A Picture of a Modern Man

In this post, I'm going to illustrate the belief system of a 'modern man'. This 'modern man' is not representative or typical of any existing individual or any individual in an existing culture, so I'm not promising that you will be able to find someone like this in real life. For our purposes, think of this 'modern man' as a hypothetical being. Let's call him 'Bob', and these are the things that Bob believes in:

Hypothetical 'modern man' Bob.
(Sorry for the illustration)

Charity

For me (Bob), there is no reason to spare any charity to anyone, unless I am compelled to do so by a strong emotional feeling or any non-moral motivations. Non-moral motivations may include the need to maintain a 'healthy' public image or the need to conform to norms (familial, social, etc.). For example, if volunteering makes me sound like a kind person or makes me look good on my CV, I'd do it primarily for those reasons. 

While I may not donate money to a suffering child in a distant country, I am still willing to pay a significant sum to help a friend out because I am emotionally attached to that friend. 

Politics
Political issues are uninteresting, unless these issues directly affect me or those whom I care about. By 'directly', I mean that the cause-and-effect is immediate and visible. For instance, changes in primary education funding policy are uninteresting, because I (Bob) do not expect to have any children in the foreseeable future and the welfare of any particular child does not affect me at the moment. 

Religion and the Meaning of Life

I do not deny that questions about religion and the meaning of life are important, but you can describe me as a 'procrastinator' in terms of how I actually behave in my inquiry. Other problems (e.g. earning a living, dressing to look smart, resolving conflicts and calculating tax payments) are actually more pressing, and importantly, more tractable than the question about God or the meaning of life. However, as a matter of intuition, I'm more inclined towards atheism than any other religious slash philosophical systems. I'm also more inclined to the view that there is no afterlife.

While I'm not exactly the 'carpe diem' or 'YOLO' sort of person, I believe in prioritising my time in solving the problems which have a real immediate impact. As for the "zen", mystical kind of questions, I'll figure them out at some point in the future when I've got a lot of time on my hands and nothing to do. 

Morality (general) 

My general judgments about what's right and what's wrong typically depends on (1) the beliefs of those around me and (2) the limited range of information I'm exposed to, but this is something that I'm reluctant to admit. In a nutshell, I 'go with the flow' with respect to morality, but I don't like to be thought of as someone who does so. Alternatively, you can describe me as 'practical' in relation to morality. 

The magnitude of my feelings about these judgments are generally weak to moderate, unless they are those which make an immediate and visible impact on how I live. 

So this is Bob. A law-abiding, practical, 'normal' man who is loyal to his family and friends but does not 'stick out' to irritate the norms of society. Call him materialistic, but Bob would say that there isn't a very good reason to behave otherwise. Why, after all, should anyone commit themselves to idealistic beliefs (about morality or politics) when they cannot know their truth or benefit from them within a single life time?  

But is anything wrong with Bob? 

Some Thoughts About Morality

Occasionally at our most 'philosophical' moments we would discover that we hold some grossly inconsistent and irreconcilable beliefs in our minds. In response, we may choose to ignore the inconsistency by assuring ourselves that there isn't actually one, and that with the passage of time the knot will untie itself. Alternatively, and ideally what philosophers tend to do, is to reflect upon our reasoning habits and find a way to metaphorically untie the knot. Naturally (and very likely) this is going to be time-consuming, but philosophers are disposed to think that the consequences of untying the knot is itself worth the time spent on untying.

One of these 'knots', I'd like to think, is the issue of morality; more specifically, it is the task of explaining the origins of morality, and related to that, the question of why we should be moral at all. 

Where does 'good' and 'bad' come from? 

Why should we be 'good'?

Philosophy textbooks, or introductory books to ethics, are abound with attempts from the history of philosophy to address these two problems; but in my opinion few have been satisfactory in offering a view that is at least not blatantly inconsistent with what we feel or (we think) we know. One such inconsistency is that between God and morality: if we don't believe in the existence of God (as referred to in the Bible), why should we be moral? Since afterlife and judgment is not likely to occur, why should we be good? If we think there is a good reason to be moral, why does the thesis that God exists faces so many difficulties in explaining why so much evil exists (The Problem of Evil), in justifying omnipotence and omniscience, and in explaining significant scientific evidence (e.g. evidence for evolution)?

Do we act morally because we fear punishment from karma or God? 

  

My personal sympathies are with the view that the personal, all-powerful and metaphysically independent-from-nature 'God' in the sense described by the Bible and classical theism fails to provide an apt description of reality. Some may label this view as atheism, but that is not the issue of debate here; my concerns are that if I am to hold the view that the Biblical God does not exist, how should I make sense of morality? Why should we be moral?

A common-sense response to this problem is what I would call the conscience (a good Chinese equivalent is 良心) reply. The reply runs as follows: since we feel 'bad' for doing immoral things, such as stealing money from an elderly woman's purse, the 'bad feeling' alone suggests that we ought to act in ways which are consistent with our conscience. Through this perspective, sympathy can perhaps be understood as one of the feelings that we get when our conscience is at work, and another example of these 'conscience-feelings' is guilt.  

Does having guilt or sympathy necessarily mean that we should act according to these feelings?

What about evil psychopaths who seem to completely lack a conscience? 

