At Evolution News and Views, David Klinghoffer presents a challenge:
Man needs meaning. We crave it, especially when faced with adversity. I challenge any Darwinist readers to write some comments down that would be suitable, not laughable, in the context of speaking to people who have lived through an event like Monday’s bombing. By all means, let me know what you come up with.
Leaving aside Klinghoffer’s conflation of “Darwinism” with atheism, and reading it as a challenge for those of us who do not believe in a supernatural deity or an afterlife (which would include me), and despite lacking the eloquence of the speakers Klinghoffer refers to, let me offer some thoughts, not on Monday’s bombing, specifically, but on violent death in general, which probably touches us all, at some time. Too many lives end far too soon:
We have one life, and it is precious, and the lives of those we love are more precious to us than our own. Even timely death leaves a void in the lives of those left, but the gap left by violent death is ragged, the raw end of hopes and plans and dreams and possibilities. Death is the end of options, and violent death is the smashing of those options; Death itself has no meaning. But our lives and actions have meaning. We mean things, we do things, we act with intention, and our acts ripple onwards, changing the courses of other lives, as our lives are changed in return. And more powerful than the ripples of evil acts are acts of love, kindness, generosity, and imagination. Like the butterfly in Peking that can cause a hurricane in New York, a child’s smile can outlive us all. Good acts are not undone by death, even violent death. We have one life, and it is precious, and no act of violence can destroy its worth.
Richard Hoppe wrote a lovely piece on death, a description of walking his dogs under a night sky. I thought I had it copied somewhere, but I can’t find it. If anyone has a link (RBH?) please post it!
There’s really no need to speculate:
And still rippling. Poor Darwin.
I would pose a counter-challenge to Klinghoffer: If a victim of the bombing asked you why God permitted it to happen, what would you say?
Yikes! What an obnoxious question!
… a dear friend lost her son in a tragic accident recently. What do I tell her – that her pain was caused by a higher power but is only temporary, as said higher power will reunite them in Heaven? Or maybe said power wasn’t looking that day, but will sort it out eventually … or … or … or … I can just hug her, tell her I understand and care, that sometimes Life stinks and sometimes it’s beautiful, that he’ll live in her heart, that it will get better, that if there’s anything I can do, anything at all … hope that’s not too laughable, David, ya slimeball! 😀
What exactly is the comfort that believers have to offer survivors?
That some people have been called home early and are therefore blessed? And perhaps the survivors should feel selfish and guilty for being envious of the dead?
sez klinghoffer:
Four words: How can I help?
There seems to be a sense that because atheism (a-theism) dispenses with the Problem of Evil, that it also creates a Problem of Meaning. It doesn’t. Just because I don’t think that the purpose of my life is to fulfil the ulterior purpose of some other being, doesn’t mean I don’t have purposes of my own.
Nor does it mean other people don’t matter.
Here are two pieces of writing that I love:
Yes, Donne was a theist, but that passage works for me. So does this one, allegedly from a letter (I think in German) by Einstein:
Yes, indeed.
Richard Rorty once wrote movingly of what he called “our need to be rescued from despair”. Klinghoffer’s assumption here seems to be that since naturalism rejects certain ‘traditional’ metaphysical accounts of value, meaning, and purpose, then it cannot satisfy our need to be rescued from despair. I do not fully understand why would would think this. It seems to me, quite frankly, like a conflation between a specific conception or account of value, meaning, and purpose with value, meaning, and purpose themselves. I do understand, somewhat, what drives this conflation — that is precisely what Nietzsche and Dewey spent so much of their time analyzing and explaining. But I only understand the sources of this conflation up to a point, and beyond that, it just sounds to me like those who complain that hip-hop isn’t really music.
Darwin’s dead. He would not even roll over in his grave.
Elizabeth Liddle:
“There seems to be a sense that because atheism (a-theism) dispenses with the Problem of Evil, that it also creates a Problem of Meaning. It doesn’t.”
How does atheism dispense with the problem of evil?
