Richard Dawkins: A Gift From God

[JimL]

Jim, first Hitler was not a "Christian" but like most men of that time he did attend church when he was young. Second, if God did decide to take the life of a man or men that act would be perfectly just - how could it be otherwise? Third, you know that Christian theology teaches that men live beyond that life. So even when God finds it necessary to remove men from this world that is not the end of their story. Fourth, morality makes no sense apart from objective moral truths. Just as mathematics or the laws of logic would make no sense if they were subjective and dependent on personal or cultural opinion. Finally you are correct, ultimate justice plays an important role in the picture. Your universe, in the end, is indifferent, my universe, in the end, is just.

I'm still curious as to whether you, in your own mind, would lose all sense of morality if you no longer believed in God or objective morality?

[Boxing Pythagoras]

That is why I said "basic math." Like in standard addition.

That's my point. "Basic math" is not a concept which is intrinsic to reality. It is a concept which has been invented, defined, and refined by humanity. Therefore, if you want to say that there is some objective moral standard which is intrinsic to reality, mathematics makes for a poor analogy.

Well you did say this: When we clearly define that which we are attempting to describe, we can evaluate objective properties for that concept. The same goes for any concept, be it logic or morality or music theory or comic book art.

So perhaps I am misunderstanding your point here.

I'm saying that the concept has objective properties, when properly defined. I'm not saying that the concept, itself, is necessarily objective. For example, "musical preference" has some objective properties. A person who says "the best music in the universe is oxygen" would be making a nonsensical statement, because "oxygen" has nothing to do with the topic which is objectively addressed by "musical preference." However, "the best music in the universe is bluegrass" would be a subjective claim of "musical preference."

[seer]

I'm still curious as to whether you, in your own mind, would lose all sense of morality if you no longer believed in God or objective morality?

Jim, of course not. The question is which set of ethics would I be following. I grew up in a largely Christian nation, with a profound Christian influence. What if I grew up in Pol Pot's Communist Cambodia, or Mao's China? What is I was a good Hitler Youth? Is our moral sense just an accident of birth?

[seer]

That's my point. "Basic math" is not a concept which is intrinsic to reality. It is a concept which has been invented, defined, and refined by humanity. Therefore, if you want to say that there is some objective moral standard which is intrinsic to reality, mathematics makes for a poor analogy.

Then how about the laws of logic?

I'm saying that the concept has objective properties, when properly defined. I'm not saying that the concept, itself, is necessarily objective. For example, "musical preference" has some objective properties. A person who says "the best music in the universe is oxygen" would be making a nonsensical statement, because "oxygen" has nothing to do with the topic which is objectively addressed by "musical preference." However, "the best music in the universe is bluegrass" would be a subjective claim of "musical preference."

Ok, I understand.

[Boxing Pythagoras]

Then how about the laws of logic?

Again, implicit in the definition of our words. The laws of identity, non-contradiction, and exclusive middle are intrinsic to our definition of "being." When we say that there "is" an entity A, we have defined "is" in such a manner that these laws of logic arise.

[jpholding]

When I said "the vast majority of Nazis," I was not referring to just the elite. I was referring to all those who associated themselves with the Nazi party. I really don't think it's controversial to claim that the majority of Nazi party members were Christian.

Actually, it rather is. Institutional Christianity in Germany at the time was so poisoned by aberrations (German nationalism, an overzealous reading of Romans 13 that granted leaders too much power, etc) that it would have earned an entry in "The Kingdom of the Cults" handbook even without Positive Christianity.

By the way, the most that can be said of Hitler is that he "played priest" when he was child. I wouldn't take that any more seriously as an indication of his career choices than I would another child playing "cowboys and Indians."

[seer]

Again, implicit in the definition of our words. The laws of identity, non-contradiction, and exclusive middle are intrinsic to our definition of "being." When we say that there "is" an entity A, we have defined "is" in such a manner that these laws of logic arise.

But are not these arbitrary definitions? Like our definition of time?

[JimL]

Jim, of course not. The question is which set of ethics would I be following. I grew up in a largely Christian nation, with a profound Christian influence. What if I grew up in Pol Pot's Communist Cambodia, or Mao's China? What is I was a good Hitler Youth? Is our moral sense just an accident of birth?

