Dear Alan,

In addition to the “obvious” confusions identified in my last post, your last post touched on another topic that has long puzzled me:

I have, for instance,

described universal utilitarianism

(or at least my understanding of it) as being incomplete since it “does not reflect our intuitions about how to treat those who mistreat others.”

Specifically, you were referring to your assertion of UU as metric, where you said:

His suggestion to prevent suffering before increasing happiness, while helpful for situations involving people choosing to act ethically, does not reflect our intuitions about how to treat those who mistreat others. That is, causing some amount of suffering to those that act unethically (whether as punishment, deterrent or simply protection from future harm) is not allowed under the simplest reading of the definition of UU, and I do not recall this being addressed in anything that Ebon Muse has written (that I have read). In this respect, UU as formulated may be incomplete.

I agree. In fact, this is the same incompleteness that I see in the various humanistic systems you’ve alluded to. However — lest you think I’m only picking on you :-) — I also feel that most deistic and theistic formulations suffer from the same limitation.

On the flip side, this means that if we can appropriately characterize and remedy this lack, we may be able to resolve several long-running conundrums that have troubled not just us, but philosophers and moralists through the ages!

To do that, though, I believe we first need to deal with anger…

Dear Alan,

Your summary of Axioms, Hypotheses and Facts certainly achieved its goal of “giving [me] something to work with;” perhaps too much so! As we discussed in the comments, though, I’m still slightly confused about your attitude towards proposition X from our Minimal Set of Shared Beliefs:

Rather than pollute the comment stream further, let me try to restate my confusion with greater clarity…

Dear Alan,

On the whole, I was probably more relieved than surprised to discover that you responded to my bet with affirmation (given my past failures to accurately identify shared beliefs :-). For the most part, I am pleased that — for the first time since our Epistemology — we have agreed on a Minimal Set of Shared Beliefs (MSSB), which renders my provocative questions mostly moot. To celebrate, I have rechristened them using [Mr. Balboa's discarded :-] Roman numerals, and rounded up to ten:

I. Happiness is better than Suffering

II. Love is better than Hate

III. Truth is better than Falsehood

IV. Truth is compatible with both Love and Happiness

V. Love and Happiness are compatible with each other

VI. There are some good things about Christianity

VII. There are many things wrong with Christianity

VIII. It is both necessary and possible to improve upon Christianity

IX. Reason and Empirical Observation are both key to improving upon Christianity

X. The goal is maximize actual and potential Happiness while minimizing actual and potential Suffering

I’ve added “V” to complement “IV”, and added the metric of Universal Utilitarianism as “X”, but I trust this still meets with your approval, and clarifies our common “goals.”

Now that we have a mutually-agreeed-upon Minimal Set of Shared Beliefs, let’s see if that can illuminate some of our previously perplexing posts; especially those about love…

Dear Alan,

Since my holiday truce failed to inspire a response, I hope you will forgive me for attempting something more provocative. :-)

While this is mostly an (oblique) attempt to respond to your latest non-DiaBlogue post — and others like it — I hope it will also serve to illuminate some of the other issues we’ve wrestled with.

Hope to hear back from you soon, when things get less busy.

Love,
Ernie

Update: Since Alan found this even more obtuse than I intended, I sent him a (brief) clarification:

I’m still trying to figure out whether your primary goal is “truth” or “love”, or if you really believe the two are compatible.

You’ve done a fine job of showing the inconsistencies, weakness, and contradictions inherent in Christianity-As-We-Know-It — but on what basis do you claim the right to “throw the first stone?” Do you have anything to propose in its place that you believe would withstand a similar level of scrutiny?

Dear Alan,

I appreciate your efforts to be more upfront about your beliefs while Seeking a Better Way. In fact, I agree with pretty much everything you said. Not just that:

* Love is better than hate
* truth is better than falsehood

But also:

And even:

So, in the spirit of the holiday, I’d like to propose we lay down our arms and focus on those things we have in common (rather than trying to score on each other’s goalposts). [Read more] for my summary of what I think those things are.

