Recently in this space, I made the bold claim that atheism by its very nature, since it defies all tradition and repudiates all the greatest thought of all history Western and Eastern as superstitious nonsense, subjects the atheist to an irresistible temptation to pride and vainglory.
Two readers objected, and their objections proved to me my that the claim was, alas, overbold, and cannot be maintained. I hereby retract the comment.
You see, my argument hinged on the fact that theology is not physics. It is perfectly possible to respect an rival who holds a theory of physics one regards as untrue or unsupported, and perfectly possible to admire and even adore one’s forefathers in physics as giants on whose shoulders one stands, even when those giants are mistaken.
I know of no disciple of Einstein who scorns Newton as an obscurantist, and no Newtonian who dismissed Brahe, Galileo and Copernicus as fools, and no votary of Copernicus who scorned Ptolemy as superstitious.
Indeed, persons persuaded of the truth or utility of one model of physics or another do not refer to themselves as votaries nor disciples. Science is neutral: one has no moral obligation to agree with one model over the other, when both enjoy equal predictive accuracy or elegance of the model. Only in pseudo-sciences, as practiced by cultists preaching Global Warming or Teutonic Race-Science, do we find preachers telling us it is a moral imperative never to be skeptical of the allegedly scientific claim.
On the other hand, the odium of theologians for their rivals is well known, and equals or exceeds the odium of political theorists and politicians for rival factions.
The reason for this any candid man can soon discover by looking into his own heart. Let me use the example of the difference between a policy discussion and a political discussion.
For the purpose of argument, let us call a policy discussion one where all parties are agreed on the ends sought, and differ only on the best means to use; or the disagreement on ends can be reconciled or compromised within some more general agreement about how to work out a compromise. With some friction, bargaining and horsetrading, business can get done. The parties can respect each other because nothing ultimate is at stake.
For the purpose of argument, let us call a political discussion one where the two parties differ on the ultimate ends sought. They have a different view of the nature of man, or the nature of justice, or the nature of the state and her role, or all of the foregoing.
They agree on little terminology or none. Even if they use similar words for things, they means opposite things by their words. Their imaginations are stirred by different images or opposite, different slogans, different loyalties. Symbols have different or opposite meanings. The rivals do not even agree on the facts of history.
Hence each man confronting a rival worldview in politics confronts a mental world incompatible with his. There is no room for compromise. Each gain to a rival is a loss for him, either in imponderables such as honor and prestige or in concretes such as wealth and land.
There is little opportunity for sympathy or mutual respect: each rival seems like a paragon of evil or an exemplar of folly to the other.
Nor is the discussion merely academic: the rival political belief is a vision of a world whose axioms and conclusions are alien to him, a moral atmosphere he cannot breathe. The rivalry is one which touches his intimate and precious and personal opinions, habits, beliefs, and virtues.
Political beliefs are intimate, since the laws under which the state is constituted influence one’s daily public behavior, and political beliefs are public, since they extend to one’s neighbors and fellow citizens and to foreign allies and enemies as well.
So political rivalries cannot be conducted in an atmosphere of mutual respect with those whose rivalry is radical. The ideas are too intimate, too public, and too mutually hostile to admit of compromise.
(Let me hasten to add that mine is a deliberate simplification. In any real discussion, what I am calling ‘policy’ and ‘politics’ are commingled, and have different degrees of influence on different questions; and obviously a man’s own character, whether passionate or dispassionate, and his philosophy, what questions he considers to be public versus private, plays a major role in whether he can maintain his dignified respect for his rivals.)
Now religion is even more intimate than politics, because more of one’s personal life is influenced and controlled by one’s religious faith than by one’s political belief.
(If, on the other hand, your political belief influences more of your life than your religious faith, your politics serves as an ersatz religion, and you are not even worthy of the backhanded compliment of being called a Pharisee. You are a Sadducee, a collaborator with the pagans who worship Caesar as a god.)
Religion is also more public than politics, because it influences not just one’s acts or attitudes toward fellow subject or citizens, toward foreign allies and enemies, but rather one’s attitudes toward all of mankind, all of history, all of the cosmos and all of creation.
So religious questions touch the heart more intimately than political ones (at least in healthy souls) but also touch the world more broadly; religious questions are simply bigger questions with more implications than political questions.
Small wonder the enmity between rival theologians is legendary. The hatred of heretics toward orthodoxy and of the orthodox toward heretics is more vehement, deeper, more bitter, and more persistent than nearly anything I can bring to mind. Men still wax indignant over the controversies of the Arians and Donatists, Gnostics and Cathars, for Christ’s sake!
Atheism is a theological stance. It is a theory of theology, or, rather, of metaphysics which holds first, the that universe is explicable without recourse to any theory of god or gods; and holds, second, that human knowledge proffers no clear evidence of the nature of divine things, whether god is one or many, whether life ends in oblivion, reincarnation, or last judgment; and holds, third, the human conscience and human prudence is sufficient, without recourse to divine spokesmen, to instruct the conscience and human decency sufficient to motivate the will to follow the conscience; and holds, fourth, that no account is logically coherent of an omnipotent god powerless to remove evil from the world nor a benevolent god unwilling to do so; and atheism concludes from this and other reasons that there is no god, and that even if there were, we would owe him no love nor loyalty nor obedience.
I draw a distinction between atheists and agnostics, since while the latter live like atheists, they do not hold the question of god’s nonexistence to be settled and sure. But as a practical matter, their uncertainty forbids their loyalty to God as surely as does the certainty of the atheist.
However, I am forced to retract my former statements that atheists suffer an insufferable temptation to arrogance on the simple grounds that the atheist do not necessarily regard their stance as a theological one.
