To be honest, I doubt that her true rejection matches her stated objections.
For several years, a lot of my friends have been telling me I had an inconsistent and unsustainable philosophy.
Emphasis mine. Her friends are Christian (probably Catholic). They heckle her when she writes atheist material for debates. Her good friend she talks about theology with is a Christian. That’s all there is to it.
Humans are still tribal monkeys who follow the customs of their tribe. You put any person around a bunch of Christians (or Buddhists, or Muslims, or Jews), and they’ll probably convert. It takes an extremely unusual person to not adopt the religion of their peers, even with all evidence against it.
Nobody says “hmm, according to my understanding of evolutionary theory, group selection wouldn’t be a strong enough force to mediate selfish pressures in evolving human moral inclinations, therefore evil is caused by a talking snake.” To answer the question directly, you convert any person the same way you change someone’s football team, by surrounding them with members of the tribe you want them to be.
Actually, it was more often my atheist friends who made these comments. They told me that you couldn’t think about morality as objective or in terms of telos and be an atheist. And then we’d have a fight. (But Jay’s right, above, that this was in the context of a philosophical debating group, so being blunt about picking fights was only polite). The Christians tended to hang back more, it was the atheists who were most frustrated by the inconsistencies. Which left me only more determined to reconcile them (if possible) and prove them wrong.
That is interesting and goes against my model. I notice that I am confused. Actually, looking further in your stuff, I’m very confused about a lot of your beliefs. Eg, objective morality as an atheist confuses me too.
How big part of the confusion about “objective morality” is the confusion about specific meaning of those words?
That is, do you have a clear definition of “objective” and “morality”, and the problem is putting those two definitions together and evaluate the evidence for/against the result… or is it more like there are dozen possible meanings of “morality”, combined with a few possible meanings of “objective”, and the problem starts by having to choose which of these meanings is right according to some unspecified criteria?
In other words, if you wrote here your best argument for/against “objective morality”, would you expect counter-arguments in form “you have ignored or misinterpreted this” or in form “no, objective morality does not mean what you said, it means this”?
To be honest, I doubt that her true rejection matches her stated objections.
Emphasis mine. Her friends are Christian (probably Catholic). They heckle her when she writes atheist material for debates. Her good friend she talks about theology with is a Christian. That’s all there is to it.
Humans are still tribal monkeys who follow the customs of their tribe. You put any person around a bunch of Christians (or Buddhists, or Muslims, or Jews), and they’ll probably convert. It takes an extremely unusual person to not adopt the religion of their peers, even with all evidence against it.
Nobody says “hmm, according to my understanding of evolutionary theory, group selection wouldn’t be a strong enough force to mediate selfish pressures in evolving human moral inclinations, therefore evil is caused by a talking snake.” To answer the question directly, you convert any person the same way you change someone’s football team, by surrounding them with members of the tribe you want them to be.
Actually, it was more often my atheist friends who made these comments. They told me that you couldn’t think about morality as objective or in terms of telos and be an atheist. And then we’d have a fight. (But Jay’s right, above, that this was in the context of a philosophical debating group, so being blunt about picking fights was only polite). The Christians tended to hang back more, it was the atheists who were most frustrated by the inconsistencies. Which left me only more determined to reconcile them (if possible) and prove them wrong.
That is interesting and goes against my model. I notice that I am confused. Actually, looking further in your stuff, I’m very confused about a lot of your beliefs. Eg, objective morality as an atheist confuses me too.
How big part of the confusion about “objective morality” is the confusion about specific meaning of those words?
That is, do you have a clear definition of “objective” and “morality”, and the problem is putting those two definitions together and evaluate the evidence for/against the result… or is it more like there are dozen possible meanings of “morality”, combined with a few possible meanings of “objective”, and the problem starts by having to choose which of these meanings is right according to some unspecified criteria?
In other words, if you wrote here your best argument for/against “objective morality”, would you expect counter-arguments in form “you have ignored or misinterpreted this” or in form “no, objective morality does not mean what you said, it means this”?