Q&A with Dr Peter Atkins & Dr Jonathan McLatchie

Don't sacrifice your prejudice to defend the Bible

https://randalrauser.com/2020/03/dont-sacrifice-your-conscience-to-defend-your-reading-of-the-bible/

Your visceral response is telling you that that kind of action is wrong, intrinsically wrong.

That's hardly a reliable guide. Amputating a gangrenous limb evokes a visceral response, but it's not telling me that this kind of action is intrinsically wrong. To the contrary, it's intrinsically right. 

It just means an observer can imagine what it would be like to have that done to him. That's a basis for compassion. 

If you agree with Pickett that capital punishment is a brutalizing practice…

There's nothing essentially brutalizing about the practice, although it can be conducted in gratuitously brutal ways.

…and if you agree with that daughter that it just gives you one more dead person

That equivalence is amoral. It obliterates the distinction between innocent death and just deserts. 

Rauser then inveighs about stoning, juvenile delinquents, concluding that:

That suggestion offends me to my core. I hope it does for you as well.

What passes for Rauser's moral core isn't my arbiter for right and wrong. Rauser is oblivious to his progressive social conditioning.

Mr. Merrill is here defending honor killing. It’s the same logic by which a Muslim father will kill his daughter after she defies him by going out with her western boyfriend. In short, it’s the same twisted logic to which blood-spattered murderers appeal when they are led away in handcuffs.

That's a malicious and scurrilous misrepresentation of Merrill's position. An honor killing is where a relative is executed because, in the eyes of the community, what happened to them brought shame on the family or clan. It's not based on anything the relative did wrong. To the contrary, they may be the innocent party. They were wronged. A classic example in Islam is the treatment of rape victims. 

The OT doesn't have honor killings in that sense. Rauser's antipathy towards Biblical revelation is so truculent that he can't bring himself to honestly represent what it says. 

Don’t be like Mr. Merrill. Don’t sacrifice your conscience in your reading of the Bible. Instead, recognize the gift of your God-given moral intuitions and let them offer chastening guides as you wrestle with the Biblical text.

Rauser never allows biblical revelation to form or inform his conscience. Problem is, he has no criterion to distinguish his conscience from social conditioning and cultural relativism. 

As I've said on more than one occasion, it's possible to be both a moral realist and a moral skeptic. We can believe in moral facts, objective moral norms, but be skeptical about our ability to isolate these from the power of social conditioning and cultural relativism. For Christians, divine revelation helps to sort them out. But Rauser doesn't have that winnowing process. It's just his seat-of-the-pants reaction, which just so happens to echo his education and peer group. 

He sacrifices divine revelation to his prejudice rather than sacrificing his prejudice to divine revelation. Rauser constantly labors to strike a balance between atheism and Christianity, and his center of gravity is secular humanism. His position is an unstable compromise between secularism and residual Christianity. It isn't consistently one or the other, which is why it's so hard for him to get others to take his position seriously. He's the atheist's favorite "Christian" because he's a useful tool.  His position is no threat to atheism, but he can be counted on to attack evangelical theology. The contrast between his sympathy for atheism and antipathy towards evangelicalism is striking and stark. 

Paper thin theology

@RandalRauser

There is no inconsistency between atheism and the existence of objective moral values. So Christians who insist that atheism entails moral relativism or, worse, nihilism, are simply mistaken. Atheists may have various accounts. See, for example, the platonism of Erik Wielenberg.

i) To begin with, Rauser acts like this is just a Christian caricature of atheism. But many atheist thinkers admit that atheism is inconsistent with objective moral values. Is Rauser so uninformed that he doesn't know their own side of the argument? 

ii) Then there's his fallacious appeal to "various accounts," including Wielenberg's platonism. But the fact that some atheists subscribe to moral realism fails to demonstrate that atheism is consistent with moral realism. It just shows you what they believe, not that their belief is true. By the same token, the fact that Wielenberg has an argument for secular moral realism fails to demonstrate that atheism is consistent with objective moral values unless his argument is successful. 

Assumption: if life doesn't go on forever, life is absurd. But why think that? If God created us only to live for 70 years and then extinguish, would our existence be absurd? No. So it doesn't follow that finite existence is, of itself, absurd.

Notice that Rauser offers no argument for his contention. Although I don't think immortality is a sufficient condition for human life to be meaningful (important, worthwhile), it is a necessary condition. Something I have argued for elsewhere. 

iii) But also notice, even by his own reckoning, how little his progressive theology contributes to what matters in life. According to him, God is unnecessary to ground moral realism. And immortality is unnecessary for life to be meaningful. So what does is progressive theology offer that atheism does not? On his view, there seems little to lose if God does not exist. Whether progressive theology is true or false makes little if any difference to what ultimately matters. 

