Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In yesterday’s Copa del Rey against Bilbao, Lionel Messi scored an unwordly goal, beating four defenders and helping give Barca a 3-1 victory. It reminded me of Maradona’s incredible goal against England in the 1986 World Cup, regarded as one of the greatest goals of all time. Messi’s is up there, too! Have a look:
h/t: Randy
It’s been a while since we discussed the philosopher Michael Ruse, but he’s suddenly surfaced in the pages of Zygon, “The Journal of Religion and Science,” with a very strange article called “Why I am an accommodationist and proud of it” (reference and possible free link below).
I found this article because Jason Rosenhouse sent it to me, and emailed me yesterday that he had posted about it at his site EvolutionBlog. At first I decided to not to post about Ruse’s paper, as I’m sure Jason did his usual terrific job, but then I thought it would be fun to read and react to the paper without first reading Jason’s review. So I’ll do that now, and then at the end I’ll go read Jason’s take and give you the link.
Ruse’s article has one aim, something he’s been pursuing ever since he wrote his book Can A Darwinian be a Christian? (the answer was “yes!”). As you can tell from the title, he wants to show why religion and science are compatible, and he prides himself on doing it through philosophy, though his tactic is simply a recasting of Gould’s “non-overlapping magisteria” (NOMA) hypothesis. The infusion of philosophy, though, seems pretty weak, as you’ll see. Further, the magisteria that are non-overlapping—or at least three of the four areas identified by Ruse—are at least partly overlapping, for science can make inroads into most of the questions that Ruse deems off limits to science. He is, then, making god-of-the-gaps arguments in at least three cases. Finally, Ruse, for some reason I can’t fathom, has taken it upon himself to tell Christians how they can retain their faith in the face of science, even though he himself doesn’t believe in God.
But let’s look at his thesis.
First, Ruse takes the usual swipes at New Atheists, for he’s clearly offended that they’ve gone after him for his accommodationism. Ruses’s butthurt is a constant theme in his accommodationism. In this case he’s particularly upset that Dawkins “slapped the Neville Chamberlain label” on him in The God Delusion. , though, as I recall, Dawkins didn’t call Ruse that directly, but simply characterized the NOMA hypothesis as a failed “peace in our time” approach.
But we needn’t tarry over Ruse licking his wounds. He proceeds to his philosophical thesis, which is pretty thin. He claims that science has incorporated the idea of “metaphor” into its argot, and that this automatically leads to a NOMA result. The first claim is true; the second doubtful.
Certainly science has used metaphors as a way of explaining things: Ruse especially emphasizes the “organism as machine” metaphor, which isn’t that much of a metaphor (we are, in fact, molecular machines). But there are tropes like talking about the “purpose” of an organ, the “design” of features, and the brain as a “meat machine.” He also mentions phrases like the “big bang,” “cell suicide,” “genetic code,” the “spin” of electrons, and so on.
So far so good. Where Ruse goes off the rails is his subsequent claim that the very use of metaphors, simply because they focus on one thing, automatically sets some areas of inquiry off limits. He says this, for instance:
And, one thing that Kuhn always stressed about paradigms/metaphors is that they work successfully because they make you focus. They throw new light on areas of inquiry and interest and they do this in part by cutting off questions in other areas. A paradigm/metaphor simply is silent about things outside its domain. I say my love is a rose. I am telling you that she is beautiful and fresh and much else. If I am being funny, I might also mean that she is a little bit prickly. I am not telling you whether she is an atheist or an evangelical, whether she is good at mathematics or has trouble with simple arithmetic. It is not that the metaphor is saying she isn’t an atheist or an evangelical. It is not saying that this is not an important question. It is just that it is not asking about this at all.
