A Secular Alternative to the Ten Commandments

Here’s a Secular Alternative to the Ten Commandments
Lex Bayer and John Figdor (Time Magazine, Dec. 21, 2014)

“Pics or it didn’t happen,” the mantra of the Snapchat generation, is a simple but profound reflection of how we think. 

The fact that the authors consider this to be a "profound reflection" bodes ill for how the authors think. There are no "pics" for a great many things, including the rest of their article, so they appear willing not only to toss out most of history but also to overlook such things as Photoshop. There are not many "pics" of Hannibal and his elephants; but otoh a local restaurant had "pics" on its walls of white-bearded farmers standing beside ears of corn as tall as they or pumpkins the size of a farm wagon. That is:

• No "pics" but it did happen; and
• "Pics" but it did not happen.

What the slogan does reflect is our tendency to demand evidence only for that of which we are personally incredulous. And of course, to think in slogans.

So here are the Ten Secular Commandments, as detailed in Time, formerly a news magazine.

The Passing of the Age of Reason

Da Man

Recently, on a forum called Quora, TOF was amused to see this topic:  What are the strongest arguments for atheism?

There are actually only two such arguments, both put forth by Thomas Aquinas some 743 years ago.  Each was stated in the form of an actual syllogism, and then answered.  They are:

Objection 1. It seems that God does not exist; because if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. But the word "God" means that He is infinite goodness. If, therefore, God existed, there would be no evil discoverable; but there is evil in the world. Therefore God does not exist.

Videtur quod Deus non sit. Quia si unum contrariorum fuerit infinitum, totaliter destruetur aliud. Sed hoc intelligitur in hoc nomine Deus, scilicet quod sit quoddam bonum infinitum. Si ergo Deus esset, nullum malum inveniretur. Invenitur autem malum in mundo. Ergo Deus non est.

Objection 2. Further, it is superfluous to suppose that what can be accounted for by a few principles has been produced by many. But it seems that everything we see in the world can be accounted for by other principles, supposing God did not exist. For all natural things can be reduced to one principle which is nature; and all voluntary things can be reduced to one principle which is human reason, or will. Therefore there is no need to suppose God's existence.

Praeterea, quod potest compleri per pauciora principia, non fit per plura. Sed videtur quod omnia quae apparent in mundo, possunt compleri per alia principia, supposito quod Deus non sit, quia ea quae sunt naturalia, reducuntur in principium quod est natura; ea vero quae sunt a proposito, reducuntur in principium quod est ratio humana vel voluntas. Nulla igitur necessitas est ponere Deum esse.

These can be summarized as:

1. Life sucks.  Therefore, no God. 
   (Vita sugit. Igitur nullus Deus.)
2. Everything seems to work fine.  Therefore, no God. 
   (Omnia videtur ad bene operandum. Igitur nullus Deus.)

All other arguments are either padding or irrelevant.  So curiosity compelled a glance at this "Quora" site to see what the ingenuity of the Late Modern mind has come up with.  TOF was bemused. 

Fourth Way Corrigan

The well-known science popularizer, Richard Dawkins, once rebutted Aquinas' Fourth Way in an article in the Times (UK).  He first paraphrased Aquinas' argument thusly:

We notice that things in the world differ. There are degrees of, say, goodness or perfection. But we judge these degrees only by comparison with a maximum. Humans can be both good and bad, so the maximum goodness cannot rest in us. Therefore there must be some other maximum to set the standard for perfection, and we call that maximum God.

and then he comments

That's an argument? You might as well say, people vary in smelliness but we can make the comparison only by reference to a perfect maximum of conceivable smelliness. Therefore there must exist a pre-eminently peerless stinker, and we call him God. Or substitute any dimension of comparison you like and derive an equivalently fatuous conclusion.

whereupon Western philosophy crumbles.  What a knockdown!  Astonishingly, no one in history, not even Voltaire, ever noticed this before.  Instead, they sought to rebut at least one of the premises (usually the minor premise).  

Now the Fourth was never TOF's favorite argument, it being rather subtle, and TOF cannot say he follows it.  But let us see what can be made of it. 

