This post is ENORMOUSLY long, and I spent way too much time writing it. Your last post broke my browser, so I wouldn't be surprised if this one causes permanent damage.
FreedomFanatic said:
True. but if NO religion is true, simply the fact that many religions have this particular rule is no reason to abide by it.
From where I sit, the Golden Rule provides a "good enough" justification for itself: I treat people the way I would like to be treated,
because it's how I would like to be treated. If I can assume other people are like me*, following the Golden Rule makes the world a better place than not following it, and if I'm lucky, maybe other people will make the same choice.
*So, can I assume other people are like me, at least in non-political contexts? Well, yes and no: On the one hand, there are obvious counterexamples, such as masochists. On the other hand, the prevalence of the Golden Rule throughout various cultures and religions, as well as my personal experiences with the vast majority of people, indicate that for the average person, "treating others as you would like to be treated" is indeed close to what you might call "universally preferable behavior" in the context of individual interaction (for the record, I'm not a Stefan Molyneux fan). Does that make it a moral truth? Well, that depends largely on how you define morality (more on this later).
Things start getting messier in the realm of politics, because everyone's subjective preference of of "how they would like to be treated" starts to diverge and become highly context-sensitive. For this reason, it becomes necessary to find a more objective estimate of universal morality governing personal boundaries. For the reasons I gave in the last post (such as ruling out clearly non-universal solutions like "positive rights"), in addition to my own subjective conscience and interpretation of the Golden Rule, I've concluded self-ownership is by far the best default guess I can make, assuming universal morality exists at all (more on that question later). Hoppe's Argumentation Ethics also nudge in the same direction: His "proof" is fatally flawed in a lot of ways, but the underlying observation is nevertheless more thought-provoking than "might makes right."
Could I be wrong? Sure, I could. I accept fallibility, and I'm okay with not having all the answers. I've made peace with the realization that there's no strict constructionalist proof for morality. It would be nice if there was, but I've found ways to sleep at night without it making my head explode.
FreedomFanatic said:
I am very certain that my axioms are accurate, but a certain degree of that certainty is internal. Nonetheless, I have enough good reasons to believe Christianity that an open minded person could be convinced. The absolute absudity of secularism is a good start.
...
Not if Christianity is the "last worldview standing" as it were."
You say you're "very certain" of your axioms, but you say an "open minded" person could be convinced. "Very certain" and "open minded" don't tend to fit well together, at least not at the same time. How can you be sure how an open-minded person would think? Can you truly say you've ever had experience with an open mind yourself, when you consciously and subconsciously limit your thought patterns to cut doubting thoughts short, under an indoctrinated lifelong fear of hell?
Then again, maybe I'm assuming too much. On the subject of open-mindedness, may I ask you how many times you have radically changed your religious worldview to or from Christianity? How much time have you spent as anything other than a professing Christian? It takes an open mind to overcome lifelong political indoctrination, but it takes far more open mindedness and courage to overcome lifelong religious indoctrination when you're told from little on to squash evil doubtful thoughts or you'll go to hell. Unless and until you completely break free of that yourself and rediscover Christianity independently years down the road, you're still thinking inside the box too much to understand what it means to be open minded. Moreover, if you're a presuppositional apologist (which I'll assume for the remainder of the post - correct me if I'm wrong), that's just about the polar opposite.
As far as I know, the only way to cleanly rule out all other worldviews is if you view things from the standpoint of a presuppositional apologist, and this particular "process of elimination" won't convince anyone who isn't doesn't already hold the same view. Christianity is only the "last worldview standing" if you cheat, and by the same standards, I could become a presuppositional apologist for Ancient Egyptianism and call that the last worldview standing. To give a closer comparison, you could have been a presuppositional apologist for Islam rather than Christianity, and then you never would have given Christianity a fair shot. Why isn't this the case? Why aren't you a Muslim presuppositional apologist? Simple: Vegas odds say you were born into a Christian family, not a Muslim one, so you let your bias do the talking, and you probably had never even heard of Islam until your mind had already closed. You can rationalize this post-hoc by saying that you were just one of the lucky ones who were saved by God's grace, and isn't that awfully convenient for you (more bias), but Muslims could say the same thing if it fit their theological fancy, and their religious grounds would be just as strong as yours. Ultimately it all comes down to which sect of humans beat the others to your indoctrination...unless that is you've decided Christianity is superior to Islam by secular standards of reasoning available to anyone (something you just kind-of-sort-of tried to argue without saying it outright when you invoked open-mindedness), but conceding that would be detrimental to your claim they don't exist and don't affect your judgment.
