Some Suspicions About The Superiority Of Liberal Moral Values

Earlier today, I drew attention to Greta Christina’s article formulating some ideas she picked up from Rebecca Newberger Goldstein.  If you have already read either or both of those posts, you can just skip the next two paragraphs meant to catch up new readers. The Goldstein/Greta Christina argument built off of Jonathan Haidt’s theory of […]

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Michael Shermer On “The Pattern Behind Self-Deception”

Shermer does TED and explains how two of the brain’s most basic, hard-wired traits, useful for survival, backfire on us: Your Thoughts?

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True And False In Adam And Eve

Yesterday I replied to Mary Midgley’s article out this weekend, which claimed that evolutionary theory does not refute Genesis since Genesis was not meant to be a literal description of how God made the world. In reply I revisted remarks and videos that I posted last fall which overviewed the ways that even if we […]

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Judging From Smells

Salon has a neat interview with Dr. Alan Hirsch, founder and neurological director of the Smell & Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago.  He argues here that the sense of smell immediately leads us to value judgment than the other senses are and then explains how our moms influence our tastes: And what’s the relationship between […]

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Andy Thomson on Why We Believe in Gods

Your Thoughts?

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Camels With Hammers Philosophy

After this introductory paragraph, every sentence in this post will summarize and link a different post expressing my views, primarily on topics related to atheism, philosophy, and ethics—which are the primary preoccupations of this blog. I am organizing all of these links into this one summary statement of “Camels With Hammers’ Philosophy.”  This post will […]

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On Failing To Grasp How Competition Can Be Cooperative And How Cooperation Can Be Counter-Productive

Robin Hanson responds to work such as Frans de Waal’s which emphasizes the invaluable role that empathy and cooperation played in natural selection of humans by stressing that as good as cooperation might be, we are prone to making serious errors about what genuinely helpful cooperation entails in specific instances: The unstated moral behind most […]

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Challenging Myths Of Eden

Below is a thought-provoking video which critiques the notion of fallenness from several angles.  It builds off of one point I’ve wanted to write about for a while and that’s that the non-literal reading of Genesis is just as false as the metaphorical one.  When religious people argue that the Garden of Eden story is […]

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The Yearning Animal

Greta Christina takes down the argument that the desire for God proves there is a God to fulfill it out there to be discovered: Someone (I can’t remember who now) recently pointed out that the “no atheists in foxholes” argument, even if it were true (which it’s not), isn’t an argument for God’s existence. It’s actually […]

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Bad Evolutionary Psychology: Attractiveness

Sendai Anonymous tears into Satoshi Kanazawa for His ridiculous research trying (and failing) to link “attractiveness” with reproductive strategies and reproductive success, and all sorts of vacuous claims regarding “attractiveness”. His statistics proved to be flawed and were many times criticised, which Kanazawa obviously ignored. He also claimed that women are getting more “attractive” faster […]

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The Evolutionary Advantages And Present Disadvantages Of Our Conformist Minds

John Wilkins has a good post on the value of our minds’ readinesses to defer to authorities from an evolutionary standpoint: The evolutionary justification for this is, of course the following: if evolution were a designer, trying to ensure that thinking beings learned and knew what they had to to survive, a cheaper rule than […]

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Are Sex and Morality Merely “Evolutionary Tricks”?

Francis Collins trots out a familiar old argument against atheism.  The argument is that if there is no God then our morality is an illusion.  Collins’s presentation of this argument features an unusual and suspicious spin.  Collins knows that arguments can be made from evolutionary psychology that broadly moral thinking seems to have evolved in […]

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An Argument For Gay Marriage And Against Traditionalism

I am puzzled by appeals to history to oppose gay marriage because history is only the story of what people have done and never of itself directly tells us anything about right or wrong.  Results of history can serve as warnings about effective and uneffective approaches to goal x or goal y but what people […]

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Stephen Pinker Makes The Case Against The “Blank Slate”

Thanks to AtheisTube for the find. Your Thoughts?

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Is God Needed For Us To Care About Starving Kids A World Away?

A few weeks ago now, I wrote a post, Commitment To Value Without God, in which I discussed how even when I was a Christian, I realized that I did not need to make reference to God in order to either psychologically recognize the value of sumptuous food or good friendship or any of various […]

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Dawkins vs. Collins (Obama’s New NIH Selection)

RichardDawkins.net has reprinted a 2006 debate between Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins, the prominent (and now powerful) proponent of compatibility between religion and science who has recently been selected by Obama to head up the NIH.  The article has some really interesting moments, so I recommend you read it in full.  Here is what I […]

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Towards A “Non-Moral” Standard Of Ethical Evaluation

In a previous post, I raised some remarks from psychologist of morality Jonathan Haidt, in which he discussed his theory that moral thinking appeals to 5 essential modules hardwired into our brains by evolution.  In the interview I cited from a couple of years ago he only referred to 4 of the 5 modules but […]

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Challenges To Evolutionary Psychology

Interesting arguments.  I’m not sure how many of them threaten the credibility of either evolutionary psychology or sociobiology as disciplines themselves , rather than specific morally and politically unpleasant theses advanced by particular theories derived by scientists working within those fields.  And these arguments force evo psych and sociobiology to incorporate a view of the […]

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