Intro:

Christians who saw the debate between Christian apologist, William Lane Craig, and atheist, Sam Harris, are baffled.  Why didn't Craig's amazing arguments work?  Isn't it obvious that Harris didn't even begin to provide an objective ontological account of morality and wasted all his time throwing red herrings at Abrahamic religions? 

Wintery Knight blog says:

I really think that what is behind atheism’s philosophical flirtations with the language of morality is an effort to put a respectable smokescreen around a worldview adopted by those who simply cannot be bothered with any moral obligation that might act as a speed bump on their pursuit of happy feelings and pleasures here and now. They want to be happy, and being good gets in their way.

What kind of "being good" is Wintery Knight talking about?  Did he listen to the same debate I did?  I thought Craig said that he probably agreed with Harris generally on applied ethics.

Steve Hays, from Triablogue, says:

To judge by how infidels handicap the Craig debates, Craig is caught in a hopeless dilemma. No matter how often he wins, it never counts. The usual excuse is that when he wins a debate with an atheist, that’s just because he’s a better debater. Not because he was right. Not because he had the best of the argument. Had the facts on his side. No, couldn’t be that. Never that.

One wonders that even if an atheist said that a theist provided better arguments than an atheist in a particular debate if that would "count" for Hays.  *coughCommonSenseAtheismcough*  In reality, Hays just doesn't like being disagreed with at all and his words that seem to be about something else really aren't.  I've seen him move the goal-post soooooo many times, it's not even funny.

William Lane Craig himself says:

So how can some atheists fail to see [that Craig's arguments are better], I ask myself.  One reason, I think, is that some people don't know how to judge a debate.  They think that the winner is the person who delivers the one line zinger like "Senator, you're no John Kennedy."  [...]  But my friend Dennis has pointed out something else to me:  there are cheerleaders and there are analysts.  The role of a cheerleader is to support the team, no matter how badly it is losing.  If a team is getting drubbed, the cheerleaders don’t lay down their pom-poms and give up.  They keep cheering to the end.  That’s their role.

All those years of experience and this is what Craig comes up with?  Okay...  That's actually called just not empathizing with the diverse landscape of where tons of different people are coming from.  Natural human epistemology is wwaaaaaayyyy more complicated than that.  If Craig doesn't want to be portrayed as a dishonest hack as he often is by equally unsympathetic atheists, and knows that he is an honest person that believes in his own arguments, he can shut up. 

Dr.Craigvideos on youtube makes much the same point as Craig.

Bnonn says:

In fact, the most annoying thing about Harris is how he can say the most outrageously illogical or irrelevant things, and make them sound utterly reasonable and topical with his soft-spoken earnestness.

As though it's clear Harris believes in what he says...

So the consensus is that a bunch of monkeys are miffed that not everyone in the world agrees with them.  Join the club.

Why atheists remain unconvinced:

I'll reiterate and elaborate on what I said in my original review of the debate (Sam Harris vs. William Lane Craig on Moral Realism).  It's pretty simple actually (as others like Wes Morriston pointed out a long time ago).   If Harris isn't allowed to "redefine" good and evil conveniently to bridge the fact/value divide (as Craig claims), then Craig can't do the same thing with his god's "good" nature (as Harris pointed out, ftw).  Craig meaninglessly tried to spear-head this objection in his opening statement with an argument from boldness.  He said..."far from being arbitrary...," and then changed the subject from god's commands to god's arbitrary nature.  So no, it's still arbitrary.  We're just not fooled, Craig.  You can't point to "god's nature" when we attack the arbitrary "commands" any more than it makes sense to point to the commands when we the arbitrariness of his nature.   "Good" has to actually be defined at some point.  Craig is playing a moving cups game with only two cups that both have the very same problem underneath.  Somehow, as usual, it's always opposite day in religulous land and losing either way still turns into winning over all in the minds of indignant Christians everywhere. 

Craig wants us to merely appreciate his definition of the Christian god and go from there with moral facts.  But Harris just wants us to appreciate his definition of the worst misery for everyone and go from there with moral facts.  Both propositions depend on the appreciation factor that is ultimately coming from our human nature (as Harris says, we're "smuggling" in well being either way).  It's the only way we understand either proposition which is actually the same continuum in concept.  In either event we're simply able to recognize the gist of good and bad when we see it (just as Harris says we can recognize fuzzy concepts like health vs. being dead). 

Incidentally, Harris' side of things has two significant advantages:

1.  The Christians have no reason for their god's nature to be the way it is.  Metaphysically speaking, it's just a huge fluke of reality.  Why are we not supposed to abuse children...because god's arbitrary nature happens to be against that.  Kinda weird, huh?  On the other hand, if we evolved as social creatures in the context of the need for group cooperation and survival, there's a very obvious ontological reason for our brains to be wired the way they are (as even Craig explains). 

