Christians... why do you identify as Christian?

[Antonio the Sixth]

In terms of those who have expressed a ‘need’ for Christianity to find beauty, structure, meaning etc, I’m intrigued on what basis have you determined that this provides/supports this as opposed to another faith or none (other than it being rhetorically effective)? Given that there are examples of individuals who demonstrate this to be the case. What prevents you from exploring these options? On what basis can you compare the ‘happiness’ from which you draw, with another state of ‘happiness’ which someone derives from some other reference?

Well, for starters, Nathan has extensive knowledge of the beliefs and practices of a multitude of religions, so I really don't see where you think you're going with this.


Anyway, to your broader point, I see where you're coming from, because I used to think more or less along the same lines when I was 15 to 17 (though obviously I wasn't as articulate). The idea that religion is "a dependency" or otherwise pathological and that people could "free themselves" through reason and critical thinking is very seductive, especially when it's sustained by the broader construct of Enlightenment values. And obviously, anything that makes you feel better or smarter than most people is good to take.

This is the only major aspect of my worldview that has really evolved over time. And the reason it's changed is that I've come to realize just how limited and inadequate materialistic rationality is in guiding the human mind. The truth is that we are, at heart, emotional beings. That's something I've come to realize both through my personal experience and in my academic studies. No matter how hard we try to think of ourselves with a coolheaded, clinical, analytical approach (and believe me, I do that a lot - I'm almost pathologically prone to introspection), this will never be enough to live a fulfilling existence.

At the end of the day, we all end up adopting some kind of mental structure, a framework that allows us to make sense of all the cognitive information we receive and translate it into emotions. Rationality can't help us with that. It can answer the questions "How does the world work? What are the consequences of my actions?", but it will never tell you what this all means. You too have a frame of mind of some kind that allows you to come to at least a tentative answer in this regard. I hope you are aware of it, and if you're not, you should look more carefully. What I've come to realize is that progressivism (that is, the belief in humanity's capacity to continually improve itself) tends to play that role for me. There are other aspects, but getting into them would make things too personal, so let's leave it here.

So yeah, in the end, religion is one of the forms (by far the most common) that these frameworks can take. It certainly can be a lot more rigid than the alternatives, and I'm the first to lament that. But the fact it's been so successful throughout human history is an indication that it also does the job far better than a non-religious ethos. Partly because, as per its etymology, it links people together in a community. Again, this as good and bad sides to it, but the good side is a pretty big deal. Partly, it's also because it provides a rigorous moral standard. It's not just about "reward", as many (and I myself once) thought. I think the purest moral implication of, at least, Christianity, is that there is someone who knows what good is and can guide you as you try to become a better person. And, when you fail in that, that someone can see it, and is ready to forgive you if you genuinely want to do better. That's a powerful and beautiful idea. Again I won't get too personal, but I found myself desperately wishing I could believe in it at some point recently.

The point is, people have valid reasons for believing, and dismissing it as an "addiction" or something of the like means missing out on all the crucial needs religion fulfills in people's lives. And again, those are needs we all try to fulfill somehow. So don't be too sure that your solution is necessarily any better than someone else's.

[Antonio the Sixth]

In fairness, I was never actually arguing religion was a 'dependency'; I was arguing why people 'depend' on it to define the centre of themselves when in many ways it hasn't actually informed them or their attributes. That their core, their centre would still be there with it, without it, or with another.

What do you mean exactly by core or center? A person's identity is a very complex construct, and religion can be a bigger or smaller part of it (or no part at all). If people say their religion plays a big part in how they see themselves, I'll be inclined to believe it unless there's any reason to doubt their word.

[Antonio the Sixth]

In fairness, I was never actually arguing religion was a 'dependency'; I was arguing why people 'depend' on it to define the centre of themselves when in many ways it hasn't actually informed them or their attributes. That their core, their centre would still be there with it, without it, or with another.

What do you mean exactly by core or center? A person's identity is a very complex construct, and religion can be a bigger or smaller part of it (or no part at all). If people say their religion plays a big part in how they see themselves, I'll be inclined to believe it unless there's any reason to doubt their word.

What I mean is say, does a good person's 'goodness' cease if they no longer believe in the source of that good being external? That their goodness was there all along and had pretty much nothing to do with from where they believed it 'flowed'?

The thing is that religion, while not the only source, certainly contributes to defining what "goodness" means to a person. Not necessarily how one ought to act in every situation, but at least the one or two defining principles by which one can evaluate their own behavior. Of course nobody would suddenly be left without any moral compass of any kind if they lost their faith, but in most people there would be a lot of doubt and soul-searching required to reconstruct a satisfactory moral framework.

Also please, please, please tell me you don't adhere to the Rousseauist nonsense about humans being "naturally good". You're better than that.

[Antonio the Sixth]

As human beings exhibit all behaviour that we would define as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ we are essentially neutral. Or in other words we accord to ourselves.