The weird way many atheists talk, as if the belief in God were a question of philosophy or physics, a belief which (for them) has no implications either in how they live their lives nor how they regard the cosmos around them. If they mean it seriously, would excuse them from the temptation of which I speak.
A polite disagreement can exist between two physicists, one believing in the Big Bang and the other in the Steady State theory, or between a geocentric or heliocentric theory, precisely because these theories do not really mean much at the end of the day. And physicists do indeed stand on the shoulders of giants and build on their work even as they learn from their gigantic mistakes. The models of physicists both evolve from and revolutionize prior models.
An atheist stands to a theologian in the same posture a consistent Buddhist might stand toward a physicist: since all material reality is the Illusion of Maya to study it at all merely entraps the soul ever more helplessly in the webs of deception. He does not disagree with a theory of physics, he disagree that any physics at all can exist. In both cases, the difference is radical, because it rejects the whole body of thought and all its disputes.
If an atheist mistakes theism for a theoretical question like that of the geocentric versus the heliocentric, Copernicus versus Ptolemy, or for a philosophical question like that of the One and the Many, Parmenides versus Heraclitus, and if the atheist is able to maintain his intellectual integrity and reserve, why, then, the temptation to the odium and arrogance of the heretic to the orthodox will pass him by.
I said previously I had not met such men. I apologize and correct myself, for there are men of goodwill who resist the temptation to pride among atheists. An Atheist like Edward Gibbon the historian or Frederich Nietzsche the philosopher displays his contempt for the faith which fathered his civilization, but an atheist like Theodore Dalrymple the prison doctor show no signs of such contempt, and even displays some respect for the faith.
I will not, however, retract my warning that the temptation is ever present and almost inescapable. I say this because I fell into it.
While my disbelief in Christianity or any supernaturalism was, at first, in my youth, merely the polite disagreement of a philosophical secularism for a mystic spiritualism, my disrespect grew as years passed and hardened into an implacable hatred, and to mock and jape and sneer at what I regarded as a filthy superstition was something I could not resist, and I saw no reason to do so.
Indeed, I thought it was my duty to puncture the self satisfied delusions of the superstitious age in which I found myself, so I scrupled not to belittle better men than I whenever the opportunity arose, or could be concocted. And what duty is more pleasant that to rise one’s own self esteem by trampling down another man’s?
I will end with one final note of irony: if atheism is correct, than man is the highest form of life and the greatest intelligence known to exist anywhere. There are neither angels nor divinities to supersede him. Also, if atheism is correct, the atheist have indeed, usually by an individual effort in a family and community hostile to the attempt, thrown aside the chains of ignorance under which mankind has suffered since prehistory: and it is an act of unparalleled mental integrity and clarity of vision. They are each of them in the position of Einstein, whose view was so radically different from all previous physics of all previous age, that no praise of his originality is sufficient.
In other words, if atheism is correct, atheists have no need to be humble. They are the most clear-eyed thinkers of the highest form of intelligence in the universe: the Lords of Creation.
But I received only one comment from an atheist saying, in effect, that he regards it as no criticism to be called proud because his atheism gives him a right to be proud. All the other atheists who wrote me were offended that I said they lacked Christian humility.
Why would even one man crave Christian humility when he lacks the craving for Christ? I assume that the heart yearns for divine things no matter what the head reasons and no matter what the blind eye fails to see.
I suggest that this is not strictly speaking a necessary component of atheism. One might reasonably hold that there is no god and that conscience and prudence, without faith, are not sufficient. Admittedly I am not aware of anyone who actually propounds this counsel of despair, but it is not logically incoherent.
Without disrespect to Einstein, this is not a really accurate description of the history of relativity. The ideas were “in the air” through the last quarter or so of the nineteenth century; in particular the mathematics of Lorenz (observe that the act of moving from one relativistic coordinate system to another is a “Lorentz transformation”), Riemann’s geometry, and Mach’s principle, which Einstein himself cited as a precursor to general relativity.
Einstein was a genius, a towering giant; but it is no service to overpraise him, to make him out a lone titan working in isolation and outside of all community. He, too, worked with and on the ideas of others; relativity did not spring fully-formed from his brow, but was the result of much synthesis and equation-scribbling as well as inspiration.
And as I understand it, it can be argued that had Einstein not published the paper on relativity, one of a dozen other physicists would have published one within a short time (that is, within a year or two). He was not the only person who was looking at one and two and figuring out how to add them; he was just the first to publish that the answer was three.
Pardon my skepticism, but I wonder why no one makes such claims about the theory of phlogiston of by Johann Joachim Becher, or the orgone theory of Wilhelm Reich? Were oh-so-many scientists also about to publish their findings within a year or two of these erroneous thinkers, or it is only successful revolutionaries in the sciences which seem not to have really needed the man of genius who fathered them?
Successful theories are all alike; every crackpot theory is individual. Men are guided to successful theories by looking at true experimental data and thinking accurately about them. They make wrong theories by – well, who knows? But at any rate there is no reason to expect two wrong theories to be much alike, while there is every reason to expect two nearly-right theories to be alike, for they are approximating the same thing.
That said, phlogiston theory is not that far removed from oxygen theory, the difficulty being only that it misidentifies the direction of material transfer. If you flip the sign and consider “negative oxygen” as being the thing moving, you get phlogiston, by and large. So it is not really obvious that Becher should be claimed as a crackpot; he might better be classified as a discoverer who had roughly the same idea as Lavoisier, but made an unfortunate sign error. A similar mistake by Franklin is, of course, the reason why the current travels in the direction opposite to the motion of the electrons, to the endless confusion of beginning students.
Jefferson? I always thought it was Franklin. (c.f. http://xkcd.com/567/)
Ooops! Correction made.
