Getting to Ought From Is

[Dr. Shades]

Arg.

A little context, please?

[Gadianton]

But, and this is the part that he invariably focuses on, objective reality can’t exist if we’re just atoms in the void, because eternal joy can’t exist if we’re just atoms in the void

Joy = meeting friends for lunch and travelling. Suppose we are just atoms in a void, but we can be resurrected, granted immortality, and continue indefinitely to meet friends for lunch and travel. Eternal joy = meeting friends and travel indefinitely.

[Billy Shears]

Yeah, I did once get through The Silmarillion. I think I might even have re-read a few parts. I guess it's a great example of its kind of thing, but it's not really my kind of thing. It kind of undermines The Lord of the Rings to find that Sauron and his ring and all the heroes are only leftovers from the really big stuff that happened ages before, but that's Tolkien for you. All the great stuff was in the past, for him.

The truth is I was never able to actually read the Silmarillion--I tried but I couldn’t follow it. However I was able to listen to the unabridged version of it on Audible--a couple of times now, in fact. Having a narrator drive it forward really helps. But the style is still that of an incredibly complicated ancient myth in a stuffy voice rather than a novel like LOTR.

One of the most puzzling things about it is the entire arc of this universe, from the first pages of the Silmarillion all the way to the end of Appendix A in the Return of the King. The arc is that the magic in the universe is constantly disappearing. I never got a good explanation of why this is--was Tolkien trying to create a way to interpolate between his world and the one we’re in now? Or does it have something to do with how the magic in biblical mythology dissipates over time, too? Or is it that the gods just get old, tired, and bored?

[Billy Shears]

The second book that really pissed me off was Atheism: The Case Against God. I didn’t want to be an atheist. But damn; the logic in that book was clear and convincing. It was like waking up from a long, strange dream and taking an ice-cold shower. I asked for the truth, and I found it. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was exhilarating.

George H. Smith. Yeah that was my impression as well all right. I remember it well, being starkly open mouthed for weeks, head buzzing after having read his exposition. There are book reviews of his text that sort of bring it down to earth some, but overall, a magnificent performance and one Mormon apologists have had the inkling to run away from, thus showing they actually do possess a smidgin of intelligence if they wish to keep a testimony...

What is your impression of George H. Smith compared to the New Atheists? My impression is that the difference is that new atheists just don’t think theism is a serious-enough philosophy to deserve a serious philosophical response like the one George H. Smith provides. Rather, they focus on the psychological and sociological impacts of religion. That’s my impression, but I’m not sure if I get it. What do you think?

[Billy Shears]

I also read a lot of C.S. Lewis long ago. His arguments didn't seem airtight but some of them did seem to raise some real issues. My memory is also that in Mere Christianity Lewis tried to derive the existence of God from the objectivity of morality. That's almost the opposite of what Peterson seems to be saying.

It's probably not really logically opposite, just presented in opposite order. I think they both are probably arguing that morality is objective if and only if there is God.

I don’t think that’s quite right. Back when Peterson actually engaged with critics, I asked him about this and he said something to the effect that it was theoretically possible for objective morality to exist without God, but that objective morality actually existing in a universe without a God was unlikely. My impression is that for him, objective morality is some sort of metaphysical tao that is out there in another dimension that isn’t space and isn’t time, but is just as real. God is plugged into this tao, but God didn’t create it.

This isn’t inconsistent with Mormon scripture. There is actually a scripture in the Book of Mormon that says that if God doesn’t do whatever, then he’d cease to be God. This passage could just be rhetoric, but taken at face value it implies that objective morality is beyond God.

On the other hand, Lewis did (if I remember rightly) start by assuming that all his readers did consider morality to be objective. I don't think Lewis allowed that there might be people wandering around without moral foundations. He did recognize that some people were atheists, but in effect he seemed to be saying (I think), Hey, you're not really an atheist, even if you think you are, because of course you believe in objective morality. Peterson, in contrast, seems to be saying to atheists, Hey, you don't really believe in objective morality, even if you think you do, because you don't believe in God.

So I guess I still think there's a significant difference between Lewis and Peterson, even if they might agree on things up to a point.

