Darwin wrote to Asa Gray in 1860: “With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.–I am bewildered.–I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was … Read the rest

Janet Radcliffe Richards has an excellent chapter on moral relativism in Human Nature After Darwin, including this on pages 198-9:

Any set of moral standards must include, as part of those standards, criteria for the appropriate treatment of other people…This means there are necessarily conflicts, when some people think they should do what other people think they should not be allowed to do. And, indeed, the essence of what it is for people to have different moral principles is disagreement: if there were no disagreement, there would be no difference. And since there is disagreement, it follows that not everyone can be given the freedom to follow their own principles.

This is what I was talking about the other … Read the rest

Simon Blackburn, not surprisingly, talks about this matter of metaethics in his short introduction to ethics Being Good. He starts right off with the question of god as the backer or guarantor or prop for ethics.

For many people, ethics is not only tied up with religion, but is completely settled by it. Such people do not need to think too much about ethics, because there is an authoritative code of instructions, a handbook of how to live.

But the trouble with that, of course, is that the code is only as good as it is. If the code in question is a bad code, then this business of not thinking too much is not good.

Blackburn goes on … Read the rest

Here, for instance. A moral issue (an issue because some people have made it an issue, though that wasn’t inevitable): a moral issue being discussed with arguments and reasons rather than with invocation of a deity or of Christian/Muslim/Hindu morality.

Last week British scientists announced a revolutionary screening process for inherited diseases in embryos. It will be quicker and more accurate than the existing method and it will detect thousands more genetic defects than previously possible…Those who don’t know about it can perhaps hardly imagine the drawn out suffering of Huntington’s disease or Duchenne muscular dystrophy or Prader-Willi syndrome or Fragile X, both for the people affected and for their families, until death puts an end to it…It will

Norm quotes Freeman Dyson reviewing Dennett’s new book.

There are two kinds of atheists, ordinary atheists who do not believe in God and passionate atheists who consider God to be their personal enemy.

No, that doesn’t cover it. There’s more to it than that. There are atheists who, independent of what they consider god to be, are (probably, in terms of what Dyson is talking about) not ordinary atheists who do not believe in god and are not fussed about it: there are atheists who, whatever they think of god, feel a certain sense of outrage, or perhaps violation, at being urged or commanded to believe in something there is no good reason to believe. It’s not so much god … Read the rest

A brief review of WTM in the Guardian today. A favourable review mostly – calls it lively. It takes issue with our putative slapping around of Derrida, which was actually far more of a slapping around of one of his fans, but that’s okay.

People have also alerted me to some nice blog posts on the book. This one for instance by an ex-Mormon. His self-description in the margin makes him sound like a B&W kind of guy:

I’m a full-time academic trying to make my way in the world and recover my own independence of thought and feeling…I was raised Mormon and was quite believing until college, when I gradually began to make an intellectual and spiritual split.