Why the usual answers to “What is the meaning of life?” tend to be unsatisfying

Ah, there’s my mistake. I was never concerned with whether the answers were satisfying, only with whether they were true.

His web page at Oxford has an incorrect spelling in his list of papers and book chapters, #20 “Mill’s Argument Against Religious Knoweldge,” therefore his entire argument is invalid.

I read his paper arguing for the existence of objective moral values, and didn’t find it very convincing. It seems to be another “We all really feel deep down that it’s wrong to murder, therefore it really is wrong to murder.”. Or am I missing something?

Reginald Selkirk
“Ah, there’s my mistake. I was never concerned with whether the answers were satisfying, only with whether they were true.”

No, your mistake is in thinking that questions of meaning have true or false answers. Values are not true, only facts can be true or false.

Not a bad interview, I’m just left puzzled as to why Tim Mawson got challenged on all of the arguments he made, but fundy Sean McDowell got his ass kissed and compliments all over!

noen

No, your mistake is in thinking that questions of meaning have true or false answers. Values are not true, only facts can be true or false.

Are you going back on your previous assertion that you believe in moral truth noen? I even remember the example you gave as a moral truth. Do you?

Atheist.pig
“Are you going back on your previous assertion that you believe in moral truth noen? I even remember the example you gave as a moral truth. Do you?”

I suspect you misunderstood me but I’ll do my best to explain. It’s also possible that I made a mistake somewhere down the line.

I don’t think there are any epistemic moral truths but I do think there are some moral truths that while epistemically subjective are nonetheless objective in the sense that they are observer independent. Therefore it isn’t up to me to decide if murder is right or wrong. We humans have come to the conclusion that it is wrong under some conditions. All the same if there were no humans then murder would be neither right or wrong.

What a lovely guy! Thanks to you both, I very much enjoyed this interview.

Luke, you have really been hammering the FT Argument lately. You could bother getting one of the bajillion physicists that thinks the argument is garbage.

Yeah, this was a fun one!

Bill Maher,

It was not planned. It all depends on who responds to me, and who has time when. Sean Carroll, for example, has not replied to my request for an interview.

Luke,
I didn’t mean to sound like an ingrate. It was nice of Mawson to do the interview and for you to put it up. :)

In lieu of an interview, you could post on Carroll’s essay Why (Almost All) Cosmologists are Atheists.

No, your mistake is in thinking that questions of meaning have true or false answers. Values are not true, only facts can be true or false.

I conceed the point. And ironically, I am one of those who holds that “moral truths” is a category error.

However, values are chosen based on beliefs about what is true. For example, whether we think putting lead in paint is good or bad may change if we have solid scientific data telling us that a) lead is very harmful to developing children and b) children eat paint chips.

I try to base my values as much as possible on true beliefs, or at least beliefs which are very likely to be true. As another example, living my life in service to a loving God does not seem satisfying to me because the case for the existence of said God is very weak.

On the topic of Sean Carrol,

What sort of questions will you ask him Luke? Will it be more about his latest book (superb book by the way) or responses to cosmological and teleological arguments?

Haven’t listened to the podcast but the following seems ironically funny/interesting

“Why atheists should pray to God”

Should listen to get context of this :-)

Reginald Selkirk: thanks for your link to Carroll’s essay. I wish I could listen to these podcasts, but without a visual element my attention wanders.

Rhys,

I don’t write the questions until I have a guest confirmed.

ildi,

You can watch a static image through the Maitzen interview on YouTube if you want. :)
www.youtube.com/user/CommonSenseAtheism#p/c/3C5FCE059BF4A4CA/0/8PkTaWTaSx0

I’d echo Roman’s comment. Charming, disarming, articulate and engaging. I’ve listened to the other interviews with theists only out of a sense of duty; this is the first one I’ve actually enjoyed. The Mawson interview makes a good pair with the Luke Barnes one, the latter setting out the science of the fine-tuning puzzle, the former making the best case for the theistic solution. And Mawson has the honesty to lead his opponent straight to the nub of the issue, where others — I suspect — delay this moment as long as possible for fear of being exposed in a weak position.

Great, lively interview, Luke.

