What did I miss? Channeling the materialist, you asked why we have brains. Your question was in the context of discussing non-material “rules of reasoning.” As far as abstract versus material existence, laws of logic and moral absolutes fall into the same category: the abstract. The materialist can’t account for either. And, by the way, materialists historically claim far more than just the non-existence of ghosts and sprites. Good grief; materialism denies the mind! It fails in accounting for logic as it fails in accounting for love, which is why nobody takes it seriously anymore.

The stomach/food analogy has, as any analogy does, its shortcomings. I have a hard time believing you don’t see the point. Anyway, this is a strange statement:

““Rules of reasoning” are concepts that we can use to describe how the physical processes work … they don’t exist independent of the physical processes they pertain to.

So the law of noncontradiction depends on physical processes. That’s bizarre. What do you mean by this? You’re not a materialist, so I wonder what your nuance is.

The reason I say your mish-mash agnostic-minded approach to morals returns us to ‘no absolutes’ is because it abandons even the pretext of a moral authority and/or opens itself to wildly conflicting possible moral conclusions, and at many points is just plain question begging. Your attempt to throw off eras of distasteful history isn’t satisfying. Someone living during such times and taking the same approach to morals as you do would, by your reasoning, legitimately conclude that slavery is, at worst, a morally neutral practice. And why does a decline in these practices prove anything? Who says the trend is positive? We’re all just products of our times.

Report comment to moderator

But we’re not at all back to no moral absolutes, and it’s this binary viewpoint that I oppose. Many people who do believe in moral absolutes seem to take the view that every moral idea they have is an absolute, and if I don’t agree with them all the way down the line, I must not think anything is absolute.

It is from that way of thinking that people say things like, “If you don’t agree gay marriage is wrong, you must believe just anything goes.”

The point I’ve tried to make a few times now is that you can look at all the diverse strands of thought I mentioned in that earlier post and find a few things on which they all agree, despite the great difference in the ways they get there. The atheist, Christian, Buddhist and Druid are all likely to agree that murdering someone is wrong. Those, I identify as absolute because they appear to be so fundamental to human thought, they must be intrinsic to our makeup, even though there will always be exceptions.

You mention individual cultures where murder (human sacrifice) or slavery have been accepted. But as time passes and our species becomes generally more civilized, those things fade. Does anyone today practice human sacrifice? And while slavery does still exist, I daresay it’s less prevalent now than in the past, and will fade even further in the future.

(Besides, if you make an exception for capital punishment, then you also don’t hold the deliberate taking of human life to an absolute wrong.)

Report comment to moderator

As for your stomach/food analogy, food is also material … and you’re talking about an input, not output. “Rules of reasoning” are concepts that we can use to describe how the physical processes work … they don’t exist independent of the physical processes they pertain to.

At any rate, materialism rejects the idea of non-material things … spiritual beings, gods, ghosts, etc. (And remember, I am not a materialist.) It doesn’t in any way deny the existence of non-material ideas and concepts. Our thought processes are explained by biological activity. The concepts that we speak about are not held to be the non-material things or beings that materialism excludes.

Report comment to moderator

Our stomachs don’t produce the food we eat. The food is something external that we take in and process. Those nonmaterial rules of reasoning Jones refers to must exist, and they must exist independent of us or our brains. We apprehend and make use of them.

If global warming killed off all humans, would the law of noncontradiction vanish like fog? If there are moral absolutes, *by definition* they don’t “arise” from anything; they exist on their own. We apprehend them. The materialist is the most hard-pressed to assert otherwise. Neither love nor logic is something that emerges from the ooze. (I can hear the objection that love is a mere matter of chemical occurrences in the brain. I have to assume you see why that idea is problematic.)

It wasn’t my intention to be hasty finding fault in any argument of yours. I read some of your language as implying that moral absolutes were dependent on consensus. Noting that most people do not like something like taking a bullet in the head is, at bottom, a neutral statement (in our context). It isn’t necessary at all to infer from that fact that murder is an absolute wrong. What of those Mayans? What about the acceptance of chattel slavery throughout much of history? On these things, it’s hard to get the true you. Your second-to-last paragraph in #45 is a case in point. Simply pointing to a few contradictory possible theologies and philosophies, some of which make absolutes impossible, and saying “Eh, who knows, could be any of ‘em” is a difficult position to engage. Why not just argue your view? If your view is no more than just “pick ‘em,” despite the antitheses between them, then we’re essentially back to no moral absolutes.

Report comment to moderator

Why do we have brains then?

Report comment to moderator

Do we live in the same universe? The law of noncontradiction is of the same essence as a migraine headache? Modus ponens is kind of like an adrenaline rush? Could you ask a materialist to point out a syllogism on an EEG? I’d like to see it.

I hope to address the ‘absolute’ thing later. I appreciate that you’ve returned here to offer me responses.

Report comment to moderator

I’ll try approaching it from a different angle: If there are moral absolutes, how would we know what they are?

Believers in any of a variety of religions would say, as you do, that absolute moral rule come direct from the deity … but they can never agree on what they are.

What I am suggesting is that those values that are absolute are those that there is no real disagreement about. The fact that 100 percent of humans don’t agree is beside the point. If 98 percent agree, it’s fair to infer that the other 2 percent are wrong.

On the other hand, if you offer a proposed moral absolute that only 60 percent agree with, it’s much harder to dismiss the 40 percent as wrong, and the degree of division suggests that it’s reasonable to consider that particular moral position to be relative.

If you believe, as Christians often do, that man is created in God’s image, and that “God’s law is written on our hearts,” then it stands to reason that moral principles that come natural to almost everyone are the result of that, while those that only some of us insist on are not.

And no materialist has, or can, give a satisfactory account for the existence of anything immaterial. Anyone who believes so is naive and deceived.

Bearing in mind that I’m neither a materialist nor an atheist, I still think this is a crock. The “rules of reasoning” that Jones refers to are simply the result of biological thought processes, which are electrical activity in the brain. Jones takes a position from which one could argue that the very ability to conceive of evolution proves that evolution can’t be true. It’s the kind of sophistry that sounds clever and impresses the uneducated.

Report comment to moderator

And no materialist has, or can, give a satisfactory account for the existence of anything immaterial. Anyone who believes so is naive and deceived.

Report comment to moderator

When I refer to the absolutes being the moral ideas that most people at most times in most cultures would agree on, that’s not an appeal to popularity. It’s an observation that there are some moral ideas that are so pervasive and so common to humanity that they are intrinsic … or at least close enough to intrinsic for there to be no practical difference.

I am not really interested in hair-splitting semantic arguments about whether or not that constitutes a belief in absolutes or not. I’ll leave it at the description and you can hang whatever label on it you like.

Lastly and briefly, since it’s possible you may not even check back here and no one else is either(!), I’ll quickly mention that you’ve misread Jones. Notice that he uses “nonmaterial” there to modify “rules of reasoning,” not “thought processes.”

OK, but that distinction doesn’t improve the vapidity of his argument. If he thinks materialism and evolution don’t allow the existence of non-tangible intellectual concepts, he has no understanding of materialism and evolution. If he does know better, then he’s happy to lie to his audience in hopes of deceiving them.

Report comment to moderator

Report comment to moderator