Discussion Grounds

Tom,

I have no aversion to being flowery. And as flowers go, Pensées is a lovely one. I just don’t know how to argue with a flower.

I’m glad you did not try to respond to everything I said in my last letter. But let me assure you it did not represent everything I think is wrong with Christianity! Not even close.

I did not want to open arguments over every theological point I raised. Rather, I wanted to give you a hint at why I think Christianity is a terrible explanation for the world as it is. Christianity is a tangled mess of horribly implausible and extremely ad-hoc hypotheses, and as such Christianity fails badly as an explanation for anything. So my letter was a direct response to your claim that Christianity offers a good explanation for the human condition.

Many of your fans complained that I offered “typical atheist misrepresentations of Christian theology.” However, nobody has yet told me precisely what was incorrect in my representation of Christian theology. Furthermore, let me remind everyone that the theological absurdities I drew attention to were not problems raised by atheists. They were first raised by Christian theologians – the ones I named in my previous letter. I specifically chose problems raised by earnest Christians, not atheists. These thinkers were believing, pious experts on Christian theology, but they saw the many contradictions and absurdities inherent to Christian theology (especially when they had scientific worldviews to compare Christianity to), and they devoted their lives to either reforming or abandoning the parts of Christian theology that make no sense.

Tom, we agree that humans experience what they call “dignity, moral purpose, goodness, destiny, value, beauty, and wonder, along with all of their opposites.” I think the natural explanations for these phenomena are plausible, while the Christian explanation is absurd. You think natural explanations for these phenomena are weak, while the Christian explanation for them is strong. Therefore I suspect we have very different ideas about what makes an explanation strong or weak, good or bad.

When you say that Christianity is a good explanation for the human condition, what do you mean? Do you mean that the Christian story for the human condition “feels” right for you? I hope you mean something more specific than that, because I will simply reply that the naturalistic story for the human condition feels right to me, and we will get nowhere.

So I’d like to suggest we sharpen our debate a bit. We are talking about explanation, but we seem to have very different ideas about what makes a good explanation. There are many models of explanation on offer. They each have particular strengths and weaknesses and applications. Personally, I tend to think of a good explanation as one that possesses many explanatory virtues: testability, consistency with background knowledge, simplicity, informativeness, and so on.

But perhaps you have something very different in mind when you use the word “explanation.” Maybe we can seek out some agreement about what makes an explanation good or bad, strong or weak. And then we will be equipped to argue about which of our worldviews offers the stronger explanation for the human condition.

How does that sound?

Cheers,

Luke

Greetings, Luke,

I have to agree with some of the comments that have been posted since your letter number 10, especially here and here. One of them said it would have helped if my last letter had been shorter, and I’ll accept that advice and correction. I got carried away with Pascal, plus it’s been a rough week with the loss of a friend. But I do want to recall for you the idea of this website, which is to keep our debate focused and somewhat disciplined. I wrote about one topic and received a response that covered just about everything you think is wrong with Christianity.

You wrote,

I would love to have somebody explain to me how Christianity makes sense. Even before we discuss whether Christianity also happens to be true, I would first like to hear a presentation of Christianity that even makes sense.

It appears to me you missed the point of what I wrote. Maybe it got buried in the glut of words I used. I’m going to repeat most of an entire paragraph in hopes it will come through this time:

The first reason I would adduce for my believing in the Christian revelation is … a step towards a first-phase outcome I hope to reach, which is to show that Christianity makes sense. This is more important than it once was…. Now we have the New Atheists (including Hitchens) presenting [Christianity] as something ridiculous or awful; or we have writers representing its beliefs as equivalent to Casper the Friendly Ghost or involving something as absurd as “metaphysical ectoplasm.” In an environment like this I don’t think it’s such a great idea to start with trying to prove Christianity. I would rather tell its story in a way that shows that it really does make sense.

In other words, what you called for in your Letter 10, with all the accompanying invective implying its impossibility, is something I said I was working on in my Letter 9. Moreover, I said it was a first step. I’m well aware of the questions you raised in your last letter. They’re not new to me. I’m not going to try to answer them all at once, okay? I’m taking it a step at a time.