No worries. Besides, that’s one of my favorite XKCD comics, so I do not mind an excuse to gratuitously link to it.
Sounds very like Karenina, that. “All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Or like the old saw “success has a thousand mothers and failure is an orphan” — Einstein’s theory is celebrated and phlogiston called crackpottery only in hindsight. There was nothing about phlogiston that makes in innately impossible or even unrealistic, we just so happen to live in a universe where it is not the case.
I think a lot of it is how we talk about these people. We like to mythologize those who fought bravely against the darkness, describing them as visionaries and leaders whose light of science sprang fully-formed from their heads like the Minerva from the head of Jupiter. Whereas those that led us into dead-ends we leave to their devices. It may very well have been that had Becher (or any who followed him) not come up with the theory that eventually had become phlogiston, someone else may have postulated similarly.
I am also given to understand that Einstein’s work in relativity in particular is in this camp. Poincare and Lorentz (who laid a lot of the mathematical grounding) were a hair’s breadth away from the same conclusions Einstein was.
This is to mean no disservice to Einstein. The man was brilliant, and had a lot of good things to say (aside from being very ardently a socialist), and was great PR for science and physics. And he did certainly have a talent for taking complicated physics and talking about in a way that a high school student could generally understand (that being when I first read his book on Relativity). And yes, he did have the crucial flash of insight first, and published it.
But just as Newton and Leibniz had the flashes of insight to develop Calculus independent of each other (but building on the work of previous mathematicians), it is not untoward to suggest that some of the other talented, intelligent people who were working with the mathematics undergirding relativity would have also stumbled upon it. The fact that their names are still attached to so much of the theory and mathematics under it demonstrates how close and important they were to the whole package.
Obviously no work is done in a vacuum. But just as obviously, it is no insult to Lorenz or others who were near to making the discovery to give Einstein the credit for being the first. Buzz Aldrin understands that to be the second man on the moon is still a great thing.
But no matter how you slice up the credit, Einstein was still the foremost genius of the age. My point is that this is the way atheists tend to regard themselves in matter of theology, as if they have discovered an astonishing new idea. If you wish to emphasize that the idea is not as original as some men have said, this makes my analogy a tighter cinch rather than loser.
Forgive me if I sound impatient, but I am familiar with the history of science, having read all the fundamental thinkers from Euclid to Ptolemy to Harvey to Galileo to Newton to Leibniz to Einstein to Lorenz, and not in textbooks. I know that no discovery is made like Minerva from the brow of Jove. I also know that it is more fashionable these days to underestimate the genius of exceptional men than to overestimate it, so warnings against undue overestimation while perfectly fair, may not be necessary. Genius does not fit into the mechanistic and soulless world view of radical materialism so beloved of modern thinkers, and so many a man seeks to explain it away.
Yes, I will grant that about atheists, though I’ll note that I’ve seen it in other ideologies as well. Many people upon first discovering an idea seem to think no one else has considered it before. I find it amazing the number of new Christians who, having just found faith, would argue with me as though I hadn’t investigated it already and rejected the central claim.
I do not mean to underestimate the genius of men like Einstein or Newton; it is merely in Einstein’s case in regards to relativity, I’m not sure that’s the best example of showing it. Mr. Andreassen’s point about photoelectrics and having the insight of where to look in the first place holds true, and I maintain that part of Einstein’s genius was his ability to explain immensely complex (mathematically) physical phenomena in simple language.
Now Newton…I would not quibble with you there in the slightest. He invented Calculus, discovered the laws of optics, provided the fundamental equations that govern the movements of the spheres, observed the moons of Jupiter, and various other strides forward in science.
Not that I would quibble about Einstein being a genius. I went through my phase of reading as much of his work as I could, and I hold him up as a role model for my children. I just, as I said, don’t think relativity is necessarily the best avenue to demonstrate it.
Hm, I had at one point written a longer reply to this, but it may have been eaten by the aether (no pun intended). Alas, I’ve forgotten entirely what I said, so I’m not sure I can replicate it at this point.
Just be patient, please. Comments are held for moderation.
Ah, my impatience gets the better of me. I had thought you had done your moderation already, having already posted. My mistake.
That may well be true, but I could not say so from my own knowledge. I observe that he got the Nobel Prize for his work on the photoelectric effect; there are those who attribute this to politics, but it seems to me that the Nobel committee made the right choice. The photoelectric effect was the first undisputable evidence that light would, in some circumstances, behave as a particle and not a wave; it was the first crack in the door to quantum mechanics. For the sheer inspiration of choosing where to look, as opposed to making discoveries when you have chosen the field, the well-trod field of optics seems to me a lot more original than points impinging on ether and whatnot, which was known at the time to be a trouble spot.
They mentioned the photoelectric effect, to be sure, but the chief thing they talked about was his work on Brownian motion. Which was, after all, the first evidence of atoms of actual finite size.
(I have also heard they left out relativity because it hadn’t been tested enough for them to be sure of it, and they didn’t want to be embarrassed later.)
Until it had been empirically verified, relativity was a branch of mathematics and was taught in mathematics departments. Only after physical predictions were verified did it move heart and soul to physics. My own encounter with relativity was in a course in differentiable manifolds.
Riemannian geometry was not a precursor to relativity any more than was tensor analysis. That is, Riemann was interested in the effect of modifying Euclid’s parallel postulate and specifically as regards spherical geometry. (A triangle from the north pole to the equator, a quarter turn around the equator and back to the pole will be a triangle with three right angles.) It turned out later that Einstein found his theory could be clarified by using Riemannian geometry; but the development of non-Euclidean geometry was not a research program into the problem of relativity.