2.  The facts of human nature (as opposed to god's hidden nature) are much more immediately evident and verifiable to all.  We may be confused on how best to define the good derived from our natures, but at least it's pretty obvious we definitely have that to work with. 

The scandalous thing about Harris' position is that it isn't even an argument.  It's an observation.  The argument part of that observation is to show to any and all contenders that in fact his observation matches reality and where they err, but also that it matches the inherent realities of their own moral perspective and they just have yet to recognize it.  Harris did this more than sufficiently for Craig and I've noted how superficial the summations of Harris' position have to be in many Christian blogs in order to avoid this (especially Wintery Knight's conveniently trite overview). 

As an observation, of course everyone agrees from there (as Craig clearly did) that science can play out the facts of maximizing well being.  That was all Harris was aiming for and clearly pretty much everything I've said can easily be derived from what Harris said on stage. 

Outro:

We'll get around to fishing out the myopic Christian attempts to save Craig from his hypocritical circularity as well as addressing similar double standards when it comes to Craig's supposed "knock down" argument against Harris' position.  Stay tuned.

Ben

Intro:

In the debate with William Lane Craig on the ontology of moral realism, Sam Harris seemed to ignore the issue of free will and how that relates to coherent concepts of moral responsibility.  He even seemed to go as far as to say that Craig misquoted him in his book, "The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values."  I've listened to Harris' book as an audiobook on my ipod and Harris does indeed cover the topic.  I couldn't pick out from memory a misquote, though Harris seemed to say that Craig was quoting Harris quote others or maybe he wasn't saying that about these quotes on this topic...  Not really sure what's going on there.  Perhaps it was a debate tactic to not have to deal with the subject and move on to what he wanted to emphasis or perhaps he mashed Craig's derived argument with those quotes in a defensive brain fart kind of way.  Not sure.  

I thought I'd take a moment to address the issue directly.

1: First off, it doesn't matter if determinism negates moral responsibility.  One has to actually address the arguments for and against determinism that Harris presents in his book or else in any event theistic or not, certain conceptions of moral responsibility are negated.  Plenty of popular theistic worldviews are deterministic anyway and pretty much the same concepts have to be worked out to attempt to absolve the morally perfect god from the responsibility of everything that transpires if he is the ultimate cause of everything.  (Naturally, I think even if successful, it still fails:  see argument map on "The Logical Problem of Evil.")

2: Secondly Craig, with his framing, attempted to blow off the responsibilities of his entire worldview.  He wanted to frame things so narrowly as to not have to deal with the existence of the Christian god or the problem of evil, or any of the practical epistemic problems that stick us in the same boat in any event when it comes to trying to figure out what moral facts are actually facts.  A difficult-to-process-abstraction in terms of "well being" (as Harris conceives of it @ 11:55) is just as difficult to deal with as a god's invisible nature with divine mandates recorded under layers of "cultural context" which even theologians of all stripes struggle to pin down.  If Craig is allowed to disown this wing of the debate, then why can't Harris disown the free will issue as I've argued above and just point to his book (as Craig specifically did with Paul Copan's apologetics for evil, which liberal Christian scholar, Thom Stark, takes quite to task)?

3A: Third, there are two things about moral responsibility that matter and one that does not.  There is the type of responsibility that is merely a matter of cause.  And in a brute sense we say that a tidal wave is "responsible" for killing lots of Japanese people (incidentally, see Craig's, um, "interesting" take on it in terms of his worldview).  But that's not a moral claim right?  But it does matter, since sometimes evil comes from moral agents who couldn't have done otherwise at the time.  We still need to describe accurately the picture of how things go down and often mere cause is a necessary piece of any moral picture at some level to some degree no matter what you think philosophically. 

3B: The second element of moral responsibility is the ability to be literally "response" + "able" in the future.  We can't go reason with that water that made up the tidal wave and tell it why it shouldn't kill Japanese people in the future.  But, no matter which conception of moral philosophy is true, everyone knows we can in fact do this with human moral agents (through reason/praise/shame/etc.).  It may be in fact the case that in hindsight, in that first sense, that person could not have even hoped to do otherwise.  Their activities were predetermined by physics to play out just as they did.  But that doesn't stop physics from striking again and allowing for a mental conversion of persuasion any more than it stops us from reprogramming computers (or from computers installing software on each other).  Hindsight can merely be a hypothetical framework that is productive and healthy for understanding future scenarios that may play out similarly.  And it simply doesn't matter if the past can never have been otherwise. 

Before I get into the final aspect (the imaginary one), it is important to note that even if we know for a fact that determinism is true, that doesn't mean we know what the response to moral persuasion will be for any given moral agent.  As biological computers, we simply aren't capable of judging each other to that precise degree.  We may guess at levels of particular stubbornness or credulity, but we never really know for sure.  That doesn't make it magic and unpredictable in principle (like some sort of libertarian free will tourettes), but it does make us ignorant and the objection to determinism meaningless, practically speaking.

