If God Is Dead...

... then as Will WIlkinson explains none of the things Ramesh Ponnuru is worried about here actually follow. As Will says:

Suppose you know that there is free will or that moral reasoning is not futile. Next, suppose you find that the universe is made out of only whatever the universe is made out of. What do you infer? You infer that free will and moral reasoning, which occur inside the universe (or as aspects of the universe), whatever they may be, are made possible because of whatever it is the universe is made out of. And there you are.

David Chalmers tackles some related issues in his relatively accessible paper "The Matrix as Metaphysics". One point to note is that even within the materialist framework we've experienced some rather stunning revelations as to what the world is made of. The discovery, for example, that matter is composed of atoms didn't lead everyone to freak out and say "oh my God! I used to think the kitchen was full of cookware but now I know it's really full of atoms!" Rather, the kitchen continues to be full of cookware, but the cookware is made of atoms.

Then you learn that the atoms are made of subatomic particles. That, in fact, the atoms are mostly empty space. That the subatomic particles obey the odd principles of quantum mechanics. All kinds of weird stuff. None of this, however, undermines your pre-existing knowledge of the macroscopic world. Pots hold water, but colanders don't. It's interesting to learn more about the ultimate nature of matter, but that doesn't make our everyday knowledge of the world endlessly renegotiable. Similarly, moral reasoning does in fact make sense -- people do it all the time.

Comments

Sometimes I use my colander if I would like a salad, and sometimes I don't want a salad. But moral reasoning, by definition, is the tool that you are supposed to use whether you like the outcome or not. In a materialist universe, I would have no reason to use moral reasoning if I disliked the outcome. Therefore it does not exist.

Posted by D Cook | July 19, 2007 9:01 AM

This does not seem to be a particularly strong answer since presumably the response would be to wonder on what basis we know that there is free will and that moral reasoning is possible.

The evidence at the end does not seem particularly compelling. People engage in reasoning about moral issues, but it does not follow that it makes sense if the reasoning is not based on anything. It makes no sense to argue that things are improving in Iraq as all indicators run in the other direction, but people do it all the time.

In fact theology has been full of people engaging in forms of reasoning that make no sense. So this is not something one should be able to slip by the theologically minded. (Or maybe it is something that is easiest to slip by the theologically minded). But one hardly seems to answer Ponnuru by begging the question that he raises.

The Chalmers argument has limitations of a similar sort. Chalmers is right that there are lots of weird ways the world could turn out to be that would turn out to be answers to the question of what a chair actually is. But it does not follow that there are no ways the world could be that would not require us to abandon some of our everyday concepts. And issues like free will and ethics seem to be better candidates than are things like chairs.

Posted by Lon | July 19, 2007 9:01 AM

The sooner humans come to terms with death as the end of everything they've ever known, with nothing more thereafter, the sooner the endless debate over what all this means can be dispensed with. It's all nothing more than you're born, you live and then you die. During the middle part just be cool and don't kill or maim or steal. The golden rule you might call it. If some situations seem cruel or unjust that's just the way it is. Life sucks for some and not for others. If your life is good try to help someone else. If it sucks hope they'll do the same for you. Quit watching the damn mortality clock and do something with yourself.

Posted by steve duncan | July 19, 2007 9:03 AM

This is Ponnuru's main argument, and it's stupid:

If it is true that the universe consists entirely and without remainder of particles and energy, then all human action must be within the domain of caused events, free will does not exist, and moral reasoning is futile if not illusory (as are other kinds of reasoning).

Apparently Ramesh Ponnuru knows exactly what "particles and energy" are, to the degree that he can be utterly certain of their complete determinism. He seems to have just taken Descartes' hypothesis of mechanism and pretended that it applies fully and comprehensively.

Now, what is interesting to me is the historical question. Matt is certainly right that people do moral reasoning. What I would suggest, though, is that contemporary secularism is (a) inextricable from religion as a concept and (b) historically dependent on a set of shared ideals about human nature which developed in liberal Protestant theology. Secularists hold to incredibly Protestant moralities.

That doesn't mean you "need God" to have an ethics, but it means that within the particular set of historical circumstances that produced the new secularism, people behave and think in ways that have a grounding in earlier liberal protestant thought and practice.

Posted by DivGuy | July 19, 2007 9:12 AM

I am not a religious person, not even in the "spiritual but not religious" sense. However, I am utterly baffled by people who find the death of God to be comforting. The French existentialists had it right; the death of God is nothing but terrifying. I find that the current atheist (or anti-theist, really) movement has spent far too little time taking their philosophy to its conclusions. Without God, there's no truth, moral or otherwise. The philosophical constructions people create to prove that there is seem to me to be pleasant fictions of exactly the sort atheists think God to be.

Posted by Freddie | July 19, 2007 9:16 AM

First Jonah Lucianne and now Ponnuru.

Matt must be paying the NRO to set up the fish in the barrel for him to shoot.

Posted by gregor | July 19, 2007 9:20 AM

Doesn't Ponnuru's argument run aground on the uncertainty principle? One of the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics is that the future can't be determined, as the movement of subatomic particles is probabilistic. Therefore there's no predestination in a quantum universe -- something one cannot say about a universe with a supreme being. The Calvinists, for example, would be shocked to find out that free will does exist.

Posted by Jeff Fecke | July 19, 2007 9:22 AM

If it is true that the universe consists entirely and without remainder of particles and energy, then all human action must be within the domain of caused events, free will does not exist, and moral reasoning is futile if not illusory

yes, that is true, and your conclusion is correct. now get over yourself.

Without God, there's no truth, moral or otherwise.

bullshit.

Posted by cleek | July 19, 2007 9:22 AM

_"This does not seem to be a particularly strong answer since presumably the response would be to wonder on what basis we know that there is free will and that moral reasoning is possible._"

Yes- but of course that's true _if God exists as well_. Go back and read the Euthyphro. (You should do it for other reasons, too- you can only barely consider yourself literate if you have not read it, for example.) Where you're done there, go read some Kant for a deeper and better worked out account of the problem. We do and should wonder on what basis we know that moral reasoning is possible or that free will exits (insofar as it does) but postulating God doesn't help answer these question _at all_ and it's a sign of not having thought very hard to think it does.

