Posts Tagged philosophy of religion
Episode 46: Plato on Ethics & Religion
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on November 16, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:52:05 — 102.7MB)
Discussing Plato’s “Euthyphro.”
Does morality have to be based on religion? Are good things good just because God says so, or (if there is a God) does God choose to approve of the things He does because he recognizes those things to be already good? Plato thinks the latter: if morality is to be truly non-arbitrary, then, like the laws of logic, it can’t just be a contingent matter of what the gods happen to approve of (i.e. what some particular religious text happens to say).
We’re joined by Matt Evans, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan to discuss the text, which seems to be not as directly related to modern debates regarding the Divine Command Theory as we thought going into this. Ah, well. We cover all the angles and Seth spends the last bit going on about Judaism. Oy!
Buy the book
End song: “False Morality” by The MayTricks, from the album Happy Songs Will Bring You Down (1994) Read about it.
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Rationally Deferring to Bob Price on Empirical Christianity
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts on November 2, 2011
I’d promised myself I was going to move on to ethics and stop posting about religious issues, but due diligence requires me to relay this follow-up to my discussion of Mike Licona claiming empirical support for the Resurrection.
As I alluded to in my exchange with Ernie P. about empirically grounding Christianity, arguing about historical evidence is, at least when it occurs between non-historians, pretty dodgy. Anyone who rejects the arguments of the religious is typically accused of not sufficiently engaging them, i.e. being ignorant of their positions and arguments, and not having reviewed all the evidence, etc. Categorically writing off claims of miracles as simply superstition that we modern people should have long grown beyond is considered a crass dismissal. And it’s true: to actually engage in religious debates requires more research than I have time and tolerance for. Personally, I can handle the philosophical disputes: the coherence of the concept of God, the classical arguments, the problem of evil. Re. the empirical issues, such as alleged Biblical archaeology, the historical questions about the writing of the Bible and the events it depicts, textual analysis of the Bible itself: for that, all I can promise is to read a few books on the topic at some point, and that’s purely to feel educated about it, much as I want to learn more about the Roman Empire or the current political climate in Japan or any number of other cultural and/or historical issues.
Topic for #46: Plato’s Euthyphro
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements on October 25, 2011
Does morality depend on religion? In Plato’s early and fun (and short!) dialogue Euthyphro, Socrates questions Euthyphro (who’s on his way to go and file murder charges against his own father) about the meaning of “piety.” Is an action (like turning in your dad) pious because it’s the kind of thing that the gods love? In modern terms, are pious actions justified just because of the commands (or, more in the absence of specific commands, the attitudes) of God? Socrates argues that this isn’t the case: conceptually, “good” doesn’t depend on these commands or attitudes of God; it’s rather that God (or “the gods,” taken together re. whatever they might all agree about) desires of us the actions He does because those actions are good.
Mark and Seth are joined by Dylan and by our former U. of Texas classmate Matt Evans, currently an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, to lay out the dialogue and discuss the extent to which it actually bears on this more modern debate about the relation of morality and religion. A divine command theorist argues, contra Plato, that since God is omnipotent, there’s no sense in which morality can be metaphysically prior to his commands (or his disposition, or his nature). On the other side (which is, you should note, also a theist side, Swinburne being a good example), to avoid morality being an arbitrary matter depending on God’s whims (meaning he could have declared child torture to be good), a Platonist would argue that like the laws of logic, fundamental moral truths have to come first in some sense: God only commands right actions because He recognizes them to be right; they don’t magically become right just because he says so.
Is this just a dispute internal to religion? No. If Plato is right, then this means we can legitimately theorize about moral truths independent of reference to God; we don’t even have to assume there is (or isn’t) a God. Theists and atheists are thus able to have a productive ethical discourse based on a common ground, and religious people who claim that atheists aren’t or can’t be moral are stymied good and hard.
Buy the book (this translation by G.M.A. Grube is the one Matt recommended)
Seth recommends the Wikipedia entry on the Euthyphro dilemma. Some of the last part of our discussion focused on the place of the dilemma in Judaism. For a good, Swinburne-esque discussion, listen to this Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot interview with David McNaughton.