This is how Ruse drags philosophy into his thesis, for he then claims that by using metaphors, science rules some questions either unanswerable or off limits. How he goes from metaphor to NOMA is unclear to me. The use of a metaphor doesn’t rule other questions out of court. It does ignore them, but so what? A scientific metaphor doesn’t mean that science can’t answer other questions, it just means that the writer is concentrating on only one. But here’s Ruse’s segue from metaphor into god-of-the-gaps:
QUESTIONS NOT ASKED; ANSWERS NOT GIVEN
Apply this all-important fact about metaphor to the root metaphor of the machine. What we expect is that modern science, that is science since the Scientific Revolution, will simply not ask certain questions. It is not that the questions are unimportant. They may be very significant. It is just that science under the machine metaphor will remain silent on these questions. So now the philosophical question becomes: What questions do I suggest that science under the machine metaphor will not ask?
Ruse then gives four questions that science supposedly can’t answer, and, as he shows subsequently, Christianity can, or at least can try to. I quote:
1. Why is there something rather than nothing?
Heidegger (1959) speaks of this as the fundamental question of philosophy. Whether this be so or not, it is not one answered by the machine metaphor. Of course you can ask questions about what came before the Big Bang and that sort of thing. But that is not quite what the fundamental question is asking. It wants to know the answer to the very fact of existence. The machine metaphor takes this for granted. You take your plastic and your steel and your copper and your aluminum and you build your automobile.
Well, to some extent that question has been answered, at least for a quantum vacuum, which is unstable and can produce “something.” Or, we could say that the question is meaningless because there has always been something, which can at least be partly tested by science investigating whether universes can produce other universes, and so on.
Further, the question can be thrown back in the laps of theists by asking, “Why is there God rather than nothing?” The answer, “Because God is eternal” is no more satisfying than saying “Because the universe is eternal.” At any rate, this question is not completely off limits to science, though later Ruse tells Christians that they can simply insert “God” as an answer. This is a god-of-the-gaps argument.
2. What are the foundations of morality?
This is the Humean (Hume [1739] 1940) problem that you cannot go from an “is” to an “ought.” You cannot go from the way that the world is—which is what science under the machine metaphor tries to describe and understand—to the way that the world ought to be—which is the moral question. An automobile takes me quickly to the restaurant for lunch. Should I drive it or not? I will save my time but cause pollution. What is the right decision? Science cannot tell me.
Few scientists assert that science can tell us what is right or wrong (Sam Harris is one exception), but all scientists realize that empirical investigation can inform many moral questions (i.e., when can fetuses be viable outside the womb?). But the foundations of morality can certainly be studied by science, just as the foundations of religion can be studied by psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and anthropology (See Dennett’s Breaking the Spell and Boyer’s Religion Explained for game tries). Ruse is mistaking the origin of morality with normative morality, i.e., what is the best way to act? And he should at least admit that science has something to say about what one should do, for it can help us discern the consequences of one action versus another.
Again, Ruse will later claim that for many religionists God tells them what is right and wrong, even though we’ve known since Plato that this can’t be true. This, too, is a kind of god-of-the-gaps argument, for of course there is a long history of secular ethics (the ancient Greeks, Mill, Hume, Singer, Grayling) which guides us in thinking about morality without any reference to religious beliefs or God’s will.
3. What is the nature of consciousness?
. . . A machine is a material object and that almost by definition is not a thinking entity. This is not to say that machines cannot think. If the cognitive scientists are correct, they can. It is rather that thinking in machine terms alone does not explain thinking. To put the matter another way, the only satisfactory solution to the mind–body problem is Cartesian dualism—res extensa and res cogitans—and that has to be false. I don’t think the problem can be solved, and I am certain it cannot be solved by science.
This is clearly a god-of-the-gaps problem, for at least the mechanism and evolutionary origin of consciousness are surely the purview of science, though there’s a reason it’s called a “hard problem.” But later Ruse will claim that religion can successfully address this problem. Depending on how you define the question, though, religion doesn’t necessarily even have the ability to answer it. If it’s construed as “how does consciousness work?”, religion is impotent. And “thinking” isn’t the same thing as “consciousness”, so this part is not well phrased.
