Tuesday 21 January 2014

Daniel Dennett is wrong. Richard Dawkins is wrong. Sam Harris is wrong. They are nice men, but they're wrong about moral realism. And they can be answered. 

I am going to do this. This blog thing, I mean. I will put my ideas up for public consumption, in this small way. Who knows? When they are out there, the memes that I am trying to implant in the minds of my fellow travellers may take on a life of their own.

What will follow in this space will be the chapters of a book that I tried for a while to get published, but finally decided was too important to leave sitting idle till it found a sympathetic reader in some overworked publishing firm. The publishers kept telling me my book was aimed at too small a segment of the reading public. I, of course, think otherwise.

The book aims to reconcile the two largest institutions of modern life, namely science and religion. The struggle between these two main shapers of our modern thinking is what is causing the fear and disillusionment that seem to underlie our era, the "Age of Anxiety", as it has often been called.

I think I can fix that.

Science is a religion and its banks of data and data-sifting concepts - in fact, its whole mode of thinking - can lead us past what most theists see as its fatal weakness: its lack of a moral vision. There is a way to connect our ideas of reasoning and evidence with our ideas of right and wrong. There is a way to - as the Philosophy students say - "derive ought from is".

The chapters of my book will appear here as I polish them one more time over the next few weeks and months. If you start to visit here and get interested enough to come back, I hope you will pass the web address of this site on to some of your anxious, or maybe just curious, fellow travellers.

Enjoy.