Now that the biologist genies are out of their bottle, can they settle the difference between an African and European swallow, so that we may proceed on our quest for the Holy Grail? 

Here is a response I wrote up a few days ago to respond to Prof. Cocks on his post on panentheism: 

I have to admit when I first read Professor Cocks' response to Garth Kindler I read pantheism as opposed to panentheism only to realize my error after posting my reply. However, I also quickly realized that my response was appropriate whether the good professor was sympathetic to pantheism or panentheism, because neither is viable if the concept/dogma of transubstantiation is true, a truth I would argue is key to understanding the Creator vis-à-vis his Creation.

Which brings me back to Spinoza again, because while Spinoza may have rejected being labeled as someone who embraced pantheism and claimed the more expansive panentheism, I'm not sure if that was really true, or really even at the core of what Spinoza was up to, I think he was rejecting Christianity and what is at the heart of it i.e., Christ presence upon consecration of the bread and wine in the Eucharist, and of course, for a Catholic thinker if you take that away everything else collapses.

Essentially what Spinoza was doing by putting forth his panenthesitic monism was attempting to mimic the essence of transubstantiation but rejecting the incarnated Christ and his continued presence thru the Eucharist. It's a brilliant attack on Catholic theology and the central role of the Catholic tradition in Western Civilization, one that many great minds have embraced since, but one that ultimately fails. It fails much as a counterfeit component might fail in a beautifully complex and designed device because the human mind that wrote the specs for the counterfeit component wasn’t up to operating on the same level as the device’s original specs writer. A flawed lens in a projector, perhaps?

So where does this leave us on the quest for the Holy Grail as we stand here at the Bridge of Death?

Battling biologists can you tell us the difference between an African and a European swallow?

Here's  a clue.
 

"My point start from the datum that humans are descendant from a very small population of less that a thousand peoples living in Africa 60.000 years ago."

Questionable data. Anthropologists generally date evolution of modern human physical form to about 100,000 years ago, human migration out of Africa as early as 1.8 million years ago evolving into homo erectus and neanderthalensis, humans splitting from apes at about 4.6 to 6.2 million years ago, homo erectus in China by 1-2 million years ago, homo heidelbergansis in Europe by 500,000 years ago during glacial period, evolving into neanderthal by 400,000 to 300,000 years ago.

I agree with Mr Cocks on that Darwinian explanations add nothing essential to the discussion of the foundations of morality, but it can help moral nihilist int embracing the ultimate truth of value of human life. Not only Psychopaths are moral nihilists; Stalin was an loving grandfather, he was very goof with their familly, most of the time. To be good at someone does not proves to be good with others. Most people are practical moral nihilists. An evolutionary explanation, although it can not help into rationally demonstrate what is good and what is bad, it may help into accepting our impulses for Good and God, if he shows that these impulses are biologically inprinted in us. My point start from the datum that humans are descendant from a very small population of less that a thousand peoples living in Africa 60.000 years ago. That was the only surviving people after volcanic winter provoked by the eruption of the super-volcano Toba in Indonesia. So in a literal sense, we al humans are a family with more " blood" ties than a single group of chimpanzees ( the genetic variation between any two humans is less than what can be found bettwen two chimpanzees of a single group). The reason for survival of this few hundred people form the great extinction is unknown, but one of the reasons for sure was an increased mutual help. What is known in evolution is that similarity in the genetic information maintains stable the collaboration. Perhaps many of these people had some fortunate mutations that imprinted in the subconscious the notion of the value of human life or the notion that Someone in the beyond (a God or many) is watching them (This is higuly plausible, as I explain below). These notions, as I will show, enhanced selfless help for others of non kin, in eternal struggle with other more preexisting selfish impulses. The enhanced collaboration that this group had permitted the survival. They were in a literal sense, almost a family. maybe this mutation extended the notion of familly. and the familly notion has not abandoned us because we inherited this fortunate set-of mutations. They must have been strange people for the rest who died: They helped neighbours, instead of killing to dead for the very scarce resources. We know weird people that have hallucinations, that have strange impulses, that do weird things. Imagine that a catastrophe changes the environment so that it makes some of them very successful because they are complementary. If they are the only survivors, their descendants will inherit these hallucinations and impulses. these phenomena will be part of human nature from this moment on, for the rest of the History. In fact we hallucinate every second. We perceive a person as a person with all their moral implications. Instead, for a chicken, a person is something completely different. What we experience, our mind, is determined by our brain architecture, and this architecture depend on developmental genes, and these genes were selected depending on the success of the brain architecture, that is, our minds, that they produced, in the task of own survival in society So, if this is right, our higher sense of morality is inprinted in us. Maybe the sense that Someone in the Beyond is observing us is also an innate part of this moral sense. This last is interesting, because being observed by another human impel a primitive sense of self image to do good things. But when nobody watch us, many people do bad things. So the notion of Good and God did not evolved entirely in the course of the extinction event, but it builds from a more primitive notion of selfish “do good when yo are observed, do whatever you need when not”. So most of the people befrore the extinction event steal food, kill neighbours etc. Imagine some strange and crazy familly in the stone age that has the obsession that Someone is observing them every time. They would have been very unsuccessful in a normal environment. But when the Toba eruption began, they could have been very successful because their enhanced collaboration. After the volcanic winter, they give thanks to the someone that apparently helped them to survive. We are their descendants.

