Uploaded June 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
Lecture at the Einstein Forum, May 12, 2026
According to Genesis, after Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge, God casts them out of Eden, telling them, “you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Yet only three verses later, God says that these creatures have now become godlike: “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil.” This religious myth is emblematic of a deep philosophical puzzle: Human beings are mere matter in a world composed of physical particles and fields. Yet, it seems that there is moral good and evil and that we are capable of knowledge and purpose. Philosophers have tried to find a middle ground between dust and gods, attempting to assimilate human knowledge and agency within a worldview in which anything real can be explained by the natural sciences. This often includes simply denying that there are any objective moral truths. Is the naturalistic middle ground stable? Can we deny the objectivity of moral norms without falling into an incoherent nihilism?
Scott R. Sehon is the Joseph E. Merrill Professor of Philosophy at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. He is the author of Teleological Realism: Mind, Agency, and Explanation (2005); Free Will and Action Explanation: A Non-causal, Compatibilist Account (2016); and Socialism: A Logical Introduction (2024). He is currently serving as an Honorary Senior Fellow at the Einstein Forum.
Lecture at the Einstein Forum, May 12, 2026
According to Genesis, after Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge, God casts them out of Eden, telling them, “you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Yet only three verses later, God says that these creatures have now become godlike: “Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil.” This religious myth is emblematic of a deep philosophical puzzle: Human beings are mere matter in a world composed of physical particles and fields. Yet, it seems that there is moral good and evil and that we are capable of knowledge and purpose. Philosophers have tried to find a middle ground between dust and gods, attempting to assimilate human knowledge and agency within a worldview in which anything real can be explained by the natural sciences. This often includes simply denying that there are any objective moral truths. Is the naturalistic middle ground stable? Can we deny the objectivity of moral norms without falling into an incoherent nihilism?
Scott R. Sehon is the Joseph E. Merrill Professor of Philosophy at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. He is the author of Teleological Realism: Mind, Agency, and Explanation (2005); Free Will and Action Explanation: A Non-causal, Compatibilist Account (2016); and Socialism: A Logical Introduction (2024). He is currently serving as an Honorary Senior Fellow at the Einstein Forum.