The Tree of Life’s Contingent Universe
Posted by Daniel Horne in Reviewage, Things to Watch on October 20, 2011
I can write nothing on Heideggerian scholar*/(anti)Hollywood director Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life that hasn’t been better written elsewhere. Even so, the film has just come available on DVD and digital download, so I thought I’d recommend it to anyone who has been interested in PEL’s recent religion episodes. (Suggestion: try to watch the HD version of the clip.) If I had to try to connect the film’s theme to recent topics, I’d call attention to Malick’s ruminations on life’s utterly contingent nature, and whether it suggests the presence or absence of God.
While the film isn’t perfect (somebody please explain the ending!), a movie with existential dinosaurs beats a two-hour couch-warming session with another Transformers sequel. Trust me.
*I can’t find a decent link, but Malick translated Heidegger’s The Essence of Reasons for Northwestern University Press before he abandoned graduate study.
-Daniel Horne
Swinburne Contra Dawkins on Complexity and Creation
Posted by Daniel Horne in Things to Watch on October 14, 2011
A name that popped up in Episode 43 and Episode 44 was that of Oxford philosophy professor Richard Swinburne. Swinburne has made his reputation positing analytic arguments in favor of Christian theism. As Robert pointed out toward the end of Episode 43, most Christians, even if sympathetic, would probably not find Swinburne’s arguments dispositive toward their belief. Even so, it’s only fair to allow serious scholars like Swinburne to frame their own arguments before rendering judgment. Swinburne’s approach reveals the strawman nature of the arguments deployed by Hitchens, Harris, et al. when they evoke the cartoonish “I believe because the [insert Holy Text] says so” stereotype. (I will cut Richard Dawkins some slack here; he’s actually done a pretty good job of engaging non-silly theists in civil debate.)
More Pale Blue Dot on Epistemology and Christianity
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts on October 7, 2011
Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot presents quite a bit of this ongoing debate in its nearly 100 episodes (and can also set you up with a fairly thorough set of ideas re. contemporary ethics; I’ll post on that after the Hume/Smith ethics episode goes up).
In this interview with Gregory Dawes from the University of Otego in New Zealand, we hear a former minister who converted to atheism precisely because of his historical investigations into the Jesus story. He talks about naturalistic vs. religious explanations and why we might want to pursue the former even in cases where we don’t have enough evidence either way (he mentions Swinburne a couple of times).
In this conversation with Evan Fales from the University of Iowa, you can hear more about Alvin Plantinga as well as another prominent Christian philosopher that we didn’t bring up, William Alston.
As a general note on the podcast for those that haven’t checked this out: this falls into the same category of other podcasts I’ve written about here before like Elucidations and Diet Soap, all of which I like, which are basically interview format: find a guest who has written a paper or book or otherwise has things to say, and pretty much let them say it.
In all three of these cases, the hosts do a good job contributing to the discussion, i.e. they’re very interested in the subject matter and do some preparation. Still, the format is limited in that if the guest sucks, the episode sucks. I’ll admit that my first couple of tries in the past with Pale Blue Dot were thwarted by the fact that the episodes often lead off with a “tell me about your spiritual journey” section, and my patience for that is fairly limited (I’ll cave in and listen to some of the grossly popular “This I Believe” podcast at some point, but I generally don’t like that format; the “man on the street” parts of the otherwise pretty consistently good Philosophy Talk podcast are definitely its weakest part) for that kind of thing. I’m also interested in the relation between these podcasts and academia: some of them will only have “academically respectable” university professors on them. Pale Blue Dot is all about the ideas, meaning you have to do additional research on your own to figure out in some cases whether the guest is a crank or not, or you can deny that that question has any meaning apart from what you the listener takes out of what you hear.
-Mark Linsenmayer
“Philosophy for Theologians” on Aquinas and Other Topics
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts on September 28, 2011
In a recent post I recommended the “Philosophy for Theologians” podcast for more information about Hume on miracles.
I’ve now listened to their first several episodes and can give a more comprehensive (both in the sense of covering more of there work and in the sense that I better understand their point) evaluation.
