Do babies come into this world with a natural tendency to tell right from wrong, or is their stance entirely informed by social conditioning? Or is it both?

I’ve blogged in the past on ethical intuitionism, and I had some favourable things to say about it. Properly functioning people under the right sorts of conditions, I maintain, have a (fallible) tendency to form true moral beliefs. I also blogged recently about the fact that children, in the course of healthy, normal development without extraordinary intervention, naturally form belief in God.

What about healthy babies and moral beliefs? Do they naturally form true moral beliefs, or is it all a matter of social conditioning and etiquette? Well, I’ve already answered that question by supporting ethical intuitionism. If that’s a plausible view on true moral belief formation in general, then it will be true of everyone as they develop into a competent knower. But is there any scientific evidence that very young children and babies actually do naturally form (what many of us would take to be) true moral beliefs?
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Is atheism or theism more natural for human beings?

According to online author Tim Covell, “Everyone is born atheist. Religion is learned.” Over at the “rational response squad” you’re treated to the claim that “Many people don’t know it but everyone is born an Atheist, it’s not until a child has religious beliefs Pushed on them with out any evidence to support them that they “think” their [sic] a Theist.” David McAfee makes the same claim: “Now, the way I see it, everybody is born an atheist and, without submersion into religion as a child, we would most likely maintain that position…”  These are just examples. There are plenty more out there in the non-peer-reviewed pool of “intellectual diversity” that is the internet.

Now, there’s at least some truth here. Newborns don’t have a lot by way of beliefs. They’re an ignorant sort, you could say, so the fact that they don’t overtly believe in God, or stars, or carrots, or causation, or planets etc, really isn’t very interesting. However, when people call themselves atheists, they don’t usually mean to convey their ignorance. It’s hardly fair game to point out what babies don’t know as grounds for any claims about what’s natural for intellectually developed adults to believe. To simply talk about what babies actually know is one thing – and something pretty uninteresting at that. What is more interesting is to talk about the kind of beliefs that babies – unaided by religious education – naturally form as their minds develop. It is here that comments like those above are quickly culled from the pool of those that can now make it to the level of scientific respectability. They are wrong – children are not natural atheists after all.
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This episode asks the question: “What is Faith”? Is it, as some maintain, just believing things for no good reason? When Christian thinkers over the years have spoken of having faith, what have they been talking about? Listen and find out!

At the end of this episode I ask listeners if they have any suggestions for scholars that I might interview in future episodes. Be sure to speak up if you have any ideas!

Episode 044: What is Faith? [ 58:30 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

A conversation I had the other day reminded me of what is now a rather old argument in relation to the question of belief in God (old in terms of twentieth century arguments anyway). Essentially, the issue was this: If my purported experience of knowing God / knowing that God exists via some sort of intuition or any other sort of experience should count as a reason for me to believe in God, then why can’t somebody else’s atheist experience (or at least their testimony of it) count as a reason for me to not believe in God? I say that I have a direct knowledge of God’s existence (let’s say I do). But what about someone who has direct, intuitive knowledge of something like “there is nothing out there, there is no purpose at all to life”? Surely, it was suggested to me, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
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In the “nuts and bolts” series, I explain and discuss some of the fundamental ideas in philosophy (and theology sometimes) that are taken for granted within the discipline, but which might not be very well known to ordinary human beings. This time the subject is ethical intuitionism (or moral intuitionism).

Firstly, and this cannot be emphasised strongly enough, moral intuitionism is not and has never been a theory about how moral facts are grounded. It is not a meta-ethical theory and it is not an ethical theory. It does not try to explain what makes anything right or wrong, nor does it try to tell us which particular actions are right and which are wrong. If you ever hear someone say “so your intuitions tell you that it’s wrong. That doesn’t make it wrong!” then you have my permission to do something unpleasant to them. Moral intuitionism is not meant to be about what makes things wrong – or right.

So if it’s not a theory of morality, what is it? Moral intuitionism is a moral epistemology. It is no more and no less than a theory about how we can come to know certain things, in this case certain moral facts. We can know them, according to this theory, by intuiting them, by experiencing the intuition that they are true.
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Nick “The Slasher” McGurk was found guilty of no fewer than nine counts of first-degree murder. A jury took just ten minutes to reach a unanimous guilty verdict. The case was open and shut. The judge donned his black cap and passed sentence: “Nicholas James McGurk, the court sentences you to death by hanging. Your sentence shall be carried out on a weekday next week in a turn of events that meets the following description: You are to be taken from your cell at midday to be hanged, but you will not know the day of your execution until the executioner knocks on your door on that that fateful day. That moment shall come as a thief in the night, in a most unpleasant surprise.”

Staring death in the face, Nick was in despair. He was led back to his cell where he would await that dreadful knock at the door. It was Friday afternoon. In the wee hours of that night, the Slasher couldn’t sleep. He had the following conversation with himself:
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Here’s episode 36, in honour of the recent retirement of Alvin Plantinga as the John O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. It’s sort of a “nuts and bolts” podcast episode on Alvin Plantinga, introducing the listener to his account of belief in God as a properly basic belief – a belief justifiably held, but not held on the basis of evidence or argument.

Enjoy.

Episode 036: Plantinga and properly basic beliefs [ 55:27 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

When he was presented with the accused man Jesus of Nazareth, the governer Pontius Pilate asked a question laden with philosophical importance: “What is truth?” It’s a question that I think was adequately answered centuries earlier by Plato: “The essence of truth is to say of what is that it is, and to say of what is not that it is not.” In normal english, the essence of truth-telling is to tell it like it really is.

