Reason Rally: secular "values" and Reason

The "Reason Rally," to take place in Washington, DC on March 24th, is billed as the "largest gathering of the secular movement in world history."  The organizers claim that the rally will "deliver the good news:" that secularism is growing. They go on to state "the event is indeed a celebration of secular values."

Wow.  That's a lot to swallow, considering there are at least three hot-button topics just in that summary: (1) what are secularism's values, (2) is secularism really good news, and (3) does the title "Reason Rally" really apply well to a secularist gathering?

To summarize up front (for those who do not wish to read the long blog post), I contend that (1) secularism has no values (and cannot have values), (2) secularism is, in the long run, really really bad news, and (3) the title "Reason Rally" is actually a misnomer when applied to a secularist gathering; in fact, only in a theistic worldview does reason even make sense.

Before getting into that, though, I would like to point out that there will be a coordinated Christian response at the Reason Rally, and that a book from a Christian perspective, and in direct response to the Reason Rally, will is soon to be published.  (See more details at the website True Reason.)

First, what exactly are secular values, and why should they be celebrated?

I contend that the term "secular values" is actually something of an oxymoron.  If no God exists, and this universe is simply an accident full of only material and material causes, then why would there be immaterial values of any kind?  Furthermore, the most honest atheists, who have actually taken their worldview to its logical conclusion, end up in a very scary place.  Take Princeton Professor Peter Singer's views on abortion and infanticide, for example.  On his secularist view, infanticide is ok, as long as we can justify the fact that the infant has no expressed preference for whether it lives or dies.  As crazy and out there as it seems, this is the logical conclusion of his secularist worldview.

Famous atheist Richard Dawkins mirrors this statement in his book "A Devil's Chaplain," where he explains that the logical conclusion from a naturalistic evolutionary worldview is that humans have no more moral dignity and worth than a chimpanzee (or than any other organism, for that matter).  This is one of the places that I actually applaud Dr Dawkins, for honest reflection and taking his worldview to its logical conclusion.

To be clear, I am definitely not saying that all atheists will live this way.  On the contrary, of course most atheists do not.  But why not?  Because, even though the worldview they have chosen for themselves logically ends in a complete lack of moral values, we humans cannot seem to shake the feeling that such values exist.  So even though cold logic will lead an honest atheist to realize the world and universe have no meaning, and there is no reason to feel like our behavior should be restrained by any sort of moral code, we all know deep down inside that is not true.  Our intuition tells us there must be an objective moral code, even if we wish it not to be the case.

In other words, no atheist actually lives according to his worldview!

This is why you see so many atheists today twisting and turning to justify their worldview in light of its lack of values.  For example, atheist Michael Shermer insists there must be an objective moral code; it just came from evolution.  That way, he can rationalize his atheistic worldview with what he knows to be true: immaterial, objective morality exists. (And by the way, if you dig deep enough into Michael Shermer's view, you do find theistic, transcendent-to-evolution moral language smuggled in.  It's a classic example of an atheist using "borrowed capital" from the Christian worldview in order to get his atheistic worldview make sense.)

On the other hand, I think it's clear that secularism does lead to a degrading of our own personal moral values.  Even though most everyone does strive to be a "good person", if you do not believe anyone or anything is holding you morally accountable, then you can (for convenience, pleasure, financial gain, etc), compromise on what you would originally think is a moral standard.  Pretty soon, after enough compromising (and self-justification), you end up convincing yourself the moral value in question wasn't really part of the moral standard anyway.  I know this from my own life.  I used to be an atheist, and I wasn't a "bad" person back then.  But looking back on it, I can definitely point to a multitude of cases where I hurt others for my own selfish purposes, and I rationalized these instances away for my own self-justification.

For more discussion on this, see my series of posts on Postmodernism, Moral Relativism (here, here, and here), Evolutionary Morals, and Presumptions.

Second, is the fact that secularism is growing actually "good news"?

(And as a side note: did the organizers intentionally use that term, taking a subtle jab at Christianity, given that the word "gospel" literally means "good news?")  As I noted above, secular values, if they are even grounded in anything, actually degenerate into chaos when allowed to take their logical course. Why would the fact that secularism is on the rise actually be good news?

