Ontology is the study of “being,” i.e. what it means for something to “be” or “exist.” I have discussed on other occasions the ontology of time and the ontology of logic and mathematics (among other things, in numerous places). A couple weeks ago for a Christian youth group (Stand to Reason) I was asked to discuss the ontology of moral facts, expanding on questions that remained after last year. A crucial section of my Sense and Goodness without God on all this is III.5 (pp. 119-34), esp. III.5.4-5 (pp. 124-34).
From the questions that I heard this year I can provide a new summary of my view on this subject, which I will support with formal, peer reviewed arguments and references to the leading scholarship in a chapter soon to appear in The End of Christianity, edited by John Loftus (the sequel to The Christian Delusion), which I'll blog about as soon as it is released. Of course much of the informal argument and bibliography already appears in my book Sense and Goodness without God (and I've blogged about this subject colloquially before: see the amusing Darla the She-Goat).
Moral realism is the view that there are moral statements that are meaningful and true, and true independent of your opinion or culture. I am a moral realist. That means I must be able to ontologically ground the existence of moral facts, and in things other than popular opinions or merely cultural facts. When I say they "exist" I have to explain what I mean by that: in what sense, and in what way, do they "exist," particularly as I am a first-order physicalist (I believe everything that exists is solely and entirely caused by physical things and events: see Defining the Supernatural), so I must be able to reduce moral facts to physical facts in some way.
Yesterday I posted on my recent article in Free Inquiry on Defining Naturalism, in which I also replied to The Teapot Atheist's response to that FI article. TPA then answered back (Richard Carrier on Richard Carrier on Naturalism...I think just using my last name would have been more economical, but that's just my aesthetics talking :-). He's well in earnest. But still wrong.
Some of my responses to other comments on yesterday's blog are pertinent (if you want to catch up with those, start here). But now I'll just quote and reply to TPA's latest blog...
An article I submitted years ago has finally made it into the pages of Free Inquiry magazine (issue 30.3 of April/May 2010, pp. 50-51), "On Defining Naturalism as a Worldview," part of their ongoing 'It's Only Natural' column. It was sitting in their queue for ages. It essentially just summarizes the most important points of my more extensive blog on the subject, Defining the Supernatural.
It has already provoked one reply at The Teapot Atheist. But had TPA read the blog recommended in my FI article, he would have known I already addressed the concerns he raised. I just didn't have the room to fit all that into two pages of print.
Ontology is the study of being. Ontologists ask questions like "What does it mean to say something exists?" The ontology of time is therefore the study of what it means to say that time exists or that something exists in time. In other words, what is time? I discuss the ontology of time in some detail in Sense and Goodness without God (pp. 88-96).
In response to what I wrote there, Dave Matson asked:
Why should time be defined in terms of relativity physics where, presumably, it means a fixed future? I would think that time, as defined in quantum mechanics, would be equally preferable. As defined in this latter sense, time is presumably compatible with an undetermined future.
If we accept time as defined in relativity, then it seems that physicists would have to accept that there are "wheels within wheels" within quantum mechanics, which most physicists deny. That denial suggests that time as seen in quantum mechanics is defined differently than in relativity physics. One view seems compatible with a fixed future whereas the other does not obviously fit into that mold, if at all.
So arguing for a fixed future on the basis of relativity theory is tantamount to assuming that its definition of time should be preferred. Therein, I see a problem.
In answering this question I will use RT for Relativity Theory and QM for Quantum Mechanics. And I will not repeat what I said in my book. So if you haven't read it, though you don't have to in order to understand what follows, you probably should read it before commenting on any of this.
