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.)
Yes, 147 comments and no materialist is able to explain why his life worth something.
Steve,
Okay, I’ll bite. What’s an “auggie”?
Hmm. Materialists cannot define matter in a meaningful way; they hold that physics is not up to the task of describing what they call emergent behavior/properties. Classical materialism has been abandoned (especially in light of nonlocal quantum effects) and in it’s place we have a “materialism” that really isn’t materialism at all.
Materialists don’t even claim that all real things are products (caused by) of material interactions. Some doubt that “causation” is anything more than psychology affixing a perspective on observations.
I wonder what the point is, then, in calling oneself a “materialist” or a “naturalist”? It seems to me that it is primarily just to exclude “god” and/or the supernatural/spiritual.
Strangely, though, it seems to me that a reasonable “god” could be postulated to exist as an emergent property of the very early universe – an observational sentience that could exert creative influence over how quantum potentials were realized, and that the “supernatural” and other “paranormal” phenomena could as easily be embraced under “emergentism”, irreducible to physics or matter, and perhaps not even accessible to current scientific investigation (which looks for regularities and would ignore emergent phenomena that doesn’t exhibit a scientifically significant “regularity”).
IOW, I’m wondering what exactly is the point in professing materialism or naturalism, when – as far as I can tell – it really doesn’t mean much these days other than a kind of semi-archaic expression of certain specific things one doesn’t believe exists even though such things are entirely possible under current “materialism/naturalism” as “emergent” phenomena.
William J. Murray,
I don’t know anyone who views their feelings as a ‘final arbiter’. I do not consider mine the final word on anything. There exist other people in the world. My feelings certainly influence what I do about a situation (in which the atheist is hardly unique).
No. I’m not addressing the argument per se, but pointing out the equivalence.
You may claim to serve a ‘greater self’, but it remains a question of what’s in it for you. Otherwise you wouldn’t bother.
What? I’d say both act to protect the child. I think you need to expand this line of reasoning.
William J. Murray,
As I am an atheist, I would find it inconsistent to support a theism I did not believe in. It might be expedient to do so, but you are not arguing on expediency. In view of the significant ills historically perpetrated by people convinced they hold the path to Truth, I am unconvinced that it would be expedient either. Neither theistically-driven nor atheistically-driven societies are exactly covering themselves in glory. Indicating that tying politics to either metaphysical position is a particularly crap approach to civics. Religion should be a matter for individual conscience. The state should butt out.
What you see as the ‘ghostly remains’ of social good I see as simply the continuing genetic and cultural heritage of a social species – the crucible from which religious ‘good’ itself arose.
Why does it require an explanation?
Wha? I wasn’t worried about any legal implications, tbh, but I assumed that when you said:
your point was that this is a problem for (some) atheists, but of course not yourself.
In your most recent post are you stating that you also have no rationally sustainable foundation for your behavior and thought process? Please correct me if I’m misreading your post(s).
WJM has no rational foundation for his beliefs.
His beliefs are freely chosen and he can change them at any time for any reason or for no reason.
If they were founded in reason they would could be derived without calling upon faith or belief or theism.
Blas, a question for you. If a god supposedly makes life worth something, why’d it require nearly all organisms to sleep through most of it?
Another way of looking at it: if life is supposedly worth something, why is there the mundane?
When WJM invokes atrocities or mistreatment of children, he is making a utilitarian argument, which does not require theism, faith, belief or any of his other hobgoblins.
Well the post question is Does atheism entail nihiism? So I expect atheist explain that life has a meaning beyond his own shelfishness.
just to be clear:
Nihilism (/ˈnaɪ.ɨlɪzəm/ or /ˈniː.ɨlɪzəm/; from the Latin nihil, nothing) is the philosophical doctrine suggesting the negation of one or more putatively meaningful aspects of life. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism, which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value
Getting back to the OP, I confess I have a quibble:
I mostly agree with this statement, however I personally find the concept of “justice”, in any of its various forms, to be completely empty in the absence of an absolute authority. But then, “justice” as a concept is so odd to me anyway, what with much of it being based on concepts of “property rights” and welfare distribution. For instance, it was not uncommon in the past for people to want “justice” having a daughter who could not be married – justice in this case being the coin value of having her sold into servitude.
