Oblivion (although I started over with a new character; Oblivion is a game like Wizardry 8 that can distract me with itself).
Record of Agarest War Zero.

I’ll only be playing the second one when I have a few hours to play, though, in the hopes that I’ll be able to get somewhere in at least two sessions.

Note this is what I had before I put Record of Agarest War on hold, so basically I’m right back where I started [grin].

So while Sewell is correct in claiming that Republicans see evolution as a hot potato, he’s simply wrong to blame that on American’s fear of eugenics and evolutionary psychology. It’s palpably obvious that Republicans are pandering to Americans’ religiosity (much stronger among fellow Republicans than among Democrats), and their knowledge that religious folks, particularly conservative ones, who form much of the Republican base, see evolution as damaging to their faith and therefore destructive of meaning, purpose and morality.

I’ll have more to say about the influence of religion on American evolution-denial in a future article, but the connection is so obvious that you have to have some other agenda to deny it. One such agenda is accommodationism: the idea that we can’t criticize religion if we’re to convert the faithful to evolution. I don’t know if that’s what is behind Sewell’s views, and I find it strange that a Brit, who lives in a country so much less religious than America, can’t descry the effect of our religion on our views about science.

But when you think about it, this answer is too simple, and when you examine it in the light of reason it doesn’t seem right. After all, American is not the only country that, in fact, has religions. There aren’t too many religions that America has that aren’t also in Europe or Canada, and I’d wager that the most popular religions are also equally well-represented in those other countries. And yet, in those other countries there doesn’t seem to be this sharp clash. Why is it that the religious — who, again, have pretty much the same religion as Americans — don’t see evolution as a threat to their religion as much as Americans do? Well, you can argue that Americans just are more religious that the people in those countries, but then you’d have to ask why that is, and you’d have to ask if it was always true. Since the conflict over evolution has been around for quite some time, why is it that the other countries didn’t have issues with it, or at least not as many issues as America has? Well, maybe religion has always been a bigger part of the identity of more Americans than it has elsewhere. But considering that England and Sweden, at least, have actual state religions, and that Canada is made up of a lot of people who do consider their religion part of their identity and even encourages people to retain that cultural identity — which America does not — that’s not all that credible either.

So, then, what is it that allows religious people in other parts of the world to accommodate evolution when America doesn’t? Perhaps … accommodation? Canada has always allowed for people to follow their own cultural mores as far as possible, including their religious ones. This includes tolerating and accommodating religious requirements. So it isn’t about a conflict between religion and secular values, or religion and science, but about one way being the default and the others being accommodated as appropriate, and not about merging or melting in but about both sides adapting to each other. There’s little reason on such cultures to demand that science teach religion; religion courses teach religion. But if it’s presented as a choice between science and religion, and that science itself will argue against religion without religion getting a word in edgewise, then that raises hackles, and sets up a confrontational atmosphere where both sides have to win outright. How can you accept, then, evolution when it would mean giving in and admitting you’ve lost?

So maybe, just maybe, accommodation is how other countries avoid this trap. Of course, this is something we can study and prove, and must prove. But the questions I raise are valid ones for Coyne’s proposal.

Now, I won’t accuse Coyne of having a hidden agenda for not seeing these questions. I will suggest that he’s a) not looking enough at history and b) not looking deeply enough to see the actual issues. When you look deeper, you’ll find that you have to ask what’s special about America, and religion does not seem to be it.

You Scored as Moya (Farscape)

You are surrounded by muppets. But that is okay because they are your friends and have shown many times that they can be trusted. Now if only you could stop being bothered about wormholes.

Moya (Farscape)
75%
Babylon 5 (Babylon 5)
75%
Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix)
63%
Heart of Gold (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy)
63%
SG-1 (Stargate)
63%
Millennium Falcon (Star Wars)
63%
Enterprise D (Star Trek)
56%
Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda)
50%
Serenity (Firefly)
50%
Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica)
44%
Deep Space Nine (Star Trek)
44%
Bebop (Cowboy Bebop)
31%
FBI’s X-Files Division (The X-Files)
31%

The tie-breaking question between it and Babylon 5, BTW, was about whether I should always question the government or give pop culture items to aliens. Considering what I thought of the show, I really think I’d work out better on B5 …

But I found one telling remark in an interview with Sewell published in Time Magazine in 2009. Here’s his response to a question about the influence of Darwin.

All things considered, do you believe Darwin was a great luminary in the path of human progress?
What has the theory of evolution done for the practical benefit of humanity? It’s helped our understanding of ourselves, yet compared to, say, the discovery of penicillin or the invention of the World Wide Web, I wonder why Darwin occupies this position at the pinnacle of esteem. I can only imagine he has been put there by a vast public relations exercise.

Yep, forget about how Darwin’s work transformed our understanding not only of ourselves, but of nature and our own relationship to other living creatures in nature, or how it made instant sense of so many observations that puzzled Darwin’s predecessors. (We all know the famous quote of geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, “Noting in biology makes sense except in light of evolution”. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but not far off.) No, to Sewell the influence of evolutionary biology reflects vast public relations exercise engineered by self-aggrandizing scientists.

The irony is that Sewell’s comment could be taken pretty much word for word from comments Coyne and others have made about fields like philosophy and theology when saying that “Science wins because it works”. They continually ask what kind of practical benefits these things have to everyday human life, and stand on the benefits that science has given. And yet, when it’s done to his field, he doesn’t take that lying down, despite not actually rising to the challenge … or, at least, not rising to it in any way that philosophy and theology haven’t, especially philosophy. So while he claims that Darwin’s work has increased understanding and explained observations, let me in turn reiterate that philosophy has clarified the problems of things like morality, knowledge and mind, and created the science that he claims works, while theology has produced the very arguments that he uses to justify his atheism. Surely, then, that’s as useful as Darwin’s work.