Prompted by a discussion about the so-called “proof” that belief in God is an evolutionary accident, I engaged in a discussion on the FoRK mailing list about Christianity vs. atheism. While not nearly as coherent (or civil :-) as my DiaBlogue with Alan, I felt it was at least worth tracking the various threads here for future reference.

One of the points I’ve been trying to make in my Reasoned Conversation is that my belief in God is a hypothesis that is supported by empirical evidence. My hypothesis isn’t perfect, and is constantly evolving, but I still find it to have superior explanatory power than the alternative “null hypothesis” of atheism.

[Read more] for some proposed experiments that you — yes, you — could (at least in principle :-) carry out to measure the difference in effectiveness between “strong atheism” and Christian assumptions.

I think some of these have actually been tried, so I’d be interested in the results. I myself don’t know how well these specific theistic variants would fare, but if nothing else I think it would give atheists a much deeper appreciation of the scope of the task Christianity attempts to tackle.

Dear Alan,

In your NTOBM:
Still Kicking, you raise a number of questions about my interpretation of Sam Harris as Deist, which I might summarize as:

a. How can an “unjustified religious belief” be as “well-justified” as belief in a mathematical universe?

b. What does it mean to believe in a “transcendent” mathematical nature of the universe?

c. “What psychophysical laws can you elaborate that have the predictive power (accuracy and precision) of the laws of physics and other sciences that have been discovered in the past four hundred years?”

d. Can (or should) moral claims be extended to the universe, not just human beings?

e. Is it possible to posit moral pathways based on evolution without deistic assumptions?

f. How can you explain suffering within a benevolently deistic world (“deodicy”)?

g. What are the “complex welter of unjustified beliefs” I consider an unattractive alternative to deism?

These are all valid and important questions, and I fully agree that I need to answer them before I can claim to “adequately support [my] first goalpost statement” (and no, I’m not giving up :-).

However, despite all that, I think they fundamentally miss the point I was trying to make. [Read more] as I give it another shot…

Dear Alan,

I was very glad to see your “bonus” post on The Myth of Secular Moral Chaos. While I clearly failed to Score One for Deism with my attempt at Rationally Analyzing Virtue, I’ve been having a hard time deciding whether you truly disagreed with/refuted my position or if I just hadn’t done an adequate job of explaining/defending it.

Once again, I congratulate you on finding an outside source that does an excellent job of illuminating the issues at hand. Ironically, the position outlined by Sam Harris:

is very close the one I was trying to articulate!

[Read more] to see how the existence of “psychophysical laws” relates to my conception of deism…

They’re no Ebon Muse — so I’m not ready to inject them into my debate with Alan — but the similarity in name, topic, and approach is so striking I wanted to link to the Triabloguers here. They appear even more over-educated than I am, so I wouldn’t want to tackle everything they do, but it is nice just to see how other people address the sort of issues Alan and I wrestle with.

Once again, I am pleased that Alan agrees that we can treat Universal Utilitarianism (UU) as Metric, Not Imperial. That is, we both agree it is a useful Metric, vs a System of ethics as Ebon Muse would construe it. Alan ended with a challenge for me to “to tell us a little more about [my] solution to [the] [ethical] trilemma.“

Which I’m happy to do, but that requires me to back to the roots of Reason, Morality and Evolution. [Read more] to see just how far back I’m willing to go…

A catalog of creedal and apologetic posts about faith, truth, and Christianity. [Last updated 2007-01-10].

One of the more delightful requests to emerge from my Reasoned Conversation on FoRK (about Christianity and atheism) was the challenge to explain Jesus in a manner that could be understood by an intelligent 12-year-old. I have perhaps taken that too literally by framing my response as a letter to a hypothetical pre-pubescent “Strawman”, and I fear my response [Read More, below] doesn’t do full justice to the question, but I hope it will nonetheless serve to increase our mutual understanding and help move the conversation forward.