Posted by Matt | July 19, 2007 9:28 AM

Without God, there's no truth, moral or otherwise.

What is moral truth? More importantly, what is immoral truth?

I think Ponnuru just likes to justaexpose words in a manner that the resulting phrases sound profound but are ultimately meaningless.

May be he has been secretly advising George Bush on morality. For without Ponnuruan (il)logic, there would be no Iraq fiasco.

Posted by gregor | July 19, 2007 9:33 AM

I agree with Freddie that, at least for most people, the death of God is terrifying. Existentialism is there for a reason.

I think a moral sense is to a large degree innate, based on empathy and emotional responses.

If one is going to ignore the emotional component of it, and just focus on a logical basis for morality, then one can categorize different moral rules based on different premises, but not come to any absolute conclusion as to what is, or is not, moral.

I agree with everything steve duncan says above, except that my eyes are riveted to the mortality clock.

Posted by Jim W | July 19, 2007 9:39 AM

I have to admit that I'm not finding either Wilkinson's ("touch your nose") or Yglesias's ("we do it all the time") positive response to Ponnuru very satisfying. I don't have a philosophy background, though.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | July 19, 2007 9:42 AM

Morality is part of metaphysics and so has only a tangential connection to the physical world. We're not going to get there by argument and reason. There are grave impediments to belief in Free Will, Morality, God etc. (Things like people who are born schizophrenics, infant mortality, the intractability of pedophilic behavior, etc.) You surmount these impediments or you don't.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | July 19, 2007 9:46 AM

The French existentialists had it right; the death of God is nothing but terrifying.

The French existentialists thought everything was terrifying. If they thought God existed, they would have been freaked out by the idea of an all-powerful demon creating the universe on a whim, damning people to hell for daring to take pleasure in anything but him.

For that matter, I never understood how the existence of God is supposed to give us either free will or objective morality. God makes these "soul" objects that direct our actions. Whether we are controlled by brains or mystical souls, both those objects would have causal history, or be completely random--and why should uncontrollable randomness be called free will? God gives us a set of moral commands and says we must follow them. Who says we must follow God? God? If circular logic is all you need, you didn't need God for that.

Whether or not God exists, morality is subjective. It just so happens that either evolution or the whims of God has given us all roughly consistent subjective moralities. You can choose to be disturbed by the fact that either Nature-Red-In-Tooth-and-Claw or Giant-Sky-Demon have dictated our subjective moralities for us. But it's your choice to be disturbed. Unpleasant fictions are no more realistic than pleasant ones--it's an aesthetic choice, not a philosophical one.

Posted by Consumatopia | July 19, 2007 9:51 AM

I often hear people say that you can't prove or diprove the existence of God. That is true, as the evidence currently stands.

However, if God actually exists, he could easily announce his presence through any number of dramatic means (announcing his presence by writing words with clouds, levitating the empire state building, etc).
I'm sure this kind of evidence would be enough even for Richard Dawkins to prove that God exists.

There is no evidence, however (with the exception of a few old wives tales told recorded in some books). The silence is deafening.

Posted by Jim W | July 19, 2007 9:53 AM

Without God, there's no truth, moral or otherwise. The philosophical constructions people create to prove that there is seem to me to be pleasant fictions of exactly the sort atheists think God to be.
Posted by Freddie | July 19, 2007 9:16 AM

Pleasant fictions? I'd say you have it exactly backwards. Until God died he was a pleasant fiction of men. Paradoxically, in death he is more real then ever before, (kind of like Jesus in that respect). 117 years after Nietzsche pronounced God dead, we are able to see that the entity that died was not God himself but our conception of God up until now.

God is very much alive, he just doesn't look like anything painted on the ceilings of the Vatican.

Posted by Northern Observer | July 19, 2007 9:53 AM

Re: "For that matter, I never understood how the existence of God is supposed to give us either free will or objective morality."

I just discussed this with a Christian believer yesterday. According to him, this one needs to be filed under: it only seems nonsensical because we are too stupid to understand.

Posted by Jim W | July 19, 2007 9:56 AM

I don't have a philosophy background, though.

what do you need one for ? the existence of god does not need to be a philosophical question. it's a valid question to ask science; and science says: there's no evidence for a god, and there's no good reason to think there needs to be a god.

religious types always want to drag the question into the philosophical realm, where they can boil the whole thing down to "the meaning of knowledge", leaving nothing solid for anyone to hold onto, including themselves - forcing a draw, in effect. but, that's a cop-out. out here in the real world, look around, there is no god: no reason for one, no evidence of one, and plenty of evidence that religion itself is the product of power politics, demagoguery, and fear of the unknown.

Posted by cleek | July 19, 2007 9:56 AM

I have to admit that I'm not finding either Wilkinson's ("touch your nose") or Yglesias's ("we do it all the time") positive response to Ponnuru very satisfying. I don't have a philosophy background, though.

Perhaps you are looking for more profundity than necessary for the argument.

touch your nose proves the existence of free will. we do it all the time is just a statement of an observable and objective fact.

So free will and moral reasoning exist, irrespective of whether or not the universe consists entirely of energy and matter. Hence, Ponnuru's statement that without God there is no free will or moral reasoning is complete nonsense, commensurate with other proclamations made daily by the uberboys at the Corner.

Posted by anonymous | July 19, 2007 10:00 AM

Personally, my experience of not believing in (a) deity can be somewhat horrible, but I know plenty of fellow atheists who don't share my same troubles. Thing is, though, my personal experience of said horror has to do with the emptiness/meaninglessness of life aspect, and nothing to do with the "how can I make moral choices without a God to dictate my morality for me?" aspect. I've never once felt any kind of hitch in the continuity of my moral principles that coincided with a change in my religious or irreligious beliefs.

That our particular moral code happens to be derived in great part from our religious heritage is, as pointed out above, a particular historical fact, but it's not a necessary one, and I have trouble understanding, really trouble on a very deep human-to-human communication level of understanding, people who think that in the absence of some externally imposed (or, if you like, some internally created fiction of an externally imposed) code society will eat itself alive or whatever. (I have no beef with, nor trouble understanding, individuals whose personal experience is that without a religion to guide their moral code life would become existentially terrifying; my beef/incomprehension is of people who necessarily turn their personal experience/perception into a universal truth. I have trouble finding meaning in my life given the absence of God; I know lots of people who don't. The world is infinitely bigger than my tiny personal experience of it, a lesson frustratingly many people seem incapable of internalizing.)

