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tonyrey
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“conglomeration” is a perfect description: “a sum total of many heterogenous things taken together” (arbitrarily) and “an occurrence combining miscellaneous things into a (more or less) rounded mass”! A delightfully authentic explanation of a materialist’s view of our **imaginary **worth as human beings…
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Sair
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The existence of life requires not a purpose, but only a rational explanation in terms of cause and effect. It exists, but it was not inevitable that it should do so; nor was it, as far as we can discern, ever necessary that intelligent life should arise. The fact that it does actually requires no further explanation than what has thus far been proffered by science. You are looking backwards from your present position - rather like Douglas Adams’ puddle…
But if the universe were somehow aware of this alleged value, it might give you a better argument for the objectivity and universality of human worth! You are again applying the anthropic principle and considering the obvious fact of life existing in the universe as evidence that the universe exists for the purpose of supporting life. If that were so, it would seem that life, and particularly intelligent life, would be more abundant in the universe than we have so far found. Indeed, the majority of the universe, so far as we can ascertain, appears to be hostile to life.
If morality such as humans employ it were a universal and objective phenomenon, the universe would behave accordingly - as opposed to indifferently.
So if I decide that the purpose of my life is to study philosophy, because I rather enjoy doing so, is that subjective or objective? What is this alleged objective purpose (singular) of human life?
I submit that my dog enjoys life, as do, I suspect, many of the higher mammals and possibly birds as well. The capacity for emotion seems to be evolutionarily prior to the capacity for higher-order intellectual computation, so one might say that many other animals apart from humans have the capacity to enjoy life. Do they have an objective purpose too, or is that just to contribute to the enjoyment of humans?
Then you must, unlike some other Catholics, acknowledge that all animals capable of enjoying life and pursing goals, even if these are relatively simple, survival-based goals, have objective moral worth and commensurate moral capacity and responsibility. Would you go so far as to say that the objective existence of subjectivity confers objective moral worth?
Does it need to be anything else in order to exist? Rationality is simply the ability to observe and recognise the patterns of cause and effect that obtain in the natural universe, and abstract such patterns into general behaviours and rules. Biological processes can be nonrandom without being purposeful - purpose implies prior planning and intention. No-one has ever found evidence of a planner…
I’m sure a quick google would turn up reams of explanation as to why humans have been successful as a species. What’s more, I think you’ll find that bacteria, amongst other forms of life, have been vastly more successful in evolutionary terms than humans are ever likely to be. Does your god have plans for them too?
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tonyrey
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Then you need to give a rational explanation of purpose in terms of cause and effect…
The issue is not whether it is necessary but likely.
An unsubstantiated assumption.
You are looking forwards from the past - like a clairvoyant…
A far better argument is that we are **not **sparks in the dark!
You are again applying the physicalist principle and considering the obvious fact of life existing in the universe as “evidence” that the universe exists for no purpose whatsoever.
(“majority” applies grammatically to a plurality of entities.) Since most of the universe appears to be hostile to life its sheer improbability is evidence that it is not an accident.
You have evaded the question…
You are assuming morality is not an objective phenomenon. Whether it pertains to a physical universe is irrelevant because it is absurd to ascribe the recognition of morality to non-rational objects.
Both!
To do precisely what you are doing!
Do you regard insight and reasoning as merely “higher-order intellectual computation”?
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Why should we regard man as the measure of all things?
It is not only absurd but morally wrong to deny that animals have objective moral worth. There is no reason whatsoever why only moral **agents **have moral worth.
I would go further and say that objective existence confers objective moral worth. Do you believe wanton destruction of inanimate objects is to be applauded?
Your notion of rationality is consistent with the view that persons are merely biological computers - with the inevitable corollary that insight and understanding are illusions.
In that case all planning is an illusion - and further evidence that persons are no more than biological computers…
You have succeeded in proving there was no need for life to develop any further than bacteria! So why did it?
If you think you can exist without bacteria you are sadly mistaken… You imply you could create a superior universe yet so far you have failed to supply a feasible blueprint… and there is no sign that it will ever appear!
Does your Godless universe justify your pantheism - which contrives to insert value into that which is objectively valueless and establish a fictitious source for that value? Atheists are at least more consistent in their view…
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Shredderbeam
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What? The way I read it, the emphasized text didn’t support a humanistic worldview at all - it stated that moral rights were a human creation, far from universal.I dare say you would agree with anything that satisfies your humanistic flights of fancy.
Yes, though I wouldn’t say that it’s selected completely arbitrarily.“conglomeration” is a perfect description: “a sum total of many heterogenous things taken together” (arbitrarily) and “an occurrence combining miscellaneous things into a (more or less) rounded mass”! A delightfully authentic explanation of a materialist’s view of our **imaginary **worth as human beings…
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Sair
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Cause and effect supplies the rational explanation.
