Posted on 07/01/2009 9:49:10 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and author of The God Delusion, has helped launch an atheist summer camp for children. Alongside the more traditional activities of tug-of-war, swimming and canoeing, children at the five-day camp in Somerset will learn about rational scepticism, moral philosophy, ethics and evolution.
Camp-goers aged eight to 17 will also be taught how to disprove phenomena such as crop circles and telepathy. In the Invisible Unicorn Challenge, any child who can prove that unicorns do not exist will win a £10 note - which features an image of Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary theory - signed by Dawkins, Britain's most prominent atheist.
Dawkins is not personally involved in Camp Quest, which originated in the United States, but helped subsidise the cost of the camp through his Richard Dawkins Foundation. The former Oxford professor said Camp Quest provided children with a summer camp that was "free of religious dogma", unlike many adventure breaks which are run by the Scouts and faith-based groups. All 24 places at the camp, which runs from July 27 to 31, have already been filled and more camps are planned for next year, including Easter.
Camp Quest was founded in America in 1996 by Edwin Kagin, an atheist lawyer from Kentucky and the son of a church minister. The woman bringing the concept to Britain is a 23-year-old postgraduate psychology student from London, Samantha Stein, who was inspired to work at an atheist summer camp in America after reading The God Delusion.
Stein said the atheist adventure breaks were "not about changing what they think, but the way that they think. There is very little that attacks religion; we are not a rival to religious camps."
LOL!
Ask and you shall receive ...
RE: VIRTUE ETHICS
I read it and the essence is that it places less emphasis on which rules people should follow and instead focus on helping people develop good character traits, such as kindness and generosity.
But that does not answer the following questions :
1) Given that there is no God, WHY are we bound to be kind and generous and why are the above traits any “better” or “worse” than NOT being kind and NOT being generous ?
2) If people decide NOT to be kind and generous, what rule in the universe (given that we simply are the accidental results of a collision of atoms), tells us that these people are bad or evil ?
3) If someone decides NOT to practice virtue ethics, does that make him a bad person ? Who says so and by what authority ?
So will they make the sequel to “Jesus Camp” called “Atheist Camp”?
The essay I referred you to made no comment with regard to the existence or non-existence of God. The good news is that people seem capable of discussing moral issues and coming to some rather strong agreements without having to agree on their positions with regard to God.
God exists, and that fact is very important, and ultimately figures in as the most important component of morality. But it seems that God created the world in such a way that lots of people of good will of varying faiths and lack thereof can come to common agreement from just what they witness in the world and in the behavior of their fellow human beings. And this common agreement seems in many cases to jibe with Christian morality and theology.
The problem with requiring everyone to agree in whole (or in great detail) with your own beliefs regarding God, is that you have a whole lot of stuff to prove before you even get around to saying whether it is right or wrong for X to do Y. You have to fully describe the nature of your God. You need to provide proofs of His existence, and that He exists as you believe. You then need to show that God defines morality, and that it is not the other way around, whereby God does what is moral. All of these are very contentious areas of philosophical discussion which would require multiple tomes to work out in sufficient detail. Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica is only one such example.
Why not try to meet people half-way? Why not try to engage them on the moral questions alone, especially if there is common agreement on lots of things? Most people have no clue how their cars work and yet they are able to drive them quite adequately. Just because lots of people don't understand where their moral values come from, doesn't mean they can't come up with a decent set of moral values and make reasonable attempts to live by them.
"2) If people decide NOT to be kind and generous, what rule in the universe (given that we simply are the accidental results of a collision of atoms), tells us that these people are bad or evil ?"
There appear to be physical laws that govern matter and energy in the universe. Why can't there be laws that govern the behavior of human beings? Atheists have convinced themselves that there is a way for physical laws to just appear out of nothing and they are quite happy to live by these laws without knowing exactly where they came from. Deontologists have a similar view of morality: they are certain that there is a moral code that is discoverable through reasoning and intution, but they can't identify a source.
Christians and atheists can work together to build a bridge even though they have different beliefs about why F=ma. Similarly, Christians, Deontologists, Virtue Ethicists, and Utilitarians can work together to create societies. These societies are based on laws, which in turn are based on moral beliefs, that can be similar even if the different groups have different ideas about where the beliefs come from.
3) If someone decides NOT to practice virtue ethics, does that make him a bad person ? Who says so and by what authority ?
There is "philosophy of science" and then there is science. Scientists use certain methods to gather data and confirm theories. The "philosophers of science" analyze the methods to see if they are indeed good ways to go about validating theories. A lot of philosophy went into developing set theory, which is a major underpinning of mathematics, which is the universal language of science. Scientists may think that philosophers are a bunch of over-intellectualized layabouts wasting their time on unanswerable questions, but science wouldn't be as rigorous and useful as it is without the input of all of the philosophy that went before.
Similarly moral philosophy is the underpinning of political philosophy and the actual practical workings of politics. The people who tell so-and-so that he is wrong for doing such-and-such are the police and the courts and the populace that has put those people in office.
If a good philosophical case can be made against a specific practice, then that will be put into law, and people that do that will be suitably punished either through the law or through public denegration.
Those of us who believe in an afterlife believe that rewards and punishments can be infinite. Those who don't believe in and afterlife believe that rewards and punishments can only be finite. Regardless of this difference we can both agree that the same sets of behaviors either need to be rewarded or need to be punished.
So we haven't convinced the majority of "secular humanists" that abortion is an abomination. We have helped people see that slavery is wrong, that racism is wrong, that sexism is wrong, that radical feminism is wrong, etc.
