Chattering classes here in the U.S. have recently been absorbed in discussions that dance around, but never quite address, a question that cuts to the heart of how we think about the basic architecture of reality: are human beings purely material, or something more?
The first skirmish broke out when a major breast-cancer charity, Susan Komen for the Cure (the folks responsible for the ubiquitous pink ribbons), decided to cut their grants to Planned Parenthood, a decision they quickly reversed after facing an enormous public backlash. Planned Parenthood provides a wide variety of women’s health services, including birth control and screening for breast cancer, but is widely associated with abortion services. The Komen leaders offered numerous (mutually contradictory) reasons for their original action, but there is no doubt that their true motive was to end support to a major abortion provider, even if their grants weren’t being used to fund abortions.
Abortion, of course, is a perennial political hot potato, but the other recent kerfuffle focuses on a seemingly less contentious issue: birth control. Catholics, who officially are opposed to birth control of any sort, objected to rules promulgated by the Obama administration, under which birth control would have to be covered by employer-sponsored insurance plans. The original objection seemed to be that Catholic hospitals and other Church-sponsored institutions would essentially be paying for something they though was immoral, in response to which a work-around compromise was quickly adopted. This didn’t satisfy everyone (anyone?), however, and now the ground has shifted to an argument that no individual Catholic employer should be forced to pay for birth-control insurance, whether or not the organization is sponsored by the Church. This position has been staked out by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, and underlies a new bill proposed by Florida Senator Mark Rubio.
Topics like this are never simple, but they can be especially challenging for a secular democracy. On the one hand, our society is based on religious pluralism. We have freedom of conscience, and try to formulate our laws in such a way that everyone’s rights are protected. But on the other hand, people have incompatible beliefs about fundamental issues. Such beliefs are often of central importance, and the duct tape of political liberalism isn’t always sufficient to hold things together.
When it comes to abortion and birth control, there’s no question that down-and-dirty political and social aspects are front and center. Different political parties want to score points with their constituencies by standing firm in the current culture wars. And there’s also no question that restricting access to contraception and abortion is driven in part (we can argue about how big that part is) by a desire to control women’s sexuality.
But there is also a serious question about human life and the nature of reality. What actually happens when that sperm and ovum get together to make a zygote? Is it just one step of many in an enormously complex chemical reaction that ultimately gives rise to a new person, who is at heart just a complex chemical reaction him-or-herself? Or is it the moment when an immaterial soul, distinct from the material body, first comes into being? Question like this matter — but as a society we hardly ever discuss them, at least not in any serious and open way. As a result, different sides talk past each other, trying to squeeze metaphysical stances into political boxes.
If it were really true that “a human life” was defined by the association of an immaterial soul with a physical body, and that association began at the moment of conception, then making abortion illegal would be perfectly sensible. It would be murder, pure and simple. (Very few people are actually consistent here, believing that mothers who have abortions should be treated like someone who has committed murder; but there are some.) But this view of reality is not true.
Naturalism, which describes human beings in the same physical terms as other objects in the universe, doesn’t actually provide a cut-and-dried answer to the abortion question, because it doesn’t draw a bright line between “a separate living person” and “a collection of cells.” But it provides an utterly different context for addressing the question. Naturalists are generally against murder, but it’s because they recognize certain collections of atoms as “people,” and endow those people with rights and privileges as part of the structure of society. It all comes from distinctions that we human beings ultimately invent, not ones that are handed down from a higher authority. Consequently, the appropriate rules are less clear. A naturalist wants to know whether the purported person can think, feel, react, and so on. They also will balance the interests of the fetus, whatever they may be, against the interests of the mother, who is unquestionably a living and functioning person. It’s perfectly natural that those interests will seem more important than those of a fetus that isn’t even viable outside the womb.
Most everyone, religious believers and naturalists alike, agrees that killing innocent one-year-old children is morally wrong. Consequently, we can happily live together in a society where that kind of action is illegal. But our beliefs about aborting one-month-old embryos are understandably very different. The disagreements about these issues aren’t simply political, they run much deeper than that.