Mr. Cocks wrote:

"Their relatively primitive religious beliefs are not the cause of their lack of development, but the result."

This may be a diversion from the main topic, but I'd say take a look over to the "Surviving Islamism" series "Part III". The argument that a lack of development or poverty or whatever it might be called causes people to develop or not develop a complex system of religious thought and belief, is very much putting the cart light-years before the horse, as the saying goes. To suggest otherwise flies in the face of the realities that exist and have existed across the world. Primitive and underdeveloped religious beliefs result in primitive and underdeveloped societies. Unless, of course, one believes in cultural relativism or moral equivalence. Each religion and form or sect of religious belief creates a different software within the human mind that says how one thinks of others, oneself, life, social and gender relationships, politics, government, clothing, work, innovation, literacy, etc. Ideas of the afterlife also create requiremnents for the pressures and priorities one feels or does not feel in living this life.

People often get confused by apparent "results" and start to talk about how environment, climate, or geography (Mann and Diamond) effect development. These ideas seem logical on the surface, but they are not: the ideas in the human mind create the world in which the human lives. If a person does not believe in the power of human ideas and thinks the answer is geography or climate, then one must consider, for example, N. Korea and S. Korea or Switzerland and France/Italy, for example. One need only look at the uniformity of the results in development, transparency, life expectancy, education, literacy, corruption, trust measurements, etc. across the world.

The countries at the top of these lists are generally the Lutheran Nordic countries (Sweden, Finland, Norway, Iceland, Denmark) and then Switzerland, Germany, and other mainline Protestant countries (UK and the UK colonies); then a few Buddhist/Confucian countries (Japan, Singapore, S. Korea) and also Israel with its practice of reformed (small "R") or secular Judaism created in Protestant Europe; as well as then the Catholic countries that were forced to deal with the Reformation (France, Belgium, Ireland); after that, come the Catholic countries that did not ever deal with a Reformation but are close to countries that did (Italy, Spain, Portugal) and then the countries in Eastern Europe that did once deal with the Reformation but were beaten down by Communism (Poland, Czech Republic, and Hungary); then Catholic and Orthodox countries that never dealt with the Reformation and are far from any who did (the Balkans and all of Latin America; note, Chile, the country with the highest percentage of Protestants, also generally ranks the best in all of Latin America), which fall, in all cases, sometimes among or sometimes above the rest of the developing world. Among these come the rest of the Confucian/Buddhist countries and Hindu India. Then Muslim countries. Then animists everywhere. In Africa and Latin America these patterns also follow the same pattern. There is and never has been an animist people that has produced a society that is advanced by Western European standards. Religion, the deepest ideas that arise the human mind (and some are not very deep) directly creates culture and then the results (wealth or poverty), not the other way around.   