Before we dismiss this reply by saying that it offers no proper reason to act morally and that many people have a 'twisted conscience' that prevents them from seeing what actions are moral and what aren't, I must remark on the significance of the conscience reply. First, it offers us evidence (by introspection) that humans have an intuitive capability to distinguish between moral and immoral actions. This, I would argue, provides a basis in resisting the typical moral theories (like textbook Kantian ethics) which attempt to justify morality upon universal and objective reason. In other words, it seems that whether an action is moral or not should be judged using our feelings, and not reason. Similar arguments have been made by David Hume. 

Second, the conscience reply is itself evidence that we don't always act morally because of a certain fear of punishment, judgment, and going to Hell. We may act morally according to feelings, but these feelings are not necessarily fear. Alternatively one may suggest that, consistent with the 'conscience' reply, that we sometimes act morally (sometimes, if not always) out of instinct.

Now entertain this (perhaps to some repulsive) idea for a moment: suppose the moral conscience is an evolutionary survival function that homo sapiens have developed in evolution. Just like the ability to feel pain and fear, or even the ability to use language, our moral conscience has helped us humans to live peacefully and survive effectively in social groups when we evolved. Our conscience inclines us to protect and defend the weak, and to act in ways which benefit our social group most as a whole. Our conscience motivates us to sacrifice ourselves for the greater good, to give ourselves up if we judge that it would save the lives of others we care about. Another way of seeing this is that the sense of duty that we may feel towards our parents, a friend, or a spouse forms part of this conscience. 

A common sense of duty may have been important for survival: when the individuals in a social group A all act according to their conscience, group A has a higher chance of survival compared to a group B which is more 'immoral' and less keen on duties on the whole. 

Does this best explain where morality comes from? 

Does that mean it's not always desirable to be moral?

In Thoughts About Morality Part II, I shall examine the significance and implications of such an evolutionary theory of morality. 

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Is there any reason to think that God is omnipotent?

Omnipotence, typically understood as the property of being all-powerful, is one of the unique properties of God in the classical theistic conception. Here, I shall examine two common objections raised against the view that God is omnipotent. Although the objections may sound persuasive at first glance, I shall argue that none of them are effectively knock-down arguments against the omnipotence of God. Hence I shall attempt to sustain the view that it is reasonable to think that God is omnipotent.
Since the conception of God is hardly univocal, I shall limit this discussion to the God of classical theism – the God who is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent and depends on nothing for His own existence. 
In this brief entry I shall examine two distinct objections of the following type: the first objection aims to demonstrate that omnipotence as a concept is incoherent, and the second objection that omnipotence cannot be reconciled with God’s other divine attributes.
The first objection is often formulated as a question. Similar forms such as this have often advanced by the sceptic: ‘Is God able to lift a rock so heavy that He himself is unable to lift it?’ This creates a paradox for theists: either way, God cannot be omnipotent because (1) if he can create such a rock, he is not powerful enough to lift it, and clearly the case (2) if he cannot create such a rock.
The most satisfactory response so far known to this paradox is to offer an alternative definition of ‘omnipotence’. With this definition, God is not plainly ‘all-powerful’; God is ‘all-powerful, but bounded by the laws of logic’. The second step of this response is to then, point out that ‘a rock so heavy that it cannot be lifted’ is a concept which is logically incoherent, and hence one cannot reasonably ask God to create such an object. It would be akin to asking God to create, for instance, a married bachelor or a square circle, which are all logically impossible ‘objects’.
I find this response valid. To consider the alternative – as held by Descartes - that God is all-powerful and is unlimited by logic - is itself an incomprehensible view, and hence unsustainable. It would be meaningless to employ reason and logic in arguing for the existence of God; for how could any comprehensible conclusion be reached if God is beyond the realms of reason? Moreover, the ‘heavy rock’ concept is one that does not seem to be conceivable, and it seems justify to describe it as a logically impossible concept.
The second objection which I plan to look at attacks the incoherence between omnipotence and another divine attribute: omnibenevolence, or all-good-ness. Again, the objection is most efficiently phrased in a question: can God do evil? This objection seems to place the proponents of theism in a dilemma: if God is omnipotent, then it seems definite the case that God can do evil; however, being all-good, it seems that God cannot do evil. Thus, the objection seems to place theists in a dichotomy where one of the aforementioned attributes must be rejected.
One possible response to this objection is to employ some analysis of the idea of omnibenevolence. The property of being all-good does not necessarily have to be an intrinsic property in the sense that it can limit God’s power; God can simply be all-good because all the actions which stem from God are good, in a somewhat Sartre-esque sense. While this may entail problems which come with the metaphysical view that an external, objective value of ‘good’ exists beyond God, it does demonstrate that God is indeed all-powerful in his nature. I admit that this response is not ideal as it cannot demonstrate that God is all-powerful in effect; but it seems to be more sustainable than its alternatives e.g. redefining ‘omnipotence’ as ‘all-powerful but bound by the laws of logic and morality’.
But is it reasonable to think that God is omnipotent? Although some reasonable theistic responses have been elucidated, admittedly, I don’t think my defence of theism has completely removed the force in its critics’ objections. It is, I think, no longer possible nor consistent to hold ‘omnipotence’ in its original starting definition.