Giles Fraser lays aside his woolly mantle to review Sam Harris

Tonight Sam Harris is discussing morality with Giles Fraser. As I previously blogged, this is the event nearest to me, out of Sam Harris's three announced appearances on his UK book tour. Nevertheless I decided not to get a ticket because so far I've been severely underwhelmed by Giles Fraser (his recent spot on the Today Programme with A. C. Grayling is an example).

Earlier today, however, I discovered that last Saturday Guardian Online published Giles Fraser's review of The Moral Landscape, and reading it I found myself wishing I had swallowed my misgivings and arranged to attend the discussion. (The fact that IQ2 decided not to live-stream the event after all, is but one more regret.)

So what is it about Fraser's review that has brought on my change of heart? Mostly it's because he seems to have cast off the woolly mantle that has to date muffled anything of his I've come across. He reviews The Moral Landscape in a forthright manner, with hardly any wishy-washy equivocation. I still think he's wrong in most of what he says about the book, but his review convinces me that his discussion with its author would be more interesting than I had thought.

Fraser takes some potshots at Harris, but I think they misfire. For instance, on David Hume's point that you can't derive values from facts:

But Harris will have none of it. Science has sold itself cheap. The peace treaty must be torn up. Science can indeed tell us about morality. Indeed, science can determine morality.

Fraser also commits — on a grand scale — what might be called the "not my religion" fallacy:

With regard to the god Harris describes, I am a much more convinced atheist than he – even though I am a priest. For Harris asks constantly for evidence, with the implication that if he discovered some, he would change his mind. My own line would be that even if the god he described was proved to exist, I would see it as my moral duty to be an atheist.

He goes on to imply that he's heard it all before:

What is presented as Harris's big new idea is really just reheated utilitarianism with wellbeing in place of pleasure.

I also think Fraser has missed one of Harris's key points:

There are so many problems with utilitarianism, it's a pity Harris does so little to address them. How can one quantify the sum total of wellbeing produced by a single action when the potential consequences of any particular action are infinite? So keen is he to turn morality into science that Harris presses on regardless. His demand is that all morality be calibrated on a single scale. Yet if one observes what it is that people call good (and isn't observation a scientific golden rule?), instead of assuming what good ought to look like, one surely recognises very different sorts of moral value.

It seems to me that Harris does indeed address this — it's what I understand by there being different peaks in the moral landscape. Fraser legitimately raises the necessity of some kind of metric for determining how high up the peaks or deep in the valleys moral actions are, as have other critics, but Harris isn't saying he's got all the answers. He's asking for science to be brought to bear on moral questions. Fraser, however, won't have it:

Harris sees the great moral battle of our day as one between belief and unbelief. I see it as between those who insist that the world be captured by a single philosophy and those who don't.

Here we see Fraser's woolly equivocation breaking through once more. It sounds to me like a plea not just for pluralistic society but for pluralistic belief. Such is, after all, the Anglican way.

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UPDATE 2011-04-13:
The mp3 audio of the Fraser/Harris discussion can be downloaded here:
http://iq2.podbean.com/mf/feed/bhegmw/sam-harris-IQ2.mp3

Burnee links for Sunday

Bay of Fundie » Blog Archive » At War with Itself
An unusual graphical representation of contradiction.

The Atheist Experience™: Some thought experiment on "potential life"
Fascinating set of hypotheticals. The Axp blog should be required reading for anyone of a godless turn of mind who wants to engage with relevant issues.

Science, Reason and Critical Thinking: Blogger Farm: A Fairytale
Allegory upon allegory.

Martin Rees's Templeton prize may mark a turning point in the 'God wars' | Mark Vernon | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
A favourable assessment of this year's Templeton prize. By a Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellow who seems to have a skewed notion of how science works.

Nutwood Junction: Harris kicked his butt!
A summary and assessment of the Craig vs Harris debate, by someone who was there.

Brian Cox Interview / Entertainment / ShortList Magazine
Refreshingly snarkless.

Agnostic Popular Front - Debates: Dillahunty vs. Comfort on the Atheist Experience (radio)
Useful brief take on the phone-in.

Agnostic Popular Front - Debates: Krauss vs Craig at NCSU
Someone not happy with either.

Sir Martin Rees Wins the Templeton Prize | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine
Sean Carroll admires the Templeton PR machine (while deploring its aims).

Westoboro Baptist Church — lessons in lucrative offence

Four years after his first foray into the weirdly twisted unreality of the Westboro Baptist Church, Louis Theroux has been back, catching up with the Phelps' (what's left of them — they've had a number of defections) to see if they are still as committed to their extreme, fundamentalist ideology as before. It turns out they are, but now appear more organised, more media-savvy, more litigious and apparently just as crazy. The BBC documentary is currently available on YouTube (but may be pulled soon):

Part 1 of 4: http://youtu.be/yh3HZ4cGNPY

Part 2 of 4: http://youtu.be/BMJHNSmpuFw
Part 3 of 4: http://youtu.be/Pj4aVHr9Ktw
Part 4 of 4: http://youtu.be/rk-s_cgfWZQ

These people truly seem to be living in fantasyland, and though some of the cult members have left, the remainder appear just as committed as ever. Louis Theroux allowed them to self-condemn from their own mouths — as is his particular journalistic style — but nothing in this documentary gave cause for hope that the cult is on the wane. Particularly concerning is the continuing indoctrination of children, skewing their development in ways that will severely affect them for the rest of their lives.