The patterns should be clear enough when one looks at any of the above described national statistics. As the below cited National Geographic article ends, “Twenty years ago everyone believed civilization was driven by ecological forces. I think what we are learning is that civilization is a product of the human mind.” It amazes me that this is not obvbious to everyone, but there are reasons from our own Western Christian tradition that provides us with the blind spot as to that thought. That article is written by Charles C. Mann, author of 1491. Considering the way he described Amer-Indians living in the Americas (still in the stoneage) as "advanced" in his book, I was very surprised to see that he seems to have realized such an idea.

In Part III of that other article here at the Brussels Journal, Peter Carl writes:

[T]he idea that religion has a formative and determinative effect on cultures and societies is not at all a radical or crazy idea. In fact it is commonly understood as being quite true. The idea is the basis for, among many other works, as stated above, Max Weber’s ground-breaking theories in “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” (1930). That book of Weber now forms what is considered to be the founding text in economic sociology – and sociology in general. In Weber’s footsteps, Clifford Geertz, “…for three decades...the single most influential cultural anthropologist in the United States…” and famed Princeton University anthropologist recognized “…the cultural dimension of the influence of religion…. [….] religion’s ability to transmit ‘patterns of meanings embodied in symbols… (by which humans) communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life.’”xvii The idea is also reflected in the French author and commentator on religion, Fredric Lenoire, and his attempt to explain Christianity for an often secular audience. In his book, “Le Christ philosophe” (2007), he explains how even when viewed for its philosophical value, as opposed to its purely religious meaning, Christianity has spurred and continues to spur on so much of all that is good and beautiful that surrounds us within Western culture and throughout the world. In more everyday genres, the same idea is posited in a recent National Geographic issue which wonders whether, at the 11,600 year old temple being excavated in what is now Southern Turkey, “…the human sense of the sacred – and the human love of a good spectacle – may have given rise to civilization itself.” As the archeologist, Klaus Schmitt, summarizes: “Twenty years ago everyone believed civilization was driven by ecological forces. I think what we are learning is that civilization is a product of the human mind.” Both Breivik’s (and Hitler’s) complete lack of civilization due to their animosity towards actual Christianity and their many unambiguous complaints against Christianity’s teachings including especially pacifism and equality, it appears on all counts, judging from the otherwise highly peaceful and egalitarian society found in Norway, prove Weber, Geertz, Lenoire, and Schmitt all quite right.

That's it. Otherwise, I very much enjoyed the article. It also applies to the thoughts about Nietzsche, Tille, Hitler, Kerrl, and Marx over in the Peter Carl article, with respect to moral nihilism. In any case, your article was a great generator of thoughts and conversation here. Much appreciated.

I hope everyone will forgive me if my post appears disjointed. The dialogue has been exceptional thus far and my appreciation to MPresley, Capodistrias, and Traveller for their contributions and to Prof. Cocks for getting it all started with his excellent essay. But there are quite a few balls in the air now, or to shift the metaphor, many loose threads. This post expresses my own confusion and inferiority with respect to several of these and my need to think "out loud" for a moment. I beg all for your indulgence of any inadequacies of  thoughts or infelicities of expression.  

The underlying assumption for much of the discussion here is that God's essence is good, loving, and rational. Traveller expressed this view succinctly: "God, in my opinion, is first and foremost Rational and as followup He can only be Good." From this premise, we deduce that God's creation, the World, as a reflection of God's Being, must also be Good and Valuable. If then the World has intrinsic value, as Prof Cocks says, human life must also be assumed to have value and meaning. These become the foundational assumptions without which a system of morality in the Judaic/Christian tradition can't proceed and with which it can begin to evaluate actions and establish principles of conduct, in short, a system that becomes teachable. 

