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.)
If secret nihilists come out of the closet, will they be allowed to marry each other?
Don’t forget theism statist tyranny, the model for much of history, the power of the state sanctified by God.
wjm:I didn’t forget it. It’s included in “statist tyranny”.
I see, theism is required to avoid statist tyranny but it also is 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.
Then it is not theism per se which is the source of those rights,it is one’s subjective choice of which God and dogma you choose. I wonder what creates the hole that God fits into?
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?
You mean some theists,right? Because the Klan certainly considered themselves as theists. But go ahead if you wish, but please prove first that all darwinists are materialists,I was under the impression that many theists accept ” Darwinism”,
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
Very poetic, but everything in religion was put there by people unless you can prove otherwise. The good and the bad.
Can someone explain what this means?
Convincingly by whose standards? By yours? Or by mine? Showing that I’m not a nihilist by my own standards is trivially easy. Showing that I’m not a nihilist by your standards is probably impossible.
Charles Robert Darwin was an agnostic. He was not a theist. The impression “that many theists accept ‘Darwinism'” is therefore misleading.
Accepting limited ‘evolutionary biology’ does not equate with accepting the ideology of ‘Darwinism.’ Many theists accept limited evolutionary biology, cf. BioLogos, Faraday Institute, ASA, ISSR, etc. Read carefully: limited, not universalistic (e.g. Dawkins’ ‘universal Darwinism’). Most natural scientists, however, who are not trained to interpret or understand ideology, are not aware of this distinction.
And many atheists and agnostics, apparently including ‘velikovskys,’ seem to intentionally blur the terminology.
Actually, I believe I can take a decent crack at it.
We can think of nihilism as what happens when two different pictures conjoin: firstly, a certain picture about value and meaning, according to which value and meaning must be somehow inherent to the very structure of reality; secondly, a certain picture about human abilities, according to which we lack access to that structure. The nihilist is someone who thinks that nothing within human experience has meaning or value, because all value and meaning must be absolute, transcendent, unchanging, etc. — and there is nothing at all like that in the world of life, history, and becoming.
If we distinguish between cognitive commitment and affective adherence, we can say that the nihilist is someone for whom the transcendent or absolute conception of meaning and value no longer compels her cognitive commitment, but since she still retains an affective adherence to that conception, she is unable to find any meaning or value anywhere else.
And in those terms, the person who does have a cognitive grasp of, and affective adherence to, the transcendent would see the world-view of the person who lives in a purely immanent world as nihilistic.
Yes, it is trivial.
KN, you have shown yourself to be such an eclectic mess (smorgasbord) of views – secular (former Reform) Jewish, naturalist (but openly hesitating), pragmatist, empiricist, Kantian quasi-environmentalist, quasi-animist, proto-scientistic, proto-Quaker (?), etc. – that it is no wonder your ‘standards’ are hard to take seriously. Change much sophistic USAmerican ‘philosopher’?
Showing you believe anything coherently or deeply appears to be a chore for you. It’s a ‘myth of the given’ you’re fighting and failing nihilistically.
As an atheist/agnostic, KN, secularist Woody Allen is probably a suitable role model for you, as quoted above. That’s nihilism staring you in the face. Your sophistry, relativizing your own personal definition of ‘nihilism’ does nothing to change that.
I think it means that Gregory is so much smarter than the rest of us that we can’t even follow his put-downs.
No elevation allowed?
You just don’t have his HPSS background.
Ok then, since I don’t claim that all my beliefs are rational, I guess we can move on.
Returning to the hypothetical that came up earlier (what stops A/Ms from killing people?), I believe (in the usual sense) that normal, healthy humans tend to avoid harming each other seriously, even if it involves putting themselves at risk. As an example, even if I was being attacked by another person to the point where my life was in danger, I have doubts that I could use lethal force to defend myself. If I did so, I suspect I would second-guess myself and regret it, even if it was determined to be completely justified. That’s one reason I choose not to own any guns, even though I live in a town where almost everyone else is armed.
I believe that this self-restraint is largely hard-wired in us. Of course someone could justify it rationally by appealing to one’s self-interest—really, your life is going to get very complicated once you’ve killed someone, you might incur PTSD, and so forth.
Nevermind that, however, I’m claiming that this self-restraint is essentially instinctive and not an act of will. I’m not attempting to derive it from a set of premises and rules of logic.
When you were an A/M, did you have any thoughts similar to these? Do you believe I’m more dangerous than the typical theist, just based on what little you know of me?
My encounters with internet theists is they claim to have no internal restraints or desire to help or cooperate with others. I’m willing to be corrected, but they seem to have trouble understanding why atheists don’t murder and rape everyone within reach.