For that reason, if you want to convince other people to adopt your viewpoint, you'll have to convince them by their own standards or a shared standard, not your own. I'd prefer to do the same with you, except I can't: Your worldview is explicitly constructed to redirect all of your considerable intelligence toward reinforcing your brainwashing in a closed feedback loop. There IS no escape from presuppositional apologism within its own framework, because a clever but short-sighted human being designed it on purpose as a mental trap/cage. In turn, Christians with a desire for certainty jumped straight into the trap precisely because there's no escape within the context of its own logic. My only choice is appealing to a shared basis of secular reasoning, which you possess and utilize but disguise in this context.
That's quite unlike rational arguments based on our flawed understanding of the natural world, under which people have been convinced to believe in or disbelieve in Christianity (and vice versa), along with many other religions. I know this from personal experience as well: I've gone from indoctrinated Catholic, to vaguely Protestant on my way to deism, to agnostic, to maybe even atheist-leaning agnostic, to optimist agnostic with a degree of confidence in the existence of a transcendental God of some sort...all or at least mostly based on secular arguments. I don't have all the answers, but I'd prefer to be uncertain and honest than fool myself into more certainty than I can really justify.
Where I think you go wrong - and where I've gone wrong in the past - is by taking the position that if an argument isn't absolutely insurmountable (by any means necessary, even by cheating as presuppositional apologists do
) then it holds no value. However, consider the case of a juror weighing in on a murder trial. Has the prosecutor proven the defendant guilty of murder beyond a reasonable doubt? You have imperfect information, and the prosecutor is probably well short of a mathematical proof. Assume nothing has been presented to disprove the prosecution's theory (scientific falsification has failed), and the evidence is overwhelming...and yet there may be some conceivable far-fetched scenario in which the defendant could have been framed. What do you do? You have to weigh the evidence based on loosely Bayesian reasoning about probabilities.
Probabilistic reasoning isn't exactly ideal, but it's how ordinary people use subjective reasoning tools to estimate the truth value of objective statements like "John killed Jane with the candlestick in the kitchen." You use the same tools in day-to-day life when you don't have [what you believe to be] a holy book to hand down an absolute final answer from on high. You don't consider "secular" reasoning to be absurd in those contexts (although you could handwave its existence away with a convenient assumption that it's subservient to religion). Why then is it so confusing that other people consider it just as valid an approach for estimating the truth value of metaphysical (moral) statements as well, based on internal evidence like conscience combined with external evidence like the ubiquity of cross-cultural references to the Golden Rule, etc.?
When you say "secularism is absurd" and limit the statement to only secularism, you're showing bias. I'm not interested in debating this issue, but consider the mental gymnastics that young Earth creationists must go through in order to convince themselves a literal reading of Genesis is scientifically plausible. When you have to go so far out of your way to explain why modern scientific tools and common sense propose a far longer timeline than an old holy book, you sacrifice the credibility it takes for other people to believe you've given other worldviews a fair shake and ruled them out using any criteria
they would consider reasonable. In doing so, you lose the ability to change their minds.
Is secularism absurd? Perhaps, but pretty much every belief system incorporates absurdities. Existence is absurd. Look at the cosmological argument for instance. We have three options:
- There's a "first cause," an "unmoved mover" outside the system: Absurd? This is only solvable by handwaving and invoking a transcendental entity whose reason for existence is somehow itself, for reasons we cannot further explain. We can call this entity God by convention, but there's no reason it has to be the Christian God or even a sentient entity at all. It's just something that "is" for no reason, which evades further explanation by virtue of being outside our comprehension. We're talking about a hypothetical entity that by definition does not obey the laws of logic, so it's a tossup whether we call this absurd (because it doesn't obey logic) or not (because by definition it logically wouldn't). Unfortunately, even if this is the solution, we still can't be certain of its specific parameters. (For the record, I lean toward this solution.)
- Time exists forever backwards in an infinite but non-cyclical causal chain: To the best of my understanding, this is absurd and doesn't provide a proper explanation. Even if infinite causal regress within the universe or multiverse exists, we're still left asking, "Why does the infinite chain itself exist? Why does anything exist?"
