"But occasionally I’ve suggested that there might be a kind of god that is real. This prospect was raised by the manifest existence of a moral order—that is, by the stubborn, if erratic, expansion of humankind’s moral imagination over the millennia, and the fact that the ongoing maintenance of social order depends on the further expansion of the moral imagination, on movement toward moral truth. The existence of a moral order, I’ve said, makes it reasonable to suspect that humankind in some sense has a “higher purpose.” And maybe the source of this higher purpose, the source of the moral order, is something that qualifies for the label “god” in at least some sense of that word." - Robert Wright, the Evolution of God
The book on religion that I've always found closest to my own believes was the Evolution of God by Robert Wright (highly recommended). It falls in between other books I've read.
(Like How to Win a Cosmic War by Reza Aslan and the Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris being at the respective ends of modern views of religion)
The Evolution of God's central thesis (made almost apologetically after an extensively researched recap of human's religious history) is that human's morals -and idea of "God"- has become more refined throughout history. The point being -which plays into an earlier work by Wright 'Nonzero'- that mankind's morals are moving it towards more and more cooperative behavior. That we could be moving to a more perfect ideal of "good," which Wright says 'might count' as "God."
I've always been a little sad that Robert Wright hasn't gotten the same notoriety that other contemporaries have gotten, like Reza Aslan and Sam Harris. But, I guess taking a harder stance is more sensational.
What do you think? Is there some "direction" to human morals? Are we moving towards some prefect idea of good? And -if we were- could that idea count as "God?"
When people talk about "God", they are not talking about an abstract idea. They are talking about a concrete entity - a sentient being. When Robert Wright claims that there is an abstract perfect good, whatever the other merits of his arguments may be, he is not saying anything about God. For him to suggest that he is is simply redefinition, a philosophically uninteresting exercise. We can call whatever we want "God", but it doesn't change anything.
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People have used "god" to mean countless things. Its exact definition seems like more of a personal choice than anything else. Regardless, I agree the labeling isn't really the point. Certainly, it shouldn't be used to obfuscate the other -more important- questions asked:
Does "prefect good" exist, and -if it does- are we moving towards it?
What to label 'it' is tangential at best, I'll not argue here. Call 'it' whatever you want; we'll all know what you mean.
Is there a "moral order?"
Well, you did post this in Religion rather than Philosophy, which carries certain connotations. And "Does X demonstrate the existence of God?" is prima facie a pretty important question; I wouldn't want to dismiss it offhand and just start rambling about the entirely nonreligious aspects of X.
Anyway.
Is "perfect" synonymous with "maximal", or is there more to it than that? Because if there is an objective morality, it seems pretty obvious that it would have a maximal state, so if "perfect" means "maximal" then the the question probably reduces to "Is there an objective morality?" (Unless you want me to really quibble and ask stuff like whether a perfect good is the sort of thing that "exists" or whether it would demonstrate some other form of being.)
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What do you think? Is there some "direction" to human morals? Are we moving towards some prefect idea of good? And -if we were- could that idea count as "God?"
Could you redefine God to mean an idea? That's absurd, but sure you can. You could also redefine God to mean a running shoe and as it turns out, I'm wearing a pair of Gods right now. They're comfy.
Well, you did post this in Religion rather than Philosophy, which carries certain connotations. And "Does X demonstrate the existence of God?" is prima facie a pretty important question; I wouldn't want to dismiss it offhand and just start rambling about the entirely nonreligious aspects of X.
It's true, I posted in it in Religion rather than Philosophy, and that does carries certain connotations. Mainly, I did that because A) Wright is talking about the history of religion if nothing else, and B) because I -personally- would count "the source of this higher purpose, the source of the moral order" as "God." However, I've come to realize my personal definition of that term is more expansive than others. Additionally, I've also come to the realization little is gained whenever I try to argue definitions with people, something I've done quite often here (as I'm sure you can attest). About the only thing I've gotten from such a discussion is the sinking suspicion I don't really understand definitions. So, if you feel/believe/know that what we're talking about doesn't have enough 'sentience' -or whathaveyou- to be defined as "God," I'm willing to let it go at that. Another semantic discussion on what counts as "God" or "god" isn't what I'm after, and something I'd rather avoid at this stage of the game. I'd rather accept what you say on that matter as more learned than my own opinion and move on.
Is "perfect" synonymous with "maximal", or is there more to it than that? Because if there is an objective morality, it seems pretty obvious that it would have a maximal state, so if "perfect" means "maximal" then the the question probably reduces to "Is there an objective morality?" (Unless you want me to really quibble and ask stuff like whether a perfect good is the sort of thing that "exists" or whether it would demonstrate some other form of being.)
Yes, that's what I mean. Is there some "maximally good" code of conduct for humans, an objective morality. And, does the "direction" of the growth in our moral understanding point in its general vicinity.
This isn't terribly different from what Sam Harris argues in the Moral Landscape. In fact, I think it might be exactly the same, just with different connotation about the nature of the objective morality. Connotation I'm happy to ignore for this discussion.
I don't see how even the most cursory investigations into the state of human affairs would lead you to believe that we are moving towards a better morality. All I see on a daily basis is an full frontal assault on my morality.
I don't see how even the most cursory investigations into the state of human affairs would lead you to believe that we are moving towards a better morality. All I see on a daily basis is an full frontal assault on my morality.
It is your understanding that is cursory. Imagine you lived a thousand years ago. In that era, democracy was nonexistent, slavery was omnipresent, wars of aggression were commonplace, rape was a perk of power, and your chance of dying a violent death was at least an order of magnitude higher. If this would not be a far, far greater assault on your morality than that which you are forced to confront today, then you need to find a new morality.
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So basically not God is good but good is God?
I don't see how even the most cursory investigations into the state of human affairs would lead you to believe that we are moving towards a better morality. All I see on a daily basis is an full frontal assault on my morality.
I never understood this sentiment outside of the context of the Rosy retrospection cognitive bias.
A larger percentage of people in Germany died because of violence in the Middle Ages than did in the World War II era. "Historical records show that between the late Middle Ages and the 20th century, European countries saw a 10- to 50-fold decline in their rates of homicide."[1]
Think about that.
And, while you're there, think about how much slavery and intolerance we have in the world now compared to then. To refute this, you might talk about people starving in Africa -or something- and how we're not doing anything about it. But, do you think 1,000 years ago people in American/European gave ANY *****s about people in Africa? The very fact you think about them AT ALL shows how far we're coming. People generally feared and hated people outside of their tribe, not worried about their well being.
Read how the Old Testament regards non-Israelites; that might give you a sense of how far we've come.
So basically not God is good but good is God?
I don't see how even the most cursory investigations into the state of human affairs would lead you to believe that we are moving towards a better morality. All I see on a daily basis is an full frontal assault on my morality.
I never understood this sentiment outside of the context of the Rosy retrospection cognitive bias.
A larger percentage of people in Germany died because of violence in the Middle Ages than did in World War II. "Historical records show that between the late Middle Ages and the 20th century, European countries saw a 10- to 50-fold decline in their rates of homicide."[1]
Think about that.
And, while you're there, think about how much slavery and intolerance we have in the world now compared to than. to refute this, you might talk about people starving in Africa -or something- and how we're not doing anything about it. But, do you think 1,000 years ago people in American gave ANY *****s about people in Africa? The very fact you think about them AT ALL shows how far we're coming. People generally feared and hated people outside of their tribe, not worried about their well being.
Read how the Old Testament regards non-Israelites; that might give you a sense of how far we've come.
To be clear, I do not agree with what Bakgat is saying. However, I think you and BS are missing his point.
Backgat is saying that morality (i.e. moral standards) are weakening over time, even though the actual incidence of immoral behavior may be decreasing.
To take your Middle Ages murder example - both now and then, murder has been considered wrong. In other words, the relevant moral standard ("murder is wrong") is unchanged. In fact, the relevant moral standard was arguably more forceful in the Middle Ages since he punishment for murder was almost always execution, whereas today the punishment is often just imprisonment.
Backgat is saying that morality (i.e. moral standards) are weakening over time, even though the actual incidence of immoral behavior may be decreasing.
To take your Middle Ages murder example - both now and then, murder has been considered wrong. In other words, the relevant moral standard ("murder is wrong") is unchanged. In fact, the relevant moral standard was arguably more forceful in the Middle Ages since he punishment for murder was almost always execution, whereas today the punishment is often just imprisonment.
So, your/Backgat's point would be people back then did it more, but thought it was worse?
If it is, I would refute this. How -other than their actions- would you determine what they thought about it? If they did it more, I would take it for granted they also didn't think it was as bad.
Or, are you/Backgat saying the severity of murder has some how changed? That it was less of a moral "sin" in the past than now?
Backgat is saying that morality (i.e. moral standards) are weakening over time, even though the actual incidence of immoral behavior may be decreasing.
To take your Middle Ages murder example - both now and then, murder has been considered wrong. In other words, the relevant moral standard ("murder is wrong") is unchanged. In fact, the relevant moral standard was arguably more forceful in the Middle Ages since he punishment for murder was almost always execution, whereas today the punishment is often just imprisonment.
So, your/Backgat's point would be people back then did it more, but thought it was worse?
The point I perceive Bakgat to be making is that the moral standards were "better" even though compliance with those standards may have been worse.
If it is, I would refute this. How -other than their actions- would you determine what they thought about it? If they did it more, I would take it for granted they also didn't think it was as bad.
For example the severity with which non-compliance with a moral standard was punished. (Many crimes in the past were punishable by death.) Or the degree of cultural/institutional disapproval of immoral behavior.
If the punishment for theft is death, but many people steal, we could say that the moral standard against theft is very strict even though compliance is low. If the punishment for theft is minor scolding, but virtually no one steals, we could say that the moral standard against theft is weak even though compliance is high.
To take your Middle Ages murder example - both now and then, murder has been considered wrong. In other words, the relevant moral standard ("murder is wrong") is unchanged.
Okay. Let's assume you're correct that the moral standard against murder is unchanged. What about slavery, rape, war, or despotism?
And in fact the moral standard against murder is not unchanged. Many killings which would clearly be murder to us were considered justifiable in ancient cultures. A Roman paterfamilias, for instance, legally had the literal power of life and death over those in his household. The Aztecs (and Romans, and many other cultures) ritually executed prisoners of war on a regular basis. The concept of "honor killing" was widespread and persists in some regions to this day.
If the punishment for theft is death, but many people steal, we could say that the moral standard against theft is very strict even though compliance is low. If the punishment for theft is minor scolding, but virtually no one steals, we could say that the moral standard against theft is weak even though compliance is high.
As I'm sure you're already aware, it's more complicated than that. Archaic punishments were often incredibly severe out of the (erroneous) belief that making an example of a few criminals would deter the rest, rather than the idea that the punishment was "fair" for the crime. Before modern policing, society's ability to catch criminals was very poor; most went free. Couldn't someone, with just as much basis as you, say that the consistency of the modern system means that our "moral standard" is much stronger than the older, more arbitrary version?
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Backgat is saying that morality (i.e. moral standards) are weakening over time, even though the actual incidence of immoral behavior may be decreasing.
bakgat is saying this on the grounds that less people are blindly accepting Christianity without thinking about it, at least in the Western world. This is a positive change.
To take your Middle Ages murder example - both now and then, murder has been considered wrong. In other words, the relevant moral standard ("murder is wrong") is unchanged. In fact, the relevant moral standard was arguably more forceful in the Middle Ages since he punishment for murder was almost always execution, whereas today the punishment is often just imprisonment.