An ethical system is easily derived from assumptions about God's Nature. But just as obviously, the kind of system and the ethics practiced will depend on what are assumed to be God's qualities. There is no definitive, compelling evidence that God is either rational or irrational. Indeed it strikes me as peculiar in one sense to ascribe a deliberative process of reasoning to Him. God need merely act, not think. Of course, the question comes back to the inner character or being whence spring His acts. The ethics of a dog eat dog world driven by self-interest and self-preservation derive from the observation of a Nature that is bloody and ravenous in tooth and claw. This views leads, in turn, to a conception of deity as, at worst, cruel, vindictive, revengeful, and jealous or, at best, distant, indifferent, and uncaring. The ethical system based on an absolutely arbitrary, willful, and capricious, tyrannical conception of God places no value on human life and finds nothing morally wrong in killing human beings if done in obedience to divine Will. The only imperative in this system is total, unreasoning, unquestioning submission. Ethical conduct consists of the precept, "May I always act towards my enemy as he would act towards me but before he has a chance."

We know of such systems operating in the world today in which everything and everyone are subject to the whims of a deity who is called loving, merciful, and compassionate by his followers. But these attributions are reminiscent of the ancient practice among worshipers of addressing their particular deity in the most flattering terms, thereby ascribing to the god those very qualities most lacking in his character for fear of provoking his true personality. With this in mind, we conclude that the qualities proclaimed for him are precisely those he most lacks.   

The dispute about the universality of morals or the general applicability of an ethical system comes down to one's definition of man and how he is to be distinguished. MPresley believes the Western view of "humanity" to be naive in ignoring the myriad differences prevailing among humans. A definition of humanity must go beyond mere physiology. In reading the comments, I was reminded of Remi Brague's essay, "The Denial of Humanity" which addresses this very matter. Examining various ancient and medieval texts from diverse cultures and historical periods, Braque concludes that philosophers have agreed in denying "humanity" to certain beings while being forced to admit them as "human." But "the human figure is not the face of man." The salient feature in all these texts, says Brague, is that the man of reason is "most worthy of his own humanity." Reason differentiates the species man from all others in the genre animal. Or put another way, a non-reasonable animal is not a man.

According to Brague, the concept of reason in these texts is "two-pronged" including both theoretical reason and practical, moral reason. One is not a man if one is incapable of grasping the intelligibles (Plato's "supra-celestial truths" or those insights gained from "post rational experiences"?) or if one behaves in a bestial fashion. For some  "religious determinations," those who are not religious are excluded from humanity. "The question arises of whether religiousity is conceived, roughy speaking, as the presence of a moral sense (I would add, divinely inspired) or as the presence of intellectual illumination. In other words, if we are dealing with an ethical or philosophical religion."

As I understand it, this question is also the crux of our debate. Religiosity, to use Brague's term, may be considered a predilection in man towards ethical conduct and rationalization, a matter of nature rather than nurture. It may or may not entail the proposition of a Deity. Religiosity based on the proposition of a deity derives its ethical dimension on the predicates of that God, for better or worse, and regards the revelation of that deity, however manifested, as its justification. In contrast, religiosity that posits ethical rules on reason requires no deity as its source. Illumination is then turned inward on man's nurture as a reasoning animal.

In summary, it seems to me that morality deriving from God is arbitrary and problematic. It is dependent on assumptions about God's being and relationship to his creation. God may be Good, God may be Bad, God may be indifferent, and the morality will vary accordingly. In contrast, morality derived from reason is one that strives to make man "most worthy of his humanity." Whether this morality is consistent with the nature of Creation and its Creator or is opposed and arises in spite of Creation and Creator is irrelevant. Its value results from its practical effects in improving human existence.

To a certain degree, morality in this context may be viewed as a "purely human invention." Certainly in a savage, cruel world ruled by a capricious uncaring deity, such morality would have to be invented by man for humanity to avoid behaving as just another unreasonable animal concerned only with survival. This does not mean that all morality is relative or that there can be no objective criteria for moral judgments. I think we have all made clear in our comments our rejection of moral relativism. Nor does it mean, as MPresley has suggested, that any universality to morality is limited to a few basic, fundamental principles such murder or incest and "higher strata" are out of bounds because they are socially or culturally determined. Applying Goedel's Theorem, I think a universal morality is one that is consistent rather than complete. Objectively then, an ethical system denying women the same rights as men is inconsistent and thus unreasonable. But such a system is permissible though unreasonable when based on a fiat from God. And therein lies the problem

Thank you, Sir, for a most stimulating, informative, and engaging reply. I was especially struck by your statement:

"In my view, right and wrong do not derive from God’s Will, but from His intrinsic goodness and our participation in this goodness which can be experienced directly only in mystical post-rational experience. His intrinsic goodness is not a matter of will or commands."

