Prof. Tresan's talk at our last spring meeting was excellent, and he was gracious enough to go out and share in imbibery and gluttony afterwards. A big thanks to him for everything, and to Holly for inviting him.
Please leave comments and thoughts if you attended.
I want to video document all our meetings with speakers from here on out. I finished uploading the video on April 25 at 6 AM but it took until a few hours ago to finish processing at GV. Enjoy it below the fold:
Gator Freethought is a registered student organization at UF that provides freethinkers of any religious background the opportunity to discuss religion and nonreligion alike.
most incisive analysis of the prospects for moral objectivity without god ever! okay, i'm biased, since i'm the one who came up with most of the interesting ideas presented. come on, someone else comment!
ReplyDeleteProf. Tresan,
ReplyDeletePerhaps the reason no one else has commented is because of how very incisive your analysis was: there were no questions left to ask! ;-)
Seriously, though, I think some theologically-minded Christians I know summarize critiques of nontheistic morality best when they ask, "What non-arbitrary epistemological basis do you have to say that is it wrong for Yahweh not to forbid war, tyranny, invasion, slavery, exploitation of workers, cruelty to children, wife-beating, stoning and treating women like chattel since on the assumption of naturalistic materialism, you couldn't know it was wrong in the first place given the lack of reliability of your cognitive faculties?"
(source)
Now, my own difficulty is not with the "truth-directedness" of our faculties, per se. Instead, the issue I still struggle in my own head with is of the arbitrary nature of our moral principles. If they are founded on, say, human survival, that is fine with me in the practical sense. If they are founded on our biology, ditto.
But these two things are not universal in any sense, and it seems that normativeness is endangered by choosing any moral "starting point" if it is arbitrary.
Theists have the same problem, of course, in the form of the Euthyphro Dilemma.