Why should life be ‘likely’? Why isn’t ‘possible’ enough? It only had to arise once in order to develop.
Why must there be an explanation that satisfies our arrogance?
Hardly. I am looking no further than the present. I don’t fancy that there will be some future vindication of human belief in ultimate purpose.
But why is that a ‘better’ argument? Because you find it more satisfying? Surely that is wholly subjective…
I don’t take the existence of life as evidence of the purposelessness of the universe - but nor do I take it as evidence of any ultimate purpose or underlying intention. Life simply exists - I find it wondrous and fascinating that it does so, but I don’t see in it the intentions of a rational (disembodied) mind…
Um…it’s highly unlikely that a young GP, after making a house call, would be writing up his notes in his car, at the very point when he was rear-ended by a truck, resulting in the pencil with which he was writing being driven through his skull into his brain, thus killing him. Yet that happened. By the same token, it’s highly unlikely, from the point of view of any individual, that he or she will win the jackpot in a lottery - yet this happens too. Accidents happen, and they can be joyful or devastating. I would have thought that the improbability and apparent rarity of life would point more to its being accidental than planned.
I am questioning how morality could be seen as an objective phenomenon, as opposed to an intersubjective one, particular to the relationships that obtain between subjective beings. If morality cannot be ascribed in general to a physical, objective universe, how can it be an objective phenomenon?
Yes. What else should they be?
Why should we imagine that anything we know about the world can be perceived by other means than our own awareness?
Yet so many humans do so, even to the point of denying that we ourselves are animals because we are fearful of the implications…
Then why countenance any distinction between humans and other life?
Now you are evading the question. You know perfectly well that I was referring to the belief that the God of Classical Theism created and has plans for the world, in particular humanity.
Planning is only illusory if one believes it comes from an immaterial agent fundamentally dissociated from the physical world.
Of course there was no need for it to do so, if by ‘need’ you mean ‘in order to fulfil a prior purpose’.
Why should I have my own blueprint for a superior universe in order to apprehend that it could be better than it is - given, of course, the assumption of a perfect creator? It is up to believers in such a being to justify why this is the best of all possible universes. And I’m not sure how you could have read into what I wrote previously, the belief that I could exist without bacteria - if anything, you’re here implying that bacteria do indeed exist for the benefit of humanity, not as entities in their own right.
I am not endeavouring to ‘insert’ value into the universe - I could not do so even if I wished to. The universe has existed and will exist without my (name removed by moderator)ut. My pantheism is about my subjective feelings towards nature, the awe and wonder I feel when contemplating the universe and apprehending that I am part of something far greater than myself. As a theist, you should understand this - the primary difference is that I feel no need to posit a being fundamentally like myself in order to appreciate my place in the wider scheme of things.
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tonyrey
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Jaaanosik
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It does not seem that there are any unified moral rights of all atheists.
Society moral rights could be the closest thing. Those can vary from country to country, even from one region to another region in bigger countries and we know those can be different from the moral rights taught by the Church.
If we examine moral rights (values) of an individual atheist then those depend on upbringing.
In some cases an atheist can uphold higher moral standards than his/her Catholic neighbor.
Society moral rights could be the closest thing. Those can vary from country to country, even from one region to another region in bigger countries and we know those can be different from the moral rights taught by the Church.
If we examine moral rights (values) of an individual atheist then those depend on upbringing.
In some cases an atheist can uphold higher moral standards than his/her Catholic neighbor.
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grannymh
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What moral rights does a Christian have?
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tonyrey
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The same as the atheist, agnostic or any other person from the point of view of the Christian and many non-Christians!
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tonyrey
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In other words you can do exactly what you like!Exactly
Material things can have a factuality. For example, a triangle will always have 3 sides - it is an eternal object. The term object denotes something that can be seen and touched. While morals are not objects, they are instead abstractions.
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Whadyamean
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“Rights” generally speaking may very well be regarded as a relative value superimposed on reality by consensus or exception by groups or individuals on others. As RAH asked in one of his novels, “What right to life has a man drowning in the ocean?” His desire to fight for it, or not, is a condition of his living and his mental state. If there are potential rescuers, they may or may not help. again depending on their own mental and physical states and their relationship to the drowner. There is no literal or inherent “law of morality” operating here in the sense that, say, gravity operates over all cases indiscriminately. There is only consequence, both for the drowner and the witnesses as matters of concern in their internal life according to the state of their awareness.
We have no inherent “rights,” only what we grant each other as concessions according to our maturity in recognizing another as being substantially equal to ourselves. In groups we exercise that to some extent by laws that allegedly protect the innocent from predation, or we legalize predation, as we have done with our financial system in this country. In the case of moral paradigms associated with religions, those are held as ideals for modeling behavior. Those are useful up to the point of cooperation and as is somewhere implied in the Bible can be discarded when the knowledge of the “other” being essentially yourself is internalized. In Fact, that internalization is the only real basis for morality and is the root of the Golden Rule and of the Great Commandment. Those no bearing on one’s philosophical predilections, intellectual level, gender orientation or whatever, only on the consistency of one’s actions with a sense of unity and any value derived from that. Everything else is commentary.
