“And then the two might get along”

As if the world’s ills stem from the theist/atheist conversational dispute.

“When you define the system this broadly, it takes on a more spiritually suggestive cast. The technological part of cultural evolution has relentlessly expanded social organization, leading us from isolated hunter-gatherer villages all the way to the brink of a truly global society. And the continuing cohesion of this social system (also known as world peace) may depend on people everywhere using their moral equipment with growing wisdom — critically reflecting on their moral intuitions, and on the way they’re naturally deployed, and refining that deployment.”

Wow.  Even if ‘world peace’ is to be developed in this manner, I fail to see how it takes on a ‘more spiritually suggestive cast’.  If anything, the actual process of ‘people everywhere…critically reflecting on their moral intuitions..’ will lead them down a path of reason and away from the superstitious dogma attached to their religions.

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Absolute rubbish. He is trying to provide an explanation by starting at the conclusion. The conclusion is that a god exists (a “moral” one at that). He then tries to cram in and juxtapose as much scientific facts as possible to fit this conclusion. This is how all religious apologists make their claims - they begin their story at the conclusion. Sorry, but this does not, and will never, pass.

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Same old tired arguments from Wright that have been refuted and destroyed many times over the years. It is obvious that Wright is not paying attention. Theists like him have no real arguments so they dredge up the old lies over and over again.

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WrIght attempts to find the most microscopic tenents of common ground possible between the religious and the rational: a bridge which will satisfy neither.  His tone is that of a repairman entertaining the homeowner while intently searching for the one broken wire among thousands that will make the phone system work again.  He never finds it.

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I have trouble with the “reality of the universe-moral truth” theory.  I’m not one to argue with Stephen Pinker, but I have yet to see any consensus on anything moral.  There are cultural approximations about abstract moral ideas, but in practice, any given situation is going to lead to differing moral reactions by people.  People (and animals) may use the golden rule, but watch any family dynamic try to settle on what “fair” or “equal” is.  Calling the golden rule a natural-universal rule is like calling supply and demand a universal rule.

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I agree with Nick.  You should see what happens at my prayer group when we’re down to the last doughnut.

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Lets see a dualistic mentality gives me a choice.

Believe in a bible that is full of six-day creation ignorance but indeed much wisdom from a few prophets if one wants to look deeply into the mysteries of life. Which most don’t, neither atheists nor the religious.

Both hold up their bibles one Darwin and one Christian and state this is truth.

And a science agenda that is more about scientism than science that states all the matter in the universe was contained in the size of a pinhead. Let me state that again all the substance in the universe was contained within the size of the point of a needle.

What a choice dualism leaves one to ponder; a god or source or first cause or intelligence made in the image of man or choose the theory taught as truth that life started due to an electrical storm hitting some muddy sloop and bang the beginning of life and with some natural selection, chance, random mutations and with enough time we have humans that have consciousness, awareness, and even some intelligence.

There is no other alternative either religious or atheist must be truth. That is dualism personified. To the atheist life is meaningless with no higher purpose except maybe to advance the human species and to the religious they have made a god in their image.

As mark twain stated: god made man in this image and then man returned the favor.

If consciousness is the hard problem can you image what awareness might be called?

In the future, far future, museums will exist where children will be able to visit and in display areas they will see what humans believed in the 20th century and they will smile like our children do now when they visit a museum and see that humans used to believe the earth was flat.

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He keeps writing “higher purpose” without fully defining it.  Given his quotation marks I think he’s being intentionally vague.  What specifically is he trying to say we’re wrong about in the science versus religion debate?  Is it just that we’re not willing to accept that a god created this higher purpose without any evidence?  Or if it doesn’t need a creator or anything supernatural and it fits in with scientific materialism and has evidence for it than by all means I’d be willing to accept it if he tells us what he actually means.

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Typical case of an “everybody is wrong and I (Robert Wright in this case) bring you the truth” article.

And: is it really so hard to think the concepts of “higher purpose” and “scientific thinking” to the end and realize how they stand to each other?

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This moral issue that religious proponents seem to think as uniquely their own can be summed up with a concept that LONG predates any religious texts:

“Treat others like you want to be treated.”