Without wishing to introduce another "non sequitur" or wander too far afield, do I hear an echo of Franz Rosenzweig in this view? Rosenzweig struggled with the contradiction of God creating out of caprice or out of compulsion. The "absolute caprice of the Creator," which Rosenzweig says early Christian and Jewish theology and Arab Scholasticism insisted upon, poses a danger in that it separates the Creator from his creation, the World. Caprice knows no necessity and leads equally to justice or injustice. It is arises in the moment, the individual instant and so, as the embodiment of all its moments, it is self denying and self abnegating.

Creation of the world by caprice would disallow any interest in the world by God. He might as easily not have created this world or he might have created a different one. In any instance, it would be a matter of complete indifference to him. God would not have any vested interest in the world or man's existence in it. Creation, the World, Man's place in it lose thereby any intrinsic integrity or meaning of their own. Their continuation becomes momentary, entirely dependent on the whim of the deity. Causality and all other "natural laws" are replaced with magic. 

In opposition, Rosenzweig asserted that God's revelation of himself, his creation, means that the three elements of God, World and Man and interrelated and connected, "emerge from themselves, belong to one another, and meet one another...." He further believes that the interpenetration and interdependence of these elements refute the notion of God creating from caprice. God's creativity is his essential attribute. God creates because it is his nature and essence to do so.  

Is this essential attribute also what you mean by God's intrinsic goodness, that it is not a matter of His choice or decision but is rather at the very nature of His being and so is not a matter of will or commands? Am I correct to think of "our participation" in the intrinsic nature of God as a result of our existing in this World and therefore, in Rosenzweig's terms, part of the interpenetration and interdependence of these elements. Indeed is not our participation only possible because we are part of the World, God's creation? And is it not the case that the "mystical post-rational experience" which awakens in us a sense of our participation arises most often from a sudden revelation or insight into the oneness of Nature, what the Zen Buddhists call satori, and the American Transcendentalist Emerson described as becoming a transparent eyeball?      

Then Creation is or must be the revelation of possibilities. It must allow the opportunity for the negative and the positive, the wrong and the right, good and evil, and all other opposites. The World and Man must comprehend choices among alternatives; otherwise it is not creation but compulsion. Ethics is thus necessary only in the context of human choices and not divine.

Thank you, I enjoyed reading your essay.

Being a pragmatic business traveller I have accumulated some simple knowledge about people world wide and came to very simple conclusions.

Everywhere I went and that covers most of our globe, I found the same desires, the same basic private behavior, even when cultures were totally different, and the same joys and sadness.

I also found basically the same rights and wrongs, slightly different in valuepoints because of different cultures.

My simple conclusion was that human beings were programmed in the same way, slightly altered by climate, culture and local religions.

If there was a program there had to be a Programmer. I admit that the reasoning was simple but it answered my questions.

Having drawn that conclusion I came to the Why.

The Why is rather complicated because of the semantics involved and I hate semantics because of its imbedded inaccuracy.

Why is something "right" and Why is something "wrong"? Why do we talk about "good" and "bad"?

I had to go back to my Programmer which was all I had and ask myself what His Purpose was to create all this and go through all the inherent pain involved in His Program?

There was only one conclusion I could come to in my arrogance, not excluding other options but I didn't see any, we were a "Test Creation". A Test to see if with a certain amount of "Good versus Bad" Programming we would survive as Creation or we would perish?

The Good versus Bad choice I saw as a means to reach extreme happiness or sadness, one doesn't work without the other. Only Good, without Bad, would wring the neck of Happiness.

So yes, I have no problem with divine origins of Morals and Ethics, but I came to that conclusion in a different simple-minded way. 