First off when you equate the morality, or moral actions, undertaken by certain tyrants with that of the people in general you are making an error. There are of course immoral psychopaths in the world, but the people in general, the people of Mao's China, Stalins Soviet union, or Hitlers Germany for instance can not be put into the same immoral category as their leader. The great majority of people in the world have a moral compass, have a sense of right and wrong, that they all basically agree upon.
Second, the fact that you realize that you would maintain your sense of right and wrong, whether God existed or not, should tell you that morality need not be derived of an objectively existing moral law. As a society we would come to the same moral conclusions either way. Your only gripe about this is that people who don't play by the rules, people who may have no moral sense of right and wrong, might ultimately get away with what we call their sinful or immoral ways and that those of us who do have that moral sense won't get rewarded for it. Well the reward for the moral life is in the safe and secure society that such moral laws provide us with as a whole, and the punishment, if they should get caught, is in the criminal justice system as well as in the conscience of the sinner should they have one. Ultimate justice and reward is only necessary as a concept for those who can not behave themselves in society without the fear of punishment or the hope of reward. But the main point is that God and objective morality is not necessary in order that people adapt a moral nature.

[seer]

First off when you equate the morality, or moral actions, undertaken by certain tyrants with that of the people in general you are making an error. There are of course immoral psychopaths in the world, but the people in general, the people of Mao's China, Stalins Soviet union, or Hitlers Germany for instance can not be put into the same immoral category as their leader.

That is just silly Jim, those men could not have done what they did without millions of followers who were willing to carry out their evil designs. Were they all psychopaths? Of course not.

The great majority of people in the world have a moral compass, have a sense of right and wrong, that they all basically agree upon.
Second, the fact that you realize that you would maintain your sense of right and wrong, whether God existed or not, should tell you that morality need not be derived of an objectively existing moral law.

How do you know that? That our moral sense isn't God given? And in the West our moral sense certainty was grounded in the idea of God and objective moral law. In the East it was the Tao and Hinduism or Buddhism, which pointed to an objective moral rule. But there were consequences, beyond this life, for bad behavior. That is in keeping with our sense of justice.

[JimL]

That is just silly Jim, those men could not have done what they did without millions of followers who were willing to carry out their evil designs. Were they all psychopaths? Of course not.




How do you know that? That our moral sense isn't God given? And in the West our moral sense certainty was grounded in the idea of God and objective moral law. In the East it was the Tao and Hinduism or Buddhism, which pointed to an objective moral rule. But there were consequences, beyond this life, for bad behavior. That is in keeping with our sense of justice.

The thing that you understand is that a God with an inherent moral nature is not necessary in order that humans subjectively adopt a moral nature of their own. God is concieved of as being moral because human beings are moral. If God did not exist, if there were no ultimate justice, no ultimate punishment or reward, as you yourself agreed, human beings would still have adopted a moral nature. So objective morality and ultimate justice has nothing to do with why human societies evolved a moral sense. God and ultimate justice, the fear of punishment and the hope of reward, is merely the way it is sold.

[seer]

The thing that you understand is that a God with an inherent moral nature is not necessary in order that humans subjectively adopt a moral nature of their own. God is concieved of as being moral because human beings are moral. If God did not exist, if there were no ultimate justice, no ultimate punishment or reward, as you yourself agreed, human beings would still have adopted a moral nature. So objective morality and ultimate justice has nothing to do with why human societies evolved a moral sense. God and ultimate justice, the fear of punishment and the hope of reward, is merely the way it is sold.

No Jim, it is that and more. If there is no God then things like murder, rape, genocide, etc... are perfectly natural acts. We are just acting as the evolutionary process created us to act (like when chimpanzees murder each other). Not so in the Christian worldview. We were never intended or created to act this way, as a matter of fact it violates our nature as God's image bearers. This is what sin does. There is a serious deviation in man's nature, in your world these evils are perfectly natural.

[rogue06]

An op/ed in the New York Times about Dawkins idiotic, amoral statements about it being "immoral" for a mother to carry on with a pregnancy if she knew that the baby had Down syndrome that is worth the read: The Truth About Down Syndrome.

Source: The Truth About Down Syndrome

LAST week the biologist Richard Dawkins sparked controversy when, in response to a woman’s hypothetical question about whether to carry to term a child with Down syndrome, he wrote on Twitter: “Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.”

In further statements, Mr. Dawkins suggested that his view was rooted in the moral principle of reducing overall suffering whenever possible — in this case, that of individuals born with Down syndrome and their families.

But Mr. Dawkins’s argument is flawed. Not because his moral reasoning is wrong, necessarily (that is a question for another day), but because his understanding of the facts is mistaken. Recent research indicates that individuals with Down syndrome can experience more happiness and potential for success than Mr. Dawkins seems to appreciate.

There are, of course, many challenges facing families caring for children with Down syndrome, including a high likelihood that their children will face surgery in infancy and Alzheimer’s disease in adulthood. But at the same time, studies have suggested that families of these children show levels of well-being that are often greater than those of families with children with other developmental disabilities, and sometimes equivalent to those of families with nondisabled children. These effects are prevalent enough to have been coined the “Down syndrome advantage.”