The idea that morality is, basically, a mildly distasteful yet necessary thing we need to get through which we can be persuaded to embrace if properly incentivized - like a kid who finally commits to making straight As because his parents promised to buy him a guitar rig if he did - is, to me, profoundly uncompelling.

Posted by Quarterican | July 19, 2007 10:01 AM

Not sure if the Matt who replied to me is MattY or another, but the fact that there are good arguments against the line that Ponnuru is taking does not mean that the argument given is not a bad one.

I would also note that the two sources you suggest reading here are not particularly helpful. I assume that you point to the Euthyphro because it raises the question of whether things are good because God loves them, or whether God loves them because they are good. But in the post linked to above from Ponurro he makes explicit that that is not the stage at which he thinks that God is necessary for morality. So in reading the Euthyphro one would get an interesting discussion of a point not at issue.

Not clear whether your reference to Kant was meant to be approving or critical. Kant is someone who agrees with Ponurro on this issue, although I think unconvincingly. While he thinks that the content of morality is fixed independently of the existence of God, he did think that the possibility of it depended on the existence of God. But that was given as a transcendendent truth, I don't know that I have ever seen anything in him on the subject that rises to the level of an argument.

I should make clear that in this debate I think that Matt, or the Matts if they are different ones, are arguing for the right side. I am just not convinced they are doing a good job of it.

I do think that the answer lies in the fact that the addition of God gives one nothing in the explanation. But it is a mistake to think that the Euthyphro argument for this actually answers the point that Ponurro is making. (An argument that has been made more famously, if no more convincingly, in George Mavrodes "Religion and the Queerness of Morality"

Posted by Lon | July 19, 2007 10:12 AM

I would say that my main problem with the absence of a God is not really that it implies that life is meaninglessness, but rather that it implies the absence of an afterlife.

Suppose there was a God but we did not have souls that survived our death. Would anyone find that comforting? Not me.

As to the morality question, I agree with a lot of the commentors that belief in God doesn't provide any more satisfying logical basis for morality than unbelief.

But, what about its effects in the real world? Take abortion. A lot of believers base their opposition to abortion to the idea that life is sacred, even if it is only a blastocyst. For me, the morality of when its ok to abort a baby and when its not is much more difficult to figure out.

For example, I think its immoral NOT to abort a Downs Syndrome fetus. What about a baby with Downs Syndrome that was just born? I think that if the parents don't want it, it would be perfectly moral to kill it. My moral beliefs are based on trying to improve poeple's lives as they are lived, not in trying to preserve things that are "sacred". Obviously, most religious people think differently.

Posted by Jim W | July 19, 2007 10:13 AM

In a materialist universe, I would have no reason to use moral reasoning if I disliked the outcome.

This is only true with the hidden presumption that you're a scumbag. And scumbags will generally act unethically whether the universe is material, jello, or is God-infused.

To boil it down, your argument is: "I am a scumbag; ergo God exists."

Posted by jpe | July 19, 2007 10:14 AM

Perhaps you are looking for more profundity than necessary for the argument.

touch your nose proves the existence of free will.

For gawd's sake, how? Wilkinson instructs me to touch my nose and I do: free will. I instruct my hypothetical dog to play dead, and he does: free will, apparently. When my dog refuses not to crap inside, is this civil disobedience on his part or an indication that I ought not feed him Cheetos?

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | July 19, 2007 10:17 AM

Trying to rescue Cartesian-style free will through quantum indeterminacy is kind of silly; if you feel so metaphysically emasculated by determination, why should you suspect randomness will offer you greater "freedom?" And by this light rocks, &c. have free will. Better to find free will in the sort of structure that free-willed beings like us have.

It strikes me that conservatives all seem to be amenable to the idea that "if we're [evolved/composed of atoms/&c.] then we're no better than [animals/base matter/&c.]," without considering how one arrangement of matter might be qualitatively different than another. Among the ones who reject a material universe you get terrible anxiety about what that would do to their place in the world, among those who accept it, you get blithe genetic determinism.

The Calvinists, for example, would be shocked to find out that free will does exist.

Not true; predestination does not imply that God has prior control over your actions. It just means that you're going to Heaven or Hell based entirely on God's say-so, independently of your actions (which are free.)

Much Muslim theology, by contrast, takes the opposite tack: you are responsible and judged for your actions, which come about only because God wills them.

Now, what is interesting to me is the historical question. Matt is certainly right that people do moral reasoning. What I would suggest, though, is that contemporary secularism is (a) inextricable from religion as a concept and (b) historically dependent on a set of shared ideals about human nature which developed in liberal Protestant theology. Secularists hold to incredibly Protestant moralities.But that's kind of trivial, isn't it? If we're really materialists, then of course we should acknowledge that cultures don't spring up ex nihilo; they're what remains of the culture before, after technology, social conflicts, and so on have changed it. Inasmuch as we're Westerners and all previous Western cultures have been religious, of course our culture's ideas have a basis in religious ideas. But they're still secular ideas, just like we're still vertebrates.

Although I most definitely agree that where our ideas come from is very interesting in the specifics! Which I guess is what you meant.

Posted by Matthias | July 19, 2007 10:20 AM

Stupid html.

Posted by Matthias | July 19, 2007 10:26 AM

Morality is part of metaphysics and so has only a tangential connection to the physical world.

Morality has everything to do with the physical world.

That people feel inclined to look for abstract metaphysical absolutes is just a fact about the world, not a statement about the existence of the abstract metaphyiscal absolutes.

Consider as simple a rule as "don't kill," and try to figure out the metaphysical certainty behind applying it to eating fish or chicken, having an abortion, fighting in a war, pushing a fat man in front of a trolley, or being eaten by gigantic ant aliens from another galaxy.

Honestly, thinking of ourselves as simply a bunch of smart monkeys provides a lot of clarity.