- Time exists forever backwards in a circular causal chain: This isn't absurd in and of itself, but it violates the third law of thermodynamics. So, either the first solution is correct, or there's a context we haven't recognized under which the third law of thermodynamics simply doesn't hold. (We believe it because all empirical observations we've ever made are consistent with it, and it seems logical, but the hypothetical existence of some higher-dimensional interactive phenomena between universes with radically different rules might break it; as far as I know, it only holds within our current universe.) Even if this is the case, we're still with the question of, "Why would this universe/multiverse exist in a stable time loop with these specifics? Why not other specifics? Why does anything exist at all?"
When you look at the apparent absurdity of every possible solution, it seems it's a total miracle the universe exists at all. (This by the way is why I'm not an atheist.) However, claiming this is (or has to be) proof of the Christian God in particular would be totally missing the mark with special pleading.
Moreover, truth can exist with or without a sentient God, let alone a personal God or a Christian God: Does 2 + 2 = 4 because God says so, or does God say 2 + 2 = 4 because it's an inherently true property of reality, regardless of reality's reason for existing? If your argument is that God can "just be," anyone else can make the same argument about any other transcendental truth.
The same applies to secular morality, especially reciprocal morality: We can take a leap of faith that God created us equal in terms of self-ownership, implying personal boundaries are reciprocal, or we can skip the God part altogether and take a leap of faith that personal boundaries are reciprocal just because (i.e. assume they're transcendental truths in and of themselves, just as we'd assume of God). We can also refuse to take any leap of faith at all, but the alternatives are as follows:
- The correct interpersonal boundaries are nonreciprocal...which is simply too bizarre for anyone to ever make universal sense of, especially when it comes to agreeing about specifics. Who gets to own everyone? The tallest, prettiest, smartest, strongest, smelliest, or meanest?
- There is no such thing as proper interpersonal boundaries. Anything goes...but even if that's true, I would still personally prefer not being eaten alive by the Lord of the Flies, so "anything goes" includes trying to establish sensible boundaries even if they aren't universal moral truths in a purely metaphysical sense.
Whether secular morality can exist or not depends on how much you cheat with definitions:
- If you define morality as a cosmological truth dictated by God, no secular standard will ever measure up, but that's asserting your own conclusion that God creates morality (as opposed to the most compatible alternative, "God clarifies morality"). If so, we can arbitrarily pick Christian morality, but we could also pick Muslim morality, or Jewish morality, or Hindu morality, etc., or if we really want to be sadistic, Ancient Egyptian morality.
- You can also define morality in utilitarian terms, such as, "Greatest good for the greatest number of people." That sounds like a reasonable definition and a noble goal on the surface, but it creates so much unlimited subjectivity that every single person will disagree on almost every detail, and you'll have some people killing other people to harvest their organs for a bunch of people in need, while the person they killed was curing cancer, while Stalin is going around getting rid of all the undesirables, because it's just so obvious they're the problem. Everyone's coming up with their own arbitrarily different moral equations with a purely subjective basis and solving them (some incorrectly, because they're bad at math), and nobody stops to consider the consequences of the question, "What if I'm wrong?" It's kind of a dead-end, to put it politely.
- You can also define morality as some universal set of rules and boundaries that enable harmonious interaction between people. This appears to be a vague definition at first, but the inclusion of the word "universal" indicates we're trying to satisfy some notion of universal morality, assuming it exists. This rules out inherently non-universal standards, and it lets us quickly arrive at a pretty good default guess. Does universal morality exist at all? A better question is...does it even matter that we know for sure?
FreedomFanatic said:
How do you know you "have to" assume that universal morality exists. And even if you make the assumption, how do you know what it is?
We don't have to assume universal morality exists and take it on faith. We just "might as well." Think about it: Does universal morality exist? Maybe it does, or maybe it doesn't, but we can make a pretty easy flowchart encapsulating both cases. Here's the heading: "Do you believe universal morality exists?" Here are the two boxes:
- YES: Then we can agree for the sake of discussion that universal morality exists, debate specifics under this assumption using whatever other shared basis for discussion we can find, and/or move on with our lives.
- NO: Then why bother arguing about moral standards? If they don't exist, they don't MATTER. If they aren't universal, and they're culturally relative, then arguing about them is in itself an act that changes the culture, so anything goes, and the specifics don't MATTER. Moreover, any argument for a universal standard would still be just as good as an argument for something else (for the same reasons). EDIT: Actually, your example of direct democracy below defies this categorization, because it defines the culture as "the majority" and specifically defines universal morality to be the whim of the majority, so it presents a corner case where morality is relative but still "matters." That said, there are a lot of immediate objections to that too, so I'll handle the case separately below.