Those who didn’t do that, who fought excessively or didn’t cooperate well, were survived by those who did. Hmm, that sounds like it could be selective type of pressure.

http://www.CelebrationOfReason.com

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“Those who didn’t do that, who fought excessively or didn’t cooperate well, were survived by those who did.”

Bullcrap.

In a purely Darwinian/materialistic world it is better to be Genghis Khan than Jesus Christ.

Strip away spiritual values and all you have left is the raw struggle for survival. In such an environment completely devoid of a spiritual dimension, a purely materialistic world view, the only “virtue” is success. To quote historian Will Durant, “Nature has no preference for Jesus Christ as opposed to Genghiz Khan”. Leaving aside the hypothetical possibility of Jesus having children, if life is devoid of spiritual meaning, the only thing that matters is the inate drive for successful reproduction as mandated by our selfish genes. In this case Durant would be correct, in a purely Darwinian sense it would be better to be a Great Khan than simple carpenter turned rabbi.

Nature rewards success, not artificial human constructs like morality and ethics. Genghiz Khan died on a silken bed surrounded by 100s of wives, power and wealth. Jesus of Nazereth lived a pauper and died a humiliating death. In a purely materialistic sense, it is better to be Genghiz Khan than Jesus Christ. Therefore if we are to maximize the power and wealth we can accumulate while alive, in accordance with the rules that govern the struggle for life, we should dispense with such sham notions as morality. Except as we may need to pretend to goodness in order to fool those around us. As Machievelli said it is “better to appear to be good than to actually be good”. Instead, we should all strive to emmulate the Khan instead of the Rabbi and act in the most natural/amoral (and if necessary ruthless) manner necessary to achieve our materialistics goals, irregardless of the harm we might do others.

Half of Asia is directly descended from Khan.  Nobody is decended from Jesus.  In the real Darwinian world bad guys win. Only a fool would think otherwise.

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This whole purpose thing seems to be the main focus of anything Robert Wright does.  Hey Robert!  Come to grips with the fact than humans are no more special than any other species.  Yes, that includes you.  When we die, we are dead and that is that.  If you want to believe there is a transcending “purpose” to life or there is some benevolent “big daddy” watching over you, wonderful!  There is no scientific evidence for that unfortunately.  But go ahead and believe what you want and continue to enjoy the fruits of a worldview (science) while trying to intimate it really, fundamentally is “off the mark”.  The design of our moral sense isn’t any different that the design of our opposable thumb, our voice box or our binocular vision.  You still have not shown why our moral sense is in anyway special or different than any other characteristic of our species.  Oh, yeah, that’s right, science doesn’t understand it completely yet…....so god did it.

Please….......

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Andyet…

We share certain moral traits with non-human primates, from whom we split at least 5 million years ago. We then spent all but a few thousand of those subsequent years living in small hunter-gatherer societies where it was difficult keeping one mate alive and reproducing, and the best place to store perishable food was in the memory of your neighbor. 99.9 % of our time on Earth was spent evolving this moral instinct.  It was, in contrast, the relatively recent evolution of language that allowed the memetic evolution of agriculture that led to specialization,  kleptocracy, larger and larger social and political organizational systems and ultimately to the Khans of this world. Probably a fatal mutation.

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Wright’s book, The Evolution of God, is rather good insofar as its historical coverage goes; as I read it and began to see his position(s), as in his article, being expressed, emerge, I simply “greyed them out”, ie, read them for continuity but not content, and enjoyed the historical overview. Should have been edited down as it’s a doorstop size, but nevertheless, scholarly lite which works for me. hours29

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Wright fails to mention a very important point: The gap between the average atheist’s viewpoint and this supposed middle ground is many orders of magnitude less than the gap between the average religious person’s viewpoint and the same middle ground.  In fact, I found it difficult to isolate what exactly an atheist would need to concede to reach this common ground.  Here is how Wright tries to explain it:

“They could acknowledge, first of all, that any god whose creative role ends with the beginning of natural selection is, strictly speaking, logically compatible with Darwinism.”

Fine, but the difference between this definition of a god and what most religious people actually believe is, strictly speaking, huge.

“And, god-talk aside, these atheist biologists could try to appreciate something they still seem not to get: talk of ‘higher purpose’ is not just compatible with science, but engrained in it.”

