T_aquaticus
(The Friendly Neighborhood Atheist)
182
My response was asking you to answer the question. The answer is I have empathy. I actually care about other people. Don’t you? Even if I could get away with it, I’m not going to harm others excessively. Of course, the big question is when it becomes excessive. That’s the line we all have difficulty finding.
Could I live more modestly and give my money to good causes that could ease the suffering of others? Yeah, I probably could. We don’t even need to make billions of dollars for this question to impact our lives.
Believe or it not, not everyone who lacks religious beliefs becomes a Nazi. I find meaning in this universe, and it doesn’t require religious belief.
If the only reason you are kind to others is because of your religious beliefs, then I’m glad you have them. However, not everyone needs those beliefs in order to love others.
Yes but not as much as I care about my loved ones. This is why i asked you that question.
I didn’t talk about becoming a nazi.
It’s not. I like doing that. But for example can you answer why it’s been found that religious people are far more likely to donate to charity than non religious people? Why is that?
Such as what? What meaning can a universe have if it is believed to be a place where Pol Pot and Gandhi meet exactly the same ultimate fate? This is a serious question, not a rhetorical one. Even when I was an atheist myself, I could not understand what meaning there could be in such an order of things
I didn’t really want to step back into this conversation but I have a few thoughts again. I am both sympathetic to your claims and the claims of @1Cor15.54 regarding our motivations to be moral creatures and meaning making in and out of religious systems. If we take an objective moral stance out of the equation then you Aquaticus can certainly develop a meaning meaning making and subjective morale system. But as @1Cor15.54 and yourself point out, just because that system works for you doesn’t mean that it works for everyone. In my expierence, I fall closer to @1Cor15.54 stance for a specific reason. Christianity, for me and my expierence, gives me completely compelling reasons WHY I should act in certain ways, how I should treat other humans, and what does human flourishing look like (like I referenced in another response to you, the Bible gives a compelling story to color these claims). I don’t believe those things simply because a potentially Divine being said them, but that the “why” that exists reinforces the evidence we have from other sources in nature and other sources ( I defer to @mitchellmckain ideas of developing morality from psychological research and evidence). I don’t follow specific morals because God commands them solely, but it certainly gives me the framework of a greater ultimate understanding of why reality is shaped the way we do and why those evidental claims from science form the picture of what I personally see in the Christian story.
If I believed or I was convinced that Christianity was false, then simply I don’t have any compelling reason WHY I should be moral or not be self interested. The evidence from science, nature, psychology becomes a is-ought problem. Just because science claims certain benefits of certain behaviors doesn’t mean I am compelled to do those actions. I don’t see this as a point of narcissism or what not, to me without the compelling WHY, I’m left personally to despair, that all moral actions derive from our evolutionary past and the continued survival of our species and society. Just because I’m a member of the human race and of a society, I don’t feel as compelled to just inherit that responsibility from our ancestor and say that is “good” simply because my instincts tell me to survive. As I said to my therapist before, “all actions in this life become reduced to making our death bed moments less terrifying”. To me and my personal struggles, the world becomes a nihilistic, despairing place that I wouldn’t be strong enough to overcome that despair with a early exit.
But ultimately I’m not trying to undermine your ability to make meaning and be moral in your life. Some of us however don’t necessarily have that ability. It’s not a risk I’m willing to take to excavate my Christian moral foundation. At the end of the day, if our convictions gives us the reasons to be moral people and make a difference, then I’d rather be an ally than your enemy.
Well said. If all our feelings are merely hormonal and biochemical reactions, and our instincts exist solely to ensure our evolutionary success as a species, then one might argue that it would be more “human” to transcend them—to establish one’s own morality that can consciously choose to disregard and even go against the so-called “common good.” This is what Nietzsche was referring to when he spoke of the superhuman.
In Nietzsche’s view, the superhuman is the individual who can move freely beyond the outdated constraints of good and evil.
I consider Nietzsche’s Weltanschauung to be inherently satanic in nature, yet I deeply appreciate it for its internal coherence.
I despise it as a christian, but if I were to believe again that materialism is true, I’d definitely embrace it.
Same thought exactly!!!
