I take it that most (though not all) non-theists assume that atheism does not entail nihilism. More specifically, most non-theists don’t believe that denying the existence of God or the immortality of the soul entails that truth, love, beauty, goodness, and justice are empty words.
But as we’ve seen in numerous discussions, the anti-materialist holds that this commitment is not one to which we are rationally entitled. Rather, the anti-materialist seems to contend, someone who denies that there is any transcendent reality beyond this life cannot be committed to anything other than affirmation of power (or maximizing individual reproductive success) for its own sake.
The question is, why is the anti-materialist mistaken about what non-theists are rationally entitled to? (Anti-materialists are also welcome to clarify their position if I’ve mischaracterized it.)
Let’s face facts, William. You don’t know what other people think unless you ask them or read what they write and accept it at face-value – as I do with your comments. How do you arrive at implying that “atheist/materialists” “act as if” which suggests insincerity on their part. Is this what you intend to imply?
Whether your “atheist-materialist” category just “talk about” letting their kids form their own opinions on the veracity of the sundry religious dogmas on offer, I suggest you can only speculate. What I can confirm is, with regard to my daughter, that I (and my wife) sent her to the local Church of England schools and did not interfere with the religious elements of the education she received. The subject of her lack of baptism came up once when she felt the odd one out among her peers. We said of course she could be baptised if she wanted though she did not pursue it. Currently, she still seems drawn to Buddhism. Life in atheist households is, I suspect, far from your mental picture of it.
Since the atheist/materialist does not hold the value, meaning or purpose of anything to be objective or inherent, this means they must evaluate the worth of others by how those others make them feel. Since the A/M holds all meaning to be personal and subjective, the meaning of the lives of others can only translate into how well those others serve some need or desire of the A/M. Ultimately, there’s nothing else to judge it by under atheistic materialism.
By the definitional terms of nihilism (at Wiki), this makes them nihilists because they don’t find there to be any innate meaning, worth or purpose – only that which they subjectively assign.
But, that would only be if those that call themselves A/Ms held and lived a worldview rationally consistent with their premises. They do not. They act as if children they don’t even know have value and as if their lives have meaning. They decry the “indoctrination” of children into worldviews they disagree with even though their worldview demands that every child is in fact “indoctrinated” by a haphazard accumulation of environmental events. We’re all indoctrinated by physics/nature to believe whatever we happen to believe – to do whatever we happen to do.
Why do atheist materialists concern themselves with such things? They might as well concern themselves with how leaves float down a creek.
But, here they argue, as if objective truths exist, as if it matters, as if we have the free will to overrule physics, as if there is innate value, meaning and purpose in existence that **should** be pursued and defended.
Seems a bit bizarre to claim that people hate non-existent entities. The invective I see seems more directed at the attempts by some fundamentalists to use political methods in getting religion inserted into public school curricula.
ETA
For example, one can hardly hate Father Christmas or the Christian version, Saint Nicholas, but I can certainly dislike the rank commercialism that accompanies an otherwise enjoyable mid-winter festival.
Why should that particularly bother an atheist/materialist?
William J. Murray,
Why would one have to know a child before finding the idea of its sufffering abhorrent?
Are you saying one cannot hate imagined or fictional entities? Why not?
What’s wrong with rank commercialism?
Is it right or wrong to purposefully indoctrinate children into a particular religious sect?
This is just unsupported speculation. It does not coincide with any reality I am aware of. How on Earth do you come to these conclusions?
I don’t follow this line of reasoning entirely.
Something has intrinsic value if it is valuable in its own right, in contrast with instrumental value, i.e. value in relation to something else. My computer has instrumental value because it is valuable as a means to achieve my purposes. But my cats aren’t instrumentally valuable — they aren’t means to achieving any further purpose. So this is intrinsic value in an innocuous sense.
It would take some further argument to show that
(1) intrinsic value must be discovered or recognized, rather than merely attributed or instituted;
and
(2) intrinsic value must be absolute, rather than relative to the recognitional capacities of the valuer.
And I think that both (1) and (2) — perhaps more as well — have to be on the table to generate the argument that “materialism” entails nihilism. In other words, one would need to do a great deal of work to license the conclusion, “if one does not believe that there is some transcendent, absolute, unchanging being which is the ground of all intrinsic value, then one is not entitled to believe that there is any intrinsic value at all.”
Alan Fox,
I got married in a church, my personal choice, even though I didn’t believe. I wanted to make it a ‘proper’ occasion, for my wife and our families and friends. But going through that process – a selfless one, as I thought – I found myself effectively accused of hypocrisy by the vicar. He made it clear he had little choice, as we lived in his parish, but would rather not.
