Philosophy

Lewis vs Haldane

by

J B S Haldane was an eminent British scientist (population genetics) and a Marxist. C S Lewis was…well, you probably already know who C S Lewis was.

In 1946, Haldane published an article critiquing a series of novels by Lewis known as the Ransom Trilogy, and particularly the last book of the series, That Hideous Strength. Lewis responded in a letter which remained unpublished for many of years. All this may sound ancient and estoteric, but I believe the Lewis/Haldane controversy is very relevant to our current political and philosophical landscape.

Read more

Black Storm Clouds and Brilliant Lightning Flashes

by

Today there are once more saints and villains. Instead of the uniform grayness of the rainy day, we have the black storm cloud and the brilliant lightning flash. Outlines stand out with exaggerated sharpness. Shakespeare’s characters walk among us. The villain and the saint emerge from primeval depths and by their appearannce they tear open the infernal or the divine abyss from which they come and enable us to see for a moment into mysteries of which we had never dreamed.

–Dietrich Bonhoeffer

(For those who are not familiar with Bonhoeffer–he was an important leader of the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany. He was executed in 1945.)

I was reminded of the above passage by something Cara Ellison wrote a couple of days ago in discussing the 9/11 anniversary:

I guess I thought they were all gone, those types of monsters, stranded on reels of black and white film.

Read more

This Has Got To Be a Typo

by

From Sweetness and Light [h/t Instapundit]:

And speaking of jobs, according to the Southern Policy Center (a 501c3 “charity”) 990 forms as reported, they received $33,526,228 in 2007. The same form reports that their net assets or fund balances in 2007 were $219,551,849.

Holy farken snit! What the hell is a charity group doing with assets of $219 million dollars on an income of 33 million? What good could they possibly do by sitting on that kind of money?

People need to spend more time researching organizations before they donate. People expect the money they donate to be put to work helping the causes they support, not shoveled into a bank vault somewhere to build up corporate assets. How many people would donate their hard-earned money if they knew that the Southern Policy Center was already sitting on $219 million?

It might be time for a law that requires non-profits to publish their income, assets and even the pay of their top executives in every donation solicitation.

The Evolutionary Function of Religion

by

[Here’s a little light (1,900 words) reading for the weekend. I banged it out rather quickly so I apologize for any typos, misspellings or poor grammar. I’ll monitor this thread over the weekend so I don’t end up posting a hot-button topic and then ignoring it like I did last time.]

Robert Wright has a new book out “The Evolution of God“. [h/t Instapundit]  The Amazon description says:

In this sweeping narrative that takes us from the Stone Age to the Information Age, Robert Wright unveils an astonishing discovery: there is a hidden pattern that the great monotheistic faiths have followed as they have evolved. Through the prisms of archaeology, theology, and evolutionary psychology, Wright’s findings overturn basic assumptions about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and are sure to cause controversy. He explains why spirituality has a role today, and why science, contrary to conventional wisdom, affirms the validity of the religious quest. And this previously unrecognized evolutionary logic points not toward continued religious extremism, but future harmony.

I haven’t read the book yet, but based on his previous works I can guess where he is going with this. I’ve been thinking about this subject as well for some time, and I ‘ve been writing up my thoughts on the matter in detail, but since Wright may have beaten me to the punch I thought I would try to get my tiny bit of priority in. (Besides, I owe him for that bar fight in Tucson.)

I believe that religions and all other facets of human culture are subject to and created by natural selection. Even though I am a philosophical agnostic and a functional atheist, I have come to a science-based understanding that religions serve an evolutionary purpose, and that they provide a vital mechanism for enhancing and maintaining cooperation that no secular mechanism can duplicate. 

Traditionally atheists have argued that religions cannot have any functional foundations because there are many different religions with so many different stories about how the universe works. They commonly point out that since most religions contradict each other, the vast majority of religions have to be wrong even if we were to assume that one is right. Science produces just one best explanation for each phenomenon. We don’t have hundreds of different, equally valid models of the solar system. How could religion be any different? Therefore, the existence of many different religions proves that religions are arbitrary, fictional, fabrications like novels. It follows that religion has little to teach us about life and cannot serve as any kind of rational guide for humanity. 

This seems like a plausible argument. I used to believe it myself but in the last 15 years my ongoing study of evolutionary theory convinced me that atheists have missed one crucial piece of evidence:  We don’t have a vast variety of contradictory religions, we have a vast variety religions that all teach the same thing. 

In one critical functional area, all religions are identical.

Read more

Those Disgusted Conservatives Vs. The Chicken F*ckers

by

[Warning: This post uses sexual imagery and a satirical tone to make a serious point.]

The authors of the disgusted conservatives study I discussed earlier reveal their ivory-tower bias when they sniff at the way real people make real decisions. 

Disgust seems to be particularly implicated in many of our moral judgements (Rozin, Lowery, Imada, & Haidt, 1999b). But should disgust play any role in these judgements? According to many liberal, educated Westerners, the answer is no. Whether a practice or behaviour is considered morally palatable or reprehensible should depend on whether that behaviour harms or infringes on the rights of another individual; disgusting but harmless behaviours do not deserve moral condemnation (Haidt, Koller, & Dias, 1993). According to this view, consuming faecal matter, engaging in sexual intercourse with animals, or masturbating to pornography is not immoral, as long as no other people are harmed by one’s behaviour (Bloom, 2004b).35 

Up until a few years ago, I would have agreed with that reasoning. (Except for the sex with animals part. Animals have a right not to be raped. Moo means moo.) I would have agreed with it for the same reasons that most “liberal, educated Westerners” would: (1) I would have evaluated moral dilemmas using highly abstract models which ignored critical real-world information, (2) I would have assumed that if I personally could not see any harm in a practice then it automatically followed that no such harm existed, (3) I would have assumed that if a behavior did not cause a significant problem if one person did something then it would not cause significant problems if half of the entire population did it, and (4) I had no understanding that unarticulated, evolved, information encoded into cultures even existed. 

Let’s just talk about number (1) right now.

Read more