Faith Interface

I hear Ravi Z on the radio sometimes. I enjoy his program. For an apologist he is pretty sophisticated. I have to say that he is more of an authority on his own response to God than he is on my response to the notions of God people try to teach to me. I reject those stories for a scarcity of evidence…. He missed that one.

You know, I am not in a position to speak for others who reject notions of God. I know that I have seen expressions from some that express concerns over the notions of Divine Authority as it is formulated in many religious doctrines. Certainly Socrates pointed out the difficulty of Divine Command theory in his dialog with Euthyphro. In fact, I do share some of these concerns. But belief in a truth claim about the real world – that there objectively exists a God is settled for me on the question of objective evidence.

When you say that evidence exists “within ourselves”, I can only assume you are speaking of subjective experience. Unfortunately, subjective experience has never proven to be a useful guide to objective fact. I cannot see how evidence “within ourselves” can help establish the existence of God. At most, I can imagine that we interpret certain casts of mind as indicative of God being “in our heart”. If you define God as the promptings of the human heart, then perhaps that’s evidence. If you define God in the traditional way, though, there is no way to distinguish God’s action from our own emotional responses.

The same can be said about “evidence” within our relationships with others. I am a Unitarian Universalist, and my minister likes to speak of God as metaphorically “bringing people together to create something” (as in a relationship). I understand this imagery, though I prefer a more prosaic expression of the importance of interpersonal relationships. But unless you define God in a very non-traditional way – as the love between people, for instance – these relationships do not provide anything in the way of evidence.

I have heard numerous apologists, including many of those you mention, claim to find evidence in the natural world or in the cosmos for God. But I have yet to see them present any objective evidence that actually favored the God hypothesis (traditionally defined), and I find no explanatory power in the versions of that hypothesis that are put forward by them. I’m skeptical of their ability to present any.

So, the basic reason that I reject the notion of God is that no one who presents that notion has shown me a way that I can confirm it, or even shown me that they have confirmed it themselves except for subjectively.

I have no problem with subjective notions of God, the Holy, the Sacred or what have you. But it is important to distinguish subjective notions from objective facts…. And I think there is a lot of confusion on that point.

Well, you know there are more facets to human existence than discovering what is objectively true. I am a materialist in the philosophical sense that I do not believe non-naturalistic methods are reliable for discovering objective truth. I’m a UU because I find in it a wonderful synthesis of ethical and aesthetic thinking, and because the community is a home to me. In a modern world where individuals and families are often isolated, I am thankful for a chance to commune with others without having to match epistemology with them.

I’m not sure if you were interested in engaging on the subject of “objective” or “universal” moral values. If you were, I’ll give you my thoughts in brief: those moral values that are “universally shared” among humans a) have adaptive value for humans, b) are shared among other animals, especially primates and other mammals, only to the extent that they have adaptive value and are consistent with the intellectual capacity of those organisms, and are absent in nature apart from their existence as adaptive features of social animals. Therefore, I see them as a product of our evolutionary history. If they were somehow created and meant to embody absolute good and evil, I would expect them to be universally expressed even in non-living matter. Moral values that are not “universally” shared among humans, I think, are best explained as cultural responses to social organization.

Bruno – I think you’re reading me backward. I’m starting with universal values, and observing about them that they have adaptive value for humans, and where the same values seem to be recognized by other animals, that they have adaptive value there. I’m not starting with adaptive value and stating about it that it makes a moral value absolute. So, while rape may, in some cases, carry a net adaptive value for the propagation of certain genes (i.e. it may be a working reproductive strategy), that doesn’t imply it is morally sound. On the other hand, among moral values that are universally recognized among humans, we can find adaptive benefit. In other words, it may be that a moral value so deeply ingrained that all but the mentally diseased carry it can be explained as a product of human evolution – because such a moral value is so highly adaptive that all healthy individual humans are strongly genetically predisposed to a frame of mind that recognizes it. Other moral values – those that are not “universal” – likely have a smaller biological component, and a larger sociological component.

A note I failed to mention before…. I may well be wrong in my thinking on the origin of moral values. If I fail to explain them, that doesn’t automatically make them evidence of God. Unless a coherent case can be made that the God hypothesis falsifiably predicts (not just “explains”) these values, then their status as evidence for God remains very weak. As skeptics are fond of saying – the existence of the “unexplained” is evidence for a lack of explanation – not evidence for a desired explanation.

I’m in no way a platonist. I simply observe, along with Roger that certain moral values are held universally by all humans not afflicted with mental illness, regardless of culture. Where he and I differ is on how this fact can be explained.

It certainly would be nice to have a transcendent judge who is impartial and wise enough to adjudicate moral law. Unfortunately, we must resort to political systems for adjudication in this world.

I do not think that ethics are addressed by Popperian philosophy of science. Falsification comes in not with our mode of ethics, but with proposed explanations for the *origin* of ethics. Roger mentions Christian apologists who say that human recognition ethical principles implies the existence of God (that is, such recognition is evidence for God). I disagree. One reason for my disagreement is that such a proposition isn’t testable. Without being testable their proposed explanation for the cause of ethics has little value as evidence for God.

If I remember correctly, logical positivism holds that only what is directly observed truly exists. My contention is that hypotheses must be testable if we are to determine whether they constitute good explanations for what we observe. I don’t think the two are the same.