The first hole in this comes up with the demand for sharp separation of Church and State, and when you look at the countries you’ll discover — embarassingly for their argument — that Sweden still has a state religion. So much for separation of Church and State in these secular hotbeds.

But the arguments are still progressing, and Jerry Coyne has used it against Alain de Botton’s atheist temple idea, arguing:

Yes, it is a glorious flop in the making, and many, many people, most eloquently the atheist Philip Kitcher, have pointed out the social advantages of religion. And the “creative conversation” has already taken place. Some people claim that atheists must adopt some formalities of religion (Botton suggests things like temples and sermons), while others—many on this site—don’t feel they need them. It’s clear that we are social beings, and do need to interact with our fellow humans and to feel supported by them. But, as the example of secular Europe shows, that can be done successfully without borrowing any of the rituals of faith. There’s nothing more to be said. Putting away temples and sermons, even when we are atheists, represents the last act in discarding our childish things.

Initially, I was taken aback by this. Surely there are still national monuments and holidays in secular Europe. So it would seem that those sorts of things would at least still be present, and not done away with completely, and would do the same job as de Botton wants done. Then, in looking at it later, I realized that I thought he had talked about holidays and he hadn’t. So then holidays and monuments aren’t as good arguments against this. But I did look up what the holidays in Sweden are:

January 1 New Years Day
January 6 Epiphany 13th Day of Christmas
April 6 Good Friday Friday before Easter Sunday
April 9 Easter Monday
May 1 Labour Day
May 17 Ascension Day
May 27 Mothers Day Last Sunday in May. Not a public holiday.
June 6 National Day
June 23 Midsummer Day Midsommardagen
November 1 All Saints Day
November 11 Fathers Day 2nd Sunday in November. Not a public holiday.
December 25 Christmas Day
December 26 Second Day of Christmas

Now, let’s take a look at those holidays. And these are official, public holidays, remember. What’s Epiphany? “Epiphany is one of three major Christian celebrations along with Christmas and Easter. It is celebrated on January 6th and commemorates the presentation of the infant Jesus to the Magi, or three wise men.” It’s a purely religious holiday, and is also celebrated by these European countries: Austria, Belgium, Finland, Germany(Regional), Greece, Italy, Slovakia, Spain, and Switzerland(Regional). Seems to me that a couple of those secular European countries are on that list. And note that it isn’t a public holiday in Canada at all, and I don’t think it’s one in the United States as well.

What’s Ascension Day? “Ascension day commemorates the ascension of Jesus into heaven forty days after resurrection on Easter Sunday.” Another purely religious holiday, and it’s also celebrated by Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Indonesia, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland. Again, I don’t think there are too many countries that are in the “secular Europe” category that aren’t here. And again it isn’t celebrated in Canada or the U.S.

And All-Saint’s Day needs no quote to show that it’s a purely religious holiday. And the same list of countries celebrate it, with a few more added on. And again Canada and the U.S. don’t.

So, if we take secular to mean “Get religion out of the public sphere”, by these measures Canada and the United States are more secular than Sweden is. It has an official state religion; Canada and the U.S. don’t. It celebrates more purely religious holidays than Canada and the U.S. do. The only one that’s purely religious — I don’t count Christmas because it has a lot of non-religious aspects to it as well — is Good Friday … and that’s a holiday in Sweden, too.

What this means is that that model of secular is not, in fact, the model that’s used in secular Europe. So the model proposed by people like Jerry Coyne, Russell Blackford, P.Z. Myers, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and others is not, in fact, the model that’s working and bettering people’s lives in secular Europe. By Sweden’s example, the approach there is far more of an accommodationist and tolerant one than is being proposed. How, then, does secular Europe’s success justify that sort of secular approach? It doesn’t. And don’t let them tell you otherwise.

So the next time someone says “It’s works for secular Europe”, ask specifically how secular Europe did it. I’d wager most of them won’t know, and that if they do know it’ll turn out that it didn’t do it the way they want to do it.

Jaime: … If a modern day person tried to sell me on the idea that a god had told him to commit genocide, enslave people, and to force women to marry their rapists, and told me that I had to simply accept the goodness of all these apparent evils on faith that his god’s knowledge of goodness was simply beyond mine, then I would judge him to be both wicked and deluded to inordinately dangerous degrees.

Stoic: Well, let’s try a simple case. Let’s say — to use an example from Space: Above and Beyond — that someone told you to abandon 25,000 people to almost certain death and certainly great suffering because doing so will save even more lives, and you know that they are in a position to know the situation better than you do, is it better for you to follow their advice or to go on your own judgement? Ultimately, if there is a God and God knows what is good and right and moral better than we do, it is indeed hubris to suggest that your limited judgement should trump that. You are free to judge God as immoral if you wish, but it wouldn’t make you right, anymore than someone asserting that those things are right would make them right. If you accept the idea that we can determine what is or isn’t moral, then you need more than simple intuitive judgements to settle these things.

Jaime: No, that’s absurd. But before I get into why, let me quickly note that even were you right and only God could create good and evil, it is still possible that God could be evil as it is clearly possible for any lawmaker to violate his or her own laws.