Justice is now more readily – at least in the west – associated with “fairness”, but what does that mean? What would be the appropriately “fair” or “just” act if someone killed your cow? Does it make a difference if instead it was your dog that was killed? What if it was your sister or your wife? In principle, “fairness” should be evaluated on a quantitative basis, yet clearly each of those entities above possess vastly different subjective qualities. How then to evaluate what is “fair” or “just” in such a case as none of them can actually be replaced (and would replacement be considered “fair” anyway?)
I just don’t see how one can come up with a working system of justice without some absolute arbiter decreeing what is just. Of course, I long ago abandoned any belief in justice, so I think the point is rather moot.
So what is the problem?
I can’t quite follow how intrinsic value can’t exist without the existence of an external agency.
How is value as determined by a human being different from value determined by another agency?
It’s a problem for those that insist their beliefs are rational. It’s obviously not a problem for atheists that don’t care or are oblivious to this fact.
My arguments are entirely about whether or not one’s behavior, arguments or more extant beliefs are reconcilable with their fundamental (worldview-setting) premises. Logic is something that examines the relationship between premises, inferences and conclusions. Logic doesn’t set the premise per se even though it can help find a suitable premise that supports other beliefs, facts and behavior.
When one says that the foundation of one’s worldview is sustainable via logic, what this means is whether or not it survives the scrutiny of the facts available in one’s experience, the other beliefs the person holds, their behaviors and the arguments they offer to defend their views.
First, you must understand what I mean when I say that I “believe” a proposition. I’ve explained it several times here but you may not know it: belief, for me, means to assume – to act as if something is true whether or not it is actually true. I don’t hold my assumptions to actually be true (they may or may not be), but I act as if those assumptions are true.
I assume a god exists. I don’t know it and I don’t “believe” it in the traditional sense – I just assume it. I assume it because it is a necessary assumption to accommodate various facts about my existence and experience, and to accommodate other things I assume, and to accommodate certain logical necessities required in my experience.
The reason I have made these assumptions is to serve the purpose for which I have constructed my system of thought: (1) to be a good person and (2) ( inasmuch as it doesn’t interfere with 1) enjoy life. Ultimately, they are both self-serving, but self-serving in different senses of the term (as I alluded to in a previous post). (1) serves the objective divine-me interest, (2) serves the subjective-me interests.
The reason I have a (1) and (2) and not just a (2), is because I tried just (2) out and it didn’t work for me. There are certain innate qualities about me that I’ve found are not subject to willful change. There are certain things I need satisfied. (1), in how I’ve constructed it, satisfies those needs and allows me to better accomplish (2).
So, as long as other beliefs (assumptions that I act on as if true) do not directly contradict or undermine that structure, they can be unrelated to it (meaning, they are not extractable from the premises, but do not contradict them) and do no damage. Thus, I can hold some irrational beliefs that are “free-floating”, so to speak, without any need to justify them according to my premises.
I suggest you closely examine what you have stated above. Even if you believe that evolution generated “good” first, then generated religious belief, theistic religious belief was still an evolutionary product that became overwhelmingly successful throughout the world in terms of natural selection. Theism essentially rules the world outside of China, which is a statist tyranny that doesn’t allow religious expression.
There is no conceptual resource for natural law, unalienable human and personal rights and freedoms outside of theism. Without it, there’s only statist tyranny or anarchy. There’s a reason evolution, if true, produced religion and there’s a reason post-enlightenment theistic religion has been the foundation of freedom-loving, representative democracies.
Tear away those roots and I don’t know how evolution can keep those emergent concepts afloat in the majority of humanity. You think they can just “free float” without the soil of theism and some kind of religious/spiritual structure in the culture. Even if “the good” is just a manifestation of some physical commodity, physical commodities need infrastructure to survive.
If evolution produced theism/religion/spirituality as the naturally-selected infrastructure of “the good”, then you are like a manufacturer who thinks he can process a necessary nutrient out of its natural infrastructure, put it in a pill and then claim it will do the same thing for the general public.
I’d consider that view very carefully.
Well the post is asking for how do you determine an intrinsic value without an external agency. Can you explain?
Do you mean that values are absolutes and that absolute values are knowable by humans? Do you know an absolute value? How do you know it?
Sounds a bit Zarathustrian (Zoroastrian).
petrushka,
Don’t expect an answer. I’ve already asked the question four times, and William hasn’t come up with a response.
He has fallen flat on his face, but he keeps moving his arms and legs as if he were upright and walking.
