Tai-chi vs Rea-li-ty

In the twilight zone between science and religion, there sits a rainbow band of pseudo-scientific disciplines that I, personally, categorize under the general heading of "woo".

Mind-reading and mediums, tarot cards and voodoo, ghosthunting and demonology, homeopathy and phrenology, astrology and numerology, reiki and fengshui. Woo goes by many names. People spend tons of time and money on these things with very little returns beyond the placebo effect. And this is OK; I am a free-marketeer by principle and people are perfectly at discretion to spend their hard-earned money as they see fit.

Even though the word "science" appears in the description, there is of course nothing remotely scientific about these things and not one has a snowball's chance in hell of surviving scientific scrutiny.  (Unfortunately for them, they actually make testable claims.)

There might very well be mysterious beings and forces outside our current understanding. We cannot be sure that there are not. But what you can be damn sure of is that the folks on TV running shows with names like "Ghosthunters" and making googly-eyes at the ceiling under a night-vision camera are transparent con-men who realize they would get paid far less if they got a real job.

Unless you start depending on this sort of thing exclusively, most of this stuff is harmless most of the time apart from making you a little poorer. But the problems start cropping up when the bullshitters actually start believing in their own bullshit. This happens on rare occasions because most successful peddlers of pseudo-science are smart savvy marketing types; they very well understand that a brush against cold hard reality will turn off the money-tap very quickly and therefore try to avoid this at all costs. People like Uri Geller found this out the hard way. But on the rare occasions when this happens, it is priceless to watch. Here is a little example of that in this video below. I am embarrassed to admit that I have never laughed so hard at an old man getting beaten up. But the unfortunate fact is that this is pretty much what happens when mystical shamanic bullshit meets the cold hard reality of a fist to the face.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=gEDaCIDvj6I

A dilemma

Since this is a lazy day and I have nothing on my hands, I was thinking. This is generally a bad thing.

I was thinking about philosophy. Which is worse.

There is this little dilemma in philosophy called the Euthyphro Dilemma, attributed to Plato. Simply stated, it goes, "Does god command something because it is moral or is it moral because he commands it?"

Let's parse that. If something is moral because god commands it, then whatever comes out of his mouth is moral. If the command is to kill your son or kill another tribe or own slaves, then that is the moral thing to do. Regardless of how heinous the act, it is moral. Most fairminded people would balk at this notion. 

On the other hand, if god commands something only if it is moral, then this means that the source of morality is external to god. The standard is set elsewhere. Which in turn means that if we wanted to behave morally, then we might as well cut out the middleman (god, in this case) and go directly to the source, making god either a moral intermediary (at best) or morally irrelevant (at worst).

One way out of the dilemma, seemingly, is the claim that god cannot command something that is immoral. He is inexorably barred from doing so because he is incapable of evil. This resolves the dilemma in favor of the statement that whatever god commands is moral because he is incapable of being immoral.

This "solution", however, bumps up against the question of moral agency.

See, here's the thing. For an act to be judged moral, there must be agency. Here is an example of what I mean. Let us imagine a group of kids on a picnic who stray too far and end up in a forest. Lost and confused, they try to make their way back to where their parents are, but end up deeper in the forest instead and run into a lion. The lion prepares to make a snack of the kids. Suddenly, there is a minor earthquake and this is sufficient to dislodge a large rock that is uphill. The rock rolls down and crushes the lion, saving the kids. 

It is quite easy to see that even though the act of saving the kids was a moral act, we cannot assign morality to the rock. The rock was following the laws of physics. It was not a moral agent because it had no choice but to roll down and crush the lion. If instead, the lion was killed by a hunter with a rifle, then there is moral agency. The hunter had a choice. He could simply have ignored the situation and carried on. 

Put simply, for an action to be morally good, the agent must have choice. To be good, you must be capable of being evil.

If god is to have moral agency, we must concede that god is capable of evil. If he is capable of evil, then we are back to the original dilemma, i.e. whatever god commands cannot be automatically moral. Even if we grant that every action and command of god has been perfectly moral so far, there is no guarantee that this will hold in the future. In fact, the very next command out of god's mouth could be dripping with evil, which we will hopefully judge using some other standard than god's own. To deny this by saying, "Well, that's impossible", is to immediately surrender the claim of god's moral agency and the dilemma stands.


[Postscript] There is a recursive trap in the structure of the Euthyphro Dilemma. One of the horns of the dilemma, if you will, states that the ultimate source of morality may be external to god. This sets up a recursion. If the ultimate source of morality is external to god, then the dilemma must apply with equal force to that source too: "Does the universal moral standard state something because it is moral, or is something moral because the universal standard says so?" And so on, ad infinitum.

At the risk of sounding like I am ranting, this is my basic problem with the god-concept in general. It is not that I dislike it because people kill in the name of god and religion. People have enough reasons to kill other people and have happily done so. A significant number of us will merrily kill even without a reason. That is not my beef with the god-concept. It is that when you dig just a little deeper beyond the happy horseshit...probe just a little farther past the pomp and pageantry, most canonical statements about god degenerate into philosophically recursive nonsense. [/Rant off.]