Sam Harris destroys Catholicism

[mistermack]

Psychoserenity, there is a right and wrong, if you have an OBJECTIVE in mind. But if you have no aim or purpose AT ALL, then nothing is right or wrong. That's why morals are a product of living minds, and don't exist independently of those minds.
That makes subjective morality, not objective.

What morals can exist, independent of conscious minds?

Like I said, UNIVERSAL moral values doesn't equal objective. It just means that we all share very similar minds, due to our near-identical dna.

[PsychoSerenity]

What morals can exist, independent of conscious minds?

But this universe does have conscious minds.

Like I said, UNIVERSAL moral values doesn't equal objective.

And in this case, I don't understand what you mean by objective.

[Robert_S]

If the existence of beings capable of suffering and happiness coupled with the power of those beings to knowingly influence each other's levels of suffering and happiness exist, then ethical behavior shouldn't be that fucking hard to figure out most of the time as long as you don't posit some stupid and immature god that we're supposed to please.

[mistermack]

What morals can exist, independent of conscious minds?

But this universe does have conscious minds.

Like I said, UNIVERSAL moral values doesn't equal objective.

And in this case, I don't understand what you mean by objective.

I clicked onto the link for the longer version of that debate.
William Lane-Craig's argument is that there ARE objective moral values, which don't just result from the evolution of intelligent minds, like ours. He says that they exist anyway, on their own, independent of any user. And he argues that this proves the existence of a God, because OBJECTIVE moral values can't just exist in a vacuum.

I totally disagree that moral values can exist, without our human minds, or something similar.
Sam Harris was also saying that objective moral values do exist, but he was really woolly on the subject.
He was really saying that so many of us share certain moral values, that that makes them objective in some way. My argument is that that is just a result of our common genome.

ALL living things have a purpose, to continue the line. That's a SUBJECTIVE purpose. The Moon doesn't care if I live or die, it's only me, and other's like me, who would care.

So I'm arguing that the supposedly objective moral values are actually subjective, and only exist as a consequence of our evolution, or of the evolution of other animals with some form of intelligence. They only matter to us, and creatures that share similar objectives.

[amused]

When questioned about where to find the statement of their God's morality, most theists will point to their so-called holy writs. For Christians, that's the Bible. To those of us who do not consider any 'holy writ' as being divinely authored or inspired, said writings are clearly human works. Which is to say, the very human authors placed into their writings their own concepts of morality. Then, later, religion saw a good idea and fabricated the 'holy source' to bestow divine authority on human concepts. Not a bad strategy at a time when most humans were three hairs away from being baboons.

What Sam Harris and the other Four Horsemen are trying to do is to remove the middle man of religion from our concepts of morality. Anyone capable of compassion and empathy (Do unto others...) will agree that suffering is worse than not suffering. We can, and have always, recognize(d) what is moral and what is not. It doesn't matter if it's considered objective or subjective, all that matters is that we take direct ownership of our own concepts of morality without the need to prop them up by ascribing our own ideals to imaginary gods. And, not justifying our worst behavior by claiming it to be a god's will.

[mistermack]

Yeh, I was really just trying to explain William Lane-Craig's argument.
It's something he does again and again. He claims that some things exist independently of physical things, and are therefore evidence of God's existence.

This morality argument is one he repeats every time he gives a speech.
I don't think Harris was much interested in rebutting it, rather than giving his own thoughts.
In his book, he did claim that some morality is Objective, because it applies to just about any living creature. Lane Craig was just seizing on the word objective, and saying that that indicates the existence of a Supernatural morality-giver.

But he was just deliberately ignoring the fact that Harris didn't mean objective in the same way that HE does.

[Robert_S]

Does he argue that because we can try to imagine things from an objective or "God's eye view" there must be some entity sitting there looking out from that point of view?

[mistermack]

Does he argue that because we can try to imagine things from an objective or "God's eye view" there must be some entity sitting there looking out from that point of view?

No, not that I've noticed. He just says that if there is a basic morality that exists by necessity, not just invented by humans, then it must be evidence of a divine morality giver. Obviously he puts it better than that, but that's essentially what he claims.

He tries to do the same with numbers in other speeches. He claims that certain numbers exist, independently of anything physical, and that that is proof that REAL non physical things can exist, and have an effect on the physical world.
Like god.

It's usually pretty much the same speech every time. He has worked hard on it, and he repeats it parrot-fashion at every venue.
He's on youtube in loads of clips, making the same arguments over and over.
Here's the link of the extended debate again, that Tero gave earlier :
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqaHXKLR ... e=youtu.be[/youtube]

[Xamonas Chegwé]

I don't think the Pope needs any help.

Rubbish! Have you seen the size of his house? The dusting alone would take him a year!

[Robert_S]

I might give the whole thing a listen. This guy's annoying, but an order of magnitude more listenable than D'souza.

[Audley Strange]

Well, I'm not a fan of Harris and I find his increasing idea that we can take a scientific view of morality an intensely foolish and potentially disastrous notion. Common behavioural traits of a species are not evidence of morality any more than red hair is evidence of demonic possession. Morality is an invention that makes claims about the worth and value of those behaviours essentially emphasising them not as behaviours but as choices. However the values are also inventions and as utterly arbitrary as correct table manners.

I'd suggest that religion was the first attempt at creating a society with such common values and thus invented the concept of morality as behavioural control. You can't really have a culture on the go if the hot new thing is for guys to kick their pregnant wives off of cliff edges, even if everyone agrees it's fucking great. You can't really make them stop without making them see it being "wrong" best way to do that is to differentiate between good and evil and claim that their is a eternal judge waiting to fuck you over if you don't follow the rules. Now we have armed men in blue uniforms, but the concept is much the same.