Apparently my last letter did not present a clear and coherent enough argument for you to respond to. You wrote,

Tom, you have said many flowery things and quoted the lovely Pensées at length, but your argument was presented so vaguely that it raises suspicions of obscurantism. If you present your argument so unclearly it cannot be refuted or supported, and if you can present it more clearly I suspect it will be easily refuted.

I’ll try to be more clear. But whatever floweriness there was in my last letter was there for a purpose: to represent or to call to mind what it means to be human. I didn’t want to dry that out like dust in some syllogism. Since you asked, though, I’ll be glad to clarify my argument, as follows.

To be human is to experience a paradoxical mix of awareness of dignity, moral purpose, goodness, destiny, value, beauty, and wonder, along with all of their opposites. This is not easily accounted for by naturalism and especially by evolutionary explanations for behavior. Evolutionary psychology is a pseudo-science in the first place, since it has little to no evidence to draw on for most of its conclusions. In the second place, even its supposed explanations fail to to explain adequately how the first arising of these paradoxical experiences took place. And in the third place, naturalism provides no ontological ground for the actual existence of things like dignity, truth, destiny, beauty, and value, or for their opposites, either, for on naturalism there is only matter and energy arranged in varying degrees of complexity, interacting according to necessity and/or chance. I don’t know how matter, energy, necessity, and chance can acquire properties of truth, dignity, value, or destiny.

Naturalism cannot actually deny the reality of these things, so it tries to accommodate them, but based on the evolutionary picture of organisms (including humans), the ultimate explanation for these things must resolve down to their contributions to humans’ reproductive fitness, or what Churchland called the Four F’s (feeding, fighting, fleeing, and reproducing). This is a poor fit with what we know to be true about our experience of these things. We know they have more meaning and more reality than just perpetuating some set of selfish genes.

Further, the sense of human experience is that there is something higher toward which we ought to be striving, and that this something higher is real. On evolution it’s not real, it’s always a proxy or a scheme for producing more offspring, which is the only ultimate explanation for any behavior.

On Christianity,¹ the sense of greatness, dignity, higher purpose is grounded in a reality of having been created in God’s image. The paradoxical experience of failure is explained in our having fallen away from the ontologically genuine goodness of our origins. It makes sense, on Christianity, that humans have high intrinsic value and such a confusing mix of goodness and badness.

That’s the essence of my argument at this stage, and this is the portion of the discussion I’m asking you to interact with at this time.

1. Also on Judaism, for this comes from the part of the Bible Christians call the Old Testament, which we share with the Jews [↩]

Tom,

You wrote that

[My first reason for] believing in the Christian revelation is not one I would present as any kind of proof, but rather as a step towards a first-phase outcome I hope to reach, which is to show that Christianity makes sense.

I would love to have somebody explain to me how Christianity makes sense. Even before we discuss whether Christianity also happens to be true, I would first like to hear a presentation of Christianity that even makes sense.

I reject theism pretty firmly for many strong reasons, but my objections to Christianity are so numerous that it is truly less plausible to me than belief in werewolves. I don’t mean that as an insult. If anything, it is an insult to werewolf-belief. Christianity is that problematic.

I could write thousands of pages on the extreme absurdities of even “mere” Christian doctrine – and many other people have done precisely that, so I don’t have to. In fact, we can turn to Christian theologians themselves to elucidate the absurdities of traditional Christian doctrine: thinkers like Schleiermacher, Harnack, Bultmann, Tillich, Robinson, and others.

Christian theology is such an ocean of contradictions and ad-hoc implausibilities that I barely know where to begin.

I don’t mean to be abrasive. But I hope you and other Christians can come to understand what Christian theology sounds like to an indifferent audience. It sounds like the rantings of a strung-out madman.

As far as I can tell, you believe that God created the universe 13.7 billion years ago, then kicked off a series of self-replicating cells called “life,” then tinkered endlessly with this this process as 99.9% of all species that have ever existed were completely wiped out. Life progressed for billions of years with no purpose – nothing but terror, desperation, and misery. Eventually, God tweaked the primate design into something as impressive and yet badly designed as the modern human. He then injected a supernatural ‘soul’ into these humans. And this is the origin of ‘man.’