In 2010, researchers reported that parents of preschoolers with Down syndrome experienced lower levels of stress than parents of preschoolers with autism. In 2007, researchers found that the divorce rate in families with a child with Down syndrome was lower on average than that in families with a child with other congenital abnormalities and in those with a nondisabled child.

In another study, 88 percent of siblings reported feeling that they themselves were better people for having a younger sibling with Down syndrome; and of 284 respondents to a survey of those with Down syndrome over the age of 12, 99 percent stated they were personally happy with their own lives.

Researchers (including one of us) have found that children and young adults with Down syndrome have significantly higher “adaptive” skills than their low I.Q. scores might suggest. Adaptive behavior is a measure of how well people are functioning in their environment, such as the quality of their day-to-day living and work skills. A paper published this week in the American Journal on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities suggests that the Down syndrome advantage may arise from these relatively strong adaptive skills.

*Article continues at link above*

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[rogue06]

A bit about the Nazi's and Christianity especially wrt Hitler

Hitler had contempt for Christianity but that did not stop him from trying to use it to support his wicked agenda. like many politicians both past and present Hitler spoke out of both sides of his mouth and invoked God's name in order to gain support. He patronized Christianity to prevent having to fight the Christian-based church. As Anton Gill explained in his An Honourable Defeat: A History of German Resistance to Hitler, 1933-1945:

indent]For his part, Hitler naturally wanted to bring the church into line with everything else in his scheme of things. He knew he dare not simply eradicate it: that would not have been possible with such an international organization, and he would have lost many Christian supporters had he tried to. His principal aim was to unify the German Evangelical Church under a pro-Nazi banner, and to come to an accommodation with the Catholics."[/indent]

But as he grew in power his anti-Christian remarks increased in frequency as he began to see Christianity as a threat to the Nazi’s domination of Germany.

"It is through the peasantry that we shall really be able to destroy Christianity because there is in them a true religion rooted in nature and blood," he said in 1933. His countrymen would have to make a choice: "One is either a Christian or a German. You can't be both." In the same year he is supposed to have told Hermann Rauschnig that he intended "to stamp out Christianity root and branch."

In the next couple years Hitler started arguing that Christian worship was a sign of weakness, and that it should be replaced by reverence for the nation and the state (the latter two embodied by the Nazi Party of course).

According to Albert Speer (the Nazi Minister of Armaments from 1942 to 1945, who served as Hitler's main architect before this period), on page 96 of his "Inside the Third Reich," at the conclusion of speculating on history Hitler often remarked:

“You see, it’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn't we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good? The Mohammedan religion too would have been much more compatible to us than Christianity. Why did it have to be Christianity with its meekness and flabbiness…."

Another telling quote comes from Allan Bullock’s "A Study in Tyranny," who cites Hitler as saying:

"I'll make these damned parsons feel the power of the state in a way they would have never believed possible. For the moment, I am just keeping my eye upon them: if I ever have the slightest suspicion that they are getting dangerous, I will shoot the lot of them. This filthy reptile raises its head whenever there is a sign of weakness in the State, and therefore it must be stamped on. We have no sort of use for a fairy story invented by the Jews."

Note also that when his private secretary, Martin Bormann, declared publicly in 1941 that "National Socialism [Nazism] and Christianity are irreconcilable" Hitler didn't raise much if any objection. Borman went on to say that Christianity's influence in the leadership of the people "must absolutely and finally be broken."

According to "The Face of the Third Reich" by Joachim Fest, Bormann stated that

"When we National Socialists speak of belief in God, we do not mean, like the naive Christians and their spiritual exploiters, a man-like being sitting around somewhere in the universe. The force governed by natural law by which all these countless planets move in the universe, we call omnipotence or God."^[1]

Keep in mind that Hitler put Bormann in charge of maintaining Nazi orthodoxy so his opinions almost certainly mirrored what Hitler believed.

One of the primary sources for the evidence revealing Hitler’s increasingly anti-Christian rhetoric and sentiment would have to be the controversial Table Talk^[2]. From it we get such gems as:

• "Christianity is an invention of sick brains"

• "So it's not opportune to hurl ourselves now into a struggle with the Churches. The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death"

• "When National Socialism has ruled long enough, it will no longer be possible to conceive of a form of life different from ours. In the long run, National Socialism and religion will no longer be able to exist together."

• "The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity ... The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity"

• "I shall never come to terms with the Christian lie . . . Our epoch will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity"

• "The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity."