The principle of relativity was enunciated by Nicole d’Oresme in the 14th cent., who credited Witelo’s Perspectiva. Oresme claimed that there was no absolute motion, and all motion was relative to an observer. The example he used was to imagine an observer affixed to the earth gazing at the stars and one affixed to the starry orb gazing at the earth. It would seem to each that the other was moving irrespective of whether the earth rotated or the heavens revolved.
This is quite interesting and scholarly. May I add a bit?
Riemannian geometry, and its obvious extension to indefinite metrics, is not needed for special relativity. But, it is certainly needed for general relativity, or else there is no way to quantify the intrinsic curvature of spacetime.
One might also supplement your interesting comments on Oresme. It was brilliant of him to formulate a principle of relativity, but there is a glitch. One gets a different principle of relativity, and indeed, as Felix Klein noted,a different geometry, for different groups of isometries.
Oresme’s example of rotations is particularly ill chosen, because even classical Newtonian mechanics is not invariant under the sort of steady rotations he considered. Oresme should have claimed relativity only under uniform, non-rotation motion- so-called Galilean transformations. If the earth were fixed and the celestial sphere of Oresme were rotating, there would be no Coriolis force. The circulation of the oceans and wind would be quite different. Without the Gulf Stream, Oresme would have lived in a colder and drier Northern Europe. Luckily for him the earth did rotate, with palpable physical consequences.
The novel geometry of special relativity consists in replacing Galilean symmetries by Poincare symmetries. In the Oresme example, classical mechanics is invariant under the Galilean group, but not under the steady rotations he considered. Similarly, Maxwell’s equations are invariant under the Poincare group, and are not invariant under the Galilean group.
Oh, let’s not be too harsh on folks who did not have the means to measure such things as that. Even Hooke, at Newton’s suggestion, tried dropping musket balls from a tower and failed to observe the predicted Coriolis deflection; and they had much better measurement systems by then.
It is of the essence of a precursor or pioneer that they do not have the final draft in hand.
The Aristotelian/Scholastic notion of the observer effect was actually much more radical (in the sense of “radix”) than that of Heisenberg. But this all drifts profoundly from our host’s chosen topic.
Harsh?
I was praising Oresme’s brilliant insight into relativity. But is also important to pick the right set of transformations for your relativity theory: this was a part of Einstein’s contribution.
Oh, and perhaps Hooke should try a very long pendulum, observed over a long duration.
Let’s replace with Mendel, then. No one else published having overlooked his paper until fifty years later.
Let us distinguish. *Special* relativity was indeed ‘in the air’ at the time. If Einstein hadn’t come up with it, someone else surely would have.
But I don’t think the same can be said for general relativity. It came more or less out of left field, so far as I can see. It is the more pressing demonstration of Einstein’s genius.
“One might reasonably hold that there is no god and that conscience and prudence, without faith, are not sufficient [to instruct and train character].”
I have read people who write with sufficient misanthropy that they seem to believe this, but the majority of them fall into that category of bleak cynicism where they don’t even include the “without faith” caveat — in other words, faith, conscience and prudence are all insufficient, separately or together, and people in general are just bad eggs.
If I recall correctly, quite a lot of atheists historically have admitted the useful social and psychological effects of widespread religious faith without believing in its truth themselves; they thus seem to believe that faith, even mistaken faith, can be a vital component of bettering character and society. I am not sure whether this should be considered more respectful of religion and religious thought, by acknowledging its practical benefit to humanity and the good intentions of believers, or less, by caring more for its usefulness than its truth and dismissing the judgement of believers.
Possibly, but no atheist with whom I myself has debated, and none I have read, makes the argument that atheists are and must be less moral than Christians who fear divine punishment. Any atheist making the argument as you outline it either admits that Christianity, while false, is good for the soul and for the state; or makes the bolder claim that there is no need to follow the conscience, nor to lament that the conscience is too weak to sustain the untrained willpower. I might call this second group satanists or nihilists. While technically atheists, their worldview is a particular doctrine that makes them distinct from mere atheists.
Atheist ideas have also been “in the air” since the time of Epicurus and Lucretius, and the modern air takes its particular foetor from the atheism of Voltaire and Nietzsche and Marx. So the analogy still fits.
I understand Alex Rosenberg follows the logic of materialist atheism to its ultimate conclusions, and the includes the dismissal of any possible belief in an objective morality. Nietzsche, too.
“I am forced to retract my former statements that atheists suffer an insufferable temptation to arrogance on the simple grounds that the atheist do not necessarily regard their stance as a theological one.”
Why retract your statement if you were speaking only of a temptation, and not of a universal inescapable fact?
It seems the temptation is resisted only by people who have a very calm and confident character and know enough about their fellow men to tell level-headed religious people from fanatics. Theodore Dalrymple is a good example. I would add Terry Eagleton (Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, 2009), a Marxist, who came up with the nickname of Ditchkins for the likes of Hitchens and Dawkins. I didn’t read the book but I found good reviews by Stanley Fish (NYT), Thomas Hibbs (First Things) and Andrew Nugent (Irish Times).
Because I said I had never met a humble atheist, and an atheist of long acquaintance reminded me that I had.
Also, I am not going to stand on a technical distinction when the spirit of what I said was erroneous. Pride is part of human nature, not the outpouring of a particular doctrine.
You are absolutely right. I encouraged pride and arrogance when humility is the only thing that can teach us to really love our neighbor. Thank you for reminding me that.
That is a dangerous line of thinking for an atheist to take. I’d guess it is also the very line a great many do take. It is the sort of Peter Keating type of second-handed evaluation of one’s self according to some standard by which one always wins.
While Christians nor even religious people were my selected targets I engaged in this sort of torso thumping for years. I have grasped this (capitalism usually) while you all are wallowing in falsehood and statist theories – obviously you are intellectually and moral deficient. While true in a great many cases, and I was victorious… I might have lost one, can’t conveniently remember, it took me years to realize the true object was the propping of a damaged ego.