As far as I can tell, you believe that God created man in full awareness that his imperfect nature would lead him to sin, and then condemned him to death (and later, eternal torment) for sinning, but then decided to provide a way for man to ‘redeem’ himself for his inevitable failure that God designed into him. And the best way God could think to do this was to send himself in human form to perform some magical healings, exorcisms, and party tricks for a few years among illiterate Jews in a 1st century desert. God then sacrificed himself to himself to appease himself for the sins he designed man to commit. God also decided that the way mankind could redeem himself would be to perform the cognitive work of believing that this all happened.

I could go on and on and on. Christian theology only gets weirder. Don’t get me started on the Trinity!

My point is that Christianity is absurd in the extreme. It is so implausible and so ad-hoc that it cannot offer itself as the “best explanation” for anything. Even if scientific explanations were unavailable to us, I would still say, “Uh, no thanks, I think I’ll keep looking for another explanation.” In fact, I could invent a hundred supernatural explanations for our universe that make much better sense than Christian theology.

And I’m still not clear on what your argument is. You wrote that “Christianity makes good sense of the human condition.” Are you saying that Christianity provides the best explanation – or even a coherent explanation – of the fact that we can know good and evil and perform both in great degrees? By what measure is Christianity a good explanation for the human condition? Do you think it has great explanatory scope, explanatory power, coherence with background knowledge, ontological simplicity, testability, and so on? Or do you mean something else?

Tom, you have said many flowery things and quoted the lovely Pensées at length, but your argument was presented so vaguely that it raises suspicions of obscurantism. If you present your argument so unclearly it cannot be refuted or supported, and if you can present it more clearly I suspect it will be easily refuted.

I would very much like to understand your argument so we can see if it has any merit. As I requested last time, “please give [your argument] in clear, logical form so that I know for sure what I’m responding to.”

Cheers,

Luke

Greetings, Luke,

I have just come home from the National Conference on Christian Apologetics, a truly great experience, where the final event was something you would have enjoyed too: a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza. I did not meet either of them personally, but sitting on the front row I was struck with something that I hope nobody involved in these dialogues will ever forget: They are human beings.

I could not tell you the question of the debate in exact words, but it had to do with how we ought to respond to radical Islam. Hitchens had the first statement, and there wasn’t a word in what he said that I could disagree with.¹ He is very concerned for the future of the Western world, in view of many persons’ unwillingness to see terrorism for what it is (especially following the Fort Hood massacre). He was brilliant on that topic.

Speaking to all readers now, I don’t know whether your inclination is more to believe Hitchens or D’Souza on Christianity. Either way it might do you good (as it did for me) to see them giving each other a hug, and to be reminded that even though we all differ in many ways, we share so much that we ought not to regard one another as less than brothers or sisters in humanity.

To do this is not always easy. I came home from the conference to find out that a friend, fellow church member, our car mechanic, had been killed by an angry intruder in his home. The suspect has apparently turned himself in; he is being held on first-degree murder charges. I don’t know the suspect personally, and I really don’t know anything more about what happened, except that I cannot imagine my friend doing anything to incite anything remotely approaching the anger he experienced. He is (I have to say “was” now; that’s painful) just a really good guy. It is upsetting beyond imagination.

It’s hard to make sense out of being human. This is the post I’ve been planning to write for several days, but it’s a lot more emotionally charged than I had expected it to be. The feelings fit the topic, however.

The first reason I would adduce for my believing in the Christian revelation is not one I would present as any kind of proof, but rather as a step towards a first-phase outcome I hope to reach, which is to show that Christianity makes sense. This is more important than it once was. Though there never was a time when everybody thought the Christian view reality made sense, still there was a time not long ago in the Western world when a lot more people viewed it that way than do now. Now we have the New Atheists (including Hitchens) presenting it as something ridiculous or awful; or we have writers representing its beliefs as equivalent to Casper the Friendly Ghost or involving something as absurd as “metaphysical ectoplasm.” In an environment like this I don’t think it’s such a great idea to start with trying to prove Christianity. I would rather tell its story in a way that shows that it really does make sense.