It's no wonder that he's so sympathetic to atheism. From his perspective, there's so little at stake if God does or does not exist. It's no wonder that he constantly plays both sides of the fence. 

Rauser spends most of his time attacking conservative theology and conservative ideology. Although he's fairly clear about what his own political beliefs are, he has very little to say about what progressive theology stands for. 

The moral landscape

https://www.proginosko.com/2019/11/craigs-modal-critique-of-harriss-moral-landscape/#more-4039

The psychopath objection

Atheist philosopher Erik Wielenberg is currently the leading exponent of secular moral realism. For the philosophically inclined, here's a takedown of his attack on divine command ethics:

http://www.mandm.org.nz/2019/09/the-psychopath-objection-to-divine-command-theory-another-response-to-erik-wielenberg-part-one.html

http://www.mandm.org.nz/2019/09/the-psychopath-objection-to-divine-command-theory-another-response-to-erik-wielenberg-part-two.html

http://www.mandm.org.nz/2019/10/the-psychopath-objection-to-divine-command-theory-another-response-to-erik-wielenberg-part-three.html

Can God be wrong?

1. The Bible says God cannot lie. Suppose an atheist challenges you: how do you know that's not a lie? How do you know God isn't lying when he says he can't tell a lie?

Likewise, God makes promises to his people: forgiveness and eternal bliss. But the atheist challenges you: how do you know that isn't a lie?

2. This has its pedigree in the Cartesian demon, as well as Steven Law's recent Evil God knockoff. Suppose Christians can't prove it? Suppose we don't know in advance if God is telling the truth? So what? We'll find out. If it's true, then we had everything to gain and nothing to lose. And if it's false, then there's no advantage in being an atheist. An evil God won't reward an atheist. If you're a dutiful devil-worshiper, that doesn't mean the devil will reciprocate your loyalty. 

3. However, let's take this a step further. The Cartesian demon knows the difference between truth and falsehood. Although he's a deceiver, he isn't self-deceived. 

But is it possible for God to be self-deceived? Is it possible for God to be confused? 

This isn't just hypothetical. In open theism, God entertains false beliefs about the future. If you take open theist prooftexts seriously, God has false expectations about the future. Sometimes things turn out contrary to what he anticipated. That's because the God of open theism is dependent on world events for his knowledge of world events. 

4. However, when we push the question to the limit, it raises the issue of what makes something true or false. What is the source and standard for truth and falsehood? Is that independent of God or dependent on God?

There are different kinds of truth: contingent, logical, counterfactual, mathematical, and modal (i.e. possibility, necessity, impossibility) truths. In Calvinism, these can all be grounded in God. Contingent facts refer back to predestination. Counterfactual truths refer back to God's ability to instantiate alternate possibilities. Logical, mathematical, and modal truths inhere in God's mind, aseity, omnipotence, and omniscience. 

Unless truths and truthmakers can exist apart from God, then even if (ex hypothesi) God deludes others, God cannot be self-deluded. So that establishes a floor for skepticism. It can't go all the way down. 

5. Taking it up a level, the question of whether God can deceive may depend on whether divine deception (if that's even possible) is motivated by malice or benevolence. In other words, inseparable from the question of divine goodness. 

And that, in turn, raises a parallel with (4). What makes something good? What is the source and standard of goodness? If good is dependent on God, then there can't be an evil God–unless goodness is an illusion. And it's unclear how goodness could be an illusion. How could evil be the ultimate reality if evil is asymmetrically dependent on good to provide the necessary point of contrast?

There are debates about whether lying is intrinsically wrong. If you think it's intrinsically wrong, then it's impossible for God ever to lie. If you don't think lying is intrinsically wrong, if there are circumstances under which lying is justifiable, then, in principle, God might sometimes lie, but never maliciously. 

Even if you think lying is sometimes justifiable for humans, there's the question of whether the considerations which make it justifiable for humans extend to God, since God is not under the same constraints as humans. But in any case, God cannot lie about his promises to his people because that would be the act of an evil God, a malicious deity. 

Admittedly, all I've done in this little post is to block out the issues and outline some argumentative strategies. It takes a lot of spadework to turn those into philosophically rigorous arguments. That's a research program for Christian philosophers. I will say that Greg Welty and James Anderson are doing yeoman work in this field, with special reference to modal metaphysics. 