Finally, Ruse gets to the one problem where science truly is impotent, for it’s a question that has no objective answer. But religion doesn’t give one, either.
4. What is the purpose of it all?
The Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg (1992) says that the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless. Why am I not surprised? We have seen that the way that the machine metaphor is used eschews any answer to this question. So on it, science remains silent.
Different religions have different “answers”, and even within a faith people diverge in their answers. But this question can’t even be asked without evidence of a god, for without a god there is no sense in trying to divine a “purpose”. Purposes come from agents, and you must demonstrate a supernatural agent before you can even say this question becomes meaningful. Ruse doesn’t do that, but simply assumes that the faithful know that there is indeed a god. The funny thing is that Ruse himself doesn’t accept gods.
What Ruse has done here is ask questions that science can’t answer, and will later claim to show that religion can. One can add others: “Is Tolstoy better than Dostoyevsky?” “Should I have steak or chicken?”, and so on. And indeed, religion can address the four questions given above, but it cannot provide widely-agreed-on answers, not like science can about questions like “How does DNA lead to the manufacture of proteins?”
Finally, Ruse shows how Christianity (why does he ignore other faiths?) answers these questions. I won’t go into the answers, as those who were previously Christians, or who want to take issue with the answers, can weigh in below:
CHRISTIAN ANSWERS
There is no great secret about what I am going to say next. I did not choose my four questions deliberately with the next move in mind. But obviously, as I was choosing them, I realized what the next move would be. The questions are questions that go right to the heart of the Christian religion (McGrath 1997; Davies 2004). They do not cover all of the religion, obviously. They say nothing about the Trinity. But they do ask about matters central to the life and thought of the believer. And moreover, thanks to Christianity, they are questions to which the believer thinks that he or she has the answer. Why is there something rather than nothing? Because God, a being who exists necessarily, created heaven and earth as an act of divine goodness. For no other reason, nor is other reason needed. What are the foundations of morality? They are grounded in the will of God. They are that which He had decreed we should do. What is the nature of mind? Being created in the image of God. What is the point of it all? That we should enjoy eternal life with God, our Father.
Well, Christians may or may not be satisfied by these answers, but they surely will differ among Christians, and especially among different believers. (Will fundamentalists answer them the same way David Bentley Hart would?) More important, what about those other religions? Ruse completely neglects them in favor of Christianity, yet those other religions will answer the questions differently! How, then, is any believer to be satisfied with his or her answers? Who is right? I suppose to Ruse, it doesn’t matter, for he’s forged some kind of phony concordat by simply bringing up hard or unanswerable questions and saying, “See, religion has answers!” It does offer “answers”, but we don’t know if they’re the right ones.
The note of triumphalism at the end of Ruse’s essay is galling, for he seems to think that he’s really come up with a form of accommodationism that is better and more robust than anyone else’s (he calls it an exercise in “tough-minded” rather than “tender-minded” thinking):
So despite the worries and sneers of the New Atheists, the position I am putting forward is far from one that gives way cravenly to the religious. I am fully prepared to criticize religion, and I do, but not on inadequate grounds. And, thinking that science unaided refutes religion is on inadequate grounds. Conversely, I think I have opened the door for the religious person—the very traditional Christian—to argue for his or her God and the implications without fear that I am allowing only a fairy story to get us to be nice to each other. Were I arguing that way, I would not be promoting accommodationism. I would be cheating.
What I don’t get is Ruse’s claim that he’s “opened the door for the religious person—the very traditional Christian—to argue for his or her God and the implications without fear that I am allowing only a fairy story to get us to be nice to each other.” Without a demonstration of a God to begin with, he hasn’t done that at all, for his tactic is to simply say that if you accept that there is a certain kind of God—the Christian one—some of the unanswered questions suddenly become answerable. If that’s not what he’s saying, then he’s simply saying that the existence of unanswered questions (which somehow derive from science’s use of metaphor) are themselves evidence for a god. But that is a god-of-the-gaps argument, and I don’t think Ruse is going there.
