Many theists believe that whenever something terrible (and often arbitrary) happens, it somehow fits into God’s plan. For instance, the earthquake in Haiti, some say, might be taken to be God’s way of making non-Haitians better people because it wakes them from their moral slumber and provokes them to do something good for those suffering, thus raising the general level of goodness in the world. As with many theistic arguments, it is often difficult to show, to one making the argument, that it makes the world less meaningful, rather than more so. But the argument, which implies that God is the sole arbiter in any question of morality, when taken to its conclusion leads to a contradiction. [Read more →]

There’s an interesting pair of articles in the journal Nature (whose editor Sir John Maddox recently died) on the morality, or at least correctness, of researching the connection between race and IQ. Is it morally defensible, or does it merely clear the path for louder and more vociferous expressions of racism? [Read more →]

Does the morality of society, on the whole, improve? It would be extremely naïve to answer with a straightforward “yes”: the 20^th and 21^st centuries have seen atrocities that more than match the most reprehensible of history’s offerings. But if we adjust the timescale to one far larger than that of centuries, and imagine instead the whole of human history, present, and future, then does the situation change? Or is humanity doomed, by its very nature, to stay at roughly the same moral level? [Read more →]