Moral without God

Many notable atheists thinkers are avowed moral relativists or nihilists. However, there are atheists, especially pop atheists, who say we can be moral without God. Indeed, we can be more virtuous without God because Christian ethics is so deplorable.

Christian philosophers and apologists usually counter that atheists who say we can be moral miss the point. They concede that people can be moral without believing in God. The point, rather, is that morality can't be justified apart from divine creation and revelation. 

That's true, but it lets atheists off the hook too easily. From a Christian standpoint, the examples of virtuous atheists are typically atheists raised in a culturally Christian nation. Even though they repudiated Christianity, their social mores were conditioned by Christian values. When, however, we look at social ethics in pre-Christian cultures or secular regimes, or the modern Democrat party, we witness massive cruelty. 

Is open-mindedness a virtue?

@SecularOutpost

Theists: when you read something by an atheist (about God's non-existence), do you genuinely try to read with an open mind, or do you read it with an intention of finding ways to refute it?

John Mark N Reynolds

I don’t think one can ready any text or adequately without first trying to agree with it or see/feel the perspective of the writer as charitably as possible.

@SecularOutpost

Fellow atheists: when you read something by a theist (about God's existence), do you genuinely try to read with an open mind, or do you read it with an intention of finding ways to refute it?

Martin Gentles

I look to refute it. But I do the same with naturalistic arguments.

@SecularOutpost

I applaud your consistency.

1. The problem with this comment thread is how it takes a principle with some legitimacy, then overextends it. Open-mindedness can be, and often is, an epistemic virtue, but elevating this to a universal absolute is far too abstract. Part of rationality is having a filter to screen out certain ideas. Is it incumbent on me to read about Ramtha, Raëlians, Dianetics, Tarot cards, Hare Krishnas, or Aleister Crowley with an open mind? Can I not read it adequately unless I try to agree with those examples? 

Consistency is a virtue when treating like things alike. But every idea doesn't merit the same consideration. It's rationally and morally subversive to be in a chronic state of open-mindedness. That's a euphemism for indecision. 

2. Open-mindedness can be a virtue when you study an issue for the first time. But it's not a virtue to be perpetually open-minded. There ought to be a process of elimination. 

3. There's the danger of being prematurely closed-minded. However, even closed-minded people can change their mind. There are people who read the opposing position with the intention of finding ways to refute it, but end up being convinced by what they read. 

4. Suppose, for argument's sake, that atheism appears to be true. But even on that hypothetical, my impression might be mistaken. And if, in addition, I conclude that atheism leads to moral, existential, and/or epistemic nihilism, then I'd be justified in discounting atheism. Although I perceive it to be true, open-mindedness includes the possibility that I might be wrong. And when you combine that with the radically skeptical consequences of atheism for meaning, morality, and reason, a closed-minded attitude towards atheism is not only warranted but necessary.  

5. A Christian can be critical of bad arguments for Christianity. We can be open-minded in that respect. 

Stain remover for bootlickers

I wish Christians would stop saying that atheism entails the rejection of objective moral value. It entails the rejection of God. But non-theistic theories of objective moral value (at least qua the theism of Judaism/Christianity/Islam) have been around since the ancient Greeks.

— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) July 7, 2019

Rauser is such a bootlicker. His tongue is black and brown from shoe polish.

Yes, there are secular theories of moral realism. That doesn't mean they are successful. 

Varieties of nihilism

There are different kinds of nihilism. Not coincidentally, these are all associated with atheism (or naturalism, to be pedantic). 

Don't imagine this is a merely academic discussion. These ideas catch on. They translate into law and public policy, when secular progressives become politically dominant. 

I'll be quoting verbatim from scholarly resources. In some cases the writer may disagree with the position he summarizes.  But these are philosophical definitions. It's not something I made up. 

Moral nihilism

A broader definition of “nihilism” would be “the view that there are no moral facts.” “Moral nihilism” is also often associated—though somewhat vaguely—with thoughts about how we should act in the more everyday sphere: as advocating a policy of “anything goes,” as holding that with the removal of the moral framework restrictions on our behavior are lifted. It is true that if the error theorist is correct then there are no moral restrictions on our behavior...Camus writes: “If one believes in nothing, if nothing makes sense, if we can assert no value whatsoever, everything is permissible and nothing is important.” And Sartre declared that “everything is permissible if God does not exist, and as a result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to” (1945/1973). Richard Joyce, “Nihilism,” International Encyclopedia of Ethics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) 

Existential nihilism

This nihilism is associated with the idea that “life has no meaning or purpose”—a realization that may sometimes lead to a loss of motivation and even depression and despair. Existential nihilism crystallized as an intellectual movement in France in the post-war period, associated especially with the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. For Camus, the absurdity of the human predicament emerges from the tension between our realization that we live in a purposeless and indifferent universe and our ceaseless propensity to continue as if our lives and decisions were meaningful. Richard Joyce, “Nihilism,” International Encyclopedia of Ethics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).