Yesterday I wrote the following
“I’ve spent too long, years and years and years, contemplating the nature of reality and analyzing the implications that follow from certain worldviews. The stark ugliness of those worldviews would be unbearable to me now. I would turn to alcohol and drugs to escape the demon I would fear most in that case: lucidity. I would not consider a life in which I could believe that a newborn child is less valuable than an adult pig to be a life worth living. Even the realization that my loved ones are ultimately meaningless would be intolerable. I would merely go on surviving until I found the courage to opt out of the whole shitshow—or until drugs and/or alcohol tore me apart. And I certainly would NEVER bring new children into this world.”
Not so fast … My own response to Theangel’s comment might be thus…
Then you aren’t trying very hard. I’m not an atheist, but I’ll presume to chime in with those who are here on this. There is a lot of plausible or even good and compelling reasons why being kind to others - even beyond your own kin, and even self-sacrificially might be beneficial. Maybe a world where people get along instead of turning the place into warring hell scapes might be a good thing? Maybe communities that can develop trust of other communities (which is never accomplished by being jerks to them or exploiting them) - maybe with trust and friendship they can work together on common causes? Maybe altruism has long-term benefits … even in an evolutionary sense? That’s been a whole part of evolutionary studies for a while now if I’m not mistaken.
You might find a book like Jonathan Haidt’s “The Righteous Mind” to be an interesting read. He (as a non-believer) discusses some of the likely pillars of morality such as we now have it, and he’s not being ‘anti-religious’ as he does so. He’s just showing how a lot of our presently operating morality makes some good sense.
Merv, you bring a lot of good points to this discussion and I appreciate my assumptions being challenged. It is certainly difficult for me to fully put myself into the shoes of my hypothetical “atheist self” because even if I became an atheist one day, I certainly couldn’t cleave myself from the Christian moral foundations and teachings. For one, I absolutely agree with you on the potential evolutionary benefits you are discussing with altruism and not making this world a hellscape. But maybe my frustrations lie is that while I certainly wouldn’t be happy with a world turning like that, if I believed in a meaningless existence, what ground could I stand on to judge that in any sense of authority? What grounding do we say that the persistence of our species is a goal we must be focused on? I personally agree on all of those things but for me I am honestly immensely struggling to come up with compelling reasons why (the ought problem that seems unanswerable). To be completely frank and vulnerable, any hope to come up with compelling reasons to focus on those things is entirely overwhelmed and drowned by seas of despair. Maybe I’ll stop my response these because as where I’m at I’m not able to cross over that sea of despair with my hypothetical “atheist self”. ( i.e. I’m aware of this mental block in my head that makes conversations like this difficult)
I have heard plenty of Jonathan Haidt’s stuff but I should definitely check out that book at some point.
-Liam
P.S. you can just refer to me as Liam; I put that in my name so people won’t have to say my username.
I should reassure you first off that I am not trying to talk you out of faith! I am a Christian, and I think our Christ-based faith is invaluable towards clarity and motivation around all these questions of ethics and morality. So I never apologize for that, and I hope to not make you feel like you have to either. I am a believer. I’m also someone who likes to celebrate truth, accurate science, well-articulated and respectful discussions that promote mutual understanding, etc. with others regardless of their faith or lack of it or their differences from me. So when I’ve had past misunderstandings of good atheist friends and have been corrected by them so that I can understand better where they’re coming from, I celebrate that! And we have some excellent non-believer participants here that do a respectful (at least in my view) job of critiquing where so many Christians get things wrong (as we are wont to do just like any other groups). One of those things is how we Christians (I used to do this too) talk ourselves into a corner where our imagination can no longer imagine any such thing as ‘authoritative’ ethical reality or morality apart from our own Deistic basis - which is the religious air we’ve breathed for so long that we lose a sense of what others know or perceive who have acclimated themselves to different mental landscapes.
I’m solidly with you in that I think the ‘ought problem’ is beyond science or any of its tools. It just isn’t the type of question that can be usefully grappled with by the slate of tools that science has to work with (i.e. quantifiable observation, falsifiability, predictive power, experimentation, etc.) Nor do those tools tell us much anything philosophically about the concept of ‘authority’.