On his argument that atheists should pray to God: I think this may apply to agnostics, but I don’t think it applies to atheists. My reason is that if someone is an atheist, rather than an agnostic, then they can’t be sincere in the way Mawson would seem to require, for it seems impossible to seriously address one’s thoughts to a being one thinks is non-existent. I could no more sincerely pray to Yahweh than to Cthulhu.

On his take on the multiverse: my understanding of the multiverse hypothesis is that the physical constants and laws differ from universe to universe, not that they differ in particular events occurring or not. This makes them different, and indeed a small subset of, all possible worlds in the philosophical sense. So it’s just not true that the multiverse hypothesis introduces a skeptical worry about the uniformity of nature, because in each universe nature will unfold according to its particular laws and constants, and will not deviate from these.

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Luke, FWIW I’m unable to post to the following area; commonsenseatheism.com/?p=9017

The message can be Submitted, and will be rejected as a duplicate if posted again, but does not appear. I’ve tried posting from a couple different browsers.

Note to everyone:

Messages with links are not being posted. They are probably(?) being sent to moderation.(???)

I don’t think there are any epistemic moral truths but I do think there are some moral truths that while epistemically subjective are nonetheless objective in the sense that they are observer independent. Therefore it isn’t up to me to decide if murder is right or wrong. We humans have come to the conclusion that it is wrong under some conditions. All the same if there were no humans then murder would be neither right or wrong. noen

I’d stop using the term “moral truth” then, its far too strong, as I could give you just as many examples of conditions where we humans come to a different conclusion on whether it is wrong to murder and this would vary from nation to nation, even person to person. The term “moral consensus” is more appropriate, and even this would be on shaky ground. We thought we’d reached moral consensus long ago that “torture was wrong” but Dick Cheney and a large percent of the American people draw a different conclusion in the interest of the public safety.
Our value system ought to be based on factual evidence wherever possible, not authority or intuition. Depending on what one means by “meaning”, of course this this can have true or false answers, even if we don’t always know if its true or false.

Luke,
Mawson is one fast speaker and I’m kind off having a hard time understanding what he says after you ask him why does he thinks a personal being beyond the Universe is the best explanation for its fine-tuning. From 31:10 to 31:25 right before you intervened. Could you please tell me what he says?

Also, what are your thoughts on his argument about why the M-verse hypothesis doesn’t explain why we are fine-tuned for the Universe? I’ve never heard it before.

Taranu,

Mawson didn’t actually answer that question I asked around 31:05. Instead he talked about the plausibility of a particular naturalistic hypothesis.

I’d like to read his paper before saying anything about the strength of M-verse theories in explaining our fine-tuning to the universe.

Luke,
I am talking about the part where he mentions the things that one is supposed to grant in order to get to the stage where the question why is God the best explanation of the fine-tuning can be asked.

Hey Luke and Taranu

You should definitely check out

Roger White’s 2000 paper, “Fine-Tuning and Multiple Universes,” Nôus 34, pp. 260–276.

and

Paul Draper’s co-authored 2007 paper, “Probabilistic Arguments For Multiple Universes,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 88, pp. 288 –307

The former uses confirmation theory to show that, “the fact that our universe is fine-tuned gives us no further reason to suppose that there are universes other than ours.” – i.e. the “This universe” objection.

The latter defends White’s paper, explains, “why Rodney Holder’s recent cosmological argument for multiple universes is unconvincing,” and develops, “a “Cartesian argument” for multiple universes,” which is not open to the objections previously noted, but, “given certain highly plausible assumptions about evidence and epistemic probability, the proposition which it treats as evidence cannot coherently be regarded as evidence for anything.”

Oh yeah I have both if you cannot get hold of them.

Rups, is there anyway you could post those papers? They sound worth a read.

Here’s one … maybe?

Roger White’s 2000 paper, “Fine-Tuning and Multiple Universes,”
philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/docs/IO/1180/ftmu.pdf

Via: www.anthropic-principle.com/preprints.html

Commentary: secularoutpost.infidels.org/2006/02/sophisticated-critique-of-many-worlds.html

Hermes, do you have the Draper paper? :P

Nope. Google came up dry.