Elizabeth Liddle:
“There seems to be a sense that because atheism (a-theism) dispenses with the Problem of Evil, that it also creates a Problem of Meaning. It doesn’t.”
Given atheism, how is a “Problem of Meaning” even possible?
On a separate note: Lizzie, did I understand correctly that you wanted to pursue some follow-up questions with me? If you want to start up a separate topic at TSZ, that sounds fine to me. Or would you prefer to correspond privately?
Mung, you’ll have to do better than just the usual cheap-shots and rhetorical questions. I know I’m in no position to make any demands, but I’ve been waiting a long time to say this: either make a claim and defend it with arguments, or go back home to Uncommon Descent or wherever.
Don’t get me wrong — you seem like a person with above-average intelligence, and sometimes it seems as if you want to learn, but I’m not convinced that it’s not just a big act. If you’re really serious about learning how a coherent philosophical naturalism might answer those questions, about morality and meaning, you’ve got to put in the hard work of actually reading and thinking. This is not easy stuff.
Maybe less time on the Internet and more time reading would be good for all of us, myself included.
I am so glad that Petrushka found Darwin’s ruminations on the death of his daughter. Nothing but time and forgetting can ease the pain of the death of a loved one. But consolation lies in remembering what we had.
The Problem of Evil I was referring to is the one normally known by that name (hence the caps), i.e. the problem of reconciling evil in the world with an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent deity.
If you don’t actually posit such a deity, there is not a Problem of Evil.
The problem of dealing with evil remains, of course. Hence our secular justice institutions. And of course the problem of how to deal with grief.
I was going to start a topic. I’ll post a thread. I’ll also give you posting rights, and you can start one yourself if you like 🙂 It was about property dualism vs substance dualism (well, one of them was – your posts at UD raised a lot of questions for me).
Mung posted this:
Exactly: there is no evidently god-defined thing called Evil.
But there does remain the lower-case problem of evil: what causes some human beings to do bad things to some other human beings?
No question it is a difficult problem. Difficult because of what we don’t know about how biology drives consciousness. Difficult because we don’t know whether there is actually a basis for free will in human behaviour. Difficult because the definition of evil is a little less clear than god-botherers like you would have people believe. Difficult because every sane person has constantly to make conscious moral choices in daily life between comfort and hurt.
Even you.
And by the way, your comment about Darwin being dead really was an unnecessarily nasty piece of work.
Klinghoffer seems to presuppose that “Darwinists” (whatever they are – he probably means atheists) have less care, less empathy, less compassion, less understanding than their religious counterparts.
The record of history says otherwise, and that he thinks so makes him well worth ignoring
Mung:
I explained it to you months ago, Mung:
You were unable to defend your God in that thread, or in a later thread on the problem of evil. Here’s your third chance.
Tell us, Mung — why did your God permit the Boston bombings?
Not sure what your point is here. My point is nicely made by the piece Petrushka posted – Annie’s joy continued to ripple on through Darwin’s life, and even after Darwin’s death, it ripples on in those who read that moving description.
Death doesn’t make life unhappen. The universe has no backspace, only commas, and periods, and paragraph ends.
The usual counter to that is: Hitler, Stalin.
But it has far simpler roots I think: the need to see meaning in death and tragedy, which is very natural. The non sequitur that Klinghoffer makes is to assume that if we think that death is just Shit That Happens, we must consider life as just Shit That Happens too. But the second doesn’t follow from the first. Living, we are intenders. Meaning is what we do (as evidenced by the expressions: “I meant to do that”; or “what I meant was…”; or “what did she mean by that?”). When we cease to have the capacity to mean/intend anything, we are deemed dead. In fact the capacity for purposive behaviour was precisely what was claimed for Terry Schiavo, as evidence that she was not dead.
Anyway, I emailed Klinghoffer the link to this thread. He asked for comments, but I don’t see where comments are enabled on the ENV blog.
If you want to start a thread on substance dualism and property dualism, I’d be delighted to contribute such as time allows!