That there were provisions against someone killing someone else somewhere in the law code does not mean the moral standards haven't changed.
For instance, there were certainly laws against murder in Sparta or Medieval Europe. Unless you were a helot. Or a serf. Or a slave. Or a baby that was seen as too weak to keep.
And in fact the moral standard against murder is not unchanged. Many killings which would clearly be murder to us were considered justifiable in ancient cultures. A Roman paterfamilias, for instance, legally had the literal power of life and death over those in his household. The Aztecs (and Romans, and many other cultures) ritually executed prisoners of war on a regular basis. The concept of "honor killing" was widespread and persists in some regions to this day.
I would like to add to that what is perhaps the pinnacle of different standards on murder, which is the ancient practice of "Trial by combat," in which a person accused of a crime was judged innocent or guilty based on whether or not he could win in a fight against his accuser, the loser of these fights often dying.
So we have the ironic and terrifying situation of it being entirely possible that a man who committed no murder could be accused of murder and then declared guilty of murder because he was murdered.
The point I perceive Bakgat to be making is that the moral standards were "better" even though compliance with those standards may have been worse.
For example the severity with which non-compliance with a moral standard was punished. (Many crimes in the past were punishable by death.) Or the degree of cultural/institutional disapproval of immoral behavior.
If the punishment for theft is death, but many people steal, we could say that the moral standard against theft is very strict even though compliance is low. If the punishment for theft is minor scolding, but virtually no one steals, we could say that the moral standard against theft is weak even though compliance is high.
How are you-for-Backgat even defining "better" and/or "strict?" Because -no matter how you slice 'better/strict'- whatever we're doing now is more effective.
If less people are committing these reprehensible crimes, then I say -by definition- our moral standards are "better" in that regard.
I remember back at Delbarton(the all boy's catholic highschool I attended) the only question I ever got wrong in my morality class was "The goal of a moral society is to make sin harder to commit." I said "False" the answer was "True."
To take your Middle Ages murder example - both now and then, murder has been considered wrong. In other words, the relevant moral standard ("murder is wrong") is unchanged.
Okay. Let's assume you're correct that the moral standard against murder is unchanged. What about slavery, rape, war, or despotism?
And in fact the moral standard against murder is not unchanged. Many killings which would clearly be murder to us were considered justifiable in ancient cultures. A Roman paterfamilias, for instance, legally had the literal power of life and death over those in his household. The Aztecs (and Romans, and many other cultures) ritually executed prisoners of war on a regular basis. The concept of "honor killing" was widespread and persists in some regions to this day.
As I said, I'm not advocating Backgat's position, I was just pointing out that I didn't think you'd responded to it. This, however, is a direct response, and I have no reason to disagree.
The point I perceive Bakgat to be making is that the moral standards were "better" even though compliance with those standards may have been worse.
For example the severity with which non-compliance with a moral standard was punished. (Many crimes in the past were punishable by death.) Or the degree of cultural/institutional disapproval of immoral behavior.
If the punishment for theft is death, but many people steal, we could say that the moral standard against theft is very strict even though compliance is low. If the punishment for theft is minor scolding, but virtually no one steals, we could say that the moral standard against theft is weak even though compliance is high.
How are you-for-Backgat even defining "better" and/or "strict?" Because -no matter how you slice 'better/strict'- whatever we're doing now is more effective.
If less people are committing these reprehensible crimes, then I say -by definition- our moral standards are "better" in that regard.
"Better" meaning the moral rules and associated punishments assigned by society were more correct. (Maybe for Backgat that means "more biblical" or something).
"More effective" does not necessarily equal more correct. If a society imposed the following strict moral rule: "you may not hug your children," and did an extremely good job of enforcing compliance with this rule, we could say that this moral rule is extremely effective. But that doesn't mean the rule is a good rule. High compliance level does not imply high quality moral standard.
"More effective" does not necessarily equal more correct. If a society imposed the following strict moral rule: "you may not hug your children," and did an extremely good job of enforcing compliance with this rule, we could say that this moral rule is extremely effective. But that doesn't mean the rule is a good rule. High compliance level does not imply high quality moral standard.
But, this goes against the idea that "The goal of a moral society is to make sin harder to commit." which -as I mentioned above- is at least the Catholic Christian stance.
And, with all of the Protestant Christians out there advocating for secular laws to be based on scripture (like wanting gay marriage banned - for example) It seems to me believing the goal of a moral society is to make sin harder to commit is a rather universal religious idea. (Just look at Sharia law, as another example)
So, I don't see how "more effective" isn't "better" or "more correct" in this context.
If the current laws are making sin harder to comment, then they are fulfilling the goal of a moral society more correctly than past laws.
Assuming for a moment that mankind has in fact been on a continuous course toward a more moral state (which I believe we have been), I was reminded of some material I'd read about the impact of the idea of Judeo-Christian "Monotheism". Historians, philosophers and religious thinkers alike seem to share an uncharacteristic level of agreement on the magnitude of that idea's effects, and it strikes me as odd the variety of arguments that its impact is used to prove.
Of course, religious thinkers point to the tangible benefits to the human condition that followed that idea, whether caused by it or not, and generally fit it into some maxim about how truth can be known by observing its good results. Typical, it's a very squishy idea.
Secular people though have observed Monotheism as pivotal, in a way that goes something like this. Mankind didn't become interested in modeling the behavior of the world around them under a universal set of rules until they believed that those rules were actually universal and consistent. Judeo Christian monotheism, as opposed to polytheism and preceding forms of monotheism, established one, limitless God whose principles were universal. Gods of equal power with competing spheres of influence, a limited, impassioned God, or whatever the alternatives were, interfered with mankind's opinion of the usefulness of practical observation. If crops grew differently in a neighboring land full of people who followed a different God, there's no point in trying to understand it because that's just their God or Gods. But if everything is subject to one, perfectly consistent God, then an imperative duty is placed upon mankind to unite everything under one explanation. Then of course through competing cultures, the one that took interest in advancing its knowledge won out. Under a certain view, that explains a good bit of the 3000 years of Western scientific achievement, economics, and exploration, inasmuch as the other cultures of the world can be argued to lack an investment of equal character in the pursuit of a unified body of knowledge.
I'm not sure I buy 100% of that. But the interesting point of difference between the view of religious thinkers and historians is that the historians don't feel the need to conflate the effects of the idea with the property of truth. Whether a person's belief in a thing has good effects isn't evidence for that believed thing to be true. And I'm sure on that specific point, few will argue that Christianity has to be true because Western advancements have vindicated it. There's plenty of room for the contrary.
I find the relationship between philosophical Naturalism and modern science to be similar. If mankind believes itself to be the only intelligent agent in the universe, with all other events natural, then certain scientific principles follow, such as the importance of repeatable experiment, hypothesis, etc. Whether the belief that created that framework is true or false seems to fade against the importance of the results. If some limitless, non-human intelligence revealed itself as not subject to natural law, that wouldn't invalidate any scientific progress, although it would disprove philosophical Naturalism.
In the area of morality then, it may very well be that the same is true. People follow ideas that produce effects that are valued as good, and an idea that has left positive effects in its wake is extremely difficult to challenge in the short term. But it may be completely arbitrary. For example, a hypothetical need of population control and conservation in the future might reshape some of mankind's moral views that were formed during an era of scarcity of labor and limitless resources. Then whatever is left in common after that hypothetical clash is taken to be true. It's hard to know without seeing the hypothetical destination of this kind of moral progress.
I think all we can say right now is that mankind has become more cooperative because we value the effects of cooperation. The fact that people comprehend these certain values of human interaction on a level intuitive enough for us to consider it a guiding light of morality seems to be evidence of something, but it might not be, and I don't know what that thing would be, besides.
Assuming for a moment that mankind has in fact been on a continuous course toward a more moral state (which I believe we have been),
Really? A continuous course?
Secular people though have observed Monotheism as pivotal, in a way that goes something like this. Mankind didn't become interested in modeling the behavior of the world around them under a universal set of rules until they believed that those rules were actually universal and consistent. Judeo Christian monotheism, as opposed to polytheism and preceding forms of monotheism, established one, limitless God whose principles were universal.
Hang on.
First of all, what do you mean by "principles are universal"?
Second, as you yourself admit, there were cultures prior to Christianity who practiced monotheism. So if you're talking about a singular God who encompasses all, there were other cultures that had that.
Third, it would be anachronistic to ascribe to either the Jews or the Christians of antiquity the term "monotheistic" in the sense that we think of it now. Jews and Christians of the Roman Empire believed in the existence of other gods. Paul affirmed this. Jews and Christians were specifically forbidden to worship other gods, which is why there's a great deal of talk of sacrifices to other gods and the consuming of the meat from them in the Bible.
However, even this was danced around. As I said, in antiquity, the vast majority people believed that all gods existed, and nobody wanted a pissed off deity after them. So, depending on where you were, many Jews did pay respects to other gods. Also, it's not as though polytheistic Christian sects didn't exist.
Gods of equal power with competing spheres of influence, a limited, impassioned God, or whatever the alternatives were, interfered with mankind's opinion of the usefulness of practical observation.
I don't know what you mean by this.
If crops grew differently in a neighboring land full of people who followed a different God, there's no point in trying to understand it because that's just their God or Gods. But if everything is subject to one, perfectly consistent God, then an imperative duty is placed upon mankind to unite everything under one explanation. Then of course through competing cultures, the one that took interest in advancing its knowledge won out. Under a certain view, that explains a good bit of the 3000 years of Western scientific achievement, economics, and exploration, inasmuch as the other cultures of the world can be argued to lack an investment of equal character in the pursuit of a unified body of knowledge.
First of all, look at that number again. 3000 years? The Jewish faith was around way longer than that, and the Christ movement has existed about 2000 years of that. So that should immediately tell us that there's a problem with what you are saying.
The second is that all of that is garbage. The advancements of Western society you speak of do not come from its monotheism. They came from the advancements of the Greeks and the Roman Empire, as well as the Islamic Golden Age, which were discovered/rediscovered by people in Western Europe. That was the Renaissance.
Case in point: in the Dark Ages, there was a whole lot of monotheism going around. Notice how it's still called "The Dark Ages."
I'm not sure I buy 100% of that.
If the argument is that monotheism is a prerequisite to scientific advancement, then no, of course you shouldn't buy any of it.
Where did you hear this anyway?
I think all we can say right now is that mankind has become more cooperative because we value the effects of cooperation.
So you think all we can say is nothing? "We value cooperation because we value cooperation" says nothing.
First of all, what do you mean by "principles are universal"?
Meaning that if "God" makes the sun rise and set in your area of the universe, He also makes it rise and set in the same way in someone else's area of the universe. (Provided you are on the same planet, of course). Basically, that the things that people observe are not supernaturally localized.
Second, as you yourself admit, there were cultures prior to Christianity who practiced monotheism. So if you're talking about a singular God who encompasses all, there were other cultures that had that.
This is a pretty cursory point. The fact is, Judaism was different from contemporary religions in terms of a certain set of qualities that people can, and do, argue over endlessly. But the fact is Judaism had immense impact. It's pointless to say that it shouldn't have because X, Y and Z religions were similar, because the fact is that it did have that impact while others didn't.
Third, it would be anachronistic to ascribe to either the Jews or the Christians of antiquity the term "monotheistic" in the sense that we think of it now. Jews and Christians of the Roman Empire believed in the existence of other gods. Paul affirmed this. Jews and Christians were specifically forbidden to worship other gods, which is why there's a great deal of talk of sacrifices to other gods and the consuming of the meat from them in the Bible.