Posted by Barbar | July 19, 2007 10:28 AM

I also find the cavalier attitude of many atheists to these questions puzzling. I do not believe there is a God, but, like Sartre and Freddie, I find this rather frightening. Moreover, if pressed I would have to acknowledge that I strive to behave morally because I feel like it. I do not find this satisfactory but it is all I have.

The recent wave of smug atheism has made me want to become religious out of spite.

Posted by BP | July 19, 2007 10:32 AM

(a) All should read Real Patterns, (b) Morality is a facet of the Wittgensteinian language-game.

Posted by sherifffruitfly | July 19, 2007 10:33 AM

The recent wave of smug atheism has made me want to become religious out of spite.

So it's almost as if you think religious belief is a matter of tribal identity rather than a connection with absolute metaphysical truths. Fascinating.

Posted by Barbar | July 19, 2007 10:35 AM

I should note that I think the above argument could be fixed if the first sentence was changed to "Suppose you know that there is pleasure and pain, and that ones actions affect the degree and distribution of these things" with the obvious changes to the rest to make it match.

The problem with the above is that they either assume the existence of things that are in doubt, or get around this by stating a willingness to employ the concepts to refer to whatever is out there in cases in which what is out there might make a very big difference.

Posted by Lon | July 19, 2007 10:39 AM

I do not believe there is a God, but, like Sartre and Freddie, I find this rather frightening.

frightening ?

i think it would be nice if there was a god (the kind, gentle, fatherly Christian god - not the jealous, spiteful, petty, dangerous monstrous Christian god). he'd be a safety net, cosmic concierge, guardian, etc.. it'd be like having the best sidekick ever.

but that fact that there isn't shouldn't be frightening - it should be liberating. you're in control of your life, you don't have to answer to an unpredictable, irrational, murderous, invisible god!

Posted by cleek | July 19, 2007 10:48 AM

I suppose that there's a kernel of truth in Ponnuru's argument if you focus on his choice of the term "reductive materialism;" if you are indeed a reductionist of a certain sort, applying the compositional fallacy to everything, then apparently-meaningful human behavior is just meaningless atomic behavior. And he's careful to say that not all atheists believe this, though the implication is that most of them do.

But of course almost nobody believes something so silly. You can't have a meaningful understanding of animals with just physics, or humans with just biology, or society with just psychology. There are people that try to do that, but they're regarded as kind of silly by serious scientists.

Posted by Matthias | July 19, 2007 10:54 AM

It seems that Michael Gerson-- and a couple of commenters here-- are arguing, "The only reason to be good is that God will punish you if you're not." Which sounds to me more like a lack of morality than the reverse.

[tangent] JimW says: "I just discussed this with a Christian believer yesterday. According to him, this one needs to be filed under: it only seems nonsensical because we are too stupid to understand."

If only more Creationists realized how that applied to evolution... [/tangent]

Posted by Eric | July 19, 2007 10:59 AM

I just think that people are much, much too quick to dismiss the enormous consequences of the death of God. I think a person like MY seems to generally believe that you can live in a classical Western worldview but just jettison God. But, look-- whether you all like it or not, the idea of God has been one of the fundaments of the Western worldview for several thousand years. And I think, if you follow the threads of reasoning to their logical conclusions, you have to be a Rorytian if you are an atheist. I don't think (and its clear some of you disagree) that you can have absolute values without God.

I also think that this subject demonstrates a weakness of the blog format. I'm not a blog hater, but I do think that in discussions like this, which require depth instead of breadth, the blog format is a little lacking.

Posted by Freddie | July 19, 2007 10:59 AM

the whole quantum indeterminacy thing is a red herring with respect to free will. if there's nothing outside the material, our "decisions" are the result of material processes, not some metaphysical soul or will. it doesn't matter if there's some indeterminacy in the input, or even in our internal decision processes, because you still can't get outside the process for any sort of "free" will or decision. look at it this way: you input numbers into a computer for calculation. even if the numbers are the result of some indeterminacy, and thus unpredictable from the computer's perspective, the result of the computer's calculation is still determined. similarly, even if there's some glitch in the computer's calculations, so that it reaches the "wrong" result, that still doesn't give the computer freedom.

none of this matters, because we feel like we decide and new revelations won't change how we feel. but to think our decisions really aren't determined is silly if you believe in science. this doesn't mean they can be predicted, which is why it doesn't feel determined to us or observers. (we are all unique biological functions calculating away on the input of the universe; while doing the calculation (deciding), you don't know where it's going to end up, so it feels like you have some control (and you do, since you're the function and only that function would do what you do).)

Posted by dj superflat | July 19, 2007 11:01 AM

(dj superflat just posted something almost identical to this, but this might be a little easier to respond to)
Maybe somebody can explain free will in an non-supernatural universe to me, because I don't understand how it's possible (and I'm an atheist). I'm a total layman at this metaphysical stuff, but here's how I see it (and I look forward to having any holes in this reasoning pointed out): Consider the state of the universe at some past time (t0), and the present moment (t1). What is it that determined the state of the universe at t1? It seems like the only factors that could be involved are 1.) the state of the universe at t0, 2.) quantum randomness, and 3.) supernatural intervention from outside the universe. Free will can't be part of 1.), since t0 could be before I was born, or for that matter before the sun condensed out of interstellar matter. Nor does it seem like it can be part of 2.), that being the whole point of randomness. So, if you deny 3.), how can you accept free will?

Note that none of this applies to moral reasoning, I find moral reasoning to be perfectly compatible with an atheistic universe. Even if free will is a fiction, it's useful enough that we can continue to order our society around it.

Posted by OhioBoy | July 19, 2007 11:05 AM

Re: "I don't think (and its clear some of you disagree) that you can have absolute values without God."

I agree with this. On the other hand, I'm not sure if its logical to have absolute values WITH God either. I'm willing to listen to a convincing argument. That's not to deny that a lot of people use their belief in God as the (illogical) basis for their values.

As for Eric's point that God provides morality through a carrot-and-stick mechanism. My understanding is that this goes against a lot of Christian thought (particularly of the Evangelical variety), wherein its just one's belief and acceptance of God that determines one's fate, rather than one's actions. Belief in God is supposed to lead to good behavior through some unspecified mechanism (notwithstanding evidence to the contrary in today's politics).