Certainly most of the earliest surviving texts are religious in nature. There must have been a vital reason for them to consider them so noteworthy.

Also how is the idea of being born with innate moral sense any different from being born with original sin? Seems to me one is making a positive and the other a negative claim about the same thing that we are good or evil.

I think it's all horseshit.

A huge percentage of people on this planet are part of a single moral system which tells them that things are moral which to those outside it seem the complete opposite. However it is, from their point of view, morally correct to deny same sex partners equal rights or to injure children's genitalia, or to blow up abortion hospitals or bus loads of hebrew scholars.
This is a system of morality. You might disagree with it as being moral. I don't, I think it is exactly what morality is. An excuse to laud or revile any behaviour arbitrarily.

[Hermit]

Sam Harris DID do a good job in that clip, but in the bigger film, he was a lot weaker.

And it's because he is pushing a fuzzy claim. That there IS some kind of OBJECTIVE morality.
When there isn't. Craig had an easy job rebutting it, because Craig was right.

There is no such thing as objective morality.
There is a fairly widespread moral consensus, most humans agree on the basics. But that's not an OBJECTIVE morality, it's just loads of humans thinking and feeling the same way.
It's subjective, even if five billion people agree. We all have nearly identical dna, so we mostly have similar morals.

Harris is very good, but he was flogging a dead horse, in the main debate.

Quite so. I am not going to watch two hours worth of the debate, but here is a TED talk Harris gave a couple of years ago, in which he advanced the view that "science can answer moral questions". You can read the transcript of it here. In his speech Harris claims that

• it's often said that science cannot give us a foundation for morality and human values, because science deals with facts, and facts and values seem to belong to different spheres. It's often thought that there's no description of the way the world is that can tell us how the world ought to be. But I think this is quite clearly untrue. Values are a certain kind of fact. They are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.

He then promptly fails to explain how "the well-being of conscious creatures" can be regarded as an objective value. Couldn't it equally be "the survival of the species", in which case we ought to live like ants where the well-being for an individual is not a factor at all?

Ignoring that failure, and accepting what he says to be true for the sake of the argument, there are more difficulties. There are several essentially secular competing ideologies claiming to maximise well-being, and for all practical and moral purposes they cannot be reconciled with each other. How can science determine whether morals should be based on extreme libertarianism, extreme communism or any other ism in between?

I imagine that Lane-Craig would have had an easy time demolishing Sam Harris' notion of objective, scientifically based moral values. It's untenable.

[mistermack]

I think that morality is a tendency that we evolved and nothing else.
We evolved to live in large extended family groups. We care about others, because they are likely to carry a high proportion of our own genes. And even if they came in from outside the group, they will play a part in the successful reproduction of members of our own family.

And we don't just care about others, we care how they BEHAVE to others.
We need a sense of right and wrong because if someone goes "bad" it damages your family group.
Say your sister started killing and eating children. You need to be able to judge that that is bad for the group, and either drive your sister away, or kill her. So we have a need to empathise, and to make judgements of right and wrong, to give the group the best chance.

Without the objective of reproducing our genes, there would never have been right and wrong, or good and bad.

It's the purpose that makes things right or wrong.
Like in the chess game. A move is good or bad, for the purpose of the game. Take away the purpose of eventually taking the queen, and there are no good or bad moves.

[JimC]

Sam Harris DID do a good job in that clip, but in the bigger film, he was a lot weaker.

And it's because he is pushing a fuzzy claim. That there IS some kind of OBJECTIVE morality.
When there isn't. Craig had an easy job rebutting it, because Craig was right.

There is no such thing as objective morality.
There is a fairly widespread moral consensus, most humans agree on the basics. But that's not an OBJECTIVE morality, it's just loads of humans thinking and feeling the same way.
It's subjective, even if five billion people agree. We all have nearly identical dna, so we mostly have similar morals.

Harris is very good, but he was flogging a dead horse, in the main debate.
This particular clip is good though. It's the best bit. Very clear and obviously right.

However, it is reasonable to argue strongly against religious types who insist that faith in a divine being of some sort is the only valid source of morality.

Morality may not be an objective phenomena in the same category as gravitation, but it does arise from an important confluence between hominid co-operative impulses and logical reasoning.

[Hermit]

Sam Harris DID do a good job in that clip, but in the bigger film, he was a lot weaker.

And it's because he is pushing a fuzzy claim. That there IS some kind of OBJECTIVE morality.
When there isn't. Craig had an easy job rebutting it, because Craig was right.

There is no such thing as objective morality.
There is a fairly widespread moral consensus, most humans agree on the basics. But that's not an OBJECTIVE morality, it's just loads of humans thinking and feeling the same way.
It's subjective, even if five billion people agree. We all have nearly identical dna, so we mostly have similar morals.

Harris is very good, but he was flogging a dead horse, in the main debate.
This particular clip is good though. It's the best bit. Very clear and obviously right.

However, it is reasonable to argue strongly against religious types who insist that faith in a divine being of some sort is the only valid source of morality.

Morality may not be an objective phenomena in the same category as gravitation, but it does arise from an important confluence between hominid co-operative impulses and logical reasoning.

If Harris did just that, I wouldn't mind. Unfortunately, by overreaching himself he is weakening his argument to the point of being counterproductive.