It matters how people think about the world. Political liberalism is a good system, but it only works insofar as the citizens can agree on a core set of values and push cultural/religious differences to the periphery. Naturalism doesn’t answer all the value-oriented questions we might have; it simply provides a sensible framework in which they can be profitably discussed. But between naturalists and non-naturalists, profitable discussion is much more difficult. Which is why we naturalists have to keep pressing, making the best case we can, trying to convince as many people as we can reach that there is only one realm of existence, governed by unbreakable laws, and that we are part of it.
Perhaps I’m overly pessimistic, but I’ve pretty much given up on any satisfactory resolution to the debate on abortion. Given the core nature of the moral principles that inform the pro and con positions, there just doesn’t seem to be any middle ground: either it’s murder, or it’s not, and since murder is completely unacceptable, it’s either completely unacceptable or it’s not. Expecting this to change is tantamount to expecting the eradication of religion. I don’t think that’s ever going to happen.
I think a much more fruitful debate must be had among the so-called “pro-choicers”: What do we do if Roe-vs.-Wade is overturned? Seriously, what should we do? What can we do?
Dronewatch: Excellent explanation of the actual issues involved in the abortion battles being waged in this country. The moral and metaphysical debate is for each woman to have privately, not for us or the government to decide. These blastocysts arent abstract features of our environment, they are inside the bodies of women, bodies which are governed by those women, not by the state. Women can make these decisions based on their own moral and metaphysical understandings as well as other considerations, not have the decision forced on them by the beliefs and metaphysics of others.
Quote:
“Catholics, who officially are opposed to birth control of any sort…”
This kind of statement is ambiguous, at the very least. Catholics can control when to have babies by choosing to avoid sex during periods of fertility.
What always got to me is those who are against abortion but pro-death penalty. They justify it by saying babies are innocent, that’s a murderer. But they conveniently forget the “love your enemy” part from the Bible. Saving babies is the easy thing to do, saving murders is harder.
If we need to solve problems of ultimate reality in order to create legislation, we’re clearly in even
more trouble than I thought.
First and foremost, to the author: Whether or not you are a scientist, or just a writer, who are you to make such a definitive statement as your claim that humans have no souls? (Before anyone argues with me on that re-read paragraph #7. If that is not what the author is stating then it needs to be rephrased. Remember kids: phrasing matters.) You live in a time where it is becoming increasingly obvious that as much as the human race knows there is STILL vastly more that we know nothing about. Until we have answered every last question that can ever be asked, such a statement, (especially on the part of both scientists and people who write for reputable science magazines), is pure foolishness, and frankly goes against the scientific ideal. In science all things must be approached with an open mind and tested, and the end results, even if they go against EVERY previously held notion MUST be accepted or else science is a waste and should be stopped. In science one MUST accept that there are things for which there is presently no method available for testing, and that there are things which currently are still unexplained; to do less is to cripple science. Further, as a person who believes that the concepts of God and of science are NOT mutually exclusive concepts, I find such an assertion flatly insulting, and would appreciate it if you would keep your personal opinions out of your writing, or at least state that they are, in fact, merely your personal opinions.
Second for those arguing with psmith: The simple fact of the matter is that had the sperm and egg that went on to become the person we think of as ‘psmith’ then the entire discussion becomes irrelevant. Since however they clearly did AND psmith’s mother chose not to abort the entire subject has changed to the question of now that we have an entire strand of DNA that is arguably unique that will, if allowed to develop uninterrupted, into what we would not argue to call a human being, is it right that we crush out that life? It doesn’t really matter from a physical OR a spiritual perspective when you would actually deem it a human being since we are in agreement as to what the end result will be. And since no one has yet called any of you on it allow me to be the first: I notice that rather than addressing the immediate issue/question/dilemma you have nearly unilaterally drug things into the discussion that ultimately aren’t relevant. Contraception is a seperate issue from abortion based on the fact that one is to prevent unwanted, or unprepared for, children from being conceived, and some have the additional purpose of attempting to stop the spread of diseases, whereas the other has to do with the extermination of what, regardless of what it is labelled as initially, will eventually in all probability become an entire person. It’s not as if a human sperm and human egg will cause the mother to give birth to, say, a platypus, and ignoring the invariable end result of a pregnancy when discussing whether or not to terminate said pregnancy, is more than slightly myopic.