Posted by Jim W | July 19, 2007 11:09 AM

That people feel inclined to look for abstract metaphysical absolutes is just a fact about the world, not a statement about the existence of the abstract metaphyiscal absolutes.

I don't think you and I share the same notion of what metaphysics mean. Metaphysics (for me) is simply that which is opaque to inspection: other minds, morality, etc.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | July 19, 2007 11:09 AM

This sort of discussion always makes me think people are announcing, "Without God, I would murder, steal and rape. A lot. I want to murder, steal and rape. I feel no compunction against those things. I don't think they're wrong or counterproductive. I don't think they'd reduce me to a compulsive bestial non-functional monster. I'd be doing all that stuff right now, if I weren't afraid that God would send me to hell."

And I think in some cases, that's exactly what people are saying: their fear of God really is the only reason they don't go on a rampage. Considering the bloodthirstiness that Ramesh Ponnuru has displayed on occasion, let's not jump to the conclusion that he's simply stating a (flawed) intellectual argument. He may be telling us a deep psychological truth about himself and those like him.

Posted by Jim Gardner | July 19, 2007 11:10 AM

"you're in control of your life, you don't have to answer to an unpredictable, irrational, murderous, invisible god!"

The lack of a god does not necessitate that you are in control of your life.

Free will is just God's replacement. God had the right to punish you for antisocial behaviour because he was god. Society has the right to punish you for antisocial behaviour because you have free will. We couldn't dump god until we had a way to do his job without him. We are nowhere near being able to run a society without personal responsibility and punishment, so we are stuck with the free will illusion for some time.

Posted by Njorl | July 19, 2007 11:11 AM

OhioBoy: obviously it depends on how you define free will.

Roughly speaking, I think a agent has free will if it is intelligent and capable of controlling itself!

This may be horribly unsatisfying to many people because it is not an absolutist definition. That is, every real agent faces limitations -- limited intelligence, limited self-control. But worrying about the fact that absolute free will cannot exist in the real world strikes me as very silly.

Posted by Barbar | July 19, 2007 11:12 AM

whether you all like it or not, the idea of God has been one of the fundaments of the Western worldview for several thousand years

and what about the Eastern, and African worldviews ? do they not have the same basic morals that you seem to want to attribute to the idea of the Christian God ?

I don't think (and its clear some of you disagree) that you can have absolute values without God.

i don't know what you mean by "absolute values". but if you're talking about basic morality, that's easily explained by evolution: basic morality is one mechanism that's evolved in us on our way to becoming the gregarious, interdependent, social animals that we are today. aggressive murderous cannibalism (as you find in spiders, for example) isn't compatible with social animals with slow-developing children, but a deep revulsion to the killing of members of our immediate social group is.

Posted by cleek | July 19, 2007 11:14 AM

worrying about the fact that absolute free will cannot exist in the real world strikes me as very silly.

Worrying about the fact that, while I think of myself as an independent agent, I'm actually a self-delusional fool who is a slave to destiny, no more able to control my life than an asteroid can control its orbit? That doesn't seem silly to me. Not that it's unresolvable, the Stoics I think did a pretty good job of explaining how to live in such a universe, but it hardly seems like an irrelevant issue.

Posted by OhioBoy | July 19, 2007 11:22 AM

I'll chime in from the Buddhist position: There are no gods, therefore, morality. With gods, you can do whatever you want, and the god can punish or forgive you.

Without gods, there is strict Karma (action and consequence): as you sow, so shall you reap. Piss into the wind and get wet. Sugar for sugar and salt for salt. Do and thou shalt be done by.

Determinism enforces morality in this scheme, but I don't know how it is affected by quantum uncertainity and Godel undecidability...

Posted by M. Peachbush | July 19, 2007 11:27 AM

Jim W, you probably should change your example from Down Syndrome to Tay-Sachs or Trisomy 13. The severity of Down Syndrome varies greatly, and in general, does not make for "a life not worth living."

Posted by Brock | July 19, 2007 11:28 AM

The lack of a god does not necessitate that you are in control of your life.

of course it does. the decisions we make are our own. they can be influenced by other factors (society, the weather, superstition), but they're still our own.

what i meant about the lack of god being liberating was that without god watching over our shoulders, influencing the world for or against us, killing or sickening us for opaque reasons, laying traps and tests for us - all depending on his own capricious and unknowable mind - we are free to see the world as it is, and to take responsibility for the things we do. we don't have to try to figure out what god was telling us when he set our house on fire, we can just learn not to leave candles burning.

We are nowhere near being able to run a society without personal responsibility and punishment, so we are stuck with the free will illusion for some time.

i hope it didn't sound like i believe otherwise. of course there are pressures on the decisions we make, but they aren't supernatural.

Posted by cleek | July 19, 2007 11:31 AM

"What I would suggest, though, is that contemporary secularism is (a) inextricable from religion as a concept and (b) historically dependent on a set of shared ideals about human nature which developed in liberal Protestant theology. Secularists hold to incredibly Protestant moralities."

Except that Western Protestant secularism is not exactly Weberian industrial capitalism in that it only formed in the Protestant West. Korea, Japan and Turkey all formed their own forms of secularism, for instance, from outside Christiandom. This isn't to say that there was no philosophical influence from the West (just as the West did not natively come up with the entire idea of the modern, functioning nation-state, which was partly influenced by the Jesuits' notes on Ming China), but it wasn't based on Protestant morality either. You seem to arguing a line of cultural determinism. Ponnuru, for one thing, is Indian-American and a convert to Catholicism, both of which don't fit that cleanly into the Protestant Western experience.

Personally, I find it more comforting that over time fewer people in the West or whatever find a basis of morality in religion or political religion (fascism, communism, anarchism). The legacy of anti-Semitism in Europe, for example, is an outgrowth of Christian theology, especially the story of the Jesus's martyrdom. Similarly, the French existentialists blamed the Death of God partly for the horrors of the two world wars, yet Christian moralism (as opposed to morality) played a huge role in crafting the tribalism behind those wars and the Holocaust. The Nazis, despite being somewhat secular, wore belt buckles that read "God is on our side." I find the idea of personal responsibility and reason to be more liberating than religion and the idea of God. I found the idea of a god to be oppressive and limiting and was happier once I gave up pretending to believe in it. When you believe that there is a god and that god defines morality, you are inherently limiting the moral possibilities before you without really questioning them.