Stoic: I don’t think the argument is that God is good simply because He creates the concepts of Good and Evil. Those seem, to me, to be independent principles. So while it might be possible starting from “God creates good and evil” for God to violate those rules, if those rules really are good and God is all-good as He has been defined to be, then He will never break those laws by definition. But we risk mixing two notions of God and morality here, so let’s not go further into that for now.

Jaime: I’m sure ordering these people to keep slaves and commit genocide in more “godly” ways than their neighbors did had a “comparatively civilizing” effect that made them relative models of humaneness. But how is this the evidence of a God who establishes an absolute Good and Evil? Can I be like your god and use this “absolute” Good and Evil to command genocides as long as they’re slightly less barbaric than Stalin’s or Mao’s?

Stoic: You are missing the point of the reply, to the point of almost being offensive. It’s not that what God did was better than what the others did, but that it was as good as it possibly could be in order to achieve the greater goal. You couldn’t survive in those barbaric cultures using the same sort of civilized model we use … and, in fact, it’s debatable given things like terrorism that we can survive in ours. You’re starting from a presumption of how the decisions are made that meets the model you want it to be to make your argument, not the presumption that people are actually using. You can claim that we don’t know that our presumption is valid, but you can’t simply avoid the issues by making claims about how it works that we’ve never argued or advocated.

In short, you presume a capricious God and answer as if you could be as capricious as you think God is. But the evidence given is not necessarily that of a capricious God, and so you misinterpret the reply and assume that’s all about simply being better than others. It isn’t.

Jaime: There is nothing “consistent” about the moralities of Mao or Stalin and nothing about atheism that either logically or practically necessitates their violence and authoritarianism. It is your conception of goodness—which has it as a matter of assertion of raw might—that would justify their oppressiveness, not my conception of goodness as intrinsic.

Stoic: Who said that the conception of goodness was simply assertion of raw might? No one has said anything like that. It’s not that God has more power than us that would make these things right. For people who think that morality is independent of God’s will — ie that God tells us what is right — it’s epistemically justified. For those who take the other tack and say that God defines what is or isn’t moral, then it’s definitional; God creates it and so God says what it is. None of this is based on it being right because God has the power to punish us if we don’t do it.

Jaime: Right, when humans commit genocides and enslave people it’s ghastly hubris—unless they did it several thousand years ago and claimed a perfect being made them do it. In which case it is totally copacetic. Godly even! And the alleged god behind their violence is a paragon of moral virtue.

Stoic: Well, it’s only not hubris if a perfect being told them to do it, or any other basis where they are saying that doing that is the morally right thing to do based on something other than their own personal opinion and limited understanding. Of course the person you’re arguing with is going to say that anything short of God is hubris, but there may be other levels where it isn’t hubris. You can ask how we are to know that a perfect being actually told us to do that, and that’s a good question … but not the one you’re asking here. Which isn’t as good a question, honestly.

Jaime: When you make claims about what does or does not allow for the creation of morality, you implicitly rely on beliefs about what makes a norm authoritative or not. You seem, for example, not to think that human feelings which differ from person to person are sufficient for creating a genuine moral norm. You seem also to think that there are some criteria which you think the god you believe in adequately satisfies to give him the rights to legislate legitimately where mere human dictators may not. Now, you might claim that your god specially revealed to you the ability to discern the conditions by which his true authority could be validated—in which case it is humorous that you keep trying to convince me with reasons that your views are sounder than mine and trying to get me to understand rationally why your god has legitimate moral authority. Or you think that investigating the intrinsic and rationally knowable nature of moral authority itself leads you to your belief in a god who is a legitimate source of moral norms.

But if you believe you can rationally assess, and rationally prove to me, the ontological necessity and moral legitimacy of your morality-giving god, then apparently you think you know the essence of morality and of moral legitimacy on rational grounds that could be communicated even to a non-believer like me. And if that is the case then apparently morality and moral legitimacy are not only graspable a priori but they are more fundamentally real and knowable than your god since your god is subject to, and could only theoretically gain legitimacy from, a moral order that is both more basic to reality and a more fundamentally understandable reality than he is. So, if we need to understand moral categories in order to infer your god’s existence and to legitimate claims that your god is morally good and authoritative, then apparently we must know these moral categories logically prior to any beliefs or lack of beliefs in gods.

In this case, I would necessarily be able to intuit these moral categories as an atheist, without any need for learning of the existence or dictates of your god. This means I do not need to believe in your god either to understand or accept the legitimacy of morality. In fact, since grasping and applying moral categories is the prerequisite for determining whether your god is moral or immoral—independently of his arbitrary, self-serving alleged claims about himself—I am perfectly in a position to judge that he is in fact disproven as a candidate for existence. Yahweh cannot both exist and behave as described in the Bible and be perfectly good, given the wickedness he is purported to have carried out and commanded throughout both the Old and New Testaments.

Stoic: The big problem here is that you confuse understanding moral authority with understanding the moral principles and rules, or even better assuming that if you can determine if someone has the authority to make rules you must have already determined what the rules are. This, is, of course, absolutely false. Let’s use this example: Imagine that you go to work for a company. Your job description is written by your manager. Because of the authority of that position — let’s put aside whether having it that way is good or not for now — you know that they legitimately define your job description by virtue of that authority. Does that mean, then, that you definitely know intuitively or a priori what your job description is? Of course not. If God has legitimate moral authority, it is for reasons that do not necessarily lead you to or are derived from some sort of intuitive notion of what is and isn’t moral, and so you don’t necessarily have the moral categories. If God’s moral authority comes from greater knowledge and a definition of goodness, then it’s an epistemic justification — ie He knows more than you and is moral — and you may well be wrong in your judgements. If it’s because God determines what is and isn’t moral, then the authority of being the one that defines the terms does it. All of this does not imply that you can indeed judge God based on your own moral intuitions. In fact, it’s only the former case where you can have any hope of judging God’s morality by any standards at all, because in the other case God sets the standard.