So when we’re looking for an authoritative judge, Christians naturally have one go-to (to vastly oversimplify) - and that is: God (as represented in ‘the Bible’ and Christ and … the church … and … well, you get the picture that complications and details quickly accumulate.) But non-believers also have forms of authority they recognize too, such as a cultural authority of at least some moral consensus, scientific authorities, educational authorities, etc. And while we can huff and puff about the inadequacy of those appeals to lay to rest our desire that we want a moral basis that is universal and unchanging across all time, space, and cultures; it doesn’t follow then that such subjective (or culturally localized) authority doesn’t exist or can’t have adequate function for those who appeal to it. In fact we all freely appeal to it; we Christians just like to see it situated in something more substantial and convincing to us that help us feel we have warrant for saying it transcends our local cultural convictions. That isn’t a wrong conviction to want or have. We just need to realize that there are those who function every bit as well as we do (and embarrassingly, many times even better!) without needing to have that “extended Deistic universality” in place! They can help us realize that subjectivity isn’t quite the frightening bogey-man that we’ve been trained to fear. It has very real things on offer too. In fact, if one wants to identify an enemy to humility (what should be lauded as an essential Christian virtue), a sober realization of our own dependency on subjectivity would almost certainly serve us much better than our wanton conceit that we speak for God! Who would you rather have as your neighbors, coworkers, fellow-voters? Those for whom accountability to anyone else is dismissed - because ‘God is on their side’? Or those who still have enough humility to realize that they almost certainly do not speak for God? An acknowledgment of subjectivity may prove to be an indispensable need for so many Christians who have lost that.
And I promptly decided that knowing who you’re most grateful to and knowing a little about them would tell me quite a bit about you. Running Haidt’s book and the insert above through ChatGPT tells me that Haidt explicitly discusses both (a) gratitude as part of reciprocity/fairness psychology and (b) strong norms of respect/obligation toward parents/elders. In other word’s the insert above’s core moral logic is squarely within Haidt’s moral-foundations picture, even if Haidt would reject its “only rational basis” rhetoric.
Hi Merv et al. Just to throw in my 2 cents on the question of “altruism” in society. It seems like the latest research in this area shows that trust and cooperation in society is ultimately based on selfishness and the fear of retribution–one’s enlightened self interest, not “true altruism” in the sense of behaving for one’s own detriment to further the good of another. “True altruism” or what Richard Dawkins calls in his 2004 essay “super niceness” can not be selected for by evolution because it reduces one’s fitness. So yes…one sees “cooperation” within one’s own tribe/society but there has sort of been a popular myth in anthropology and evolution lately that this means we are evolving to more beneficence. Coincidentally, someone sent me this Aeon article this morning which reviews the tension between cooperation and conflict in societies. A popular science article but one which gives a good overview of the field, I think.
Richard Dawkins, in his 2004 essay “Atheists for Jesus” also paradoxically agrees with @1Cor15.54 . Dawkin’s essay is an interesting read! Evolutionarily, enlightened self-interest, not altruism, should evolve. I can’t load a pdf of the essay here but if you google “Atheists for Jesus” a pdf comes up from the CFI:center for inquiry website….
I recall a well-respected, and quite religiously conservative old Pastor of mine once referred to all these things as ‘enlightened self-interest’ - which amused us at the time. Yeah - certainly if it was truly not self-interest at all (in a biological sense anyway), then evolution has nothing to promote, and even an active role in squashing it! I suppose one could note that Jesus, Paul, and such were the biggest evolutionary failures, given they had no children. And yet, the opposite of failures when one looks beyond science and worldly score sheets.
I think I understand what you are intending to say and do not disagree with it in substance if so, but a more accurate phrasing is you invent meaning. You can’t find something that doesn’t exist. If God doesn’t exist, then He too is an invention of humans. So technically, us finding God is delusional if true. If you deny final causality or telos, it seems silly to find something you claim doesn’t exist as an objective part of the universe.
So you invent meaning just as you invent morality. Think Billy Zane in Titanic (“Real men make their own luck”). For me, truth is not something invented, it is something real that exists external to my opinion that we discover.
I looked it up on Google, and the first result I found was the following:
“The purpose of Dawkins’s essay ‘Atheists for Jesus’ is to encourage skeptics to find a way to promote kindness — even what he describes as ‘super-niceness.’””
That wasn’t really my point, though. I believe that materialism leads directly — logically and rationally speaking — to the Nietzschean system.
I’m not denying that — but beneficial for whom? Why should I sacrifice the only absurdly short life I have?