We do this in part because we have ‘volition’ rather than free will. Your will can never be uninfluenced by anything other than your own experiences so can never truly be ‘free’. Your brain makes decisions based on it’s physical condition at the time you make the decision. It’s current physical condition is determined by it’s previous states.  You have the control that evolution and life experiences have afforded you but you can never have 100% responsibility for every moral, immoral or amoral action that you may undertake. Not surprisingly, in most systems of justice, including simple communal or even family accords, we seem to take this into account when rewarding or punishing without being prompted.

If you're willing to make this argument, why not push it to its logical conclusion? In purely materialistic terms, there is no free will at all. Each and any of our actions is determined by chemical reactions in our brain, which, like any chemical reactions, are determined by interactions between particles. Every single one of those interactions is determined by a prior interaction, from before the particles were even part of our bodies. Literally, "everything happens for a reason" and, with infinite knowledge, we could infer the entire history of the universe from the very first instant of its existence.

This view is actually almost a good argument for the existence of God, since, as Bore said, none of this would make any sense without a primal cause, a cause that isn't the consequence of a prior cause (where this argument fails, of course, is that such primal cause could take any possible form, including one that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the idea of deity). Still, that's where extreme materialism and Calvinism meet: from before we were even born, every second of our lives was already set in stone.

The only escape from this horrifying conclusion is to assert that there is something that transcends material reality. It can take any form you like (personally I'm fine with the concept of soul, for all its hand-wavyness), but it has to involve a faith of some kind. Any attempt to defend the existence of free will through rational arguments will become an argument for determinism (I think it's Bergson who said something like that). The only alternative is to have faith in free will. Otherwise existence becomes meaningless.

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Well duh, that's exactly what I said a few posts ago. I'm a secular agnostic who at least likes to believe he's trying to do good. Obviously you won't see me argue that religion is the only source of morality.

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Most Christians thankfully don't think in these terms, though. For sure, there are many - and since they're found so often in America, it's easy to lose sight of the multiplicity of theological reflections on morality. I'm not familiar enough with these debates to really say anything interesting about that, but many other posters are, so you can ask them. In short though, the idea isn't that "it is good because God says so", but that (for example) the overarching story that emerges from religious texts says something about the nature of the world, and that in turn has moral implications. Or alternatively, religious rites can ingrain certain behaviors in the human mind (here I have to pay some tribute to my ongoing education in social psychology) that in turn have moral implications. Of course the ultimate conclusion is that God wants us to act a certain way, but the road you take to get there isn't as basic as you assume.

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What can it come from, then? The rest of your post seems to go all out on moral relativism, but surely you realize it's just as much of a dead end as the worldviews you criticized? Sure, morality is subjective in the sense that we all hold different beliefs on what is right and wrong, but if we abandon any ambition to come to a common understanding of that, then what? Anybody can feel morally entitled to act based on their own subjectivity? This is tantamount to abandoning morality altogether. We all have unconscious biases and prejudices that cloud our moral judgment in self-serving ways, and it's hard enough to fight those biases in themselves. If we actually start legitimizing these biases, giving them the status of actual moral beliefs, then morality stops meaning anything at all. Then, really, "nothing is true and everything is permitted".

[Antonio the Sixth]

Fair point regarding quantum physics, though if I understand currently the notion of indeterminacy isn't as strong as it was initially presented as and a situation like Schrödinger's cat could never actually occur even if the technology for it existed. So, basically, it means that the state of particles is probabilistic rather than either/or. In any case it's still not compatible with free will.

There are two problems with your concept of volition. The first is that the line between conscious and unconscious decisions is awfully hard to draw. Most of what goes on in the human mind has both conscious and unconscious aspects to it, in different proportions of course (ranging from automatic functions like breathing to the most carefully-thought decision). Generally, the tendency in Western thought has been to overestimate the rationality of our thought process, and sweep under the rug the importance of instinctive or socially conditioned behaviors. This certainly gives a flattering image of the human mind, but is unfortunately highly misleading.

Either way, even if you could somehow isolate the decisions that the human brain consciously makes and call it "volition", how can you justify making it a morally relevant concept without any reference to a broader interpretive framework? Who says that "your brain is you" if your brain, as you say, does so many other things you have no control over? What's the fundamental difference if, at the end of the day, both processes are caused by chemical reactions, which also occur in different forms outside the human brain and even the human body? You can't possibly defend the idea that your concept of "volition" logically flow from a rational observation of the material reality. Volition is as much of a metaphysical construct as the soul, in fact I have a hard time seeing any difference (your attempted deconstruction of the soul is based on a whole slew of assumptions I never made, although someone else could, and mixes up the material and metaphysical realms in ways that get us nowhere).

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I can't speak for religious people, but my understanding is that, for most of them, those things are not mutually exclusive. The point is that religion (as do secular philosophies, of course - I don't care about that distinction as much as a religious person might) provides a lens through which one can give meaning to a word that, otherwise, is just a mechanic concatenation of causes and effect. This meaning, in turn, informs us about the nature of good and evil. In the context of Abrahamic religions, it is generally understood that God wills the good of humanity and thus wants humans to be good. Thus, yes, by living according to the principles that derive from that understanding of the world, we end up doing God's will, but that doesn't mean that the moral framework provided by religion can be summed up to "do that because God wants you to".