Part of me wants to read Lewis and figure this out, but a deeper part of me dreads such an endeavor--what C.S. Lewis thinks about morality might be academically interesting, but to me his style comes across as insufferable hubris.

[Physics Guy]

I believe Tolkien did state explicitly, at some point, that it was canon in his Middle-earth that Middle-earth was simply Earth, and that all its events were forgotten pre-history. If my memory isn't confused, the beginning of either The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings says that hobbits are still around today but that readers won't have seen them because they are elusive. So, yeah, I think that the downward trend of Tolkien's history is partly meant to connect the dots between a time of gods and the real world in the present day.

It has always seemed counter-intuitive to me, though, to propose that things were systematically so much cooler in the past. I'm used to progress; stuff from even two decades ago is probably garbage compared to what you can get today, almost no matter what it is, and things have been like that as long as I can remember. Tolkien's dwindling history isn't even exactly nostalgia, because LOTR at least doesn't really remember the glorious past. For most of the characters, it was all literally ages before they were born, and the few ancient figures who are supposed to have lived through it are minor characters who offer few details. They don't recall the wonderful past with longing, but just casually mention that the ancient battles were enormously larger than the current ones.

So I tend to think that Tolkien must have had more motivation than continuity, for presenting a shrinking world so consistently. It might have been his own life. His father died when he was 4 and his mother died when he was 12.

[Physics Guy]

There is actually a scripture in the Book of Mormon that says that if God doesn’t do whatever, then he’d cease to be God.

Yeah, although Mormons use a lot of traditional Judaeo-Christian words about their deity, the final reveal seems to be that Mormon Elohim is a former mortal who attained divine status under a set of moral rules that exist beyond all gods. There does not seem to be any Mormon conception of an ultimate creator who has made all reality. So as far as mainstream Jews, Christians, and Muslims are concerned, Mormonism is an atheistic religion devoted to a superhuman alien.

This makes it hard to understand why someone like Peterson would think that Mormonism provides an objective basis for morality that atheism can't have. Mormons apparently derive moral rightness and wrongness by postulating them as axioms of existence, as any (other) atheist is free to do. The existence of Mormon deity (or deities) isn't even part of the logic of ethics for Mormons, as far as I can see.

What I can sort of see is that Mormonism's exalted alien is supposed to make ethical behavior rewarding, like a parent who will buy you a car when you turn 16 if you mow the lawn once a week until then. This doesn't do anything to make moral obligation objective, though. It just sidesteps the whole question of moral obligation by offering you a supposedly sufficient selfish motive for the moral behavior.

I guess you could see that as outside-the-box thinking, cutting a Gordian knot. To me it just seems like somebody coming into my seminar while we're all struggling with a hard equation, glancing at the whiteboard without any comprehension, and declaring that the solution is to go to lunch. I'm like, Okay, you go do that. We're working.

[Boomer57]

Tolkein's aim was to produce a mythology for Britain, because it didn't really have anything on the order of Ancient Greece, Rome or Scandinavia. The Silmarillion was not really a book, but a collection of writings. His son tried to sort them out after Tolkien died, and that effort is what we have today in the Silmarillion. So it is an unfinished mythology; hence sometimes confusing and contradictory, but nonetheless intriguing if you're a geek like me.

[Gadianton]

Yeah, although Mormons use a lot of traditional Judaeo-Christian words about their deity, the final reveal seems to be that Mormon Elohim is a former mortal who attained divine status under a set of moral rules that exist beyond all gods. There does not seem to be any Mormon conception of an ultimate creator who has made all reality. So as far as mainstream Jews, Christians, and Muslims are concerned, Mormonism is an atheistic religion devoted to a superhuman alien.

Agreed, it's explicitly an eternal regress. With lots of chest pounding about how Mormonism rejects the creeds, philosophy, theologians, and learned these truths anew from revelation and "scripture" although no scriptures, especially in the Book of Mormon, teach anything like it. D&C and and Book of Abraham may get close. There are plenty of Chapel Mormon analogies to teach these truths, such as standing between two mirrors, and seeing your reflection recede into infinity.

