A Tale Of Uplift

I attended the Slifka center lunch with Troy Cross today. It's anybody's guess why a professor who is as gentile as anyone can be got invited to Slifka---my hunch is that Jews have a better-than-average interest in philosophy and better-than-average taste in professors. Before the event, he noticed that the signs advertised him as "Troy Cross, Professor of Philosophy," which he relished since they implied that he had gotten tenure.

Although he is Yale's resident metaphysician, Troy spent most of the event answering questions about ethics and meta-ethics. Confronted by a proponent of the Alvin Plantinga "Christian argument against evolutionary naturalism," Troy described his own feelings as a formerly devout theist. While still a theist he thought that his moral beliefs were inextricably tied to his theism, and that they would fall away upon any move towards atheism or agnosticism. Yet, for Troy at least, his moral intuitions, and his conviction that moral laws are absolute and universal, survived his evolution as an agnostic.

This sort of story gives me hope. I myself gave up theism long, long before any of my moral beliefs had crystallized. And I have met so many people who moved towards theism for the very reason that they couldn't find a way to sustain their moral beliefs without believing in God. Personally, I privilege epistemic rationality far above pragmatic rationality, and if it's the case that one cannot have both moral beliefs and unbelief in God, I'll have no choice but to jettison my moral beliefs. At times I see no alternative but to do so. Troy's small bit of autobiography points in a brighter direction (and also, incidentally, proves Dostoevsky wrong).