Moral issues aside, the fact is that ultimately, as in so many other places, this isn’t exactly a place governments should be sticking their collective noses. What a person believes and chooses to do is on them, up until they begin to step on the toes of others. People do not live in a vacuum, but neither do they ordinarily live in cages. A government has no business in topics such as abortion beyond ensuring they are as clean and as safe as they can be for the people who choose to have them. Who has them and who pays for them is not a decision a government has any right (or for that matter, qualifications) to decide for anyone. (Yes I realize I sound terribly anti-government, but I’m not. I, like every other country boy, just want people to keep their nose out of business that isn’t their own.)
“… there is only one realm of existence, governed by unbreakable laws …” The laws of psychology might depend on placebo beliefs, some of which are objectively false. According to Nikos Kazantzakis. “Every perfect traveller always creates the country where he travels.”
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nikos_Kazantzakis
David C. R (#31) says:
No. Science demands evidence, but it is also willing to accept conclusions that are well-supported by scientific evidence. Your position, on the other hand, lands us in total skepticism (i.e., we’d have to say we know nothing at all).
But we do know that all matter is composed of quarks and electrons. And we do know that quantum electrodynamics governs all neural processes. And we do know that there are no souls.
(I frankly can’t follow your second point — we all agree that contraception is different from abortion and that a human won’t give birth to a platypus. I’m surprised but pleased that we also agree that the government should not try to take control of a woman’s body by restricting abortion.)
One does need not know everything to know that certain things are not true. Accumulation of sufficient amount of evidence incompatible with a certain idea is generally enough for reasonable people to reject it. If humans had souls the whole monumental corpus of scientific knowledge, all the billions of pages of it, will have to be completely scrapped and rewritten because souls are incompatible with the laws of physics as we know them. The evidence in support of the existence of souls is, to put it very mildly, insufficient to warrant such overturning of all of the accumulated knowledge of humanity
There is no such thing as a “concept of science” that is no equal footing with the “concept of God”. Science is a proper epistemology applied in practice to advance our understanding of the world around us. Faith is the precise opposite of proper epistemology and with that the supposed compatibility of science and religion simply evaporates
There is no such thing as an unique strand of DNA that is allowed to develop uninterrupted, there are 46 strands of DNA in a zygote which then turn into billions and trillions of variants of those original 46 strands due to somatic mutations, V(D)J recombination, etc.. Each of them could potentially develop into a human being if it is cloned (technical difficulties aside). Do we shed tears for every murdered human being in each skin cell we shed every fraction of a second and for every erythroblast that loses its nucleus? What is the difference between those and a zygote, blastocyst, etc.?
We’re not – the end result could be anything from the next Newton to something going horribly wrong during neural tube development and an anencephaly. A lump of cells is a lump of cells, not a person – it has no self-awareness.
Yes, we should be distinguishing contraception and contragestion but for most people that’s too much terminology so we lump contragestion into contraception and treat contraception as a mild form of abortion. There is a very good reason to do that – according to the Catholic Church contraception is just as evil as abortion so we do in fact have to fight opposition against both from the crazies
Well, by banning abortion, which is what the lunatics want, government would very much interfere with one’s personal choices. It’s not as if government is going to force abortions onto people, although this is a critical necessity right now because of how drastically we have overshot the carrying capacity of the planet. But that’s not what we’re talking about – the debate is should government ALLOW and provide abortions for those who want them. One side says “Yes, it should”, the other says “No, abortion is murder, ban it”. The latter is very much interfering with people’s personal lives and it is tragically ironic that the very people who are so loudly anti-government will hold to that position for dear life
The government can best make sure abortions are safe by providing them. That’s the hidden gotcha in what people like Ron Paul are saying on the subject – you can not let people pay for these kind of things themselves because the typical situation is some poor naive 17-year old girl with some Jesus-obsessed parents who got pregnant and simply can not afford to pay for an abortion on her own. By keeping government out of these things, you effectively force the most vulnerable to have their unwanted babies because they will be simply out of the market for abortion services.