One straightforward rationale for nihilism is the combination of supernaturalism about what makes life meaningful and atheism about whether God exists. If you believe that God or a soul is necessary for meaning in life, and if you believe that neither exists, then you are a nihilist, someone who denies that life has meaning. Albert Camus is famous for expressing this kind of perspective, suggesting that the lack of an afterlife and of a rational, divinely ordered universe undercuts the possibility of meaning (Camus 1955; cf. Ecclesiastes).

We have a presumptive duty to desist from bringing into existence new members of species that cause vast amounts of harm. Extensive evidence is provided to show that human nature has a dark side that leads humans to cause vast amounts of pain, suffering, and death to other humans and to non-human animals. Some of this harm is mediated by destruction of the environment. The resultant presumptive duty we have not to create new humans is very rarely if ever defeated. Not all misanthropy is about humans’ moral failings. David Benatar, "The Misanthropic Argument for Anti-natalism," S. Hannan, S. Brennan, & R. Vernon, eds. Permissible Progeny?: The Morality of Procreation and Parenting (Oxford 2015), chap. 1. 

Another fresh argument for nihilism is forthcoming from certain defenses of anti-natalism, the view that it is immoral to bring new people into existence because doing so would be a harm to them. There are now a variety of rationales for anti-natalism, but most relevant to debates about whether life is meaningful is probably the following argument from David Benatar (2006, 18–59). 

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/life-meaning/#Nih

As an evaluative view in the philosophy of life, nihilism maintains that no lives are, all things considered, worth living. Prominent defenders of the view hold that, even so, it can be all-things-considered better for us to continue living than for us to cease living, thus endorsing a ‘soft’ nihilism that appears more palatable than its ‘hard’ counterpart. In support of an intuitive assumption about what nihilism implies, I argue that soft nihilism is incoherent. David Matheson, "The incoherence of soft nihilism," Think 16 (47):127-135 (2017).

Epistemic nihilism

Epistemic antirealism/nihilism, as it is termed, is committed to the claim that there are no epistemic facts. Terence Cuneo, The Normative Web: An Argument for Moral Realism (Oxford 2007), chap. 4. Cf. Allan Hazlett "Anti-Realism about Epistemic Normativity," A Luxury of the Understanding: On the Value of True Belief (Oxford 2013), chap. 9; Alvin Plantinga, "The Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism," Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford 2011), chap. 10. 

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/#SKE

Godless Normative Realism in review

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/faithandphilosophy/vol33/iss2/10/

Antisocial atheism

Increasingly and predictably, secular progressives champion abortion, infanticide, eugenics, and euthanasia. One problem (among many) with this trajectory is that it's antisocial. Human existence requires a viable social life because we are social creatures dependent on other humans to survive and thrive at every stage of life. A social philosophy in which no one should ever have to help anyone else, no one should be inconvenienced by anyone else, becomes unlivable for everyone. Social life requires an element of self-sacrifice. 

There's a certain logic to the antisocial outlook of secular progressivism: if this life is all there is, then there are no ultimate compensations for self-denial. It's now or never. That, however, demonstrates how unlivable atheism is, if you try to be a consistent atheist. 

Infidels sometimes say things they don't really believe. They say it because they think they can get away with it. But if their brazen statements were put to the test, they might back down.

One of the challenges of discussing social ethics at this stage of the culture wars is lack of common ground. There's almost nothing too horrific that secular progressives won't celebrate. But even in that regard it can be useful to illustrate how far they are prepared to go. 

Let's some hypothetical examples of involuntary duties.  That's a limiting case of social ethics. For many secular progressives, the idea of involuntary duties is oxymoronic. To be obligatory, you must consent. Although my examples are hypothetical, they are realistic, too. Situations like that happen with some frequency. In addition, there are movies on themes like this, viz. Dominick and Eugene, The Last Picture Show.

Suppose my brother is autistic. He's intelligent in surprising ways, but he'll never be able to live on his own. Should he live with me? He can continue to live with our parents, but the day will come when they are too elderly to look out for him. So I'm the fallback. 