Now, you can ask how we know this, and it does come down to whether or not God exists, or if God has the right properties. That’s still a completely different question than the one you’re riding.

Jaime: Ah, and so those of us who think genocide is evil and that it has nothing to do with goodness just don’t really understand goodness. Only if we add an entirely superfluous concept to goodness—that it is a personal being—and then add an entirely contradictory concept to goodness—that this personal being of goodness itself commands evil actions like genocide—can we finally understand what goodness itself really is. The normal human a priori grasp of goodness is inadequate for this task.

Stoic: While I’m not sold on having to have a personal notion of God, I think it pretty obvious that the normal human intuitive grasp of morality is inadequate for morality, whether we have God in the picture or not. Our intuitive morality often does seem heinous, and is also often contradictory. We need to do better than our intuitions. Whether that’s a priori or not — I tend to think it is — does not impact that normal human moral intuitions don’t seem to be good enough for morality. God as proposed either has knowledge — whether it’s intuitive or not — or simply defines it. By the way, you might have noticed that I keep giving two answers. That’s because there are two ways to think about God and morality, as stated above, and your replies seem to straddle the two. Theists of the first sort might have an actual problem with God advocating genocide, but won’t have issues with it until you can settle all disagreements about what is moral. Theists of the second sort have no actual problem with genocide being moral only when God does it, but are the ones that are making the sort of arguments you’re talking about here. At least someone in this debate is confused [grin].

…

Jaime: So then there is no absolute Good and Evil, after all, on your view since your god can reverse the properties at any time. So, how is that a basis for belief in a true and absolute morality?

Stoic: Under this view, we have an absolute definition of what Good and Evil is, which is that it is what God says is Good and what is Evil. If these things are in any way to be considered things, they were created by God, and God defines what properties they have. Think of it this way, to borrow from Plato: the Forms of Good and Evil are defined by God, and everything that is Good and Evil only is such by participating in that Form. If God changed the Form of Good or Evil, then all of that would change … but since they would still be Forms they’d still be absolute in that sense, at least. You seem to want a true and absolute morality to be immune from change in principle, while all that’s required is for it to be immune from change in practice.

Jaime: How does it make any sense that the essence of dogs could become the essence of cats or vice versa? If a dog changed its features and the DNA which causes them, that’s not a dog taking on a cat essence, it’s a dog being replaced by a cat! The kinds of beings are still totally distinct. Properties cannot be made into their opposites in any rationally coherent way.

Stoic: True, but again that’s not the point. The point is about the Form of dog or cat, not about the properties that an individual dog or cat has. If the Form of cat changes so that things that bark and pant are now cats, then the Form has been inverted and their essence has been inverted. This would make what we used to call dogs cats, by changing the Form. If God can change the Form, then He can do this without any trouble and without contradiction or irrationality. And so if God changes the Form of Good, then what was once Good may now be Evil and what was Evil may now be Good.

Jaime: Except for when he told his “original” chosen people to commit genocide and keep slaves but started telling his modern ones that those things are evil?

Stoic: Again, you presume that making a command circumstanital means that it isn’t absolute, and so this would have to be a reversal of the concept. No absolute morality requires this. Take Kant and lying. He insists that lying is always wrong not because his moral rules have to be absolute, but because there aren’t any cases where lying wouldn’t violate his universal maxim. It’s actually consistent with Kant’s view that if you could find an exception where it wouldn’t, then you could universalize on that maxim and thus get different behaviour based on circumstances. This is one of the myths that really bugs me, that either you have to be a consequentialist or you can’t consider circumstances or even consequences ever. That’s not the case. It’s the principles that matter, not the individual cases.

Take Virtue theory, for example. All virtue theories insist that there are at least somewhat absolute properties or values for morality, the virtues. But how you apply those virtues to everyday situations depends not only on the virtues, but on the situations as well. Sometimes to be brave means running away, sometimes it means staying and dying. You take general principles and then apply them to specific cases, considering specific cases to the extent you need to to work out how the absolute principle applies in it. Thus, genocide might have been more acceptable in more brutal times where a reputation for mercilessness was required, but not as much now where you don’t need that reputation, without ever changing the rules of absolute morality.

Jaime: But he could and in principle is unconstrained by morality, since it is his invention and not something that he is subject to in any binding way. By your own logic, he created it and can dismiss it whenever he wishes. He can be systematically deceiving us all and having a good laugh at Christians like you who simultaneously believe in, first, his supremely malignant Old Testament deeds, second, his absolute independence of morality as its total creator, and thirdly and most hilariously naïvely, his “perfect moral goodness”. He might just be the most mischievously wicked tyrant of all time. Maximum evil with maximum praise for his “goodness”. I admit, this is a much more plausible prospect for a real god given the world we live in!

Stoic: This boils down to “Maybe God isn’t how you think He is”. Conceded, but it doesn’t address the comments and points being made. We could be wrong, but you aren’t going to get there by judging the world by your morality and then expecting everyone else to go along with it. All the first type of theists need to do is show how genocide could be moral and your argument is merely so much text. For the second, there is no way to judge Good or Evil apart from God’s standards. Again, you start with an argument from the second type of theist and argue that they are bound by the first type of theist’s problems. It doesn’t work.