I tend to think that the Internet brings out the narcissist in all of us.
Maybe it would help if they spent an hour browsing r/animalsbeingbros .
petrushka,
Many of them reach that conclusion not through self assessment but rather because their churches teach it to them.
Yes, and many of them – like William above – insist that if not for theism and 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”, all those theists would immediately turn to rape, murder, deceit, and fornication and the whole world would crumble into ruin. This of course is stated in spite of the fact that theism has never prevented any of those behaviors and if one is truly honest, actually granted power and authority to many such folk to engage in such behaviors all the more.
William is simply wrong about theism as a product of evolution and as a physical infrastructure of goodness. At best one can say that evolution gave one species a means for elaborate story telling in order to relate where food would be, when rain would fall, and how hunting and gathering (or agriculture) could be done successfully. In other words, we began to tell stories to relate an understanding of the predictability of the world. Unfortunately, we then tried to fill in the parts we didn’t understand with the actions of beings we could not see, but who – oddly – had the emotional capacity of 8 year olds. They were ok beings when they were appeased with proper human behavior, toys, worship, and sacrifice, but boy did they get cranky when the humans didn’t do “the right things”. And lo, those “right things” got set down as rituals and dogmas and became the basis for the control of societies. But there’s nothing magical about them. They no longer hold anything up. A good many people have come to realize that there’s no reason to worship or give toys to or follow the rules of such beings because it’s not likely that actual gods and demons exist, but if they do, it’s doubtful they have the emotional maturity of human toddlers.
“Explain in principle” makes sense to me, I think. But I am not sure if that means the same as “reduce in principle”.
Wide content– thanks for the hint and that helps a few pieces click into place for me. I now understand your point about levels of explanation to be saying, roughly, that some neuroscience might concentrate on proximate causes, eg neuron states, whereas psychology must allow for the distal causes in its models.
I see how one could make a similar argument to justify philosophical/psychological accounts of morality in addition to biological/neuroscientific accounts of brains and bodies.
I sometimes wonder whether some of your postings here act as test of possible topics for undergrad seminars. They work that way for me, in any event.
Off topic: You have an admirably thick skin.
I have no reason to assume anything at all about you.
Yes, because history and the current news makes that so evident!
If you are as you picture yourself, I suggest that you and many other atheists here share psychological traits and a view of human nature that, without the protective shield of a large number of largely religious badasses to protect you, your rights and your freedom, would be quickly wiped out or put into slavery. As you say, you don’t know if you could even defend yourself.
I think that you are so foolishly mistaken about human nature that it makes you a danger to yourself, and to society if you’re a voter who thinks that most people – on the inside – are like you. I think such atheists as you (as you have described above) wish to blame (and often attempt to blame) war, genocide, slavery, violence, abuse, crime, rampant corruption, etc. on anything other than human nature – you’ll blame it on religion, policy, laws, politics, etc.
Atheists think they are freeing a more noble humanity from the superstitious misconceptions that made them behave badly. They’re wrong. They’re breaking the chains that kept them relatively safe from a wild, dangerous animal.
I think that’s a good, terse way of summing up the basic contentions at stake here: the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment.
William J. Murray,
I think you are attributing to me an argument I have not made. I did not argue that religion evolved out of our social natures, but think that it is a cultural overlay.To be attributed to Natural Selection, theism itself would need to have a genetic basis, and be favoured by increased reproductive capacity. I have not advanced that argument. I do think that socially constructive behaviours have a genetic basis – including one’s attitude to children and one’s social group. But there is also substantial cultural influence there too.
Of course, I am aware that I have no formal backing for that viewpoint either. No experiments have been constructed to assess the genetic basis of such behaviours or their selective advantage. But likewise, no formal experiments have been conducted on the genetics of religious inclination.
It does not really matter. If theism is genetic, I can hardly argue the genes out of the population! Nor do I wish to. I simply think that people are predisposed towards kindness, particularly toward children, and don’t need the more bilious trappings of religious fear or self-interest in order to access that. I don’t consider religion as essential for society. Perhaps I have a less ‘nihilistic’ view of human nature than you.
What an odd delusion. There has never been a time in recorded history without laws and police and prisons and wars. Religion has never constrained anyone. What it has done is engage in a lot of non-productive and even counterproductive blather about the causes and management of misbehavior.
Case in point: The abuse of children by clerics. Not just Catholic clerics. I dealt with child abuse for seven years, and the church related cases I encountered involved Protestant ministers. There has been a false assumption that religion diminishes the frequency of misbehavior. This is simply not true.
