Harbal wrote: ↑Mon Jan 09, 2023 6:21 pm
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Mon Jan 09, 2023 3:57 pm
Ironic, isn't it? The most common reason it's been "thrown" is simply to prevent further thought about the problems in Atheism. The blithe assumption has been, "If some religion is irrational, then Atheism must, by default, be rational."
If you keep insisting on burdening me with the baggage you have loaded onto atheism,
Oh, sorry...I wasn't. I was discussing Atheism as a "them." It's the common position of skeptics these days, it seems. But I wasn't drawing any conclusions about you.
Henceforth, I would simply like to be referred to as a non-believer (in God). I feel absolutely marvellous now that all those problems of atheism have evaporated.
Well, they haven't evaporated for Atheists. But I'm perplexed by your new position now, because one is they going to be asked, "Is your non-belief merely something you
want to do, or is it something you think you
have reason to do?" But if one "has reasons," then one can be asked to produce those reasons...and if one does not, then it's not clear to me how merely
wishing that God might not exist, absent any reasons for the same, is going to prove useful to anybody.
I make no assertion that God does not exist, I am merely declining my invitation to join the club that says he does exist. You should be pleased about that. I would probably be a far bigger nuisance to the church inside than I am outside.
Actually, the "nuisances," the questioners and problem-raisers are a positive benefit sometimes. Any group of people can become too settled on its lees; people who raise problems stir them up and get them thinking again.
So think of yourself as a philanthropist-nuisance.
I would only say that we are wise to believe in what is already real, and not to imagine that disbelieving in the real somehow banishes it from existence: that's manifestly not true.
I agree, but I don't believe God is real. What can I do?
Well, you could inquire. Or you could leave things as is. But in a matter as absolutely crucial as the existence of God, I suppose they're not equal options.
Nobody said you could do it without thought or effort. One has to decide which view of God is the right one. One cannot have them all, since they are all different, and in mutually-contradicting ways. But equally, one cannot get around the problem simply by declaring it a non-problem.
Do you think I've never thought about the possibility of God, and the claims that I have heard about God?
I would be surprised if you hadn't. Most people have, at some time or another.
So, if I really do not have a problem, what do you suggest I declare it as?
That would depend.
If what you mean is "I don't have a problem" as in, "I don't care," then I'd suggest the problem doesn't disappear by not thinking about it. But if you mean, "I don't have a problem" as in "I am content with the conclusions I have," then what can I say? Free will is sacrosanct...even if I don't think the conclusions are warranted or wise. I'll stand for your right to be wrong.
Untruth isn't an issue either, in a Godless universe. Why should truth be regarded as objectively more moral, desirable, and demanding of our allegiance than comforting delusions would be, if the universe itself is indifferent to such matters?
You say that belief in God is the rational course, and therefore you believe because your rationality has given you no choice.
Oh, those are not my words. "No choice"? No, one always has a choice to make.
That's because, if nothing else, all human knowledge is probabilistic, not absolute. If you give me a mathematical proof, then I truly have no choice, as a rational person, not to believe that 2+2=4. But if you tell me that I have cancer, even if you're a doctor, then I have to ask, "What's the probability of that diagnosis being right?" And maybe I even seek a second opinion, and try to form for myself an estimate of what the probabilties of my having cancer, or the probabilities of me adopting certain therapies, are likely to be. But even there, there are only probability-estimates, not certitudes.
We are all wagering our souls. And we do it whether we want to, or not. We estimate the probabilities of God, and when we have come to our best conclusions, we live and die accordingly. But we do ourselves harm when we cut ourselves off from any information that might help us rationally form our best probability calculation. Still, we're wagerers on probability. All of us.
That's called faith. We all have it, we all need it. But only some of us know about it.
That does not mean you had to embrace God, and act according to his wishes. You had a choice about that, and you have chosen it because you see value in it. Am I presuming too much to suggest that you think that being faithful to God makes the world a better place for everyone, and that you want the world to be a better?
So far, so good. I'm with you.
Abstract concepts such as truth and morality may not have an objective existence in the way you believe God has, but if I am drawn to them, and perceive value in them, why is my choice to embrace them any less valid?
Well, because you also think they're not real. So how firm is your "embracing" going to be? Furthermore, since you don't suppose they're objectively real, are you likely to share them with anybody else? Will you be able to convey them to your children? (Surely not, if you also insist on being honest with them: for you will have to tell them, "These are the values I believe in
for me; but I know they're arbitrary, and fictive, and have no correspondence in reality to anything. So you'll have to make up your own.") Will you believe in them strongly enough to vote for lawmakers who are likely to uphold them? Would you assent to seeing somebody sent to jail on the basis of values you think are arbitrary and non-real?
You see, while the values you choose might make you a "good" person from others' perspective, or even make you indistinguishable or "better" than somebody who is "religious," they will not be durable enough to inform a society, or to construct a two-sided relationship, or to inform you of what to do when your feelings and preferences mayhap run to a different goal...
I also want the world to be a better place, and I believe that the more truth we have in it, the better it will be.
I don't doubt it.