The extremity of the Phelps' views has led some to speculate as to their genuineness. One such, El_Camino_SS, reports that "Fred Phelps is a Con Man". An article entitled "Why the Westboro Baptist Church is a Scam" lists a number of apparent facts about Fred Phelps:

• He says God Hates Fags, God hates the US Govt., that God hates the US Military, God Hates you, and God justifies the killing of others.
  Phelps knows that saying 'God' and 'Hate' in the same sentence gets people worked up. He knows that. He knows that people have a knee jerk reaction to that.
• He says that the US Govt. and the United States are evil.
  This is another hot button with people who love their country. It is intentional. It is designed to make you take a swing at him. He wants $50,000 from you. He wants a Powerball winner to swing at him so he gets 100 million dollars. It's that simple.
• He goes after homosexuals, he goes after people who are making sacrifices. Phelps intentionally targets people that are being victimized, or good people doing their jobs to create more outrage. He kicks people when they're down. He does that so someone will come up and defend them. Then he will sue you.
• His boards are laminated on hardwood, because he pulls them out of trucks at least five times a week. He also puts them in bright colors for attention, and makes absolutely sure that you can read them at all time. He's phishing you. Everyone must know that.

The thesis of the article is that the Wesboro Baptist Church is not interested in God, it's just interested in being as offensive as possible — within the law — in order to incite other people to break that law. Phelps will then sue for as much as he can get. Whether this is true or not isn't something that can be readily determined, but it's a hypothesis that seems to fit the known facts. What we need now, perhaps, is a proper test of that hypothesis.

Debate: Is Good from God? — William Lane Craig vs Sam Harris

Though I've not yet seen the video, I've heard the audio recording of this debate that took place on April 7 between William Lane Craig and Sam Harris, hosted by Notre Dame University. The motion was "Is Good from God?" The following are my thoughts, noted while listening.

Craig starts, using his "argument from morality", which he frames in his usual way:

• If God exists, objective moral values exist.
• If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
• Objective moral values do exist, therefore God exists.

The problem with this argument is the definition of objective. Craig characterizes Harris's formulation of morality in The Moral Landscape — where Harris says that morality is about the well-being of conscious creatures — as just a redefining of morality, which is no more than saying that the well-being of conscious creatures is about the well-being of conscious creatures. This, says Craig, is circular tautology. But Craig's own definition of morality — in particular objective morality — is itself circular. You only have to listen to his "argument from morality" to realize (despite his denials) that his definition of objective morality is morality originating from a transcendent source, so it's no surprise that in his view morality can't come from a source other than God.

What many of Sam Harris's critics fail to grasp is that he's not attempting to resolve the "value problem". He's not trying to derive values from facts (ought from is). His book The Moral Landscape begins not with an is but with an ought, as he explains in this debate. He starts off with the worst possible misery for everyone, then says that everything else — states or conditions that are not "the worst possible misery for everyone" — is obviously better. It's higher up the moral landscape; no-one can doubt this. It's a value judgement, but it's a judgement we all share, and it's as near to objective as we're likely to get.

Naturally Craig doesn't accept this. He claims that objective morality must come from an authority, and in the absence of God, that authority is moot. Like many theists, Craig cannot get around his authority fixation. He claims there's nothing, in the absence of God, to say that the well-being of conscious creatures is "good". He insists that Harris isn't using the words "good" and "bad" in a moral sense. Again this is hardly surprising from someone who believes that goodness and badness in the moral sense can only be derived from a transcendent source. Craig's definition of morality is inextricably entwined with his personal concept of transcendent authority.

Perhaps Harris misjudges his audience in his first rebuttal, launching into an excoriation of religious morality without tying it sufficiently to his argument. What he says is true, but possibly not on point.

Predictably Craig follows up with the claim (he always does this in debates, whatever his opponent says) that his points have not been responded to, then goes on to claim that theism provides a foundation for morality — even though Harris has just illustrated the moral vacuity of divine command theory. But Craig insists that the existence of evil proves the existence of God; that moral authority comes from God, therefore God exists. God exists, therefore we have objective morality. Of course you can't refute this because objective moral authority, by Craig's definition (despite his denial) comes only from God.

Harris, in his second rebuttal, points out that Craig has misquoted him, but concentrates on the theme of his book — that we can use science to investigate ways to maximize the well-being of conscious creatures. He does, however, point out that Craig is merely defining God as good.

In his concluding statement Craig takes up this last point, denies it, then proceeds to do precisely what Harris accuses him of: he defines God as good. Remarkably, Craig objects to Harris's statement that we rely on certain axioms. Craig says that's taking something on faith, which it isn't. Axioms are self-evidently true — no faith is required in order to believe them.