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This part of your post seems pretty confused. At first it seemed you were restating Glaucon's argument in Book 2 of Plato's Republic (which is a very serious issue and might take our conversation in an interesting direction), but then what it devolves in basically another Rousseauist appeal to nature. So human morality derives entirely from evolutionary imperatives and the way our genetics are programmed? Well, in that case, that means a lot of things we consider immoral are in fact perfectly OK. That's not quite the same as your earlier point about morality being based on a social contract to ensure peaceful coexistence. I'd much rather discuss that one instead of some naturalistic nonsense.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I’ve lost where you’re going with this. This will be my last effort post because I don’t think it’s wise to keep arguing over this in this particular thread

Well, yeah, it's probably not fair for us to hijack a thread explicitly addressed to Christians. That said, I'm very interested in pursuing this conversation elsewhere if you'd like.


I'm OK with defining volition as "the ability to make decisions that cannot be predicted", but you have to be aware that this makes volition increasingly fragile. Human decisions are not inherently unpredictable: to the extent that they are unpredictable, they are due to a lack of knowledge. And indeed, advances in neurosciences, psychology, anthropology and sociology (just to cite a few) have allowed us to predict a whole range of human behaviors that previously seemed unpredictable. Sure, these predictions are probabilistic rather than deterministic, but I don't think that distinction is enough to shrug off the problem. If, based on my scientific expertise, I can predict with 80% probability that you will do something, can you still say you're doing it of your own volition? And if so, where do you draw the line in a way that makes sense from a strictly materialistic framework? If not, does that mean that progress in human knowledge has reduced the extent of our volition, even though the process through which we make decisions remains the same?


I don't really disagree with anything you say regarding the material universe being amoral and morality deriving from our self-awareness. In fact, in some way, it proves my point. If the material universe is amoral, then simply studying it will tell us nothing about what's right and what's wrong. Materialism can't help us with morality, and that's exactly why we need metaphysics. Otherwise, if you decide to reject any form of metaphysically-based morality whatsoever, what's left? A purely subjective, self-centered, and inevitably hedonistic intuition? A Hobbesian or Lockean social contract to keep us from killing each other? A Rousseauist "natural goodness" ingrained in our genes? Or can you see another alternative that doesn't require metaphysics? I've been trying to ask you that for a while and you repeatedly seem to dodge the question.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I'm answering the question. I've made it pretty clear in the last few posts why morality doesn't need to invoke metaphysics.

Studying the universe isn't going to tell us anything about what is right and wrong because firstly it's not a question we should be asking the universe and secondly in observing the universe we observe inorganic, non-sentient processes. There is no teleology to the universe.

'Good' is a physical concept. Metaphysics must be rooted in physics. There is nothing objectively 'real' about abstract philosophical concepts outside of the minds that infer them. Abstract concepts like ‘love’ are rooted in objects; physical things to show love to. Concepts such as ‘justice’ are bound to physical concepts like action, punishment and so on. These cannot be externally defined (and refined) by something external to the human experience, so who is it that defines them? We do.

Sorry, that's still not an answer. You say that morality is rooted in the physical reality, yet at the same time you say that morality doesn't apply to the physical reality because it isn't sentient. How do these two things go together?

And of course "we" are the ones who define moral concepts. That's completely missing the point of my question. How do we define them? On what basis can we legitimately say "this is good, this is bad"? Again, I ask you, can we derive this exclusively from the material reality? If so, how, since as you yourself say, the material universe is by definition amoral? If not, what's left?

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Metaphysics, similarly to other forms of theory (including scientific ones!) is about formulating a set of assumptions or axioms and deducing from them. The difference is that those deductions are not falsifiable, and therefore not scientific. If you think that unscientific = worthless, good for you, but thankfully most people would disagree.

[Antonio the Sixth]

How do we define moral concepts? We define them. End of. We define them in laws, we change them, we define moral concepts in smaller groupings, in family units there are 'house rules' and so on. On what basis do we legitimately say 'this is good, this is bad,? We legitimise those. Then we change our minds. Is there a single moral answer a moral good or moral bad in abortion? No. We can easily legitimise either outcome. If you have power you can coerce legitimacy. You can do it internally as an individual. Now you can try and legitimise your killing spree in a packed cinema but the chances are someone is going to detain you. Or shoot you.

Then the morality of the mass shooter is just as valid as the morality of the guy who throws himself in front of him in an effort to save the other people around. The morality of Eichmann is just as valid as the morality of the families who hosted Jews during the war. It's all subjective, isn't it? There's no higher principle to distinguish between them, other than each individual's opinion of them.

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Because reality is not a relevant concept in metaphysics. The idea that something has to be real to be meaningful is ludicrous. Metaphysics is meaningful because of its power in giving humanity a purpose, a moral framework and, indeed, a meaning. A metaphysical theory should be judged on the basis of how well it does these things, not on whether or not it's confirmed by evidence (which by definition it isn't).