The latest episode of the Unbelievable? radio show is out this weekend. This time it features a discussion between me and Arif Ahmed, an atheist from the University of Cambridge.

We were discussing the moral argument for theism. The discussion was certainly interesting enough, although it was divided up so as to fit into the show’s schedule. It wasn’t structured like a formal debate, so we didn’t get to respond in depth to each comment that we might have liked to. Both of us remarked after we had recorded the show that we could have gone on for a couple more hours unpacking the material that we had briefly touched on. Well, we couldn’t do that, but I have a loaded blog and I’m not afraid to use it.
Interested? Read the rest.

Really? So humanism is natural law theory? Or maybe a humanist wrote the book of Romans. Someone didn’t do much thinking when making this one! If humanism were really nothing more than a moral epistemology then someone should have told them!

Hey all. About an hour from now, there will be a hardware upgrade with the server, so the site will be briefly down. It’s all for the best.

Sometimes the facts are unpopular. The title is not meant to imply that I’m going to talk about facts that connect homosexuality and Islam. Simply because neither one of these statistical realities really deserved a blog post of its own, I’ve combined them into one.

Unpopular fact 1: There aren’t nearly as many homosexuals out there as some would like you to believe.

Sorry folks, it’s true.

Just one in 100 people in the UK say they are gay or lesbian, the first ever survey of British sexual identity has revealed.
A further one in every 200 people are bisexual, according to the data published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

So if we combine the homosexuals and bisexuals, that’s 1.5%. Now, depending on which homosexual group you ask (until this data came out), you might have heard anything from 7% to 10%. A recent article by Jacqui Stanford over at New Zealand homosexual / bisexual / transexual interest website GayNZ expresses “disbelief” at recent statistics to come out of the UK.

The new estimate that just 1.5 percent of Britain’s population is gay or bisexual is being met with utter disbelief. The Office of National Statistics came up with the surprising figure after interviewing more than 450,000 people. It’s a massive drop from previous estimates of 5-7 percent.

Well, here’s the unpopular truth (well, unpopular with some, anyway): The figure is not even slightly surprising, and there has never (ever) been a reputable estimate of 5-7 percent.

Here’s the unusual line of reasoning that the GayNZ article draws on:

Correspondent Mark Townsend points out in The Observer that the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, most recently conducted 10 years ago, asked 11,000 Britons: ‘Ever had sex with a same sex partner, including genital contact?’ More than 6 percent of the respondents replied: ‘Yes.’ “Are we to believe the pool of potential partners for gay and bisexuals has recently evaporated by millions? If not, then why the vast discrepancy?” he writes.

Notice the slippery standard: Townsend notes that in a (very much smaller) survey, a little over six percent of adults said that at some point in their lives they had either had sex with a same sex partner or had genital contact with one. Notice that this is not a question about the present, nor is it a question about whether a person considers themselves homosexual or bisexual (for example, a respondent may have been thinking of a drunken mistake, and experiment that turned them off ever considering bisexuality, or a dare, any one of which might have occurred some years ago), and it includes people who have engaged in behaviour that may not even be regarded as having sex of any kind. But notice that the article at GayNZ uses that data to attempt to overturn a vastly more comprehensive study (with forty times as many people surveyed – the “largest social survey ever produced by the ONS) ) which actually asks about whether or not people consider themselves heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. GayNZ is clearly comparing apples with oranges. It’s like saying that if a person has ever tasted meat at any time in history (or even just touched it!) then they can’t possibly be a vegetarian.

As I have noted at this blog before, the UK is not unique here. Similar statistics exist for New Zealand as well, for example. According to a well known University of Otago study (see the last link), “Less than one per cent of people identified themselves as homosexual, but three per cent had a same-sex encounter.”

So this isn’t news. It will merely be spun as “surprising” or “doubtful” by those who perhaps wish things were otherwise. Sorry. Facts is facts, and it’s no good complaining that the facts are in poor taste.

Unpopular fact 2: Far more Muslims in America support suicide bombing than some Western Islamic spokespeople would like you to believe.

I know, I know, it’s supposed to be an unfair, ignorant stereotype: The crazed Muslim suicide bomber blowing himself (or herself) up, taking as many infidels out of this world as possible in the process. We’re not supposed to think that way about Muslims. That stereotype is based on a tiny tiny handful of very unique extremists in non-Western nations where they don’t have democracy and all that good stuff. To say otherwise is not merely mistaken, it’s impolite!

So for the second time in one most let me make myself unpopular (with some people, anyway). The facts indicate that this politeness may be misplaced:

The survey by the Pew Research Center, one of the most exhaustive ever of the country’s Muslims, revealed a community that in many ways blends comfortably into society. Its largely mainstream members express nearly as much happiness with their lives and communities as the general public does, show a broad willingness to adopt American customs, and have income and education levels similar to others in the U.S.
Even so, the survey revealed noteworthy pockets of discontent.
While nearly 80 percent of U.S. Muslims say suicide bombings of civilians to defend Islam can not be justified, 13 percent say they can be, at least rarely.
That sentiment is strongest among those younger than 30. Two percent of them say it can often be justified, 13 percent say sometimes and 11 percent say rarely.

Reflect on that. In the American Muslim population below the age of thirty, twenty six percent maintain that suicide bombing is acceptable in some cases. That’s just over a quarter of them.

Say it’s unpleasant, say it’s mean to point the facts out (but be prepared to say why, of course), but don’t say it isn’t true.

The facts, quite frankly my dear, don’t give a damn about what’s popular.

Some years ago now I was involved in exposing somebody as a publisher of child pornography. That man is no longer in New Zealand as a result, and I am glad of that.