And what juicy, succulent fruit it is. You can step right over the corpse of your victim without a care as you suck the nectar from your fingers while stroking your manly, and logical, chest hair.
Until you realize what you are when you do so. It is a sort of spiritual cannibalism.
Nicely put.
Thanks.
And what duty is more pleasant that to raise one’s own self esteem by trampling down another man’s?
The only thing sweeter is to join someone in trampling over another man. As a guy who likes to get along with lots of people, I need to be careful of this, because the fastest way to make a friend isn’t money, humor, or good looks; no, you just need to join him in speaking ill of someone else.
Alas, too true. The devil knows it too. Gossips (and I include myself, as one can see from all my screeds) allows both pride and ire to be inflamed while under the hypocritical mask of self righteousness — that is three sins right there for the price of one.
Not so. There are many atheists — well, maybe not many — who affirm metaphysics without affirming the power of any supernatural person. This is not a quality of atheism as such.
Good sir, one of my comments has been marked as spam. Would you be so kind as to retrieve it?
(I’m following instructions! Really! The WebGoblin told me to contact the site admin!)
Please be patient. Comments are held. Since I am presently in the habit of checking my website at least four times a day, it is unreasonable to expect a quicker reaction time than that from your humble host.
Perhaps I was not clear: I did not say atheists lack a metaphysics. Everyone has a metaphysical belief (the only choice is whether to have an articulate, coherent one or an inarticulate incoherent one). I said atheists lack a theology; or, to be perfectly precise, their theology consists of a single universal negative statement, and whatever might be logically deduced from that.
It’s difficult to deduce anything at all from a negative statement, which is why I think calling atheism a “theology” is needless hair-splitting.
Will all due respect, your statement is simply not true. From the statement “No god nor gods exist” I can deduce the statement “The son of god does not exist” and from that I can deduce the statement “The claim that the son of god rose from the dead is not accurate” and so on.
I think you are confusing the difficulty of proving a negative universal with the ease of deducing the implications of a negative universal. The first is a question of evidence; the second is a question of logic. It is difficult to prove that there is no black cat in a black room, because I must check every square foot of the room to confirm it. It is easy to deduce that if there is no black cat in the black room, and I hear the cat yowling, that the sound is coming from somewhere outside the room.
I will amend my statement: It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to deduce anything interesting, and certainly nothing positive, from a negative statement alone. One cannot deduce anything at all about the universe as it actually is, as opposed to the Omega-cardinality infinity of counterfactual possible worlds.
It is perhaps superfluous to note that you must reference many positive statements as enthymemes in this “deduction”, as well as that there are infinitely many plausible alternatives to your proffered conclusion.
If you are not interested in the logical implications of atheism, then we need not discuss it, and yet need no defend it.
Whether a statement is positive or negative is a term of art from logic, and does not refer to whether the statement is cheerful or bitter: “All S is P” or “Some S is P” is a positive statement, and “No S is P” or “Not all S is P” is a negative. From the statement “There is no God” I can logically deduce the statement “I have no moral obligations to God” based on the positive minor premise that one can only owe moral obligations to real as opposed to imaginary beings. The fact that the enthymeme refers to a positive statement is obvious, and I thank you for stating the obvious. It was also not in dispute.
I do agree that the statement about a cat not being in the room was not presented in a formally logical syllogism, nor did I expressly emphasize and discount every other possible alternate explanation, as the noise being a recording or hallucination or the room being nonexistent, but I was using the statement as an example to point out the difference between proving a negative and deducing something from a negative, a distinction not reflected in your comments, and which I assume you do not grasp.
Since your reaction was to correct me on trivial matters aside from the point, you now begin to me to sound like a crackpot interested in counting coup, rather than a sober thinker interested in a real discussion.
Generally I allow someone ten or twenty crackpot gaffes before I stop taking his comments seriously, so you have some margin to use up. And I also move the crackpot counter down by one increment for every sober comment which stays on-topic, so a conversation with two sober comments for every crackpot outbreak stays in the region of my patience.
I mean no insult: I merely want to explain the rules so you are not taken by surprise if I do not take scorn and emotional blither seriously. I also want to emphasize that there is a world of thought outside the fever swamps of insult-comedy and bluster which passes for conversation among the Modern intellectuals.
Aha! So you do grasp the concept of irony!
You are inching closer to the crackpot goal.
A sense of humor, John, is as important an Aristotelian virtue as justice.
You must hasten to inform me once you develop such a sense, sir. Did you mistake your barbs and carping for witticisms?
The whole point of calling it a theology is to show that atheism is not a stance related to the subject matter of metaphysics, physics, epistemology, ontology, morals, politics, aesthetics, psychology, economics, history, or any other branch of philosophy or science. It is a theological conclusion only, and it is argued, when argued properly, using theological categories and modes of argument.
I am surprised you would dispute this. It is an argument about God. Arguments about God are theological arguments. Do you think atheism is a branch of zoology?
Nor can one argue that because the argument is negative, this would cause all the books on atheism to be shelved somewhere else than in the theology department. Nihilism is a negative argument about philosophy, but it is shelved with philosophy because only philosophical argumentation concerns it. Creationism is shelved with Evolutionary sciences because only an Evolutionist can argue with a Creationist. Flat Eathers make claims that only can be refuted by reference to geography, so it is shelved with geography.
I do not think this is a particularly useful way to talk about atheism. You can, if you choose, argue atheism on theological grounds and in theological modes; I regard those modes as spectacularly useless. As Sam Harris says, “Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.”
