I take Spinoza's arguments against a free will to be sound. The issue is whether humans have an infinite capacity of self-determination, i.e., can function as the causal ground of action. There is a further question about whether and how this capacity or ground interacts with, or is exempt from, the natural causal order. (The rejection of free will generally rests on a rejection of the possibility of exemption from the natural causal order.)

There are some neo-Hegelians (I guess you can call them that, anyway) who have good arguments for there being such a capacity. (See: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=10904 and http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=15445 )

But there is something to be said for the distinction between a free will and a non-free one being merely verbal. (That is, amounting to nothing more than an insistence that in ordinary parlance we should keep talking as if we have a free will even if scientific evidence points to that claim being false... this is generally what the compatibilist view amounts to... though they may disagree with such a cynical assessment.)

Anyway, it's also true that complex nervous systems generate emergent degrees of freedom, but this doesn't stem from the will, but from computational power and related powers of self- and future-representation.

It's not identical, nor fallacious. My claim involves the following analogy:

Pasteurization doesn't remove all bacteria, it just kills enough (i.e., most) of it to make things safer for general consumption.

Likewise, vaccines are weakened/dead versions of often lethal viruses, set up, like pasteurization, to make things (in a more general sense) safer in general.

The claim that pasteurization can be done without (i.e., the weakening or killing off of sufficient bacteria to make things safe for general consumption) is exactly analogous to saying that we should just forgo vaccination since what we might call unvaccinated/"raw" experience, as in unpasteurized/raw milk, boosts immunity (even if a certain percentage of people will die as a result in either case).

The argument is not fallacious because it follows quite clearly by analogy, unlike the original fallacious argument, which doesn't.

By that logic, we should stop immunizing people against things because, at least if you don't die, you'll be building up your immunity (and the collective immunity of the human race).

The premise "There are risks with everything [you eat]." has nothing to do with an argument for drinking unpasteurized milk. In that regard, it is a red herring---it diverts attention away from the very claim it is intended to refute, namely that you shouldn't drink unpasteurized milk because you could die.

You could run a probability argument here to counter their claim, but it's unnecessary since the argument isn't that you shouldn't drink unpasteurized milk because it's more likely that you'll die from drinking it than from eating/drinking anything else, but rather that it's stupid to choose to drink unpasteurized milk when pasteurization is already the norm.

I don't know if this has been mentioned yet, but "philosophical apologetics" is a contradiction in terms.

Philosophers don't have the authority to get to define the language everyone else is allowed to use. What you're doing would be like a physicist complaining every time someone uses the word "force" to mean something other than mass times acceleration.

I didn't define it, I said it made no sense.

One of the reasons people are objecting to this article is that some of the claims are libelous, verging on equivalence to the blood libels against the Jews. E.g., point #21. That point is unequivocally false in its general form. While it may be true that SOME Muslims pretend to be friends with non-Muslims (maybe even for religious reasons) it is absolutely not true that they all do (any one of us with friends who happen to be Muslim are living reductio ad absurdums against this claim, and if you object that our friendships are all shams, well, then you're more paranoid and delusional than I imagined...).

What a stupid article.

Long Johns Silver:

"Rationalist" is a word that speaks for itself.

No it isn't. That's not how words work. At the very least (without taking sides in an ongoing philosophical/linguistic issue of semantics) sentences and the contexts of the sentences often, if not always, determine the meaning of words. 'Rationalist' in the context you used it makes no sense, however. That is why I picked on it.

Long Johns Silver, I don't know what you mean by 'rationalist', but that word is usually used in contrast to 'empiricist'. I'm also pretty sure most people on this website are not particularly rationalist, since most people don't think one can have knowledge of the world by reasoning from first principles (I do, but never mind...).

Claiming the 'rationalist' worldview for your views without really understanding what the word means is pretty ignorant.

Yeah but being "provocative" doesn't excuse being mind-numbingly STUPID.

"It is not surprising that those who have thought up occult qualities, intentional species, substantial forms and a thousand more bits of nonsense should have devised spectres and ghosts, and given credence to old wives' tales with view to disparaging the authority of Democritus, whose high reputation they so envied that they burned all the books which he had published amidst so much acclaim." ~ Spinoza, Letter 56

Hilarious. This reminds me of the time that Dawkins was interviewed by another remarkably stupid Irish American with inexplicable media clout.