When it came to the question of baptising my children, I probably wouldn’t have anyway, but in light of that experience I wasn’t about to stand up and make promises about bringing them up in the faith. Similarly, when I was asked to be a godparent to my niece, I politely declined for the same reason. Honesty matters to me. A certain kind of bilious theist will never understand this – “why not lie, they’re only molecules”. Or “You’re still a hypocrite, because you act as if things have meaning, which is inconsistent with your worldview”.
Who said anything about it suffering?
If the value and meaning of a child’s life is not objective or intrinsic, but instead only has an abstract or subject value and meaning assigned by the individual based on how that child’s life makes the individual feel, I suggest that what really has value and meaning to the atheist/materialist is only their own feelings and how the state of that child makes them feel – even if the child is an abstract concept or the particular identity isn’t known..
That’s all it can be. It cannot be an objective duty or responsibility to the intrinsic, objective meaning or value of the child itself, because according to the A/M he has no such objective duty or responsibility, and the child has no such intrinsic, objective worth.
According to A/M (the rationally consistent version), the child (real, unknown or abstract) only has meaning, value or worth in the sense of how that child (real, unknown or abstract) affects the feelings of the atheist as the atheist considers the child (real, unknown or abstract).
The atheist has posited no axiomatic resource that such feelings could be accessing (as in, subjectively responding to/interpreting an objective commodity, like an objective good or an objective purpose or objective worth) other than their own subjective nature. Thus, the rationally consistent A/M would have to admit that children are only worth what he/she feels that particular child is worth – that it is only their feelings, in fact, that give the child any worth or value whatsoever.
Rendering children (and everyone else) as only a means to the end of satisfying their personal, subjective feelings. Which is roughly the same mentality as any serial killer or sociopath.
William J. Murray,
I don’t hate any concept of God. I reserve my hate for specific people who have harmed me and those I love in specific ways. I do have an intense dislike for those people on the “religious right” who use a specific concept of God to legitimize policies that cause immense suffering. But my dislike of them is all about the politics. I have lots of friends who are deeply religious and whose politics is more centerist and left-of-center, and we get along perfectly well.
William J. Murray,
Oh, I love that contemptuous signoff! Take that, atheists!
Really? Not even your own enjoyment or happiness, or that of someone you care about?
I think that what you’re observing is more often the time-honoured tradition of mocking one’s opponent, rather than actual evidence for hatred of god. Not necessarily productive, I do admit, but it happens from time to time in these discussions. I’m sure you have noticed the same coming from Barry Arrington and the crew over at UD.
I see. I actually understand your position, given your later post stating that “nothing” prevented you from killing people while you were an A/M. However, please rest assured that the vast majority of us are not like that, and consider the possibility that your own negative experience with A/M has given you a distorted picture of what atheists are typically like.
William J. Murray,
There does not need to be any ‘intrinsic’ value to a child (as in: manifesting Godf’s purpose) for it to be valued. Simple as.
Idealist/theist: mind has explanatory priority over matter (since the material universe originates from the eternal, infinite, and unchanging Mind of God).
Materialist/atheist: matter has explanatory priority over mind (since finite, embodied minds evolved from non-minded configurations of energy-and-molecules).
Emergentist: both ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ are abstractions, neither term refers to some class of beings. The dynamic patterns of creation-destruction, being-becoming, has some features that are ‘mind’-like and some features that are ‘matter’-like.
You remind me that my church wedding was a similar compromise of principal. I agreed to not make waves as my future wife did not want to create issues with her family. Though, it turns out that her parents were not at all religious. The rector (real old school C of E) made t pretty clear that church attendance was obligatory for us to witness the reading of the banns and we had to attend some “^pre-nuptial seminars” at the manse, the content of which I cannot now recall, which may be an indication of how relevant the advice was.
Exactly. William’s caricatures are not congruent with reality.
You respond as if such harming was the act of someone with free will. If all actions are just the aggregate of interactions of matter with no objective right or wrong available, nor any ghost in the machine that can override the merciless and indifferent onslaught of interacting matter, it seems to me that such “intense dislike” of certain outcomes or politics is foolish.
But then, I don’t guess that under atheistic materialism you’d be able to do anything about that. Your emotions would also just be the happenstance effects of countless accumulated physical causes.
This brings up another problematic area — the difference between inherent/relational value and intrinsic/instrumental value. What has intrinsic value is the relation I have with the cats — the mysterious, very animal and very chemical bond between humans and their mammalian pets, not really love and yet something very much like love. It’s a relationship that sustains all of us, such that my life would be smaller and emptier without them it, and I suspect (though of course one cannot know) that something similar could be said of them (even though they lack the conceptual resources to think that thought to themselves, since each of their brains is about the size of a walnut).
