5 minute videos – Prager U – Oct 28, 2013

My cmnt: There were two great cities that heavily influenced Western civilization: Athens and Jerusalem, that is Greek philosophy and the Judeo-Christian worldview as expressed by Moses, Jesus and the Apostles. Tertullian’s two most famous expressions: “what has Athens to do with Jerusalem” and it is “to be believed because it is absurd” aside these two cities represent two great truths that must guide our conduct and culture: Faith and Reason. Faith represents our presuppositions and Reasons represents our ability to reach valid conclusions from our limited data.

My cmnt: If our presuppositions (our unprovable assumptions about the world) are amiss or if our logic is forced or flawed or guided by prejudice then we are doomed – both in this life and the next.

My cmnt: Faith without Reason leads to fanaticism as seen in Islam and the Cults. Reason without Faith leads to despotism and despair as seen in communist Russia and fascist Germany.

My cmnt: In our time (the last 200 years) there remain two opposed presuppositions or worldviews and really only two. They are “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth” or “In the beginning were the eternal particles and physical laws”. That is we believe in either naturalism or supernaturalism. Is the most basic furniture of the universe material or immaterial? Or, put another way, is it matter/energy or information? Is it Mind or Matter?

My cmnt: The most basic question of our time is: Can information (i.e., ordered complexity – the words on a page, DNA code, etc.) arise from matter/energy + time + chance or can information only arise from an intelligent mind?

Ever since the 18th century and the dawning of the so-called “Age of Reason,” most of the best-educated people in the world have been absolutely certain that reason alone will lead us to goodness and a good world. We don’t need a God. We don’t need religion. All we need is reason. Evil, we have been told for almost three centuries, doesn’t make sense. It’s irrational.

That’s why you’ll often hear murderous dictators referred to as “madmen” and their evil regimes described as products of “madmen;” in other words, the very opposite of rational men. Stalin was irrational. Pol Pot was a madman. Mao’s genocidal Cultural Revolution in which he directed the killing of 50 to 75 million Chinese — in peacetime, no less — is routinely called “madness.” And the Iranian regime’s calls for the annihilation of Israel are routinely dismissed as, you guessed it, irrational.

Meanwhile, good and moral things are always associated with being reasonable. But this association of reason with good is wishful thinking.

Of course, reason might argue for doing good. But it might just as well argue for doing bad. Take a non-murderous example. Is it right or wrong for a student to cheat on a test? It’s wrong, of course. But now answer this: Is it rational or irrational to cheat on a test?

The answer is not quite as obvious — is it? After all, if you can get away with it, and it might mean the difference between getting into a great school or getting a great job, cheating on a test may well be reasonable.

The same logic applies to participating in a shady, but lucrative, business deal or engaging in a marital infidelity. If you know you can get away with it, or simply judge that the benefits of doing something illegal or immoral outweigh the risk of being caught, why not do it?

Or answer this: Was it rational or irrational for a non-Jew in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II to risk his or her life to hide a Jew? We all know that this was moral greatness of the highest order. But was it rational?

Not really. You can’t get much more rational than self-preservation. Moreover, in all the studies I have read of non-Jewish rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust — and I have read many — I have never read of any rescuers who said that they did what they did because it was the reasonable or rational thing to do. Not one.

Reason leads to good only when you want it to. Just as it leads to bad when you want it to.

Reason is just a tool. It is no more intrinsically moral than a knife. A knife can be used to murder or to torture people. But in the hands of a surgeon, it can be used to save lives.

If you want to preserve liberty, then it is rational to fight and risk your life on its behalf. And if you want to maintain a fascist or a Communist or an Islamist dictatorship, then it’s equally rational to risk your life on its behalf.

And talking about liberty, it isn’t reason that makes people value liberty. Many rational people value security, or order, or territory, or theocracy, or many other things much more than they value liberty.

Reason can lead people to all kinds of conclusions. For example, asked if he would kill a disabled baby, a distinguished professor of philosophy at Princeton University responded, “Yes, if that was in the best interests of the baby and of the family as a whole.” Can you offer a purely rational reason why the professor is wrong?

The only reason I can offer is a belief that all human beings are created in God’s image and are therefore infinitely precious. But the preciousness of all human life is a belief, not an assertion of reason. The Greeks, the founders of Western reason, thought it quite reasonable to leave sickly babies to die of exposure. The baby would just be a burden on the parents and the state. It was faith-based Jerusalem, the other parent of Western civilization, not reason-based Athens, that taught the world to keep sickly babies alive.

So, the next time you read of some terrible crime or some terrible regime, please don’t dismiss it as irrational or mad. Call it for what it is.

Evil.

I’m Dennis Prager.

Why Has the West Been So Successful?

Ben Shapiro5-Minute Videos Apr 08, 2019

Western civilization. It’s been around for a while, but suddenly everybody is talking about it. Some are anxious to save it; others are happy to see it go.

But what exactly is Western civilization?

Is it the great cathedrals of Europe or the Nazi concentration camps? Is it the freedoms secured in the US Constitution or chattel slavery? Life-saving medicines or poison gas?