Sean, you write: “But between naturalists and non-naturalists, profitable discussion is much more difficult. Which is why we naturalists have to keep pressing …”
if profitable discussion is difficult, then perhaps you have to work harder at learning how to do it, rather than aping the people you disagree with by making big claims about your knowledge of reality and trying to win by getting more people on your side.
I didn’t like the way this post joined a discussion of the way a naturalist way of thinking might lead one to behave to a stoking of the coals of the American abortion debate – it seemed to guarantee that most readers would become too upset to think straight – but on reflection, perhaps you were right to do that as a demonstration that we do all have to share the world with people whose beliefs can’t really be reconciled with our own. it’s very difficult.
but it’s one of those problems that isn’t going away soon. you’re right, ultimately a political solution to a problem (or a compromise that stops it exploding) does depend on the different factions having plenty of people on their side, but is having one’s side rally under the banner of one’s truth going to help much? there are loads of ways to convince people to support things.
if you have a little time, I recommend Richard Rorty’s book ‘Contingency, Irony and Solidarity’, which is an attempt to work out how ‘we’ (liberals/leftists) could argue for and hopefully achieve some of our vision of a good society to live in if we had decided to leave the idea of truth alone since we thought it was part of the problem rather than part of the solution. after all, we think all people have worth just because they’re people, don’t we? so shouldn’t we respect people’s ideas even if we don’t share them, not because we might one day be convinced by them but because people have them?
it comes down to appealing to people to help you stop some other people doing something that you are afraid of or makes you angry or upset. I think I am saying that a little less metaphysics, and a little more emotional honesty, could help in these really gnarly debates.
I understand that you have really good reasons for claiming that, as a physicist, there are some domains of existence that you understand a lot better than other people. I’ve re-read ‘Physics and the Immortality of the Soul’ to remind myself and you put your arguments well. it’s just that being right won’t help much here unless you are thinking on multi-generational timescales.
I feel I’ve not expressed this very well, but I wanted to have a go. cheers, Andi.
Courageous, Sean.
A rarity: a balanced discussion. Just two points: First, there seems to be a feeling that people who are against abortion even in the case of rape, incest etc are somehow more evil than those who make exceptions in these cases. However, if one really believes that abortion is murder, then it is clear that no exceptions should be made here, so really these people are less hypocritical. One might disagree with them, but the disagreement has to be about whether abortion per se is murder. One might disagree with the other side’s reasons, but any argument has to acknowledge those reasons. (Of course, for those whose real aim is to punish (by forcing them to have an unwanted child) people for having sex, then the exceptions make sense.) On a similar note, if one really believes that a human life begins at fertilization, then it is hypocritical not to oppose the IUD as a form of contraception since part of its effect is due to stopping very young embryos from nesting into the lining of the uterus. Also, many embryos are spontaneously aborted, but even religious fundamentalists don’t hold funerals for them, which they should by any logic, from which I conclude that they are hypocritical, misinformed or have another agenda. I actually don’t know of anyone who opposes only the IUD. Some oppose (almost) all forms of birth control, but clearly the motivation here is different since in many cases no fertilization ever occurs.
Personally I don’t believe in free will and see no value in human life in itself. I consider quick and painless death a blessing. I would have preferred to be aborted in fact and not because my existence is particularly miserable but rather because all existence is miserable.
As a product of our species evolution I do however have certain pro-social mechanisms like empathy encoded in my psyche and therefore am against needless suffering. Suffering is bad not only for the individual, it also cripples productivity and is therefore bad for society in general.
Abortion and death are good when they minimize suffering and this is the only criterion that matters. As the fetus doesn’t suffer much if anything and others (with the possible exception of mother) haven’t yet formed strong enough bonds with it to be seriously affected in the event of it’s death I am all for abortion if the child is not wanted.
I would even support killing already born children and adults if there was some reliable way to prove that this would result in less total suffering. Hitler and Stalin should have been aborted or killed in retrospect. But since there is no way to know it beforehand and since children and adults already have strong bonds with family and friends whose suffering in the event of killing would have to be taken into account I am against it.