Wouldn't even have to be my brother. Suppose he's a neighborhood boy. We're about the same age. Grew up together. Other kids pick on him. Play cruel tricks. His parents are embarrassed by him. I'm his only friend. 

To vary the example, suppose my brother and I are in our upper teens. We both have plans for the future. Nothing special. Get married. Have kids.

Then my brother has a sporting accident that leaves him in a wheelchair. Due to technology, he could live on his own. Be independent. 

However, mundane tasks that used to be simple and effortless are now a time-consuming chore. And everything is like that. It's so much easier if he has me to help him out. Easier for him–not for me.

Due to the accident, his friends drifted away because he slows them down. That makes him socially isolated. If he lives with me, he has companionship as well as assistance. 

But if he lives with me, that may curtail my marital opportunities. How many women want a live-in autistic or quadriplegic brother-in-law, even if for altruistic reasons? If I put his interests ahead of my own, I may be a childless bachelor all my life. In secular ethics there's an insoluble tension between altruism and self-interest when these conflict–which inevitably happens.

Explaining evil, part 4

1. There's not much to say about Davis's contribution. He recycles cliche objections to Reformed "determinism". His objections do nothing to advance the argument. They don't interact with the burgeoning philosophical literature. 

2. As a freewill theist, he thinks moral evil originates in the libertarian freedom of the creature. But even if we grant such freedom for the sake of argument, I don't think that gets the job done.

For one thing, that only creates the potential to do wrong. But if human agents are truly free to choose between good and evil, what accounts for the universality of evil? If agents are free to either do the right thing or the wrong thing, then they are free to do the right thing all the time. So why aren't some free agents uniformly good? 

3. Moreover, the capacity to do evil doesn't make evil appealing. Why would a free agent wish to commit evil? What makes evil attractive?

Of course, some vices, like sexual promiscuity, are naturally enticing. But to play devil's advocate, how is it fair for us to have these natural urges, then be blamed when we succumb to temptation? Isn't that like entrapment? It's hard to take his position seriously. 

4. At one point he says:

What I'm talking about is our being aware that we could have decided to act on those different reasons under the same causes on one and the same occasion (43).

i) Are we in fact aware that we could have decided to act on those different reasons under the same causes on one and the same occasion? Does he think our ability to imagine hypothetical courses of action means we could just as well have taken a different fork in the road? One problem with that inference is that it's untested and untestable. We never step into the time machine, go back, and make a different choice.

ii) In addition, the ability to imagine hypothetical courses of action doesn't mean those are realistic. Indeed, many people have goals that turn out to be unattainable. There were so many variables they couldn't foresee. Variables beyond their control. So contemplating alternate courses of action can be deceptive. There are many twists and turns that shortsighted, simple-minded creatures like ourselves can't begin to anticipate or navigate. Like a chess game, we can only think a few moves deep (at best). 

iii) Finally, Calvinism doesn't deny possible worlds. In cases where your hypothetical is coherent, there is a possible world corresponding to that fork in the road. But that doesn't mean the human agent has the ability to open different doors (i.e. instantiate alternate possibilities). Rather, from a Reformed perspective, that is God's prerogative. 

Explaining evil, part 3

Wielenberg is a secular ethicist who labors to be a moral realist. 

Part of the answer…is that for something to be evil is for there to be a reason to avoid or eliminate a thing (123).

But that's indiscriminate since what people take to be something to avoid or eliminate is so variable from one person to the next.  

Whether a person is happy depends on the attitude of someone–namely, the person himself–but it does not depend upon the attitudes of observers towards him (125).

As social creatures, our happiness is typically dependent on the attitudes of others.  

Like Chalmers, I endorse the existence of nonphysical properties (128). 

i) Isn't Chalmers a panpsychic? So that's an appeal to mental properties. But Wielenberg's position seems to be moral platonism rather than panpsychism. 

ii) Assuming he's a Platonist, he must believe basic ethical facts are abstract objects They exist even if there was no universe. 

iii) If so, what are they? They're not physical or mental properties. So they have no analogy in human experience. 

iv) How are they instantiated? What's the mechanism? His nonphysical properties aren't agents and his evolutionary physical processes aren't agents. 

v) Assuming these impersonal immaterial properties exist, how do they obligate human conduct? They didn't create us. They aren't intelligent entities. They are indifferent to human flourishing. Why are we duty-bound to conform our behavior to these impersonal properties? 

vi) If human beings are merely physical organisms, how do we gain access to nonempirical moral facts? How do unintelligent evolutionary processes tap into immaterial moral facts in order to instill them in human beings? It can't be a physical causal connection if one relatum of the cause/effect relation is immaterial. 

