical world.

You're right that morals vary across cultures, and of course anyone can say that their morals are the correct ones because they said so. But I don't think that it has to end there. I think that it's possible for someone to make a better argument than that to support their system of morality – and that if all they have to support themselves is "because I said so" (or "because the [religious text] says so") then their system of morality is probably not going to promote objective human well-being.

You should check out Sam Harris' TED talk about morality, and (if you're really interested) his book on the same topic. He makes a very persuasive case against the idea that morals are purely subjective. At one time I would have agreed that we shouldn't legislate morality, for the exact same reasons that you gave, but listening to what he had to say changed the way I think about the whole topic of morality.

Sam Harris talks about it in length in his book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values

This one

Sam Harris talks about this a lot; he wrote a book called The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values , and also did a TED Talk about the subject.

This

How about this.

http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Landscape-Science-Determine-Values/dp/1439171211

For more on this, I suggest reading his book: The Moral Landscape

http://www.amazon.com/Free-Will-Sam-Harris/dp/1451683405 You could probably read the entire thing in a couple hours.

The Moral Landscape

Not sure if this is the type of answer you're looking for, but I've come to believe (with this book as the jump off point) that there is no such thing as free will. This literally means that no one can act in any other way than they do. Knowing this really helps me reflect on kneejerk judgments.

>It is scientifically impossible to prove moral values.

I don't agree. References:

The Moral Landscape

Evolution of Morality

>The argument of "if you dont like X, than do it" clearly is fallacious.

It was more of a soundbite than an argument. My apologies. The fact is that you have to present very good reasons when you take away someone else's right. We've decided to do this in the case of Drunk Driving because the behavior presents a clear danger to others within our society.

It is not illegal to join a gang. It is illegal to commit crimes often associated with gang membership.

Not everyone pays federal income taxes but everyone is required to pay their fair share as defined by the federal and state legislatures.

The real concern regarding gay marriage is that it is victimless. The LGBT community is simply asking for equal rights, not greater rights or rights to impinge on the rights of others in the society.

The best analogy is the historical laws prohibiting interracial marriage. Interracial marriage is now almost universally accepted. There is no longer a question of it being morally wrong.

History will also judge your prejudiced viewpoint unfavorably. It is an assault on human dignity.

In case anyone else committed the blasphemous sin of forgetting one of the Four Horsemen's first names like I did (it's Sam, btw) or are just too lazy to Google the book:

http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Landscape-Science-Determine-Values/dp/1439171211

quickly googles for Sam Harris new book - here it is: The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values

But it says it will be available in October 2010 :(

http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Landscape-Science-Determine-Values/dp/1439171211

They do. At least broad and general claims about morality can be measured and made. We can make observations about human fufilment and human suffering that are undeniable.

> We make decisions based on option, experience, upbringing, that sort of thing

This implies that two people who had the exact life experiences would react the exact same way in any given circumstance.

> Indeed, we can only be held responsible if we actually have a decision making process

Given your previous statement, how can one be held responsible for the an outcome that was pre-determined by their past experience?


Lets say the culmination of the experiences and influences of a man's life determined that he would wake up the morning of October 1st 2013 and decide to kill his neighbor. Your first statement implies that if you had lived his exact life up to that point, you would make the exact same decision he did.


This rules out the idea that he was, in fact, responsible for his decision to kill. The decision was simply the product of all his previous "experience, upbringing, that sort of thing". Do you assign the moral responsibility to him or to the culmination of his experience?


I know I'm not putting this forward very eloquently. It's a concept covered in the book Free Will by Sam Harris; a book that this thread has prompted me to start re-reading today.

No, it wasn't in self defence... And yes you are completely ignorant to psychology. Your reply is further proof of that.

I had actually written several paragraphs trying to explain it to you, but it's probably worthless. So instead I suggest you try and read some material on behavioural psychology. And read this book. Free Will only takes about an hour to read (it's short) and it illustrates a very real problem that exists in the mentality of most people.

You are saying that there are circumstances where these things aren't wrong, and I disagree. No matter what "yardstick" you use, some things should always be wrong.

