After opening remarks from Borg and Wright in the first two chapters, the third opens with Wright discussing the prism that one should start to view Jesus, 1st century Judaism. He makes a consorted effort to explain how the first century Jew saw things in religious and political terms and how they were fused together. This fusion of politics and religion is often hard to grasp for American students who have been preached to since they could comprehend about separation of church and state.

At the most basic level, Jesus was a first century Jew.

What were traits of 1st century Judaism? |inline

In an earlier post:”The Unsound Argument(On Speciesism)”:http://unsoundargument.com/ethics/on-speciesism, I talked about Cushing’s paper, Against Humanism that argued successfully against Humanism in the following two formulations:

Primary Speciesism :

All and only (innocent ) humans are moral persons

Necessary Agency for Personhood (NAP) :

One is not entitled to the kind of moral consideration that persons receive without the capacity for moral agency.

Primary Speciesism is obviously wrong. Cushing points this out when he brings up the case of an alien with abilities identical to ours. Another way to look at this is to imagine a great ape drinking an elixir that develops his cognitive abilities to match those of an adult human, a Dr Zaius:”Planet of the Apes Character List(Dr Zaius)”:http://www.movieprop.com/tvandmovie/PlanetoftheApes/character1.htm if you will. These beings would obviously be persons and therefore would have rights to life. There is nothing on a genetic basis that gives us moral worth. Strict Speciesism is easily thrown out the window with other prejudices such as racism and sexism. So far, I agree completely with Cushing.

However, when it comes to NAP, I think Cushing has a good point. If one holds to NAP, then they are forced to disallow for the moral worth of babies and the retarded. They would be on the same plane as animals because of their reasoning abilities. The notion that human babies have the same moral worth as cats is frightening, to say the least. I think one can modify the approach so that one is not lead into a indefensible position that Cushing lists.

As a Christian, I am tempted to use the easy out of the soul requirement for personhood. Under this view, whoever has a soul is a person (being with moral worth). However, this is empirically impractical, even it if is true. Who around here carries a mark designating if they have a soul? The Christian would reply that the Bible sets forth the beings that have souls. What about beings that the Bible is silent about? Say we encounter aliens. The Bible is silent on the status of their souls. How do we go about determining their moral worth? Christians maintain that the soul leaves the body. What about the people that have nearly died and come back? Did they lose their moral worth while they were seemingly dead? Then there is the animal issue. Christians maintain that animals do not have souls. What if animals are found to have the ability to be rational and communicate? Can we still sanction their wholesale destruction at a whim? If they have no soul and therefore no moral worth, then we can. On the other hand, what if God has imbued the higher animals with souls and did not tell us, since the Bible was written to our situation? Since there is no emerical way to measure the soul, this gets very messy, very quickly.

What if one were to only use a future of value requirement as a starting point in the search for personhood?

The reasoning would be as follows:”The Unsound Argument(An Objective view of Personhood)”:http://unsoundargument.com/papers/objective-view-of-personhood/:

1. A future has value if the subject will have the ability to make moral determinations.
2. X, in its future will have the ability to make moral determinations.
3. C1. Therefore, X�s future has value.

1. Subjects with valuable futures are personsO.
2. X�s future is valuable.
3. C2. Therefore, X is personO.

1. PersonsO have a right to life.
2. X is a personO.
3. C3. Therefore, X has a right to life.

While for most cases, I would prefer that approach, as it gets around most of his complaints and provides a way to develop a class of beings with moral worth, it has some limitations that are very disheartening. What about beings that had the ability to make moral determinations, but now are unable to and will never again be able to? An real-world example of this would be a person who has Alzheimer�s. Also, what about those humans who can never make moral determinations, such as the severely retarded? Under the above approach, those individuals would not have a claim to life. I am not prepared to make such a determination; my intuitions are too strong otherwise.

