Finally! A highbrow religious debate.

[poolerboy0077]

If you're tired of the really mind-numbing debates on religion, then this is the video for you!

The debate takes more the form of a discussion but there is clear disagreement and perspectives between this atheist scientist and theistic philosopher. I hope you enjoy.

(Meta)Physics: Hans Halvorson and Sean Carroll at Caltech - YouTube



Please comment after you have watched the debate.

 

[leftrightleftrightleft]

A very interesting debate. More of a discussion really.

A couple points. First of all, I think my views and Hans align fairly well. But I found myself wondering whether his labelling of himself as "Christian" was an accurate one because his beliefs fall so far from the stereotypes and expectations one has of a person who labels themselves as such. How can he and Pat Robertson both identify under the same label?

This speaks to my problem with the Christian label in general. A word is only useful if it describes something that all listeners agree upon. If the words "banana", "apple" and "orange" did not exist and we instead had some word "gorzj" to describe all three, then what use would "gorzj" be for two people sharing a conversation? One person says "gorzj" and is describing a yellow, soft, elongate fruit with a thick skin, while the other person is describing a red, hard, round fruit with a thin skin. The word is no longer useful if it describes such entirely different things.


A couple interesting and/or thought-provoking points I took away:

-The universe can be thought of as a Turing machine
-Hans' clear embarrassment about Christians ignorantly using the fine-tuning argument
-the redefining of what "materialism" and "physical" mean with the advent of quantum mechanics. I just spoke to that in a recent thread; the whole concept of "physical" is just a definitional word-game. Naturalists define "physical" as "all that is", and as such, even new types of matter that would have previously been considered "non-physical" are incorporated into the "physical" realm.
-I thought Hans' comments on the biggest challenges with revelatory knowledge was a good one and something that I think few Christians really think about or deal with appropriately

I thought the most interesting thing said was this quote from Carroll:
"Figuring out the mass of the electron is enormously easy compared to figuring out what's a bad person and what's a good person."

Why would this be? And why would he think that?

 

[poolerboy0077]

A very interesting debate. More of a discussion really.

A couple points. First of all, I think my views and Hans align fairly well. But I found myself wondering whether his labelling of himself as "Christian" was an accurate one because his beliefs fall so far from the stereotypes and expectations one has of a person who labels themselves as such. How can he and Pat Robertson both identify under the same label?

This speaks to my problem with the Christian label in general. A word is only useful if it describes something that all listeners agree upon.

I'd say it does. Both he and Pat agree in an anthropomorphic God who sent Himself down in the form of his Son to die as a kind of scapegoat for the collective sins of mankind to thwart an impending doom that was going to occur for human beings behaving fallibly. The rest of the details are clear areas of disagreement. I think there are more problematic terms than Christianity, such as a word like "sports." Ask yourself what is similar between sports like badminton or lawn bowling versus Muay Thai kickboxing apart from breathing? I'm sure there're elements to justify being covered under this umbrella term, but they're not very obvious I hope you'd agree.

I thought the most interesting thing said was this quote from Carroll:
"Figuring out the mass of the electron is enormously easy compared to figuring out what's a bad person and what's a good person."

Why would this be? And why would he think that?

Because unlike morality, the axioms to explain physical properties are much more straightforward. Once you arrive at an epistemology to observe the physical world around you, like how much things weigh, you can use certain tools to find measurements and other means of achieving that. With morality you first have to converge on just what this term relates to, what are axioms we reasonably can converge on and how to begin finding answers to "right" and "wrong" behaviors and attitudes. I talk a little bit about this in my thread "On Establishing Secular Morality."

 

[quatona]

Thanks for the link, I enjoyed their conversation thoroughly.

 

[quatona]

I thought the most interesting thing said was this quote from Carroll:
"Figuring out the mass of the electron is enormously easy compared to figuring out what's a bad person and what's a good person."

Why would this be? And why would he think that?

Because we don´t even all agree on the frame of reference within which these questions need to be answered, to begin with.

 

[quatona]

A very interesting debate. More of a discussion really.

A couple points. First of all, I think my views and Hans align fairly well. But I found myself wondering whether his labelling of himself as "Christian" was an accurate one because his beliefs fall so far from the stereotypes and expectations one has of a person who labels themselves as such. How can he and Pat Robertson both identify under the same label?

This speaks to my problem with the Christian label in general. A word is only useful if it describes something that all listeners agree upon. If the words "banana", "apple" and "orange" did not exist and we instead had some word "gorzj" to describe all three, then what use would "gorzj" be for two people sharing a conversation? One person says "gorzj" and is describing a yellow, soft, elongate fruit with a thick skin, while the other person is describing a red, hard, round fruit with a thin skin. The word is no longer useful if it describes such entirely different things.

This word already exists: "fruit". Depending on what you want to express, it can be as useful as "apple", "orange" or "banana".

 

[KCfromNC]

I thought the most interesting thing said was this quote from Carroll:
"Figuring out the mass of the electron is enormously easy compared to figuring out what's a bad person and what's a good person."

Why would this be? And why would he think that?

Because only one is amenable to being "figured out" at all. Questions of morality are tests of opinion, not of facts about reality.