I’m not arguing about what atheists are like; I expect that western atheists are much like anyone else that western (meaning: theism-infused) culture has produced. My argument is that what they are “like” is rationally unobtainable from their stated philosophical premises. The culture has largely formulated their behavior, but that culture is infused with theistic premise. So, their behavior and thought process has no rationally sustainable foundation if they insist they are atheists and materialists.
Of course, William, having the free will to decide to believe in intrinsic values, also has the free will to change his mind about this at any arbitrary time,
I guess mentally ill people could hate their demons. I can’t see how any sane person can hate something they are convinced doesn’t exist. As I said, I can’t hate Father Christmas.
I’m against unfettered commercialism. Better regulation of the commercial sector might have prevented the economic melt-down we (as tax payers) are still paying for.
Can’t see how you could do it accidentally. I would consider it wrong to indoctrinate a child of mine, which is why I didn’t do it. I concede it is practically impossible to prevent parents from telling children whatever they want. Fortunately most parents and most children emerge from the child raising process relatively un-scarred.
OT Hawking misquote?
Chemical bond? If that’s all you have, then your cats are no more than chemical addictions/enjoyments – like meth or marijuana. They are instruments through which you feel good – nothing more.
Kantian Naturalist:
Exactly. It’s the using of a religious excuse to mobilise the voters to get your way in legislation. The assumption of a “God-given” right to control people’s inner lives by statute must be opposed.
Metaphor, William!
So, William, are you saying that your concern for a child is grounded purely by its status as a ‘child of god’? Does that mean you value it principally because you value keeping on the right side of God? I doubt that your conception of ‘intrinsic’ worth avoids the accusation of self-interest you level at atheists.
Here’s where William keeps losing me:
“Subjective meaning” /~ “serve some need or desire”. It’s not even a correlated relationship as far as I can tell. I find the “must evaluate the worth of others by how those others make them feel” a little better, but the former does not follow from the later.
I reject nihilism for a very simple reason – nihilism, at least existential nihilism, begs the question. It rests on the the assumption that without intrinsic purpose, life is meaningless and therefore depressing. But no one seems to be able to articulate why the former inherently leads to the latter. I certainly buy that there is no intrinsic purpose to life, but I find meaning in life nonetheless.
Hmmm…I have spent hours watching leaves (along with other debris) float in creeks. I find the physics and patterns fascinating myself.
The problem, KN, is that if mind is not primary, then no matter what you call it, mind cannot even in principle be trusted. Theistic principles are necessary if we are to trust our own minds in any capacity. There’s just no way around it. Happenstance, determined, and emergent just doesn’t cut it – we must live, act and argue as if mind is primary.
William, what you offer is a free-floating decision to assign value, based on nothing at all other than your free-will decision to believe.
If you accept that there is no intrinsic/objective meaning to life, you are a nihilist by definition. It doesn’t necessarily follow that you should be depressed if you accept that. I don’t think anyone argues that nihilism entails abandoning the idea of subjective meaning and value.
Well, that and the free checking. Don’t forget that!
But your intrinsic meaning and value are grounded only in your free-will decision to believe in them. And since your belief is freely chosen, you can choose to unbelieve at any moment.
But you distort the source of meaning and value.
Salt is salty because of chemistry and biology. The same is true of a child’s value to a parent. Salt does not require belief to be salty, and children do not require an objective frame of reference in order to have value. Biology creates the same kind of fixed relationship between parent and child that it creates between salt and the taster.
You guys act like what “they” do is in principle any different from what “you” do, when under atheistic materialism, it’s all the same brute material physics doing whatever it happens to do. Under A/M, hating someone for some political/religious choice/act is **no different** than hating them for their skin color; that’s just the physics card that particular collection of molecules happened to draw.
You act like they have the capacity to do something other than what material forces happened to cause in that particular case.
Once again – behavior irreconcilable with premises on parade for all to see. You cannot live, talk, or think as if there is no libertarian free will, but yet you hold premises that deny its existence.
So, we shouldn’t interfere with parents that kill their children, or abuse them – because it’s just chemistry running its course, right? So a child is like salt – the only value it has to the parent is how it serves their needs or desires?
Heh.
I agree completely up to this point in your argument, William.