3C: The third element is that element of entitlement.  People often feel overly morally entitled to be able to always reign down judgment on others even if that person couldn't have known any better or couldn't have done otherwise.  We don't like it as victims when it seems like the criminal has some kind of metaphysical excuse.  It seems undermining if determinism blocks some of our judgie-ness, but upon careful consideration, it isn't taking away anything that we actually need (see 3A and 3B).  The past doesn't change for anyone or any philosophy.  The obligation to be consistent as determinists just prevents us from being sloppy with our moral claims and relinquish what was never within our control to begin with. 

Outro:

Overall, I think Harris made some pretty good debate/presentation choices and that the misunderstandings, misapprehensions, and accusations of having not established his case are the fault of the listeners.  I will continue to show this as I review more reactions to the debate.  Harris was sensitive to the idea (@9:42) that many people would be particularly let down if he blew the debate with Craig, and I have to say, imo, Harris did great.

Ben

Theodore Beale (Vox Day) deals with the problem of evil by proposing a lesser god most Christians wouldn't accept.  The only reason he seems to believe in theism at all is because he believes evil is so darn real (the exact opposite reaction many atheists have, see my extensive argument map on "The Logical Problem of Evil"). William Lane Craig, as I recall in the debate with Sam Harris, made the "evil therefore God" argument as well (in addition to falling victim to the same definitional circularity issue that Beale does which I noted that Harris successfully used against Craig ftw). 

I only had Beale's pre-debate comments before, but now he's posted his reaction to the debate:

No, we cannot simply accept that "moral" can reasonably be considered "well-being" because it is not true to say that which is "of, pertaining to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong" is more than remotely synonymous with "that which fosters well-being in one or more human beings." One might as reasonably substitute "wealth" or "physical attractiveness" for "well-being".

Of course, Harris already addressed this point in the debate itself when discussing how we can be wrong about the facts of well being and noting that it is possible to not know what we are missing when it comes to deeper virtues.  So if you arbitrarily substitute in "wealth" or "physical attractiveness" you have not actually provided a "just as good" account of the human condition on its own terms. 

On any other day of the week (when not trying to desperately seize morality for only their worldview) Christians will make haste to deride the superficial life of the heathen based on trite interests like looks and money (the exact things Beale uses as "alternatives") and brag about the unending blessings of the deeper Christian virtues that unrepentant sinners would agree with them about if only they would have faith and be obedient to their god's commands.  But they can't have it both ways.  We live in the same universe with the same facts of basic psychology as the same species.  Faith and gods are not required to understand the human condition when all you need is experience with those virtues on their own terms.  Some unseen divine nature has nothing necessarily to do with it and this is a millions times more easy to verify than anything important about Craig's or Beale's differing conceptions of gods.

So is Vox Day just that shallow in a morally Dunning-Kruger effect kind of way or is he being a defensive hypocrite who conveniently refuses to devote his whole brain to the conversation about morality at the same time when his views are threatened?  Either way is pretty pathetic. 

Ben

So I did a google reader search on Sam Harris and William Lane Craig and I thought I'd run through some of the reactions (find all my coverage with my Harris vs. Craig tag).

Before the debate, Theodore Beale (Vox Day) had this to say:

It should be interesting to see if Craig elects to make his own positive arguments and challenge Harris to refute them or if he takes a cue from TIA and shreds the arguments that Harris puts forth.

Not withstanding that Beale agrees with the new atheists on the argument from evil and simply proposes a less awesome, not that moral god to fix the problem...  Whatever dude.

Wintery Knight Blog decides to play up the "I don't like Yahweh" angle to the extreme and ignore the arbitrariness of defining "good" as Yahweh's nature with his summary here.  Good job.

An atheist, "Reasonably Aaron," says:

The problem is [Harris] was all over the place in terms of answering Craig's objections and never refuted Craig's knock-down argument that he presented in the 1st reply.

Which "knock down argument" was that again?  Um...no, Harris just pretty much ignored Craig's irrelevant points and had the debate he wanted to have.  That's not being all over the place. Aaron then proceeds to make basically the same point that Harris did which is that Craig is secretly using the same basis to bridge the value/fact divide. 

Uncommon Descent tries to unconvincingly squeeze the debate into their categories and says:

How can one scientifically examine if an intelligent agent exists or is causative, if one a priori excludes intelligent agents from possible causes?

What did that have to do with their debate again?  When did Harris exclude the possibility of intelligent causes?  Where did all these thoughts come from?!?!  Who knows...

So, good job everyone!  Keep up the lame work.  This really inspires my confidence in humanity.

Ben

See here for audio.  Here for video.