Agora, the Gift that Keeps on Giving

Catching up on tabs. 

A schlock movie

A scholarly source,
albeit secondary

Over at Armarium Magnum, an atheist blogger yclept Tim O'Neill, who often takes his fellow atheists to task for being, well, stupid and ignorant about history, returns to the movie Agora. 

Agora was a movie that purported to tell the life and death of Hypatia of Alexandria, and which hit all the expected tropes.  As Marie Dzielka pointed out in her seminal book (entitled, appropriately enough, Hypatia of Alexandria), the poor Neoplatonic philosopher has been roped in as a Symbol for whichever hobby horse the current age was riding.  To Gibbon's generation, she symbolized Classicism and the fine old Greco-Roman civilization.  To 19th centurians like Draper and White, she symbolized Science (vs. Religion).  More recently, she has symbolized Woman (hear her roar).  In each mythos, Hypatia was killed because she was a pagan, because she was a "scientist" [sic], or because she was a woman.  Better yet, because she was a scientific pagan woman! 

Attack of the Brain Atoms!

Once more a public thinker has set forth to prove in public that he has no mind.  The brain atoms inhabiting the vehicle called "Sam Harris" have moved Mr. Harris's fingers to type a blog post yclept: Free Will (And Why You Still Don't Have It) contending that he did not intend to type a blog post, but was caused to do so by a congeries of external and internal stimuli. 

The post is an excerpt and/or digest of a section of the book which the brain atoms, responding to information from the external world, internal states of the body, and the ennoiasphere, entitled The Moral Landscape.  Like Condorcet before him, Sam Harris expects that he can find morality inductively by means of physical science, as if by knowing the mass of an electron he would tell us whether we should off granny for the inheritance.  In the course of this, his brain output replicated the following external stimuli:

Maundering Becomes Elektra

"The physiologist Benjamin Libet famously demonstrated that activity in the brain's motor regions can be detected some 300 milliseconds before a person feels that he has decided to move.  Another lab recently used fMRI data to show that some "conscious" decisions can be predicted up to 10 seconds before they enter awareness (long before the preparatory motor activity detected by Libet). Clearly, findings of this kind are difficult to reconcile with the sense that one is the conscious source of one's actions." 

Actually, findings of this kind are difficult to reconcile with the idea that they are scientific experiments, since they invariably over-interpret the actual empirical observations.  Identifying the "response potential" with the "moment of decision" is to beg the question. 

Obama, Ockham, Wind Turbines, and Sex

Another Milestone Passed!

An anonymous Twitter notes that "Obama has launched more cruise missiles than all other Nobel Peace Prize winners combined."

Arsenic and Old Lace

Does a New Life Form Mean God Is Dead?

The recent NASA announcement of bacteria that use arsenic in place of phosphorous in their DNA chains has prompted the Usual Suspects to attempt a metaphysical conclusion from a tentative derivative measurement.  To wit:

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/12/04/does-a-new-life-form-mean-god-is-dead/?ncid=webmail

"The polite thing to say is that discoveries such as this don't really impeach the credibility of established religion, but in truth of course they really do," David Niose, president of the American Humanist Association (AHA), a leading secularist organization, said of this week's revelations about the microbes discovered in Lake Mono in California.

"The fact that life can spring forth in this way from nature, taken in context with what else we've learned in recent centuries about space and time, surely makes it less plausible that the human animal is the specially favored creation of all-powerful, all-knowing divinity," Niose said.

Why do people who proclaim the superiority of reason do such a persistently poor job of using it?  One expects poor reasoning from Young Earth Creationists, but at least they make no claims to worship at the altar of the cerebral. 

Stop the Presses!

Who Would Have Suspected?

An especially clueless atheist has discovered that a Catholic hospital endorses, well, Catholicism.

In a blog post, he whines: 

I am a strong atheist by definition, and I have a great job and love my profession except I feel completely stifled at work. I work for a private catholic hospital and they REALLY push religion down our throats as well as those that use the facility. There are pamphlets lying around everywhere about coming to christ and how the "good" lord will solve all the problems of the word-including the sick and dying patients. They broadcast a prayer twice a day and each time I hear it I simply become angry.

