A leading philosopher talks to us

[turoldus]

A.C. Grayling is interviewed on Edge.org.

Science is the greatest achievement of human history so far. I say that as a huge admirer of the Renaissance and Renaissance art, music and literature, but the world-transforming power of science and the tremendous insights that we've gained show that this is an enterprise, a wonderful collective enterprise, that is a great achievement of humanity. How are we going to make more people party to that? That's a pressing question for our century.

James, it really pains me to tell you this, but I think he won't like your book. Civilization as we know it to him apparently began on Renaissance prior to which the darknesses of unreason ruled over the world, except for the brief Greek interlude. In other words, he hasn't read any serious history book for the last hundred years. Is he ready for the truth? I doubt it.

[humphreyclarke]

This guy is an idiot.

What is happening is that the amplifiers have been turned up a lot by people on the religious side of this discussion because they feel under threat. This has happened in history before; there are precedents for this. One goes back to the sixteenth, seventeenth century when the Reformation occurred and the consequence of that was the Counter-Reformation, the effort made by the Church of Rome to recover its hegemony over Europe. That was a bloody and painful hundred years, and the tumult made it seem as though the only thing that mattered at that time was religion. Now when we look back across the landscape of history, we see that a lot more important things were happening at that time than that religious quarrel — the rise of science, the great literary efflorescence in England and in the rest of Europe. What we learn from that is that when religious people feel under threat and under pressure, they turn up the volume and they fight back; it's the cornered-rat syndrome.

Nope. What you learn from this is that intellectual turmoil in the religious sphere can spur activity in other areas of human enterprise. One sees that pretty clearly in the Protestant culture of England at the time of the 'scientific revolution'.

And you get institutions like the Templeton Foundation, which is wealthy and offers a very big money prize — more valuable in money terms than the Nobel Prize — and offers it to anybody who will, in effect, make it seem that religion and science are perfectly respectable bedfellows and even, indeed, that science supports some religious claims.

If you think about this, people who do work in science in universities and elsewhere are not paid like bankers on Wall Street. You can imagine that just to say something, even if you don't really have a religious belief, to be friendly towards that point of view, you may end up with a million dollars. That's like bribery. That's a corrupting influence in this debate and a very bad one.

That prize money always goes to fund scientific research, establish scholarships and prop up worthy causes; George Ellis for example spent his on social causes in Africa. I think one year it all went to a leper colony. Doesn't look particularly sinister to me.

[James Hannam]

Although to be fair to A.C., I am with him on the question of civil liberties.

That's one of the nice things about humanists. They may not have a clue where their strong ethical beliefs come from and try not to think about it too hard, but at least they have them. This to my mind makes them inconsistant but preferable to the logically coherent Randians.

Best wishes

James

[sandwiches]

Did you see his cheery article in the New Statesman. He seems a curiously naive chap, and rather ethnocentric?:

www.newstatesman.com/religion/2009/04/superstitions-religions-living
The empty name of God
A C Grayling

"I would wish people to live without superstition, to govern their lives with reason, and to conduct their relationships on reflective principles about what we owe one another as fellow voyagers through the human predicament – with kindness and generosity wherever possible, and justice always. None of this requires religion or the empty name of “god”. Indeed, once this detritus of our ignorant past has been cleared away, we might see more clearly the nature of good, and pursue it aright at last."

[humphreyclarke]

Apr 19, 2009 19:27:41 GMT sandwiches said:

I would wish people to live without superstition, to govern their lives with reason, and to conduct their relationships on reflective principles about what we owe one another as fellow voyagers through the human predicament – with kindness and generosity wherever possible, and justice always. None of this requires religion or the empty name of “god”. Indeed, once this detritus of our ignorant past has been cleared away, we might see more clearly the nature of good, and pursue it aright at last."

Yes. Lets focus on the nature of good by demolishing it's objective basis and ushering in moral nihilism.

[sandwiches]

"We see on the horizon China, which is a tremendous country, with a huge population, now one of the great economies of the world. Without any doubt, it's going be a superpower in the next generation or two. And it's tremendously important, therefore, that that country should be one which, like the best among the liberal democracies in the West at any rate, has built into it respect for human rights and for civil liberties. It doesn't at the moment; it sometimes tries to pretend that it does, but it doesn't have a good record in this respect. If it were to become an even more powerful player on the world stage, it would matter whether or not it did respect these things. Now is the time, too, to be having a conversation about that, thinking a bit about the future and trying to make sure that these frameworks for protecting individuals and communities are properly in place."

I think he ought to be made ambassador to China so he can explain this to them and oversee the introduction of Western values. He would find the burgeoning Christian population a good starting point:

www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article5960010.ece
From The Times
March 28, 2009
One billion souls to save
Christianity in China is booming. With 100 million believers, far more than the 74 million-member communist party, Jesus is a force to be reckoned with in the People’s Republic. We talk to the new faithful who love China – but love God more
Jane Macartney

[syzygy]

Are we necessarily moral nihilists without God, or is the moral sense one of several natural things that encourage us to make a faith leap to God, not because reason discovers God as the condition of the possibility of these things but because they all seem to point somewhere beyond what we can reach on our own? I'm stumbling around, trying to find ways to enlist reason broadly conceived in the defense of theism but not believing that God can be a scientific hypothesis. I don't think the search for whatever fine-tuned the universal constants--a scientific quest--is the same as the search for God. I think reason has other ways of searching.

[unkleE]

Apr 23, 2009 1:31:40 GMT syzygy said:

Are we necessarily moral nihilists without God, or is the moral sense one of several natural things that encourage us to make a faith leap to God, not because reason discovers God as the condition of the possibility of these things but because they all seem to point somewhere beyond what we can reach on our own?

I think we have to be aware that we use the concept of "reason" in more than one way.

In a rigorous sense, we may use "reason" and "logic" to mean "provable". In that sense, I think few people think reason can "prove" God's existence. Various philosophical "proofs" have been tried, and the arguments and counter arguments demonstrate that they are not as simple as Euclid.

But reason can also be used in a sense of probability and uncertainty, and in this sense, I believe God's existence can be shown to be reasonable (though of course many other people disagree). For example, the moral argument you refer to, is based on the recognition that most people believe that some actions are truly right (e.g. helping someone in need) or truly wrong (e.g pedophilia). But if we start with the assumption that no God exists, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that ethics is simply something that evolved to promote survival, which might lead to things we call right (e.g. caring for our children) or things we call wrong (e.g. eliminating our enemies). Thus, if we believe there is truly right and wrong, the assumption of no God seems to fail, and we are left proposing that God provides the basis for ethics. It's not an argument that will convince people who are looking for "proof", but it might make belief more reasonable for others. (It certainly does for me!)

Idon't think the search for whatever fine-tuned the universal constants--a scientific quest--is the same as the search for God.

No, of course it is not the same as a search for God, but it may provide evidence for God anyway. I see it this way. If God exists, then he exists outside this space-time universe, and he cannot be directly observed by our senses or measured by science. But his actions in the world may be observed and his existence inferred from them. Such actions may include the scientific (the big bang and the fine-tuning), our common humanity (our experience of ethics, rationality, beauty, love, freewill, etc), revelation (Jesus and the New Testament) or experience (our spiritual awareness, healings or communications).