Sam Harris ignored much of William Lane Craig's chop shop syllogistic framing and simply presented a positive case for naturalistic moral realism based on the well being of conscious creatures and then attacked in broad strokes the inherent double standards and irrelevancy of Craig's Biblical Christian theistic ontological "sound" "basis" of morality.  I thought this was reasonably justified as Harris is talking to a room full of Christians.  At no point did I feel that Harris defaulted to his talking points at the expense of addressing some meaningful point as I've seen him do in the past (which I was cynically expecting). 

The one point that basically landed the debate in Harris' favor despite not intimately following Craig down his prescribed ultra narrow path for the debate was this:  Harris pointed out (@ :09 seconds) that arbitrarily defining God's nature as good is just as much a "definitional game" as Craig's most relevant objection (@ :59 seconds) to Harris' case in his opening.  That's pretty much all that needs to be said.  Craig in turn reasserted that "no" by definition God is the most worthy of worthiness.  My only real complaint about Harris is that he didn't follow up and slam Craig on this in his closing statement and point out that just appealing to how awesomely awesome we've defined the Christian god is simply no different than hypothetically defining Harris' "worst misery for everyone" concept and accepting that connection between facts and values as unavoidably representative of the human condition.  That would have knocked it out of the park and stuck Craig in the exact same boat.

Craig is of course set at the proverbial Spinal Tap "11" on morality like if natural morality isn't the most objectively objective objective moral objectivity that's objective beyond objective....he's getting his Nazi on and rapin those babies.  Craig seemed incredibly shaken in his first rebuttal to Harris as though at some level he was connecting with where Harris was coming from, but still forced to prescribe all of his superfolous Christian ideology on top of what was already a reasonably complete picture.  What a dirty job.  To have to be an evil apologist and justify the god of the Bible, and to have to undercut what you've already admitted is common ground observational good that obviously appeals to all people beyond the confines of Christian theology that is such a ridiculous task to justify.  I wouldn't want to be Craig.  I hope he can live with himself.

Ben

---

By some fluke of the time-space continuum, you wake up one morning to discover that you live culturally next door in the same country with an equally proportionate amount of ancient Aztecs who offer human sacrifices to their gods on a regular basis.  After a period of time of learning the language, you have a conversation over the fence with some of their most outspoken representatives and they tell you that it is perfectly okay for human sacrifice to be legal because you don't personally have to kill any humans yourself.  They are pro-choice.  You, as a conservative minded person, evaluate your options.  You can:

A:  Passively support legislation to make pro-life laws banning human sacrifice, waging a decades long legal war with Aztec representatives in various courts and Congress.

B:  Start a war based on your irreconcilable differences with your evil neighbors.  

If you chose A, I'd be surprised.  People are being murdered and you resolve to vote perhaps once a year about it.  If you remember to send in your voter registration that year, of course.  

If you chose B, you are on the same moral page with the killers of abortion doctors, given that you think the unborn are equally human as anyone being sacrificed by your next door Aztec neighbors.  

You are also on the same page with most of the Liberals in this country I would think, who would probably be right there with you starting that war because they have basically the same values you do in reference to the institutionalized murder of innocent humans.

By not starting this war over the abortion debate, by implication, it appears that you do not value the unborn as much as you think you do.  (BTW, please do not start a war over the abortion debate.)  You just value them a little bit more than Liberals. 

Discuss.

[Note:  I was going to post pictures of aborted fetuses for comparison, but it turns out those pictures are a lot more gruesome than that one.]

Outro:

Moral disagreements do not have to be the intellectual equivalent of a game of turbo tops if we are willing to systematically evaluate why we value what we value.  We can be wrong or ignorant about the facts and wrong on our own terms by making use of logical fallacies to justify our claims, etc.  My hypothesis is that when most humans take correcting for all of that seriously there will be a lot more convergence than not.  Most people don't do that.  They accept their first impression of things and it's all superficial attack and defend from there with little to no possibility of self-correction.  Even if they do have some change of heart, or several, there's still nothing really rigorous about it, and it is more psychological accident than intentional method. 

Of course there are also the problems of resolving differences between liberal pacifists who presumably wouldn't choose option B in any event.  Additionally, what happens when our country fights an unjust war overseas?  This particular thought experiment is just directed at conservatives even if we can think of ways to make it more messy.

I have plans to build an argument map attempting to reconcile some of the differing answers that prominent atheists have given to the abortion question.  It will at the very least show which particular issues need to be resolved between them on the secular side of things and which disagreements are illusionary.

Ben

I'm somewhat curious as to Pinker's account of the motivation behind human sacrifice to the gods, but it is plausible and we'll move on.

Spoiler alert:  Despite the pretenses of disagreement the only difference between Harris and Pinker's position is a semantic one over what we mean by science (which Pinker discusses at the end of his talk).

