This photo I took one night in January at Purdue. I like the orange light in winter, one surprising benefit of sodium lamps. The last photo is of a park bench near the top of Slayter Hill. 
In terms of information architecture, I am reminded of Alain de Botton's book "The Architecture of Happiness". He has a passage in which he says "as we write, so we build; to keep a record of what matters to us". While information architecture is not physical architecture, we are creating a heirarchy of information. We are playing with the design of websites just as architects play with buildings. In what way, if any way, does information design reflect what is important to us? 
I keep going through my pictures from this summer. Here is another from London, I believe this is Cromer street at night
How can we argue about the answer to a problem when we do not even agree on the basic elements?
Watching a fundamentalist preacher on a college campus is like watching a burning car wreck. I gain nothing useful from the experience, but I cannot look away. Engaging is often an empty and hollow gesture because even the most level discussions dissolve into shouting matches.
I have seen many of these instances. I’ve also been involved in a couple. Invariably one person will ask the preacher this question: “Who would get into Heaven? A good atheist (and by good atheist we mean a person who lived a moral, decent life) or a bad Christian (and by bad we mean a person who professes to believe in God but leads a life of ‘sin’)?” And always, many times without hesitation, the answer is the Christian goes to Heaven, the atheist to Hell.
Of course, the atheists in the crowd are generally pissed because, well, that does not seem fair.
One way the preachers justify their answer is that the atheist has committed the worst sin, and that is by denying God. By refusing to acknowledge God nothing else they do matches up, or ever could. The answer can be summed up as; it isn’t enough to be good, you have to believe. Our (atheist’s) reactions are often shouts, anger, consternation, or laughter because we knew this answer was coming.
But why? What about the belief itself is so important? Well, the Bible tells us so. Why is that important? Because the Bible is given to us by God and it contains His laws. How do you know? It was revealed by revelation. We still don’t see why this is important. Then you don’t get it and are not open to God’s love. Once this point has been reached, both sides are talking past each other. Most of the time, nontheistic people are ok with that answer.
At the heart of this discussion and argument is a belief in what is valuable. While this may seem obvious, it is a nuanced distinction that requires some reflection. Arbitrariness aside (and honestly, both atheists and theists have moments of dogmatism, it is not just on the theistic side) there is a serious disagreement over the rules of the game, or what matters anyway.
Action versus faith is an old argument in the Christian tradition. One way to consider this issue is the Catholic v Protestant stance. Protestant denominations typically emphasize a personal relationship with God. Faith and belief are the most important aspects. Historically, the Catholic Church placed an emphasis on good works in addition to faith. In the nontheistic view, the action (or work) is valued for what it was.
My personal take on this is as a virtue ethicist. There is a certain mix of action and intention, as well as impact that helps to define moral behavior. Positive and moral behavior is a practice to be fostered. People who engage in these behaviors are behaving morally (loosely speaking, if you want my nuanced view please don’t hesitate to ask). There is no single school of thought in the nontheistic community, but we do feel we have obligations and duties to each other often in virtue of just being human (Here is the Secular Humanism Manifesto http://www.americanhumanist.org/who_we_are/about_humanism/Humanist_Manifesto_I ).
Theistic belief is an arbitrary second layer. To say that since atheists do not believe in God they are deficient regardless of behavior returns to the action versus faith debate, only this time with different players. If religious actions result in good works (ex. Catholic Charities, church run soup kitchens, all of these are good things) then we can say it was a good or ethical action. The same can be said of nontheistic people.
But without God, how do we assure that someone will behave without fear of punishment? If there is no Heaven or Hell why doesn’t everyone just do what they want? This is a slippery slope fallacy. The assumption is that people do terrible things without the threat of something afterlife. This can be addressed in two ways:
1) If belief in God is somehow supposed to solidify or assure moral action, then it often fails to do so. People will be good or bad regardless of religious affiliation (not to take cheap shots, but leaders of religious groups, those supposed to be the models for the members of the organization, have been seen committing transgressions they preach against). I, personally, fail to see how the giving of one’s self over to Christ or God in anyway helps in that regard.
2) Simply dismiss the claim. Obviously, there are individuals who do not believe that God exists. Many of these individuals are like Christians in behavior, look, demeanor, in their dedication to their families and loyalty to friends. Something other than God is responsible for moral and ethical action.
So God is not enough for moral action itself. Responsibility for the action lies on the individual. Sure, in some cases God may be a motivating factor. But for atheists that motivation has to, and does, come from somewhere else. I recommend reading “Free Inquiry”, the publication of secular humanism. It contains concerns and views that many atheists and agnostics share as well as articles from scientists, philosophers, and others. There is a many thousand-year-old literature on moral actions that have nothing to do with religious motivation. Even Kant, a Christian who was a philosopher, had ethics that could be construed as secular in principle, and did not require a supernatural being.
If we agree on what moral action is, and in a western country such as ours while we have differing views we tend to agree in the larger areas moral and ethical life, then why claim that one group is immoral when they act in accordance with the same moral code, just without the belief? And if the answer is still “because you have to believe full stop” then it is arbitrary in a way that doesn’t deserve endorsement.
To start, I want to layout a quick distinction before I jump into what I mean by philosophical engineering.
In freshman physics (yes I used to major in physics), the physics majors took their intro class with the honors engineering students. The honors engineers, as the title would suggest, are brilliant people (so were the physics students. Well, we hoped we were). However, we often sneered at their insistence to just know the equation. A homework session of physics and engineering students represented and ideological divide between how the problems in a physics assignment should be approached. We, the physics majors, insisted at starting at first principles (we had two to work with, the momentum and energy principles) while the engineers looked at the problem, the variables, and said “what equation do we use here?”
This is not to say the engineers did not have a grasp of the intricate subtleties of physics, that they were not inquisitive people. They were brilliant individuals who had a very different focus. They understood how to derive the equations they wanted to use, they could do what the physics majors did, they just didn’t see themselves as needing to reinvent the wheel for every problem. “Yes, I get it, and I’ve demonstrated I know the basics. Now, where’s my d*** equation?”
I bring this up to frame a similar divide in the current field of philosophy. I’ve discussed with classmates the relative merits of different fields of philosophy. We’ve decided I’m like a philosophical engineer. My view of philosophy is that it can (and should) be able to engage with real world problems and situations. Ethical and moral theories in particular have been brought up and discussed in many disciplines outside of philosophy (see Joshua Greene’s experiments http://www.pon.harvard.edu/faculty/joshua-greene/ , discussion of norms in sociology, biology, etc http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~stich/Publications/Papers/Framework_for_the_Psychology_of_Norms_7-23-05.pdf).
So why philosophical engineering? A metaphysician on this analogy is like the physicist. They want to know the deeper truth about the makeup of the world and traditionally this work has been done via thought problems, intuition, and traditional armchair philosophy. And (much to the frustration of my metaphysics professor) I’ve made the naturalistic assumption, meaning I’m willing to accept the structure of the world is as the natural sciences describes it (maybe with some qualifications). So I have my first principles in a sense.
And now I want to work on finding answers to more pressing problems. Like the engineers in physics classes, I’m the ethicist in metaphysics. “Thank you, this is all well and good, but do we really have to start from here?”
Have I committed a gross philosophical injustice? Or like in the physical sciences, do we have room for those of us more application minded over theory?