It's disingenuous to hold that body of thought to a standard where it's not allowed to evolve without exposing itself to criticism as inauthentic. Unless someone actually does believe that "God" gave Moses the "whole truth" on Mount Sinai, which is absurd in my opinion, it's incongruent to use the traits of the religion at its founding to support the idea that it didn't develop certain ideas. Because the fact is that these objective patterns of thought did emerge in that culture and that area of the world, where they did not elsewhere.
However, even this was danced around. As I said, in antiquity, the vast majority people believed that all gods existed, and nobody wanted a pissed off deity after them. So, depending on where you were, many Jews did pay respects to other gods. Also, it's not as though polytheistic Christian sects didn't exist.
It's also incongruent to show that other sects may have believed different things to refute the effects of what others did believe. Unless one believes that a group placing itself under the banner of "Christian" is the single act that made its patterns of thought important, which is also absurd in my opinion. It seems to me like only a prototypical follower of Christianity would believe anything like this, and you certainly don't have to be one in order to observe its effects on history.
Gods of equal power with competing spheres of influence, a limited, impassioned God, or whatever the alternatives were, interfered with mankind's opinion of the usefulness of practical observation.
I don't know what you mean by this.
Basically, the more you believe in a supernatural causality that is arbitrary, the less interested you are in fitting that causality into a pattern, because you don't believe there is one.
If crops grew differently in a neighboring land full of people who followed a different God, there's no point in trying to understand it because that's just their God or Gods. But if everything is subject to one, perfectly consistent God, then an imperative duty is placed upon mankind to unite everything under one explanation. Then of course through competing cultures, the one that took interest in advancing its knowledge won out. Under a certain view, that explains a good bit of the 3000 years of Western scientific achievement, economics, and exploration, inasmuch as the other cultures of the world can be argued to lack an investment of equal character in the pursuit of a unified body of knowledge.
First of all, look at that number again. 3000 years? The Jewish faith was around way longer than that, and the Christ movement has existed about 2000 years of that. So that should immediately tell us that there's a problem with what you are saying.
Again, I don't agree that attributing these cultural traits to the singular act of founding the religion is necessary to prove that they developed. It seems to me that the only people who would argue that would be those who believe that the founding was in some way divine.
The second is that all of that is garbage. The advancements of Western society you speak of do not come from its monotheism. They came from the advancements of the Greeks and the Roman Empire, as well as the Islamic Golden Age, which were discovered/rediscovered by people in Western Europe. That was the Renaissance.
Case in point: in the Dark Ages, there was a whole lot of monotheism going around. Notice how it's still called "The Dark Ages."
The idea that the Dark Ages were less advanced than the Classical Period, because oh look Rome had aqueducts, is poor history. The anthropologist would conclude that the Hellenist culture was missing something based on nothing more than the bare fact that it didn't survive against other cultural influences.
I also don't know what to make at all of the argument that advancement didn't come from Western Monotheism, because it was the Romans and the Islamic Golden Age. What??? Both the Roman Catholics and Islam were Monotheist.
I'm not sure I buy 100% of that.
If the argument is that monotheism is a prerequisite to scientific advancement, then no, of course you shouldn't buy any of it.
Where did you hear this anyway?
No, the argument is that a world view where observed phenomena are objective and repeatable is necessary in order for objective, repeatable observation (i.e. Science) to have any appeal. And that the most important factor in the development of that cultural trait, as it actually happened in history, was Western Monotheism. Clearly monotheism itself isn't a cardinal requisite for that cultural trait. Which is exactly what I was getting at in regards to the OP and the evolution of moral belief. Still, history shows that was how this cultural trait developed in the West, in contrast to the rest of the world where it didn't.
As to where I heard it, basically everywhere. The idea that Western Culture predominated because of what Western Culture is forms the traditional view that revisionist books like Guns, Germs and Steel argue against. But I don't know how we're going to debate individual sources if we can't even agree that Muslims were Monotheist.
I think all we can say right now is that mankind has become more cooperative because we value the effects of cooperation.
So you think all we can say is nothing? "We value cooperation because we value cooperation" says nothing.
We progress more toward social states that we subjectively value rather than toward objective moral truth was my point. In contrast to the idea in the OP that progress of a "moral order" indicates an objective sense of "God" that exists external to our values.
"More effective" does not necessarily equal more correct. If a society imposed the following strict moral rule: "you may not hug your children," and did an extremely good job of enforcing compliance with this rule, we could say that this moral rule is extremely effective. But that doesn't mean the rule is a good rule. High compliance level does not imply high quality moral standard.
But, this goes against the idea that "The goal of a moral society is to make sin harder to commit." which -as I mentioned above- is at least the Catholic Christian stance.
The fact that this was on a test in your Catholic school does not necessarily make it correct, but let's run with this definition for a moment.
If "the goal of a moral society is to make sin harder to commit," then we need to do two things right to reach that goal:
(1) Correctly identify what is sin and what isn't sin - this is the property I'm referring to when I say "more correct" in the quote above. A moral rule that identifies hugging one's children as sinful is not correct.
(2) Actually make the sin harder to commit (i.e. put in place punishments, impediments, barriers, etc. to immoral action) - this is the property I'm referring to when I say "more effective."
A moral system needs to accomplish both (1) and (2). It doesn't help us to be super effective at (2) if we don't get (1) right to begin with. We can end up with a system like the one I described where an innocuous action is punished (i.e. hugging one's children) or where an immoral action is not identified as immoral.
It might even be reasonable to see (1) as significantly more important than (2) in answering the question "how moral is our society?" This might be true because the usefulness of (2) entirely depends on the correctness of (1). It's also worth noting that (2) tends to naturally increase over time with advances in technology, law enforcement, information gathering, etc. Over time, (2) will tend to increase independent of whether (1) gets better or worse.
If it happens that (2) gets better over time but (1) gets worse over time, then society as a whole becomes less moral, doesn't it? Even though society would be highly effective at enforcing its moral standards, those standards would be corrupted and wrong.
If the current laws are making sin harder to comment, then they are fulfilling the goal of a moral society more correctly than past laws.
Right, if they are. But a devout Catholic, for example, might think they're not. Our society generally views abortion as morally acceptable, for instance. A traditional Catholic would say we're failing at (1) by not correctly identifying abortion as a sin. Thus even though our moral system is "more effective," i.e. it's very good at (2), the Catholic would say it fails at (1) because it does not correctly identify sin in the first place.
The traditional Catholic might say, then, that even though our murder rate is one of the lowest in history, this is partly because we are not defining "murder" to include abortion. To refute the Catholic's argument, you need to not only show that our society is more effective in deterring what it identifies as murder, but that our society has correctly defined the moral concept of "murder" to begin with.
Meaning that if "God" makes the sun rise and set in your area of the universe, He also makes it rise and set in the same way in someone else's area of the universe. (Provided you are on the same planet, of course). Basically, that the things that people observe are not supernaturally localized.
That doesn't make any sense. People believed that the sun rose because a deity made it happened believed this was the case for everyone. It's not like they believed, "Oh, this deity is the reason why the sun rises over us, and then when it gets to right about there in the sky, over those other people, a completely different reason why the sun rises happens." No, they believed that the deity in charge of the sun was responsible for it making it rise, and that was the case regardless of whether it was their sun god, or their One God, or their One God who happened to also be the personification of the sun.
This is a pretty cursory point.
No, it's not a cursory point. It's a pivotal point. You're talking about the magnitude of the impact of Judeo-Christian monotheism. That there were other monotheistic religions is a pivotal point. It's not like pagan Greeks didn't think of the concept of a One God long before Christianity ever existed.
The fact is, Judaism was different from contemporary religions in terms of a certain set of qualities that people can, and do, argue over endlessly. But the fact is Judaism had immense impact. It's pointless to say that it shouldn't have because X, Y and Z religions were similar, because the fact is that it did have that impact while others didn't.
"Had an immense impact" HOW exactly? Judaism was around for a very, very long time. You're talking about this revolutionary impact of Judaic monotheism, and yet what is it exactly?
It's disingenuous to hold that body of thought to a standard where it's not allowed to evolve without exposing itself to criticism as inauthentic.
I have no idea what this even means.
It's a fact that what we think of as monotheism, that only one God exists, is not what, say, the early Christ movement believed. Paul himself affirmed the existence of other deities besides God. This was just the given belief of the time regarding religion. The default position was that every god existed.
So it's not like the Judeo-Christians of the Roman Empire rejected the existence of the other gods. Thus, they did not possess the very quality you are basing your argument around them possessing.
Unless someone actually does believe that "God" gave Moses the "whole truth" on Mount Sinai, which is absurd in my opinion, it's incongruent to use the traits of the religion at its founding to support the idea that it didn't develop certain ideas. Because the fact is that these objective patterns of thought did emerge in that culture and that area of the world, where they did not elsewhere.
I feel like you didn't read my post. You're talking about this pivotal impact Judeo-Christianity had on the world because of its monotheism. Except, what impact? Where? When? Why? And how could it have that impact if it wasn't actually monotheistic?
It's also incongruent to show that other sects may have believed different things to refute the effects of what others did believe. Unless one believes that a group placing itself under the banner of "Christian" is the single act that made its patterns of thought important, which is also absurd in my opinion. It seems to me like only a prototypical follower of Christianity would believe anything like this, and you certainly don't have to be one in order to observe its effects on history.
It is both absurd and factually false to state that there is one unified Christian belief or stance. Asserting this belies a lack of knowledge of Christian history. In the history of the Christ movement, there have been numerous positions and stances on a variety of topics, especially in the first and second centuries, but indeed throughout the entirety of Christian history. Writ simply, no Christian today would have a belief system recognizable to someone like Paul.
Basically, the more you believe in a supernatural causality that is arbitrary, the less interested you are in fitting that causality into a pattern, because you don't believe there is one.
Again, that doesn't make any sense. "God did it" is just as arbitrary as "one of the gods did it."
Second, the Greeks and the Romans made enormous advances in science. Indeed, rediscovering those advances, as well as exposure to the Islamic Golden Age, were what allowed for the Renaissance, the great awakening of Western European science, to happen.
This is something you repeatedly ignore. Which was more monotheistic: Athens or Dark Ages Western Europe? I don't think I need to say who had more scientific discoveries. You cannot say that the polytheistic religion of Athens or Rome prevented them from ever making scientific advances when they made tons of them.
Again, I don't agree that attributing these cultural traits to the singular act of founding the religion is necessary to prove that they developed.
What are you talking about?
You argued that the past 3000 years of Western scientific advancement happened because of Judeo-Christian monotheism.
Except that makes no sense because Christianity didn't exist 3000 years ago, therefore you cannot argue that Christianity was responsible for something that happened 3000 years ago. Right?
And as for Judaism, really? Something's been around since before the Roman Empire ever happened, since before Alexander, and you're attributing the last 3000 years of Western European scientific advancement to its monotheism? Doesn't that signal a problem to you? Judaism was around a long time before that. It's not like people weren't exposed to this idea of a one god, and as I said before, Judaism wasn't even monotheistic as we think of that word now in the time of antiquity. So how could it be that the last 3000 years of scientific advancement were because of Judeo-Christian monotheism?
Furthermore, have you forgotten about the Dark Ages? Western scientific advancement went backward when knowledge was lost due to the Western Roman Empire's collapse.