Pinker claims that science can't discover that we should be consistent with our values and hold our own suffering and well being in principle as of the same value as the suffering and well being of others (including cats).  Yet Pinker clearly believes that we should and that this is a better moral conviction.  Pinker wants to split the realms of scientific discovery and reason as though Harris wasn't already putting reason in the pot of a general scientific frame of mind.  But why is it a "reason" if it does not appeal to some fact of the world?  Why should I be consistent with my values if that doesn't relate to the actual consequences of my own mental states?

What if we evaluate the factual claim about two different people.  One lives a life of double standards and the other universal reciprocity.  On their own terms of seeking choice mental states which is clearly what each is attempting to do, who is making out better?  And yet we all know that reciprocity tends to bring in the better dividends.  That's a fact of the world that science can discover (or even overturn) that is just as on par with the first half of Pinker's talk that goes through example after example where science clarified some factual dispute that fixed our moral picture.  It can't even be a meaningful "a-scientific reason" unless that is so. 

There are many different ways to play out the criminal justice system.  What if we are missing out on some benefit by only relying on the most minimal of deterrence?  What if some manner of vindictive eye for an eye punishment actually stands to make the world a better place?  Either Pinker is going to appeal to some discoverable fact about the world of the well-being of conscious creatures or he is stuck with making some uninteresting and unmotivating appeal to nonsense.  There's no other option.  And that's exactly what Pinker unwittingly appeals to!  He speaks of there being good reason to calibrate the criminal justice system so as to make sure it is not incentivizing the worst possible scenarios where a shop-lifter is compelled to murder in order to ensure the lesser probability of getting caught and supremely punished.  Hence, we tone down the punishments so that only lesser crimes are committed by the most common and trivial criminal motivations. 

But what is defining the worst possible scenarios?  Well clearly having living shop keepers with access to all the choice mental states that implies (or not having to recover from a gun shot wound) is already exactly what Harris' theory predicts Pinker will have to refer to to make a convincing moral argument.  We can say that "science" discovered it, but only in the basic sense that we observed it and thought about it.  That's just part of the overall scientific method or mindset Harris is referring to even if a particular question doesn't necessarily need to be taken to the super-evaluated lab coat level.

Pinker admits by the end of his talk that he is merely making a semantic distinction that Harris doesn't make.  Science means "knowledge," right?  So no, all those domains of knowledge are not "honorary" science.  They are real science if they represent actual knowledge that represents a testable and possibly defeasible conclusion.  Hence, there's no disagreement of substance between Harris and Pinker, just a preference of terms to congeal with unhealthy pop-cultural notions of where science begins and ends.  At least, that's a great deal more self awareness than the others on the panel had.

Outro:

Bravo to Pinker for not totally stifling the conversation.  We don't have to heap him on the pile of why philosophers suck at making important issues accessible for progressive public consumption.

Ben

Intro:

Christian apologists from around the world gathered in San Diego to discuss honestly their misgivings about defending the faith.  It was an unprecedented, no-holds-barred, "skeptifest" of Biblical proportions.  It had been long supposed that Christians could stand up to any intellectual attacks and hence had nothing to fear from brandishing their confidence for all to see.  Everyone was encouraged to get their most skeptical thoughts and doubts "out there" and see what others had to say.  By some accounts, from some of my atheist friends who were allowed to attend, this apparently snow-balled into mass apostasy.  I'm still a little skeptical, but I've pulled some intriguing quotes from the transcript.  Take a look...

At first everyone was a bit squeamish to speak and a few offered some rather vague random points of contention that really didn't matter that much to the big picture.  Finally, William Lane Craig just blurted out why he'd apparently stopped trusting the Holy Spirit:

Of course, anyone (or, at least any sort of theist) can claim to have a self-authenticating witness of God to the truth of his religion. [...] they've just had some emotional experience...

Dead silence.  Um...that's the HOLY FREAKING SPIRIT you are talking about.  And yet Richard Swinburne cheered Craig on and was remarkably sarcastic noting (with air quotes no less) we'd never want to be forced into certain absurdities based on that kind of evidence:

...if it seems to me Poseidon exists, then it is good evidence that Poseidon exists.

He had the whole crowd rolling with laughter since they all knew that the Greek pantheon had a long history of success in the hearts and minds of ancient Greeks.  Were they really going there?  Maybe I'm missing something.

Staunch evidentialist, Lydia McGrew, wanted to turn the conversation to more tangible matters and get the ball rolling on discussing her lack of confidence in the resurrection of Jesus: 

Well of course the prior probability is very low and we all know that. [...]

There’s a most unfortunate passage by G. K. Chesterton in which he says, “If my Apple woman, the woman who sells me apples tells me that she saw a miracle I should believe her. I believe her about apples so I should believe her about miracles.” That’s a paraphrase; it’s not an exact quotation.