The story I want to tell begins with what we all know best: ourselves. Christianity makes good sense of the human condition. How did we get to be so marvelous and yet so miserable at the same time? Why are we so good and so bad? Someone at the conference I attended this weekend put it this way: the lion eats the antelope. It does not strategize or conspire to wipe out entire herds. It doesn’t even think of eliminating the whole neighboring pride of lions. We can be very, very bad indeed.

But no animal can be as good and loving as a human can. No animal rings bells at Christmastime for the poor among them. Apart from the communication/awareness problem, it’s hard to imagine any animal caring for cyclone or tsunami victims on the far side of the world.

It’s especially hard to think of animals seeing their moral faults and weaknesses, trying to improve themselves, believing they ought to be better.

We are a very confused lot. No one has expressed this better than Blaise Pascal, in his Pensées.

The nature of self-love and of this human Ego is to love self only and consider self only. But what will man do? He cannot prevent this object that he loves from being full of faults and wants. He wants to be great, and he sees himself small. He wants to be happy, and he sees himself miserable. He wants to be perfect, and he sees himself full of imperfections. He wants to be the object of love and esteem among men, and he sees that his faults merit only their hatred and contempt. (100)²

“Full of faults and wants,” and full of contradictions. Nothing else we know of has an experience at all like this:

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be miserable. A tree does not know itself to be miserable. It is then being miserable to know oneself to be miserable; but it is also being great to know that one is miserable. All these same miseries prove man’s greatness. They are the miseries of a great lord, of a deposed king. (397, 398)

A tree does not know its misery. An animal may certainly know its pain, but what does it know of greatness? There is no such paradox in its experience.

The universe, for all its vastness, has nothing on us small humans:

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water suffices to kill him. But, if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this. (347)

Where does this sense of great wretchedness, or wretched greatness, come from? The naturalistic story is that we have arisen out of the animal kingdom; but no, not out of it at all, for we are part of it. Pascal sees the answer in our having descended: not as in Darwin’s “Descent of Man,” in which we are the children of the animals, but as in having descended from a higher, better condition in which we were originally intended to live.

The greatness of man is so evident, that it is even proved by his wretchedness. For what in animals is nature we call in man wretchedness; by which we recognise that, his nature being now like that of animals, he has fallen from a better nature which once was his.

For who is unhappy at not being a king, except a deposed king? Was Paulus Æmilius unhappy at being no longer consul? On the contrary, everybody thought him happy in having been consul, because the office could only be held for a time. But men thought Perseus so unhappy in being no longer king, because the condition of kingship implied his being always king, that they thought it strange that he endured life. Who is unhappy at having only one mouth? And who is not unhappy at having only one eye? Probably no man ever ventured to mourn at not having three eyes. But any one is inconsolable at having none. (409)

From an evolutionary perspective this is a puzzle. At the moment in our history when we supposedly developed this unhappiness, what was its adaptive value? How did the first discontented men or women bear more offspring? How did the first population that said, “We are not as good as we should be,” outstrip other competing populations in making babies that lived to make others? How does it even make sense today to regard our failures as failures? For no other organism seems to depend on this sense for its survival.

I know there are evolutionary psychological answers to these questions. Set aside for now that I think evo-psych is about the ultimate in evidence-free “science.” Let me suggest that even if there is some plausibility in its stories of human altruism, they are pale, thin, and watery compared to what we know about our own real selves.

Judeo-Christianity’s perspective on this paradox is utterly unique. Pascal says,

All these contradictions, which seem most to keep me from the knowledge of religion, have led me most quickly to the true one. (424)

The Judeo-Christian view is that we have indeed descended from a height. We were made in the image of God, intended to live in harmony with him, living a truly good existence, enjoying life in our physical, mental, social, and spiritual dimensions. But we rebelled. We chose against that goodness, and tried to develop an alternate one of our own. (The original source of this is in Genesis 3.) The image of God is still present upon us, and the awareness of something better is not lost. But it is certainly marred.

No other religion has recognised that man is the most excellent creature. Some, which have quite recognised the reality of his excellence, have considered as mean and ungrateful the low opinions which men naturally have of themselves; and others, which have thoroughly recognised how real is this vileness, have treated with proud ridicule those feelings of greatness, which are equally natural to man.