Among the Skiffoids

This weekend was Philcon.  It was curiously small, and I heard this attributed to the Con Committee not sending out Program Participation invites until three weeks before the Con itself.  In any case, there were very few pro writers.  I saw Bud Sparhawk, Tom Purdom, and Gardner Dozois.  I suppose fantasy writers and gamesters were thick as ticks on a hound dog's back, but on panels I saw they introduced their oeuvre with the names of small publishers.  Some were impressive nonetheless.  A twelve-book series of YA fantasy is no mean accomplishment.  But the SF content seems to be getting thinner each year. 

One fellow had an interesting talk about the Apollo Guidance computer.  He had one, discussed the programs, the primitive nature of the hardware and the architecture lo these many years later. 

My own adventures ran as follows. 

Sometimes, You Wanna Just Have Fun

Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence

A physicist named Victor Stenger seems willing to contribute to the mounting pile of evidence that those trained in the metrical properties of physical bodies can't do metaphysics for dog barf.  We will try to accommodate him.

Yes, it's the auld God-does-not-exist-and-I-can-prove-it foolishness through *Science!* 

Believe it or don't believe it, sez I; but don't believe you don't have to believe it. 

Like many narrowly trained, he extends his own tool kit into domains of discourse for which it is not suited, much like a plumber who comes to counsel your teenager on his anxieties.  In particular, terms are always to be understood in the casual ways in which he understands them.  Dr. Stenger would not tolerate this sort of thing if the subject were physics.  "Dark Matter?  Well, dark means it's not lit up, so if we shine a light on it, we should see it."  This would induce a similar eye-rolling to some of the usages in the essay. 

But in any case, said essay provides a number of tasty tidbits for our intellectual noshing. 

De moralitate atheorum

Elsewhere, the Usual Suspects brought up a perennial question, and it amused me to take the counterarguments and the sed contra from what seem at first unlikely sources.

Question: Whether those who do not believe in God may act morally. 

Objection 1. It would seem not, because  as Jean-Paul Sartre held in "Existentialism is a Humanism, there disappears with God all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that 'the good' exists, that one must be honest or not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men.

Objection 2.  Furthermore, as Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in The_Twilight_of_the_Idols,   "when one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one's hands."

Objection 3. In addition, the atheist philosopher Richard Rorty wrote, in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, "For liberal ironists, there is no answer to the question 'Why not be cruel?' - no noncircular theoretical backup for the belief that cruelty is horrible. ... Anyone who thinks that there are well grounded theoretical answers to this sort of question - algorithms for resolving moral dilemmas of this sort - is still, in his heart, a theologian or metaphysician.  He believes in an order beyond time and change which both determines the point of human existence and establishes a hierarchy of responsibilities." 

Objection 4.  Also Voltaire did not believe in God but wanted his butler to believe because he thought he would then be robbed less. And Rousseau thought that a nation needed a religion if it was to accept laws and policies directed at the long term future. Without religion, people would insist on immediate gain, to their eventual cost. Clearly, they believed that without religion there would be no morality, save among the Enlightened. 

Objection 5. Also Alex Rosenberg, in "The Disenchanted Naturalists Guide to Reality, asserts that naturalism denies the existence of objective moral value, of beliefs and desires, of the self, of linguistic meaning, and indeed of meaning or purpose of any sort. All attempts to evade this conclusion, to reconcile naturalism with our common sense understanding of human life, inevitably fail, and we just have to learn to live with that. A belief in meanings and purposes is what puts us on a “slippery slope” to religion.

On the Contrary, St. Paul writes in Romans 2:11-16, "There is no partiality with God.  All who sin outside the law will also perish without reference to it, and all who sin under the law will be judged in accordance with it.  For it is not those who hear the law who are just in the sight of God; rather, those who observe the law will be justified.  For when the Gentiles who do not have the law by nature observe the prescriptions of the law, they are a law unto themselves...  They show that the demands of the law are written in their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even defend them on the day when, according to my gospel, God will judge people's hidden works through Christ Jesus."