[ExI] Tolerance

[Brent Neal]

On 7 Dec, 2009, at 22:39, JOSHUA JOB wrote:

> I am intrigued by your repeated stress on falsification. You cannot  
> live your entire life based on falsification alone without any  
> principles created inductively from experience and reason. So why  
> place such stress on falsification, especially in a moral system,  
> which is expressly about how to live your life?


You're reiterating exactly the point I was making. Morals and ethics  
are not scientific, in the Popperian sense or any other sense. I  
conclude from that that any purported "universal" ethics are flawed.  
In the vernacular, only you have the ability to decide for yourself  
what is morally or ethically correct. It has been my observation that  
people adhere to social structures due to some utility that they  
provide. I choose a rationalist approach because it provides me with  
more utility than a superstitional approach. I rather like being able  
to figure out what's going on around me through testing hypotheses and  
appreciate the value that having some guidelines on what can be  
objectively determined and what cannot.  Some people, apparently, don't.

Now, I could go all anthropological and argue that at some point in  
the distant past the structures we now call "religions" had some  
utility in society, but now, the marginal utility of religion has been  
driven to the negative by insistence, particularly of the Abrahamic  
set, that faith comes before science, therefore atheism/humanism/etc.  
is on the rise as increasing numbers of people discover that these old  
traditions are truly not useful anymore. But, I won't, since I'm a  
physicist and not an anthropologist and as such I'm quite aware that  
this argument can fairly be considered crackpottish. :)

It still doesn't change my original argument that calling people names  
based on your sense of superiority is profoundly self-defeating.  
Someone mentioned the Four Horsemen interview. I recall thinking that  
Dennett was the only one of the four of them that wasn't a total tool  
in the interview. :) While I tend to sympathize, as you will no doubt  
have noted, with Hitchens and Dawkins, that doesn't mean that I don't  
think they can act like asses at times.  And I question the  
rationality of a worldview that provides such a black-and-white view  
of superiority and inferiority as the worldview of these so-called  
"Brights" does. Outside the realm of the scientific, I've learned to  
be profoundly distrustful of folks who offer me either-or choices:  
Believe in my god or suffer. Free markets mean zero regulation. You're  
either atheist or stupid.  The world is only that simple to people who  
are too lazy to think in depth about the issue at hand or are too  
uneducated to have a complex opinion.

B


--
Brent Neal, Ph.D.
http://brentn.freeshell.org
<brentn at freeshell.org>