Another way you could ask this is, "What are the consequences of a secular worldview actually dominating society?"  Communist Russia, Hitler's Nazism, and Mao Tse-Tung's regime are all commonly-cited examples of the horrific results of a state-enforced secularism.  I am aware that many atheists will try to twist out of this charge, stating that these regimes did not have atheism as their primary belief system, and that atheism itself is not a belief in something (it is rather a non-belief in something), and thus you can't place the blame on atheism's shoulders. However, it is clear that worldviews have their consequences, and the Reason Rally is a direct (and self-promoted) proof that atheists consider secularism to be a belief system/worldview.

Finally, does secularism really have reason on its side?

While most people's knee-jerk reaction would be, "Of course," if you dig down deeper, you'll find that theism is the only worldview that actually makes rational sense.  Unfortunately, the name "Reason Rally" is a classic example of a loaded term in marketing.  Just by its name, it is implying that only in secularism will you find reason, rationality, and logic.  Why would anyone want to waste their time with religion, which can be characterized as superstition, mythology, and fairy tales?

Clearly, I don't agree with that implied position.  In fact, as I've argued in the past, reason, logic, and the rationality of the universe find a much nicer fit within theism.  To take it one step further, atheism is actually in conflict with rationality, reason, and logic.  Let me provide a brief summary of this for you.

The laws of physics, the laws of logic, and the rationality of the universe are all something that we would expect if the universe were the product of a rational mind (i.e., God).  As far as we can tell, each of these things is an immaterial, transcendent reality, something that makes no sense in a materialistic worldview.  The positive philosophical and scientific evidence for theism is overwhelming, and to deny it is a matter of volition rather than rationality.

Furthermore, the atheistic worldview not only provides a more uncomfortable fit for logic and reason, it actually does violence to our reason.  The secular worldview posits the occurrence of a series of astronomically improbable events to explain the existence of this universe and the fine-tuning necessary for life.  The common explanation for this is that we happen to live in a "very lucky" universe.  But if it is indeed luck, and we explain away every unlikely event (or, to phrase it another way, every event we don't like) as chance, then why in the world would we think any day-to-day events would conform to the common laws of probability?  Why not have extremely unlikely events occurring all the time?  No, the atheist only posits the weird stuff happening when it's convenient.  Furthermore, our own cognitive ability, as the product of blind chance, somehow has rationality and correspondence to reality.  This makes no philosophical sense.

As you can see, secularism definitely has not cornered the market on reason.  On the contrary, only on theism do reason, logic, and rationality exist.  For more on this topic, see my series of posts on logic and theism (here, here, and here) and on our free will decisions (here and here).

On Jerry Coyne's free will stance, part 1

Since Dr. Coyne's article on free will appeared in USA today, I am sure many of people (Christian or otherwise) have written about it.  So naturally, I'll have to throw in my two cents about it.

In this article, Dr. Coyne argues that we do not have free will.  Because we are biological organisms, we are subject to the laws of physics, and thus everything that we do is pre-determined by our molecular make-up and the interactions that we have with the world around us.  We "chose" to eat dessert tonight because of some chemical reaction that occurred in our brain, not because it was really a choice that we made.

Dr. Coyne further grounds his point of view in the fields of psychology and neuroscience, saying that researchers are finding out that "the experience of will itself could be an illusion that evolution has given us". In other words, every time you make a choice, you just think you're making a choice. It is an illusion.

He goes on to talk about what the philosophical repercussions are for us, once we all realize that we do not have free will.  These repercussions include becoming kinder people, since we now know we cannot judge others (eg, criminals really had no choice but to commit those crimes), abandoning our Christian faith (since we really don't put our faith in Jesus Christ; we just had to do it because of our brain chemistry), and "realizing the great wonder and mystery of our evolved brains".

The astute reader will, at this point, realize that Dr. Coyne's stance on free will is entirely self-defeating. Meaning, if his position is correct, then it creates a contradiction within itself.  Or, to put it another way, if Dr. Coyne is right, he's right for the wrong reasons; he's only lucky, and he did not arrive at his conclusion based on his scientific or rational approach.