Since the answers don't even matter in the second case, the only case it makes sense to spend time considering is the first case. Remember the question, "What if I'm wrong?" If I assume universal morality doesn't exist, I might be missing something important (and if we all assume it, the world is going to go to hell in a handbasket anyway, so it's a bad thing to assume if we value our sanity and survival). If I assume universal morality does exist, the worst thing that can happen if I'm wrong is I'll waste some of my own time considering something that doesn't matter. Therefore, it's worth taking a leap of faith that universal morality exists. I could be wrong, but then if I am, nothing matters anyway, so who cares?
I concentrate on the only case that matters,
because it's the only case that matters.
I'm repeating myself now, but I'll retread the ground of how I use all the tools available to make a best guess that's better than a blind guess:
First (or maybe this came later, but it makes sense to put first), I rule out all non-universal standards as tautologically inapplicable, which pretty much rules out every form of morality based on "positive rights."
Also, I'm most concerned about the question of proper interpersonal boundaries, because this is actually a pressing matter for harmonious existence with other human beings on Earth. This is what gives the question of "ought" practical meaning beyond the academic and metaphysical, so it's where I direct my focus. I could consider religious standards, but they're only "universal" by fiat, not for any externally logical reason: They include a lot of nonviolent offenses against self/God/gods which aren't really relevant in the context of defining proper interpersonal boundaries. Worse, they also all disagree with each other in these "parochial" particulars, and there's no logical reason to prefer one over the other,
except by indulging in the same secular reasons I would use to pick self-ownership over all of them. Plus, there's no way we'll ever build a consensus based on which religion to pick, so our best bet for the purpose of interpersonal boundaries is to find a least common denominator.
Overall, it "just so happens" that self-ownership and the Golden Rule are the closest things we have to least common denominators between differing religions and secular beliefs. There might be other potentially universal moral systems I'm not thinking of, but Occam's Razor and the curious principle underlying Argumentation Ethics both offer further empirical evidence that self-ownership has some sort of moral value beyond "might makes right." There are still a lot of blanks to fill in (e.g. verbal abuse and malicious inaction), so I then turn to what almost every world religion that has every existed says about the Golden Rule (least common denominator again). If even one of them is divinely inspired, that's further evidence in favor of the Golden Rule...and if not, the ubiquity across time and cultural boundaries are still evidence that the Golden Rule represents something significantly more universal than just a personal subjective view of morality. (It's not proof for the same reason popularity contests aren't proof, but it's not exactly the daily whim of the majority either: Since it's been used as a basis for peaceful interaction for thousands of years among people who either thought it up independently or were somehow divinely inspired, it demonstrates significant value worth seriously considering, especially compared to a moral vacuum.) Using my own conscience and a bit of Bayesian reasoning, it's really not so hard to arrive at the tentative conclusion that self-ownership, the NAP, and the Golden Rule are the most logical guesses available for discerning what universal morality may be.
(As a side note, I could always make like a utilitarian and argue that deontological principles are ironically superior for the long-term well being of the greatest number of people from even a subjective utilitarian point of view. That's not an argument for "having the right answer" in a metaphysical sense, but it's a useful pragmatic argument for establishing, enforcing, and living by a moral standard nevertheless. Since most people are utilitarians anyway in a political sense, we're going to have to argue this point and beat them at their own game whether our morality is universally and metaphysically correct or not.)
Is this process fallible? Yes, of course. Is there any alternative that's less fallible (such as the process of believing in the Bible)? If so, I'm not seeing it. How can I sleep at night knowing I can't prove universal moral truths by strict construction? AMBIEN. (Just kidding about the last part.)
FreedomFanatic said:
Old Testament prophecies that were fulfilled in the New Testament is one proof of this. The fact that over 40 authors wrote the Bible yet without any internal contradictions is another.
I'd argue that prophecies and Biblical consistency are both more a matter of opinion and interpretation than anything else. Given the "right" interpretation, you can say the same thing about not only Christianity but all other religions: No internal contradictions, and all prophecies were fulfilled (except the ones that haven't been...YET! Dun, dun dun...). It's a nice enough property, but I can't really agree it's exceptional, and if other people couldn't make the same argument about their own religion (given the "right" interpretation), there would be a whole lot less religions around today.