I really wish Chesterton hadn’t said that because that’s just wrong as an approach. You don’t just automatically say, “Oh, somebody says they saw a miracle, I’m going to buy it.” You have to have much stronger evidence than that.

Indeed.  I can agree with that.  Triablogger, Steve Hays immediately piped up with three pertinent examples of the kind of evidence we would need to justify various kinds of similar extraordinary claims: 

[In reference to having an alien spaceship]  On the face of it, I could discharge my burden of proof by showing you the spacecraft.  Of course, you might insist on having it properly inspected (to eliminate a hoax).

So what evidence would I need to prove that I own this unique coin? [...]  Ideally, the only evidence I'd need to prove that I own this unique coin is the coin itself. My ability to produce the coin upon request.  Maybe you'd demand that the coin be authenticated. Fine.

...suppose I call you up and tell you I've just won the lottery (and on the first occasion I've ever bought a ticket). Surely that's an extraordinary claim. Naturally you're skeptical, so I invite you over to my house, where you see with your own eyes both my ticket and the newspaper reporting the winning numbers. I'd say that would be sufficient for you to rationally believe that I've won the lottery.

So it was a case of a highly improbable event that required evidence of a[n] admittedly powerful [...] kind in order to be rationally believed.

I can't help but note that it was almost as though the words of atheist, Richard Carrier, were on the minds of all those in attendance:

If Jesus was a god and really wanted to save the world, he would have appeared and delivered his Gospel personally to the whole world.

Recognizing of course that Jesus didn't do this, Craig spoke up again to say what had been weighing on everyone's mind since the conference began: 

...you are thinking, “Well, goodness, if believing in God is a matter of weighing all of these sorts of arguments, then how can anybody know whether God exists? You'd have to be a philosopher or a scientist to figure out whether God exists!” In fact, I agree with you. A loving God would not leave it up to us to figure out by our own ingenuity and cleverness whether or not he exists.

People were clearly shocked.  And it got everyone lingering on the problem of evil.  Hays spoke up again to point out that the long standing explanations for evil from Calvinism and Arminianism both suck: 

...it sounds bad [...] to say that God predestined sin and evil. However, it also sounds bad to say that God allows sin and evil.

Everyone was dismayed by this.  How could they all have been defending such bad explanations for evil all of this time?  How in the world had Christian apologetics kept up with it?  They weren't all that stupid and/or delusion were they!?!  No one especially wanted to hear atheist, John Loftus, say, "I told you so."  Even though their faiths seemed to be cracking under the weight of their collective doubts, they all agreed no one wanted to hear that guy gloat. 

Hays had clearly been thinking things through and gave everyone an astute analogy to help explain where most everyone had gone wrong with their apologetic sensibilities: 

Almost too proud of himself for how well he'd explained things, something clearly snapped in his mind.  Hays collapsed on the floor in front of everyone and started mumbling almost incoherently.  It seemed he was talking about himself though he couldn't bring himself to even speak in the first person:

...he indulges in so many ad hominem attacks [...] which includes that constitutional incapacity for self criticism in its judgmental criticism of others which emboldens him to openly expose his emotional insecurities, oblivious to the disconnect between the image he is laboring to project and what is really coming through.

It also seemed that he was admitting that all of his previous apologetic efforts could not be said to:

...move us from a state of ignorance to a state of knowledge.

He'd realized that too many people had been wondering if Hays was:

...really that dense, or if he is just playing dumb to advance his agenda.

And whether or not it was always just a "rhetorical tactic:"

...to impose an all-or-nothing dilemma on the reader.

Hays was okay apparently and someone nursed him back to health in a corner of the room as the conference moved on.  Was he really talking about himself?!?  We may never know.

The next day after Hays had recomposed himself, he was overheard talking to fellow Triablogger, Jason Engwer, about all the horrible things that he'd said about agnostic, Ed Babinski, to get out of the force of the case in Ed's "The Cosmology of the Bible" chapter in "The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails."  Hays finally admitted it was implausible to dismiss all the evidence that the Bible embraces a false cosmology:

Mixed metaphors are mutually inconsistent if taken literally, but a wide variety of metaphors can and do figurate the very same concept.

So I guess they did understand the criticism after all to all their hairsplitting?  Not sure. 

Elsewhere, William Lane Craig was overheard discussing the many universes hypothesis with Robin Collins:

We appear then to be confronted with two alternatives: posit either a cosmic Designer or an exhaustively random, infinite number of other worlds. Faced with these options, is not theism just as rational a choice as multiple worlds?

They both agreed they hadn't taken the hypothesis seriously enough in the past and that we really weren't in any position to decide between two rational options.   I didn't think Christians were capable of agnosticism on that issue...