….and then you veer WAAAAAY off the road into the bizarrely erroneous. No William, personal feelings do not render anything “a means to an end”. Where do you come up with such silliness? Personal feelings render things just what the person’s personal feelings present: a feeling of meaning. As such, if my personal feelings indicate that teaching creationism harms children and that in turn gives me feelings of frustration, rage, and anger, I will likely act on those feelings and work to remove the perceived offending creationist teachings. I don’t need a deity to tell me it’s right or wrong; I just need feelings of sufficient influence to spur me into action.
And here’s the kicker – so long as my subject feelings don’t force me to do anything illegal (like…say…take a shotgun and blow the head off of what I feel is some wacky creationist) and instead allow me to assess the various options, I will likely feel that my best course of action is through education of the science boards and school systems and through political and judicial work to ensure the parameters of what can and can’t be taught as “science”.
So really, there’s nothing rationally inconsistent here. This is all just acting on personal feelings. Mine just happen to be more important than yours. Well, at least that’s how I feel…
What makes you able to speak to that? What’s your special insight?
William J. Murray,
Whooosh! How far did you have to duck to miss the point?
But you freely choose your needs and desires and can freely change them. You freely choose what you believe to be the worth of things and can freely choose to change what you value or what you believe is the source of value.
Your system of values has no anchor.
A Darwinist is simply a product of countless generations in a population that exists because it values children. The salt has its flavor because the taster would not otherwise exist.
If you’re alluding to Plantinga’s EAAN, I’ve argued against it before. It’s just not a good argument — and certainly one that is not rationally compelling to a pragmatist. We can revisit the issue if you’d like, but since I’ve gone ‘on record’ with my objections elsewhere on TSZ, just alluding to it isn’t going to get anywhere with me.
Mind and matter are abstractions made of/by what? A mind? Abstractions made by abstractions?
This is an oddly contradictory statement William. Assuming you’re right and we are just bodies of molecules reacting like billiard balls (which is erroneous given how physics actually shows molecules interacting, but whatever…), hating someone for their supposed political/religious views could not be anything like hating someone for his or her skin color simply because the system itself presents the illusion of choice. So A/M would only be irrational if we didn’t condemn the yo-yos we felt (see…there’s that “feeling” thing again) were making a choice vs versus the folks with a skin color we’d feel was just a product of their heredity.
OTOH, if you’re wrong (and oh how wrong you are) about how molecules work, then we A/Ms would know that there’s a HUGE difference between someone’s freely chosen (or willfully ignorant) religious/political beliefs and we’d condemn them for that, while we’d recognize there hereditary basis of melanistic
skin color and would care less about that.
On the contrary – we act like the system makes us “feel”, William – and we “feel” that they have the will to make choices. That’s what our material forces tell us.
Nope…our behavior is only irreconcilable with your strawman A/M premises.
More than eghty comments and I haven´t see an materialist explanation why their life will be important 60 yars from now, when all of us will be ashes.
I don’t allude to other people’s arguments. How can you claim it’s not a good argument if you have no fundamental basis by which to trust your mind?
Pragmatism can only be understood by mind, and can only be experienced to be as effective or useful as it is in the mind. Without mind posited as primary, all arguments fail.
We may remain in memories, I hope fond ones. There are no guarantees. Many historical characters live on as examples;saintly or salutary.
I don’t know how old you are, but i assume from context that you expect to be dead within 60 years. Do you have a point?
But that’s the point – as self-described, rationally consistent (and presumably intelligent) materialists, you would know that what you are condemning is an illusion, and you would know that their political/religious “choice” is actually no more a choice for them than their skin color.
Your characterization of molecules as “billiard balls” is a straw man. It doesn’t matter how molecules interact, or what emerges from them; the behavior of any system, under materialism, is caused by that which precedes and contextualizes it, even if the effect cannot be determined or predicted.
What we call our political or religious “choices” are caused by the physical interactions that preceded it. As are our views. As are our feelings. As is everything. Skin color is caused by matter interacting according to physics. What we think, decide and say is caused by matter interacting according to physics. There is no “ghost in the machine” beyond the happenstance interactions of matter in either case.
William J. Murray,
What do you mean by “mind”? I suspect idiosyncratic usage.
Being able to choose and employ an anchor, then get rid of a faulty anchor and find a new one is not the same as having no anchor.
Whatever one calls the mind, it must be primary – meaning, it cannot be caused by other things. If mind is caused by other things, then we are lost. We would say, believe, argue and think as other things cause us to.
But, nobody lives and thinks and argues as if mind is not primary. It can’t be done. Every argument you make here – even against the primacy of mind – cannot help but imply affirmation of the primacy of mind.
If you didn’t hold (whether consciously or not) to primacy of mind, to objective truths, to objective right and wrong – there would be no reason to argue here, nothing to argue about, and nobody to argue with.