I want to build a personhood and ethical theory that uses the above principles, allows for the moral worth of the past-persons and person-like beings. The ethical side of the theory would use my formulation of ethical relativity:”The Unsound Argument(Real Ethical Relativity)”:http://unsoundargument.com/ethics/real-ethical-relativity, which is nothing like ethical relativism, but instead uses consequentialism to resolve conflicts within a deontological framework.

So far, I can come up with the following personhood categories:

• Persons
• Entities that are below Persons
  • Past-Persons - beings that used to be persons, but are not currently persons.
  • Proto-persons - Entities, that if allowed to develop naturally, will develop into persons
  • Person-like Entities- Entities that have some of the qualities of a person, but not enough to qualify as a person and via natural development will not develop into a person.
  • Non-Persons - Entities that are neither proto-persons, not person-like
• Hyper-persons -Entities that are above Persons
  • Entities that have more qualities than persons and therefore have more moral worth
  • Purely hypothetical
  • God
  • Other Supernatural Beings
  • More advanced life forms, such as Star Trek’s Q.

I want to incorporate all of these classes into the personhood/ethical theory, but I don’t know how to deal with person-like entities. I might be able to solve the animal and severely retarded issues by introducing a clause that the more like a person one becomes, the more of a right to life they receive, a sort of graded personhood. All of this is still unclear where the lines of rights to life are and might seem very arbitrary. Perhaps all beings that are alive have a right to life and when conflicts arise, the beings with the higher moral worth win out over the less ones, ala ethical relativity’s consequences. More thought is needed.

The following is a sketch of Revolution, as presented by Anthony Alioto in my Philosophy of Revolution class at Columbia College.

What is Revolution? Some maintain that is it a new change, a return to an older system. Others maintain that is a clean break with the past. Many revolutionary leaders have taken the second view.

It is necessary to distinguish rebellion from revolution. Rebellion is remembered as an event within a system, while revolution fundamentally changes the system. A paradigm shift, if you will.

6 Traits common to revolutions:

1. The Idea and the faith in it.
   • i.e. the sun is the center of the system.
   • from each according to his ability to each according to his needs.
2. The faith is first held in the minds of the intellectuals and it sounds almost like a religious faith.
   • Marx
   • Galileo
3. Simple message and slogans - the revolution spreads through effective propaganda.
   • Liberty, Equality, Fraternity
   • Peace, Land, Bread
   • Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to loose but your chains and the whole world to gain!
4. Heavy use of symbols
   • Fire - burns the old system away and provides the energy for the new system. There is a bit of the phoenix myth present here.
   • The circle - used in the revolutions that talk about bringing about a return to the old utopia.
5. The Prometheus myth - the primal act of throwing off the unjust authority.
   • Prometheus brought fire from the gods to man. This was against the will of the gods and Prometheus was eternally punished for this.
6. The Pythagoras myth - a secret society of revolutionaries. They alone see the reality beneath the surface.
   • Smoke filled rooms filled with men discussing the needs of the revolution

Scotsman.com News - International - Creationism dismissed as ‘a kind of paganism’ by Vatican’s astronomer

BELIEVING that God created the universe in six days is a form of superstitious paganism, the Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno claimed yesterday.  Brother Consolmagno, who works in a Vatican observatory in Arizona and as curator of the Vatican meteorite collection in Italy, said a "destructive myth" had developed in modern society that religion and science were competing ideologies.

He described creationism, whose supporters want it taught in schools alongside evolution, as a "kind of paganism" because it harked back to the days of "nature gods" who were responsible for natural events.

Well said. Religion and science are not opposed to each other. Science helps us learn about the phenomenumenal world and religion talks about the noumenal world. To quote Sir William Bragg:

Religion and science are opposed … but only in the same sense as that in which my thumb and forefinger are opposed - and between the two, one can grasp everything.

P.S. This post was cross-posted at Hundie Jo dot com and the Mass Theology.

The excitement is continuing to build for the fall. This past week I got my keys to my building, my department and to my to-be office; signed my employment forms; and met some of the current program students. I also found out this week that I will be TA’ing for Intro to Religion.