I would find child porn reprehensible no matter what my family situation, but I have four children. That makes the thought of child porn even more grotesque to me. In recent discussions over the last day or so with a couple of self-styled libertarians, they put it to me that a libertarian (which I am not) should oppose all censorship, and since banning child pornography counts as censorship, it should not be banned. One of these men was a particularly vile defender of the child pornographer who is no longer in this country. I could understand this coming from him, but the other person is a Christian. The principles of liberty and free speech, he insisted, extended tot he publication of child porn.

What say you then? If you believe in free speech, do you extend this freedom to a person who writes homosexual erotica where men in their thirties seduce and engage in sexual acts – acts described in lurid detail – with young boys (pre-pubescent), and who advocates in that literature that people stop persecuting “boy lovers?” If not, why not? (I use this example because this was one of the examples I was confronted with in the case of the child pornographer I referred to earlier). I’m interested in what readers think about this. Do you agree that libertarianism should lead to the freedom of the child porn industry?

Please be aware that in this particular thread I will be enforcing the blog policy fairly strictly. Read it before posting if you’re not sure what it involves. Please note also that I will not publish any advocacy of child porn or paedophilia at this blog. This is my blog, and you don’t have the freedom to use it however you like. Just don’t post it OK?

This is the first time I have ever actually apologised for an episode. It’s long. It’s dry. You might fall asleep. I’m sorry.

Episode 037: Classical Liberalism and Natural Law [ 57:50 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

As many of you will know (unless you’re new here), a series of shoddy errors by my (now former) domain host resulted in this site being down for a while in mid July through to August this year. That put a major dent in traffic (reducing it to nothing for a while), lowered the search visibility of the site, resulted in broken links into the site, etc, and really messed things up.

While these things are a bit of a subjective measure, looking at the traffic as it has gradually returned and increased since sorting those problems out, it looks like we have nearly recovered from that hit, and the site ranking should be back up to the level that it was earlier this year within a few months. Thanks for helping this happen by visiting. And please – tell your friends about this place!

Today Erik Wielenberg’s book Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe arrived in the mail. Wielenberg is a proponent of the claim that moral facts exist without God. They are just brute facts. They are there, and that is that, with no deeper explanation to be offered. Because of my keen interest in the moral argument for theism, I was interested in seeing what he had to say.

At the moment I’m still at the stage of flicking through the pages, but already I am recognising some familiar friends (or enemies!) on the pages I read. The first one I thought I would mention is the perennial confusion of the the concept of moral rightness with more general goodness. In a way it’s actually encouraging to see so many examples of the error in the literature, because it confirms that there is a good reason to complete my article on “The Non-moral Goodness of God” and have it published (I’m fairly sure that some of what I say here will find its way into that article). But while the subject is fresh in my mind I thought I’d explain how Wielenberg makes this confusion. Bear in mind throughout, this isn’t a special problem with this book. A number of philosophers make the error, whether only through careless use of terminology, or, as in this case, through a confusion of the underlying concepts involved.

In the section of the book that I’m referring to, Erik Wielenberg is discussing the position that moral facts depend for their truth value on God, a position that he does not accept. He calls this the Dependency Thesis. He cites Edward Wierenga as an example of a philosopher who holds this view. That Wielenberg uses Wierenga as an example reassures me that I have understood what position he is referring to, since Edward Wierenga is a well known proponent of a divine command theory of ethics. According to this view (actually it’s more like a cluster of similar views), the truth of moral facts comes (in some important way, it varies from one view to the next) from God’s commands or will.

At this point (drawing on Ralph Cudworth), Wielenberg raises a very familiar objection to divine command ethics. The argument here is that if morality is based on God’s will then it would be completely arbitrary. God could command us to torture and pummel each other, and this would be OK. As Wielenberg puts it, this view implies “that it could be morally permissible for one person gratuitously to pummel another.”¹ According to Wielenberg, this is “absurd.” Notice that he Wielenberg is referring, and correctly so, to the concept of being “morally permissible.” The subject is morality or ethics, the study of what we ought and ought not do. This will be relevant in a moment.
Interested? Read the rest.

Sometimes my blog posts aren’t terribly academic in nature, but are purely personal. This is one of those.

If you’re an evangelical Christian then you and I have some pretty important things in common. In fact if you’re a Christian at all – a serious Christian (I hope you know what I mean: you’re self consciously Christian, Jesus is at the centre of your faith, you believe in the supernatural and the ability of God to do the humanly impossible, you don’t want to change the religion to make it easier for you or others to accept, you accept that you actually have a duty of obedience towards God, you agree that there are no cases where you’re right and the the Bible is wrong, you think the truth matters, you think that there really is such thing as sin, you even have the audacity to state as historical fact that God raised Jesus from the dead etc) – then we have a lot in common. You could say we’re family.
Interested? Read the rest.

Perhaps the central bone of contention in the moral argument for the existence of God is the claim that philosophical naturalism cannot provide a basis for moral facts, while theism can. To say that one outlook cannot give an account of moral facts while another can is to assume that moral facts need an “account” if they are to exist at all. It is to suppose that they require some sort of basis: states of affairs need to exist that give rise to moral facts. Moral facts can then be explained in terms of these states of affairs.

One way of rejecting the moral argument is to reject this claim in the moral argument, not by claiming that naturalism or atheism can provide a basis for moral facts, but instead to reject the idea that moral facts need any basis or explanation at all. They just exist, that is that, and you’d better get used to it! Erik Wielenberg claims that “objective morality does not require an external foundation of any kind.”¹ Moral facts are not explained by other facts, they obtain as a matter of brute fact.
Interested? Read the rest.