It's as if a five year old wandered into a graduate seminar.

A gurdwara, a mandir, and a stupa would be great too.

Architecture ftw.

Well, some of you (in the comments) have, at least superficially, equivocated on 'value'. He doesn't mean data points, he means moral values/normativity in action.

Of course, that doesn't make him quite right. It is true that we don't have a 'good/evil meter' (despite Scientology). But, and this is where I will mildly agree with Sam Harris (even though I disagree with almost everything else he has to say on the subject), that values (of the moral/normative kind) are natural, and so fall under the scope of possible science. The question is how to respond to, evade, or otherwise trump the naturalistic fallacy, and systematize a scientific approach to normativity. All hitherto existing attempts to do so have dropped the ball on some level. Probably the closest things we have to a success is utilitarianism, but utilitarianism most often gets cashed out in too narrow a fashion (and responses to G.E. Moore's Open Question Argument have generally been weak).

What is needed is not merely a description of the neurobiology of moral talk, but an interplay between existing moral, social, political, and legal philosophical theories of normativity, reason, and value, and scientific approaches to the substantive content of those theories.

Ayala has already shot himself in the foot by denying systematic human intellectual discovery the means to understand this immensely meaningful facet of human life.

The word 'faith' is problematic. In German, 'Glaube' means both religious faith and mere 'belief' (e.g., the difference between "I have faith in God" and "I believe I see a zebra over there.") It seems people use `faith' to mean something like a trusting belief that things are as they want them to be even in the face of ignorance (which often cannot be helped or avoided).

There's nothing horribly wrong with that in itself. In that same sense it is possible to say that all people, atheists included "have faith" that the ground beneath their feet won't suddenly give out at random. It isn't true that atheists will enter the upper floors of a skyscraper only because they know that the floor is sturdy and certain not to fail. If that were true, no atheists would ever die in building collapses.

In any case, it would be stupid to retain even this more limited sense of 'faith' in the face of obvious evidence to the contrary (E.g., "I know the man at the front said don't go up there because the wood is rotting and they need to replace it, but I have faith that I'll be fine.") There is an open question for any given person about where they need to retain some sense of `faith' qua trusting belief in order to function in their daily lives. It may be true that most people could get on with a lot less of it, especially the nonsensical kind, but perhaps they can be assuaged by a more nuanced criticism of the problem with that kind of belief, rather than taking a machete to the semantics of ordinary language.

Also, re: comment #6:

Atheist have the highest average IQ.

That really doesn't seem right. You'd have to believe something like that on faith, since there's no reason not to think that atheists are normally distributed.

Someone hasn't read enough Spinoza... Which is odd for a well-educated woman, many of whose formative years were spent in Holland.

Or rather, her position is contra-Spinoza on the defeating of negative emotions. But such skepticism in the face of rigorous deductive arguments (however a priori and dogmatic) requires argument itself.

See Spinoza's Ethics, Part 4, Proposition 7. Her assertion to the effect that reasonable and just entreaties to the enemies of reason cannot work must contend with this.

Yeah the problem isn't adolescent bisexuality/experimenting. The problem is abuse of children and covering it up. Not sure how many times that needs to be said.

Oh for crying out loud... not this again...

Atheism has nothing to do with morality EXCEPT insofar as it requires rejecting divine command theory as a moral foundation. This doesn't entail rejecting moral foundationalism itself. The argument for that is something else entirely---resting on an account of normativity that renders values purely subjective.

Gah.

(... Oh, uh, and Richard's answer was pretty good, for what it's worth.)

To quote Artie Ziff, ``There is a difference between ignorance and stupidity.''

The children, and probably most of the parents are at least prima facie innocent of the charge of stupidity (some of them may in fact be stupid, but it doesn't follow from their being indoctrinated in this way that they are).