I promise to defend my statement in a later post, but for now let me just rant.  Dr. Coyne is a respected evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago.  He has a very popular blog called "why evolution is true" and is a prominent speaker and writer.  This is evident in the fact that one of his opinion articles can get published in the USA today.  So my two big questions are (1) why does such a brilliant, esteemed person not realize how philosophically bankrupt his position is, and (2) why does the USA today and other media outlets swallow (hook, line, and sinker as it were) the opinion of someone like Dr. Coyne in a field outside of his own expertise just because he is a professor at a prestigious university?

In regards to question 1, I find it very interesting that he even claims to be in touch with philosophy.  In his article, he says:

The debate about free will, long the purview of philosophers alone, has been given new life by scientists, especially neuroscientists studying how the brain works. And what they're finding supports the idea that free will is a complete illusion.

The issue of whether we have of free will is not an arcane academic debate about philosophy, but a critical question whose answer affects us in many ways: how we assign moral responsibility, how we punish criminals, how we feel about our religion, and, most important, how we see ourselves — as autonomous or automatons.

That just blows my mind.  In essence, he is saying that no matter what debates or critical thinking has happened in the past in philosophy, the incredibly non-quantitative and soft fields of psychology and neuroscience have proven that we don't have free will?  How in the world does a neuroscience experiment prove that logic doesn't work? What I mean is, if the conclusions of the neuroscientists are correct, then they are completely self-contradictory (as I stated above but have not defended; again, please be patient until next time).  Therefore, to adopt the stance that Dr. Coyne is, based on the results of these soft sciences, you must abandon the laws of logic (the very foundations of philosophy and all of reason for that matter)! Very curious indeed.

In regards to question 2, well, I guess this is just another case of what we've been seeing all over the place from the new atheist movement.  Richard Dawkins, with his non-sequitur arguments, Steven Hawking with his grand pronouncements about metaphysics, etc.  It's really difficult to go up against these giants who have very little argument to stand on, but who can completely change the minds of many just based on their credentials alone.  Credentials, I might add, that do not have anything to do with the subject on which they are speaking.  (Yes, I am a hypocrite.  I am not trained in logic or philosophy either.)

But it really just underscores something that has become more and more clear to me as I take a close look at the new atheist movement.  There is absolutely no substance to their arguments.  It is almost all -- to put it less-than-politely -- drivel.  (And by the way, I am not the only one to realize this.  Take a look here.)  Classical philosophers such as Hume and Kant were the real giants in their fields.  If you really want to argue against Christianity, take a look not at the bold pronouncements that biologists make about philosophy and theology, you need to look at the philosophers themselves!  (Again, a hypocrite am I, since I have not bothered to read these either.)

So, in my next post, I do promise to actually defend my take on Dr. Coyne's free will stance.

Evolutionary morals

OK, so maybe very few people really believe in moral relativism.  After all, you can get to some pretty crazy conclusions from it.  So what do the majority of people believe about morals?  Besides those that adopt an absolute moral system (ie, from Christianity and other possibly transcendent sources), many people nowadays will adopt something I call evolutionary morals (for lack of a better term).

Those that claim this point of view will often say that this belief system is different from complete moral relativism, in that their morals are grounded in an objective system: the greater good of humanity.

The belief system goes like this (I think).  Humans evolved as a societal species.  We make relationships with each other, and we make social contracts, etc.  These things were selected for as we evolved. Therefore, evolution has preserved in us a natural tendency to do things that promote the good of the human race as a whole.

In this way, morals develop.  There are things that are definitely bad for the human race, as a whole, such as killing another human without justification.  That's why murder is wrong in almost all societies.  In fact, any moral can be defined this way: as long as it's good for society as a whole, then it's morally right.  Anything that's bad for society is morally wrong.  Thus, an absolute standard exists.

If anyone out there can explain this point of view better, or if you have one that's similar to this but there are important differences, please speak up.

Moral relativism part 3: cultural relativism

The flavor of moral relativism that I was talking about fairly recently had to do with one's own view of morality.  In this view, you chose your own reality, and whatever seemed good to you was indeed good (as long as you didn't hurt someone or impinge on their rights).  I think that's entirely absurd, and I believe many people agree with me.