Mr Harris categorizes a philosophical discussion about a profound matter as noise. When I was an atheist, I did not make noise, I make logical arguments, and that arguments were on a theological matter. If you, like him, regard it is useless to use philosophical reasoning to reason about a philosophical matter, or theological reasoning to reason about a theological matter, then you have, in effect, excused yourself from reasoning at all.
Those who excuse themselves from reasoning are left, as Mr Harris is, with merely making noises. He is uttering an insult pretending it is an argument.
I will use an example or two.
The following argument “if God is exists as the Christians claim, then He is both omnipotent and benevolent. But there is evil in the world. If there is evil in the world, either God lacks the power or the willingness to prevent the evil. If He lacks the power, He is not omnipotent, or lacks the willingness, not benevolent. There is evil in the world. Therefore God does not exist as the Christians claim.” is not an empirical argument, nor is it an argument about epistemology, ontology, aesthetic theory, ethics, jurisprudence, economics, politics, formal logic, or any other branch of philosophy. It is a theological argument.
Again, “If God exists, He is an omnipotent and acting being. In order to act, an acting being must be dissatisfied with present circumstances, have the foresight to foresee a change in circumstances which are an improvement, and have the ability to act to promote that change. But an omnipotent being by definition can bring about immediately, without the use of instruments or intermediary causes, without the expense of any cost or effort, whatever circumstances He might desire or foresee, upon the instant. Therefore an omnipotent being cannot be an acting being, and and acting being cannot be an omnipotent being. Therefore no being can be an omnipotent and acting being. Therefore God does not exist.” This, again is not an empirical argument, nor is it an argument about epistemology, ontology, aesthetic theory, ethics, jurisprudence, economics, politics, formal logic, or any other branch of philosophy. It is a theological argument.
I confess I do not understand the nature of your objection to this categorization. Arguing that God does not exist is an argument about God. Arguments about God are theological arguments.
By your argument, all argument about God are theological, except when the argument is made that God does not exist, whereupon this is not an argument at all, but a noise reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.
Your objection to this terminology is illogical. It seems to be an emotional reaction to the word “theology”, and not a dignified or noble emotion at that.
Theological reasoning is a contradiction in terms.
Huh. I see it as an argument about epistemology, ontology, ethics, and it is definitely empirical. We observe certain things; we conclude that the observation seems to contradict the logical implications of certain ontological statements about the world (an existing God with specific attributes). But whatever. If you want to call it “theology,” be my guest. It seemed to be an important part of your critique of atheism that atheism was theological, but I think we both have bigger philosophical fish to fry.
“Theological reasoning is a contradiction in terms.”
Add one more to the crackpot score. The running total is two serious comments to three wisecracks. You are inching away from the terrain of a sober discussion. Are you here merely to exchange barbed jests?
If you are serious, I suggest you reflect on the definition of empirical. Empiricism refers to the observation of measurable quantities of quantifiable entities, such as matter, energy, motion. It does not refer to judgments, even though we often use the word ‘observation’ to mean a judgment, such as an observation that the world is getting worse or getting better. The “observation” that evil exists in the world is not an empirical fact, because it involves no measurable quantities of matter or energy or motion.
In any case, atheists are a larger group, and more diverse, more cacophonous, than you give them credit. Think Protestants, but without scripture or Christ, and multiply them by modernism and immamentism and every philosophy but Thomism.
For that matter, there is at least one atheist with a bastardized version of Thomism.
You have not represented the metaphysics of atheism accurately. Actually, there is no such thing as specifically atheist metaphysics; atheism is just a label for a lack of belief in any god. You have, however, described many important conclusions about scientific naturalism. I go on at greater length at Physics, politics, and religion.
I’d like a link to the previous article you refer to in your first paragraph. I would certainly deny that atheism “defies all tradition and repudiates all the greatest thought of all history Western and Eastern as superstitious nonsense.” I’d like to see your entire argument, however, before I respond in more detail.
It’s wicked cool that you’re a published SF author. I’ll have to dig my Dozois out of storage (don’t ask; it’s been a complicated summer) and check out your work.
If we live in a universe where there is no God, this has immediate metaphysical implications which do and must apply to all forms and variations of atheism, such as, for example, the lack of an intelligent creator establishing the laws of morality, and the lack of a willful actor behind the first cause of all events, and so on.
Atheism in the sense I am using the word here (as “naturalism” rejection of all supernatural claims) also has immediate metaphysical implications in the area of epistemology: mysticism and knowledge by revelation are a priori rejected as impossible. If there is no God, then any message from God is hallucination or falsehood.
Naturally, there are some forms and varieties within this: one can believe or not believe in cause and effect while being an atheist, or believe morality is objective or subjective, and so on.
I am baffled that you would even question the statement that atheism defies all tradition.
While you and I might disagree on some nuances of what constitutes “tradition”, I suggest as a touchstone we refer to the Great Books which encapsulate and inspired the intellectual history of East and West for all of history in every area of learning.
Here is a list of the Great Books of the West. http://www.stjohnscollege.edu/academic/ANreadlist.shtml
I can count the authors who are atheists on the fingers of one hand: Epicurus, Lucretius, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud. Possibly Hume. Writers on the list younger than this are moderns, not part of tradition.
And here is a list of the Great Books of the East. I can count the authors who are atheists on the fingers of no hand, because there are none. http://www.stjohnscollege.edu/GI/EC/reading_list.shtml
Perhaps your objection is that I refer to atheism as a radical rejection of all Western thought, rather than as an evolution or outcome of Western thought. There the burden of proof is on you, to show the increasing degrees of atheism reaching from the highly religious ancient Greeks, Plato and Aristotle, through the less and less religious Romans and Medievals, Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas, to the utterly unreligious moderns, men like Kierkegaard and Dostoevski.