The idea that the Dark Ages were less advanced than the Classical Period, because oh look Rome had aqueducts, is poor history.
If you think less people reading, less people having stone houses, less people eating meat, and less people making scientific advances is not less advanced, I don't really know what to tell you.
Yes, there are historians who argue that there was no Dark Age. I do not agree with them. Neither does reality.
The anthropologist would conclude that the Hellenist culture was missing something based on nothing more than the bare fact that it didn't survive against other cultural influences.
Seriously? That's your argument? Some other army conquered them, therefore not more advanced?
So were the Huns, who did not even cook their food, more advanced than the armies they slaughtered? Or is that a ridiculous assertion?
Hell, a lion could take out a human being pretty damn quickly even if that human being were armed with a firearm. It takes a particularly high-caliber hollow point to effectively stop a lion. Lion: more advanced?
I also don't know what to make at all of the argument that advancement didn't come from Western Monotheism, because it was the Romans and the Islamic Golden Age. What??? Both the Roman Catholics and Islam were Monotheist.
Actually, I said it was the Greeks, the Romans, and the Islamic Golden Age. It was exposure to the respective scientific advancements of these that allowed for Western European scientific revival. It wasn't Christian monotheism, because they had plenty of that in the Dark Ages, and despite that, still Dark Ages. Not to mention, oh right, all those Greek scientific advances were done in a time of polytheism. Woops.
No, the argument is that a world view where observed phenomena are objective and repeatable is necessary in order for objective, repeatable observation (i.e. Science) to have any appeal.
The scientific method? People were monotheistic Christians long before that came about.
As to where I heard it, basically everywhere. The idea that Western Culture predominated because of what Western Culture is forms the traditional view that revisionist books like Guns, Germs and Steel argue against. But I don't know how we're going to debate individual sources if we can't even agree that Muslims were Monotheist.
Of course the Muslims were monotheists. I never said the Muslims were not monotheists. Stop distorting my words.
What I said was that in the Dark Ages, we had Judeo-Christian monotheism. We also had scientific regression, because, y'know, DARK AGE. It wasn't until people were exposed to the scientific advancements of the Greeks, Romans, and the Islamic Golden Age that the whole history of Western scientific advancement happened.
So if you're saying that Judeo-Christian monotheism resulted in Western scientific advancement, that is evidently false by a basic understanding of history. Hell, the Dark Ages were a time when everyone was Christian, yet was much less advanced a society than the pagan Roman Empire that had preceded it.
No, the reason that the Western scientific advancement happened was because they were exposed to - what you call it - science, not monotheism.
I think to even answer whether we are traveling towards a more "moral" society requires a few different questions be answered, to say nothing of what the cause of movement toward/away from said society could be.
First, a clear statement for "moral" needs to be defined. In a society where, to use a previous example, the punishment for theft is execution, and as a result theft is much less frequent, is that more moral than a society where the punishment for theft is a fine or imprisonment but theft is significantly more widespread? Is the fact a lot of "immoral" people are being killed and the "immoral" act of theft is decreasing a sufficient justification for the "immoral" act of killing people, regardless of what type of people they may be? This is a highly subjective thing and not easy to answer, and for most people is on a very individually-biased sliding scale.
Secondly, on what information are we measuring the rate of immoral events occurring? If past law enforcement was less competent then that would result in fewer reported, observed, and/or solved crimes. This would result in the appearance of a lower crime rate, when in fact the crime rate was much greater than it appears from recorded information dating to that time period.
Third, what are we defining as "society"? Are we measuring this on the basis of an entire world, or merely one culture? One subset of a culture? The current laws of an existing culture? The larger scale you end up going it becomes even more difficult to accurately measure things, even today.
Hell, the Dark Ages were a time when everyone was Christian, yet was much less advanced a society than the pagan Roman Empire that had preceded it.
The truth is much more complicated than this. First of all, there's a whole lot of "Dark Age" - different regions and different generations had different experiences. Hell, there were not one but two periods smack dab in the middle of the Dark Ages that are commonly termed "renaissances": the Carolingian Renaissance and the Anglo-Saxon Renaissance. So we want to be careful about making any generalizations. And even granting that literacy did fall off in most places at most times, and that Greek scholarship all but disappeared, that's still only one measure of "advancement" and a pretty academy-centric one at that. I am not aware off the top of my head of any practical technologies that were lost with the Roman Empire, and a fair number of them were gradually improved upon over those centuries. Material culture does not seem to have taken a qualitative hit in any objective sense. I certainly would not call the Early Middle Ages "much less advanced a society" - they were mostly just poorer. (And some historians would even dispute that.)
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Meaning that if "God" makes the sun rise and set in your area of the universe, He also makes it rise and set in the same way in someone else's area of the universe. (Provided you are on the same planet, of course). Basically, that the things that people observe are not supernaturally localized.
That doesn't make any sense. People believed that the sun rose because a deity made it happened believed this was the case for everyone. It's not like they believed, "Oh, this deity is the reason why the sun rises over us, and then when it gets to right about there in the sky, over those other people, a completely different reason why the sun rises happens." No, they believed that the deity in charge of the sun was responsible for it making it rise, and that was the case regardless of whether it was their sun god, or their One God, or their One God who happened to also be the personification of the sun.
One hundred percent incorrect. I don't really know what else to say here. Ancient peoples didn't even have the prerequisite beliefs about the existence of people in other areas of the world, much less that the supernatural way they believed the world worked would apply consistently to people unknown to them. Or even that it would apply consistently to them over ensuing generations unless they fulfilled rituals/practices/etc that they believed their deity wanted.
This is much popularized by how grade school teachers in the US tell the discovery story of Columbus, that the common person believed you would fall off the edge of the world, presumably ending up in a place where who knows what happens. The idea that the thinking of everyone was this backward isn't factually correct, just like a lot of myths told to grade schooler's, but the depiction of this unscientific view of the universe I find pretty illustrative.
It's enough to say that universiality is not something mankind is born with or intuitively grasps as part of its survival makeup. It had to be developed.
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This is a pretty cursory point.
No, it's not a cursory point. It's a pivotal point. You're talking about the magnitude of the impact of Judeo-Christian monotheism. That there were other monotheistic religions is a pivotal point. It's not like pagan Greeks didn't think of the concept of a One God long before Christianity ever existed.
Once again, the impact or non-impact of belief systems not in question is... not in question.
The argument is NOT that Judeo-Christianity had its impact as evidenced by it being the only known belief system that held to certain tenets. Whether it was or wasn't the only one doesn't matter. The evidence that the impact came from Judeo-Christianity is based in the fact that certain thinkers and peoples styled themselves as Judeo-Christian, and that the religious developments in that area of the world, such as Islam, made explicit reference to figures in Judaism and Christianity. So, the hypothesis that these belief systems had immense impact doesn't rely whatsoever on them being unique in any way. It's a fact of history that stands on its own.
Whether the same sort of objective world view I'm talking about would've prevailed had people believed more in Zeus, or Ahura Mazda, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster doesn't matter at all, because people didn't. It seems completely arbitrary to me. The way I see it, the only perspective really interested in showing how unique and original Judeo-Christianity was would be the perspective trying to vindicate its theology or the divinity of its founding. What I said wasn't pointed at that at all. Showing its effects on historical thought shouldn't be taken as an intent to do that.
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The fact is, Judaism was different from contemporary religions in terms of a certain set of qualities that people can, and do, argue over endlessly. But the fact is Judaism had immense impact. It's pointless to say that it shouldn't have because X, Y and Z religions were similar, because the fact is that it did have that impact while others didn't.
"Had an immense impact" HOW exactly? Judaism was around for a very, very long time. You're talking about this revolutionary impact of Judaic monotheism, and yet what is it exactly?
What was Judaism's impact? That's what you're going to ask?
You could get a doctorate in history studying that question alone, and you would still have to narrow it down to get anywhere.
My point was the the world view existing in the areas of the world where it predominated lent value to the type of objective observation that forms the basis of science.
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It's disingenuous to hold that body of thought to a standard where it's not allowed to evolve without exposing itself to criticism as inauthentic.
I have no idea what this even means.
It's a fact that what we think of as monotheism, that only one God exists, is not what, say, the early Christ movement believed. Paul himself affirmed the existence of other deities besides God. This was just the given belief of the time regarding religion. The default position was that every god existed.
So it's not like the Judeo-Christians of the Roman Empire rejected the existence of the other gods. Thus, they did not possess the very quality you are basing your argument around them possessing.
I'm not going to list all of the aspects of Judaism (and its derivatives) that reveal belief in a singular, Pantheistic God, because they start from word one of the Torah in its creation story.
But first, my point wasn't based on that theology rejecting the idea of other Gods, or really any specific tenet at all. Let me put it this way. Suppose for argument's sake that we pin down Judeo-Christianity as being polytheistic, to what I'm sure would be the disagreement of current and historical members of these religions. Them aside, we're supposing that they're polytheistic. So what? Now that they're polytheistic, that theology can't, as a rule, have the historical impact that the record shows it to have had? All the self-styled, Christians, Jews and Muslims writing with the express purpose of advancing their theology, all of those things about them are irrelevant? Best case, pinning these religions down as inauthentic or unoriginal (which they weren't), would only indirectly support the hypothesis that it was something about those religions other than their theology that resulted in their historical impact. So, what was it? Let's say it's because their ceremonies involve bread, and people going to church are just really hungry. But wait, that might explain their popularity, but how does that lead to the cultural zeitgeist of rationality and measured observation pervading in that area of the world, where in others it didn't? My point if very self-evident - that what people actually believed about the observable universe, i.e. their theology, is the most likely cause for how they went about actually observing that universe. I'm not concerned with exactly what theological tenet caused what aspect of their world view, just that those were the results.
Second, trying to prove that these theologies were inconsistent, as well as unoriginal, does in no way mean either that those beliefs can't be credited with their historical effects. Put simply, what Paul said or didn't say doesn't matter. Paul isn't an authority on history. He's an authority to Christians on their theology inasmuch as they accept him as one. The question at issue is what the historical effects of those religions were on the philosophy of the time, not the merit, consistency, or uniqueness of those religions. So more broadly, whether one person or another believed in other Gods isn't relevant. What they believed about the nature of the universe is. Even some modern Christian sects, like Mormons, believe in other Gods, that people become Gods, and so on. They also believe that the universe is governed by a consistent set of observable principles, because it would be absurd not to at this point.
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Unless someone actually does believe that "God" gave Moses the "whole truth" on Mount Sinai, which is absurd in my opinion, it's incongruent to use the traits of the religion at its founding to support the idea that it didn't develop certain ideas. Because the fact is that these objective patterns of thought did emerge in that culture and that area of the world, where they did not elsewhere.
I feel like you didn't read my post. You're talking about this pivotal impact Judeo-Christianity had on the world because of its monotheism. Except, what impact? Where? When? Why? And how could it have that impact if it wasn't actually monotheistic?
How can a religion have impact if it's not Monotheistic? That's what you're asking?
And if you're requesting that I exposit the particulars of all the historical effects of Judeo-Christianity, I'm going to have to decline for the sake of brevity.
If you feel I didn't read your post, it seems to me that's because you think I'm supporting some argument that I'm not.
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It's also incongruent to show that other sects may have believed different things to refute the effects of what others did believe. Unless one believes that a group placing itself under the banner of "Christian" is the single act that made its patterns of thought important, which is also absurd in my opinion. It seems to me like only a prototypical follower of Christianity would believe anything like this, and you certainly don't have to be one in order to observe its effects on history.