For instance, in 12th-century Catholic Europe, if you took the idea of god as fact and that god's will was transmitted to you via the interpretations of the Papacy and your local priest and they told you Jews were evil and needed to be killed in pogroms, you would automatically be limiting yourself to immoral options. Historically, the majority of people probably haven't believed that there is a single god for all of us, but a single or group of gods for everyone and that those who do not follow your god are immoral. Believing in a universal god is a totalistic enterprise.

Posted by Reality Man | July 19, 2007 11:32 AM

Worrying about the fact that, while I think of myself as an independent agent, I'm actually a self-delusional fool who is a slave to destiny, no more able to control my life than an asteroid can control its orbit?

How quickly we slide from an absurd "absolute free will" (I can create my abilities and interests and actions independently of anything else in the universe, including physical laws and history) to "self-delusional... slave... no more able to control my life than an asteroid can control its orbit." Hmm, do you think there's any middle ground there?

Posted by Barbar | July 19, 2007 11:33 AM

Wow -lots of responses. I'd just like to point out that WW begs the question, as far as Ponnuru is concerned.
Further, there's a tremendous difference between finding out that "free will exists" or that "moral reasoning is not futile."
Eventually, libertarian philosophy is going to have to give way to the facts of neuroscience.

Posted by berger | July 19, 2007 11:35 AM

Hmm, do you think there's any middle ground there?

Describe it, then people will take a shot at knocking it down. Maybe they won't be able to.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | July 19, 2007 11:35 AM

Elaborating a bit... does your dog have more free will than an asteroid? Obviously yes. Do you have more free will than your dog? Obviously yes. The question isn't "do I have free will" but "do I have *enough* free will."

Posted by Barbar | July 19, 2007 11:37 AM

Damn, it's been two hours and we haven't solved philosophy yet. Perhaps if we simplify things:

1) Is the universe deterministic?

2) Do we have free will?

3) Does God exist?

4-6) What bearing do the answers to these questions have on each other?

I guess we have to answer 4-6 first so we know which order to tackle 1-3. Bonus points for defining free will, and deciding whether a God proved to exist through this process would be likable (or terrifying if disproven).

Posted by drlemaster | July 19, 2007 11:39 AM

Well, gee, "obviously yes" is a convincing argument. Let's see: "Does God exist. Obviously yes." And suddenly Ponnoru is back in the game.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | July 19, 2007 11:40 AM

Another thing, secularism in Europe did not grow organically solely from inside Protestantism, but throughout the (proto-)liberal thinkers as a philosophical basis for violence control. Locke's secularism was pretty much a form of cultural and moral relativism that basically Muslims believe in the Qu'ran, Christians believe in the Bible, Jews believe in the Torah, you can't prove any system of religious belief superior to another and thus have no right to violently force anyone else to believe in your god either. Enlightenment thinkers were horrified at the effects of the Wars of Religion that plagued European soil, the persecution of religious minorities in Europe such as Jews, Anabaptists and atheists, the constant fighting between European powers and the Ottoman Empire that were partly based on religious tribalism, etc. Not wanting oneself, those around one and innocents in general was a powerful motivator for questioning the whole god concept in Europe.

Posted by Reality Man | July 19, 2007 11:43 AM

> Worrying about the fact that, while I think of > myself as an independent agent, I'm actually a > self-delusional fool who is a slave to destiny, no > more able to control my life than an asteroid can > control its orbit? That doesn't seem silly to me

Its silly if it makes you question your independence in well-proven areas.
In the context of your own life, you can
still decide whether to pick your
nose. Whether that decision was caused, in the
universal scope, by a butterfly fluttering its
wings in Brazil is...interesting, I suppose, but
not of any particular concern.

Posted by Raj | July 19, 2007 11:45 AM

..."the kind, gentle, fatherly Christian god - not the jealous, spiteful, petty, dangerous monstrous Christian god) "

Based on the way this universe operates, God #2 might very well be out there.

As for the main topic, I still don't get why the existence of God is necessary for free will. Then again, I'm not quite sure what "free will" really means in the first place. I get randomness. I get determinism. What's "free will," except for a black box drawn around phenomena we don't want to investigate?

Posted by AlanC9 | July 19, 2007 11:45 AM

Well, gee, "obviously yes" is a convincing argument.

Why don't you explain to me how asteroids and dogs have the same amount of free will? Or how you can't tell who has more freedom, you or your dog?

Here are some helpful counter-arguments (I apologize for not elaborating into 30-page mathematical proofs):

1. Dogs can be said to have wants and desires. Asteroids cannot.

2. If a dog is hungry and wants to eat, it can engage in behavior designed to satisfy its goal. An asteroid cannot.

3. People can articulate their desires and reflect on them, even sometimes changing them. Dogs cannot.

As I said before, this whole issue is puzzling only because people insist on absolute freedom. Think of yourself as a glorified monkey and the puzzles go away.

Posted by Barbar | July 19, 2007 11:46 AM

The recent wave of smug atheism has made me want to become religious out of spite.

There's been a recent wave of smug atheism? I must have missed it. I saw a minor surge (three books worth) of defiant, or perhaps desperate, atheism, but can't recall seeing any smugness.

Posted by dob | July 19, 2007 11:52 AM

If you believe in the Hindu philosophers' construct of God, all this debate becomes kind of trivial.

If it is beyond the capacity of the human mind to fully know God (the finite cannot comprehend the infinite, according to the Hindus, and, therefore, God can be described by humans only in terms of what it is not and not what it is), all the statements made by humans about what follows from the existence of God are just speculations.

I think that to my personal intellectual satisfaction, no one has been able to improve upon the Hindu philosophers' construct of God.