The left likes to focus on the bad – genocide, slavery, environmental destruction. But those have been present in every civilization from time immemorial.

The positives are unique to the West – religious tolerance, abolition of slavery, universal human rights, the development of the scientific method: these are accomplishments of a scope and scale that only the West can claim.

These aren’t the only achievements that make the West special and uniquely successful. As Western thought evolved, it secured the rights of women and minorities, lifted billions of people out of poverty, and invented most of the modern world.

Progress hasn’t been a straight line, of course. But the arc of history is clear. The obvious proof is that the world is overwhelmingly Western. And, with few exceptions, those parts of the world that aren’t aspire to be.

Why? Why has Western civilization been so successful?

There are many reasons, but the best place to start is with the teachings and philosophies that emerged from two ancient cities: Jerusalem and Athens.

Jerusalem represents religious revelation as manifested in the Judeo-Christian tradition: the beliefs that a good God created an ordered universe and that this God demands moral behavior from His paramount creation, man.

The other city, Athens, represents reason and logic as expressed by the great Greek thinkers Plato and Aristotle and many others.

These two ways of thinking – revelation and reason – live in constant tension.

Judeo-Christian religion posits that there are certain fundamental truths handed down to us by a transcendent being. We didn’t invent these truths; we received them from God. The rules He lays down for us are vital for building a functioning, moral civilization and for leading a happy life.

Greek thinking posits that we only know truth by what we observe, test, and measure. It is not faith, but fact, that drives our understanding and exploration of the universe.

Western civilization, and only Western civilization, has found a way to balance both religious belief and human reason.

Here’s how the balance works.

The Judeo-Christian tradition teaches that God created an ordered universe, and that we have an obligation to try to make the world better. This offers us purpose and suggests that history moves forward. Most pagan religions taught the opposite: that the universe is illogical and random, and that history is cyclical. History just endlessly repeats itself – in which case, why bother to innovate or create anything new?

Second, Judeo-Christian tradition teaches that every human is created in the image of God; that is, each individual’s life is infinitely valuable. This seems self-evident to us now, but only because we have lived with this belief for so long. The far more natural belief is that the strong should subjugate the weak – which is precisely what people did in nearly every society in all of history. Only by recognizing the divine in others did we ever move beyond this amoral thinking toward the concern for human rights, democracy and free enterprise that characterize the West.

But Judeo-Christian religion alone didn’t build our modern civilization. We also required Greek reason to teach us objective observation: that man has the capacity to search beyond revelation for answers.

Greek reason brought us the notion of the natural law, the idea that we could discover the natural purpose – the telos – of everything in creation by looking to its character. Human beings were created with the unique capacity to reason; therefore, our telos was to reason. By investing reason with so much power, Greek thought became integral to the Western mission.

Nowhere is this more perfectly expressed than in the American Revolution, in which the Founding Fathers took the best of the European Enlightenment with its roots in Greek thought and the best of Judeo-Christian practice with its roots in the Bible and melded them into a whole new political philosophy.

Without Judeo-Christian values, we fall into scientific materialism – the belief that physical matter is the only reality, and therefore also fall into nihilism – the belief that life has no meaning, that we’re merely stellar dust in a cold universe.

Without Greek reason, we fall into fanaticism – the belief that fundamentalist adherence to unprovable principles represents the only path toward meaning.

The Soviet Union, Communist China and other socialist tyrannies rejected faith and murdered 100 million people in the 20th century.

Much of the modern Muslim world has embraced faith but rejected reason. It’s noteworthy that when the Muslim world did embrace Greek reason, from the 8th to the 14th centuries, it was a leading center for scientific advancement.

So, again, we need both – Jerusalem and Athens. Revelation and reason.

And yet, many want to reject both. These people call themselves “progressives.”

Ironically, they want to take us backwards, to a time when man was governed neither by reason nor faith, but by feeling, and therefore back to a time of moral chaos and disorder, of feeling over fact.

It would be a fatal mistake to follow the “progressives.” Stick with Athens and Jerusalem.

I’m Ben Shapiro, editor of The Daily Wire and author of The Right Side of History, for Prager University.

Is it rational to believe in God?

Many people think that faith and reason are opposites; that belief in God and tough-minded logical reasoning are like oil and water. They are wrong. Belief in God is far more rational than atheism.

Logic can show that there is a God. If you look at the universe with common sense and an open mind, you’ll find that it’s full of God’s fingerprints.

A good place to start is with an argument by Thomas Aquinas, the great 13th century philosopher and theologian.

The argument starts with the not very startling observation that things move. But nothing moves for no reason. Something must cause that movement. And whatever caused that, must be caused by something else, and so on. But this causal chain cannot go backwards forever. It must have a beginning. There must be an Unmoved Mover to begin all the motion in the universe: a first domino to start the whole chain moving, since mere matter never moves itself.

A modern objection to this argument is that some movements things in quantum mechanics — radioactive decay, for example — have no discernible cause, but hang on a second. Just because scientists don’t see a cause, doesn’t mean there isn’t one. It just means science hasn’t found it yet. Maybe some day they will. But then there will have to be a new cause to explain that one. And so on and so on. But science will never find the first cause. That’s no knock on science. It simply means that a first cause lies outside the realm of science.