Also, there are external contradictions to worry about: Remember again what I said about the mental gymnastics required to reconcile a literal Genesis with real-world experience. You can make the contradictions go away when you squint hard enough and look at things sideways, but the sheer effort involved doesn't really inspire a lot of confidence from people who don't already share your views. Instead, it makes it appear to outsiders as though you could convince yourself of anything using the most elaborate rationalizations just to make it fit a book. (Again, I'm not interested in debating Creationism here. I'm just pointing out why you're not going to convince anyone new using the approach you take.)
FreedomFanatic said:
I can't verify this ATM but I've heard that the Bible's manuscripts have been carefully enough protected that if any other ancient book (ie. the iliad or the odyssey) had that much it would never even be questioned as to its accuracy, in fact, there are more variations of the illiad than there are of the Bible.
I wasn't really referring to tampering with the manuscripts centuries down the line, but at least as far as the Old Testament goes, you never know whether there may have been two or three totally different versions of a book without many extant copies, then the correct ones were extinguished, and the wrong ones proliferated. Still, there are a lot of other areas where things could have gone wrong, or at least differently from the perfection you assume (because I suppose it's always possible that God intended us to use our brains to make sense of mixed sources too):
What if the Bible wasn't divinely inspired at all? In this case, authors may have written based on their personal convictions, the desire to reshape the morality of their time (early Judaism), and the desire to expand upon the existing mythology (later Judaism and Christianity). When you realize you view the holy books of all other religions (also internally consistent, from a certain point of view) in exactly this way, is it really so surprising that others view your own as such? In the words of Mark Twain,
Mark Twain said:
The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.
If you permit the existence of supernatural entities like God, Satan, etc., you also have to consider the absolute worst case scenario: The Bible was inspired by something that wasn't human...but wasn't the one true God either. Hopefully that's not the case, but there are a lot of passages I've read with moral revulsion, thinking, "Why would an all-loving God with superior morality to mine be speaking more like Stalin than Jesus here? Why would the one true God possess qualities to be completely awful in humans? Just to give one example, self-absorbed narcissistic tyrants demand worship from others, but good and loving people are simply
above that. Why would a loving God be more petty and spiteful than people? Why would he behave at times more like the worst among us than the best among us?" The obvious copout is, "God is above us, so we can't judge him by any standard. He's so unknowable to us that we can't make sense of his morality in earthly terms, and our concept of good and evil is flawed. Just trust what the book says, because its morality is superior to yours." Maybe that's true, or maybe that's what a demonically inspired ancestor of Fred Phelps wanted us to think when he wrote it. How would we know the difference? It's an excuse, not a reason,
and someone could make the same argument about Moloch being above our judgment and reasoning! An actual
explanation might be, "The passages illustrating a God more like Stalin than Jesus were part of the Bible's corruption." I mean, if that's reasoning enough to doubt the integrity of other religions (viewed on an equal basis, without Christian presupposition), why not your own? That said, GunnyFreedom and jmdrake have half-convinced me in the past that with the right theological interpretation, certain "questionable" passages aren't really as bad as they sound. For the record, I tend to deeply respect their versions of Christianity, even though I don't adhere to them. Among others, they give me hope for the future of Christianity: I don't think their views are foolproof (nobody's are; you can't prove the Bible's divinity the same way I can't prove anything about secular morality), but they're defensible enough to respect at least.
What if the Bible was divinely inspired to a degree, but the authors exaggerated the extent of divine influence? They could have filled in the blanks based on their own personal convictions as above, or the whole thing could have been influenced by a mixture of sources (as above...), including preexisting oral and written accounts. What if the Bible was divinely inspired to a degree, but there was a time lapse between the epiphany and "pen to paper?" The same thing could have happened.
What if entire books of the Bible were divinely inspired, but others were not? False books could be made consistent enough to avoid blatant contradictions, yet they would fill in the blanks with wholly human-inspired beliefs (at best). Consider the fact that the corrupt Catholic Church - which Reformed theologians so despise - settled on the Biblical canon hundreds of years after Jesus's death based on an opaque process which - by all secular reasoning - could very easily have been influenced more by, "How do we get rid of the contradictions in the way that best helps us maintain our power?" than, "What books were divinely inspired?" This process wasn't without controversy, and from an external point of view, there's no more reason to believe God inspired the correct choice for Biblical canon than to believe God inspired the correct choice for <insert any/every other religious canon here>. The same goes for the Torah before it...exactly what human process led to the decision that those books were the divinely inspired ones? Some or all divinely inspired books could have been thrown out, while many false books could have been kept.