Yes. And for myself, were I to be so wretchedly unfortunate as to lose a child in a tragically senseless manner, I believe that I would prefer, eventually, to be able to accept that the child lived on only in memories; and not to think that somehow he/she still existed on some other plane, but without access to my love and support.
I think it was Georgia Purdom at AiG who suggested to someone who had lost a child that it was OK because it was for the Glorification of God.
I think that’s despicable.
It’s also worth mentioning that a few religious philosophers have suggested that theodicy is just the wrong kind of response to the problem of evil — that the right response to misfortune is compassion, not justification. I don’t think it would be going too far to suggest that the very project of theodicy betrays a deep hubris, if the only way we could understand God is by making ourselves equal to Him. Just saying that the Lord works in mysterious ways is the opposite of theodicy, because theodicy is an attempt to explain just how the workings of the world are in accord with divine justice.
There’s certainly no shortage of people who know the mind of god.
To frame the question in such a way is, essentially, bigotry. The idea that we surrender compassion when we conclude (or always thought) that there is no God is ludicrous. We remain human beings, all with a variable capacity for empathy irrespective of our metaphysical viewpoint. It is by no means the case that the capacity is better developed among the religious – even though they have the added incentive: to suck up to the Boss.
Kantian Naturalist:
But of course compassion and justification aren’t mutually exclusive.
Judging God’s goodness doesn’t imply that we are his equal, any more than judging Clapton’s playing means I could share the stage with him. Sure, our judgments of God might be wrong — but so might any of our judgments. We have to go by the evidence and do our best.
Those who judge God to be perfectly good are clearly not doing their best, based on the evidence at hand.
Claiming that “the Lord works in mysterious ways” is a poor theodicy, no doubt, but it’s still a theodicy. Those who declaim it are attempting to reconcile God’s perfect goodness with the presence of evil and suffering in the world. Their explanation is that everything God does is ultimately good, though it may sometimes appear evil to us mere mortals.
The problem is that the inverted argument works equally well: I could just as easily argue that God is perfectly evil, and that everything He does is ultimately evil, though it may sometimes appear good to us mere mortals.
Both arguments are possibly correct, though unlikely. A more reasonable interpretation of the evidence is that God is neither perfectly good nor perfectly evil, if he exists at all.
Of course it’s bigotry, but it flows from a form of fallacious “logic”. That is, if you believe that “goodness” flows from an authority and arbiter of “what is good”, then it follows that those who reject said authority and arbiter clearly can’t be good. Conservative Christians/fundamentalists/apologists/creationists all have the concept of all men being wretched sinners incapable of goodness without His Divine Bootstrap Yank drilled into them. Is it any wonder that they then think in such bigoted terms?
Of course, the other thing to consider is many conservative Christians had really wretched lives before their born-again experiences and for them, if not for their belief in “god” they would not be good people. Witness many of the “origin” stories that get rattled around UD. So yeah…most of those folks can’t even imagine being good without something prodding them and reminding them to be so. Non-belief automatically equals self-centered and compassionless to them.
Or that God is beyond good and evil.
Unusual to see an Orthodox Jew with such a take, though. Still, with titles like “How Would God Vote?: Why the Bible Commands You to Be a Conservative.”, he ticks all my boxes! 😉
Wich is your definition of good acts?
Altruistic acts.
Muslim suicide bombers fits your definition?
For the greater good?
I am not so sanguine about our ability to define good and evil.
At one level you can define evil as intentionally causing pain, but to do this you have to define intention in a fuzzy way. One can inflict pain on a child for legitimate medical reasons. One can cause pain by withholding favors when granting favors would be to the long term detriment of the recipient.
So defining the intention of causing pain requires the assumption that we have knowledge of the future, or perfect knowledge of cause and effect.
So here is some wiggle room for mysterious ways.
No.
Don’t think so. Some such individuals have produced videos justifying their intended acts and martyrdom appears to play a large part in the motivation.
Only an atheist could be truly altruistic, doing good to others without expectation of a reward in Heaven.
Lizzy, you may or may not know more about Quakers than I do, but I did graduate from a Quaker college.