I am now trying to decide on what area of emphasis and minor to go after. Here are the ones I am looking at:

Area of Emphasis:

• American Religious History
• Biblical Studies
• History of Christianity
• Religions of South Asia

Minors:

• College Teaching
• Linguistics
• Ancient Studies
• South Asian Language and Area Studies

I am not sure what combination I want to go with. Each has its pros and cons. It looks as if I am going to have to learn another language no matter what. While that seems to be a tough task, I am looking forward to it. The different options would dictate which language I would need to learn. Right now, these are my top three along with the language I would need to learn:

1. Biblical Studies and Ancient Studies - Greek
2. History of Christianity and Ancient Studies - Latin
3. Religions of South Asia and South Asian Language and Area Studies - Sanskrit

Since this is a liberal, secular school, choosing option one might prevent me from ever teaching at a Christian Colleges. I hear a lot of them do not take kindly to textual criticisms.

During option two I would pick up a lot of christian (that is, Catholic) philosophy. That is one thing where the Catholics absolutely kick the Protestants butt is in philosophy. A lot of Protestants seem to treat philosophy as if it was a dirty word. “I don’t know about you, but the Bible is enough for me! I don’t need any pagan Greek ideas tainting anything,” is an example of quotes exemplifying this attitude. As a Christian that wants to be a philosopher, I need to study the philosophy of the Catholics in detail.

Option three is a heavy curiosity of mine that I could develop my expertise in. I don’t know how “marketable” it would be when I went to get a job.

Anyway, those are some of the things that I am trying to decide between.

The existence of God is very important to religious people. Well, I suppose that Buddhists do not really worry about proving the existence of God. If there is a God (or Gods, depending on your persuasion), we should be able to demonstrate the God’s existence. This demonstration if often the beginning point in the defense or attack of a person’s belief. If I am going to argue about what an ocean is like, all that I might say is meaningless if there is in fact, no ocean. There are several ways to go about doing this. The most common in the Western religious tradition are:

• the Cosmological Argument,
• the Ontological Argument,
• the Teleological Argument,
• the Argument from Religious Experience,
• the Argument from Miracles, and
• Pascal’s Wager.

There are scores of others, including Pruss’s argument from Altruism:”The Unsound Argument(“Altruism, Teleology and God” by A. R. Pruss Part I)”:http://unsoundargument.com/ethics/altruism-and-teleology-i, but the above are the classic ones. There are some that say Pascal’s Wager is not really a proof of God’s existence, but an attempt to justify belief in the unproven. In the coming weeks I will be evaluating each.

Paper: Altruism, Teleology and God
Author: Alexandar R. Pruss

Summary

Because unlimited altruism is not biologically beneficial and yet humans see it as a desirable trait, there must be a non-scientific explanation for this. The best non-scientific explanation is that a god designed humans to be altruistic.

Part I will deal with the types of Teleology and the introduction of Altruism. Part II will deal with the application of Altruism to the types of Teleology.

Introduction

Pruss begins his paper by discussing a few of the arguments for the existence of God. First up is the ontological argument. It uses pure reason. An example of this is St. Anselm in the Proslogium.

Next up are the argument’s that use empirical observations. They are usually in the following structure:(quoted, but slightly paraphrased)

Common Empirical Arguments for God

1. There is a general fact about reality that cannot be explained in natural (i.e. non-supernatural) terms.
2. One argues that either the best or the only explanation includes the existence of God.
3. :. God exists.

Pruss goes on to say that there are two sorts of arguments from empirical observations, Cosmological arguments and Teleological arguments.

The Cosmological Arguments

Cosmological arguments are what he calls “prima facie value-neutral“, a mere fact, such as “there is order in the universe.”

Example: The Kalam cosmological argument:

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. :. the universe must have a cause.

The nice thing about Cosmological arguments are that they lie outside the realm of science. As Pruss puts it, “science is unable to address the question, since scientific explanations are in terms of the activities of contingent beings. The draw back is, are there even answers to such questions?

