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."
I think SeekandFind is doing a good job showing this isn't so.
Peope of reason are those that capably use their mind.
I guess we’re at an impasse on this issue. Since you believe in divine beings, you can look to them for what is intrinsically good or bad. I can’t do so, so I’m left with what we fallible humans decide is intrinsically good or evil.
Perhaps, from a philosophical point of view that's true. But such navel-gazing doesn't mean I'm willing to throw up my hands and let Hitler or Bin Laden do as they will.
Hitler was also a Catholic, and not even Pius XII could stop Hitler’s monumentally irrational acts.
You said it ... I didn't.
Another problem for virtue ethics, which is shared by both utilitarianism and deontology, is (iv) "the justification problem." Abstractly conceived, this is the problem of how we justify or ground our ethical beliefs, an issue that is hotly debated at the level of metaethics. In its particular versions, for deontology there is the question of how to justify its claims that certain moral rules are the correct ones, and for utilitarianism of how to justify its claim that the only thing that really matters morally is consequences for happiness or well-being. For virtue ethics, the problem concerns the question of which character traits are the virtues.
In the metaethical debate, there is widespread disagreement about the possibility of providing an external foundation for ethics — "external" in the sense of being external to ethical beliefs — and the same disagreement is found amongst deontologists and utilitarians. Some believe that ethics can be placed on a secure basis, resistant to any form of scepticism, such as what anyone rational desires, or would accept or agree on, regardless of their ethical outlook; others that it cannot.
Virtue ethicists have eschewed any attempt to ground virtue ethics in an external foundation while continuing to maintain that their claims can be validated.
Your own link mentions some of the metaethical problems with the accounting for or justification of virtue itself. On a naturalistic world view, without simply presupposing it, there doesn't seem to be any way to account for any such things as for virtue ethics to be about. Why should the chance/necessity of physical processes that constitute the universe produce any such things as virtue or vice? What sense does it make to praise or blame physical processes for anything? If the physical universe is all there is, how is it that there could be something that is not as it ought to be, or is as it should be?
Cordially,
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen!
And did the countenance divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark satanic mills?
Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green & pleasant Land.
Ahh yes, this by William Blake from the preface to his epic Milton: a Poem.
I had forgotten about it from high school. Thanks for sharing that once again :)
You are most welcome.
Are you English?
Even Dawkins doesn't believe in pure randomness. If everything were purely random then there would be no basic laws of physics. As soon as you have basic laws of physics, then you have boundary conditions, allowed and disallowed states, etc. So although popularized texts about evolution might use terms like "purely random" this is a misnomer.
In any case, my main point is not to prove or disprove God's existence, but to make the reasonable claim that Christians can engage in useful philosophical dialog with non-Christians. God made the world, and God made us in His image. Because of this, non-believers of goodwill will come to similar conclusions as Christians. Because of this we as Christians can join with non-Christians and create workable societies that are better than what the Commies, or Fascists, or Socialists came up with.
We can theoretically convince Dawkins that private gun owernship is a good thing without having to first prove to him the existence of God. We can convince some people through purely scientific reasoning that abortion is the killing of an innocent human life.
Why not take advantage of this fact? If we can't engage in useful dialog with non-believers then the only rational options are to either stop everything we are doing and spend all of our time evangelizing, or move to the middle of the forest.
If the Republican Party and/or "conservatives" are ever going to be important components of the political process then we need to be able to work with non-believers or believers who believe differently than we do.
Reagan got union members to vote for him, for gosh sakes! How the heck did a rightwing Republican accomplish that?
We should be able to work with libertarians, independents, anti-statist liberals, etc. to implement good legislation and remove bad legislation.
And we don't need to first get everyone to become born again and baptized in the nearest river.
However, there are lots of people who don't agree with me.
Even though they don't agree with me on this point, there are lots of other things we can agree on: private gun ownership is a good thing, small government is a good thing, free markets are good things, abortion is a bad thing, etc.
We need to work with lots of people in order to get the working majorities necessary to eliminate bad legislation and enact good legislation. Why would we want to, right from the get go, eliminate all non-Christians from our coalition?
If I can get an atheist to support the second amendment without first convincing him that God exists, what is wrong with that?
Cordially,
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