We have no inherent “rights,” only what we grant each other as concessions according to our maturity in recognizing another as being substantially equal to ourselves. In groups we exercise that to some extent by laws that allegedly protect the innocent from predation, or we legalize predation, as we have done with our financial system in this country. In the case of moral paradigms associated with religions, those are held as ideals for modeling behavior. Those are useful up to the point of cooperation and as is somewhere implied in the Bible can be discarded when the knowledge of the “other” being essentially yourself is internalized. In Fact, that internalization is the only real basis for morality and is the root of the Golden Rule and of the Great Commandment. Those no bearing on one’s philosophical predilections, intellectual level, gender orientation or whatever, only on the consistency of one’s actions with a sense of unity and any value derived from that. Everything else is commentary.
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MindOverMatter2
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So according to you there is no such thing as moral truth?
Whats is maturity but another meaningless word that human beings invented? Given the truth of metaphysical naturalism, maturity sounds like make-belief to me. There is no such thing in reality.
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Whadyamean
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Of course there is, relative to your accepted paradigm. Who would argue with that? But you have to accept responsibility for what that paradigm is as you understand it. Is your understanding equal to Reality?
All words have meaning relative to our experience of them. Every word you use is a human invention. You don’t squeek like a dolphin or grunt like an ape? Uh… maybe you do… I do sometimes, lol! In my understanding I use the word “maturity” to refer to the distance one has traveled from believing the various levels of ego towards a functional internalization of the knowledge that we are all in essence the children of God made in That image and likeness and potentially consciously aware. Not quite the dictionary answer, but it works for me.
Thanks for your comment.
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MindOverMatter2
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Isn’t this just the same as saying that truth is relative?
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MindOverMatter2
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I am known for both grunting and farting an various occasions with differing degrees of disgustingness.
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Whadyamean
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Unless you are God, you have extremely limited band width and area (name removed by moderator)ut as to the totality of Creation and the significance and consequence of anything as part of that totality, do you not? Therefore what you experience and act according to is “truth” relative to your ability to perceive and comprehend whatever bit of Allness it is within your scope to know. So even if there is an Absolute, which there is, our experience of the manifestation which that supports is infinitesimally small and relative to our human ability. Add to that that most of us have no clue as to how our brain/mind/soul actually operate in utilizing (name removed by moderator)ut and simply go on the beliefs we grew up with or which we acquired from a limited field of availability even in this internet age, not to mention two or five thousand years ago, or longer. So Truth is not relative, it cant be because it is ALL. But our human experience of it is necessarily relative to what we acquire as a paradigm. As Paul says, unless you are clear, we see now “as through a glass, darkly.” That sounds pretty relative to me. What do you think?Isn’t this just the same as saying that truth is relative?
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ThinkingSapien
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This sounds a lot like what is labeled as the “positivist” view or rights in a law book that my sister has from when she was in school. More or less we only have what ever rights that we can enforce and unenforcable “rights” break down to bare assertion under this view. As you’ve pointed out our rights are imposed on groups by others. In psychological terms they often seemed to be enforced through some form of “coercion” with those coercive techniques being something that in most cases are seen as something afforded to the society but not to the individual. By any chance have you ever read Freud’s “Civilization and It’s Discontents”?
And that sounds a lot like the concept of “satisficing.”[1] Because we have limited cognition, limited time, limited resources, and limited knowledge about the world around us when we look for solutions because of our limitations we often don’t come up with the best one, but instead come up with solutions that are satisfying and sufficient (Satisficing). Often times the expenditure of further resources to improve upon the solution is withheld because there are other problems that also demand attention. While some people may try to specialize in a specific problem domain to improve upon the state of available solutions for it the same people may still need to work with solutions outside of that domain for the other areas of their life and still resort to satisficing solutions.
[1] - A term coind by Herbert Simon in 1956. It was originally about human behaviour but is also used in the context of machine intelligence.
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grannymh
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What I want to know before “thinking” is – what is Paul seeing? Otherwise, how can one determine if what Paul is seeing (you did say “we see now”) is something relative to you or me or perhaps is something objective?
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Whadyamean
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This is an excellent question, Grannymh. Outside of the Church there is an interpretation of both Paul and Jesus that to me makes far more experiential sense than what to my understanding of history and philosophy may be slightly clouded interpretations within the Church. And rather than “objective.” it is subjective in a sense other than what one might regularly mean as “private within one’s own mind.” It is something rather more universal than that.
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