Posted by gregor | July 19, 2007 11:55 AM

1) Is the universe deterministic?

yes

2) Do we have free will?

not if you mean "I can create my abilities and interests and actions independently of anything else in the universe, including physical laws and history" (quoting Barbar at 11:33). the fact that the universe is deterministic (and i'll add, self-contained) makes this impossible.

in the sense that our brains can come up with ideas faster than we can identify, in real time, all the inputs that went into forming those ideas, then sure. just like essentially everything else people do, free will's an illusion based on incomplete knowledge and high-level interpretation. but we interpret that illusion as reality and live our lives based on that interpretation.

3) Does God exist?

no

4-6) What bearing do the answers to these questions have on each other?

the answer to 3 makes all further questions and conclusions about "god" irrelevant at least, and fantasy at best.

Posted by cleek | July 19, 2007 11:56 AM

For example, I think its immoral NOT to abort a Downs Syndrome fetus. What about a baby with Downs Syndrome that was just born? I think that if the parents don't want it, it would be perfectly moral to kill it. My moral beliefs are based on trying to improve poeple's lives as they are lived, not in trying to preserve things that are "sacred". Obviously, most religious people think differently.

Wtf, immoral? Why is it immoral, care to make an argument? If we could, should we abort all autists too? How about all children with mental retardation?

Really, I urge you to visit your local special-ed school for a day to get a claerer picture of what you're talking about.

Btw, I'm as atheist as it gets and think god is a meaningless and generally unhelpful concept.

Posted by novakant | July 19, 2007 11:56 AM

basic morality is one mechanism that's evolved in us on our way to becoming the gregarious, interdependent, social animals that we are today. aggressive murderous cannibalism (as you find in spiders, for example) isn't compatible with social animals with slow-developing children, but a deep revulsion to the killing of members of our immediate social group is.

Evolution, among other things, predisposes one to rape. I just don't think turning to evolution for the roots of morality is worthwhile.

Posted by Freddie | July 19, 2007 11:58 AM

"Worrying about the fact that, while I think of myself as an independent agent, I'm actually a self-delusional fool who is a slave to destiny, no more able to control my life than an asteroid can control its orbit? That doesn't seem silly to me. Not that it's unresolvable, the Stoics I think did a pretty good job of explaining how to live in such a universe, but it hardly seems like an irrelevant issue."

Let's say that when you were five your parents told you that light was a particle, that light and electricity are related and that your brain runs on electricity. You would grow up believing that. Now say at eight your parents told you that light was a wave. You would have to change your prior assumptions for the physical scientific basis for your existence. Then at ten your parents told you light behaves sometimes like a wave, sometimes like a particle, but we don't have a perfect understanding of this. In the grand scheme of things, how would this all really change your day-to-day life? You can't make light obey whatever you want it to obey. If you want to become a writer, fall in love, join the military, have sex, become celibate, eat only meat, become a vegetarian, have kids, stay childless, etc. you can make those decisions without knowing whether or not you have complete free will. If we had complete free will I would will myself to grow huge wings from my back so I could fly, but our free will is bounded by the realm of physical possibility. Is it really conducive to improving your happiness from one day to another if you found out that humanity on average had, say, 15% more free will than you had assumed? If you are happy in life, so be it. If you aren't, be mature enough to stop blaming this on a lack of god and try to fix your own life. If we don't have free will, so what? If you discover this, all it does is add new information to your life. If it causes you to alter your behavior, then that in itself brings into question the whole idea of "there is no free will."

Posted by Reality Man | July 19, 2007 11:58 AM

Well, gee, "obviously yes" is a convincing argument. Let's see: "Does God exist. Obviously yes." And suddenly Ponnoru is back in the game.

"Obviously yes" means that we can observe it - look there, right before your very eyes! The asteroid not only follows the same path every x years but does not have any particular opinions about its path or goals which it's trying to fulfill by it - no opinions or goals at all, really. Your dog has goals and maybe even opinions, though not terribly cultured ones, and her actions are performed to bring them about. And you have goals and opinions, some of them contradictory, and reason and so on, and you can act to enfurther them just as they are, and you can also critically examine your goals and values and opinions with reference to reason and each other, and, through that process, come up with new and better goals, which you'll then pursue through your actions.

That's all that free will means. If you want, ex ante, for "free will" to be supernatural by definiton, you can certainly choose to define it that way - but in order for us to have a meaningful discussion about it, you'd have to show why it's desirable, as opposed to the above definition, which obviously is.

Now show me God.

Posted by Matthias | July 19, 2007 11:59 AM

I forgot to add: is there anything more silly than a sentiment like "Oh my God, what about the possibility that I have no control over the words I'm typing right now, they're being created by destiny, and to make me even more distressed I actually believe I control what I am saying and thinking, so not only am I a slave but I am also SELF-DELUDED. Oh the agony and distress! What can be done, what can be done?"

Posted by Barbar | July 19, 2007 11:59 AM

I forgot to add: is there anything more silly than a sentiment like "Oh my God, what about the possibility that I have no control over the words I'm typing right now, they're being created by destiny, and to make me even more distressed I actually believe I control what I am saying and thinking, so not only am I a slave but I am also SELF-DELUDED. Oh the agony and distress! What can be done, what can be done?"

Posted by Barbar | July 19, 2007 11:59 AM

Why don't you explain to me how asteroids and dogs have the same amount of free will? Or how you can't tell who has more freedom, you or your dog?

Oh sweet jeebus. A very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care. I eagerly await MY's second book, Liberalism: From Feuerbach to Free Will.

The uncomfortable truth is that, as drlemaster indicates, these are largish topics unlikely to be dispensed with in a blog post, or even in comments.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | July 19, 2007 12:05 PM

Evolution, among other things, predisposes one to rape. I just don't think turning to evolution for the roots of morality is worthwhile.

You're right to reject the naturalistic fallacy, but:

1) That isn't necessarily the case about rape (though that's a discussion in itself), and

2) The argument is not a moral theory itself ("this is the way we evolved, therefore, this is the way we should act") but an account of how we arrived at moral theories. Obviously moral statements are true or false regardless of how we came to believe them (excluding self-referential moral laws we might come up with for fun.) Regardless of whether our moral intuitions came from evolution, or divine revelation, or the halls of philosophy or whatever, we should find whether they're true or not by engaging them with reason and empathy.