“Lift your eyes to God,” say the first; “see Him whom you resemble, and who has created you to worship Him. You can make yourselves like unto Him; wisdom will make you equal to Him, if you will follow it.” “Raise your heads, free men,” says Epictetus. And others say, “Bend your eyes to the earth, wretched worm that you are, and consider the brutes whose companion you are.”

What, then, will man become? Will he be equal to God or the brutes? What a frightful difference! What, then, shall we be? Who does not see from all this that man has gone astray, that he has fallen from his place, that he anxiously seeks it, that he cannot find it again? And who shall then direct him to it? The greatest men have failed. (431)

…

After having understood the whole nature of man.—That a religion may be true, it must have knowledge of our nature. It ought to know its greatness and littleness, and the reason of both. What religion but the Christian has known this? (433)

What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, imbecile worm of the earth; depositary of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error; the pride and refuse of the universe!

… Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Humble yourself, weak reason; be silent, foolish nature; learn that man infinitely transcends man, and learn from your Master your true condition, of which you are ignorant. Hear God. For in fact, if man had never been corrupt, he would enjoy in his innocence both truth and happiness with assurance; and if man had always been corrupt, he would have no idea of truth or bliss. But, wretched as we are, and more so than if there were no greatness in our condition, we have an idea of happiness, and cannot reach it. We perceive an image of truth, and possess only a lie. Incapable of absolute ignorance and of certain knowledge, we have thus been manifestly in a degree of perfection from which we have unhappily fallen.

I could quote Pascal for pages, but I’ll restrain myself finally here.

To summarize, we all know that there is a good, that the good can be known, that the good is real, and that we are meant to aspire to it. Other systems, like evo-psych, can shoehorn something similar into their overall perspectives, but in most (or perhaps all) of them this paradox is solved in an ad hoc, uncomfortably fitting kind of way. In Christianity it is core, it fits, it belongs. It explains how we know murder is wrong, but how we can do it to each other anyway. It explains what Solzhenitsyn called the line dividing good and evil, which “cuts through the heart of every human being”—yours and mine. Christianity makes sense in terms of what we know to be true about ourselves.

It has an ultimate solution to the paradox, too. I’ll just allude to it briefly, by way of Pascal once again:

The knowledge of God without that of man’s misery causes pride. The knowledge of man’s misery without that of God causes despair. The knowledge of Jesus Christ constitutes the middle course, because in Him we find both God and our misery. (526)

…

Jesus Christ is a God whom we approach without pride, and before whom we humble ourselves without despair. (527)

This is not the whole reason I believe, and certainly not offered here as proof of the Christian faith. But it is one reason the Christian faith makes sense. I’m content with that for a start.

1. D’Souza had the interesting task of making a debate out of it, which he did by enlarging the issue to other questions relating to religion and violence. [↩]
2. Numbers in parentheses are “fragment” numbers, by which the source can be found in the Pensées. [↩]

I’m not sure when I’ll get to respond next, Luke. It could be tomorrow or maybe as late as Thursday. Today I went to a funeral/celebration that lasted three good hours, and later in the week I have a lot of meetings, so I’m not quite sure when I’ll get time to write. Thanks for your patience

Tom,

Sure, we can discuss moral progress later.¹

To recap, then, here’s what we agree on so far:

• Truth is not relative.
• Science is our most reliable and successful means for gaining knowledge about the natural world.
• We humans are plagued by many cognitive biases, which corrupt our pursuit of the truth.
• The laws of logic are true.
• Some propositions are more probably true than others.
• You and I and the external world exist.
• The supernatural may exist, but it cannot be known to exist prior to experience.
• The ontological argument does not prove the existence of God.
• Science has a lot to say about the reality of God and Christianity.
• Moral values exist, and they are objectively true in that their truth value does not depend on human beliefs about them.
• Most humans have an inner sensation that objective moral values exist, and many believe they are responsible to those values.
• Most humans accept metaphysical libertarianism.
• Most humans believe there is something ‘wrong’ with the world. They think it could be ‘better.’
• Humans are aware of their own thoughts and subjective experiences.
• Most humans believe there is some sense in which they are the same “person” from day to day, even as their thoughts and memories and the atoms that make up their body change.
• Most humans believe that their life has some kind of meaning and purpose that transcends the purposes they invent for themselves.