We either need to live with those that God has chosen to place around us and come to some acceptable level of working truce, or we must move into the hinterlands and wait for the collapse of society and the return of The Remnant.
Of course we could remain physically among the unbelievers and close our ears and shout "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!" at the tops of our lungs hoping that that might work to convert the unbelievers. That in my mind is just an intellectual form of withdrawal no different than hiking to the top of a remote mountain peak and waiting for the radiation to drop down to survivable levels.
You might want to send a copy to any of a number of philosophical journals, because if your proof is valid and correct, then it will be among the greatest accomplishments in philosophical history.
As a starting point, you might want to come up with an answer to this age old question:
Regarding the Euthyphro Dilemma, which for the benefit of the newbies, asks the question -— Is a thing good simply because the gods say it is? Or do the gods say a thing is good because of some other quality it has? If so, what is that quality?
The challenge forces us to consider an important detail in any discussion on the nature of morality: GROUNDING.
The word “ground” originally meant “the lowest part, base, or bottom of anything.”
The task is to identify the logical grounding of piety or virtue. What base does morality “stand on” ? ( this isn’t the only question believers in God must answer, this is the same questions atheists ( those who insist that we must be “good” ) must answer as well.
As I see it, A law is only as legitimate as the authority upon which it rests. The U.S. government can’t pass laws governing Canadians. Our federal laws apply only to the people of this country. Individuals can’t make up laws that apply to their neighbors. They don’t have that authority.
The founders of our country argued that even governments are subject to a higher law. Certain truths are transcendent, they argued, grounded not in human institutions but in God Himself. This appeal to higher Law was their rational justification for the morality of the American Revolution.
The problem of grounding morality is a difficult one for atheists who claim one can have ethics without God. Certainly, an atheist can act in a manner some people consider “moral,” but it’s hard to know what the term ultimately refers to. It generally means to comply with an objective standard of good, a Law given by legitimate authority. However, without a transcendent Lawmaker (God), there can be no transcendent Law, and no corresponding obligation to be good.
A ‘moral’ atheist is like a man sitting down to dinner who doesn’t believe in farmers, ranchers, fishermen, or cooks. He believes the food just appears, with no explanation and no sufficient cause. The atheist’s morality has no grounding.
Does the believer in God fare any better, though? I believe he does.
I believe Euthyphro Dilemma us a false one. There are not two options, but three.
The believer in God can reject the first option, that morality is an arbitrary function of God’s power.
And he can reject the second option, that God is responsible to a higher law. There is no Law over God.
The third option is that an objective standard exists (this avoids the first horn of the dilemma). However, the standard is not external to God, but internal (avoiding the second horn). Morality is grounded in the IMMUTABLE CHARACTER of God, who is perfectly good. His commands are not whims, but ROOTED in His INTRINSIC HOLINESS.
Could God simply decree that torturing babies was moral? I think the answer can be “No,”, “God would never do that.” It’s not a matter of command. It’s a matter of character.
Morality is not anterior to God—logically prior to Him—as Bertrand Russell suggests, but rooted in His nature.
Morality is not grounded ultimately in God’s commands, but in His character, which then expresses itself in His commands.
In other words, whatever a good God commands will always be good.
Now let’s say Dawkins is right — that God is non-existent... on what objective basis do we *GROUND* our beliefs that one act is better than its opposite ?
If we are all but products of accidental collision of atoms, then what we observed in the late 1930’ and early 40’s in Auswitz or Treblinka was the natural phenomenon of an accidental collision of atoms called Nazis hitting upon accidental collision of atoms called Jews. It’s all NATURE. Where is the evil or good there ?
“There is very little that attacks religion; we are not a rival to religious camps.”
Which is why they’re also having another of these camps during Easter time right?
Wow, liberals truly have no shame.
“There is very little that attacks religion; we are not a rival to religious camps.”
Which is why they’re also having another of these camps during Easter time right?
Wow, liberals truly have no shame.
They're sure beginning to act like it despite their denials.
Ethics are for people who don’t have morals.
First they copy the Christian fish, and now they are copying our summer camps. But the Temple of Darwin is not a religion!
Thanks for the ping!
“How is ethics and morality going to be objectively true and binding without God ??”
See Aristotle’s (rational) Nichomachean Ethics (of happiness) at
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.1.i.html
Or in .... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicomachean_Ethics
... where it is written ... “Aristotle states in the opening chapter that eudaimonia, often translated as well-being or happiness, is the highest goal of all human deliberate actions, and coincident with the aim of Politics, the subject of another closely related work of Aristotle. He takes this as a starting point, going on to describe what is necessary to be happy.”
Violence only determines what is "right or wrong" so far as the law goes. It has no impact on basic morality or ethics.
I would hope that you would be able to see the distinction between what is lawful/unlawful and what is moral/immoral.
Also, your claim that if there is no God the only valid philosophical opinion with respect to morality is nihilism is problematic. Certainly there are those that believe as you do, but they are in the minority.
If God can do anything then He could choose to remove Himself from His creation. At that point would we be free to do whatever we wanted? Or would it be best to live morally upright lives?
Yours is a very good counterargument to the Euthyphro dilemma. Thanks.
Your arguments with regard to morality requiring some grounding are good, but not compelling. Another possible grounding would be human nature. For example, it seems to some that we humans evolved in such a way that we need to be both cooperative and competitive in order to best succeed in this world. This is the basis, I believe, of why democratic free market governance is better than dictatorship or anarchy.
Pithy comment, though not particulary useful.
'Ethics' and 'morals' are generally interchangeable terms in philosophical discussions. So your statement would read either:
Morals are for people who don't have morals.
or
Ethics are for people who don't have ethics.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.