Dear Alan,

I must say, I think we are dangerously close to actually making forward progress! Alas, I’ve often felt this way before, only to discover that it was merely a superficial agreement masking a deeper misunderstanding. :-(

I think part of the challenge is that we each have underlying assumptions that are not merely unspoken, but actually unconscious. That is, it is precisely our own unexamined assumptions that lead us to misinterpret what each other is saying. I believe the only way to get past that is to both work harder at clarifying our own reasoning, as well as make an extra effort to deduce why the other person isn’t getting our point (or appears to be making a non sequitur).

Case in point: I believe the reason I was uncomfortable with the The Utility of Universal Utilitarianism is that I didn’t understand how you intended to use it, or what exactly you meant by a “theory of ethics.” In fact, I see three different (but overlapping) roles that “UU” might play, and I suspect I was critiquing (III) while you were defending (I). [Read more] to see what those three are, including (hopefully) one that matches your vision of UU.

[Updated 10/09 @ 1 PM PST with Alan's Comments]
[Updated 10/11 @ 7 AM PST with Ernie's Comments, at end]

I am grateful for Alan’s follow-up post On Carrots and Sticks, as I was quite unsure about how to respond to his Clarifications, Hopefully. I appreciated the necessity and relevance of his request for me to clarify my position, but given our recent failure to find (solid) common ground I wasn’t quite sure where to start.

Fortunately, his reference to Daylight Atheism‘s post on The Ineffable Carrot and the Infinite Stick (I love the title :-) appears to provide exactly the starting point I was looking for, with its definition of Universal Utilitarianism:

Always minimize both actual and potential suffering; always maximize both actual and potential happiness.

For purposes of this discussion, let us both stipulate that this moral imperative is at least “proximately true” — that is, any ethical theory we propose has to either incorporate or address this truth to be considered valid.

Fair enough, Alan? In that case, [Read More] to see whether the “Ebon Muse” has managed to shed “Daylight” on a non-deistic theory of morality…

Francis, Collins , aka the Genomic Guitarist, led this song during the 2006 ASA Annual Meeting. I didn’t attend, but I was strruck by the lyrics as printed in the Newsletter, so I wanted to capture the lyrics and music here.

In his exploration of The Ethical Universe, Alan clarified that he no longer thinks of (I) [belief in] Truth as “inherently good”, but what I might term ‘instrumentally good‘ in relation to (II)Love [for others] and [III] [personal] Happiness. I am pleased that he concurred with my analysis of the pre-Newtonian state of secular ethics, yet curious about the source of his optimism that this handicap can be overcome. [Read more] for what might be consider the ultimate question…

Alan makes an Earnest attempt to respond to my Ethical Trilemmas, but I fear I’m not quite following him (and worry that he’s not quite ‘getting’ me). He did helpfully update his post with this clarification:

The more I ponder this, though, the less sure I am that I understand what he means. [Read more] for my stumbling attempts at asking clarifying questions…

Having finally Found: Two Goalposts, which I support and he denies:

II. Epistemic dependence on received Scripture as a reliable indicator of divine will

Alan and I can now turn our attention to pursuing answers rather than merely seeking questions! I’ll start with the first one, where I assert:

I. Belief in a transcendent moral purpose for the universe is as well-justified and essential for social inquiry as belief in the transcendent mathematical nature of the universe is for scientific inquiry.

Note that in (I) I am merely trying to establish the meaning and relevance of Deity — what might be called Strong Deism — not full Theism.To be sure, Alan has implied in the past that he doesn’t object to deism per se, but his response implies that he sees no need for this kind of deity.

Obviously, I do. [Read more] to find out why…

I must commend Alan for his diligence in following through on my recommended reading, given that I’ve only now got around to reading his last three posts — from July! To be sure, I regret that Chesterton was such a disappointment, but I will (perhaps too generously) ascribe that to the large conceptual and chronological gap between Chesterton’s age and ours.

On the other hand, McLaren’s A Generous Orthodoxy appears to have done exactly as I hoped: clearing away the peripheral gripes to enable us to focus on the core disputation. Together with Seeking Middle Ground (Alan’s followup to my Pursuit of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth a la The Pilgrim’s Regress) I think I may finally have a (tentative) grasp on the core of Alan’s beef with Christianity.

Have I got it right about what he thinks I’ve got wrong? [Read more] to find out…