You are, however, echoing the sentiment that has been popular for most people, including the scientific community, for quite some time. I mentioned Sam Harris, as he makes some very good arguments against this:

Check out his book.

Definitely worth a read. At the risk of failing miserably to properly convey his point, he is suggesting that our "yardstick" should be, and can only be, the well-being of conscious beings. If we agree on this, then it can be surmised that there are answers to questions of morality that are definitely right and answers that are definitely wrong.

Basically, he is taking the notion that has been common for so long, "it is impossible to have a universal standpoint on morality," and rejecting it. And he makes some damn good arguments. Moral relativism is a way for us to excuse the inexcusable.

Your next mission fellow baby eater is to read these 2 books.

The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Have you read The Moral Landscape? Sam Harris is a neuroscientist and a philosopher, and the book is an argument for Utilitarianism, a philosophical position which states that the morality of an act is determined by the amounts of suffering and/or well-being it causes.

That's not to say that Harris doesn't adopt a scientific approach to this question (or to the questions he examines in his other works of philosophy). His thesis is essentially that well-being can be measured objectively by using scientific tools like MRI scans etc.

But if what you're trying to suggest is that Harris is a scientist who somehow does away with that pesky philosophy nonsense, then you're deeply mistaken, both about what sorts of things science and philosophy are, and about Harris as an individual.

Dude... people don't make free choices. I mean, take a minute and look into psychology, genetics, studies on how people's environment shapes what they do and think, mental health issues, etc. If you dig into the science of it, anyone who look at it openly realizes, people do not have free will. Neuroscientists even write books about it.

https://www.amazon.com/Free-Will-Sam-Harris/dp/1451683405

So to say anything is 100% free choice... I mean, how naive can you get?

Do you think healthy women can get into bad relationships with an abusive man and get driven to suicide? Or even better... do you think Stockholm Syndrome isn't real? The examples are so endless it boggles the mind.

I doubt the guy who committed suicide was totally healthy to start, but it doesn't mean the woman didn't push him either. Its also possible she was sane, and he had all the issues. But usually, crazy attracts crazy.

I wonder what Penn does/would think of The Moral Landscape.

Also this:

> you get no moral credit for forcing other people to do what you think is right

I love Penn and I don't know how rigorous he was intending to be when writing this, but this point is obviously false in at least some circumstances as long as we can read "moral credit" as "being moral". Clearly, using coercive or violent force to stop a murderer from killing your toddler-aged child IS an unambiguous, unassailable example of "moral credit" to you.

If the threat of hell is the only thing that keeps you from shooting and raping people, then you probably aren't a very good person to begin with.

By the way, you should read this:
http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Landscape-Science-Determine-Values/dp/1439171211

>I have to imagine you're angry that I have equated your moral realism to christian fundamentalism, but as I keep pointing out, there is a reason for that.

I'm not angry about that. I'm angry I wasted so much time on you. You espouse nothing but poor reasoning. You're an apologist. You've chosen that position and it's an ugly one.

>The only reason you think it is universally wrong is because you believe in your morals blindly—with FAITH.

My morals are quite measured and I do not follow them blindly, with faith. I quoted this because this is all you do. You make stupid and baseless attacks because you have no defense.

>Of course, but that doesn't make those commonalities universally necessary, and certainly not universally moral.

You don't get it. I'm done. I'll leave you with this, because I don't think I've talked to someone who needs to read it more than you:

http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Landscape-Science-Determine-Values/dp/1439171211

If NAMBLA set up on a island and established a culture of raping 3 year olds in the ass and then eating them alive while they were awake would you step back and say "Hey, hey, hey. It's their culture who are you to say raping children in the ass is bad and dismembering them for the purpose of a good goulash is immoral?"

I'm just trying to figure out what your line of reasoning is.

edit
If you're just trying to pose the question of which metric is most valid, without asserting that all moral behavior is relativistic and cannibalism of conscious persons, child rape, torture, etc. are, in fact, moral within a given context then this method is probably a good start.