It would be more accurate to actually use the word “naturalism.” Since I subscribe to naturalism, your conflation of the terms is not of immediate personal importance, but it can potentially lead to confusion, as not all self-described atheists reject mysticism and revelation. (They might, I suspect, simply ascribe their mystical revelations to a source other than “god.”)
The key word is “all”. Is every word, or even most of the words, in the the “great books” about or can be derived only from mysticism and revelation?
Your reading of the humanities seems somewhat superficial. We can see the glimmerings of naturalism even as early as Thales and Socrates. Marcus Aurelius at least in part bases his ethics and aesthetics on what he observes with his senses and reasons with his own mind. The canon of humanities is a record of human beings groping towards what it means to be human; we can see the talk of gods and religion even in the “Great Books” as a metaphor (perhaps a metaphor too-literally believed) without rejecting the natural, observable meanings attached to those metaphors.
And the “Great Books” are only a sample of Western tradition. All of Western tradition includes all Western thought, not just that selected by college professors. So Western tradition also includes Diderot, Twain, Ingersoll, etc.
Yes. Atheism does contradict some of Western tradition. All innovation contradicts tradition, by definition. Whether you like it or not, cultures evolve.
You are conflating a general statement “Man is a rational animal” with a universal statement “All men are primates.” The first one is generally true, albeit exceptions (children, madmen, etc.) exist; the second is true by definition.
I was not claiming that it is true by definition that atheism contradicts every word every written by anyone in the West. Obviously that is a nonsensical claim. Let me amend my statement: Western civilization consists of an intellectual tradition passed on from generation to generation, and the study of certain fundamental and predominant ideas has also persisted from generation to generation. Atheism is not one of those ideas.
I am pleased that you mention Ingersoll. I had thought modern atheists too parochial to have read the classics in their own field.
Ingersoll makes no mention (at least that I can recall) of Lucretius, albeit Lucretius does make mention of Epicurus. Mark Twain makes no mention (at least that I can recall) of the Treatise of the Three Impostors, allegedly written by Voltaire, if not by an earlier author. One of the foremost writers on atheism, the Marquis de Sade, did indeed compose his philosophy of naturalism in the form of a dialog, which harkens back to Plato; and Ayn Rand, a preeminent naturalist, explicitly credits Aristotle; and Marx writes in the footsteps of Hegel.
Is this sufficient to establish an atheist tradition flowing alongside the mainstream traditions of Greco-Roman philosophy, Medieval scholasticism, and modern philosophy? I would think one would have a better chance of finding continuity among neoplatonists ancient and modern, or Stoics.
So, while not every single word written by every single person in the West has been theist, it is safe to say that the atheist overthrows the mainstream of Western tradition, and all side-streams which display a continuity running back across centuries.
Atheism, until the Eighteenth Century, has been a scattered and uninfluential stance, not one that is representative of any particular nation, state, tribe, or school of thought in the West, and never passed from one generation to the next. Compare it to Platonism or Aristotelianism or Thomism.
Cultures literally “evolve” if and only if cultural change is directed toward an end-state.
But even if you intend the word only metaphorically, the metaphor seems not to fit anything. Where is the Babylonian culture now? Why are its traits no longer found among us, or any echoes of its greatness?
I admit cultures change in some respects and stay the same in others, and some changes are good and virtuous and some are bad and vicious. Merely because something happened recently does not mean that it occupying a loftier evolutionary plateau.
For example, I would not regard the failure of Julian the Apostate to reinstate the pagan worship of the Roman Empire to be an “evolution” even though it happened after the conversion of Constantine. Nor the fall of Rome. Nor the withdrawal of the Legions from Britain. Nor the invasion of Spain by the Moors, nor their expulsion by Ferdinand and Isabella. Nor the overthrow of the Aztecs by Cortes. Nor the overthrow of the Czars by the Bolsheviks, nor the Fall of the Berlin Wall.
On the other hand, I do regard the invention of modern science by the schoolmen of the Middle Ages after the overthrow of the obscurantism of pagan astronomy and metaphysics, and the Church inventing and founding the University system to be progress, but then I regard the natural sciences as directed toward an end, that of understanding the mysteries of Creation.
But since this scientific and philosophical revolution took place during the downfall of a multicontinental Roman commonwealth, when both road systems and monetary systems fell into disuse, and an incalculable treasure of ancient scrolls could not be saved, even by the diligence of the medieval scriptorium it is hard to regard this as “evolution” unless the word merely means “change”. Since the Roman system of slavery also fell into disuse or was abolished by medieval Christendom, the change of the collapse of the Empire does not seem to be an unmitigated evil, nor, since international slavery was reintroduced during the so-called Renaissance and Enlightenment, does the progress of material civilization, the invention of oceangoing ships, the magnetic compass, the pocketwatch, the jib sail, necessarily keep pace with what is normally (and optimistically) called social progress.
Remember, I had nothing to go on but the bare statement in this post, and I explicitly asked for clarification. Also, I’m a student of economics and political science, not a humanities scholar. I do know that the nice thing about the humanities is that the canon is subject to endless reinterpretation. Is there a strong religious trend in the Western humanities? Of course. Is there a trend to subject theological authority to skepticism and critical inquiry? I would say there is, and I think a better scholar than I could make the case that the value of the Western humanities is precisely that tradition of skeptical, critical inquiry, not the record of progressively more refined mystical revelation.
Atheism, then, becomes the natural outcome of that tradition of skeptical, critical inquiry. One by one, the tasks ascribed to God — ordering the cosmos, adjusting the orbits of the planets, creating the diversity of life — are explained a the workings of non-teleological, non-intentional, non-intelligent, non-conscious physical law. So many tasks indeed have been taken from God’s purview — by the Western tradition of skeptical, critical inquiry — that those left to God seem so abstract (God is the ground of all being!) and ineffectual (God subtly adjusts quantum randomness!) that they seem unworthy of so potent an hypothesized entity.