Another way to explain this argument is that everything that begins must have a cause. Nothing can come from nothing. So if there is no first cause, there can’t be second causes. Or anything at all. In other words, if there’s no creator, there can’t be a universe.

But, what if the universe were infinitely old, you might ask? Well, all scientists today agree that the universe is not infinitely old, that it had a beginning in the Big Bang. 

If the universe had a beginning, then it didn’t have to exist. And things which don’t have to exist, must have a cause.

There’s confirmation of this argument from Big Bang Cosmology. We now know that all matter, that is, the whole universe, came into existence some 13.7 billion years ago and it’s been expanding and cooling ever since. No scientist doubts that anymore, even though before it was scientifically proved, atheists called it “creationism in disguise.”

Now add to this premise, a very logical second premise — the principal of causality that nothing begins without an adequate cause. And you get the conclusion that since there was a Big Bang, there must be a Big Banger.

But is this Big Banger God?

Why couldn’t it be just another universe? Because Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity says that all time is relative to matter and since all matter began 13.7 billion years ago, so did all time. So there’s no time before the Big Bang.

And even if there is time before the Big Bang, even if there is a multi-verse, that is, many universes with many Big Bangs, as String Theory says is mathematically possible, that too must have a beginning. An absolute beginning is what most people mean by God.

Yet, some atheists find the existence of an infinite number of other universes more rational than the existence of a Creator. Never mind that there is no empirical evidence at all that any of these unknown universes exists, let alone a thousand or a gazillion.

The conclusion that God exists doesn’t require faith. Atheism requires faith. It takes faith to believe in everything coming from nothing. It takes only reason to believe in everything coming from God.

I’m Peter Kreeft, professor of philosophy at Boston College, for Prager University.

Where Do Good and Evil Come From?

I’m going to argue for the existence of God from the premise that moral good and evil really exist. They are not simply a matter of personal taste. Not merely substitutes for “I like” and “I don’t like.”

Before I begin, let’s get one misunderstanding out of the way. My argument does not mean that atheists can’t be moral. Of course atheists can behave morally, just as theists can behave immorally.  

Let’s start then with a question about good and evil:  ‘Where do good and evil come from?”

Atheists typically propose a few possibilities. Among these are evolution, reason, conscience, human nature, and utilitarianism.

I will show you that none of these can be the ultimate source of morality.

Why not from evolution? Because any supposed morality that is evolving can change. If it can change for the good or the bad, there must be a standard above these changes to judge them as good or bad.  For most of human history, more powerful societies enslaved weaker societies, and prospered. That’s just the way it was and no one questioned it. Now we condemn slavery. But based on a merely evolutionary model, that is an ever-changing view of morality, who is to say that it won’t be acceptable again one day? Slavery was once accepted, but it was not therefore acceptable. And if you can’t make that distinction between accepted and acceptable, you can’t criticize slavery. And if you can make that distinction you are admitting to objective morality.

What about Reasoning? While reasoning is a powerful tool to help us discover and understand morality, it cannot be the source of morality. For example, criminals use reasoning to plan a murder — without their reason telling them that murder is wrong. And was it reasoning — or something higher than reasoning — that led those Gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust? The answer is obvious: it was something higher than reasoning — because risking one’s life to save a stranger was a very unreasonable thing to do.

Nor can conscience alone be the source of morality. Every person has his own conscience and some people apparently have none. Heinrich Himmler, chief of the brutal Nazi SS, successfully appealed to his henchmen’s consciences to help them do the ‘right’ thing in murdering and torturing millions of Jews and others. How can you say your conscience is right and Himmler’s wrong if conscience alone is the source of morality? The answer is you can’t.

Some people say ‘human nature’ is the ultimate source of morality.  But human nature can lead us to do all sorts of reprehensible things.  In fact, human nature is the reason we need morality. Our human nature leads some of us to do real evil, and leads all of us to be selfish, unkind, petty and egocentric. I doubt you would want to live in a world where human nature was given free reign.

Utilitarianism is the claim that what is morally right is determined by whatever creates ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number.’ But to return to our slavery example: if ninety percent of the people will get great benefit from enslaving the other ten percent, would that make slavery right? According to utilitarianism it would.

We’ve seen where morality can’t come from. Now let’s see where it does come from.

What are moral laws? Unlike the laws of physics or the laws of mathematics, which tell us what is, the laws of morality tell us what ought to be.

But like physical laws, they direct and order something. And that something is right human behavior.

But since morality doesn’t exist physically — there are no moral or immoral atoms, or cells or genes — its cause has to be something that exists apart from the physical world. That thing must therefore be above nature — or super-natural.

The very existence of morality proves the existence of something beyond nature and beyond man. Just as a design suggests a designer, moral commands suggest a moral commander. Moral Laws must come from a moral lawgiver.

Well, that sounds pretty much like what we know as God.

The consequence of this argument is that whenever you appeal to morality you are appealing to God whether you know it or not; you’re talking about something religious, even if you think you’re an atheist.

I’m Peter Kreeft, professor of Philosophy at Boston College, for Prager University