I agree concerning Anders Breivik's state of mind.

@ Capodistrias: " Am I being too simple in assuming you are arguing against the notion of morality as universal?"

@ Richard Cocks: "Like Capodistrias, however, I am a little worried about your interest in limiting the universality of ethics."

Morality, what is right and wrong, is most clearly defined within closed groups. Indeed, that was always the case from tradition, and from tradition the tenants of moral conduct were never considered contingent, artificial, or attributable to the vagaries of positive law determined ad hoc. Instead, the moral law was brought forth by a god-king, or in some instances a priest, and its origin was divine. Within a traditional organic setting there was always general agreement on proper behavior, and specifics were hardly ever debated since there was not much to debate. [As an aside, this is one of the important innovations of Plato—his task, through Socrates, was to conduct a critical analysis of these sorts of questions in contrast to the received wisdom of the poets, who themselves were inspired. Now, Socrates was certainly inspired, but his tool was reason. It was a dangerous endeavor inasmuch as any conclusions (if there ever were conclusions) may have fully supported tradition, but there was no guarantee of it.]

The problem of the moral code really only arises whenever disparate groups interact. In these situations, a once divine derivation of moral law is now open to competition. Christianity was a rejection certain aspects of Jewish law, an incorporation and modification of other aspects. Islam, while somehow related, is a different situation altogether. From a practical standpoint it is better for groups to be both politically and geographically autonomous, since often the practical applications of their respective moral teachings are incommensurate, at least once one moves beyond a very basic set of rules such as the prohibition against murder, incest and theft.

However the practical aspect of cultural divisions and their interactions is not really the theme of the article, as I read it, so I may have moved off topic. It is, instead, whether the moral law can be considered natural (and hence discoverable by reason along with being supernaturally revealed), or whether it is an artifact. There is no doubt in my mind that it is both natural, a divine manifestation directed toward the end of man, and its understanding is necessary for living the good life. What I doubt, however, is whether men composed of different natures can ever understand (much less adapt to) what ill-fits their respective natures.

Who these men are, and what constitutes their nature is another topic for another day.

To conclude, if I were younger I would take Professor Cocks' class, and be better for it I am sure.

While I truly sympathize with the author's goal and, like him, despair of the moral relativity prevalent today, I'm less eager to agree that the choice is between God and moral nihilism or that moral values must be "derived from the intrinsic goodness of the source of creation", i.e. God.

I believe it was in the  Euthyphro that Socrates asked whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods." If the latter, then what is holy or good or true depends on the caprice of the deity and so we end with the nihilism of islam in which obedience to divine tyranny is paramount and rational, ethical, human decisions are heretical. The resultng psychopathic behavior is evident around the world wherever morality springs from such spiritual roots. But if the former be true, that the gods love what is holy, then isn't Socrates implying the value of what is holy (or good or true or moral) is independent of God?

Bertrand Russell made a similar argument. If right and wrong derive from God's Will, then for God himself, the values are indistinguishable, and it is no longer meaningful to call God Good. But if God is Good, then the values of right/wrong, good/bad have some meaning independent of God's commands since His commands are judged as good and not bad independently of his having made them. In their essence, Russell concludes, these values are logically anterior to  God. Thus ethics has a validity and value apart from any theistic system.

"I suggest that the fundamental ground for morality must be inclusive to the group, but as its axioms expand, its universal applicability becomes limited accordingly."

Limited "somewhere" between those stuck in the cave and the mystics?  Frankly, I don't understand limited universal applicability? Am I being too simple in assuming you are arguing against the notion of morality as universal? It is late and I may be missing something, somewhere. Thank you for your added comments. 

Thank you for the article. I am happy to find another university professor showing the way, because I didn't think there were many out there. In reading several ideas arose:

Socrates argues that virtue must be more like right opinion than knowledge, but that right opinion can be just as useful a guide to action as actual knowledge, though more unstable.

Socrates proposes that excellent rulers, prophets and soothsayers often speak the truth under divine inspiration.