“It’s perfectly natural that those interests will seem more important than those of a fetus that isn’t even viable outside the womb.”
Indeed, unless of course an ideology (e.g., life is sacred) or worldview (Christianity) distorts one’s natural value hierarchy. Abortion rights can be defended on the basis that there are no good *secular* grounds for thwarting our hard-wired psychological preference that the interests of visible, actual beings trump those of merely potential beings; see “Faith in hiding: is there a secular case for banning abortion?” at http://www.naturalism.org/abortion.htm
Nice to see the argument described as one between naturalists and supernaturalists and their respective metaphysics, an argument which as you say doesn’t get much air time in our culture. To make the case that there’s just one realm of existence (the natural world), I think we have to first address the epistemological question of what are good grounds for knowledge claims, and make the case (not so difficult) that empiricism has no rival, http://www.naturalism.org/epistemology.htm#rivals
Sean, oddly your defintion of human life does not include references to scientific literature on the beginning of human life and viability of new borns let alone a fetus outside the womb. Nor do you cite any teachings of the Catholic Church with respect to the beginning of human life, abortion (and treatment of women who have had an abortion) and birth control. Do I detect a straw man?
Hhmmm…lots of folks might not be viable without external help outside the womb, even adults. I find this one of the stranger criteria by which to decide.
@#38: Be my guest. I’m sure folks can advise you on painless ways to end your life. Yes, in some societies attempted suicide was punished by death (really!), but I don’t think that’s the case where you live now.
Sean – good post, and I completely agree.
I’m a philosophical property dualist rather than a materialist. That is, I believe physical processes can have both material and experiential (conscious) aspects. To take a classic example, which equations would you use to describe the color red? Not the wavelength of light, mind you, but the actual experience of seeing the color. Besides, one can hypothetically rewire the nerves in the brain such that 680 nm maps to blue and 460 nm to red. The actual experience itself is impossible to reduce to QED or anything else. So I think there is something “more” there (but not some magical material which has never been detected!).
But it is pretty clear that consciousness only exists within brains, not zygotes. So I would draw the cut-off for legality of abortion at the development of capacity for consciousness as a marker for “ensoulment”. As for people who worry they would never have existed had their mother used abortion, perhaps they would have been born to somebody else, use a different brain and body, and see the world from different eyes.
DNA is a chemical substance, not a human being. You might as well say that a CD is a live concert, just because it has the unique code for that particular performance on it. The exaltation of DNA as the materialized soul of humanity is I think a remnant of scientific racism, which is alive and well in evolutionary psychology. Religious people usually love evolutionary psychology because it usually affirms that God wrote human nature as religion has portrayed it into the genes.
People grow, physically and mentally. It is true that a newborn cannot pass a mirror test, or many kinds of tests at all. But it has the potential to grow if someone simply feeds and clothes him or her. Thus, you can point at a newborn and say, correctly, that it has the potential to be a full human being and ascribe it rights. But, if you try to point at a fetus, you point at the mother. Worse, the fetus doesn’t really have the potential to grow into a full human being until some undetermined point. Taking away a woman’s rights on behalf of an uncertain potential?
Science itself has been corrupted by the influence of religion. Notably, in terms of the abortion debate, scientists have refused to measure the natural abortion rate. There is a powerful political tendency to downgrade this. In more leftish times, the estimate I recall was that eighty percent of conceptions fail. Now, if you can find any estimate at all, hardly anyone would dare to estimate more than fifty percent. Quite aside from raising serious question as to the strength of sexual selection versus in utero selection that demolish the foundations of evolutionary psychology, no one wants to acknowledge that God is the greatest abortionist at all.
The abortion debate is so intractable because one side is irrationalist and too many people want to pretend rationality and irrationality are somehow equal.