Jaime: Then we can prove the god of the Bible is false, a fictional character and not the real god, by pointing out all his wicked deeds unbecoming the god whose goodness we can understand a priori.

Stoic: That we can understand good a priori does not mean that we do. We would be seeing the evidence of good all around us and might be coming to the wrong conclusions. As soon as you come up with an a priori understanding of morality that everyone agrees with and agrees is proven, then we can talk. We aren’t there yet.

Jaime: No, I just think Goodness is a basic, a priori discoverable feature of the world. If you want to rename it “God”, then be my guest—as long as you don’t ridiculously claim it is a personal being with a Son, a thing for the smell of blood sacrifices, and a creepily excessive interest in consensual adults’ sex lives.

Stoic: Why not? Who is to say that when we actually discover that feature of the world that those things would be seen as acceptably moral, or at least things we couldn’t determine the morality of without more knowledge? You continually judge God’s actions by standards that you hold that you can’t even convince other humans to accept. Why would we think that your limited knowledge would trump God’s, if He existed? There’s more work to do here, but your insistence on claiming immorality for things that you find personally offensive is not doing it and is, in fact, becoming quite strained.

Jaime: No, if there is your imagined highly willful personal god, then morality and goodness are just subject to arbitrary assignations of properties by that being. But if we do not confuse ourselves by invoking your metaphysically and scientifically baseless being, we can rather look for goodness right here in the natural world as one of its intrinsic discoverable features.

Stoic: This is a false dichotomy and, in fact, also makes a mistake on what it would mean for morality. For the latter, take this analogy: In the game The Old Republic there is, in fact, a very specific — and very much impacting — definition of Good and Evil, that was written by the game designers. If you step outside the world, you can argue that it is arbitrary, because the game designers simply invented it and could change it at any time. But from inside the world, this is just as intrinsic and discoverable as any of the fake laws of physics that it follows, and so inside the world is not, in fact, arbitrary at all. That’s the sense of non-arbitrary that we need; if the laws of morality are as non-arbitrary as the laws of physics, then that should be fine by most people.

And that’s why your argument creates a false dichotomy: you can have the laws of morality defined by God and still have it be something that you can look for in the world as being discoverable, by looking at how the moral world works, just as you can by for the physcial laws by looking at how the physical world works. If there is a problem here, it would be that you likely can’t get morality descriptively and so can’t get it by looking at the world.

Jaime: Goodness is a matter of effectiveness relationships in the natural world. When I say that vegetables are good for me, I do not mean that they have an arbitrarily assigned property granted to them by an invisible supernatural super-being that makes the statement true independent of empirically and a priori analyzable real world functions. Instead, I mean simply they are good at effectively keeping me alive. And this effectiveness is wholly independent of my feelings too. Personally I hate vegetables, but they are good for me. I don’t even feel any special love for this fact that they are good for me—I rather begrudge it, truth be told! But it’s just true. And unless a god changed their effectiveness potentials to harm me in objective ways, no simple ascription of “properties of badness” by any god would make them bad for me.

Stoic: You’re generalizing goodness beyond morality to try to show how we can determine moral goodness naturalistically. This doesn’t work. What we are interested in here is, in fact, moral goodness when we’re talking about God and morality and all those morally heinous things you claim He’s done. Now, if you decide not to eat your vegetables, are you going to consider that in and of itself some kind of moral failing? Almost certainly not; it’s pragmatically bad — or at least not good — but not morally bad or not good. Where, then, is your evidence that moral goodness is the same type of goodness as that? We’re risking major equivocation here, and all of your argument relies on, in fact, that definition of good. A definition of moral good that I, and the Stoics, strongly disagree with.

Jaime: If that is all you mean when you say that your god creates goodness, then we can dispense with worrying about whether or not he exists altogether and can certainly ignore your holy books. We certainly don’t need him or Christian churches for knowledge of goodness or morality.

… because the objective effectiveness relationships would exist and be subject to rational investigation independent of any reference to the being that set up such relationships. Such relationships need no such intelligent design to come about or to be maintained and there is no evidence of such a creator behind them. They just are. And even were they set up by some super-mind in the first place, as long as they are rationally investigatable (as they are) then that is our best route to truth about them. The arbitrary (and often wildly wrong) hunches and fantasies of ancient nomads and modern egomaniacs who are bad at statistics provide no extra help in figuring out the differences between good and bad or right and wrong. Frankly, they can only be expected to hinder any progress on this score.

Stoic: The problem, though, is the argument that without having some kind of outside the world intentional force defining this, you don’t have it. And so if you actually discover one, you’d effectively discover and have to discover God to do that at all. Otherwise, your investigations will only lead you to justifying your own personal prejudices and calling them moral. Note that this is an argument for the second type of theist. The first type of theist will agree with you and simply argue that the proof is independent of this moral question, but that this doesn’t in fact make the morality of religions or the Bible immoral or even irrelevant to figuring that out. Pick your poison; you aren’t going to get rid of God that easily no matter which way you go.

Jaime: The other option is hell! That’s like some sick abusive husband telling his wife that she has two options—either she stays in the physically and emotionally damaging relationship or he “divorces” her—and keeps her chained up in the basement being subjected to non-lethal torture the rest of her life. And, as a bonus, he has the power and the unchanging will to make her live and continue suffering in that dungeon forever. By your definition, a woman who refused to be in this relationship would be “choosing” this torture. But this is ridiculous. For “choosing” your god to actually be “freely done”, under these circumstances, it is clear there has to be another option—we have to be able to be without your god and not suffering at all for it.