But "better" is what we call a "value-laden" term. That means that we can't know what it means until we unpack the "values" behind it. So your view, and mine, of a "better" world is likely to be very different from that of say, Marx, Rand, Stalin or a Jihadi. And that's where the objective-values problem returns: we need to be able to say, if only to ourselves, that the values of a Marx, Rand, Stalin or Jihadi are really wrong...and not just because, for one moment, you and I think so, but because they're really wrong. And we need to say what other values, the "good" ones, we would stand for in their place.
Watch that drama playing out in Tehran right now.
Morality is a double-edged sword, and can do more harm than good in the wrong hands,
Hmmm. "Moralizing" is dangerous, I agree. "Morality" is not. By definition, the objective morality would always be right, and always best.
...so I think it wiser to have some leeway with that, rather than its being set in stone by someone with too much authority. It doesn't matter that the universe is indifferent to things like truth and morality, it only matters that people are not indifferent to them.
But they're worse. They're not only sometimes "indifferent" but also "different." I don't doubt that a Jihadi is a moralizer. You can see from their pronouncements that they are. But is he
moral? That's quite a different question.
Either way, we're not going to protect ourselves from moralizers by going soft on morality. What will happen instead is we will lose our own warrant for resisting oppression, cruetly, injustice, and immoral behaviour from others. And that's not a good trade.
But if morality were subjective, then that is precisely the situation in which we would find ourselves.
At this point you usually say something like, "yes, but people can change their minds, while God is constant." Well God might be constant, but you are still free to change your mind about being faithful to him.
Not just "free," but likely. That's because human affections are changeable, and human loyalties are perfidious. But that's not what happens, actually, in the Christian experience.
This won't make perfect sense to you now, but what happens is that God comes on side with the believer and helps him with his faithfulness. God's not indifferent or distant, you see, as the Deists would suppose, perhaps; and his working inside the believe is the real reason for what faithfulness is possible to a human being. To an outsider, especially one struggling with doubts himself, that could seem like mere obduracy. But it's a great deal more than that.
I'm sure you are no more likely to change your mind about being loyal to God
That's true, but primarily because I've spent some 40 years knowing God. So it would indeed, be quite unlikely for me to find the kind of setback that would deprive me of all that.
Nothing really matters, because death ends all. What care any of us for what happens between the womb and the tomb, so long as we are happy? Let us delude ourselves, then. Untruth is no issue at all, so long as it makes us happy.
I don't believe that. But then, I don't have to, because I do believe that this life is not the end. But I can't presently see a rationale that defeats it for Atheism.
I know that I will die, and I don't expect anything to come after it, but I find that that does not make having values while I'm here seem pointless. Why should it?
Well, as I said above, it depends on what you expect your values to do. If they serve only you, then perhaps they are enough. But if you have to live in a society, or raise a child, or have a marriage, or make a contract, or secure your lifestyle, or vote for the right candidate, or support a judicial system, or whatever, then you're going to find that your values have to move beyond the merely subjective...and that you have to contend for them as "bridging arrangements" between you and other human beings.
But if you don't know WHY they should accept your particular values, instead of whatever else they may happen to prefer, you're going to be at one severe disadvantage in any communal situation.
If one says, "There's no evidence," then surely one should know what particular "evidence" one had been looking for, or open to, in the first place. How else would one know one hadn't found what one expected?
Well, what did one "expect"? What was one open to? What was one looking for, and what did one fail to find?
If someone were to put a proposition to you that you found implausible, and not of particular interest to you, how much effort would you devote to looking for evidence?
It would really depend on the seriousness of the proposition. If somebody said to me, "Your shirt is untucked," I might not even consider it worth my looking. If they were to say, "Your house is on fire," then even if I didn't believe it, I'd probably check.
In any case, what form "should" our concern take? Should it be concern to help one another, as say, Jesus Christ taught us, or should it be concern to eliminate and defeat our survival rivals, as say Nietzsche, Rand or Darwin would teach us?
Jesus was only one of many who said, and say, that we should have concern for one another.
But what about all those, like Nietzsche, Rand, or Marx, or the Jihadis, who positively said we should harm others in order to advantage ourselves or some other group? Their "concern" is not of your kind. But since the values you advocate are (you say) subjective, what have you got to counterpose to their kind of "concern"?
And Darwin was making an observation, not prescribing a course of action.
Well, he was actually spinning a narrative. Because the vast majority of "events" of which he claimed to know proceeded from a pre-history he had never seen, and never could.
But ideas have consequences. And Darwin, whether he liked it or not, essentially rationalized such things as what became known as "Social Darwinism," which is only the view that we should apply Darwin's own principles to human beings. And worse than that, Darwin ended up becoming the foundation of the "science" known as "eugenics," the selective-breeding of human beings for maximal survival and progressive mutation. And I don't need to tell you how bad
that was to prove for the human race.
You see, nobody can go throwing ideas that ambitious around without there being some fallout. If you banish God as Creator from the universe, then there's a Pandora's Box of moral horrors waiting to come out of the same source. Darwin did what Darwin did; and he might not have meant to do it, but he did.
But again: how do we tell the eugenicists and Social Darwinists that they cannot do what they "value," and cannot have the "concerns" they have, when all we ourselves have is subjective valuing?