What we do or should do is complicated, but we might as well dispense with fairy tales about how religion is useful for preventing crime and abuse.
Right! I’d forgotten about the wide content vs. narrow content debate, but that’s right — I’m on the side of wide content!
In fact, I’m an externalist about mental content: I think that mental content essentially and necessarily involves physical objects (for perceptual states) and other persons (for propositional states). One would first have to be an internalist about mental content in order to then either generate worries about Cartesian skepticism or try and reduce mental contents to neurophysiological processes
I actually was basing my statements on my own feelings and my experience with other individuals rather than historical data. I currently live in a small town, and you see people going out of their way to help each other quite a lot. There also is the fact that violent crimes have dropped drastically in the past several decades.
Well, I do take care to lock my doors! I just don’t see mass killings or slavery on the horizon (at least in my world); that’s not a great fear of mine.
Indeed I do think most people are like me (off the internet of course). I do admit I likely have a greater aversion to violence than some others, and that could end up costing me.
Not at all. As I’ve stated, I think most people are a bundle of contradictions, and human nature leads to all these things as well, and they would still all exist with or without religion. I’m not anti-religion at all (although I certainly have made offhanded remarks and jokes that appear insensitive).
As an illustration, I contribute to various Christian charities, including a small organization which runs a school and orphanage in Africa, because I think the work they do is valuable. I am acquainted with the folks who run the place, and they are great people. In fact, they deliberately have put themselves in a very dangerous place in order to be able to help these children who otherwise would have no chance for a normal life. They are ‘religious badasses’.
Ouch! Well, I don’t have such a negative view of my fellow humans, I guess. Look, I understand that even without religion, people would find reasons to commit all sorts of evil acts. I don’t even have a goal of eliminating or reducing the practice of religion. I do value the truth, on the other hand. I’ve seen bogus YEC and ID ‘science’ being preached from the pulpit. Intelligent, promising students have handed me AiG tracts and the like. I wouldn’t mind seeing less of that.
The data show that less religious places are not more dangerous or less stable than religious hot beds.
This is one of the great under-reported stories of the century. Violent crime in most parts of the world has been going down steadily, even as church attendance has been declining.
William’s wild animal is not being allowed to run loose. No one has a sanguine view of human nature.
The data don’t show.
Link is busted.
Let’s try again: Data on religiousness and indicators of societal health
I’m all in favor of empirical verification of what we believe to be the case, but in this particular case, I’m not sure they bear on what William is claiming. Since I’m not quite sure what exactly William is claiming here, I won’t pretend to be defending his specific position, so I’ll take a different argument — one can find this line of thought in various social conservatives, or a philosopher like Alastair MacIntyre.
On this argument, from the fact that our civil institutions, political practices, and philosophical conceptions developed within a largely theological context, it (seemingly) follows that they only make sense given that context. So as that context is taken less and less seriously, we will lose our grip on the intelligibility of those institutions — we will be unable to make sense of them to ourselves, to justify them to our adversaries, and transmit them to our descendents.
A brief contrast between two of my favorite philosophers, Nietzsche and Dewey, might help. Nietzsche and Dewey both understood that democracy and science grew out of Christianity. On Nietzsche’s view, democracy inherited all of the false and dangerous assumptions about human nature that were found in Christianity; since Christianity is (he thought) false and dangerous, and since democracy emerged out of Christianity, democracy is also false and dangerous. (That is, dangerous to the “higher types” who advance the species.) Dewey, by contrast, thought that democracy retained what was basically true and healthy in Christianity but dispensed with what was false and dangerous in it. So while Christianity gave rise to democracy, democracy doesn’t depend upon Christianity — Christianity is just an earlier stage of cultural development. So the intelligibility of our civil institutions, etc. doesn’t depend essentially on Christianity — we can defend them in their own right, on their own terms.
(Slightly off-topic: I wrote my dissertation on Nietzsche, but I’m much more of a Deweyan than I am a Nietzschean. Much of what I think is true in Nietzsche is also there in Dewey, and in Dewey one doesn’t find the misogyny, anti-liberalism, anti-Christianity that one finds in Nietzsche. The one major thing that Nietzsche got exactly right and Dewey missed, which is what “mass culture” does to us. Nietzsche worried about newspapers in ways quite analogous to how many people today worry about Google and Facebook and smart-phone apps.)
petrushka,
I’d say I do. I am well aware of the large number of shitty people in the world, and the ease with which people can adopt shitty patterns of behaviour. But I think we are strongly susceptible to notions of ‘fairness’, of ‘caring’, of unreciprocated help. I encounter large numbers of people in my various roles, and the shitty variety are mercifully thin on the ground. This is partly a function of where I live, but I really do think people are generally well-intentioned. The exceptions prove the rule, indeed – we notice the shits, but they do not constitute a truly representative sample.