That would seem to be your question, not mine.
I do not require an imaginary agency to assign value. Sugar is sweet, salt is salty, and people and life have value, regardless of what I believe. Theism and atheism cannot change the properties of sugar and salt and life.
Now it is true that value is a perception, and perception requires a perceiver, but it doesn’t require belief or faith or an external agent. On could, in a thought experiment, imagine a person who perceives things differently. In fact, one does not need the experiment. there is a neurological condition known as synesthesia in which the wires are crossed, and numbers can be perceived as musical notes, and so forth.
So I can’t even figure out how something can have intrinsic value. Value is always in relation to a perceiver.
That would be a bit unhygienic as he died in 1888. I met my great aunt Lizzie who seemed a very old lady (dressed in black with lace as far as I can remember) as a young child who still at that time in the family home and I have a couple of mementos and a few stories that would probably only be of interest to his descendants. Why do you ask?
I guess the question is, what is the origin of the intrinsic value of an object? Seems to me that a given person can only determine a personal value for any object.
If by “another agency” we just posit an extraterrestrial or even “Engineer race” (a la Prometheus), then I’d say there is no difference. However, I’m not thinking of another anthropomorphic entity when I note that I can’t come up with a working system of justice without some absolute arbiter decreeing what is just. Said “absolute arbiter” need not be an entity or even intelligent. It just needs to be definitive. Gravity, for instance, at least to me, is an absolute arbiter.
Blas,
Since you haven’t taken me up on my offer, it’s clear that you think that temporary, earthly things are quite meaningful.
Why then are you surprised that materialists find their finite lives to be meaningful?
Well, there you have the two answer for your questions:
1) If “Now it is true that value is a perception, and perception requires a perceiver,”
Then the your, mine, and God perceptions could be differents, then yes, God and humans can have different velues.
2) If “So I can’t even figure out how something can have intrinsic value. Value is always in relation to a perceiver” then atheism is entailed to nihilism as they cannnot found that something has intrinsic value.
wjm:Tear away those roots and I don’t know how evolution can keep those emergent concepts afloat in the majority of humanity. You think they can just “free float” without the soil of theism and some kind of religious/spiritual structure in the culture
Perhaps we can just assume it,just like you.
Because seems your answer to the worth of your life will be let here some memories. I think that nobody will remember ayone of us, and will not care of what we have done in a blink of an eye.
There is an intrinsic relation between object and perceiver. The relationship does not require faith or belief or the existence of a third party perceiver. This is tautological and trivial.
This whole exercise appears to be a back door (or front door) way of saying atheists are amoral and likely to be immoral.
It is name-calling in a cheap tuxedo.
Life has worth to the person who lives. Memories of people have worth to the rememberer. Most of the people who have ever lived are not remembered.
I presume it makes you sad that people disappear and are not remembered.
Making up stories might relieve your sadness, but it doesn’t change the way the world works.
And not believing stories doesn’t make the unbeliever incapable of feeling sad.
I’d be happier talking the causal closure of the cosmos (CCC), which gets at roughly the same point without invoking the worry that, by invoking the CCP, we are thereby committed to the idea — which I regard as mistaken — that we could even in principle explain psychological or biological properties in terms of fermions and bosons.
On my view, if the description of the posited entities is part of a model which specifies the causal relations between the posited entities and the observable entities, then the posited entities are just as real as the observable ones. (This is why not all posits are created equal — because not all posits are couched within a model of the causal relations.) So we can happily invoke talking about “thoughts” and “sensations” because our description of those entities is part of a causal model about the relation between those entities and observable behavior.
And this makes them quite different from, say, numbers. The Quine-Putnam indispensability argument for the existence of numbers treats all posits as on an epistemic par, and I think that’s a mistake, unless the theory of mathematics also included a description of the causal relations between us and those abstract objects. And it’s not even enough to just stipulate that there’s a causal relation — we’ve got to be able to test for it.
Here’s an aside: a friend of mine told me a story about an argument between two prominent philosophers, one of whom was defending semantic platonism and the other was criticizing it. The critic pressed the point: “so, is there some magical fluid in the brain that explains our cognitive access to these entities?” And the other person had no choice but to say, “yes”. At that point, I think the critic has decisively won the argument.
Actually, by ‘the usual arguments’ I was alluding to Ryle and Sellars, and their point that the normative is irreducible to the natural — nothing to do with the privacy or ineffability of qualia.