This makes it hard to understand why someone like Peterson would think that Mormonism provides an objective basis for morality that atheism can't have. Mormons apparently derive moral rightness and wrongness by postulating them as axioms of existence, as any (other) atheist is free to do. The existence of Mormon deity (or deities) isn't even part of the logic of ethics for Mormons, as far as I can see.

Agreed. Although, Peterson appears to reject a good deal of Chapel Mormon thought. As Billy has also noted, he's very careful not to take a real position on anything. If he ever writes his 7 volume "A reasonable leap into the light", it won't answer any of these questions people have about his position, he will recycle 7 volumes worth of articles from his blog that carefully avoid taking a real position on anything.

The closest I recall him ever taking a real position was a long time ago back on MDDB, he made a comment that becoming a God didn't necessarily entail being like God the Father and creating our own planets, but sharing in the process somehow. This would go along with his idea of social trinitarianism. The trinity can be physical and separate, and share in the same vision and thereby "be one". Extend that a little, and we can "become Gods", merely by sharing in the work, and being something like married angels where sex is plausibly deniable, and sex by (God or us) plausibly deniable as the means of producing spiritual offspring -- in other words, redefine all the verbiage in a way to make it sound less ridiculous to mainstream Christians.

This doesn't do anything to make moral obligation objective

Absolutely. He's not offered anything that would help his position if the person reading him has had five hours of theology training. One of many stumbling blocks he has is clearly demarking the problem of real imperatives, and the motivation to follow imperatives. As an example, Kant had a rigorously defined way of creating statements that represent object oughts. However, they are just there in the abstract. We can simply chose not to follow them. Enter his "practical argument" for God, which is generally considered to be his most uninteresting work, that there must be some kind of reward or punishment after this life because practically speaking, there's then no real incentive to be moral.

Mormon scriptures teach "men are that they might have joy" which seems to firmly establish Mormon morality within its materialist framework -- the good is fundamentally the joy of man. It's consequentialist through-and-through. But you just don't know how he thinks about this. For all we know, he might think this is bedrock morality, but he might think it's only true because God said so, or he might think it's only true because God can realize the joy of man. And depending on what is meant, it could make all the difference between whether he really believes in objective morality as he insists.

By the way, let me just clarify one thing: The fact that Dan refuses to clarify and eternally evades and says as little as possible isn't because he's dumb, it's because he's smart. He knows he'll get owned if he says too much. He must suspect that because peers of his who specialize in these kinds of matters don't have a clear way forward, he's probably not going to figure it all out. And he knows that the value of firm answers is limited anyway, repetition, feel-good stories, name dropping, credential dropping, appealing to biases and mastering a few lines that sound good to people who aren't interested in digging very deep is the way to go, practically speaking. I think he believes that these murky generalities he trades in have a core truth behind them that someday we'll know more about, but for now, there's just enough to point the way to faithful verbiage.

[Kishkumen]

Yeah, although Mormons use a lot of traditional Judaeo-Christian words about their deity, the final reveal seems to be that Mormon Elohim is a former mortal who attained divine status under a set of moral rules that exist beyond all gods. There does not seem to be any Mormon conception of an ultimate creator who has made all reality. So as far as mainstream Jews, Christians, and Muslims are concerned, Mormonism is an atheistic religion devoted to a superhuman alien.

This makes it hard to understand why someone like Peterson would think that Mormonism provides an objective basis for morality that atheism can't have. Mormons apparently derive moral rightness and wrongness by postulating them as axioms of existence, as any (other) atheist is free to do. The existence of Mormon deity (or deities) isn't even part of the logic of ethics for Mormons, as far as I can see.

What I can sort of see is that Mormonism's exalted alien is supposed to make ethical behavior rewarding, like a parent who will buy you a car when you turn 16 if you mow the lawn once a week until then. This doesn't do anything to make moral obligation objective, though. It just sidesteps the whole question of moral obligation by offering you a supposedly sufficient selfish motive for the moral behavior.

I guess you could see that as outside-the-box thinking, cutting a Gordian knot. To me it just seems like somebody coming into my seminar while we're all struggling with a hard equation, glancing at the whiteboard without any comprehension, and declaring that the solution is to go to lunch. I'm like, Okay, you go do that. We're working.

LOL!!! Bingo. From beginning to end. Spot on.