My Road to Unbelief Part VI

My Road to Unbelief

Part VI: Moral Models

Model Theory is essentially what I used as a child to evaluate morality (although I obviously didn't know any model theory, and I was being extremely primitive). However, now I had the concrete idea of a Model, so I could construct them based on simple rules. I found the idea of morality to be vague at best. Now I could make it more concrete by comparing what we find in the model to what we refer to when we say "morality."

So let's look at some possible models:

God is the Moral Authority

The so-called morality that religious people claim to use. I call bullshit on this. There are obviously rules in the bible that we do not follow, but, more importantly, there are rules that we follow that are not in the bible. The idea that "sexism is bad" is nowhere in the bible, and yet people seem to use it. Hell, the entire idea of "equality" is not a biblical idea at all, and the bible far from suggests that people are "equal" in any way. Oh, and don't forget the whole 'slavery' business. (Even worse, consent is not actually in the bible, especially for women).

I'm also a little skeptical of the objectivity of this model. It's kind of a weird style of 'objective.' If the rule was "Hitler was the moral authority" I guess that would be objective, but it's based on a somebody's point of view. It's like partially subjective or something. I don't know. In this case, why would you necessarily take the viewpoint of God? Because he has power?

It's ironic I think that a lot of Christians claim that "Well if you aren't ruled by God then you're ruled by whomever has the power at the time," despite the fact that God is the best example of that.

Harm is bad.

This is a very simple model. It's good because it's pretty objective. Harm is not a really a subjective idea. It may seem pretty good at first, but there are issues. What about a tattoo? What about a piercing? What about BDSM? I don't think you can argue that this isn't harm or damage. It obviously is.

The Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you

The Golden Rule. I think most people are aware of the problem with the Golden Rule: Sadomasochism. A rapist may enjoy getting raped, for instance. However, there's an easy fix for this problem: just throw in Consent.

The Golden Rule + Consent Requirements

Now, I think this is a surprisingly good model. I don't actually know of a direct counterexample to this (although I'm sure there is one). I think the main problem is that it just doesn't cover larger problems beyond people's personal lives. Obviously Consent Laws are a bit vague: You have things like "age of consent." You have ambiguities with permanent damage and assisted suicide. Permanent consequences lead to complications with rules of consent. Personally, I found this model to be pretty good, though. I do like the idea of Consent as being an integral part of morality, because where consent is ambiguous, the morality of actions seem ambiguous.

I would say that as a practical deontological model goes, this is one that most good people use in their daily lives. When we refer to morality, this seems to be pretty close to what we mean (with maybe some Enlightenment ideals thrown in).

The Advancement of Human Well-Being

I didn't come up with this. I heard the phrase actually from Sam Harris. I think this is the an almost-correct model. This seems to be nearly exactly what people refer to when they talk about "morality."

This is a consequentialist model. It's not based on rules (deontological), but based on consequences. If something has good consequences then it is good, and if something has bad consequences then it is bad. And if something has mixed consequences it is mixed. It seems a little arbitrary when you first think of it, but eventually you realize it works surprisingly well, even for "the ends justify the means" situations (after all, the 'means' is a consequence).

"Well-being" seems ambiguous. This is actually a good thing, because this leaves very easy ways for humans to be wrong. Humans will not have perfect information, and will not know precisely what is the best thing for human well-being. This makes it a knowledge game. We want to know as much about our world and as much about ourselves as possible so that we can better ourselves, others, and all of humanity. Knowledge is inherent to morality.

I don't think this model is perfect though. The main issue is the word "Human." What about animals? What about my cats? Animal cruelty certainly is somewhere in here. I'm not exactly sure how to include it though, but clearly our idea of "morality" does not confine well-being to just humans.

So this is how I applied Model Theory to moral ideas. However, that's not the only thing Model Theory is useful for...