Now, I’ll post this and then go over and look at what Jason said, adding a link after I read his piece.
UPDATE: I see Jason has written a longish reponse to Ruse, and then another post in which he describes how he first decided to publish a rebuttal to Ruse’s piece, but found out that someone had done it. Jason’s response, I’m glad to see, is complementary to mine in a good way, though we agree that Ruse is making god-of-the-gaps arguments. Jason highlights Ruse’s unintended contempt for religion’s inability to answer its questions, which I do allude to above. Jason thinks that, like Gould, Ruse will get his major pushback from religionists rather than scientists, for Ruse appears to say in the piece that religion has nothing to say about realities of the universe.
________
Ruse, M. 2015. Why I am an accommodationist and proud of it. Zygon 50:361-375.
There’s no other way to interpret today’s Non Sequitur cartoon except as the incitement of xenophobia, hatred, and violence by religion. I don’t know how Wiley Miller gets away with this stuff!
h/t: Linda Calhoun
by Greg Mayer
The unidentified leucistic bird in the photos sent by my Wind Point correspondent have generated a lot of interesting discussion (as well as a heart-rending tale from one of our regular commenters). Most of the debate has been grackle vs. cowbird. When I first saw one of the pictures (the third of those I posted), I thought it was a crow, but zooming out showed it was much smaller. My correspondent had suggested cowbird, and that was my suspicion too, due to the brown ‘hood’. But as several readers pointed out, the bill is not conical and finch-like like a cowbirds. I should also say the native habitat is deciduous forest– sugar maple, basswood– with prairie/savanna not far off, but far from the more coniferous northern forests of Wisconsin, which makes something like a gray jay highly improbable on distributional grounds.
Several readers have commented on the enlargement and jpeg artifacts interfering with deciphering. I’ll ask my correspondent if he has the original files in a more lossless format, but in the meantime here are the pictures not enlarged, which may aid in identifying the bird. The size of the bird is easier to judge with more context, and, in the third picture, you can see that it was in company with a grackle. (My correspondent thought the other bird was a starling, but the light mark near the head is not its bill; IIRC, he had other photos that when we checked showed it was a grackle. The presence of the grackle might lean one toward the leucistic bird being a grackle, but icterids often occur in mixed species flocks.
*******
I’ll add some bird photos sent by three readers. From Stephen Barnard, who seems to see every U.S. bird in Idaho, we have a pair of American white pelicans (Pelecanus erythrorhynchos), which are in fact known to breed in parts of the state:
This is a mated pair. The males grow a weird “horn” on their beaks during breeding season. These are very large birds and voracious fish eaters, so I chase them away from the creek whenever I see them.
And some photos from England by reader Mal Morrison:
A few photos taken over the last couple of days on Roborough Down, which is land between Plymouth and Dartmoor in Devon. The first couple is of a Linnet (Carduelis cannabina). The next is, I think, a Corn Bunting (Miliaria calandra) although I’m open to correction not having seen one before. The last is a Meadow Pipit (Anthus pratensis) with its breakfast.
And, in Diana MacPherson’s part of Canada, the male (but not the female) hummingbirds have arrived from the south:
Male Ruby Throated Hummingbird (Archilochus colubris) fluffs feathers as he guards his nectar
What a dreadful, miserable weekend in Chicago, at least for weather. It’s almost June, yet it’s cold outside and raining furiously, with the wind howling outside the windows. I can hear it this morning, though I haven’t yet the courage to look outside or leave my warm bed, where I’m ensconced under a down comforter. Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, biology grad student and animal lover Justyna, one of Andrzej’s early protegees, has come for a visit:
Hili: Gravity is just a theory.
Justyna: Why do you say that?
Hili: I’m always holding on with my claws, just in case.
Justyna: You don’t have to do that now.
Hili: Grawitacja to tylko teoria.