If you believe Jesus was the Son of God (axiomatically, because you consider it self-evident perhaps?), it stands to reason the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are pretty historically reliable (but there's disagreement of course:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_reliability_of_the_Gospels). That said, they weren't the only four Gospels written either. Consider the Gospel of Thomas for instance: "PURE GNOSTICISM! HERESY!" Perhaps, but how do you know Gnosticism is a heresy...because a bunch of long-dead Catholic bishops hellbent on maintaining their power and the Apostolic Succession said so, and the biblical canon they later handpicked (possibly for that specific purpose) may not be entirely consistent with it? There was a huge diversity of belief in the early Christian Church until centralized power clamped down on its competition. If the Catholics went wrong with the indulgences, theology, etc., who's to say they didn't go wrong a whole lot earlier? Who's to say they ever got much of anything right at all?
From a secular point of view - considering the Bible like you'd consider any other holy book - any combination of these things could have happened to heavily distort whatever divinely inspired truth was supposed to be inside of it. There are more unknowns than knowns, really. On top of all that, there are a lot of different people with radically different theological interpretations. For what it's worth, if I took the Bible at face value as the complete, undiluted, unaltered Word of God, I'd be inclined to side with these guys, at least on the question of Calvinism:
http://pfrs.org/calvinism/calvin09.html
I want to clarify something at this point: This discussion originally began because I stressed the importance of debating abortion in nonreligious terms with the nonreligious if you ever want to make any headway, but it's gotten a bit off track. At this point I'm essentially defending disbelief, but I want to be clear I'm not exactly arguing against Christianity either, so to speak. I do think Biblical inerrance, literal Biblical theology, and especially Calvinism are flat-out wrong, but by and large I find Christianity to be a perfectly reasonable worldview. I don't think there's such a thing as being "too smart" or "too wise" to be a Christian...but you
are too smart to be as self-certain as you are, and you owe it to yourself to gain some broader perspective and a respect for others' beliefs.
FreedomFanatic said:
Or anything else, for that matter.
...
Again, or when reading and interpreting any text. This one isn't a problem either.
You're right when you say that taking those two assumptions on faith are not problems, and that they're necessary for a secular worldview as well. However, my point here was to clarify something that Sola Fide and Theocrat always refused to acknowledge: Faith in your senses and reason comes BEFORE faith in the Bible in a chronological sense. You must trust them first to believe you're getting an accurate representation of what the Bible says. Realistically speaking, you probably also first put your faith in another human being who told you, "This is the Word of God. Believe it, or you're going to Hell."
As a result, whenever the Bible contradicts the consensus reality we experience on a day-to-day basis, a reasonable person must side with their senses and reason, because doubting those means doubting the basis by which you arrived at the Bible in the first place. If the tools you use to experience the world are suspect, so is the Bible itself. (Reflect again upon Genesis interpretations from this perspective.)
FreedomFanatic said:
I've never encountered anyone that can actually defend secular morality under any kind of scrutiny. Maybe you can. You've certainly got me beaten at an intellectual level, whereas most people I debate frankly don't (This would be IRL, most of this forum is probably smarter than me.) So if I want to change a secular person's mind about whatever, I'd probably start by showing them how little they actually know.
I wouldn't say I have you "beat." I've had a little more time to absorb a wider variety of ideas, but you're a good bit more intellectually advanced and engaged than I was at your age, and you've broken entirely free of mainstream political indoctrination a few years sooner too (but I'm not sure what your family is like either...plus, you had the advantage of Ron Paul being more popular earlier in your life). However, your religious indoctrination has been a lot stronger, and you probably never had a clever agnostic ex-girlfriend to challenge your beliefs and certainty before you got too way too sophisticated for your own good.
From my viewpoint, you just use your vast intelligence to reinforce a fortress of rationalizations to lock yourself further into a presuppositionalist mindset (a trap). In that sense, your intelligence may be a liability in this context, because the smarter and more sophisticated someone is, the more effectively they can convince themselves of
anything they want to believe strongly enough. Still, you're also young enough and inquisitive enough that there's "hope."
When it comes to certainty, there's pretty much only one thing I know for sure: "I think, therefore I exist," as René Descartes said. It's technically possible that I'm just a brain in a jar being fed external stimulus from a totally alien outside world. It's even technically possible that my mind is the only thing in all of existence, has no reason for existing beyond absurdity, and that it's dreaming everything else up and trying to make sense of something that never will...and similarly, from your perspective, the same could be true for you. These are very bizarre possibilities, and they're just two out of a potentially infinite number of realities, so I'd consider them pretty unlikely. I don't take the position of philosophical skepticism, but...I can't disprove it either.