In his concluding statement Harris gives an impassioned plea for rationality in our investigations into how we should live. It's heartfelt, but probably too subtle a response to Craig's rather simplistic, point-scoring style of debate. Craig is a good debater; he uses rhetorical tricks to get his audience on side, but the philosophical content of his speeches is relatively low. He sticks to basic points (most, incidentally, long since refuted), and repeats them, usually along with the mantra that they've received inadequate response from his opponent.

Harris, on the other hand, is less interested in point-scoring, just wanting people to see where he's coming from, and to give his ideas serious consideration.

Half an hour of mostly insightful questions follows the debate proper, and the answers are necessarily short and consequently not very enlightening, except to show that Harris and Craig are never going to agree on the foundation for morality. It seems likely, therefore, that the two sides of this question will continue to talk past each other.

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Audio here:
http://www.brianauten.com/Apologetics/debate-craig-harris.mp3

Video here:
Part 1 of 9 http://youtu.be/7UigeMSZ-KQ

Part 2 of 9 http://youtu.be/rh8FU2UlHp4
Part 3 of 9 http://youtu.be/L2CJgPTOHSY
Part 4 of 9 http://youtu.be/lmeSjF6CSQA
Part 5 of 9 http://youtu.be/ljXCHgPaZO4
Part 6 of 9 http://youtu.be/wAcdg2RlUJY
Part 7 of 9 http://youtu.be/Pa2fHkpOfoA
Part 8 of 9 http://youtu.be/uQTZBBkkcxU
Part 9 of 9 http://youtu.be/YTdQ_u1-xfc

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UPDATE 2011-04-22:
YouTube now has the whole debate in single video:
http://youtu.be/yqaHXKLRKzg

Burnee links for Thursday

The Blog : Being Mr. Nobody : Sam Harris

There are an uncountable number of erroneous and unfounded doctrines that we all reject. Why must we name their absence from our lives?

I know Sam Harris doesn't like to identify as an atheist, but the reason we name the absence of erroneous and unfounded doctrines that we reject is that the majority doesn't reject them. The majority thinks these erroneous and unfounded doctrines are true.

Why Are There Atheists? | Godless Girl
Could it be that theists are actually getting the message? By conceding that theists are generally not theists because of reason and evidence, but because of revelation, maybe that means they'll give up debating the evidence with atheists. When theists offer an evidential basis for theism, however, atheists should nevertheless respond in similar terms until the aforementioned concession is acknowledged — at which point the debate is over.

The Daily Mash - 'Atheist bible' an impossible fairy story, say Christians
There, what did I tell you?

The unpalatable truth is that the anti-nuclear lobby has misled us all | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian

"...we owe it to ourselves not to squander our lives on fairytales."

George Monbiot looks at the facts.

Guardian Readers 'Fix' the Fukushima Power Plant | Science | guardian.co.uk
Huh, experts. What do they know?

Eating the abiogenesis cake

It seems Joe W. Francis can't make up his mind. In "Oxygen, Water, and Light, Oh My! — The Toxicity of Life's Basic Necessities", which forms chapter 10 of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God, he appears to be claiming that the world is fine-tuned for life. And that it's a wonder life got started at all, given the world is so hostile to it. Well, which is it Joe?

This chapter appears to be an example of what might be called the argument from abiogenesis — the complexity of present-day biology is expounded in some detail (detail that I'm not competent to assess, not being a biologist), but it appears to miss one significant factor that's typically (or deliberately) missed in all such arguments. Sure, modern multicellular life is extremely complex, but abiogenesis isn't the wholesale springing-into-existence of complex multicellular life. It's not even the emergence of complex unicellular life. Abiogenesis is the first event — the appearance of the first self-replicating molecule. This molecule and its descendants might not even merit the description organic, even though they would lead to organic life. Whatever they were — and we can only speculate here as we don't really know — they would likely be relatively simple. Certainly relative to the intricate biological machinery evident within cells we examine today, they would probably appear absurdly simple. We have no archeological evidence — such early organisms, being soft-bodied, would not have fossilized.

To give Joe Francis his due, he doesn't explicitly present anything in this chapter as evidence for God (though I wonder, therefore, why the editors included it). But the implication is clear: cellular organisms contain highly complex mechanisms to protect them from the hostile toxicity of their environment — an environment that is fine-tuned for the existence of such cellular organisms. (No, I don't get it either.)

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4truth.net:
http://www.4truth.net/fourtruthpbscience.aspx?pageid=8589952959

D. J. Grothe at TAM London 2010

JREF president D. J. Grothe's talk at TAM London 2010 was a bit like a State of the Union address, focussing on the moral imperatives of skepticism (briefly referencing Sam Harris's new book just published) and on how he sees the skeptical movement in general, both globally and locally. As for locally, he announced that the fund-raising of TAM London would be channelled to JREF projects in the UK, and mentioned the grass-roots, loosely affiliated Skeptics in the Pub gatherings that seem to be burgeoning nationwide. Some of these appear to be a direct result of unofficial arrangements made at TAM London itself.



I was looking forward to hearing the new JREF president, and DJ's rallying cry to "the troops" didn't disappoint.