Sure, Tom, let’s start with your existential argument in favor of Christianity. If possible, please give it in clear, logical form so that I know for sure what I’m responding to. And of course, please give it in the context of our question:

Which worldview offers the best explanation of our world: Christianity or naturalism?

I look forward to the start of our debate!

Luke

1. For now, let me note that you did not respond to the historical argument for decreased violence. Also, you made a methodological complaint about a single study out of dozens that I cited in support of the view that Scandinavian countries are among the healthiest in the world. Even if that study is flawed, it affects my argument very little. I am going to remove that study from my list of sources; thanks for pointing me to the critiques! [↩]

Luke,

Thank you again for working through our common ground questions here. We do agree on a lot. I did some research on #8, the moral sensibilities of animals, and I will agree with you that there is an open question there: not whether there is a difference between humans and animals, since obviously there is, but how great that difference is.

Apparently we are going to continue to disagree on Item 10. With respect to this:

In contrast, the nations that are considered to be the most “progressive” – and also, incidentally, the least religious – are triumphant beacons of moral progress.

First, it doesn’t address the historical question, it’s a different topic. Second, while I have not studied all the references you linked to on your blog, I have looked at a number of them in the past and found frequent methodological problems in them (especially in one you footnoted, see also here). The chief complaint is that there is a lot of data-picking going on in studies like these.

The 20th century’s violence cannot be attributed just to efficiency of weaponry. In Rwanda, the tool of choice was the machete. In Ukraine it was starvation. You refer to weapons “that could kill hundreds of millions in a single stroke,” but you know that’s not what was used. Perhaps the real murderous innovation of the 20th century was the death camp, where disease, starvation, guns, and gas have made killing an assembly line operation.

Slavery rates are dropping, yes. Some day perhaps we’ll talk about the reason for that, and for this as well:

And now racial boundaries are beginning to fall, and many of us care for our entire species. We even send money and food to people on the other side of the planet we will never meet, and who can never help us in return.

For now, though, we can leave it as moot, and if we come back to it later, we come back to it later.

In the meantime, one more point of agreement: we are off to a good start. I do appreciate your narrowing the focus of your position to naturalism, because atheism includes too wide a range of possible beliefs.

You wrote,

Originally, I had proposed we mostly avoid the usual arguments for and against supernaturalism. In considering the above question, the usual arguments will be unavoidable. But I think that’s okay.

Actually the starting place I would suggest is one that’s not on the beaten path. It drew the attention of Blaise Pascal, and more recently Chesterton, Lewis, and Schaeffer among others, but it still doesn’t get as much play among apologists as some other points of discussion do. It is the existential argument for Christianity: that human life and the human condition make considerably more sense under a Christian understanding of reality than under naturalism. Worded that way the topic could be very broad, but I propose starting on it with a post I will write on a focused subset of that topic. How does that sound to you?

Thank you again, by the way, for making this a friendly discussion. I wish we could be doing this at Starbucks. (At least I have a good cup of coffee right here with me in the living room.) I’m looking forward to launching from here into points of dispute, and it’s encouraging to be able to be confident that the discussion will remain positive as we do so.

Best regards,

Tom

Tom,

Let us continue our search for common ground:

1. I said we can agree that “Moral values exist, and they are objectively true in that their truth value does not depend on human beliefs about them.” You wondered if I thought moral values would remain if there were no humans. I do. To me, morality is about a universal consideration of reasons for action. As it happens, desires are the only reasons for action that exist. But humans are not the only things with desires. So reasons for action would exist without humans. Therefore morality would exist without humans.
2. Sure, we can agree that “Most humans have an inner sensation that objective moral values exist, and many believe they are responsible to those values.“
3. We agreed on this.
4. I think we agree that “Most humans accept metaphysical libertarianism.“
5. We agreed on this.
6. Ditto.
7. We agree that “Most humans believe there is something ‘wrong’ with the world. They think it could be ‘better.’” I saw this merely as a summary of what you had written, not a weakening of it.
8. You want me to agree that “no animal has anything even distantly approximating a human-like cognitive experience” of moral beliefs. But “distantly approximating” is pretty vague. And while this might be true, I’m not so sure. So I’m not going to agree, but I’m not going to disagree, either.
9. …is a repeat of #7 and #8.
10. Let me address this below…

Concerning #10,  the claim that there has been “very little” moral progress in the “past several millennia,” you write:

…there are certainly pockets of increasing moral rightness, but the 20th century was by far the most murderous in history, slavery still abounds in major parts of the world, there’s no evidence that persons are more honest today than they were in the days of Plato or the Buddha, and there’s not much evidence… that persons are any less self-serving now than then.