Basic Model Theory

My Road to Unbelief

Interlude: Model Theory

Eventually I went to college. At this point I was still wavering between Deistic ideas and Atheistic ideas. I found out that many of the founding fathers were Deists (although most were Christians of various sects). If one could possibly prove that the universe is ordered in some way, I figured that would prove the existence of an almighty force, which would be labeled God. Hence Deism.

As a mathematics major I took a course in Set Theory and Model Theory, and to understand my arguments one needs a basic understanding of how Model Theory works. I found Model Theory to be one of the most effective tools to answering these kinds of questions.

In order to make statements, you have to start with initial assumptions about how things work. We call these initial assumptions Axioms. Once the Axioms are in place, they define your Model. Everything in the entire model can be derived from the initial Axioms. Usual mathematics that we are used to can be entirely derived from the Zermelo-Frankel Axioms. Just to get an idea of how basic the axioms are, I suggest you check them out (you can ignore all the complicated notation): ZF-Model Axioms. For instance, one axiom says that "the empty set exists" and another says that "two sets are equal if they contain the same elements."

These Axioms completely define the ZF-model. The model is unchanging, regardless of whether we discover more theorems and ideas inside of it. Those ideas were always in the model, we just hadn't discovered them yet. Often we want Calculus so we need the Axiom of Choice, which grants us the more powerful ZFC-model. The models have some important differences. For instance, in ZF there is no way to find an 'immeasurable set,' but in ZFC we can do it easily. It's not that immeasurable sets in ZF don't exist, it's just that they cannot be found in the model.

Now we can construct whatever Axioms we want, and create whatever model we want. Then prove things within those models. So in many ways we can essentially choose which model we are looking at. The models themselves are entirely objective, based on axioms, but the choice of model is subjective. It is not, as you will notice, arbitrary.

When considering models, there are some things one should be aware of. One is the Principle of Explosion. Essentially it states that if you allow for one statement to be both true and false in your model, all statements are rendered both true and false and your Model is trivial. In other words, contradictions and inconsistencies destroy the model.

The second and third major rules are Godel's Incompleteness Theorems. The first incompleteness theorem essentially says that within all models there are statements that cannot be proved (or disproved). You cannot have a single model that answers every question. The second incompleteness theorem says that it is impossible to prove the consistency of a model from within the model itself. So don't bother trying.

Anyway, using Models, I found that you make very powerful arguments about theology and morality. Simply construct some axioms and compare the models that are generated by them.

My Road to Unbelief Part V

My Road to Unbelief

Part V:Emotions and Logic

You may notice that my reasons so far for rejecting theistic ideas comes out of highly emotional responses. I'm not really talking in terms of evidence or proof. My reasons are concerned more with whether I want God to exist, rather than whether it is true.

There is some misunderstanding I believe that emotions and logic are somehow diametrically opposed. I have never understood this. Emotions have very clear causes and effects, and they have very sensible logic to them. The main issue is that certain emotional states cause people to be delirious and illogical.

As I discussed briefly in Part II, the logical grounding for most religious arguments is shaky. The best answers to a lot of theistic claims is "It does not follow" or "I don't know." For instance, the Watchmaker Argument. It basically goes like this: if you were to find a random watch, you would see that it has a clear intention and you could deduce from the watch that there is a watchmaker somewhere. Similarly, the universe must have such a designer.

However, there is no reason why this would necessarily work for everything. Take a child. If I were to find a random child, it would not imply a child-maker. It would imply parents. Parents may create a child, but they don't design a child by any normal definition of the word. And we can see how the logic falls apart: Design does not imply a designer. And you can use similar arguments to realize that creation does not imply a creator (You just make the same argument with natural phenomenon like lightning). It could. That's possible. But it does not follow.

I have always been interested in logic and mathematics. What can be invariably deduced from other statements? But I have found that simple logic isn't very useful in these discussions because it is so limited. There's not a lot statements you can definitively make. Saying "it does not follow" gets frustrating and begs the question "well what does follow?!" One needs much stronger concepts, like Occam's Razor, Model Theory, and eventually Bayesian Reasoning to use logic for these discussions.