I have thoroughly enjoyed listening to Mary Eberstadt's satire on atheism. The main benefit I got from it was excellent counter-arguments about theism/atheism and the aesthetic (e.g., Chartres) and moral (see later)high ground. One point she makes is that abortion is the key issue of our day and the theists have been right on this. Another is the fact that atheists like Steven Pinker and Peter Singer have argued for infanticide and bestiality respectively. If these are heinous yet acceptable in principle to atheists, then the claim that an atheist is as likely to be moral is problematic. Furthermore, she notes an excellent survey that correlates theism/atheism with generosity/selfishness respectively when it comes to giving $$$ to charity. Finally, her comeback to Dennet's reference to atheists as "brites" is to point out "the woman problem," i.e., that women are more likely to believe in God than men: so the question Eberstadt poses is, does Dennet believe that men are brighter than women?
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...
Comments