This is not a main topic of our debate. It’s just not going to be one of the things we agree on. But I’d like to explain why I reject your view that we’ve seen very little moral progress in the past several millennia.

First, it should not surprise either of us that much of the world has not experienced much moral progress. Saudia Arabia, for example, is a horrifically immoral place – full of discrimination, oppression, female genital mutilation, violent radicalism, and inequality – precisely because its leaders have the same values they did 1300 years ago.

In contrast, the nations that are considered to be the most “progressive” – and also, incidentally, the least religious – are triumphant beacons of moral progress. These societies are among the most well-developed, most free, least corrupt, least violent, most peaceful, healthiest, happiest, most egalitarian, most charitable, and most environmentally compassionate societies in the world. (See here.) And I think that’s moral progress, even if much of the rest of the world still practices Dark Ages morality.

Now, as to your specific claims:

“the 20th century was by far the most murderous in history”

It depends how you measure it. If you measure by sheer numbers then, yes this century was the most murderous in history, because there were more people around to murder than ever before, and because for the very first time we had weapons that could kill hundreds of millions in a single stroke.

But I don’t think that’s the relevant measurement. I think the relevant measurement is the murder rate. And I suspect rates of murder – and violence in general – have been falling steadily over the millennia. We don’t have good data on ancient murder rates, but here is the historical argument (video).

“slavery still abounds in major parts of the world”

Ah, but slavery is far less common than ever before in human history, and dropping. The world is not perfect, but I only said it was getting better.

“there’s no evidence that persons are more honest today than they were in the days of Plato or the Buddha”

Yes, there’s no evidence either way. I think it’s likely we’ve made great moral progress in some areas and almost none in others. But that’s still moral progress.

“and there’s not much evidence… that persons are any less self-serving now than then”

Charity rates, like rates of deceit or murder, are hard to come by for the ancient world. But I think the following story is at least plausible, given what we know of history:

It seems we have become more loving toward more and more people. At the beginning of our species it was every tribe for itself. These tribes got bigger and the moral became every kingdom for itself or every nation for itself. But gradually, many of us learned compassion for our fellow beings, and we learned to care for and support everyone of our own race. And now racial boundaries are beginning to fall, and many of us care for our entire species. We even send money and food to people on the other side of the planet we will never meet, and who can never help us in return. And some of us are even starting to care about the welfare of other species. Great Apes now have certain rights in Spain, and other nations will eventually follow. This is what Peter Singer calls the expanding circle. I think more humans are more charitable to a greater array of beings than ever before.

Past eras had their Jains and their Francis of Assissi, but there is now a worldwide movement for complete human brotherhood and charity. There is even a worldwide movement for animal rights, and never before have so many people treated their pets so charitably.

In summary, I see lots of moral progress.

We may disagree about moral progress, but we have found a great many things to agree about, and I am happy for it.

Moving on…

We were going to argue about: “Which worldview offers the best explanation of our world: Christianity or atheism?” But it is much fairer to argue about this:

Which worldview offers the best explanation of our world: Christianity or naturalism?

Originally, I had proposed we mostly avoid the usual arguments for and against supernaturalism. In considering the above question, the usual arguments will be unavoidable. But I think that’s okay. Our discussion has already developed a very different character than most theist-atheist debates have, and that was my purpose for avoiding the usual theist-atheist arguments.

Tom, you told me why you believe Christianity is true:

I believe because of the convergence of a whole constellation of reasons, ranging from my experience of God, to my experience of myself and other humans, to philosophical arguments and to historical evidences.

Well, I believe naturalism is true because of the convergence of a whole constellation of reasons, ranging from the unbroken history of successful natural explanations and failed supernatural explanations to the failure and near-incoherence of major supernatural worldviews, as well as philosophical arguments and scientific evidences.

