Hello Renegade,
I am pleased the modicum of agreement we can find. Of course I understand your atheistic perspective will bring a wide divide in how far we can come to agreement.
I hope this doesn't get too long, but you made a valid point. You said,
I'm still not sure how this relates to bolstering Dan's positions. But anyway...
I haven't spoken to Mr. Peterson and don't personally know him but indeed find agreement in his position. So true, most of my positions are simply my own. What I find most agreement in a general sense with Dan is this. The secularist does not have a logical mooring for his moral beliefs. I will quote Dr. Peterson at the end on his writing that I find this general theme. Generally the secularistic, using atheistic or agnostic presuppositions bases its positions in a moral ground, whether criticizing Mormonism or theism in general. But from where the moral position grounds itself I think the theist is justified in saying.
In this dialogue I have been pointing out how this trend occurs in all areas. Scientific enquiry for example. The climatic epistemological position of the secularist has a swampy subjective underground to it that the secularist likes to ignore, pretend it isn't there, but alas, it is! So my discussion here has been more focused on that discussion but I have taken it from Dr. Peterson's essay and talk, here is what he says:
First, the critics' basis for criticizing Mormonism on moral grounds is unclear, and its coherence needs to be demonstrated. "Rebellion cannot exist," observes Camus, "without the feeling that, somewhere and somehow, one is right.28 But on what basis can a materialist, whose universe is exhausted by material particles and the void, claim that something is objectively wrong? Do right and wrong not become matters merely of personal preference, and, perhaps, of power? Not only existentialists but many superficial "life counselors" suggest that we should construct our own "meaning" for life. But is self-constructed meaning really meaning at all? Or is meaning not, rather, something that can only be received, from another intelligence? And why should anybody else pay even the slightest attention to somebody's self-constructed "meaning?"
Camus observes of the atheistic French revolutionaries of 1793 that, when they effectively "guillotined" God, "they deprived themselves forever of the right to outlaw crime or to censure malevolent instincts."29 "From the moment that man submits God to moral judgment, he kills Him in his own heart. And then what is the basis of morality? God is denied in the name of justice, but can the idea of justice be understood without the idea of God?"30 If those who deny any objective basis for morality nonetheless go on behaving morally and invoking morality, we can only be grateful that they have not pursued the implications of their position to their logical end, and that they continue to live on borrowed moral capital. Of the nihilistic revolutionaries who are the subject of his brilliant meditation in The Rebel, Camus remarks that
All of them, decrying the human condition and its creator, have affirmed the solitude of man and the nonexistence of any kind of morality. But at the same time they have all tried to construct a purely terrestrial kingdom where their chosen principles will hold sway.31
It is not surprising that, just prior to his tragic and early death in a 1960 automobile accident, Albert Camus was evidently giving serious consideration to being received into the Roman Catholic Church. He was, I'm guessing, horrified by the revolutionary excesses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and had come to suspect that only theism could provide an objective basis for moral judgments. It is precisely the same kind of reasoning that led the Anglo-American poet W.H. Auden to embrace Christianity: He found himself sitting in a movie hall in the late 1930s, in an area of New York City then heavily populated with German immigrants. As a newsreel played, depicting acts of Nazi barbarism toward European Jews, the audience around him erupted with cheers and surges of pleased laughter. Shaken by what he had witnessed, Auden realized that his secular worldview couldn't provide him with a firm moral ground from which to protest that Nazi brutality was objectively evil.
Camus and Auden may have been right. On the basis of what moral principles do secularizing critics pronounce the Church wanting? How were those principles chosen, and why should anybody else defer to them? Even if one were to grant the factual claims on which they stake their moral judgments, it is not at all clear that those moral judgments are capable of bearing any objectively real weight.
But then, neither is it clear, given secularizing principles, that concepts like "factual claims" and "personal preference" are even coherent--which brings us to the second type of secular objection to Mormonism: The critics' basis for criticizing Mormonism on intellectual grounds, saying that it is untrue, is unsure, and its coherence needs to be demonstrated.
Why? We all know essentially what it would mean to say that an astronomer's thinking about the atmosphere of Jupiter was correct, and what it means to say that the conclusion of a syllogism follows from, or is entailed by, the premises of the syllogism.
However, on a completely secularist, naturalistic view, it seems that "thoughts" are really merely neurochemical events in the brain, able (in principle, at least) to be described by the laws of physics. But the laws of physics are deterministic--I'll leave quantum indeterminacy out of consideration here, because I don't think it helps either side much--such that, if "thoughts" are merely physical, it is unclear how we can really say that a conclusion follows from premises. Why? Because any given brain state seems to be causally determined by the preceding brain state. And it is hard, moreover, to see how the neurochemical condition of the brain can have a relationship of either truth or falsity with the atmosphere of a distant planet--or, for that matter, with anything else. A lump of cells is neither true nor false. It isn't "about" anything else; it just is.
Thus, truly consistent secularist critics of Mormonism may have sawed off the limb on which they were sitting. They may have deprived themselves not only of a standard of moral judgment that cannot be dismissed as merely subjective, but of a coherent claim to be able to address questions of truth and falsity (with respect to Mormonism and every other topic). Some form of theism, or, at least, of non-naturalism, may be required to save their position from being merely self-refuting. (If it is not, this will have to be demonstrated.) But if they adopt theism, or even mere non-naturalism, they will no longer be secularist critics, but will have become something else.
I think he is right, I think nihilism is a much more consistent position for a secularist to take.
Next, I agree in the necessary requirement of creativity and imagination needs to be tempered with reason and logic.
I find beauty related to caring, when one finds something beautiful they care and even develop a cathartic relationship with it, beliefs regarding it are developed due to this very caring.
I disagree with you (understandably) regarding confusion of depth of self and spiritual awareness in a more traditional sense of including a deity. I can of course tell the difference and like you enjoy an awareness of the depth of self as well as a awareness of the holy, and other.
Regarding moral intuition. I appreciate what say and we might be back to the schoolyard. What does it mean to 'discover' the law of gravity - was it present before Newton 'discovered' it? Even if one says no, surely it doesn't make the discovery un'real'. Gravity is real. Discovering moral truths is similar - don't torture children is a discovery and a real one at that. But, I agree one can conduct scientific enquiry without a moral compass.
my regards, mikwut
All communication relies, to a noticeable extent on evoking knowledge that we cannot tell, all our knowledge of mental processes, like feelings or conscious intellectual activities, is based on a knowledge which we cannot tell.
-Michael Polanyi
"Why are you afraid, have you still no faith?" Mark 4:40