Justyna: Dlaczego to mówisz?
Hili: Zawsze na wszelki wypadek trzymam się pazurkami.
Justyna: Teraz nie musisz.
Reader Ben Goren managed to find a posted recording of my book talk at Politics & Prose. I’m not going to listen to it, but I see it’s a bit over an hour long, so it includes the 35 minutes of Q&A. There’s a TRIGGER WARNING at the beginning.
A report in City News, an online venue from Toronto, reports an example of insufferable bigotry—the kind of bigotry that one might think would not be tolerated in Canada. Except it was. A Muslim high school in Toronto was playing football (the soccer kind) against a Catholic High school from Caledon. The Muslim team complained because there were two girls on the Catholic school team.
A boys soccer team from ISNA Private Islamic High School refused to finish a game on Tuesday because two females were on the opposing team during a Brampton tournament.
Robert F. Hall Catholic School, in Caledon, does not have a girls team so the two females played on the senior boys team, which was approved by the Region of Peel Secondary School Athletic Association (ROPSSAA).
During halftime, the ISNA Private Islamic High School team brought the concern to the referee. Robert F. Hall Catholic School school was winning the game 3–1 at that point.
At that point, of course, the referee should have made the Muslim-school team forfeit for refusal to play. But (as the video below suggests), the girls on the Catholic school team voluntarily withdrew from the field so their team could rack up extra points that they needed to advance. (It seems that a forfeit would not have given them as many points, though I’m not clear about that.) They should not have had to do that.
The girls on Robert F. Hall Catholic School team told CityNews they insisted on sitting out for the second half to allow the game to continue. The team went on to win 6-1 but both teams ended up advancing to the next round.
There is a chance the two teams could face each other again on Monday.
ROPSSAA said their rules are black and white.
But this is uncharted territory for the board so they are gathering their facts and will make a ruling on Friday about how to proceed.
The way to proceed, of course, is to insist that the Muslim-school team play against any and all legal comers, and kick them out of the league if they don’t. They have to abide by the rules, regardless of their religion. Of course if you watch the video below (go to the link), the Muslim coach, Essa Abdool-Karim, insists that it’s not about gender discrimination, but “religious freedom.” What freedom, exactly, is he talking about? The freedom to discriminate against women?
The coach also said this: “Free mixing is generally something we do not do, more so out of respect than anything.” Seriously? Out of RESPECT? If they truly respected women, they’d play football against them!
Do watch the video, which also has an interview with Carla Briscoe, who’s upset to the point of tears of this kind of unexpected bigotry.
UPDATE: I wrote this post two days ago, but there’s an update from this morning. The Muslim team has been told to obey the rules, which are province-wide rules on gender equality. In the future, the Muslims must either play against women or forfeit. But look at this masterpiece of waffling and disingenuousness when the school reacted:
In a statement issued Friday night, ISNA [the Muslim school] said its soccer team “regrets the confusion and misunderstandings that have arisen” from the incident.
The school explained that the team’s coach offered to forfeit the game “due to the religious commitment of non-contact with members of the opposite gender who are not family members.”
“The opposing team chose to substitute the female players as opposed to accepting the forfeit. In hindsight, ISNA high school regrets that the female players felt they could not participate,” the school said.
“It was never the team’s intention to exclude female participation, which was reflected in the offer to forfeit. The team sincerely regrets if any team members or participants were hurt or felt discriminated based on their gender due to the accommodation made by the opposing team.”
The school said it “fully respects” ROPSSAA’s rules and plans to consult the organization on whether any accommodations can be sought on the issue.
So they’re still fighting it, for what “accommodation” is possible? As for saying “It was never the team’s intention to exclude female participation,” that’s just a bald-faced lie.
I’ve written before about National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins’s claim that “the Moral Law”—that is, the instinctive feelings of right and wrong we experience when, say, we see a drowning child or a cheater—are evidence for God. For, claims Collins, there’s no way to explain such instinctive feelings by evolution or other naturalistic processes. In this way Collins, an evangelical Christian, violates his own admonition to fellow believers to avoid god-of-the-gaps arguments.