Why would a naturalist agree that killing a one-yer-old is morally wrong ? I took an anthropology class back in the sixties that studied severe famine, in which the old and the young were expendable – nobody else had any energy to deal with it anyway. So, never mind abortion – why should I get dinged to pay for someone else’s sex change operation ? Who annointed Planned Parenthood anyway as the favorite provider of various services. I have no personal objection to abortion except that, as Clinton said, it should not even be necessary. Religions are generally against it because until recently, if you had 10 kids, 7 of them would die anyway from epidemics and whatnot. Today, thanks to antibiotics, we have more humans than anyone would have guessed, and all the attendant problems. Do people have a ‘right’ to act like disgusting and irresponsible pigs ?
psmith wrote:
“I am that child. If she had aborted that foetus she would have murdered me, she would have killed that life with all its rewards, fulfillment and happiness. Trapped in her own despair she had no way of foreseeing the gift of happiness and fulfillment that she would be giving to me, and to my children. Because she clung to hope she made the unforeseeable possible.
Abortion would have murdered me.”
I think it would be more accurate to say she would have destroyed something that had the potential to become “you”, just like if your parents had used some type of spermicide that killed the sperm that in reality went on to fertilize an egg which in turn grew into you. And speaking of potentials, my mother aborted another pregnancy very shortly before she became pregnant with me–so if she had kept that baby, I would never have existed. Thus, I could equally well say that my mother not aborting that other fetus “would have murdered me.” (similarly, by the butterfly effect in chaos theory it is reasonable to say that any possible change to history occurring more than a few days before my conception would have resulted in my not existing, but that doesn’t mean I should think every possible historical event was “good”, including massacres and disease epidemics and such).
Ian wrote:
“Sean, oddly your defintion of human life does not include references to scientific literature on the beginning of human life”
There is no such literature, because “human life” is not a term with any technical scientific meaning (it is mostly used in ethical or metaphysical discussions). For an example of why our colloquial use of the phrase “human life” doesn’t really translate into any precise scientific definition, consider this question: how much of an adult’s body can be lost such that if the remainder is still alive on a cellular level, it still qualifies as a “human life”? I think colloquially most people would say that a person with an artificial heart is still a “human life” even though the organic part of their body would not be able to function on its own, but they might have doubts about a hypothetical case like a body where the head has been cut off and destroyed but everything below the neck is being kept alive on life-support machines, and if we consider a case like that shown in Woody Allen’s movie “Sleeper” where a human nose is kept alive after the rest of the body has been destroyed, I think virtually no one would call that a “human life” even though it’s living human tissue with human DNA.
@ Physicalist: My second point was simply that the people who are bringing the topic of contraception into an argument regarding an abortion are bringing something into the conversation that isn’t really relevant to the issue at hand.
@ GM: First let me say thank you for doing a point by point breakdown of why you disagree with me. It’s a nice change of pace for me to see a person address each issue seperately. However: there is a ‘concept of science’. The word concept is defined as an abstract idea or a general notion. Which in this case fits since there is no concrete object one can point to and name ‘science.’ You can only point to scientific equipment, personnel, research, results, etc. The same goes in any discussion one has regarding the concept of God. Since there is no physical entity one can point to and call ‘God’ it, like scieince, can be referred to as a ‘concept’. (Yes. I admit that in the case of God that much of the evidence is open to debate as to cause.) On your response to my statement regarding DNA, since it was abundantly clear what I meant, your response to that is just splitting hairs. You know what I meant, and while it IS true that there can be catastrophic failures in the DNA sequence, or reproduction of cells, or environmental hazards that could cause a pregnancy to end prematurely, they all fall under the category of interruptions of the natural process of fetal development. And in regards to your response regarding my belief that the government has no place in the abortion debate: You treated the first sentence as though it were part of a seperate point, which it was not. The rest of your argument to that, while well worded and well thought out, seems to disregard the fact that doctors, clinics, and hospitals, are the ones who actually carry out abortions, and that people should not be forced to pay for something they disagree with. If the government were to provide abortions it would be paid for with taxpayer money, and many of those taxpayers would be furious to have their money spent on something they disagree with. (Not that it typically stops the government anyway, but many people feel VERY strongly about this particular subject. As evidenced by the fact that abortion clinics have been bombed and doctors have been killed over it.) As I said, the government would do best to simply NOT disallow it but mandate that any person or organization must meet certain minimum safety and health requirements. Which is what the government is currently doing, though apparently some people are pushing for more than that.