Epistemology is tricky like that, because almost every truth we hold dear is technically fallible, even some of the most obvious ones. It's a field of philosophy that will always be discussed and perhaps refined but never solved completely. On the balance, I believe the arguments I laid out above are sufficient to rule out certain forms of morality from consideration as universal moral standards (by refuting their universality), so that narrows the field. I'd also like to think my arguments for accepting the Golden Rule, self-ownership, and NAP are probabilistically superior to the argument of absolute ignorance: "Well crap, I don't have absolute moral proof, so I haven't the foggiest idea whether it's wrong to kill someone and make a dress out of their skin or not. 50/50 shot, right? It rubs the lotion on its skin..."
If not, and if you haven't read into Hans-Hermann Hoppe's Argumentation Ethics, now would be a good time to do so. I'll come right out and say that his precise argument is deeply flawed and relatively easy to refute as a proof, but the underlying insight of his argument is so unique (that people arguing about an issue have already performatively acknowledged that argumentation is superior to force) that I can't help but think somewhere, someday, someone is going to reformulate it into a far more defensible argument based on the same underlying observation.
All that said, I can't claim divine authority behind any of my beliefs, at least not that I know of. You can, but understand that claimed authority is not the same as actual authority, which you know very well considering you disagree with e.g. Muslims and every other religion on Earth that isn't yours. If your reason for falling back on divine authority in the absence of provable secular morality is, "If this really is the Word of God, it's the final say, and that's better than what you have" that's a pretty big if...and you'd have to concede the same thing for other mutually exclusive religions as well, leaving you back at square one.
What exactly do you mean that nobody can defend secular morality under any scrutiny? Do you truly hold the position that without your Christianity, you would adhere to no morals whatsoever and demonstrate a complete lack of conscience? Can you really not comprehend why a nonreligious person would strive to be a moral person, even in the absence of certainty regarding what that precisely means? That's really what this all comes down to. Everyone except psychopaths has a conscience, and it's a mishmash of subjectivity (concepts of fairness, empathy, etc.) and cultural influences. There may be no way to eliminate subjectivity entirely, but we can make special effort to eliminate inconsistencies and absurdities (which true universal morality wouldn't have) using the most objective means available to us, then use all the other tools available to make the best of what's left. How is that not a more fruitful approach than assuming, "I can't prove it's wrong, so let's start eating babies?" Do you truly hold the opinion that morality has absolutely no inherent value or meaning whatsoever apart from being God's decree? If not, why would it be so surprising that nonreligious people would be drawn to that value and meaning for its own sake? If some compelling universal moral truth exists, wouldn't it be more surprising if nonreligious people were strangely incapable of finding value in it under any context whatsoever? (It's worth reiterating here that few people adhere to self-ownership on a political scale, but it's mainly due to indoctrination. At a small interpersonal scale, most people tend to implicitly understand the interpersonal boundaries it presents.)
Ultimately, if your standard for defending secular morality under scrutiny is, "I need irrefutable proof or an ancient claim of divine authority," I will fail miserably...but by the same token, if I demanded that you prove the divinity of the Bible, you would also fail miserably. You can argue, "I can prove my own beliefs within the context of my own belief system, but you can't," but that's really only because secular philosophy is more self-conscious and conservative about taking leaps of faith. If I really wanted, I could claim a belief system that boldly asserts whatever conclusion I want as an "absolute truth," and so it would "prove" whatever argument I wanted by default (within its own axiomatic framework), but that would be cheating, and it wouldn't do anything to persuade someone who didn't already believe the same thing. In the end, honestly defending and justifying a belief is always going to end up back at the same Münchhausen trilemma I mentioned in my last post (and this happens a lot faster for intangible beliefs). Infinite regress (requiring further justification for each justification) can only be solved by either:
- Circular reasoning: The theory and proof support/corroborate each other. This is cheating of course, so the best way to mitigate the possibility of being wrong is to ensure that our circular beliefs don't contradict consensus reality in a way that requires extraordinary effort to justify.
- Axiomatic reasoning: These are bedrock principles we can be sure are true, because they're "self evident" for some reason. This is also cheating, because it can be considered asserting your conclusion even more directly than with circular reasoning. In reality, I might consider axioms to be principles we agree to take on faith when we can't imagine the alternative.