I don’t deny that thoughts supervene on “the physical”, broadly construed — but not on brain-states alone. Rather, thoughts supervene on a fantastically complex system of relations between the individual’s brain, her body, and her entire history of relations with her physical and social environments. (This is why it would not be an error to say that my thoughts do, in some sense, persist after the death of my body and brain — they persist in the articles and books I’ve written, in the conversations I’ve had, and so on.)
wjm:There is no conceptual resource for natural law, unalienable human and personal rights and freedoms outside of theism. Without it, there’s only statist tyranny or anarchy.
Don’t forget theism statist tyranny, the model for much of history, the power of the state sanctified by God.
There’s a reason evolution, if true, produced religion and there’s a reason post-enlightenment theistic religion
If theism is so beneficial to human rights why exclude the majority of time before the Enlightenment?
has been the foundation of freedom-loving, representative democracies.
Unless one happened to be a Native American, Black, and woman or not a landowner.
Or a native South or Central American.
But then their lives had no intrinsic value.
William has no memory of the neverending religious wars that have plagued the world and which most of the narrative we call world history.
It is true that the overthrow of theistic monarchies has involved a great deal of brutality, but there was a great deal of brutality in the monarchies before the revolutions.
Blas:Because seems your answer to the worth of your life will be let here some memories. I think that nobody will remember ayone of us, and will not care of what we have done in a blink of an eye.
Then life because it is a finite resource has value,
I didn’t forget it. It’s included in “statist tyranny”.
Because not all theisms are the same. The concept of personal freedom and inviolable human rights only flourishes under certain kinds of theism.
Theism/religion has been the driving force behind the fight for equal rights for all of those groups. Shall we consider the historical materialist/Darwinist position on those subjects?
Well, I wasn’t there, so no, I have no memory of them. However, I do have information on them, and no, I have not disregarded it – I have only put it in context of evolution. So what if evolutionary processes are brutal? Indifferent? If various species go extinct because they cannot meet the challenge? Through that evolutionary crucible, the idea of unalienable human rights, personal freedom, and representational democracy has come to exist. Those concepts do not exist without infrastructure, free-floating as independent entities – at least not according to materialists.
They are dependent/embedded in physical architecture that is also represented conceptually. If you think you can pluck your eye from your head and still see through it, then you haven’t really considered the idea of plucking “the good” from the body of theism it evolved in and expecting most people to still be able to see through it.
William, we all know what pain is, and some of us have empathy and compassion.
I understand why societies find ways to manage people who have no built-in desire to cooperate with others and to work for mutual welfare. Traditionally the mechanism for managing people has been religion.
The problem I see is that the content of religion is fictional, and yet the organization of religion has been so important that wars have been fought over competing fictions. We seem to be in a continuation of that tendency to fight over competing mythologies. People all over the world are killed and brutalized by religious zealots.
I’m not a big fan of politics or government, but secular governments fight over money and property and brutalize citizens in the name of power. Resisting this is much simpler, because it is naked aggression. One can simply resist the aggression without pretending it is about something else.
Atheism entails nihilism.
William, correct me if I’m wrong, but the bottom line seems to be that You and Gregory and Blas would like to say that atheism is bad because it leads to bad behavior.
Aside from this, theism makes no sense at all.
There are thousands of religions making claims about God and such. They cannot all be right. Be best case for theism that can rationally be made is that all but one of them are wrong.
So when theists of various stripes collude against atheism ,they are basically saying that believing nothing is worse than believing something that is wrong.
And this is becuse atheism causes or enables bad behavior.
Where am I wrong?
That is a form of hiding behind words. Is a finite resource for what? If you do not define for what your saying that has value because is usefull that is a aerendipity.
Perhaps you mean that you understand that evolution has developed people and their views in a way that is conducive to social success? You phrase things as if “people” are something other than material constructs generated by evolution, or as if they have power over the evolutionary process.
Animals all over the world are killed by other animals. So? Evolution develops survival tactics which can mean being a better predator or muscling out the competition. You say that as if what humans do under the evolutionary influence of religion is somehow qualitatively different than an animal using any evolutionary product to its advantage. That usually involves the extinction of some prior version of that species.
What difference does it make if the content of an advantage is “fictional”? All kinds of animals and plants have evolved features that make the plant or animal seem to be something other than what it is to ward of or camoflage against predators. You respond as if the advantage offered by religion is somehow less of an advantage because it what it refers to (in your view) doesn’t actually exist. So what? It’s still an evolutionary advantage or it wouldn’t be so prevalent.