Sure. But what if I could become a multibillionaire by stepping on others? I would then ensure that both my family and I could live like royalty anywhere in the world. We would certainly not be affected by a less cohesive society. Do you think, for example, that Murdoch’s life — or that of his family — would become significantly worse if America were to decline? They could move anywhere in the world and afford a lifestyle that perhaps only one person in 500 million can enjoy.
I absolutely believe that altruism has long-term evolutionary benefits. The question, however, is why we should care about that from a physicalist or materialist perspective. Evolution is not a sentient being that loves or cares for us; it is a cold, indifferent process that quite literally does not give a rat’s ass about you or me or anyone else.
Not only that, but evolution has endowed us with an acute awareness of our own mortality. It has given us what is a natural inclination toward dualism — children across cultures tend to exhibit dualistic intuitions even before receiving any religious instruction or learning the term “soul.” It has instilled in us a deep thirst for meaning and justice, along with the sense that if someone lives like Jimmy Savile and appears to “get away with it” in purely human terms, there ought to be some ultimate reckoning. Yet if materialism were true, the stark reality would be that living like Jimmy Savile or living like a selfless and loving person ultimately leads to the same end: annihilation in the same cosmic void.
To be honest, from such a perspective, I would feel a profound resentment toward the entire process of evolution. I did not ask to be born, and I certainly did not ask to possess an awareness of my own mortality or to spend my life striving for meaning that does not ultimately exist — if, in the end, the “real truth” is that we are nothing more than dust in the wind.
So I am not denying that altruism may serve an evolutionary function. I am saying that, from this viewpoint, I would find no ultimate value in that function at all. In fact, I would feel deep hostility toward the mechanism itself, as though the universe were an immense façade, a cruel travesty. I would resent a universe that brings us into existence with a natural sense of dualism if we are, in reality, nothing more than biological machines without souls. I would resent a universe that leads us to experience love as something profound and meaningful if it is ultimately nothing more than a chemical reaction. I would resent a universe that gives us a deep longing for justice and meaning, only for the final truth to be that whether one lives like Richard Huckle or like Padre Pio, the end is exactly the same.
I would devote my entire life to turning it into the greatest possible ‘f**k you’ to this whole farce. That is, until exhaustion set in and I simply checked out altogether, because I would have absolutely no desire to spend eighty or ninety years in a universe where children get cancer for no reason while someone like Jimmy Savile lives to eighty-five and gets away with it.
I’d read the essay before jumping to conclusions. (don’t rely on google or AI summaries which are often superficial or incomplete). Dawkins there laments the fact that there is no “reason”/ evolutionary basis within materialism to ground altruism. (i.e. agreeing with your Nietzschean perspective). So he (in light of his admiration for Jesus’s ethics), urges atheists to come up with an analogous “religious” motivation for behaving altruistically, although he admits he’s not sure quite what that might be…
My perspective is more nuanced than that. I do believe that, within a materialist framework, there could be an evolutionary basis for altruism.
I simply don’t think it would be worth pursuing. In that view, altruism would be nothing more than a blind, indifferent mechanism — selected for the evolutionary advantage of the species as a whole — but devoid of any deeper meaning. It would offer no real answer to the injustices and evils that ravage the world, no resolution for the suffering of innocents while wicked people prosper and live long lives, as the Book of Job laments.
So yes, I believe there could be a purely evolutionary grounding for altruism within materialism. But I would want no part in it. In fact, I would feel a perverse impulse to rebel against what would seem like an immense farce — a system that brings us into existence with desires and longings that can never be fulfilled.
I would feel no respect or loyalty toward an impersonal process founded on a profound deception — one that instills in us a sense of justice and a thirst for meaning that will never be satisfied, reducing them to nothing more than “evolutionarily useful delusions.”
I would feel driven to spend my life resisting this entire façade, defying whatever “evolutionary purpose” it might claim — at least until I reached the point where I had the will power to end it all.
T_aquaticus
(The Friendly Neighborhood Atheist)
201
Absolutely, just as people choose religion as a source of meaning in their lives. We all create the meaning in our lives.
Do you think people who believe in other gods or belong to other religions are delusional? Are Mormons delusional? Are Hindus delusional? Would you agree that they still find meaning in their religious beliefs even if you don’t share those beliefs?