In this edition of the nuts and bolts ( a series in which I cover the fundamentals of philosophy and later, theology), I won’t be wading through theories of truth. What I am going to do, prompted by a recent conversation, is to discuss the distinction between two different kinds of truths: analytic and synthetic. It might sound a bit artificial at first to talk about distinguishing between different sorts of truth. Some statements are true, and some are not. Right? Bear with me.

Here’s a list of statements that is true: 1) Write now Glenn is typing up a blog post about truth, 2) I just had a mochaccino, 3) Everything is the same as itself, 4) our van is blue, 5) a square has four sides, 6) 4 + 4 = 8. To say that the statements are true is to say that they correspond to the facts. However, this list consists of two different sorts of claims, and each type is true for different reasons.

Look at statements 1, 2 and 4. They are true because of how the facts just happened to be. Things could have been different. Things could have turned out so that I typed this blog post tomorrow, or an hour earlier than right now. I might not have had a mochaccino – I could have had a hot chocolate, or just a glass of water, but I happened to have a  mochaccino. Our car could easily have been painted a different colour. The facts just played out in such a way that these claims are true, but things could easily have been different. These claims are called “synthetic” claims, because they bring things together in a kind of synthesis. Take statement four. It brings together the idea of our van and also the idea of blueness. These two things don’t necessarily belong together, but just because of the facts as they are, these things have come together in the fact that our van is blue, and so the ideas are brought together in this statement. All synthetic truths are like this. For example the statement “rape is wrong” brings together the idea of rape and the idea of wrongness. “Microsoft Windows sucks” brings together an operating system and the quality of being suckful. Or think of more philosophical contexts. Imagine that someone has just presented an argument that you think is  fallacious. Saying “that argument is fallacious” or “that conclusion does not follow” (which is the same as saying “your argument is invalid”) would also be a synthetic statement, bringing together her argument or premise, and the concept of being fallacious or invalid.

Now look at statements 3, 5 and 6. They’re also true, but not for the same reason. True, they also line up with the facts, but they don’t just happen to line up with the facts. In fact the facts could not possibly have been any other way in these cases. Look at statement 5. Yes a square does, in fact, have four sides, but that’s because in order for something to be a square it must have four sides. Having four sides is part of the very definition of being square. Stated differently, there is no possible world in which statement 5 is false. The same is true of statements 3 and 6. Everything is the same as itself, because if at any given point in time, something is different from object x, then that thing is not object x but a different object. Likewise, there will never be a time when things change so that 4 plus 4 equals something other than 8. Statements like these are not synthetic, they are “analytic.” This is because they don’t bring two different ideas together. Look again at the statement about squares having four sides. Just by analysing the meaning of the terms, we see that the statement is true. We don’t need to do any evidence gathering to realise that 4 + 4 = 8. Analytic statements are true by definition.

Be wary of people presenting arguments or claims and giving them a bit of extra rhetorical “ompf” by throwing in the phrase “by definition.” For example over at Scott Klarr’s blog you’ll read: “If a god is not composed of matter or energy, then that god, by definition, does not exist.” This is not true at all. Sure, someone might wish to argue that in fact nothing but physical matter and energy exists, and because of this fact, a God who is not physical does not exist. But none of this is a question of definition, it’s a question of fact – facts that people clearly do not agree on.

As a second example, take the comments of an anonymous author here: “If, in order for a belief to be rational, I must have reasons for the belief, then faith is, by definition, not rational.” Again, this just misuses the phrase “by definition.” The author misleadingly suggests that s/he is talking about an analytic truth. The author might think that things held as articles of religious faith are in fact not supported by reasons, but this is a matter of contestable opinion, and certainly not merely a matter of definition. Even if it’s true, it would only be true because we checked the reasons that all religious people held their beliefs, and we discovered that they have no reasons for their beliefs.

So there you go: Analytic vs Synthetic truth.

Glenn Peoples

In a recent discussion with one of the commenters over at M and M’s blog (see the interchange between myself and someone using the nickname “Heraclides”) it occurred to me yet again that there are people – especially on the internet – who frequently wander into arguments about what are essentially subjects in philosophy, who clearly don’t have a background in philosophy, who appear not to have done much (or any) reading in the area they are arguing about, who are at times not really familiar with some of the basic terminology involved (even though they are using it), and there’s nothing terrible about any of this so far – but then your realise that they are talking as though they are absolutely certain that they are experts in the field. You offer a little advice, but you are told by this obvious newcomer that you couldn’t possibly know what you’re talking about.

Take my recent encounter. I said that scientists treat theories as provisional, but they do not treat knowledge as provisional. Knowledge is, after all, warranted true belief, so a scientist only knows something if he has become convinced that it is true. The reply that I was promptly given was “Theories *are* knowledge This suggests to me that you don’t understand what a theory really is.” Oh, and as for the fact that knowledge is warranted true belief, this is what my zealous fellow blog visitor had to say:  “Only a religious person would write “knowledge is warranted true belief”. This both shows that you don’t understand science (and thereby aren’t in a position to criticise it) and that you don’t understand the failing of insisting something is “true belief” either (it’s blind to any revision or new information).”

Rather than simply get further frustrated at the bleak intellectual scene that one often finds in the comments section at blogs out there (as illustrated by the above encounter), I have decided to put a little more energy into becoming part of the solution. I’m adding a new category to my blog. The category is called “nuts and bolts.” In this new category, I’ll add posts that spell out basic terms and concepts used in the various subject areas in philosophy. You might think this is a bit redundant. After all, there are plenty of online dictionaries and encyclopedias out there. And you’re right, there are. But the way I see it, the more good basic information is out there, the more likely somebody will be to stumble upon it. So here it is, the very first post in the nuts and bolts category.

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