In it he apparently accepted a largely Nietzschean explanation of Christianity as being a conspiracy of the Jews for a slave revolt against their Roman conquerors:

• "Christianity is a prototype of Bolshevism: the mobilization by the Jew of the masses of slaves with the object of undermining society"

But as they say, actions speak louder than words. When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, members of the clergy were specially targeted. For instance, in West Prussia two-thirds of the 690 parish priests were rounded up with only those that fled escaping. After only a month in custody 214 of those priests were executed while by the end of 1940 only 20 (about 3.5%) were left in their parishes.

Further, according to testimony presented by several top Nazi officials including Albert Speer, Hermann Göring, Martin Bormann, Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Alfred Rosenberg at the Nuremberg Trials, the Nazi’s had a plan to eliminate Christianity altogether.

You might find this, The Nazi Master Plan: The Persecution of the Christian Churches put together by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the CIA, an interesting read.

Many historians have argued that even before their rise to power the Nazis had intended to obliterate Christianity wherever they gained control:

• Joseph W. Bendersky, "A concise history of Nazi Germany" (2007)

• Marshall Dill, "Germany: A Modern History" (1970)

• Jack R. Fischel, "Historical Dictionary of the Holocaust" (2010)

• Roger Griffin, "Fascism's relation to religion" (2006)

• George Lachmann Mosse, "Nazi culture: intellectual, cultural and social life in the Third Reich" (2003)

• William L. Shirer, "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany" (1990)

• Eliot Barculo Wheaton, " The Nazi revolution, 1933-1935: prelude to calamity:with a background survey of the Weimar era" (1968)

Wheaton probably put it most succinctly when he wrote that the Nazis sought to "to eradicate Christianity in Germany root and branch." But Hitler well understood that it wouldn't be wise to start a "Kulturkampf" against Christianity until after the Nazis had eliminated their other enemies first. Doing so prematurely would be disastrous.

The fact is that Hitler had little use for Christianity except to act as window dressing and ultimately sought to replace Christianity with Nazism.






1. As Jehuda Bauer, Professor of Holocaust Studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, wrote in "The Trauma of the Holocaust: Some Historical Perspectives":

"[Hitler and the Nazis] wanted to go back to a pagan world, beautiful, naturalistic, where natural hierarchies based on the supremacy of the strong would be established, because strong equaled good, powerful equaled civilized. The world did have a kind of God, the merciless God of nature, the brutal God of races, the oppressive God of hierarchies."

2. It's accuracy has been questioned by many but in this case, as can be seen by the other sources I listed, the claims made in this case are supported

[JimL]

No Jim, it is that and more. If there is no God then things like murder, rape, genocide, etc... are perfectly natural acts.

Well actually they are perfectly natural acts whether God exists or not. I'm assuming that what you meant to say is that without God they are not what we would call immoral acts, and that because morality is purely subjective. But God is not necessary for moral objectivity, the enviroment determines moral objectivity with regards to our survival not us, so morality is objective in that sense. Thats why we see a difference between murder and killing, the former being immoral, the latter not necessarily so.

We are just acting as the evolutionary process created us to act (like when chimpanzees murder each other).

No, we are acting according to the laws that we have discovered through evolution to be in our best overall interests for survival.

Not so in the Christian worldview. We were never intended or created to act this way, as a matter of fact it violates our nature as God's image bearers. This is what sin does. There is a serious deviation in man's nature, in your world these evils are perfectly natural.

They are perfectly natural, yes, they are not perfectly moral which term defines what is in our own best interests as a species for survival. Morality has to do with survival and peace in this world not ultimate justice in the next. If there were no God or next world, we would still develop a moral code by which to better survive and live in peace in this world.

[seer]

Well actually they are perfectly natural acts whether God exists or not. I'm assuming that what you meant to say is that without God they are not what we would call immoral acts, and that because morality is purely subjective. But God is not necessary for moral objectivity, the enviroment determines moral objectivity with regards to our survival not us, so morality is objective in that sense. Thats why we see a difference between murder and killing, the former being immoral, the latter not necessarily so.

No Jim, I meant what I said. They are not natural - it is not natural for man to act this way. We were not created or intended to do these things.

No, we are acting according to the laws that we have discovered through evolution to be in our best overall interests for survival.

And if that includes genocide then that is perfectly natural, and good, if it is in the best interest of the survival of our group.

They are perfectly natural, yes, they are not perfectly moral which term defines what is in our own best interests as a species for survival. Morality has to do with survival and peace in this world not ultimate justice in the next. If there were no God or next world, we would still develop a moral code by which to better survive and live in peace in this world.

The only thing that is moral or immoral in your world is what is good or bad for survival. So if genocide helps your group to survive then it is good.