Stoic: Well, there is a lot to say here, and let’s start at the end. You assume that for a free choice under these circumstances it would have to be the case that no suffering would arise from not choosing God. This might be consistent with the idea of Hell, in this case, as being a punishment, but isn’t consistent with the idea of Hell being a consequence. Even the punishment model does not lend itself to that sort of conclusion. After all, there is the threat of punishment if I murder someone, but that doesn’t mean that I never freely choose not to murder. Ultimately, you are looking at it in a sense that if you are under a threat, you can’t make a real choice and so cannot be held responsible for it, but I’m on-board with the Stoics here and deny that. If someone puts a gun to my head and says “Murder that person”, I still make a free choice. We might, of course, completely understand someone making the wrong choice and killing someone and so be more lenient, but they still made that choice. If you really think that you should not believe or worship God, that’s your choice … and then you live with the consequences. And I don’t just hold this for you, but for myself as well. There are things that I disagree with when it comes to religious morality, at least in part the idea that morality is to be determined separately. So I act in ways, knowingly, that are called sinful. I do so because I decide they are what I should do, and I’m prepared to accept the consequences of being wrong, no matter what they are or, in fact, even if I get punished, no matter what that is.

Your analogy with the abusive husband and battered wife is also a bad one. First — again, starting at the end — it isn’t the case that if we reject God that God “divorces” us. We “divorce” him, and separate ourselves from him, and God is always willing to accept us back. So, in essence, the choices would be between her staying in the relationship and her leaving it herself and separating herself from God. Second, you simply assert that it’s a physically and emotionally damaging relationship, but religious people certainly don’t feel that way, and in fact feel quite the opposite. So from the religious point of view, it would be her leaving either a fulfilling or potentially fulfilling relationship for … something else, thus separating herself from God who is always patiently waiting for her to return, but where the consequences are bad. It doesn’t seem like a good choice for her to make in that case, and not because God is some kind of abusive monster.

Jaime: I’m sure that’s what every bullying husband tells his battered wife—he knows she really needs him and is too stupid to understand that herself.

Stoic: But God really would know better and we might really not understand ourselves. It’s easy to get caught up in chasing indifferents and ignoring the real virtues, to think that the less restricted life is better. Humans have a tendency to choose things that seem like they’ll provide the best life that actually don’t, like say people who think getting plastered all weekend is great despite the hangover and damage to their bodies. The sarcastic reply, here, still simply carries on the misunderstandings shown earlier; you consider God abusive, and so deny that the advice may be in the best interests of the people involved, whereas if you don’t look at it that way it certainly, at least, isn’t clear.

Jaime: There are plenty of indications that your own Bible and influential Christian theologians teach that the dead are resurrected—and not that they simply become disembodied spirits. You do claim Jesus’s body came back to life, right?

Stoic: That Jesus rose bodily from the dead doesn’t mean that we do. Remember that the NT says that his body went missing from the tomb. That clearly doesn’t happen to us, so if that’s what’s meant then you have an obvious way to falsify Christianity. But things are not that simple. Since it isn’t our body, then, what does it mean for us to have a body, or do we even really have a body at all? This can only be settled with a lot of theological work.

Jaime: But my life as an atheist not even believing in your god is not miserable. Why would it be any more miserable were I sent somewhere after life where I wasn’t around your god either? Why would this suddenly start eating me up inside then, when it certainly does not now?

Stoic: Living in the world, you aren’t actually separated completely from God. After death, you would be. Simply not believing that something exists does not mean that you are separated and not influenced by it. After death, you might actually be separated, which would be a completely different experience.

Jaime: I would think it would be impossible to be miserable and not realize it! How could I be confused that I was happy when “in reality” I was secretly miserable? If I feel like I’m experiencing pleasure—or even just indifference, or even feeling, you know, just “blasé”—then how could that be misery unbeknownst to me. What do you even mean by misery if it’s something someone could not know they were experiencing. If hell is an eternity of thinking I’m as pleased as I am here on earth but “secretly” and “unbeknownst to me” being miserable then I’ll start packing for my eternal “suffering” in hell.

Stoic: Misery may be too strong a word, but you may simply be not realizing the true and greater pleasures, and you’d feel miserable if you had experienced them and then tried to find fulfillment you would indeed feel miserable. So it might be that you don’t feel miserable now, but would if you knew what real pleasure was. I, personally, resist basing my arguments for this on happiness versus misery, feeling that decisions should be right without considering the traditional notion of “happiness”, but that’s just me.

I don’t know, I feel pretty damned fulfilled. And I feel like there is plenty of good in my life without your god. In fact, I would say I know there is plenty of good in my life without your god. Saying your god is identical with goodness and that all badness is identical with being separated from your god is meaningless. Sex is good—is your god sex? Food is good, is your god food? Power, respect, fame, accomplishments, friendship, romantic love, and all the people themselves whom I love—they’re all good; are they your god too? What about all the virtues I have that lead to good things in my life without any need for your god’s intervention and which are themselves delightful to have? Is my generosity your god? Is my sense of humor your god? Are my powers to investigate truths your god? All these things are good and I can have them without your god because they are totally distinct and independent from your god.