It is both absurd and factually false to state that there is one unified Christian belief or stance. Asserting this belies a lack of knowledge of Christian history. In the history of the Christ movement, there have been numerous positions and stances on a variety of topics, especially in the first and second centuries, but indeed throughout the entirety of Christian history. Writ simply, no Christian today would have a belief system recognizable to someone like Paul.
Agreed. I have no idea in the world how you could draw the conclusion from what I said that I have the false belief in some unified body of Christian belief. Just the opposite. What I've been saying is that a body of thought doesn't have to be unified, consistent, or even factual on any level in order to have historical impact.
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Basically, the more you believe in a supernatural causality that is arbitrary, the less interested you are in fitting that causality into a pattern, because you don't believe there is one.
Again, that doesn't make any sense. "God did it" is just as arbitrary as "one of the gods did it."
If the only differentiating aspect between two theologies is how many Gods fit under it, then true. Nowhere did I argue that was the case. I even acknowledged that certain prior theologies were monotheist to point out that it was specifically the Judeo-Christian movement that had this impact. I pointed out that they believed in a pantheistic, supernatural causality, rather than an arbitrary supernatural causality, i.e. impassioned Gods, as I originally wrote. And it seems self-evident the next point about how a rational Deity would relate to a cultural value of rationality.
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Second, the Greeks and the Romans made enormous advances in science. Indeed, rediscovering those advances, as well as exposure to the Islamic Golden Age, were what allowed for the Renaissance, the great awakening of Western European science, to happen.
This is something you repeatedly ignore. Which was more monotheistic: Athens or Dark Ages Western Europe? I don't think I need to say who had more scientific discoveries. You cannot say that the polytheistic religion of Athens or Rome prevented them from ever making scientific advances when they made tons of them.
First of all, you need to acknowledge Islam as influenced by Judeo-Christian theology, if not an outright derivative of it. Its canon makes specific mention of Judeo-Christian figures like Abraham. The absolute, pantheistic theology, external proselytizing, and a long list of other qualities happen to be traits in common with those movements, and the cultural contact between them was immense. So if your intent is to discredit Judeo-Christian theology of any cultural or scientific advancement, then you get exactly nowhere, as far as history is concerned, by crediting those advancements to Islam instead.
Second point, I have no idea in the world how you could draw the conclusion that I think the advancements of one culture possessing one trait indicates that another culture not possessing that trait didn't make ANY advancements. That denies the antecedent. As to what I think you're trying to do, which is divorcing the Medieval period from Western cultural advancement, I'll continue here...
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Again, I don't agree that attributing these cultural traits to the singular act of founding the religion is necessary to prove that they developed.
What are you talking about?
You argued that the past 3000 years of Western scientific advancement happened because of Judeo-Christian monotheism.
Except that makes no sense because Christianity didn't exist 3000 years ago, therefore you cannot argue that Christianity was responsible for something that happened 3000 years ago. Right?
And as for Judaism, really? Something's been around since before the Roman Empire ever happened, since before Alexander, and you're attributing the last 3000 years of Western European scientific advancement to its monotheism? Doesn't that signal a problem to you? Judaism was around a long time before that. It's not like people weren't exposed to this idea of a one god, and as I said before, Judaism wasn't even monotheistic as we think of that word now in the time of antiquity. So how could it be that the last 3000 years of scientific advancement were because of Judeo-Christian monotheism?
You're doing the same thing in reverse here. Only here, it's so absurd that I'm thinking that you willfully misconstrued the idea. It's even worse to take you at your word that this is your line of thinking.
Let me follow that line of thought a little bit. So, cultural ideas have either exactly one cause, or they are created in a bubble without influence from any others. They're the same at their inception as they are subsequently. Their impact, if any, must also be immediate and revolutionary as against other cultural influences. So that being the case, a sure way of discrediting the impact of a cultural idea is to show that it existed at some prior point and had little impact then.
Just to be clear on my viewpoint, I believe the exact opposite of all those points. Cultural ideas are not created in a bubble. Previous ones influence subsequent ones, and they do so in way that all of them become part of an indistinguishable whole that represents a people's cultural viewpoint. And so previous cultural ideas can be credited with those effects on subsequent ones. Their ideas are neither "good" nor "bad". They are best judged and understood in terms of their effects. Cultural ideas are also not constant from beginning to end. They change over time. They are not constant in their impact, either. Ideas, and new forms of the same idea, can emerge and have influence where they didn't previously.
Judaism influenced Christianity influenced Islam. When I'm saying Judeo-Christianity had an effect in causing the scientific advancement that preceded Christianity, I'm talking about the collection of traits in common among these sources and using the common label "Judeo-Christianity" for the cultural movement. That's what I mean by 3000 years of thought. I'm not saying either that Western science has a single cause, that being this religious movement. Science had many concurrent causes, as do all cultural beliefs.
What I'm saying is the this theological movement influenced basically every cultural belief in the West as judged by the extensiveness of commentary on these three related religions. You can debate what those effects were. My assertion is that Western religion played a role in developing the rationality of Western thought. You can disagree. But to say that these religions didn't have that effect because they existed before these effects I'm claiming occurred, that one religion is unrelated to another, or that cultural ideas deserve no credit for the influence they have on others, that line of thought is just absurd.
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I also don't know what to make at all of the argument that advancement didn't come from Western Monotheism, because it was the Romans and the Islamic Golden Age. What??? Both the Roman Catholics and Islam were Monotheist.
Actually, I said it was the Greeks, the Romans, and the Islamic Golden Age. It was exposure to the respective scientific advancements of these that allowed for Western European scientific revival. It wasn't Christian monotheism, because they had plenty of that in the Dark Ages, and despite that, still Dark Ages. Not to mention, oh right, all those Greek scientific advances were done in a time of polytheism. Woops.
...
Furthermore, have you forgotten about the Dark Ages? Western scientific advancement went backward when knowledge was lost due to the Western Roman Empire's collapse.
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The idea that the Dark Ages were less advanced than the Classical Period, because oh look Rome had aqueducts, is poor history.
If you think less people reading, less people having stone houses, less people eating meat, and less people making scientific advances is not less advanced, I don't really know what to tell you.
Yes, there are historians who argue that there was no Dark Age. I do not agree with them. Neither does reality.
If you're talking about the idea that culture and science were in prograde, rather than retrograde, during the Medieval period, that's not just an obscure minority viewpoint. That's an accepted historical fact. No respected historian has used the term "Dark Ages" without that caveat for almost a century. It's a cultural fable. Once modern historians started researching the Medieval period, they found abundant advancement, and the term "Dark Age" went on to be used only as a descriptor for periods lacking in source texts. But even then, most historians oppose using that term because of the possibility that the reader will still construe it in that pejorative context.
Why all the cultural fable around it if the evidence doesn't support it? Maybe it's helpful to understand why it's been spread by the viewpoints that spread it. First, it supports the Anglo-centric and Protestant-centric bias prevailing during the height of the British Empire. Factually speaking, Britain was not advancing science or culture during the Medieval period and did not begin to do so until the Reformation and the Renaissance. So the idea that the rest of Europe was in a similar state seems to bolster its prestige.
In a similar way, it makes sense that denouncing a Catholic Europe advances the American exceptionalism dogma also, both due to the Protestant heritage of the US and its claim to religious tolerance and secular government.
Finally, you have the naturalists, self-styled "scientists", such as Neil Degrasse Tyson, who in Cosmos drew up Galileo's struggle with the Catholic church as emblematic of mankind's liberation from the unambiguously negative influence of religion. Evidently to him, that means that the sum total of human progress in the West during Catholicism's heyday is zero, along with the periods of pre-Christian religions. Because religion can do no good, all cultural progress must be credited to the more secular periods of history. The only route for mankind to arrive with telescope in hand to disprove God was to divorce history from religion.
So, there are lots of things telling you to esteem a pre-Christian Rome and a post-Catholic Western Europe. Some esteem is warranted. But the fallacy is to take the extreme stance that the West was in retrograde during the intervening period. That's not factual.
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The anthropologist would conclude that the Hellenist culture was missing something based on nothing more than the bare fact that it didn't survive against other cultural influences.
Seriously? That's your argument? Some other army conquered them, therefore not more advanced?
So were the Huns, who did not even cook their food, more advanced than the armies they slaughtered? Or is that a ridiculous assertion?
Hell, a lion could take out a human being pretty damn quickly even if that human being were armed with a firearm. It takes a particularly high-caliber hollow point to effectively stop a lion. Lion: more advanced?
You'll have to forgive my brevity, I mistook most people as capable of distinguishing culture and conquest as separate things. I didn't say anything about conquest. If your belief is that the survival of a group's cultural beliefs depends on them preventing the conquest of their political systems, I disagree. History doesn't support the idea that political conquest must always be followed by the spread of the victor's cultural beliefs.
I imagine that mistake must come from the muddling of conquest as a cultural ideal itself. In certain cultures of history, conquest produces enough shame to shake the belief systems of the conquered, particularly if that belief system is oriented around prestige and conquest itself, such as Nationalism or Tribalism, rather than something like Philosophy, Religion, etc. But the nature of beliefs being what they are, people don't believe things until they think they are true. The force of coercion might convince one group that they're more powerful than another, and if a culture relies on the opposite they're in trouble, but in any other area of belief that's not conquest itself, coercion can only go so far.
A couple cultures that we've been talking about are a good case in point that conquest does not always precede cultural advancement. The Greeks were conquered by the Romans, after which point their culture went on to have immense influence on their conquerors. The Jews were conquered by the Romans over and over, and at times suffered attempts at genocide. They remained culturally distinct from their conquerors. Later on, their culture, specifically the Christian offshoot of their culture if you want to split hairs, had immense effect in Rome subsequent to those events. There are also conquests extremely minimal in military effect that did, in fact, cause a disproportionate amount of cultural upheaval, say as in the case of the European New World conquests.
So when I'm talking about the Hellenic culture not surviving against other cultural influences, what I'm saying is that people of their own belief did not hold to the Hellenic world view anymore. So the rhetoric of a Dark Age in cultural retrograde after the Classical Period makes at least one mistake in that it assigns too much appeal to the Hellenic culture. If the Renaissance had resurrected Hellenic religion, government, or anything Hellenic aside from a few isolated secular thinkers, the case would be stronger. As the record stands, the fact of a Hellenic revival is mostly fable.
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No, the argument is that a world view where observed phenomena are objective and repeatable is necessary in order for objective, repeatable observation (i.e. Science) to have any appeal.
The scientific method? People were monotheistic Christians long before that came about.
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As to where I heard it, basically everywhere. The idea that Western Culture predominated because of what Western Culture is forms the traditional view that revisionist books like Guns, Germs and Steel argue against. But I don't know how we're going to debate individual sources if we can't even agree that Muslims were Monotheist.
Of course the Muslims were monotheists. I never said the Muslims were not monotheists. Stop distorting my words.
What I said was that in the Dark Ages, we had Judeo-Christian monotheism. We also had scientific regression, because, y'know, DARK AGE. It wasn't until people were exposed to the scientific advancements of the Greeks, Romans, and the Islamic Golden Age that the whole history of Western scientific advancement happened.
So if you're saying that Judeo-Christian monotheism resulted in Western scientific advancement, that is evidently false by a basic understanding of history. Hell, the Dark Ages were a time when everyone was Christian, yet was much less advanced a society than the pagan Roman Empire that had preceded it.
No, the reason that the Western scientific advancement happened was because they were exposed to - what you call it - science, not monotheism.
I think I touched on most of this. Western Religion may be owed credit for advances made in the Muslim world, because you know, cultures affect one another. These cultures are derivatives of one another. The idea of scientific regression during the Medieval period is a fable. Science, as a cultural idea, didn't create itself in a bubble, because cultural ideas don't create themselves in a bubble. They're caused by the collection of preceding cultural ideas.
And finally, a cultural idea existing for an extended period of time prior to another is NOT proof that the prior did not cause the subsequent one. Because the converse of that is that only contemporaneous ideas serve as causes, which is to argue that cultural ideas are caused by themselves. Cultures change, and that's exactly what happens when they do.
You need more structured education in the field of history, and I'm not going to be able to give that in an online forum about a card game. Read the work of Edward Grant, and especially the anthologies by Ronald Numbers and David Lindberg. Better yet, take a course that sources their work. They have credentials in the field of history. That's something that these multi-disciplinary, pop-science authors like Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Jared Diamond do not.
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The book on religion that I've always found closest to my own believes was the Evolution of God by Robert Wright (highly recommended). It falls in between other books I've read.
(Like How to Win a Cosmic War by Reza Aslan and the Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris being at the respective ends of modern views of religion)
The Evolution of God's central thesis (made almost apologetically after an extensively researched recap of human's religious history) is that human's morals -and idea of "God"- has become more refined throughout history. The point being -which plays into an earlier work by Wright 'Nonzero'- that mankind's morals are moving it towards more and more cooperative behavior. That we could be moving to a more perfect ideal of "good," which Wright says 'might count' as "God."
I've always been a little sad that Robert Wright hasn't gotten the same notoriety that other contemporaries have gotten, like Reza Aslan and Sam Harris. But, I guess taking a harder stance is more sensational.
What do you think? Is there some "direction" to human morals? Are we moving towards some prefect idea of good? And -if we were- could that idea count as "God?"
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Does "prefect good" exist, and -if it does- are we moving towards it?
What to label 'it' is tangential at best, I'll not argue here. Call 'it' whatever you want; we'll all know what you mean.
Is there a "moral order?"
Anyway.
Is "perfect" synonymous with "maximal", or is there more to it than that? Because if there is an objective morality, it seems pretty obvious that it would have a maximal state, so if "perfect" means "maximal" then the the question probably reduces to "Is there an objective morality?" (Unless you want me to really quibble and ask stuff like whether a perfect good is the sort of thing that "exists" or whether it would demonstrate some other form of being.)
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
The source of our 'moral order' is the human experience. It is and always will be, subjective.
My G Yisan, the Bard of Death G deck.
My BUGWR Hermit druid BUGWR deck.
Anyway.
Yes, that's what I mean. Is there some "maximally good" code of conduct for humans, an objective morality. And, does the "direction" of the growth in our moral understanding point in its general vicinity.
This isn't terribly different from what Sam Harris argues in the Moral Landscape. In fact, I think it might be exactly the same, just with different connotation about the nature of the objective morality. Connotation I'm happy to ignore for this discussion.
I don't see how even the most cursory investigations into the state of human affairs would lead you to believe that we are moving towards a better morality. All I see on a daily basis is an full frontal assault on my morality.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
A larger percentage of people in Germany died because of violence in the Middle Ages than did in the World War II era. "Historical records show that between the late Middle Ages and the 20th century, European countries saw a 10- to 50-fold decline in their rates of homicide." [1]
Think about that.
And, while you're there, think about how much slavery and intolerance we have in the world now compared to then. To refute this, you might talk about people starving in Africa -or something- and how we're not doing anything about it. But, do you think 1,000 years ago people in American/European gave ANY *****s about people in Africa? The very fact you think about them AT ALL shows how far we're coming. People generally feared and hated people outside of their tribe, not worried about their well being.
Read how the Old Testament regards non-Israelites; that might give you a sense of how far we've come.
To be clear, I do not agree with what Bakgat is saying. However, I think you and BS are missing his point.
Backgat is saying that morality (i.e. moral standards) are weakening over time, even though the actual incidence of immoral behavior may be decreasing.
To take your Middle Ages murder example - both now and then, murder has been considered wrong. In other words, the relevant moral standard ("murder is wrong") is unchanged. In fact, the relevant moral standard was arguably more forceful in the Middle Ages since he punishment for murder was almost always execution, whereas today the punishment is often just imprisonment.
If it is, I would refute this. How -other than their actions- would you determine what they thought about it? If they did it more, I would take it for granted they also didn't think it was as bad.
Or, are you/Backgat saying the severity of murder has some how changed? That it was less of a moral "sin" in the past than now?
The point I perceive Bakgat to be making is that the moral standards were "better" even though compliance with those standards may have been worse.
For example the severity with which non-compliance with a moral standard was punished. (Many crimes in the past were punishable by death.) Or the degree of cultural/institutional disapproval of immoral behavior.
If the punishment for theft is death, but many people steal, we could say that the moral standard against theft is very strict even though compliance is low. If the punishment for theft is minor scolding, but virtually no one steals, we could say that the moral standard against theft is weak even though compliance is high.
And in fact the moral standard against murder is not unchanged. Many killings which would clearly be murder to us were considered justifiable in ancient cultures. A Roman paterfamilias, for instance, legally had the literal power of life and death over those in his household. The Aztecs (and Romans, and many other cultures) ritually executed prisoners of war on a regular basis. The concept of "honor killing" was widespread and persists in some regions to this day.
As I'm sure you're already aware, it's more complicated than that. Archaic punishments were often incredibly severe out of the (erroneous) belief that making an example of a few criminals would deter the rest, rather than the idea that the punishment was "fair" for the crime. Before modern policing, society's ability to catch criminals was very poor; most went free. Couldn't someone, with just as much basis as you, say that the consistency of the modern system means that our "moral standard" is much stronger than the older, more arbitrary version?
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
That there were provisions against someone killing someone else somewhere in the law code does not mean the moral standards haven't changed.
For instance, there were certainly laws against murder in Sparta or Medieval Europe. Unless you were a helot. Or a serf. Or a slave. Or a baby that was seen as too weak to keep.
I would like to add to that what is perhaps the pinnacle of different standards on murder, which is the ancient practice of "Trial by combat," in which a person accused of a crime was judged innocent or guilty based on whether or not he could win in a fight against his accuser, the loser of these fights often dying.
So we have the ironic and terrifying situation of it being entirely possible that a man who committed no murder could be accused of murder and then declared guilty of murder because he was murdered.
If less people are committing these reprehensible crimes, then I say -by definition- our moral standards are "better" in that regard.
I remember back at Delbarton(the all boy's catholic highschool I attended) the only question I ever got wrong in my morality class was "The goal of a moral society is to make sin harder to commit." I said "False" the answer was "True."
As I said, I'm not advocating Backgat's position, I was just pointing out that I didn't think you'd responded to it. This, however, is a direct response, and I have no reason to disagree.
"Better" meaning the moral rules and associated punishments assigned by society were more correct. (Maybe for Backgat that means "more biblical" or something).
"More effective" does not necessarily equal more correct. If a society imposed the following strict moral rule: "you may not hug your children," and did an extremely good job of enforcing compliance with this rule, we could say that this moral rule is extremely effective. But that doesn't mean the rule is a good rule. High compliance level does not imply high quality moral standard.
And, with all of the Protestant Christians out there advocating for secular laws to be based on scripture (like wanting gay marriage banned - for example) It seems to me believing the goal of a moral society is to make sin harder to commit is a rather universal religious idea. (Just look at Sharia law, as another example)
So, I don't see how "more effective" isn't "better" or "more correct" in this context.
If the current laws are making sin harder to comment, then they are fulfilling the goal of a moral society more correctly than past laws.
Of course, religious thinkers point to the tangible benefits to the human condition that followed that idea, whether caused by it or not, and generally fit it into some maxim about how truth can be known by observing its good results. Typical, it's a very squishy idea.
Secular people though have observed Monotheism as pivotal, in a way that goes something like this. Mankind didn't become interested in modeling the behavior of the world around them under a universal set of rules until they believed that those rules were actually universal and consistent. Judeo Christian monotheism, as opposed to polytheism and preceding forms of monotheism, established one, limitless God whose principles were universal. Gods of equal power with competing spheres of influence, a limited, impassioned God, or whatever the alternatives were, interfered with mankind's opinion of the usefulness of practical observation. If crops grew differently in a neighboring land full of people who followed a different God, there's no point in trying to understand it because that's just their God or Gods. But if everything is subject to one, perfectly consistent God, then an imperative duty is placed upon mankind to unite everything under one explanation. Then of course through competing cultures, the one that took interest in advancing its knowledge won out. Under a certain view, that explains a good bit of the 3000 years of Western scientific achievement, economics, and exploration, inasmuch as the other cultures of the world can be argued to lack an investment of equal character in the pursuit of a unified body of knowledge.
I'm not sure I buy 100% of that. But the interesting point of difference between the view of religious thinkers and historians is that the historians don't feel the need to conflate the effects of the idea with the property of truth. Whether a person's belief in a thing has good effects isn't evidence for that believed thing to be true. And I'm sure on that specific point, few will argue that Christianity has to be true because Western advancements have vindicated it. There's plenty of room for the contrary.
I find the relationship between philosophical Naturalism and modern science to be similar. If mankind believes itself to be the only intelligent agent in the universe, with all other events natural, then certain scientific principles follow, such as the importance of repeatable experiment, hypothesis, etc. Whether the belief that created that framework is true or false seems to fade against the importance of the results. If some limitless, non-human intelligence revealed itself as not subject to natural law, that wouldn't invalidate any scientific progress, although it would disprove philosophical Naturalism.
In the area of morality then, it may very well be that the same is true. People follow ideas that produce effects that are valued as good, and an idea that has left positive effects in its wake is extremely difficult to challenge in the short term. But it may be completely arbitrary. For example, a hypothetical need of population control and conservation in the future might reshape some of mankind's moral views that were formed during an era of scarcity of labor and limitless resources. Then whatever is left in common after that hypothetical clash is taken to be true. It's hard to know without seeing the hypothetical destination of this kind of moral progress.
I think all we can say right now is that mankind has become more cooperative because we value the effects of cooperation. The fact that people comprehend these certain values of human interaction on a level intuitive enough for us to consider it a guiding light of morality seems to be evidence of something, but it might not be, and I don't know what that thing would be, besides.
Hang on.
First of all, what do you mean by "principles are universal"?
Second, as you yourself admit, there were cultures prior to Christianity who practiced monotheism. So if you're talking about a singular God who encompasses all, there were other cultures that had that.
Third, it would be anachronistic to ascribe to either the Jews or the Christians of antiquity the term "monotheistic" in the sense that we think of it now. Jews and Christians of the Roman Empire believed in the existence of other gods. Paul affirmed this. Jews and Christians were specifically forbidden to worship other gods, which is why there's a great deal of talk of sacrifices to other gods and the consuming of the meat from them in the Bible.
However, even this was danced around. As I said, in antiquity, the vast majority people believed that all gods existed, and nobody wanted a pissed off deity after them. So, depending on where you were, many Jews did pay respects to other gods. Also, it's not as though polytheistic Christian sects didn't exist.
I don't know what you mean by this.
First of all, look at that number again. 3000 years? The Jewish faith was around way longer than that, and the Christ movement has existed about 2000 years of that. So that should immediately tell us that there's a problem with what you are saying.
The second is that all of that is garbage. The advancements of Western society you speak of do not come from its monotheism. They came from the advancements of the Greeks and the Roman Empire, as well as the Islamic Golden Age, which were discovered/rediscovered by people in Western Europe. That was the Renaissance.
Case in point: in the Dark Ages, there was a whole lot of monotheism going around. Notice how it's still called "The Dark Ages."
If the argument is that monotheism is a prerequisite to scientific advancement, then no, of course you shouldn't buy any of it.
Where did you hear this anyway?
So you think all we can say is nothing? "We value cooperation because we value cooperation" says nothing.
Meaning that if "God" makes the sun rise and set in your area of the universe, He also makes it rise and set in the same way in someone else's area of the universe. (Provided you are on the same planet, of course). Basically, that the things that people observe are not supernaturally localized.
This is a pretty cursory point. The fact is, Judaism was different from contemporary religions in terms of a certain set of qualities that people can, and do, argue over endlessly. But the fact is Judaism had immense impact. It's pointless to say that it shouldn't have because X, Y and Z religions were similar, because the fact is that it did have that impact while others didn't.
It's disingenuous to hold that body of thought to a standard where it's not allowed to evolve without exposing itself to criticism as inauthentic. Unless someone actually does believe that "God" gave Moses the "whole truth" on Mount Sinai, which is absurd in my opinion, it's incongruent to use the traits of the religion at its founding to support the idea that it didn't develop certain ideas. Because the fact is that these objective patterns of thought did emerge in that culture and that area of the world, where they did not elsewhere.
It's also incongruent to show that other sects may have believed different things to refute the effects of what others did believe. Unless one believes that a group placing itself under the banner of "Christian" is the single act that made its patterns of thought important, which is also absurd in my opinion. It seems to me like only a prototypical follower of Christianity would believe anything like this, and you certainly don't have to be one in order to observe its effects on history.
Basically, the more you believe in a supernatural causality that is arbitrary, the less interested you are in fitting that causality into a pattern, because you don't believe there is one.
Again, I don't agree that attributing these cultural traits to the singular act of founding the religion is necessary to prove that they developed. It seems to me that the only people who would argue that would be those who believe that the founding was in some way divine.
The idea that the Dark Ages were less advanced than the Classical Period, because oh look Rome had aqueducts, is poor history. The anthropologist would conclude that the Hellenist culture was missing something based on nothing more than the bare fact that it didn't survive against other cultural influences.
I also don't know what to make at all of the argument that advancement didn't come from Western Monotheism, because it was the Romans and the Islamic Golden Age. What??? Both the Roman Catholics and Islam were Monotheist.
No, the argument is that a world view where observed phenomena are objective and repeatable is necessary in order for objective, repeatable observation (i.e. Science) to have any appeal. And that the most important factor in the development of that cultural trait, as it actually happened in history, was Western Monotheism. Clearly monotheism itself isn't a cardinal requisite for that cultural trait. Which is exactly what I was getting at in regards to the OP and the evolution of moral belief. Still, history shows that was how this cultural trait developed in the West, in contrast to the rest of the world where it didn't.
As to where I heard it, basically everywhere. The idea that Western Culture predominated because of what Western Culture is forms the traditional view that revisionist books like Guns, Germs and Steel argue against. But I don't know how we're going to debate individual sources if we can't even agree that Muslims were Monotheist.
We progress more toward social states that we subjectively value rather than toward objective moral truth was my point. In contrast to the idea in the OP that progress of a "moral order" indicates an objective sense of "God" that exists external to our values.
The fact that this was on a test in your Catholic school does not necessarily make it correct, but let's run with this definition for a moment.
If "the goal of a moral society is to make sin harder to commit," then we need to do two things right to reach that goal:
(1) Correctly identify what is sin and what isn't sin - this is the property I'm referring to when I say "more correct" in the quote above. A moral rule that identifies hugging one's children as sinful is not correct.
(2) Actually make the sin harder to commit (i.e. put in place punishments, impediments, barriers, etc. to immoral action) - this is the property I'm referring to when I say "more effective."
A moral system needs to accomplish both (1) and (2). It doesn't help us to be super effective at (2) if we don't get (1) right to begin with. We can end up with a system like the one I described where an innocuous action is punished (i.e. hugging one's children) or where an immoral action is not identified as immoral.
It might even be reasonable to see (1) as significantly more important than (2) in answering the question "how moral is our society?" This might be true because the usefulness of (2) entirely depends on the correctness of (1). It's also worth noting that (2) tends to naturally increase over time with advances in technology, law enforcement, information gathering, etc. Over time, (2) will tend to increase independent of whether (1) gets better or worse.
If it happens that (2) gets better over time but (1) gets worse over time, then society as a whole becomes less moral, doesn't it? Even though society would be highly effective at enforcing its moral standards, those standards would be corrupted and wrong.
Right, if they are. But a devout Catholic, for example, might think they're not. Our society generally views abortion as morally acceptable, for instance. A traditional Catholic would say we're failing at (1) by not correctly identifying abortion as a sin. Thus even though our moral system is "more effective," i.e. it's very good at (2), the Catholic would say it fails at (1) because it does not correctly identify sin in the first place.
The traditional Catholic might say, then, that even though our murder rate is one of the lowest in history, this is partly because we are not defining "murder" to include abortion. To refute the Catholic's argument, you need to not only show that our society is more effective in deterring what it identifies as murder, but that our society has correctly defined the moral concept of "murder" to begin with.
No, it's not a cursory point. It's a pivotal point. You're talking about the magnitude of the impact of Judeo-Christian monotheism. That there were other monotheistic religions is a pivotal point. It's not like pagan Greeks didn't think of the concept of a One God long before Christianity ever existed.
"Had an immense impact" HOW exactly? Judaism was around for a very, very long time. You're talking about this revolutionary impact of Judaic monotheism, and yet what is it exactly?
I have no idea what this even means.
It's a fact that what we think of as monotheism, that only one God exists, is not what, say, the early Christ movement believed. Paul himself affirmed the existence of other deities besides God. This was just the given belief of the time regarding religion. The default position was that every god existed.
So it's not like the Judeo-Christians of the Roman Empire rejected the existence of the other gods. Thus, they did not possess the very quality you are basing your argument around them possessing.
I feel like you didn't read my post. You're talking about this pivotal impact Judeo-Christianity had on the world because of its monotheism. Except, what impact? Where? When? Why? And how could it have that impact if it wasn't actually monotheistic?
It is both absurd and factually false to state that there is one unified Christian belief or stance. Asserting this belies a lack of knowledge of Christian history. In the history of the Christ movement, there have been numerous positions and stances on a variety of topics, especially in the first and second centuries, but indeed throughout the entirety of Christian history. Writ simply, no Christian today would have a belief system recognizable to someone like Paul.
Again, that doesn't make any sense. "God did it" is just as arbitrary as "one of the gods did it."
Second, the Greeks and the Romans made enormous advances in science. Indeed, rediscovering those advances, as well as exposure to the Islamic Golden Age, were what allowed for the Renaissance, the great awakening of Western European science, to happen.
This is something you repeatedly ignore. Which was more monotheistic: Athens or Dark Ages Western Europe? I don't think I need to say who had more scientific discoveries. You cannot say that the polytheistic religion of Athens or Rome prevented them from ever making scientific advances when they made tons of them.
What are you talking about?
You argued that the past 3000 years of Western scientific advancement happened because of Judeo-Christian monotheism.
Except that makes no sense because Christianity didn't exist 3000 years ago, therefore you cannot argue that Christianity was responsible for something that happened 3000 years ago. Right?
And as for Judaism, really? Something's been around since before the Roman Empire ever happened, since before Alexander, and you're attributing the last 3000 years of Western European scientific advancement to its monotheism? Doesn't that signal a problem to you? Judaism was around a long time before that. It's not like people weren't exposed to this idea of a one god, and as I said before, Judaism wasn't even monotheistic as we think of that word now in the time of antiquity. So how could it be that the last 3000 years of scientific advancement were because of Judeo-Christian monotheism?
Furthermore, have you forgotten about the Dark Ages? Western scientific advancement went backward when knowledge was lost due to the Western Roman Empire's collapse.
If you think less people reading, less people having stone houses, less people eating meat, and less people making scientific advances is not less advanced, I don't really know what to tell you.
Yes, there are historians who argue that there was no Dark Age. I do not agree with them. Neither does reality.
Seriously? That's your argument? Some other army conquered them, therefore not more advanced?
So were the Huns, who did not even cook their food, more advanced than the armies they slaughtered? Or is that a ridiculous assertion?
Hell, a lion could take out a human being pretty damn quickly even if that human being were armed with a firearm. It takes a particularly high-caliber hollow point to effectively stop a lion. Lion: more advanced?
Actually, I said it was the Greeks, the Romans, and the Islamic Golden Age. It was exposure to the respective scientific advancements of these that allowed for Western European scientific revival. It wasn't Christian monotheism, because they had plenty of that in the Dark Ages, and despite that, still Dark Ages. Not to mention, oh right, all those Greek scientific advances were done in a time of polytheism. Woops.
The scientific method? People were monotheistic Christians long before that came about.
Of course the Muslims were monotheists. I never said the Muslims were not monotheists. Stop distorting my words.
What I said was that in the Dark Ages, we had Judeo-Christian monotheism. We also had scientific regression, because, y'know, DARK AGE. It wasn't until people were exposed to the scientific advancements of the Greeks, Romans, and the Islamic Golden Age that the whole history of Western scientific advancement happened.
So if you're saying that Judeo-Christian monotheism resulted in Western scientific advancement, that is evidently false by a basic understanding of history. Hell, the Dark Ages were a time when everyone was Christian, yet was much less advanced a society than the pagan Roman Empire that had preceded it.
No, the reason that the Western scientific advancement happened was because they were exposed to - what you call it - science, not monotheism.
First, a clear statement for "moral" needs to be defined. In a society where, to use a previous example, the punishment for theft is execution, and as a result theft is much less frequent, is that more moral than a society where the punishment for theft is a fine or imprisonment but theft is significantly more widespread? Is the fact a lot of "immoral" people are being killed and the "immoral" act of theft is decreasing a sufficient justification for the "immoral" act of killing people, regardless of what type of people they may be? This is a highly subjective thing and not easy to answer, and for most people is on a very individually-biased sliding scale.
Secondly, on what information are we measuring the rate of immoral events occurring? If past law enforcement was less competent then that would result in fewer reported, observed, and/or solved crimes. This would result in the appearance of a lower crime rate, when in fact the crime rate was much greater than it appears from recorded information dating to that time period.
Third, what are we defining as "society"? Are we measuring this on the basis of an entire world, or merely one culture? One subset of a culture? The current laws of an existing culture? The larger scale you end up going it becomes even more difficult to accurately measure things, even today.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
One hundred percent incorrect. I don't really know what else to say here. Ancient peoples didn't even have the prerequisite beliefs about the existence of people in other areas of the world, much less that the supernatural way they believed the world worked would apply consistently to people unknown to them. Or even that it would apply consistently to them over ensuing generations unless they fulfilled rituals/practices/etc that they believed their deity wanted.
This is much popularized by how grade school teachers in the US tell the discovery story of Columbus, that the common person believed you would fall off the edge of the world, presumably ending up in a place where who knows what happens. The idea that the thinking of everyone was this backward isn't factually correct, just like a lot of myths told to grade schooler's, but the depiction of this unscientific view of the universe I find pretty illustrative.
It's enough to say that universiality is not something mankind is born with or intuitively grasps as part of its survival makeup. It had to be developed.
