Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Leah Libresco: Atheist blogger schocked the secular community with her announcement that she's converting to Christianity

According to this website, "Libresco details her personal struggles with understanding the root of moral law... For Libresco, this ideal has come full-circle, as she inevitably arrived at an understanding that aligns with a Christ-centered world-view".

Libresco comments "I believed that the Moral Law wasn’t just a Platonic truth, abstract and distant.  It turns out I actually believed it was some kind of Person, as well as Truth.  And there was one religion that seemed like the most promising way to reach back to that living Truth.  I asked my friend what he suggest we do now, and we prayed the night office of the Liturgy of the Hours together (I’ve kept up with that since).  Then I suggested hugs and playing Mumford and Sons really, really loudly."

As I've explained in other posts, it is hard to make sense of the ontology of objective moral values in a  worldview which is non-personalistic. Naturalism and many Eastern wordviews are essentially, fundamentally and radically, non-personalistic (i.e. the fabric of reality is fundamentally non-personal). But moral values are essentially personal (i.e. related intrinisically with PERSONS endowed with free will, consciousness, rationality and so forth). Hence, in a personalistic worldview (i.e. a worldview rooted in am ultimate person who is the creator of all reality, like God), moral values are expected to exist and be a intrinsic, essential, ultimate and objective part of such created reality.

This powerful philosophical insight underlies the so-often misunderstood and intentionally misrepresented moral argument for God's existence.(This argument doesn't says or entails that moral values are arbitrarily imposed and enforced by God's commands... the argument only says that moral values, if objective (i.e. instrinsically constitutive of reality), fit better in a theistic wordlview because it is a radically personalistic worldview which makes sense of person-relative properties like moral values, and related person-relative phenomena like moral responsability, consciousness, free will, rationality, purpose, decision-making, etc. The common idea that the moral argument postulates an arbtrary decision or imposition by God is a straw man created by atheists who are impaired to understand correctly arguments for theism = another consequence of Jime's Iron Law).

Once you grasp clearly the radical difference between personalistic and non-personalistic worldviews, and the essentially personalistic nature of moral values and their presupossitions of efficacy (consciousness, free will, rationality, purposeness, etc.), you'll realize (even in an intuitive level) the cogency of the moral arguments for God's existence.  Do objective, essential and intrinsic personal properties fit better in a personalistic wordlview than in a intrinsically impersonalistic one? I think the answer is pretty obvious.

Even in spiritual-oriented circles (e.g. New Age cirlces) informed by Easter philosophies, objective moral values cannot be grounded in any person and turn out to be illusory. Some of these philosophies say, for example, that we live in a world of "duality" (e.g. good and evil, you and me), of illusion, of shadows, "egos" etc. which are not fundamental to reality and that the TRUTH is beyond all duality (including all good and evil) whatsoever, etc. 

Obviously, such morally neutral wordlview cannot ground objective moral values in anything, because such values are illusory products of the dualistic way in which we perceive the world. Objective moral values don't exist in a substantial, intrinsic sense and "persons" are also by-product of these illusions. The "truth" (so argues the followers of these views) is beyond all of this.

This is a spiritual, non-materialistic version of the impersonalistic worldview of naturalism (they are different in their principles, but they have THE SAME impersonalistic consequences and hence don't make room for essential, intrinsic, ultimate person-relative properties or entities).

It is not surprising that Libresco, after deep reflection on morality, renunced her atheistic position. Many other people, including atheistic philosophers who have defended for decades a secular morality, have realized the ontological insufficience of atheism (in all its versions, specially in its contemporary naturalistic version) for grounding moral values, and the superiorioty of its leading competitor (personalistic theism) in this regard. (See for example the confession of atheist moral philosopher Joel Marks). If they keep being atheists, they consistently become moral relativists or nihilists; or if they stick to objective moral values, they consistently become theists.

See also the view about morality and moral problems by leading atheist intellectuals here.

I think the moral argument, when properly understood in its implications and worldview pressupositions, is one of the most convincing arguments for theism.

The main reason why some atheists don't concede this point is that they're so hostil to theism, that they don't want to make any major concession (specially any moral concession) to it. Another reason is that they strongly misunderstand the argument; and another reason is that they conflate the argument with the claim that atheists are inmoral (which is NOT the argument... the argument is not about the moral beliefs of atheists or theists, but about competing WORLDVIEWS and how objective moral values fit in them).

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