The Argument for God from Morality is common, and, as I show in FvF, deeply flawed. Plato’s Euthyphro Argument kills dead any claim that morality derives from God. And even if it did, what do we do with the bullying, misogynistic, homophobic, rape-and-genocide-approving God of the Old Testament? Did He change his mind some time during the last 6000 years? In the end, we can see that religion can serve only as a sustainer or reinforcer of morality that comes from sources other than God. It can indeed serve this function for some people, but the observation that diverse religions promote drastically different (and often conflicting) moral codes puts paid to the notion that there is a universal religious morality.
My view is that morality is a combination of evolved feelings that were adaptive for our ancestors who lived in small social groups, overlain with a veneer of largely consequentialist morality that comes from our evolved reason. That is, we can figure out ways to behave that are good in our modern society, which explains why what is considered “moral” changes over time. (Religion can’t explain that without invoking secular reason.)
At any rate, a friend who will remain unnamed told me that I should pay attention to the website The Conversation, which, he said, published good and thoughtful stuff. Well, it might, but he then pointed me to an article called “Morality requires a god, whether you’re religious or not,” by Gerald K. Harrison. My friend, who’s an atheist, thought the article deserved a look, but it was so dreadful, so ridden with holes, that it’s put me off the whole website. What kind of intelligent website would publish an argument that I’ll present briefly below, and argument that would be graded “F” by a first-year philosophy student? Moreover, its author, Gerald K. Harrison, works at a secular university, Massey University in New Zealand, and if he teaches this stuff to his students I’d be appalled. It simply goes to show you that, contra Massimo Pigliucci, someone with real philosophy credentials (Harrison has a philosophy Ph.D. from Durham University) can be taken apart by a mere biologist, or by anyone who reads his website!
The argument proceeds via four assertions, each deeply flawed (the indented text is Harrison’s):
Take moral commands. It is trivially true that a moral command is a command. A command is a command, right? It is also true that commands (real ones, rather than apparent or metaphorical ones) are always the commands of an agent, a mind with beliefs and desires. My chair cannot command me to sit in it. And commands cannot issue themselves. It follows that moral commands are the commands of an agent or agents.
They are not commands in the traditional sense, but feelings or opinions that guide your behavior. And, like the feelings of hunger or love, they need not be “issued by an agent”. They can be evolved feelings and emotions, and then who is the “agent”? Natural selection? Or, they can be arrived at by reason, and reason is the result of cogitation involving experience, genes, and the influence of others. The use of the word “agent” here is of course designed to make us think that there is a god behind it all. This is reinforced by his point #2.
2. Only agents can issue commands – so moral commands are the commands of an agent or agents.
Many philosophers maintain that moral commands are commands of reason. They are right, I think. But the point still stands. Reason’s commands are commands. Therefore, reason’s commands are the commands of an agent or agents.
This is verging on lunacy. We have feelings about all kinds of things, many instilled by natural selection. We feel love and kinship, for instance, and those aren’t different in substance (or origin, I think) from moral feelings. Is there an agent telling you to fall in love, or feel closer to your own children than to other peoples’? Is there an agent commanding you to solve a math problem using reason?
3. Moral commands have an external source – so moral commands are the commands of an external agent or agents.
We are agents. Could moral commands be our commands? That does not seem plausible. For one thing, it would mean we could make anything morally right just by commanding ourselves to do it. That doesn’t appear to work – and we can test that easily enough. Command yourself to do something that has hitherto seemed obviously wrong to you – physically assaulting someone, say – and see if it suddenly starts to seem morally right to assault someone now.