But what about the claim that our culture defines our morality?

Cultural moral relativism goes like this: whatever we define, as a culture, to be good or bad, that's what's good or bad.  Furthermore, this argument is usually supported by the realization that most things we consider to be bad, as as culture, are things that hurt (and do not benefit) society.  For example, murder is considered bad by society because it's such a detriment to society that we deem it bad.

So cultural moral relativism seems to work for most people.  But does it make sense?

If morality is simply cultural, and there is no absolute standard of morality, then we have no way of judging other cultures.  In other words, on matters where the morality of two cultures differ, who's to say our culture's view of morality is preferred?  If there is another culture out there that has decided that burning women on the funeral pyre of their dead husbands is ok, then who are we to say that's wrong?  If culture decides what's good and bad, then their culture has decided that burning women is good.

What do we do then?

Here's another major issue.  If culture decides what's good or bad, then what room is there for cultural reform?  When women did not have the right to vote, who's to say that's wrong?  Why should I choose to believe that women should have the right to vote if I live in a culture where they don't?  If I did, I would be choosing to believe in something that culture deems morally wrong.

In the 1960's, during the civil rights movement, who is to say that blacks should be treated better?  If culture had already decided that it is ok to treat blacks poorly, how could someone say that's wrong?  As long as that's the cultural view, then isn't that by definition what's good?

OK, one more question.  How is it decided what's accepted culturally?  Do we put it to a vote?  Sometimes, we do.  Take Proposition 8 for example, voted on in California back in 2008, on whether it would be legal for same sex couples to be married.  In that vote, Proposition 8 was upheld, albeit barely, making it illegal for same sex couples to be married.  I knew a lot of people that were outraged by the fact that Prop 8 passed.  But why?  Why should we be angry about that when, as a culture, we decided by majority vote that it is "wrong" for same sex couples to marry?

Presumptions

Before I move on and discuss moral relativism at the cultural level, I briefly wanted to point out something that Michael Shermer (atheist, relativist, and editor of Skeptic's Magazine) said in a debate about moral relativism.  His take is that, even though there is no God, our morals are absolute, handed down to us by evolution.  I definitely disagree; if no God exists, evolution certainly can't hand down to us moral absolutes.

Anyway, in this debate, he and his opponent were discussing the rape example.  He said that the rape would be wrong no matter whether there is a God or not.  I thought that was interesting, because he was presuming there is no God.

He is claiming that there is something deep down inside of us such that we "know" that the rape is wrong. 

THEN he says it would be wrong whether or not there is a God.  Do you see the fallacy here?  His argument is entirely based on the fact that each of us knows it's wrong, so it must be wrong regardless of whether God exists.  What?  That is what's called circular reasoning folks.  Let me step you through the circle.

Presumption: there is no God.  Observation: we all feel that rape is immoral.  Therefore, some sort of moral absolutes exist inside us, even though there is no God.  Conclusion: you don't need God to explain moral absolutes.

Actually, what he's just proved is that you can convince yourself that moral absolutes can exist whether or not you believe in God, which of course has no bearing on the existence of God.

Moral relativism, part 2

Well, last time I wrote here I was talking about moral relativism, and I brought up the idea that you can do whatever you want, as long as you don't either (1) impinge on someone's freedom, and (2) hurt anyone.  I was trying to make the point that there are problems with (1), because freedom could be an absolute standard and because how do you know you "shouldn't" impinge on someone's freedom unless that is given from a higher standard?

But what about hurting someone?

Let's return to the example of the man who raped your little sister.  How do we know it's wrong?  There are two views to this.  First, if there are moral absolutes, then the rape itself is wrong.  No matter who I am, if you ask me if the rape is wrong, no matter what I answer, the rape is still wrong.  (In other words, I could say the rape isn't wrong, and I would be incorrect.)

On the other hand, if you're a relativist, then the rape is no longer wrong.  It is only up to the observer to choose whether it is right or wrong.  If you ask me if it was wrong, then I would say it's wrong, OR I could say it wasn't; in either case, I would be correct.  The rightness or wrongness of the action doesn't have to do with the action, it only has to do with whom your are asking.  No one has a privileged opinion.