Stoic: On what grounds do you say that those things are good? You need to distinguish between good used in the colloquial and Good as used in terms of ultimate ends. Is sex good? It’s generally pleasant, so in the colloquial it is. Is sex Good? Well, is sex a virtue? No, it seems like sex is not intrinsically good in that way. So, then, again borrowing from the Stoics I see sex as an indifferent when we talk about Good. So, then, you have an indifferent in your life. The same applies to pretty much everything you listed until you get to the virtues, and of those only generosity seems to be undeniably a virtue. Now, I personally think that we can find the virtues without believing in God, because I consider them — as the Stoics do — to be the base principles of morality, and I believe theologically can we have the capacity to learn to be moral without having to appeal to scripture or God directly. So, if you really are virtuous without believing in God, that’s fine. A theological argument — and one I support — would be that subscribing to real virtue is far more like a proper belief in God than lip service of declaring belief in a God. So acting virtuously may well be argued to actually not separate you from God, even if your web of belief doesn’t include the proposition “God exists”. At which point, it wouldn’t be independent. I’m not sure how far I want to push that argument, though; it’s pretty controversial in many ways and may even look like a way of defining atheists as really being theists. Suffice it to say, though, there’s a lot more to say here about good, Good, virtue, God, and separation from God.

Jaime: Not believing someone exists is not “refusing to be with” that person. I mean, seriously, Robin, why do you refuse to be with Aquaman? Why do you reject him so? Don’t you see how you will one day deservedly suffer emotionally forever with an Aquaman-shaped-hole in your heart after you die because of the ways you “deny” Aquaman in your life? Why won’t you just accept that Aquaman loves you and that only in Aquaman will you find fulfillment? Why won’t you accept that all the good things in life that you currently enjoy are not nearly as good as they would be if you also knew Aquaman? Don’t you see how an eternity in which you have all of Aquaman’s gracious gifts except for the presence of Aquaman himself would be a terrible fate from which you should want salvation?

Stoic: For novelty, I’ll start at the top. I agree with you that not believing someone exits is not a rejection, and so lean towards explanations that allow for the missing belief while still allowing room for real and legitimate rejection. As long as you don’t reject God, you won’t be separated from him, and so would not, one presumes, go to Hell on the “Hell is living without God” model (which always reminds me of the Alice Cooper song, BTW). But if you reject God, then you would be separated from him on that model. Now, are comments like “Seriously, even if he was up there in some heaven, I could never love—let alone worship—someone who offered me the choice between loving him and being burned alive for eternity.” indications of rejection? Is your stance that God is completely and terribly immoral a rejection? It might be, but note the difference between that and simply lacking belief. It’s much more active and much more rejecting, which would bring us back to the original comment.

So, let’s take Aquaman. Do I reject Aquaman? No, I merely do not believe that Aquaman exists. I do not deny Aquaman’s supposedly intrinsic qualities; if Aquaman existed, I accept that he can swim, breathe underwater, and talk to fish. But I think him a fictional character. That’s not a rejection … but it also isn’t what you do.

Also note an important difference here. I know that Aquaman does not exist except as a fictional character, because I can trace the history back to Aquaman’s invention and prove that. Do you really know that God doesn’t exist? I have seen nothing that rises to that level yet, and so this weakens such analogies; it is difficult to compare something that we know does not exist to something that we may not know exists, but that we also do not know doesn’t exist. But without that move, these analogies don’t work; it is not as unreasonable to believe that something exists when you don’t know that it doesn’t exist (and have evidence outside of your mind, at least, for it) as to believe that something exists when you do know that it doesn’t exist.

His deeds are ugly—and none is uglier than the gruesome child sacrifice in which he has his own son brutally crucified.

Stoic: None uglier? Why? Is life a virtue, or an indifferent? I think it reasonable to claim that giving up your life and enduring suffering for the virtues is, in fact, morally superior to avoiding it. As with most of your examples, you have a specific idea of what is good and right and moral in mind, and you use that to bludgeon your opponents. But your idea of morality is not yet proven. Neither is mine. Under mine, there are certainly good reasons to think that death and suffering are indifferents and that a virtuous end might have been achieved by sacrificing those indifferents, and if that was the case all virtuous beings must allow this sort of thing to happen. Yours is different, perhaps, but we don’t know if you’re right and I’m wrong. Your “gruesome child sacrifice” is my “noble and virtuous death”. The same applies to the other examples, in some sense: can you think of no cases where it is morally questionnable whether or not genocide is right or wrong, for example? If you can’t, then you don’t watch or read enough science fiction, I submit. The cases may still be wrong, but there are interesting questions there, that you ignore when you make such pronouncements. That you do so knowing that those you are replying to do not see the events the way you do smacks of simply ignoring them, something that you yourself seem to get quite upset about when you perceive it happening to you.

1) It’s a better show than the revamped BSG.
2) It’s a better show than “Firefly” was.

Now, the second one is certainly controversial, and I even think that it’s a bit unfair. Firefly and Space: Above and Beyond aren’t the same type of show, and have little in common other than both being in space and both being killed by Fox after one season. The type of person who really likes the more actiony, less serious, quicker show that still has excellent characters and character dynamics and even, on occasion, drama will like Firefly better. Space: Above and Beyond has humour, but is much more serious and is indeed darker overall, and if that’s what you’re looking for you’ll prefer it. As someone who likes both, right now I’d say that I still think that Space: Above and Beyond is the better show overall, mostly because it’s better science fiction. It goes into more detail about its setting and goes out of its way to highlight what has changed and what hasn’t. Firefly’s setting is less important to it; we know that it is futuristic, but there’s not as much emphasis on it. Also, Space: Above and Beyond has characters with more relatable flaws that are still likeable, although it isn’t by much.