Near the end of the conference there were a lot of tears shed and everyone was looking around at each other a bit anxiously, thankful they had not brought any babies to test their new atheist appetites on or any children to dismember to make sure they were made of all atoms.  Triablogger, Paul Manata went around poking walls, waiving his arms up and down, and testing various places on the floor to check on the uniformity of the universe for everyone.  He kept yelling, "It's all clear!" over and over again to the annoyance of all.  Finally they told him to shut up and that they should just go with it until further notice.  However everyone was still bracing for impact and wondering how they could prepare for the inevitable Nazi-brainwashing-rapist-regime that was sure to sweep the whole world away from them now that they'd changed their minds about Jesus.

Fortunately libertarian renegade and (former) theologian extraordinaire, Vox Day spoke up to call attention to atheist, Sam Harris' book, "The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values":

I have to applaud Sam for having the intellectual courage to seize the bull by the horns; unlike his fellow New Atheists (except Daniel Dennett), he has recognized the weak point of the lack of universal warrant and is attempting to do something about it.

So amazingly, all was not lost. 

Outro:

If anyone has any other interesting quotes from the conference, post them in the comments, please.

Ben

Objection #1:

The "Brave New World" objection (that Harris answers himself here) is abysmal in that it assumes such satisfaction is even feasible or relevant.  When there is too much severance from reality, the odds of maintaining the desired mental state decrease.  If it truly was a genuinely real so-called "fool's paradise" who is the fool? The ONLY reason that dystopian movies convince us that certain visions of the future suck is by appealing to the obvious suckage and misery going on in conscious creatures despite the obviously mistaken pretenses of paradise.  Yo dawg, I pointed out their spot fail on your spot fail so you can fail to spot your fail while proving Harris right. 

How does one attain complex forms of edification based off of mere drug induced states?  We enjoy interacting with our environment to attain those states, so I'm not really sure how the two could be feasibly separated or why it even matters if they can.  If one is just as good as the other, then why are we complaining?  There has to be some basis for the complaint and it seems the scenario, if we assume it is 100% efficient, by definition has eliminated it.  Otherwise it is appealing to something.  And if it is appealing to something, it has to be real, and the only reason we are going to be concerned about it in any way is because of our affinity for certain mental states.  There's no escaping it. 

On the Amazon website for Harris' book, a commenter raised a similar objection:

If people obtain psychic benefits from such false beliefs, should we discourage them? If someone asks whether we prefer the red pill (reality) or the blue pill (delusion), how should we answer?

In the movie The Matrix, Cypher eventually realizes that he prefers the Matrix delusion:

Cypher: You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize?
[Takes a bite of steak]
Cypher: Ignorance is bliss.

Is he wrong?

False beliefs can be "okay" but not ideal. Some are more benign than others. Please note that even in the movie Cypher died the horrible death of a coward because he was screwing people over and they weren't very happy about that. There are almost never any "perfect scams" as that behavior is especially risky given the universal law of reciprocation. Only the most absurd of philosophical conundrums can really hope to contradict that rule of thumb. And those things pretty much never happen and shouldn't be a stumbling block to developing a full blown practical moral science as Harris conceives of it. 

The Matrix movie as an example is actually atrociously bad at presenting the peril of a false world, since the world is actually just as good or better than the "real" world.  In fact it manufactures Matrix-depression out of thin air as though just for the sake of it not being real we can somehow mystically detect that.  Neo even goes so far as to say that his favorite noodle eating experience was "invalid" as though that really even means anything.  EVERY noodle eating experience is just a simulation in your brain.  The point here is that everyone was wrong about the Matrix, including the Architect, Morpheous, and pretty much everyone else.  The "path of Neo" was actually about transcending every narrow-minded worldview and doing a new right thing based off of a self-generated humanistic and fallible paradigm.  No one knew what was going to happen given the escalating circumstances of Smiths overrunning the Matrix.  The Architect should have let people out from the beginning and most people that wanted out so badly probably should have stayed in.  With an open-door policy, there's simply no conflict and clearly a well-run Matrix is a better choice than a post-apocalyptic world devoid of natural resources.

But that's just how that fictional story played out, which isn't evidence of anything...  If we are having a serious scientific discussion about morality, it makes little sense to pretend like we can prescribe ignorance. We don't have to be ignorant to be happy.  Although I think there are some instances where we can maturely conclude that knowing more about a narrow given topic would make us needlessly unhappy and would not likely matter logistically for the aim of our lives.  We can't solve all the world's problems, nor hope to process literally every suffering-related bit of information that is out there.  Do I really need to see that next tragic news report about the suffering of some random person I'm never in a million years going to help?  Probably not.  I'm not doing anyone any favors by constantly subjecting myself to that kind of experience over and over again just because I can.  It's impossible to process it all anyway and fails to take into consideration the "moral user" clause that says we need happy enough users to even have moral anythings happening at all.