Michael Shermer (a moral relativist and founder of Skeptic magazine) would say that we need to ask the girl whether the rape is wrong.  Ok, so let's ask the girl her opinion on whether the rape was wrong.  I have no doubt she'd say yes, it was wrong.  So does that settle it?  She says she was hurt, therefore the rape was wrong?

But if there are no moral absolutes, then again, no one has a privileged opinion.  In other words, we would be just as accurate to ask the rapist whether he thought the rape was wrong.  I'm not a criminal psychologist, but I get the feeling that he'd say it was wrong, too.  But let's just say for the sake of argument that he said it wasn't a wrong thing to do.  Now where do we stand?

Well, we could bring him to court, since the girl or her family would probably press charges.  Then it's up to the jury to decide (based on the evidence at hand) whether the rapist should be punished.  But again, if there are no moral absolutes, then no one has a privileged opinion.  Why should the jury be allowed to decide that it was wrong if we're supposed to be able to decide what is right and wrong for ourselves?  Sure, you could claim the guy hurt the girl, and that's why he should be punished, but what if he says she's lying and that he didn't hurt her?  And why in the world, if there are no moral absolutes, can we say you shouldn't hurt someone?

In summary, if you're a moral relativist, then metaphysically you have no power to stand in judgment over someone who has committed a crime.  The jury cannot decide, the judge cannot decide, the police cannot decide, and the family similarly has no moral highground to stand on to judge this man's actions.

The answer that most people give to this seeming absurdity is that, as a culture, we define our own morality.  So, sure, no moral absolutes exist, but for the good of mankind and the good of the culture, we have decided to enforce some rules, and one of them is you shouldn't rape someone.  That's why a jury of twelve peers should be able to make a decision on this: it's a sufficient cross-section of our society to come together and decide what our culture's point of view is on such a case.

But when you carry that to its logical end, even that doesn't make sense.  More on this later.

Moral relativism

From my last post, I laid out a brief description of postmodernism, as I understand it.  One of the outworkings of postmodernism is this view called moral relativism, which essentially says that no one has a privileged view of morality.  You should do what feels right to you, and that's what's right.

Well, that's clearly not true.   If it were, then what I think is right and what might feel good to me is to go on a shooting spree (as has been done recently and several times in the last couple of decades).  I don't think anyone would agree that the people who committed these terrible acts were well within their moral right.  So, that alone is easy to defeat.

But some would say that you can do whatever feels right to you, as long as you're not hurting others or impinging on their freedom.  OK, that's fine, but the questions I have then are, how do we know (1) what freedom is or what hurting someone else is, and (2) that upholding others' freedom and not hurting them are "good" things?  Those two points might be confusing, so I'll elaborate a bit further.  I'll talk about freedom first because I think it's easier.

In order to make a claim like "you can do whatever you feel is right as long as you don't impinge on someone else's freedom" (note italics), you have to have some absolute standard that tells you what freedom is and why you shouldn't take it away from someone.  Because how can you recognize that someone's freedom has been violated without knowing, inherently and subconsciously and conscience-ly, that such an abstract thing as "freedom" exists?  But most of us understand (or at least think we understand) what freedom is, even if we don't know where it comes from.  But even so, how do we know that freedom should be something that is good?  Maybe we can define freedom without an absolute standard (and that's a big maybe).  But what gives us the right to say that you shouldn't take it away from someone?  Do you see what I'm saying?  The very moral claim that says, "you can do whatever you want except take away someone else's freedom" is making an absolute moral claim regarding taking away someone else's freedom.  So even then, there are moral absolutes.

Here's another.  Justice.  Everyone longs for justice in their heart.  If your little sister got raped, there would be something burning within you, saying the person responsible must be punished.  But why?  If everything's relative, then how can you judge someone else's actions?  Well, most people would answer that the criminal hurt your little sister (to put it lightly).  And that's why there should be justice.  But there we have it again.  Where do we get this abstract standard of justice if no such absolute standard exists?  And even if we did somehow know what justice was, what standard of goodness is telling us that justice ought to be upheld?