First, this is a good case to counter anyone who equates being Christian with being philosophically sloppy or positively stupid. What attracts me to this mainly is that the guys (there are a few regulars plus guests who are studying some particular figure and want to present him) give nice, in-depth presentations of (short) philosophical texts. The majority of many of the discussions is not about their Christianity (in their case, it’s “reformed,” meaning Protestant descended from Calvinism), and in fact it takes some work and digging into the episodes to figure out what their religious views are.
Episode 43: Arguments for the Existence of God
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on September 15, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:42:49 — 94.2MB)
Discussing the arguments by Descartes, St. Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, William Paley, Kant, and others, as analyzed in J.L. Mackie’s The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God (1983), chapters 1-3, 5-6, 8, and 11.
Are the ontological, cosmological, and teleological (argument from design) arguments for God’s existence any good? Mackie, a very sharp analytic philosopher well hooked into recent advances in philosophy of science, says no. He’s chiefly responding to his Oxford colleague, Richard Swinburne, who takes a very rationalist approach to God, taking the concept of God to be wholly simple and intelligible and providing a superior scientific explanation for, e.g. the beginning of the universe than the brute fact of an ultimately uncaused physical universe. Read more about the topic.
Mark, Seth, and Wes are joined by groovy South African theist blogger Robert Scott.
End song: “I Believe,” by Mark Lint (2011). Read about it.
Topic for #43: Arguments for the Existence of God
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements on August 9, 2011
On many episodes we’ve mentioned in passing, or given some author’s criticism of, the classic arguments for the existence of God:
-The ontological argument, whereby some quality of the idea of God itself is supposed to necessitate that such a being exists. The most famous versions are by Descartes and St. Anselm.
-The cosmological argument, which deduces from the fact that everything has a cause (or everything is contingent, or everything moves… there are several variations of this) that there must be a first cause, i.e. God. This argument dates at least back to Aristotle but was given its most famous formulations by Thomas Aquinas.
-The teleological argument, or argument from design, which says that since nature looks designed (i.e. uniformity, complicated structures that achieve impressive results), there must be a designer, i.e. God. This was given its most famous formulation in William Paley’s metaphor about finding a watch on the beach: of course, we’d assume that had a designer.
We’d planned an episode on these arguments from the very beginning of the podcast, but merely reading the source materials linked above would take us about 10 minutes. Well, we found (recommended in both theist and atheist sources) a book that does a pretty exhaustive job analyzing these major arguments: J.L. Mackie’sThe Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God
Paul Tillich on Religious Existentialism
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Things to Watch on July 3, 2011
A name commonly thrown around when discussion liberal Christianity is Paul Tillich, famed for a Christian version of something like Heidegger’s philosophy of religion. Here’s a very long and slow-to-get-going (not to mention very dark on my screen) interview with him:
Watch on youtube.
In this first clip (around 5 minutes in), he describes how tragedy shaped his philosophy (interestingly, he seems to equate “idealism” as having a positive, optimistic outlook with the metaphysical idealism of Hegel, Fichte, etc.). Around 8 minutes in, he compares philosophizing in German vs. English (with a pretty positive assessment of English as better enabling analytic clarity).
On Religion, the PowerPoint!
Posted by Daniel Horne in PEL's Notes on June 27, 2011
Given Schleiermacher’s dense prose, I found it a lot easier to prepare for the podcast by “translating” his first two speeches into a more modern voice. As a result, here’s On Religion, the PowerPoint! (Well, the first two speeches, anyway.)
If you want to review Schleiermacher’s basic arguments without having to wade through 18th century German translated into 19th century English, I’m hoping this might provide a useful aid. I likely committed all five of the shocking design mistakes I was warned to avoid. But hey, they’re just notes. Be gentle.
-Daniel Horne
Heidegger on Schleiermacher’s Second Address
Posted by Daniel Horne in PEL's Notes on June 23, 2011
Let us think for a while of a farmhouse in the Black Forest, which was built some two hundred years ago by the dwelling of peasants. Here the self-sufficiency of the power to let earth and heaven, divinities and mortals enter in simple oneness into things, ordered the house.
- Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking” (1951)
Schleiermacher’s On Religion provided me a kind of Rosetta Stone by which to decipher certain Heideggerian concepts. Heidegger discussed On Religion’s Second Address in lectures he gave on religion in 1920-21. I agree with those who believe Schleiermacher’s influence remained well into Heidegger’s later writings, and I feel that in any event the Second Address informed Heidegger’s monism.
Heidegger’s later gnomic talk of “the relation of man and space” is more understandable to me if viewed through the prism of Schleiermacher’s “third realm” of religious intuition, separate and distinct from either conceptual thought or moral action.
“Prima Facie Weirdness?”
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Misc. Philosophical Musings, PEL's Notes on June 20, 2011
During the episode I made a comment about the seeming weirdness of Christianity that I feel it would be helpful for my thinking to try to elaborate.
I’ve said in several posts here that I think that the new atheist movement is primarily political: it’s not about advancing new arguments to philosophers, but about shifting the tide of opinion so that, for instance, an atheist could have some shot at winning an election in this country.
In the heat of conversation on the episode, I articulated something like this by saying that all I want is for Christianity to be acknowledged as, on the face of it, really weird. I’m wondering now whether I actually believe that and whether it makes any sense as a goal.
Schleiermacher on Miracles and Revelation
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes on June 19, 2011
We talked a bit on the episode towards the end about S’s take on immortality. His take on miracles and on revelation is similar. In short, miracles are all around us, and all creativity is inspiration. It takes a pious person to recognize our ordinary environment as full of magic and wonder.
From his second speech:
The more religious you are, the more miracle would you see everywhere. All disputing about single events, as to whether or not they are to be called miraculous, gives me a painful impression of the poverty and wretchedness of the religious sense of the combatants. One party show it by protesting everywhere against miracle, whereby they manifest their wish not to see anything of immediate relationship to the Infinite and to the Deity. The other party display the same poverty by laying stress on this and that. A phenomenon for them must be marvellous before they will regard it as a miracle, whereby they simply announce that they are bad observers.
What is revelation? Every original and new communication of the Universe to man is a revelation, as, for example, every such moment of conscious insight… Every intuition and every original feeling proceeds from revelation… If nothing original has yet been generated in you, when it does come it will be a revelation for you also, and I counsel you to weigh it well.
Comparing Kant with Schleiermacher on God and the Soul
Posted by Daniel Horne in PEL's Notes on June 16, 2011
On the Schleiermacher episode, we spent some time comparing On Religion to Kant’s religious arguments, particularly citing Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. Kant did not try to prove God’s existence or the soul’s immortality. Rather, he postulated those concepts as helpful ways to help realize the summum bonum, the highest good. “Postulate” is defined as a “a hypothesis advanced as an essential presupposition, condition, or premise of a train of reasoning.”
With that in mind, read along as you listen to this passage from the Critique of Practical Reason. Reviewing it may help highlight what Schleiermacher was rejecting:
The Immortality of the Soul as a Postulate of Pure Practical Reason
The realization of the summum bonum [highest good] in the world is the necessary object of a will determinable by the moral law. But in this will the perfect accordance of the mind with the moral law is the supreme condition of the summum bonum. This then must be possible, as well as its object, since it is contained in the command to promote the latter.
Episode 39: Schleiermacher Defends Religion
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in Podcast Episodes on June 10, 2011
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:43:12 — 94.5MB)
Discussing Friedrich Schleiermacher’s “On Religion; Speeches to its Cultured Despisers” (1799, with notes added 1821), first and second speeches.
Does religion necessarily conflict with science? Schleiermacher says no: the essence of religion is an emotional response to life; it doesn’t give knowledge or even tell us what to do exactly. Moreover, this attitude is a necessary to fully enter into life, to be a whole and fulfilled person. Yes, he’s of the “romantic” school, but his approach can still be seen today in liberal Protestant churches.
Featuring guest podcaster and blog contributor Daniel Horne.
Read the text online or buy the book.
End song: “Remembrance” by Fingers (read more about it).