Again, the “higher purpose” that Wright is talking about here is quite different from the “higher purpose” that would be required of, say, the God of Abraham.  It is the latter form of higher purpose that most atheist biologists are against.

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Robert Wright, do you water down your whiskey, put tea in your coffee, mix water and oil, turn a light on in the middle of the day, laugh at funerals, cry at weddings, watch radio, listen to television, walk on your hands and work with your feet. If not, then stop trying to get atheists to wrap their heads around an unseen world and religious zealots to wrap their arms around the seen world. Ain’t gonna happen, my brother.

The touch of God is everywhere in the universe, from the beginning to now.

The laws of science are everywhere in the universe, too.

Are these two compatible? Of course. The laws of science show God’s marvelous mind. The touch of God gives the laws of science almost limitless posibilities. One without the other is absolute nonsense. To think God miracles his way through history is to make God a supreme being with a Messiah complex rather than with supreme cleverness. To think the laws of science smashed, spilled, spun, flipped, heated, cooled, cut, spliced, waved and shot themselves into existence is to make the laws of science dumb accidents rather than clever ideas.

And that is that. Additions welcome. Subtractions are not.

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Mario the word God may be a stumbling block on a website such as this one. And the virgin birth idea may want to keep that one in wraps except at your local church.

The word God has been given many human traits. As mark twain stated god made man in his image then man returned the favor. Of course by twain stating the word “his” meaning god, mark twain did exactly what he stated others did.

You may try other terms like cosmic consciousness, or absolute, or infinite but the word god will not fly here. Then again I doubt if any of these three mentioned will fly either.

Paradigms whether atheist, materialist, or religious are very powerful and we don’t even know we have them.  They are hidden from our view but yet they have a profound influence on our beliefs and even on our research. Especially our research history has proven that to be so.

And here is the most interesting part those that swear the loudest that they are not influenced by any paradigm and they are completely rational and open minded are the most affected by their paradigm or paradigms.

Humans are an interesting species and everyone has a god of sorts whether it is materialism, need for a king or savior, or a god made in the image of man. Ego thing.

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What would genome do?

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Researcher, I appreciate the tone of your intellectual babble, and, having a graduate degree in research, I appreciate where you are coming from.

But you have made the mistake of thinking I am you, a reader and follower of what I read.

I write from another source—years of solitude, without books, opinions, etc. I allowed knowledge to come to me, not the other way around.

For example: The virgin birth is far more than any religion can handle. It is the birth of God in a human being. It is the stamp on humanity that mails us to eternity. It is God showing us that we are worth his love. This is only religious to those who have not researched and contemplated it fully. Religion is a concept that gives everyone an escape clause out of realizing their true humanity.

Therefore, I have no interest in pleasing humans.
Surely if I wanted to please people I wouldn’t be pleasing God.

You have embraced your mind as the measure of all things, thus closing it to all things. Silly.

God is who he is despite all the minds that have ever existed. We are the measure of nothing. We see nothing as it is for we are governed by the laws of our created nature. The speed of light dictates when we see anything, which is never at the moment it is there.

As we cannot see both sides of a coin simultaneously, so we cannot see the physical and divine worlds together. But they both exist to form one world.

You seem to have some capacity for rational thought. Good. Use it to see beyond the printed word and the ideas of men, especially your own ideas. Through reason God can be found. And he has high hopes that you will take up the search, for without him you can only skim the surface. But your pride in your intellect has told you a different story, hasn’t it? Sad.

Read Thomas Merton. He can help you overcome the delusion you suffer from.

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Brother Mario,

Your position is a defense of the non-overlapping magisteria argument.  You remind us of our limited human perspective, saying that an understanding of the manifest world requires a divine perspective which is (conveniently), unavailable to mankind.  You argue that the unity of the material and divine realms are revealed by the miracle of the incarnation of Christ in which the very God of creation entered the profane material world for its salvation. 

And you are right.  You are right in saying that we have a limited perspective.  Let me ask you to consider a still wider perspective. 

It is the body of knowledge called the Historical Critical method of Biblical analysis.  This is a vast academic exercise which, over the last two hundred years, has studied the linguistic development, social and historical setting, and literary, thematic and mythic origins of Scripture.  (I refer you to Bart Ehrman’s book “Jesus, Interrupted” especially, but also his “Misquoting Jesus”, as the barest of introductions.) 