But, sure, that’s debatable. I don’t think there’s much debate, though, that the revamped BSG is not as good a show as Space: Above and Beyond. They are more directly comparable because they have similar tones and even similar content, but where S: AaB gives us likeable characters that still have major flaws that add drama, BSG fails to do that. And part of that is focus. S: AaB’s focus is small; we focus on one squadron of marines and their place in the big picture, while in BSG we start at the big picture and try to work down to the individuals. It’s a split of focus that doesn’t leave enough time or room to make your flawed characters seem human and likeable. Both still cover the same ground, but we get involved more with our heroes than BSG delivered, at least for me. Add in that it is better science fiction and has a better dramatic plot that is desperate but never seems overdone, and it’s a better show.

It’s a shame that it only lasted a season.

While I admire Enns’s frank admission that Evangelical Christians must deal with science, he weasels out on the most important questions: the effects on Christian faith of trashing the Old Testament as a literal document, and the reasons why we’re supposed to accept the Old Testament as metaphor but the New Testament as literal. I challenge Enns, who knows these things perfectly well, to come clean about these. His failure to deal head on with the important questions shows, more than anything, why the ministrations of BioLogos won’t work.

So Coyne essentially accuses Enns of ignoring the big questions of the impact this change in attitude will have on Christianity and about when to take parts as literal or metaphorical. The problem is that the first part is, in fact, work for theology or philosophy of religion, two fields that Coyne has continually denigrated while feeling free to engage in speculations about theological conclusions. Yes, there may be an impact that has to be addressed, but it won’t be addressed by science or the theory of evolution itself, but by theologians and philosophers looking deeply at what things mean and if you can indeed maintain Christianity if you don’t take these stories literally. So, big questions, but Coyne continually talks as if he has the answers to them, and that the answer is that there’s a solid, unresolvable incompatibility there that no amount of theological work will fix. We should do the work first before coming to the conclusion, no?

The second one is worse, because Coyne is concluding for no good reason that the argument is that the Old Testament should be taken metaphorically and the New Testament literally, presumably on the basis that if someone in the Old Testament is to be taken metaphorically it all must be. This is like arguing that because Chalmers’ zombie argument is a thought experiment and not to be taken literally nothing else in “The Conscious Mind” should be taken literally, which is clearly absurd. No one argues that everything in the Old or New Testaments is literally or metaphorical. They have to be analyzed on a case-by-case basis using the proper criteria.

What are those criteria, you ask? Well, one of them is the possibility of it being true if taken literally. Coyne will likely argue that I’ve conceded his point, but I haven’t. If a story or passage can be taken literally, then that means that you can either take it literally or metaphorically; it might be either. But if you discover that it cannot be taken literally, then you cannot take it literally, and so must take it metaphorically. And before Coyne or other atheists roll their eyes or chortle, note that I argue that you are not done at that point. You then have to ask if the passage will still fulfill its purpose if it’s taken metaphorically. If it doesn’t if taken as a metaphor or a parable, then you have to abandon it, and everything that depends on it. This might mean that you then have to abandon, in this case, your religion entirely. If it does, then you can move on with only a few patch-ups. Ultimately, if you discover that it cannot be taken literally, then you have to drop everything that requires that it be taken literally … but that doesn’t necessarily mean everything that depends on it.

Now, I don’t think that we lose anything important by taking the Adam and Eve story as a metaphor as opposed to literally. But I might be wrong about that. There’s a lot of theological work to do to figure this out, and if Coyne and Rosenhouse want to participate I’m willing to go along with it. But only if they’re willing to get into the theological and philosophical trenches and understand how to go about figuring this stuff out. At the end of the day, I might be convinced of their position, but they’ll have to convince me first.

Now, I have to admit that in the whole Crosby/Ovechkin debate I was solidly on Ovechkin’s side, which might be considered heresy (I hope Don Cherry doesn’t read that I was passing over the good Canadian kid for the Russian). But the main reason for that was that Ovechkin seemed to love the game and have a strong zest for life that was nice to see, if not to share. Crosby was always more measured, which is fine but made him less entertaining than Ovechkin. Ovechkin celebrated his goals and goals by his teammates with the same enthusiasm that indicated a great enthusiasm for the game.

So it’s no surprise that he was the one who made the shoot-out competition at the All-Star Game an event instead of just a show of skill, and no surprise that at last year’s draft he was the one filming and laughing at and with the last player to be selected.

But this is disappointing. Ovechkin comes off like someone in a snit as opposed to someone who’s interested in the game. Even his GM’s patch-up of “He doesn’t think he deserves to be there” doesn’t work when Ovechkin’s first reply is that he doesn’t feel like being there and that reply is the after-thought in his discussions.

Now, Ovechkin’s performance has also dropped over the past few seasons, and my worry is this: with the suspensions and with the change in style of play and even with other teams making huge efforts to contain him, Ovechkin might no longer be as enthusiastic about the game. So all of this might simply be a reflection that he doesn’t find the game fun anymore. He can’t play the way he wants to play and win or even keep from being suspended, and this whole incident just drives home for him that hockey’s not as much fun anymore. Maybe it’s turning into just a job for him.

If it is, that’s probably a problem, as it seems to me that most of his success came from his not thinking of it as just a job. So it would be unfortunate for everyone if he ends up that way.