So I think the ground is set! Where shall we begin? I leave it up to you.

Luke

Greetings, Luke,

Well, at least we found some further grounds for agreement, even if not as much as I had predicted. I want to make sure I understand some aspects of what you just wrote.

1. You word it thus: “Moral values exist, and they are objectively true in that their truth value does not depend on human beliefs about them.” That leaves me wondering whether you think moral values would exist, and their truth values would remain, even if there were no humans.
2. You say humans have an inner sensation that moral values exist, yet you do not want to accept my proposed statement that humans have a sense of responsibility relating to at least some of those values. I’m wondering how that makes sense.
3. I can accept this in this form.
4. I think based on one commenter’s response that “contra-causal” requires definition. I think you probably mean it in the sense of being independent of the course of natural law and/or chance.
5. This is fine in this form.
6. Same.
7. I think you have weakened this considerably beyond what is true.
8. I have not read Wild Justice, but I cannot imagine that it any animal has a conception of rightness or wrongness that “distantly approaches” that of humans.
9. Same. I do not know of any animals trying to build their own character in a moral, vocational or other sense,
10. We can point to some increasing awareness of moral right and wrong over the millennia, and there are certainly pockets of increasing moral rightness, but the 20th century was by far the most murderous in history, slavery still abounds in major parts of the world, there’s no evidence that persons are more honest today than they were in the days of Plato or the Buddha, and there’s not much evidence (apart from the influence of religion on individuals) that persons are any less self-serving now than then.

Which worldview offers the better explanation of our world: Christianity or atheism? Is that the focus of our debate?

Recognizing that we might not come to full agreement, yes, that’s how I’m viewing it.

(P.S. I’m at the eye doctor’s office with my eyes dilated. The world looks weird, as usual in this situation. I’ll keep this short until I can really see again!)

Tom,

Let’s consider your suggested points of agreement. I’d like to rephrase them so that I can confidently affirm some of them. Can you affirm 1-7 below?

1. Moral values exist, and they are objectively true in that their truth value does not depend on human beliefs about them. [In particular, I defend desirism as a successful theory of moral realism.]
2. Most humans have an inner sensation that objective moral values exist.
3. Humans are aware of their own thoughts and subjective experiences. [Human consciousness is "real."]
4. Most humans believe they have some powers of contra-causal free will.¹
5. Most humans believe there is some sense in which they are the same “person” from day to day, even as their thoughts and memories and the atoms that make up their body change.²
6. Most humans believe that their life has some kind of meaning and purpose that transcends the purposes they invent for themselves.
7. Most humans believer there is something “wrong” with the world. They think it could be “better.”
8. [I wouldn't commit to #8 at all. See Wild Justice and other works on animal moral cognition and beliefs.]
9. [The only part of #9 I can commit to is a repeat of #7.]
10. [I definitely can't commit to a lack of moral progress in the past several millennia. I think there has been tremendous moral progress.]

And, just as a reminder, we already agreed on the following:

• Truth is not relative.
• Science is our most reliable and successful means for gaining knowledge about the natural world.
• We humans are plagued by many cognitive biases, which corrupt our pursuit of the truth.
• The laws of logic are true.
• Some propositions are more probably true than others.
• You and I and the external world exist.
• The supernatural may exist, but it cannot be known to exist prior to experience.
• The ontological argument does not prove the existence of God.
• Science has a lot to say about the reality of God and Christianity.

Tom, you did not answer my questions about your probability calculations. But perhaps we can skip it – and also skip proper basicality – if we can just focus our discussion on the following question: Is Christianity or atheism better supported by argument and evidence? A simpler way of phrasing roughly the same question would be: Which worldview offers the better explanation of our world: Christianity or atheism? Is that the focus of our debate?

Cheers,

Luke

1. This belief is certainly not incorrigible as you seem to think. Also, you may be surprised at how many people do not believe in contra-causal free will, including millions and millions of religious believers, as well as most philosophers of mind and neuroscientists. [↩]
2. Again, their may be more exceptions to this than you think. Buddhism, for example, rejects personal identity. [↩]