The Teleological Argument

The opposite side of the coin are arguments from values, such as, “the universe is beautiful“. These design arguments are called Teleological arguments. Pruss notes that usually these arguments are in competition with science and other philosophical explanations to provide explanations. An example of this is “the constants in nature are fine-tuned for the existence of life.” Perhaps the most famous is Paley’s arguments about design in animals. He said that since limbs and other parts of animals serve specific functions, they must have had a designer.

The drawback to this approach is that science may one day explain the features without the aid of a supernatural designer. Paley’s arguments were stripped of their forcefulness by Darwin’s theory of evolution. Evolution explained in natural terms how life could have an appearance of design without there actually being a designer.

So to speak, evolution filled in the gaps that Paley’s God sat in. Alas there was no room in the argument for God anymore. This is where we get the term God-of-the-Gaps. Any argument that uses science’s inability to explain phenomena is called a God-of-the-Gaps argument. Thing is, science keeps figuring out all of it’s problems. This has proved to be rather embarrassing to theists over the years. In addition, in answer to the fine-tuning argument is that if it existed any other way, we would not be here to observe it. This is called the anthropoid principle.

Principled Cosmological/Teleological Arguments

Beyond arguments that rely on holes in science, there are what Pruss calls Principled Teleological Arguments. They are arguments that attempt to explain phenomena that are outside the realm of science. Science can only deal with “hows“, it does not concern itself with “whys” . Well, not after we stopped using Aristotle’s scientific approach to nature. For instance, when confronted with a rainbow, science can tell you how the image is created in your mind, detailing the process of refraction and image collection by the mind. What it cannot do it tell us why it is a beautiful sight. In order to show something is a principled argument, one needs to show how science cannot explain the phenomena and then provide the alternate explanation. Pruss says that it needs to be noted that there are other competing explanations, but these will be from theology or philosophy, not from science.

The Idea of Altruism

Pruss notes that humans exhibit altruism. He defines altruism as doing things for others without expecting to be repaid. He brings up three arguments to back this claim against those of the cynics that believe that all actions that seem altruistic have an ulterior motive. The first conjures up a stranger asking you for the time of day. Secondly, he brings up a study by Monroe, Barton, and Klingemann that details the motives of gentile holocaust rescuers and how they were not attached to selfish reasons. His last argument appeals to the rationality of altruism. Pruss maintains that an important step in the moral development of humans is to realize the unity of mankind. I am no different from you or her. We all have the same moral worth. Therefore, doing a good to you is like doing a good to myself.

Altruism: Doing something for another without thinking to be repaid.

Pruss then argues that Altuism is a trait of the human species that cannot have been a result of evolutionary mechanisms since there is no competitive advantage for the altuist, only the recipient of the altruism. So far this is only a God-of-the-Gaps argument. It only rules out Natural Selection as a cause of altuism. It does not eliminate other naturalistic explanations.

Part II of this notes serries will cover the application of the above notion of Altuism with the two types of teleological arguments from above.

I think I am almost set for the fall at MU. This is what I accomplished last week:

• Turned in all of the employment paperwork
• Signed up for fall classes
• Found out what class I will be TA’ing
• Requested my book list for the fall classes

I will be taking “Major Religious Thinkers”, “Modern Perspectives / Study in Religion”, and “Gospel Literature”. I requested the book lists for the classes and was able to find out the book list for two of the classes. To my pleasant surprise I have already read one of the books, The Lost Gospel, the Book of Q and Christian Origins by Burton Mack. As a matter of fact, I have written a paper and did a presentation on the book while I was at ColumbiaCollege: A Review of “The Lost Gospel” by Henry Imler. That is one book off the list to read. I checked out a couple of others from the library to start reading and taking notes . Right now I am working on The Meaning of Jesus, Two Visions by Borg and Wright.

The following is the general outline and classification of religous development as presented in the introduction of In the Presence of Mystery: |inline