Posted by Matthias | July 19, 2007 12:09 PM

So claiming that you have more freedom than your dog is like claiming that there is a tradition of liberal fascism from Hagel to Whole Foods? Well fuck me. I hope you have a smart dog.

If you need to read a book on the subject, I strongly recommend "Elbow Room" by Daniel Dennett.

Posted by Barbar | July 19, 2007 12:09 PM

Barbar, I feel like you're missing my point (which is only fair, because you obviously feel like I'm missing your point). You keep giving many reasons why we appear to have free will, which I don't dispute. Asteroids were perhaps an unhelpful example, so consider computers. Computers can certainly appear to have free will; a computer chess program, for example, will certainly appear to freely choose the Tarrasch defense or whatever, but in fact it did not, it was merely blindly and helplessly following instructions that had been preprogrammed into it. So the question is, am I, or am I not, different from a computer in any meaningful way? That seems like an important question to me, even if, ultimately, it won't really impact my daily life.

Reading some more comments, I guess people will want me to justify my assertion that whether or not I am different than a computer is an important question, which is fair, since that seems just as self-evident to me as "We have free will" seems self-evident to MY. Certainly the reason that Ponnuru (who started this whole discussion off, after all) would give is that, if humans are not fundamentally different from computers, than our whole moral system falls apart, because then killing a person isn't distinguishable from destroying a computer. But mainly, determining the truth about the universe simply seems like something that we ought to do. Determining whether we are fundamentally different than computers seems as important as determining whether the world is flat or round was to the ancient Greeks. It made absolutely no difference to the lives of anyone alive at the time whether the world was flat or round, and it certainly may have seemed like a pointless debate to many of them, since they were never going to travel a mile from their birthplace regardless. But truth matters, at least to me.

Posted by OhioBoy | July 19, 2007 12:09 PM

The uncomfortable truth is that, as drlemaster indicates, these are largish topics unlikely to be dispensed with in a blog post, or even in comments.

Right. I mean, blogs (and blog comments) tend to look for answers that can be boiled down to a thousand words or less. I'm afraid that this question, which has been turned over by the greatest minds in history for quite some time, is not going to be resolved by a blog-comment zinger.

Posted by Freddie | July 19, 2007 12:10 PM

"Evolution, among other things, predisposes one to rape. I just don't think turning to evolution for the roots of morality is worthwhile."

That depends whether you think we're closer in terms of evolution to chimpanzees or bonobos. A recent article in "Foreign Affairs" notes that for decades geneticists believed we were most closely related to chimpanzees, which tend to live in loosely constructed male-dominated societies that value extreme individualism and violence. Recent studies have made scientists wonder if we are just as closely related to bonobos, which tend to live in close-knit, matriarchal societies that tend to be less violent and more cooperative. Bonobos tend to react with horror, revulsion and compassion upon seeing another of their number hurt or attacked, unlike chimpanzees. There are recent neurological studies that suggest we evolved to feel an innate sense of revulsion at seeing another human in pain, which would make evolutionary sense because we are social creatures who depend on one another for our survival. Rape, after all, is an act of violence that disrupts social harmony. I am pre-disposed to wanting to put my penis in hot women, but I would feel bad about myself for doing that to women who wouldn't want it. I would feel physically ill if I cheated on a math test in third grade, which is a much less grave offense. Even in ancient Greece, although raping your enemies' women was seen as heroic, raping a fellow Greek was already seen as a grave offense.

Posted by Reality Man | July 19, 2007 12:12 PM

1) That isn't necessarily the case about rape (though that's a discussion in itself), and

2) The argument is not a moral theory itself ("this is the way we evolved, therefore, this is the way we should act") but an account of how we arrived at moral theories. Obviously moral statements are true or false regardless of how we came to believe them (excluding self-referential moral laws we might come up with for fun.) Regardless of whether our moral intuitions came from evolution, or divine revelation, or the halls of philosophy or whatever, we should find whether they're true or not by engaging them with reason and empathy.

I see what you mean. I do think that looking to evolution for the measure of morality is a waste of time. And I also think that, whether or not we think that evolution predisposes us to do anything that we consider morally repugnant now, I think anyone can see that the process of evolution could lead us to be predisposed to behavior that we consider repugnant.

Posted by Freddie | July 19, 2007 12:14 PM

Evolution, among other things, predisposes one to rape. I just don't think turning to evolution for the roots of morality is worthwhile.

yes, and eating and breathing also lead to choking. i urge you, for your own sake, to stop eating. and breathing.

Posted by cleek | July 19, 2007 12:17 PM

So the question is, am I, or am I not, different from a computer in any meaningful way?

OhioBoy: I think you're getting to the heart of the matter.

Some people think that the difference between you and the computer lies in objectively measurable skills such as perception, memory, pattern recognition ability, general intelligence, the ability to move around, and so on.

Others think that it must lie in the type of material stuff you're made of, or in the blessing you've received from God (the granting of free will and soul), or in some other ineffable mysterious quality.

I'm personally in the former camp, as you can probably tell.

Posted by Barbar | July 19, 2007 12:19 PM

"Barbar, I feel like you're missing my point (which is only fair, because you obviously feel like I'm missing your point). You keep giving many reasons why we appear to have free will, which I don't dispute. Asteroids were perhaps an unhelpful example, so consider computers."

According to what we know of string theory, the universe as we observe it does not exist, meaning existence does not existence. If you do not exist, then the question of whether or not you have free will does not exist in the first place and is meaningless. However, we might all be deluded into thinking we exist, just like we might all be deluded into thinking we have free will. Does that really change your life? Just chill out and have a Coke.

I, on the other hand, do exist. HAHAHAHA!

Posted by Reality Man | July 19, 2007 12:20 PM

I just don't think turning to evolution for the roots of morality is worthwhile.

then where does morality come from? you say above that you're not religious. yet you refuse to believe that it comes from the same natural causes that created the brains that control what we do.

so, where does it come from and where is it located?

Posted by cleek | July 19, 2007 12:22 PM

yes, and eating and breathing also lead to choking. i urge you, for your own sake, to stop eating. and breathing.

Man. You are a skilled rhetorician. I bow befo