from a letter to my bro... on justice and God

... I propose that if we have a good reason to seek justice, then we have a good reason to believe in God.

The same claim from another angle: if one denies that there is a God, then one has undermined belief in justice. An atheist may insists that there is such a thing as justice, but such a claim is ultimately inconsistent. Granted he or she won't see that inconsistency, but it will nevertheless be there.

Let me clarify a couple of things.

First: I am NOT saying that one must FIRST believe in God or else he will have no reason to be just. Atheists often misrepresent the theistic position in that way and then spend a lot of time pointing out how some atheists are ethical. But such a fact does not weaken my thesis: it merely shows that atheists, like all other human beings, can be inconsistent. I'll explain below.

The following analogy will help make my point. Imagine a deluded science major who insisted that one must first believe in nuclear fusion before one can believe in sunlight.

We would point out to him or her that one FIRST believes in sunlight, then seeks an explanation, and after much seeking one discovers the cause of what one had previously observed. One who understands that nuclear fusion causes sunlight knows that the latter (sunlight) cannot exist without the former (fusion). But that does not mean that one can't think of (sunlight) without first having thought of (fusion). Furthermore, not everybody recognizes the source of sunlight. Some very intelligent people may deny it. But those who deny that nuclear fusion even exists yet insist that there is such a thing as sunlight will ultimately end up in an inconsistency. Of course, they don't recognize that inconsistency, but it will nevertheless turn up.

Analogy applied to justice and ethics: first one has some notion of justice, then one seeks to understand how it is that humans recognize that some actions are just and others are unjust. On a really good day (I propose) one recognizes that all purpose comes from God. One therefore sees that purpose (including justice) cannot exist without God. But that is not the same as saying that one can't think of truths regarding justice without thinking of God. One certainly can, just like one can think of sunlight without thinking of fusion. But to DENY that God exists yet insist that there is such a thing as justice is to be inconsistent, just like the person who denies the existence of nuclear fusion yet believes in sunlight. Both deniers are ultmately inconsistent, even though they may not be able to recognize their own inconsistency.

One way to avoid the conclusion that I am arguing for is to deny that there is such a thing as justice: you can instead claim that it's a fabrication--a form of mob control. Fine: be that way. You have undermined the argument. But you have also assaulted human dignity. For if justice is an illusion, then so is the intrinsic value of human beings. You might as well say, with The Cure, "It makes no difference whether we're dead or alive."

Atheism leads to nihilism.

On the other hand, if human beings really do have an intrinsic worth, then there is a God who is the Light and Destiny of us all.

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson. He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal. My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this. I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true. Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist. In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...

response to friend who suggested that the self is a democracy of neural parts

This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level. No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies. None of them thinks about the whole as such. And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist). None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well? And why not parts of these parts, et...

interesting article by Jimmy Akin on death before the Fall

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/jimmy-akin/did-animals-die-before-the-fall/ Akin below: Aquinas.... writes: In the opinion of some, those animals which now are fierce and kill others, would, in that state, have been tame, not only in regard to man, but also in regard to other animals. But this is quite unreasonable. For the nature of animals was not changed by man's sin, as if those whose nature now it is to devour the flesh of others, would then have lived on herbs, as the lion and falcon. Nor does Bede's gloss on Genesis 1:30, say that trees and herbs were given as food to all animals and birds, but to some. Thus there would have been a natural antipathy between some animals [ Summa Theologiae I:96:1 ad 2 ]. Aquinas thus holds that it was not all death that entered the world through man's sin, but human death.

The Human Question

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