You say that as if people have an unlimited, magical free will capacity to override physical infrastructure attached to such thoughts. You don’t for a second consider that the capacity to resist aggression for most people might rely upon the physical infrastructure that is embedded in theistic conceptualizations of objective right and wrong, the promise of an afterlife, and the idea of necessary consequences for those engaged in wrong activities.
In evolutionary terms, you expect to be able to pluck out an eye and still see through it. You have no idea what the idea of “the good” is bound to, or what will happen when you try to take it out of the context that supports it for most people on the planet.
It’s hard for me to think that any of you have spent any real time or effort examining the beliefs you claim to hold.
Blas,
If temporary, earthly things have no intrinsic value, then why are you so reluctant to transfer your assets to me?
They are only distracting you from the truly meaningful things that await you in the hereafter.
It would make no difference if people did not fight over the content of different mythologies. But historically, there has been these things called heresy, apostasy, heathenism, non-conformity and such, which get people killed or imprisoned, and which cause wars.
Actually, I’m not convinced that religion causes war, but it complicates talking about the causes. I suspect wars and tyranny are just expressions of common greed, but they wear the cheap tuxedo of ideology and theology.
Where to start…
Wrong. Please show me where I intended to say that.
Wrong again. Maybe do not make sense to you, but make sense to many people.
Correct.
Maybe someone thinks in tha way. Not me, I believe that wrong.
I wouldn´t say causes, but I would agree with enables bad behavior, or more precisely do not provide reasons to not behave accordig to the values of our society.
I can assure you, assuming it without actually believing it to be true is a pitiful substitute infrastructure for the development of, and behavioral adherence to, “the good”. I would not want to live in a world full of people like me, who only strive to be “good enough”.
William,
Look in the mirror, William.
You can’t even defend your beliefs against two simple challenges:
Challenge 1
Challenge 2
At this point, looking back over the discussion, it seems to me that the question, “does atheism entail nihilism?” has the following conditional answer:
If one begins by assigning a sense to the terms “value”, “mind,” “matter,” “objective,” “subjective,” “preference,” “absolute,” “relative,” “reason,” and “cause” such that atheism just means nihilism, then yes, atheism entails nihilism because nihilism entails nihilism. And it is just those senses for those terms that are insisted upon by certain kinds of theism.
So it’s pretty clear why for the theist atheism entails nihilism. What’s left mostly unclear by the preceding discussion is just what senses the atheist or non-theist would need to assign to those terms in order to avoid the entailment (assuming that one wants to do so).
KN, it’s just name-calling in a cheap tuxedo. It is obvious from people’s behavior that theology or it’s lack doesn’t cause people to be good or bad or sad or depressed or whatever.
Professed beliefs are the skin color of philosophy.
Such rhetoric has worked for the Taliban.
That’s probably true. I myself harbor a deep suspicion that beliefs are basically dispositions to behave — to believe that I’m out of milk is to be disposed to check the fridge to make sure, to make the decision to buy more milk, to be disposed to go to the market, to be disposed to check my account to make sure I can afford milk, to be disposed to time my day so I can go the market while avoiding long lines at check out, and so on.
However, the dispositional theory of belief has some problems — I won’t defend in all cases — but to the extent that I would, it does have this very interesting implication: if someone’s behavior does not match up with their beliefs, then they don’t really believe what they believe that they believe. To believe that one believes is to be disposed to utter, “I believe X,” which is not the same as really believing X.
One fundamental drawback of on-line discussions is that professed beliefs — what we believe that we believe — are all anyone here has to go on. I’m reasonably confident that if we knew each other in real life, our interpretations of each other would be radically different.
That’s almost too true to contemplate!
Once one elevates levels, atheists cannot help but be nihilistic. The trick is, atheists often aren’t willing to elevate to higher (or lower) levels. Comedy can then be their temporary ‘sociological’ self-cure.
The hardest part here, KN, is that you personally have not demonstrated that you are not a nihilist. Certainly not convincingly. And you have hinted that you are a nihilist or struggle with it repeatedly, if nevertheless in a subtle sophistic way.
Btw, secular (read: atheistic) Judaism is quite obviously ripe for nihilism nowadays. Just take Woody Allen for an example: