Religion & Ethics: Content from Across the ABC




Date/Time 13 Jul 2014 11:41:54am
To be honest I didn't read the blog post you linked to - I was just responding directly to the content of your post.

Having now read it I can comfortably say that it doesn't make the matter any clearer. For all the talk about Aristotle and teleology, it still implies that to know what is right implies knowing what 'human nature', in the teleological sense, is.

So how do we know what the teleology of humans is?

Deriving ethics from some kind of teleological standpoint isn't useful because it turns one hard question - "What is ethical?" - into an even harder question - "What is teleological?". I'm not sure some kind of in-built teleology is even falsifiable.

The holy writings or men come in to answer the teleology question with answers that can't be verified or tested, and all of a sudden you've got ethics by command.

Started reading the link, got to the part about nihilism, closed it. I am not a nihilist. Atheism can be consistent with absolute ethics, and some of the 'new' atheists take that standpoint. (Some don't. Atheism is a pretty broad church. :P).

Game theory isn't magic, and science most certainly isn't 'theological babble'. The thing I'm referring to here is when people construct an argument by slinging together a bunch of philosophical terms in some kind of melange that doesn't really mean anything, that doesn't make any claims, or is inherently unfalsifiable (and therefore doesn't really make any claims). People being Not Even Wrong. See, for example, this article: .

The closest science has to that is string theory, unfalsifiable by virtue of being able to describe all possible realities. The difference is that theoretical physicists try to tie down string theory, make it falsifiable, or useful.