But of course if moral feelings come from evolution, reason, and what we’re taught by others, then they derive from either natural selection promoting specific feelings or are the byproducts of reason and emotions that derive from natural selection. In other words, they’re coded in our neurons, which are built by our genes and our environments. Just because you can’t make yourself feel differently about what’s “right” (and I’m not sure you can’t, given the way people resolve cognitive dissonance), doesn’t mean that there are one or two people out there making you feel the way you do. If moral feelings are internalized, then of course they’ll be hard to dispel. But you see where Harrison’s going here: the external agent will be God. Harrison has already decided what he wants to show before he starts his argument, and hasn’t considered alternatives. This is one way that his piece differs not only from secular philosophy, but from good philosophy.
4. All moral commands have a single source across all of us and all time.
Another basic truth about moral commands (and the commands of reason more generally) is that they have a single source across all of us. This can be demonstrated by the fact that “Tim is morally commanded to X” and “Tim is morally commanded not to X” are clearly contradictory statements. They cannot both be true.
Yet, there would be no necessary contradiction if moral commands could have different ultimate sources. And as those statements contradict each other whenever or wherever they are made, moral commands must have a single unifying source across all space and time.
Well, sadly, different people are “commanded” to do different things. In Saudi Arabia, people are “commanded” to kill apostates, gays, and infidels, and to stone adulterers. In the U.S., we are “commanded” (well, most of us) to leave such people alone, and to treat gays, women, and unbelievers as equals, or at least not kill them. That alone contradicts proposition #4, but maybe I am misunderstanding what Harrison is saying here. If there is a single unifying source of morality, that single source gives different people and different societies different commands, and moreover those commands also change over time (viz., compare the Old Testament versus now).
5. Ergo, God.
We are heavily influenced by moral commands and other commands of reason. Thus, this single agency is immensely influential. Moral commands are, then, the commands of a unique, external, eternal agent who has colossal influence over virtually all of us.
It is no abuse of the term to describe this agency as a kind of god. Thus, the commands of morality (and the commands of reason more generally) require a god because they are, and can only be, the commands of one.
If that’s not philosophical weaseling (really? “kind of god”?), I don’t know what is. Harrison hasn’t even proven a single agent issuing “commands,” much less that moral feelings even are “issued commands” or that there is one external source of those commands across all time. (What happened to “agent or agents”? Why couldn’t the “commands,” if they exist, be issued by a committee of gods.)
Harrison then asks, “but what if there are no gods”? Good question! His argument falls apart completely if there is no god, for then we simply wouldn’t have moral feelings and we’d all be killing and looting in the streets. Fortunately, Harrison has a kicker here:
6. Reason requires a god, too. (JAC’s words). Harrison says this:
Well, if that is the case [if there are no gods] all moral and rational appearances constitute illusions and all our moral beliefs are false. Happily, however, there seems no rational way to reach this conclusion. If the commands of reason really do require a god, then that god exists beyond reasonable doubt.
For any argument that sought to show that a god does not exist would have to appeal to some commands of reason, and thus would have to presuppose the existence of the very thing it is denying. The same applies to any argument that seeks to show that the commands of reason do not exist in reality. All such arguments undermine themselves.
Thus, if the commands of reason are – and can only be – the commands of a god, then that god exists indubitably.
There are of course ways to determine if beliefs have the intended consequences, and to do that rationally. If we are consequentialists, and see morality as producing certain results in society, well, those moral “commands” can be tested. And notice the segue he makes between “moral commands” and “commands of reason.” Those are not equivalent, nor has he shown them to be. He’s just slipped in another assumption here—that reason comes only from God. But of course reason can come from natural selection and experience as well, so there’s another alternative Harrison hasn’t considered.
I don’t want to go further; the argument above is a hash of false assumptions, seasoned with a failure to consider alternative explanations. The whole argument is simply confected a posteriori to arrive at Harrison’s preferred conclusions. Anybody with two neurons to rub together can give alternative explanations for moral sentiments that have a purely secular basis.
If this is the rigor of Harrison’s thinking, I feel sorry for his students at Massey.