Let's take it a step further.  Let's say the rapist went on trial for his actions and was jailed.  Then he could claim that the people jailing him were taking away his freedom, something they should not be allowed to do.  But you could answer, "that's what you get for hurting someone else."  That's justice.  But again, if everything's relative (with the exception being, for this example, that you can't take away someone's freedom), on what moral grounds can you stand while insisting justice be served?  If you have no moral grounds for justice (as the moral relativists say), then the rapist, as he is being jailed, could rightly say that his jailers should then be then jailed because they were taking away his freedom and thus deserve punishment as well.  But then the jailers of the jailers should be jailed, etc.

OK, so that seems absurd, but don't miss my point: if you follow moral relativism to its logical conclusion, then you end up somewhere absurd.  In other words, no one, not even the most die-hard moral relativist, really lives as if everything were relative.  We only appeal to it when it's convenient for us.  We only go to it when we want to justify our actions.  When it comes right down to it, search your heart of hearts: there must be a standard.  I can't even speak of these examples without inherently appealing to a standard.  Everywhere in this post where I said, "should" and "must be" and "ought," I am using the language of moral absolutes.  You can't even talk about these things without borrowing the capital of moral absolutism.

Ok, but then what about hurting someone?  Surely you can say that you shouldn't hurt someone, even in a relativistic world, right?  More on this later.

Postmodernism

I was answering an email question the other day that someone had about postmodernism.  It's an interesting thing, this philosophical (and now cultural) movement of postmodernism.  It's really just a pendulum swing away from what everyone thought in the early 1900's (a philosophical movement interestingly enough called "modernism").

Modernism is essentially scientific positivism.  It had to do with the idea that advances in science and technology would eventually cure all of the world's ills.  We would become advanced enough to the point that pain and suffering would no longer be a problem, and evil and sin would be overcome, just because we'd have enough knowledge to make it happen.

Well, sometime in the mid-1900's, people began to realize that was hogwash.  And that makes sense from the Christian worldview: man is both brilliant and despicable.  It's in our nature.  We're made in the image of God, tarnished by sin.  And that's what we are, so how could knowledge and science and technology erase that?

A quick tangent from my already worn-out tangent on modernism (remember the topic of this post is supposed to be postmodernism).  The Christian worldview is really the only worldview that makes perfect sense out of what has been called for ages "the enigma of man."  Many people (philosophers, writers, etc) down through the ages have wondered whether man was inherently good or evil, and there were brilliant people in both camps.  I think Jung was one of the bigger names in this struggle: he considered man to be "an enigma to himself."  But the Christian worldview really hits the nail on the head, that we are both made in the image of God and have made unto ourselves a sin nature.

Anyway, postmodernism was in part the violent reaction to the failure of modernism.  In postmodernism, nothing is for sure.  You can't know truth, you can't prove anything, you can't even know what I'm saying (because my true intent to tell you things may get lost in translation).  This got extended into two major cultural ideas: (1) there is no absolute truth, so whatever you want to believe is fine; I'll stick with my own beliefs, and (2) there is no absolute morality, so go with whatever "feels" good, and if you do something nice and self-sacrificial for someone else, it's just because it makes you feel good inside to do something nice.

Ugh.  OK, the first point is obviously false when you think about it.  If there is no absolute truth, then the statement "there is no absolute truth" is in and of itself, not absolutely true.  It's self-contradictory.  As a "scientist" (if I may call myself that), that statement makes no sense at all.  If there were no absolute truth, what's the point of empirical investigation (which is what science is)?

The second point (moral relativism) is a bit trickier.  I think it's one of the biggest challenges facing Christianity today (that and the problem of evil).  First of all, I don't believe it's true.  I think it's clear there are absolute moral imperatives.  I also think that if everyone was straight with themselves, they also would realize it's true.  I don't think anyone can really go about their lives as if moral absolutes didn't exist.  We all inherently and subconsciously act as if they did exist.  The problem for atheists and agnostics is, if moral absolutes do exist, then where do they come from?  More on this later.