@ Physicalist and GM: Both of you state that science says that souls do not exist. My question is this: How do you figure? Most scientists will admit that our concept of the universe and how it functions is terribly incomplete, which is evidenced by the numerous competing theories for how it all began, how many dimensions there actually are, where it’s all going, how it all fits together, and so on. GM you specifically pointed to the crucial flaw in that argument when you made the statement ‘souls are incompatible with the laws of physics AS WE KNOW THEM’ (emphasis mine). Can either of you point to a single theory on how to test for the existence of a soul? What they are made of? Experiments performed testing for the existence of a soul? Can you point to an explanation that even explains HOW they are incompatible with the laws of physics? I’ve yet to find any information stating any of these points, at least not from a credible source. I understand your assertions, and I do see your reasoning, but I disagree based on a lack of evidence.
#45: I think you’re being a little over-the-top, but you touch on another intractable problem: Either you think there is objective morality, or relative morality. Though it’s not a guarantee, I’d say any Venn diagram that includes naturalists is going to show considerable overlap with moral relativists. Same goes for the overlap between moral realists/objectivists and religionists. Again, what hope is there of persuasion? If God is real to some people, and God determines what is moral, then to them those morals are not subject to question. Moral standards may be ignored by the hypocritical, but to certain among the religious they’re not dependent on airy-fairy things like historical context or cultural mores. Period.
People (like me) who see morality in purely naturalistic terms find the notion of objective morality absurd, even bizarre. To some degree we can understand how those who believe morality is defined by God might find certain practices completely unacceptable if they also believe those practices are subject to holy interdiction. But we certainly can’t sympathize. In a very fundamental way, we view the world completely differently.
There is no “argument”, only opposition. Someone wins, someone loses. Anyone who chases after mutual agreement of some form more satisfactory than grudging tolerance of ideological defeat in a democracy is probably kidding themselves. And history tells us many will likely never tolerate certain practices they deem immoral. Meaning either one side or the other is defeated utterly, exits each other’s legal sphere of influence (e.g. secession), or we’re locked in perpetual strife.
Which do you think is our most probable future?
My precise wording was “There is no such thing as a “concept of science” that is no equal footing with the “concept of God”. That is a bit different from what you are replying to – what I am saying is that science can not be treated as something comparable and on the same level as God, it isn’t. The conflict is between science and faith as ways of knowing the world. Faith has been conclusively shown to be a very poor way of understanding the world around us, that’s why I also talked about proper epistemology and bad epistemology. God is a hypothesis. Faith in its validity is incompatible with scientific thinking because the evidence to support it simply isn’t there.
Things go wrong a lot of the time, in fact the majority of fertilization events do not result in live births. And again, a lump of cells is not a human. You can only argue that it is if you believe in souls but such a belief is just as unjustified as belief in God.
I wasn’t actually replying to you there, I was making a general point.
Well, pretty much everything the government spend money on is objectionable to someone. Should the government just cease to exist then and stop doing anything? Also, people can object to whatever they want, if they are wrong about it, the government is not only fully within its rights to override their objections but it should in fact do it. The assumption that people know what is best for them is demonstrably wrong but its prevalence is one of the main reasons for the dysfunctionality of most of modern democracies. We should have gotten rid of religion using such a mechanism a long time ago by actively teaching kids as soon as they start school why religion is a bunch of nonsense. A lot of current societal problems we wouldn’t be having now had this happened.
Souls have very little to do with modern cosmology and particle physics. The basic issues is how exactly souls, if they exist, interact with the well established material foundations of neuronal activity. You do need new laws of physics to explain that. But there is no need to invent such laws because there isn’t any evidence for the existence of souls any way, not is there any need to invoke the existence of such entities to explain anything – material explanations for how the brain functions are more than sufficient. Yes, we at present do not understand how exactly higher cognitive functions arise from the basic neuronal biology, but there is absolutely no reason to think that with another few decades or centuries of research we won’t be able to figure it out and that souls are involved in that.