Both of those solutions have the potential to be error-prone for obvious reasons, and I tend to side with fallibilism:
Wikipedia said:
The failure of proving exactly any truth as expressed by the Münchhausen trilemma does not have to lead to dismissal of objectivity, as with relativism. One example of an alternative is the fallibilism of Karl Popper and Hans Albert, accepting that certainty is impossible, but that it is best to get as close as we can to truth, while remembering our uncertainty.
This is part of the reason why I think it's so important to consider the ramifications of the question, "What if I'm wrong?" If only the Bolsheviks considered that question before getting rid of all the "undesirables!"
Back to axiomatic reasoning, I mentioned Kurt Gödel in my last post. If you haven't looked him up, you really should: In the early 20th century, Albert North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell wrote the Principia Mathematica, an attempt to create a complete and consistent set of mathematical axioms that could be used to prove any mathematical truth...and in 1931, some young upstart named Kurt Gödel shocked the world by actually proving it was impossible:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel's_incompleteness_theorem
The best explanation for ordinary dummies like us is probably in the first article:
Wikipedia said:
In 1930, Gödel's completeness theorem showed that first-order predicate logic itself was complete in a much weaker sense—that is, any sentence that is unprovable from a given set of axioms must actually be false in some model of the axioms. However, this is not the stronger sense of completeness desired for Principia Mathematica, since a given system of axioms (such as those of Principia Mathematica) may have many models, in some of which a given statement is true and in others of which that statement is false, so that the statement is left undecided by the axioms.
Gödel's incompleteness theorems cast unexpected light on these two related questions.
Gödel's first incompleteness theorem showed that Principia could not be both consistent and complete. According to the theorem, within every sufficiently powerful logical system (such as Principia), there exists a statement G that essentially reads, "The statement G cannot be proved." Such a statement is a sort of Catch-22: if G is provable, then it is false, and the system is therefore inconsistent; and if G is not provable, then it is true, and the system is therefore incomplete.
Gödel's second incompleteness theorem (1931) shows that no formal system extending basic arithmetic can be used to prove its own consistency. Thus, the statement "there are no contradictions in the Principia system" cannot be proven in the Principia system unless there are contradictions in the system (in which case it can be proven both true and false).
Later, more proofs were created that expanded beyond self-referential statements. Ultimately, the result is that any mathematical system capable of expressing all true statements (i.e. it's complete) cannot be consistent, and any consistent mathematical system cannot be complete. This means that there are mathematical truths that will never be provable within a self-consistent system...yet still true. (Today, mathematicians use the ZFC system, which is believed to be consistent...but for the record, I'm NOT conversant in set theory.)
While Gödel's theorems dealt specifically with mathematics, they demonstrated in the general sense that it's possible for true statements to exist that are unprovable, even provably unprovable. If this is true in mathematics, the purest form of logical human reasoning which has allowed for the establishment of so many proofs (within the limits of axiomatic truth), it stands to reason it's true in other contexts as well, where proofs themselves are inherently more nebulous and hard to come by. By extension, could the same be true about morality?
For all we know, there may be universal moral statements that are also true but unprovable...but if this is the case, how do we arrive at them? If we're going to arrive at unprovable truths, we have no choice but to use imperfect means to arrive at tentative conclusions, which is how I arrive at self-ownership and the NAP. It's pretty much how you arrive at Biblical belief too...just with a different balance of self-consciousness and self-certainty.
Actually, I'll go farther. I suspect that without knowing it, you yourself have chosen self-ownership over other interpretations of Biblical morality because of essentially secular reasons (the same kind I use). Moses killed a man for working on a Sunday, and he killed Jews regressing to paganism (worshipping a golden calf) in a horrific way, by pouring boiling metal down their throats. They committed nonviolent crimes, and he killed them. Was this wrong? Surely it wasn't right for Moses but wrong for you, which would violate the meaning of universal morality! Why don't you advocate or even commit these atrocities? "Thou shalt not kill?" What about "Whoever does this and that blah blah blah shall be put to death?" Why do you resolve this in favor of "Thou shalt not kill" and decide the rest belongs to a different context? I recognize you can defend your choice with Biblical reasoning, but the apparent contradiction can be resolved in more than one direction through MORE than one interpretation, and you silently gravitated toward the
reasonable interpretation. New Covenant? Perhaps, but it's still more a convenient excuse for choosing the sane interpretation than a mandate. When you first came to your conclusion, did you REALLY honestly consider all possibilities from an unbiased standpoint and use the Bible to settle the matter, or did you retroactively search for Biblical reasons to justify the common sense solution you wanted to believe was superior (for all the right secular reasons)?
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