I am much less sanguine about the future of humanity, but this has nothing to do with moral decline.
I would argue that religion simply rationalizes the central tendencies of civilizations. It provides a convenient way to talk about why we do things and why we require other people to do things or refrain from doing things.
Not entirely unlike the way religion provides us with things to say when someone dies or has a serious misfortune. It provides a common set of platitudes and lubricates discourse.
But, in my opinion, it has also produced a lot of counterproductive methods of dealing with misbehavior. It has stressed punishment and retribution at the expense of trying alternative approaches.
I’m well aware of the longstanding joke regarding rehabilitation. I’ve been in the rehabilitation business and know a lot about what doesn’t work. Not so much about what does work.
Every now and then someone makes the news because he found Jesus in prison and became a good citizen. Okay. Nice anecdotes. Not good data.
I am not sanguine, because even if 98 percent of people are well behaved most of the time, the two percent who are ruthless will rise to positions of power because they will employ any means to do so. Including deception and sheep’s clothing.
Religion is irrelevant in this regard. If piety is the path to power, the ruthless will be pious. Religion merely manufactures the sheep pelt.
It seems to annoy some theists that atheists do not conform to the assumed stereotype. If they don’t get to a-misbehavin’, they are instead held in contempt for riding the moral coat-tails of ‘religious badasses’, being ornery concept-thieves, or – the horror – ‘rationally inconsistent’.
Heh and, indeed, heh.
petrushka,
It’s true that certain kinds of personality are over-represented in positions of power.
Can you provide other rationalization? Why we do things?
Anecdotes and bad data according to you .
I don’t rationalize. I do the things I do toward other people because it’s what I want to do. And I expect others to reciprocate. I associate with people who are similarly inclined.
That includes most people
For people who are not inclined to be well behaved, I support laws that provide the incentives. It’s not perfect, but it’s straightforward.
I have hesitated to post the following, but I think it’s relevant. I raised two kids to adulthood without preaching and mostly without punishing. My philosophy of parenting is to be the kind of person you want your children to be and to make sure your kids know that you expect them to model themselves after you.
Last September my daughter was recruited by CUNY for an assistant professorship. She sent me this unsolicited email:
You don’t need a rationale for good behavior. It’s like learning to talk. You model yourself after others.
petrushka,
Yep. I deeply regret even the limited physical chastisement I used on my son (countable on one hand). My daughters, never. Never had the occasion to. All three children are, I am repeatedly told, a credit to myself and my wife. Religion played no part in their upbringing either (it is part of the curriculum, but they don’t get ’em till five). Nor mine. So I simply don’t buy the ‘that way lies anarchy’ line.
Then you act irrationally. You do what you do without a rationale, just because you have teached in that way and everybody does.
Blas,
Is it irrational to follow an example?
You don’t rationally compute your writings and speech. You just do it.
Is it irrational to teach by example, or by parable?
If you do not have a reason to follow it, yes. Which example are you going to follow Maddoff or Mother Teresa?
Yes if you do not have a rationale behind what you are doing.
*Edited* Looking at your question again, I might have misread your intent. We certainly agree that it would not be rational to follow Bernie Madoff’s example, no?
Blas,
I think that is what is called a false dichotomy.
I don’t see where following either Maddoff’s behavioral example or Mother Teresa’s behavioral example would be irrational in and of itself. But then, I don’t see learning by example being irrational in general. However, I would caveat this by noting that it would be completely irrational to follow Maddoff’s behavioral example while ignoring the consequences of his behavior.
In the end I think Petrushka’s mostly right – one does not need a rationale for good behavior; one need only see good behavior performed. I think that such learning is reinforced by seeing bad behavior and the consequences there of.
I think perhaps, for most of history, that people grew up seeing the rapacious prosper, so one could rationally copy examples of success.
I think the world has become and is becoming a kinder, gentler place.
Certainly not yet for inner city folks, or many third world people. Dare I suggest that societies evolve, and that methods of regulating behavior also evolve?
Will Gregory pounce on this?
Meanwhile, Blas might want to choose a different moral exemplar than Mother Teresa.
In what book does he talk about this?
Democracy is a Greek idea originally, of course.
I think Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity is something he got largely right.
Blas,
So what’s your rational reason for following Jesus’s example?
That’s a very charitable reading of William, since he insists that we are all wild animals without theism.
Anyhow, we seem to be making secular sense of civil institutions and political practices so far, of course.