Do We Need God to be Good?

https://www.proginosko.com/2018/11/do-we-need-god-to-be-good/

The Euthyphro Dilemma - Matt Flannagan vs Jason Thibodeau

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_M19Rv52Og&feature=youtu.be

Lustful monkeys with big brains

As I've probably said on more than one occasion, conservative candidates are at a disadvantage in public debates. Democrats and/or secular progressives are uninhibited in saying whatever they think. They express the most outlandish views with impunity. By contrast, conservative candidates have to project sensitivity. To mix metaphors, they're constantly pulling their punches and walking on eggshells. They're afraid to say what needs to be said. They're afraid to challenge liberal assumptions. Liberals win by stipulating outlandish claims as indisputable, then proceeding to build on that false premise. 

I don't necessarily blame conservative candidates for being so squeamish, because many voters are irrational. It's a tough environment to navigate. That's why those of us who aren't candidates need to challenge Democrats and/or secular progressives to be consistent.

A Supreme Court nominee has been accused of attempted rape when he was 17. How should that be morally assessed? That depends in large part on our moral frame of reference. Is that Christian ethics or secular ethics? Before I get to that I'd like to address two preliminary issues: 

1. What's the difference between rape and attempted rape? Attempted rape is ambiguous. Consider two different scenarios:

i) A male intends to have sexual intercourse with a female against her will. He initiates the action, but for whatever reason, is unable to carry it through. 

ii) A male at a drinking party gets sexually aggressive with a female to test her sexual receptivity. If she resists, he will back down.

In the case of (i), he was willing but unable. In the case of (ii), he was able but unwilling. In the case of (i), he tried and failed. In the case of (ii), he was in a position to physically overpower her, but relented. In the case of (ii), the overture was unsolicited, but whether he carried through with it was contingent on her consent. He didn't intend to have sexual intercourse against her will. 

Are both these actions attempted rape? Is (ii) sexual assult or aggressive unsuccessful seduction? Is (i) failed rape while (ii) is failed seduction? 

Up to a point, this is reversible. At a drinking party, a female might get sexually aggressive with a male to test his sexual receptivity. She can't physically overpower him, but her overture is unsolicited. She "forces" herself on him in the sense of forcing the issue, pressuring him to make a choice. Is that sexual assault or aggressive unsuccessful seduction? 

Men can be the object of rape. That's common in prison. 

It's possible for a woman to roofie a guy and perform sexual actions on him. Is that rape? 

It's possible for a woman to sodomize a man if she incapacitates him and uses something like a mop handle. That's rape.  

2. Another issue is the role of alcohol in relation to rape or attempted rape. There's a sense in which intoxication induces a state of diminished responsibility. And if both male and female are drunk, that lowers or erases the threshold for consent. Indeed, that's one reason some people get drunk in the first place: to remove sexual inhibitions.

That said, an agent can be morally responsible for inducing a state of diminished responsibility. If I drive to a tavern, I intend to drive back. If I get drunk, I'm making a choice, at the time I'm sober, which will severely impair my perception and reflexes. If I kill a cyclist or pedestrian when I'm under the influence, I'm culpable for inducing that condition. 

However, there's a sense in which driving drunk is more brazen, more premeditated, than getting drunk at a party–where the objective is to create open up certain possibilities. 

Moving along to the main point: 

3. From a Christian standpoint, humans have animal bodies, albeit bodies designed for human minds. We have the ability to inflict physical or emotional harm on others. But we're supposed to exercise self-restraint out of consideration for the welfare of others. 

In addition, standard Christian ethics regards fornication as a sin. That rules out rape, attempted rape, and seduction. Consensual as well as nonconsensual premarital sex. Not to mention extramarital sex. 

Of course, secular progressives despise Christian ethics in general and Christian sexual ethics in particular. So what's their alternative? 

4. From a secular standpoint, humans are libidinous monkeys with big brains. There are, moreover, evolutionary theories of rape. Combined with evolutionary ethics, what's the secular basis to condemn rape or attempted rape? 

One response is that sometimes we have a duty to resist our natural impulses. But there are problems with that response:

i) How many times have you seen atheists say we don't need God to be moral because evolution can account for our moral instincts? But how can they simultaneously insist that we ought to suppress our evolutionary mores? Is evolutionary psychology a reliable source of morality or not? 

ii) What's the standard an atheist relies on to differentiate good evolutionary mores from bad evolutionary mores? 

5. Since sexual performance declines with age, isn't it reasonable, from a secular standpoint, for men to make the most of their short-lived sexual prime? Why should they turn down opportunities when their opportunities will diminish with the passage of time? 

6. Sodomy and sadomasochism are more damaging than attempted rape. If attempted rape is so traumatic to the victim as to disqualify a candidate, why not sodomy or sadomasochism? 

Dismal prospects for secular ethics

http://www.mandm.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Flannagan-Robust-Ethics-PC-19-2-1.pdf

Is secular moral realism defensible?

http://www.randyeverist.com/2018/02/review-of-craig-wielenberg-debate-on.html

Disenchanted naturalism

The Disenchanted Naturalist’s Guide to Reality

by Alex Rosenberg

This is a précis of an argument that naturalism forces upon us a very disillusioned “take” on reality. It is one that most naturalists have sought to avoid, or at least qualify, reinterpret, or recast to avoid its harshest conclusions about the meaning of life, the nature of morality, the significance of our consciousness self-awareness, and the limits of human self-understanding. This is a vast agenda and it’s presumptuous to address it even in a format 30 times longer than this one. My excuse is that I stand on the shoulders of giants: the many heroic naturalists who have tried vainly, I think, to find a more hopeful version of naturalism than this one.

We all lie awake some nights asking questions about the universe, its meaning, our place in it, the meaning of life, and our lives, who we are, what we should do, as well as questions about god, free will, morality, mortality, the mind, emotions, love. These worries are a luxury compared to the ones most people on Earth address. But they are persistent. And yet they all have simple answers, ones we can pretty well read off from science. 

Most scientists are reluctant to admit science’s answers to the persistent questions are obvious. There are more than enough reasons they are reluctant to do so. The best reason is that the answers to the persistent questions are not what people want to hear, and the bad news may lead them to kill the messenger—scientific research. It’s people who pay for  science through their support of the NIH, the NSF, and the universities where most  research happens. So, scientists have an incentive to cover up.

Even if scientists came clean however, most people wouldn’t accept the answers science gives to the persistent questions because they can’t understand the answers. The reason is that the answers don’t come in the form of stories with plots. What science has discovered about reality can’t be packaged into whodunit narratives about motives and actions. The human mind is the product of a long process of selection for being able to scope out other people’s motives. The way nature solved the problem of endowing us with that ability is by making us conspiracy theorists—we see motives everywhere in nature, and our curiosity is only satisfied when we learn the “meaning” of things—whose purposes they serve. The fundamental laws of nature are mostly timeless mathematical truths that work just as well backwards as forward, and in which purposes have no role. That’s why most people have a hard time wrapping their minds around physics or chemistry. It’s why science writers are always advised to get the science across to people by telling a story, and why it never really works. Science’s laws and theories just don’t come in stories with surprising starts, exciting middles and satisfying dénouements. That makes them hard to remember and hard to understand. Our demand for plotted narratives is the greatest obstacle to getting a grip on reality. It’s also what greases the skids down the slippery slope to religion’s “greatest story ever told.” Scientism helps us see how mistaken the demand for stories instead of theories really is.

But the process that Darwin discovered–random, or rather blind variation, and natural selection, or rather passive environmental filtration–does all the work of explaining the means/ends economy of biological nature that shouts out ‘purpose’ or ‘design’ at us. What Darwin showed was that all of the beautiful suitability of living things to their environment, every case of fit between organism and niche, and all of the intricate meshing of parts into wholes, is just the result of blind causal processes. It’s all just the foresightless play of fermions and bosons producing, in us conspiracy-theorists, the illusion of purpose.

If there is no purpose to life in general, biological or human for that matter, the question arises whether there is meaning in our individual lives, and if it is not there already, whether we can put it there. One source of meaning on which many have relied is the intrinsic value, in particular the moral value, of human life. People have also sought moral rules, codes, principles which are supposed to distinguish us from merely biological critters whose lives lack (as much) meaning or value (as ours). Besides morality as a source of meaning, value, or purpose, people have looked to consciousness, introspection, self-knowledge as a source of insight into what makes us more than the merely physical facts about us. Scientism must reject all of these straws that people have grasped, and it’s not hard to show why. Science has to be nihilistic about ethics and morality.

