tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9479398.post5963505853975382938..comments2024-03-28T11:33:16.271-05:00Comments on Adventus: Your Title Here*Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9479398.post-80457751571991612392013-08-15T15:58:53.631-05:002013-08-15T15:58:53.631-05:00It's an interesting point: Harris is not radi...<i>It's an interesting point: Harris is not radically liberal; he's radically conservative. </i><br /><br />Indeed. When I read <br /><br /><i>the only thing that currently stands between us and the roiling ocean of Muslim unreason is a wall of tyranny and human rights abuses [in Arab countries] that we have helped to erect.</i><br /><br />somehow all I could think of was Hobbes' Leviathan and Harris' non sequitur as described here<br /><br /><i>Experiments in neuroimaging, Harris argues, reveal that the brain makes no distinction between judgments of value and judgments of fact; from this finding he extracts the non sequitur that fact and value are the same. We may not know all the moral truths that research will unearth, but we will soon know many more of them.</i><br /><br />sounds like the glosses I've heard politically conservative Catholics give on Aquinas or politically conservative Jews give on Maimonides. The ironic thing is about this sort of "values, shmalues; facts, shmacts" rhetoric is that some of its greatest practitioners are the same people who would dismiss any liberal with Kantian or big-P Pragmatic leanings as being "overly subjective" and as engaging in "moral relativism". Here Harris and his ilk engage in hidebound quasi-religious/quasi-magical reactionary thought and would accuse us of being steeped in religious superstition?alberichhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03852752646926946626noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9479398.post-37609566399020317332013-08-15T12:17:59.651-05:002013-08-15T12:17:59.651-05:00Thank you for the plug and of doing a good job wit...Thank you for the plug and of doing a good job with Lears' article. <br /><br />One thing that is obvious in the last ten years of atheist venting, mud throwing and writing, uh, scholarly works on these topics, for atheists atheism is the overriding issue. I think almost every single article I've read in which a reasoned, evidenced criticism of atheists is made, there is a mandatory gesture to assure the readers that the author is either an atheist, or that the argument you're about to read doesn't really impinge on atheism. Even Lears does it, though in about as reasonable and less self conscious a form as I've seen<br /><br /><i> None of this ferment discredited the role of science as a practical means of promoting human well-being: midcentury laboratories produced vaccines and sulfa drugs as well as nuclear weapons. Nor did it prove the existence (or even the possibility) of God, as apologists for religion sometimes claimed. But it did undermine the positivist faith in science as a source of absolute certainty and moral good. </i><br /><br />Well, proof of that kind is irrelevant, believing in God is a matter of being persuaded by experience and what information we find persuasive. Actually, despite what we always like to assert, even proof is, ultimately, a matter of persuasion. The experiences of the 20th century, the Holocaust, previous and continuing genocides and mass murders, the civil rights struggles, hurtling towards self-extinction, the role that science, political ideology, etc. play in those all have a role in persuading me into facing that belief is a choice of being persuaded by what you are looking at and experiencing. I believe because of the things Lears notes, of the impossibility of me believing that what is necessary to avoid those is possible with atheism and materialism. Those produce the prerequisite conditions for those to happen. There must be a reason for that. The Thought Criminalhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01381376556757084468noreply@blogger.com