Once again, the impact or non-impact of belief systems not in question is... not in question.
The argument is NOT that Judeo-Christianity had its impact as evidenced by it being the only known belief system that held to certain tenets. Whether it was or wasn't the only one doesn't matter. The evidence that the impact came from Judeo-Christianity is based in the fact that certain thinkers and peoples styled themselves as Judeo-Christian, and that the religious developments in that area of the world, such as Islam, made explicit reference to figures in Judaism and Christianity. So, the hypothesis that these belief systems had immense impact doesn't rely whatsoever on them being unique in any way. It's a fact of history that stands on its own.
Whether the same sort of objective world view I'm talking about would've prevailed had people believed more in Zeus, or Ahura Mazda, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster doesn't matter at all, because people didn't. It seems completely arbitrary to me. The way I see it, the only perspective really interested in showing how unique and original Judeo-Christianity was would be the perspective trying to vindicate its theology or the divinity of its founding. What I said wasn't pointed at that at all. Showing its effects on historical thought shouldn't be taken as an intent to do that.
What was Judaism's impact? That's what you're going to ask?
You could get a doctorate in history studying that question alone, and you would still have to narrow it down to get anywhere.
My point was the the world view existing in the areas of the world where it predominated lent value to the type of objective observation that forms the basis of science.
I'm not going to list all of the aspects of Judaism (and its derivatives) that reveal belief in a singular, Pantheistic God, because they start from word one of the Torah in its creation story.
But first, my point wasn't based on that theology rejecting the idea of other Gods, or really any specific tenet at all. Let me put it this way. Suppose for argument's sake that we pin down Judeo-Christianity as being polytheistic, to what I'm sure would be the disagreement of current and historical members of these religions. Them aside, we're supposing that they're polytheistic. So what? Now that they're polytheistic, that theology can't, as a rule, have the historical impact that the record shows it to have had? All the self-styled, Christians, Jews and Muslims writing with the express purpose of advancing their theology, all of those things about them are irrelevant? Best case, pinning these religions down as inauthentic or unoriginal (which they weren't), would only indirectly support the hypothesis that it was something about those religions other than their theology that resulted in their historical impact. So, what was it? Let's say it's because their ceremonies involve bread, and people going to church are just really hungry. But wait, that might explain their popularity, but how does that lead to the cultural zeitgeist of rationality and measured observation pervading in that area of the world, where in others it didn't? My point if very self-evident - that what people actually believed about the observable universe, i.e. their theology, is the most likely cause for how they went about actually observing that universe. I'm not concerned with exactly what theological tenet caused what aspect of their world view, just that those were the results.
Second, trying to prove that these theologies were inconsistent, as well as unoriginal, does in no way mean either that those beliefs can't be credited with their historical effects. Put simply, what Paul said or didn't say doesn't matter. Paul isn't an authority on history. He's an authority to Christians on their theology inasmuch as they accept him as one. The question at issue is what the historical effects of those religions were on the philosophy of the time, not the merit, consistency, or uniqueness of those religions. So more broadly, whether one person or another believed in other Gods isn't relevant. What they believed about the nature of the universe is. Even some modern Christian sects, like Mormons, believe in other Gods, that people become Gods, and so on. They also believe that the universe is governed by a consistent set of observable principles, because it would be absurd not to at this point.
How can a religion have impact if it's not Monotheistic? That's what you're asking?
And if you're requesting that I exposit the particulars of all the historical effects of Judeo-Christianity, I'm going to have to decline for the sake of brevity.
If you feel I didn't read your post, it seems to me that's because you think I'm supporting some argument that I'm not.
Agreed. I have no idea in the world how you could draw the conclusion from what I said that I have the false belief in some unified body of Christian belief. Just the opposite. What I've been saying is that a body of thought doesn't have to be unified, consistent, or even factual on any level in order to have historical impact.
If the only differentiating aspect between two theologies is how many Gods fit under it, then true. Nowhere did I argue that was the case. I even acknowledged that certain prior theologies were monotheist to point out that it was specifically the Judeo-Christian movement that had this impact. I pointed out that they believed in a pantheistic, supernatural causality, rather than an arbitrary supernatural causality, i.e. impassioned Gods, as I originally wrote. And it seems self-evident the next point about how a rational Deity would relate to a cultural value of rationality.
First of all, you need to acknowledge Islam as influenced by Judeo-Christian theology, if not an outright derivative of it. Its canon makes specific mention of Judeo-Christian figures like Abraham. The absolute, pantheistic theology, external proselytizing, and a long list of other qualities happen to be traits in common with those movements, and the cultural contact between them was immense. So if your intent is to discredit Judeo-Christian theology of any cultural or scientific advancement, then you get exactly nowhere, as far as history is concerned, by crediting those advancements to Islam instead.
Second point, I have no idea in the world how you could draw the conclusion that I think the advancements of one culture possessing one trait indicates that another culture not possessing that trait didn't make ANY advancements. That denies the antecedent. As to what I think you're trying to do, which is divorcing the Medieval period from Western cultural advancement, I'll continue here...
You're doing the same thing in reverse here. Only here, it's so absurd that I'm thinking that you willfully misconstrued the idea. It's even worse to take you at your word that this is your line of thinking.
Let me follow that line of thought a little bit. So, cultural ideas have either exactly one cause, or they are created in a bubble without influence from any others. They're the same at their inception as they are subsequently. Their impact, if any, must also be immediate and revolutionary as against other cultural influences. So that being the case, a sure way of discrediting the impact of a cultural idea is to show that it existed at some prior point and had little impact then.
Just to be clear on my viewpoint, I believe the exact opposite of all those points. Cultural ideas are not created in a bubble. Previous ones influence subsequent ones, and they do so in way that all of them become part of an indistinguishable whole that represents a people's cultural viewpoint. And so previous cultural ideas can be credited with those effects on subsequent ones. Their ideas are neither "good" nor "bad". They are best judged and understood in terms of their effects. Cultural ideas are also not constant from beginning to end. They change over time. They are not constant in their impact, either. Ideas, and new forms of the same idea, can emerge and have influence where they didn't previously.
Judaism influenced Christianity influenced Islam. When I'm saying Judeo-Christianity had an effect in causing the scientific advancement that preceded Christianity, I'm talking about the collection of traits in common among these sources and using the common label "Judeo-Christianity" for the cultural movement. That's what I mean by 3000 years of thought. I'm not saying either that Western science has a single cause, that being this religious movement. Science had many concurrent causes, as do all cultural beliefs.
What I'm saying is the this theological movement influenced basically every cultural belief in the West as judged by the extensiveness of commentary on these three related religions. You can debate what those effects were. My assertion is that Western religion played a role in developing the rationality of Western thought. You can disagree. But to say that these religions didn't have that effect because they existed before these effects I'm claiming occurred, that one religion is unrelated to another, or that cultural ideas deserve no credit for the influence they have on others, that line of thought is just absurd.
If you're talking about the idea that culture and science were in prograde, rather than retrograde, during the Medieval period, that's not just an obscure minority viewpoint. That's an accepted historical fact. No respected historian has used the term "Dark Ages" without that caveat for almost a century. It's a cultural fable. Once modern historians started researching the Medieval period, they found abundant advancement, and the term "Dark Age" went on to be used only as a descriptor for periods lacking in source texts. But even then, most historians oppose using that term because of the possibility that the reader will still construe it in that pejorative context.
Why all the cultural fable around it if the evidence doesn't support it? Maybe it's helpful to understand why it's been spread by the viewpoints that spread it. First, it supports the Anglo-centric and Protestant-centric bias prevailing during the height of the British Empire. Factually speaking, Britain was not advancing science or culture during the Medieval period and did not begin to do so until the Reformation and the Renaissance. So the idea that the rest of Europe was in a similar state seems to bolster its prestige.
In a similar way, it makes sense that denouncing a Catholic Europe advances the American exceptionalism dogma also, both due to the Protestant heritage of the US and its claim to religious tolerance and secular government.
Finally, you have the naturalists, self-styled "scientists", such as Neil Degrasse Tyson, who in Cosmos drew up Galileo's struggle with the Catholic church as emblematic of mankind's liberation from the unambiguously negative influence of religion. Evidently to him, that means that the sum total of human progress in the West during Catholicism's heyday is zero, along with the periods of pre-Christian religions. Because religion can do no good, all cultural progress must be credited to the more secular periods of history. The only route for mankind to arrive with telescope in hand to disprove God was to divorce history from religion.
So, there are lots of things telling you to esteem a pre-Christian Rome and a post-Catholic Western Europe. Some esteem is warranted. But the fallacy is to take the extreme stance that the West was in retrograde during the intervening period. That's not factual.
You'll have to forgive my brevity, I mistook most people as capable of distinguishing culture and conquest as separate things. I didn't say anything about conquest. If your belief is that the survival of a group's cultural beliefs depends on them preventing the conquest of their political systems, I disagree. History doesn't support the idea that political conquest must always be followed by the spread of the victor's cultural beliefs.
I imagine that mistake must come from the muddling of conquest as a cultural ideal itself. In certain cultures of history, conquest produces enough shame to shake the belief systems of the conquered, particularly if that belief system is oriented around prestige and conquest itself, such as Nationalism or Tribalism, rather than something like Philosophy, Religion, etc. But the nature of beliefs being what they are, people don't believe things until they think they are true. The force of coercion might convince one group that they're more powerful than another, and if a culture relies on the opposite they're in trouble, but in any other area of belief that's not conquest itself, coercion can only go so far.
A couple cultures that we've been talking about are a good case in point that conquest does not always precede cultural advancement. The Greeks were conquered by the Romans, after which point their culture went on to have immense influence on their conquerors. The Jews were conquered by the Romans over and over, and at times suffered attempts at genocide. They remained culturally distinct from their conquerors. Later on, their culture, specifically the Christian offshoot of their culture if you want to split hairs, had immense effect in Rome subsequent to those events. There are also conquests extremely minimal in military effect that did, in fact, cause a disproportionate amount of cultural upheaval, say as in the case of the European New World conquests.
So when I'm talking about the Hellenic culture not surviving against other cultural influences, what I'm saying is that people of their own belief did not hold to the Hellenic world view anymore. So the rhetoric of a Dark Age in cultural retrograde after the Classical Period makes at least one mistake in that it assigns too much appeal to the Hellenic culture. If the Renaissance had resurrected Hellenic religion, government, or anything Hellenic aside from a few isolated secular thinkers, the case would be stronger. As the record stands, the fact of a Hellenic revival is mostly fable.
I think I touched on most of this. Western Religion may be owed credit for advances made in the Muslim world, because you know, cultures affect one another. These cultures are derivatives of one another. The idea of scientific regression during the Medieval period is a fable. Science, as a cultural idea, didn't create itself in a bubble, because cultural ideas don't create themselves in a bubble. They're caused by the collection of preceding cultural ideas.
And finally, a cultural idea existing for an extended period of time prior to another is NOT proof that the prior did not cause the subsequent one. Because the converse of that is that only contemporaneous ideas serve as causes, which is to argue that cultural ideas are caused by themselves. Cultures change, and that's exactly what happens when they do.
You need more structured education in the field of history, and I'm not going to be able to give that in an online forum about a card game. Read the work of Edward Grant, and especially the anthologies by Ronald Numbers and David Lindberg. Better yet, take a course that sources their work. They have credentials in the field of history. That's something that these multi-disciplinary, pop-science authors like Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Jared Diamond do not.