It is my impression — from observation rather than from studying doctrine — that Quakers believe in proactive steps to prevent obvious evils like violence. This is how they reconcile nonviolence in the face of evil. One has a duty to take steps to prevent violent conflict.
This runs into my belief that knowing the future is difficult and imperfect. It is quite difficult to know what will prevent violence and what will enable the violent to prevail.
petrushka,
Oh, I take your point. I just wasn’t feeling very cooperative.
I think that “altruistic” is as good a definition of “good” as we are going to get, and that the idea of preferring altruistic to non-altruistic behaviour is a reasonalbe all-purpose definition of “morality”.
How we determine what is truly altruistic in any given scenario is a different story, and what usually seems to be called “ethics”. I guess if a muslim bomber truly believed that it was worth the sacrifice of his/her life and the lives of innocents in order to make things better for some greater number of others, you might call the action ethical, by their own lights, if not by ours; whereas if they thought that 72 virgins would be rather neat and to hell with the innocents, not so much.
It’s often difficult to know what the most altruistic thing is to do, and people can differ; but I don’t think people differ much on the idea that to be good is to be altruistic.
But the reason I was being uncooperative with Blas is that this has nothing at all to do with the OP.
The OP is about how we try to make sense of untimely and violent death.
And I guess I shouldn’t have been so curt.
Blas, I don’t think ethical decisions are easy – figuring out the right thing to do in any given scenario is difficult, because so often we are trying to find the least worst thing to do, rather than the best.
“Who is my neighbour?” or to put it in the context of my first response: “who are the “others” I should consider?” is often where ethical dilemmas start.
But it is easier to see who is harmed by an action, and the people harmed by the Boston bombs include the young people whose futures were stolen from them and their families and friends, who are grieving their loss. Whatever moral calculation the bombers made, we can agree that those who suffered loss, suffered loss.
Bad things.
While we can probably agree that the smile on the face of Martin Richard, and his message “no more hurting people” is a Good Thing.
Well Lizzy muslim suicide bombers are making something they consider an “altruistic act”. They are giving their lives to attack the people that are hurting their people. According to them, you see the loss in your people not the loss in their people.
Perhaps you should re-read my post?
Lizzie,
I do not see why “his message “no more hurting people” is a Good Thing.” and the
the bombers are not doing an “altruistic act”.
This is what I wrote:
My point being that sometimes we have to choose between the lesser harm and the greater, but we can pretty well all agree about what constitutes harm.
“Not hurting people” is not harm, by definition.
Killing people is.
You know what? Coming up with words in the light of something horrific like the Boston bombings is really difficult. Some people find comfort in the promise of a future justice. There is no reason to believe that justice will ever be served. How is justice even meaningful to a long distance runner who has just lost the use of a leg? The suffering of others wouldn’t comfort me. Rather I would be empathizing with the sufferers. A promise of Hell for the majority is not compatible with a blissful tomorrow.
There may not be much comfort in the void, but I don’t see any comfort in the Christian dogma of eternal suffering for the many either. Nor in the promise of eternal bliss, for it is a promise no-one has ever seen delivered, or in other words, a lie.
For those who have had their lives shattered, healing comes with a great passage of time, not with seventy, seven hundred, or seven thousand words prettily arranged.
This may seem like a rather odd response, but I’m reminded of Pinker’s Better Angels.
It strikes me as comforting that the world is actually less violent than it used to be, and fewer people are dying violently. Amazingly this is despite the genocides and barbarity of the last century.
It’s actually an improvement. And violent crime has declined over the last 20 years.
I think it’s important to study the facts concerning violence in order to overcome the subjective impressions created by the increase in news coverage.
Cold comfort? I can’t decide that for you.
I finally disagree with Lizzie on a substantive issue!
I see nothing particularly morally good about altruism per se. My simple definition of good acts is summed up in the Wiccan Rede: An it harm none do what ye will.
(No, I do not self identify as Wiccan.)
Well, harm can be a tricky thing. As Asimov understood with his story Liar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar!_(short_story)