Topic for #39: Schleiermacher’s Liberal Piety
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in General Announcements on May 8, 2011
Friedrich Schleiermacher, a contemporary of Hegel, bought into Kant’s views on ethics and the division between scientific and religious realms, but didn’t like Kant’s ultimate view of religion, i.e. that its only support is an indirect (and really pretty flimsy) appeal to what we have to as a practical matter believe for ethics to really make sense to us.
Instead, for Schleiermacher (a Lutheran preacher), religion is grounded on the emotion of piety, which each one of us can experientially (phenomenologically) confirm the existence of, if we’re not too poor in spirit to do so. This reflection on our own emotions is what provides meaning to life: religion is not a theory of the way the world is or a direct command to some action, but is fundamentally an inexpressible but all-pervasive experience of oneness with the world.
This of course raises some questions: if religion isn’t knowledge, then what is its relation to metaphysical claims such as in the existence of God? Even if piety is not the justification for ethical action, fully human action or knowledge, according to S., will involve piety. Religion ends up being an essential part of life fully on par with science and ethics. Also, the feeling of piety has to play itself out socially in particular historical circumstances, and that’s where we get religious traditions. So S. is a pluralist about religion, but not a non-denominational spiritualist (like maybe Emerson).
We’re reading an early work (from 1799), “On Religion; Speeches to its Cultured Despisers,” (focusing on the first two of the four speeches) which was originally written when he was at his most theologically adventurous (influenced greatly by Spinoza), but then was revised and has end notes to each “Speech” written much later in his life (1821) where he wants to prove that he really is a Christian.
Read the text online or buy the book.
We’ll also look at the prefaces to Kant’s “Religion Within the Bounds of Bare Reason” (sometimes translated as “Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone”), which you can read online here.
Notes on Dennett’s “Breaking the Spell,” Part 1
Posted by Mark Linsenmayer in PEL's Notes, Reviewage on March 31, 2011
For our atheism episode (which has, incidentally been pushed back to be recorded in late May or possibly June… sorry, Russ!), I’m trying to read through the most popular of the “new atheist” books, and I’m sure we’ll only end up discussing some select portions of the books in any detail, so as I’m going through these, I’m going to generate a few blog posts to fill readers in on some additional points and help myself remember what I’m reading. My point here is primarily to give points from the books, not to cast judgment upon them, so don’t take this as an endorsement (or rejection).
Daniel C. Dennett is the only actual philosophy professor among the most popular of these folks. (Sam Harris was a philosophy undergrad when he wrote his major works and has just recently earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience; Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, and Hitchens is a “columnist and literary critic.” I know Peter Singer also argues for atheism, and he’s as famous a philosopher as they come, but he’s not been considered part of this movement for some reason.) We read a little bit of him and devoted maybe 10 minutes of our discussion to him in our philosophy of mind episode, which didn’t go very well, in that Wes at least really dislikes him, yet we didn’t go into enough detail on the arguments of his article to clearly convey why Wes dislikes him. To sum up the critique, he’s not known for, say, clearly and charitably presenting the views of past philosophers and saying exactly how his position differs from them. Instead, he uses a popular style to make his points, with a heavy emphasis on specifically citing scientific work
Colbert vs. O’Reilly on the Argument from Design: Best Comic Use of St. Thomas Aquinas Award
Posted by Wes Alwan in Web Detritus on February 4, 2011
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Crisis in Egypt – Anderson Cooper & Bill O’Reilly<a> | ||||
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Here’s another brilliant take-down by Colbert of Bill O’Reilly’s argument from design (2 and a half minutes in): “Thank you Bill. You’re like St. Thomas Aquinas. … In that your understanding of the world is also from the thirteenth century.” A feel a little stung on Aquinas’ behalf by the association with O’Reilly and his half-baked theology.
– Wes Alwan
"I’ve never before heard my work discussed like that, and rarely as intelligently ... I listened to the whole podcast, and felt exalted afterward." -- Arthur Danto
The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don't have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we're talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion. Discuss episodes and provide feedback here or via our Facebook group. You can also e-mail comments to mark@marklint.com or wesalwan@gmail.com.
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