It would be stupid, however, if any of these children were taught (adequately, of course) about the proof for evolution by natural selection, about the sheer volume of facts they would have to reject beyond biology in order to continue believing what they are being told to believe, and yet they failed to believe then. Willful ignorance is not ignorance, but a form of stupidity characterized by irrationality or a failure to adopt or reject beliefs on the balance of reasons one has for or against them.

Criminalizing Christian youth ministering, however stupid it may be, doesn't seem the way to go, as the consequences are to some degree unforeseeable. (And bear a striking resemblance to Stalinist practices which did nothing except embolden nationalist movements with religion at their center).

In any case, this stuff is heartbreaking.

Seems like she might've also had a genuine health issue as well as religious fervour. Seems a cheap-shot (and bad science!) to say that this girl fainted/cried because of her belief in nonsense. I mean, the beliefs are nuts, but the causal role is unclear.

Having it emerge in "201" that it was Santa Claus in the bear suit all along was a stroke of genius.

And so on. Adèle Mercier comes closest to making an interesting argument—that believers do not really believe what they think they believe—but it soon collapses under the weight of its own baseless presuppositions.

No it doesn't.

See, look how easy it is to negate things without giving reasons. :)

Mercier is a stellar logician -- it would be far more disturbing than this troglodyte could ever realize if her arguments were so easily negated.

The article is simply a transparently failed analogy. Nothing more really needs to be said.

Maybe I can make my point clearer.

I see sense in writing/editorializing that the pope SHOULD be arrested, or at least investigated by international law, for his role in the cover-up and abetting of child abuse. I take this to involve the use of reasons to convince others of justified moral outrage.

My not seeing any sense in actually trying to arrest the pope is solely a matter of pragmatics and a particular opinion about the big picture. There's no law that says as a card-carrying anti-supernaturalist I have to agree with everything my compatriots support.

Arresting the pope has nothing to do with making people more logical or reasonable, and nor should it. But what I actually said was that I don't see any sense in *trying* to arrest the pope, because it isn't going to happen.

I am so very tired of people failing to understand that the word 'God' doesn't have one meaning. Einstein was a Spinozist. Period.

You may want to say "Oh, but he used the word 'God'.", but that doesn't mean what you think it means. Cherry-picking these claims from Einstein out of context is just ... stupid.

This might actually be one of the dumbest articles I've ever read, and that's saying a lot.

Then again, I don't particularly think trying to arrest the pope makes any sense either.

Rather than suddenly having faith in a divine supernatural deity, It looks he just thought that 'vitality' (or, rather, the activity of living beings) couldn't be understood as originating through a sliding scale of complexity, from inanimate particles and chemicals, to quasi-animate viruses and amino acids, to somewhat animate bacteria, fungi, and plants, to fully animate animals.

It's an understandable thing for a philosopher or scientist to struggle with.

What I can't figure out is why he would be persuaded to accept a sort of 'life-giving' principle (ala "God breathed the breath of life into Adam" or whatever...) rather than simply saying "This is a very curious conundrum, and it is not easy to see how the universe works in this way".

But even still, his position isn't as stupid as it keeps getting portrayed, it's just a bit screwy.

Oh well. I don't see what one human being changing his mind about the possibility of a kind of divinity or principle has to do with anything. Is it supposed to convince everyone else to stop seeing the world the way they see it for no reason?

Alternative Carpark, you mean like Mother Teresa?

Chuck, the problem wasn't the use of (quasi-)science, but the derivation of pseudo-morality from it.

When I was in high school (a Catholic one, by the way), I recall being forced to attend an abstinence presentation by a priest. His remarks were pretty much identical to this, except he tried to couch them in scientific terms --- every time you have sex your oxytocin and vasopressin production causes you to bond with that person, but both monogamy at a young age, not to mention promiscuity, means you are transgressing those bonds, since in all likelihood you aren't going to end up marrying that person.

What I found most disturbing at the time was that: a) the priest was very very VERY effeminate (and from Boston, by the way), and therefore very difficult to take seriously, and b) I knew enough science and critical thinking to see quite clearly that he was making a ridiculous leap in logic, but a lot of people in that room couldn't see it.

I remember thinking about raising my hand to point out the flaws in his reasoning, but then I realized I wanted to graduate. 0_o