Perhaps it is an obvious point, but one sometimes overlooked or not thought about, that Plato was first a teacher. He taught the nature of truth, and in spite of the fact that his arguments seem very straightforward, to the point of simplicity, they are hardly simple.

It is interesting to speculate on the origins of the Socratic epistemology. Professor Cocks' quotes can be referenced to Socrates' own initiation into knowing. I use the word initiation carefully, since that is what is was, although this too is often overlooked in our casual reading. Socrates was schooled by the witch Diotima, apparently a priestess of Zeus. In Plato's Banquet, Diotima revealed a “middle way” (analogous to right opinion) on the path toward understanding aesthetics. By implication, if knowledge is divine, or from the gods, then mortals necessarily must approach knowledge (the understanding of essence, or the forms) via an intermediary, the daemonic man (or in this case, the daemonic woman).

If you cannot be right or wrong concerning moral matters then this means there is no truth of the matter...

As the author states, this sort of thinking turns on a crass materialism, and is bad philosophy: to even state that “there is no truth” is rather self-refuting. Nevertheless it is our thinking, and is all too prevalent. Where to begin? First, scholastic nominalism offered an initial theoretical push, and ever since the Enlightenment our notions of what constitutes knowledge have been tied to attempts to formulate all knowledge steeped within an overriding empiricism. This scientism, certainly wrongheaded, can be said to have triumphed over an older (and in my humble view more correct) Aristotelian world view. By the time the project was introduced into the “social sciences” by Hobbes, the result was to destroy not only a coherent view of what men are, but what they should become.

Under the older traditional view, the end of man was considered principal. This flowed from Aristotle's classification of causation (a classification Christianized by Aquinas) that included form and matter, act and potency, existence and essence. It was an “organic” teleological understanding wherein man integrally fit within a greater organic unity: we recall that for Aristotle the city was logically prior to the citizen.

With the coming modern science, final cause was abandoned for the mere efficient, and along with it came a loss of purpose. No one had any idea what one's end might be, and more importantly, the end was quickly seen as chimera, and philosophically untenable.

In group discussion, I heard a student claiming that invoking God seems too easy. Another student pointed out that people also point to God as the origin of the universe simply because they don’t have a better explanation, she thought.

This is because it is, frankly, difficult to begin to approach classical and scholastic conceptions of God. Consider Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and Aquinas. Their original arguments are subtle, but today glossed, and hardly ever rightly understood. So we encounter questions such as, “if everything has a cause, who caused God?” And because we have abandoned tradition, few educators are in a position to explain the difference between causal series per se versus per accidens.

There is remarkable agreement among those at the higher reaches of many world religions [who] all describe ultimate reality in similar terms and much of what they say can be summed up in the cliché, ‘all is one.’

I believe that what we may term “higher mind” is probably univocal. However, I am also quite unhappy with this sort of formulation in popular thought (not saying that this is how it is presented here, or in your class—I'm talking generally), since mysticism aims at transcendence, but those of us stuck in the Platonic cave know only the shadows. A foundation of moral thinking grounded in a universal mysticism is problematic for all but mystics. This is because there is much real difference within the exoteric explication of various religious teachings, and this difference is not easily resolved. For instance, we may cite the so-called Spanish neoscholastics, such as Bartolome de las Casas, who abandoned a traditional notion of Aristotelian types when he argued that, since Jesus died for all mankind, even “savages” possessed natural right. But we know that to entertain the natural savage within a more civilized order is asking for problems.

I must assume at least that ‘human life is valuable’ before morality can establish anything.

The problem we face, today, is our wont to presume universality in morality. But we don't have the intellectual way out, for if we presume that morality is not universal, how can we accept it without reservation, and how can we not presume it is contingent? I suggest that the fundamental ground for morality must be inclusive to the group, but as its axioms expand, its universal applicability becomes limited accordingly. Aristotle taught that human nature was not univocal in all its aspects. Plato before him argued as much. This is not to state that morality is arbitrary at all, but rather that it should be based upon natural law. That is, what is right by nature. As Plato would say, virtue is giving to one what is his due according to his nature.

we may also end up like Anders Breivik