There is no room in a world where all the facts are fixed by physical facts for a set of free floating independently existing norms or values (or facts about them) that humans are uniquely equipped to discern and act upon. So, if scientism is to ground the core morality that every one (save some psychopaths and sociopaths) endorses, as the right morality, it’s going to face a serious explanatory problem. The only way all or most normal humans could have come to share a core morality is through selection on alternative moral codes or systems, a process that resulted in just one winning the evolutionary struggle and becoming “fixed” in the population. 

This nihilistic blow is cushioned by the realization that Darwinian processes operating on our forbears in the main selected for niceness! The core morality of cooperation, reciprocity and even altruism that was selected for in the environment of hunter-gatherers and early agrarians, continues to dominate our lives and social institutions. We may hope the environment of modern humans has not become different enough eventually to select against niceness. But we can’t invest our moral core with more meaning than this: it was a convenience, not for us as individuals, but for our genes. There is no meaning to be found in that conclusion.

We have to add to these illusions of the will and sensory experience, robust experimental results which reveal that we actually navigate the world looking through the rear-view mirror! We don’t even see what is in front of our eyes, but continually make guesses about it based on what has worked out in our individual and evolutionary past. Discovering the illusion that we are looking through the windshield in stead of the rear view mirror, along with so much more that neuroscience is uncovering about the brain,  reveals that the mind is no more a purpose-driven system than anything else in nature. 

Perhaps the most profound illusion introspection foists on us is the notion that our thoughts are actually recorded anywhere in the brain at all in the form introspection reports. This has to be the profoundest illusion of all, because neuroscience has been able to show that networks of human brain cells are no more capable of representing facts about the world the way conscious introspection reports than are the neural ganglia of sea slugs!

It’s just a useful heuristic device, one with only a highly imperfect grip on what is going on in thought. Consequently, there is no point asking for the real, the true, the actual meaning of a work of art, or the meaning of an agent’s act, still less the meaning of a historical event or epoch. The demand of the interpretive disciplines, that we account for ideas and artifacts, actions and events, in terms of their meanings, is part of the insatiable hunger for stories with plots, narratives, and whodunits that human kind have insisted on since natural selection made us into conspiracy-theorists a half a million years ago or so.

Nevertheless, if the mind is the brain (and scientism can’t allow that it is anything else), we have to stop taking consciousness seriously as a source of knowledge or understanding about the mind, or the behavior the brain produces. And we have to stop taking our selves seriously too. We have to realize that there is no self, soul or enduring agent, no subject of the first-person pronoun, tracking its interior life while it also tracks much of what is going on around us. This self cannot be the whole body, or its brain, and there is no part of either that qualifies for being the self by way of numerical-identity over time. 

https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/on-the-human/2009/11/the-disenchanted-naturalists-guide-to-reality/

i) This is a lot more candid than the usual atheist propaganda. Indeed, Rosenberg says right out of the gate that most of his fellow-atheists are lowballing the nihilistic implications of atheism.

ii) Rosenberg illustrates the predicament of an atheist who strives to consistently develop an inconsistent paradigm. Naturalism suffers from internal contradictions, so that when you try to take it to a logical extreme, it generates head-on collisions. For instance, Rosenberg confidently appeals to a scientific description of reality. An objective, third-person description of what the world is really like. 

Yet he says minds are reducible to brains, and brains can't represent facts about the world. But scientific knowledge relies on the understanding of human observers! 

But that contradiction is unresolvable within his naturalistic paradigm. You can only relieve the tension by scrapping the paradigm. 

iii) He says:

This nihilistic blow is cushioned by the realization that Darwinian processes operating on our forbears in the main selected for niceness! The core morality of cooperation, reciprocity and even altruism.

According to him, evolutionary psychology has brainwashed us to practice cooperation, reciprocity and even altruism. But even on its own grounds, the obvious problem with that "cushion" is that brainwashing is only effective if you don't know you've been brainwashed. He himself is pulling back to explain how moral instincts are an illusion. But once you see through the programming, it no longer controls you. Agents must remain oblivious to their conditioning for that to pull the wool over their eyes. 

In the past, there were infidels who personally ridiculed and repudiated Christianity, yet they still promoted civil religion to keep the unwashed masses subservient to the ruling class. They felt the rank-and-file needed a religion of carrots and sticks to keep them from getting out of hand. Infidels didn't subscribe to the social mores of civil religion, but they feared the rabble.  

Ironically, Rosenberg is saying evolutionary psychology performs the same function as civil religion. The intelligentsia know it's a ruse, but it serves their purpose to keep the hoi polloi in the dark. Too much nihilism is a dangerous thing! That's a trade secret of the secular illuminati.