Objection #2:

Blackburn brings up the idea that some conceptions of "well being" entail repressing desires like in Buddhism.  However, this is a rather conveniently lop-sided appraisal.  Buddhists are simply favoring a particular kind of mental state.  No one aims for non-mental states.  Even in terms of self-sacrifice where we aim to not-exist for the sake of some higher goal, it is as though we will be around for the sake of the mental states we would have had in the event we could exist while not existing.  Even people who commit suicide to avoid existing end up thinking about it in terms of how good it would feel if all the pressure of their life were off their backs as though that is coherent.  Or, even if they don't have such an understanding, they are weighing their options based on the fact they can't have the mental states they do desire and so are ending the impertinence.  It's still the same realm of backhanded coherency that is based entirely on the aim of choice mental states.  ANYTHING that can be appealed to in order to convince a human being that something is good or bad, to be at all convincing, will be dealing with this choice-mental-state-nomenclature.  And if you think you've found some example that doesn't apply, you are wrong.  But feel free to demonstrate your conceptual failure and present it anyway.

It may well be that Buddhists have discovered the highest peak on the moral landscape via their sequestering of particular mental states over others.  This CERTAINLY is not outside of Harris' conception at all since he continually brings up the possibility himself.  Of course, everyone ignores him...because why?  Anyway...  It is a factual question:  which well-being paradigm satisfies the human condition the best?  If it is the case that someone who manages to strike the best conceivable balance of typical Western impulses simply is not as satisfied than someone who goes off to do their meditation in a cave for six months...then guess who the winner of the moral landscape contest is?  It's not Simon Blackburn, I'll tell you that.

Blackburn wants to say that you have to work it out for yourself and that science can't give you an answer like the above.  Oh really?  Blackburn is switching terms to institutionalized science from Harris' conception of science as universal methodology.  Why wouldn't the bottom line on the above research project not include asides like, "Not everyone can necessarily achieve these mental states."  Or:  "People who have been encultured a certain way for most of their lives are typically unable to use these monastic tools to achieve the same level of effects."  Or:  "Everyone who has given these tools a test run despite their personal misgivings finds that they do in fact enjoy the best the human condition has to offer."  There's not some imaginary wall that separates these concepts.  "Working it out for yourself" has to do with mental states and the facts of the world.  A moral science could be all on top of that even if practically that has to include you doing your part of that equation based on the best external information the institution of science has worked out for you on your behalf.  Isn't that how all medicine works (to use Harris' choice analogy)?  It doesn't uber-cater to you.  There's room for error.  In Harris' moral world, that all goes together under the same banner.  Prescriptive moral science doesn't have to make inept narrow-minded prescriptions which fail to take into consideration still other real facts of the world.

Objection #3:

Science can't tell you how to prioritize your life.  Oh really?  What can then?  Oh...right we have to do that for ourselves.  But what are we basing that off of?  Our affinity for choice mental states and the actual facts of the world...or what?  That's the same thing "science" has to work with.  Blackburn switches meanings on Harris again to make his dull contribution to the discussion.  What prioritization scheme best suits a human being in general?  Do you have the personal time to test out the implications of every possible scheme?  Well no, it'd be great if we had help.  Those are facts of the world science can evaluate systematically, which may well include the "user" component that says science may not actually be able to study the divergent particulars of you personally.  That doesn't mean it shouldn't be the same empirical process in essence. 

Then he says that ethics is more complicated than just the basic orientation of "everyone is miserable" vs. "everyone is happy."  He goes so far as to say that it is no help at all.  No help at all?  Blackburn conflates Harris' task of getting people on board with the most basic picture of moral realism with the playing out of every complexity.  That's not Harris' fault that Blackburn fails to appreciate the aim of Harris' message.  He says this despite many allusions that Harris makes to how complicated things can be.  That again is another mere failure to pay attention based off of a premature value judgment.  In reality land, we can easily understand Blackburn's insistence that folks need to go on holiday despite the fact they could be making the world a better place with the same funds and effort.  Why is that?  Well it's completely explicable within the confines of people seeking choice mental states.  We need breaks for our brains.  Saving children in Africa doesn't necessarily do that for us.  The amoral reality is that we have to deal with the coherency of our own lives first before we can hope to save the rest of the world.  But all of this falls under the basic paradigm that Harris has laid out and it is foolish to pretend otherwise.

Blackburn closes with "it is a complete illusion that science will give us all the answers" as though Harris has not already noted many times that the impracticality of science being able to literally stand over our shoulder navigating every single life decision.  This has nothing to do with the principle that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions in ways that science can address.  This is just not paying attention.   This is the world of professional philosophy failing us as usual to ever come to a reasonable consensus on ANYTHING.  "Thanks" smart people. 

Ben