Philosophy Gym

Tonight is the third meeting of the Philosophy Gym discussion group that we (the pastor with prompting from me) started recently at my church. The meetings are loosely based on selected chapters from the book “The Philosophy Gym – 25 Short Adventures in Thinking” by Stephen Law.

So far, we’ve looked at ‘Where did the universe come from?’ and ‘But is it art?’ – tonight we tackle ‘Is morality like a pair of spectacles?’.

According to the book, there are four options available to answer the question ‘what is the ultimate cause or origin of the universe?’:

1. Identify a cause;
2. Say it has a cause, but we can’t or don’t know what it is;
3. Say it doesn’t have a cause, it just is; or
4. Claim that the question doesn’t make sense (like asking ‘what is north of the North Pole?’).

All of these options have their faults from a philosophical viewpoint. I guess one of the reasons I have for wanting to study physics is to delve into questions like this from a scientific viewpoint.

The second session on art was quite interesting, too – with questions discussed like ‘does art require a human creator?’, ‘does art have to be appreciated by a human in order to be art?’, ‘is computer-generated art / music really art?’, ‘can there be a universally accepted definition of art?’.

Tonight we talk about whether things or actions are good/right or bad/wrong in and of themselves, or whether ‘goodness’ and ‘badness’ is something we impose on them from outside. My initial instincts are that we impose morality from the outside according to the inbuilt morals we have each absorbed from the culture we are part of. How else can we explain the different ideas of morality that exist within different cultures?