The incarnation of a deity in human form to save fallen humanity is an old trope in religious literature.  The examples are numerous.  I will only ask you to recall the stories of the Hindu gods Krishna and Rama, the Zoroastrian Mithras, the Greek and Roman demogod Hercules, and the Mesoamerican Quetzalcoatl. 

Though their stories differ in particular,generally they incorporate the elements of the incarnation of a deity, labors to save the world, sacred teaching, self-sacrifice, and return to the divine realm where they watch over us and will come again to save us in the future. 

The only reason that Christ is relevant to us today is that Christianity survived the ancient world to be an important part of the culture which happened to become dominant in the West.  His story has been told, retold, edited into the Hebrew Bible to make it fit, spliced and diced with the myths of other traditions, and buttressed by the institutions of the church.  His story has been elaborated by centuries of evolving theology into a broad system of self-validating thought, true because it says it is true, ultimately and necessarily dependent solely upon faith. 

All this would have happened to any of the other religions of the ancient Near East had they survived.  In fact it did happen in other cultures.  Just look at Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Jainism, Sikkhism, and on and on. 

A broader perspective shows us all that the only reason we believe what we believe is the accident of birth into a particular culture, country, ethnicity, language group, socio-economic status, neighborhood, and family. 

A broader perspective is sobering.  It is hard to accept.  But it shows us quite clearly that we are indeed atheists regarding all the other gods but our own.  Yes, we can commit the Scandal of Particularity by closing our eyes and saying that our tradition is singly and uniquely true, and all the others are false.  Or, we can be intellectually honest by admitting that we are not unique, and let go of that one more god.

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esnyder, your post is riddled with intellectual nonsense. You are a relativist, without any deep experiences of your own, so you grasp at the writings of others. These others are puny men and women with ideas that they twist and turn to fit their criteria.

My writing was from EXPERIENCE. God is not and idea. Jesus is not a concept, one of many concepts. To think so is to deny they even exist and to put human beings as the measure of their existence.

We are the measure of nothing. God’s existence is not contingent upon our believing it.

The divine perspective is easily available. We need to only ask for it. I have given a glimpse of it. You have rejected it and accepted the writings of others. You have chosen to accept that which fits into the neat compartments you have created in your mind. The spirit has no chance with you. You have shut the door to a vast and profound world. Enjoy your relativism. I’ll enjoy my Lord, my God.

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Brother Mario,

Thank you for posting on The Reason Project.  We need people of humility and penetrating insight like you to throw light into the dark corners of our skeptical minds with the candle of revealed truth.  Indeed, your subjective personal experience really is far superior to the hard won evidence of linguistics, archaeology, history, comparative religion, genetics, evolutionary psychology, and other such godless trash. 

Yes, thoughtfully weighing the authoritative writings of others is a severe weakness of mine.  I suppose that first I should decide what I believe.  Then it would be easy to find authors who reinforce those beliefs.  But alas, I can think. 

So please do tell us of your invaluable personal EXPERIENCE.  So far we have no idea what you are talking about.  Have you seen God or talked to Christ?  Have you felt His comforting presence in moments of misery, doubt, and pain?  Have you experienced moksha or satori while in deep meditation?  Do you know what those words mean? 

Show us.  Surely your experience is not second-hand.  You could not have read apologetic tracts from the esteemed Jack T. Chick?  Read the collected works of Ted Haggard?  Jim Bakker?  Jimmy Swaggart?  Perhaps I am being unfair, and you do have better sources, but really, we cannot tell. 

I offer one bit of advice as I leave this little flame war, though admittedly I am too shallow, narrow-minded, and inexperienced to offer any.  When responding to my replies in the future, try not to prove my point for me.  It only makes people laugh.

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this is a pretty lame article - nothing new here. but ok - if religious believers accept the sciences of evolution, cosmology, geology, etc. i welcome them. the 11th commandment: thou shalt not have any religious beliefs that are in direct conflict with proven science,

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Brother Mario
You are coming across as very angry… Remember that not everyone will believe as you do, and if your interest is in expressing your beliefs or influencing other thinkers,  then you need to keep the focus on the subject not the personalities.  I am happy to hear your views, even though I dont agree with most of them. So continue writing, but keep the points above in mind..

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