Oh. This is a semantic dispute, or else you are using the term “skeptical inquiry” to mean only those inquiries leading to your particular hobbyhorses.
Yes, skeptical inquiry, starting with Socrates, is a central part of the Western Tradition. Some of that skeptical inquiry is inquiry about the nature of the divine: we call that theology. My skeptical inquiries have led me to embrace Catholicism, where my fellow skeptics, St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas reside.
If you are making the assumption that all Socratic inquiry leads not to the conclusions of Socrates but to those of Carl Sagan, this conceit is beyond the pale of candid discussion. Stop kidding around.
Is there a trend to subject theological authority to skepticism and critical inquiry?
Certainly. See Peter Abelard’s Sic et non or The Sentences of Peter Lombard, not to mention Thomas Aquinas’ Summa theologica, as well as other theologians throughout the Middle Ages. Medieval Christendom was unique in that it did apply reason and the dialectic to itself. That’s one reason why Thomas’ Summa is included among the “Great Books.” They enshrined this systematic “culture of poking around” (as historian Edward Grant put it) in their self-governing corporations called “universities.”
…could make the case that the value of the Western humanities is precisely that tradition of skeptical, critical inquiry, not the record of progressively more refined mystical
revelation.
Surely. You’re catching on.
Atheism, then, becomes the natural outcome of that tradition of skeptical, critical inquiry.
Aw, now you went and spoiled it by making an assertion of faith. You will need to show that atheism is the natural outcome rather than, as Nietzsche and others averred, an act of will. Was it Hitchens or Dawkins who said that when he was nine years old he just knew that there was no God. Compare the careful syllogisms of Thomas against the personal epiphany of a nine-year old boy.
One by one, the tasks ascribed to God — ordering the cosmos, adjusting the orbits of the planets, creating the diversity of life — are explained a the workings of non-teleological, non-intentional, non-intelligent, non-conscious physical law.
You are confusing the confused imaginings of the scientific age with the reasoned conclusions of the medieval age. Sure, Newton supposed that God had to intervene periodically to keep the planets in going. (His system is mathematically chaotic, after all.) But it was primarily due to his faulty metaphysics. He was “already seized by the early modern ‘mechanical philosophy,’ in which nature is seen as a kind of unnatural composite of passive, unintelligent, preexisting matter, on which order has to be ‘extrinsically imposed’ by a Supreme Intelligence.” The medievals otoh had a far saner view of Nature as self-organizing and following natural laws written into her from the beginning. That is why Thomas would have taken something like Darwin’s Laws (to the extent that they are natural laws) as one more mild confirmation of God’s existence, while Late Moderns and Post Moderns think that only apparent exceptions to these laws would constitute proof. For the medievals, it was precisely the lawfulness of nature that provided the evidence.
I’m not sure how you can square the palpable existence of natural laws with the notion that there is no teleology. If nature did not move toward an end, how could A cause B “always or for the most part” and not to C, D, E, or nothing at all. Why is there in nature attractor basins, potential minimizing functions, equilibrium states, and so on? It’s fine to say IT JUST IS! but that is nothing more than a kerygma of faith.
The idea that God fashioned each individual species and poofed them into existence would have surprised the medievals. The one time Thomas commented on that in passing he wrote:
IOW, he expected that if new species ever did arise — no one had ever seen any — that they would do so in an entirely natural manner. If we extend “putrefaction” to include “genetic mutation,” it’s actually not to bad an anticipation.
“Atheism, then, becomes the natural outcome of that tradition of skeptical, critical inquiry. ”
Other skeptics (eg. anyone else) cannot assume that your atheism is skeptical, critical, inquisitive, or the result of a method – or that such would be ‘natural’, or even that your positions as given are the necessary and terminal ‘outcome’ of any tradition.
It strikes me personally that you’re making stuff up as you go along, scrabbling for witticisms, and and what-have-you. This isn’t the end of the world for you, but it doesn’t make great conversation for the rest of us.
As you mention elsewhere, your kind of certainty doesn’t require ‘exceptional integrity and clarity’ to achieve.
“Don’t expect anything, and you won’t be disappointed,” etc.
“the Great Books of the East”
Almost all atheist in the strict sense of the world.
A Creator God is not to met with in Eastern philosophy.
This is why I defined my terms. I was using the word ‘atheist’ to mean ‘philosophical naturalist’. The reason why I did not use the more correct technical term is that the average reader would perhaps think I was talking about men who study birds and insects when I spoke of a ‘naturalist.’
Beside, the idea of a creation, much less a Creator, is rarely encountered in the East. Like the Stoics, the Hindu believes in an eternal return, time as a serpent swallowing its own tail forever and aye. The Taoist and Confucian conceptions are both more subtle and more practical, but the upshot of both is a view of the world where the ‘Jade Emperor of Heaven’ and all the gods and spirits and immortal saints are merely creatures controlled by a deadly and ineluctable fate, and the notion of an eternal return is not absent from them either. Even those paganism which have a creation story have no creator: gods arise out of chaos, or out of a primordial egg, and later sever the sky from the earth, or create the home islands of Japan by stirring the sea with a spear, or suchlike.
The arguments I have heard claiming that Buddha or Confucius were atheists seem to assume they did not believe the worldview of their native era, a conclusion I see no evidence to support. More likely, like Socrates, these Eastern philosophers accepted the basic idea of the gods and heavenly powers, but, like Socrates, thought the belief in the gods unrelated to their moral and spiritual teaching. Also like Socratice philosophy which developed into a system we would call religions by the time of the Neoplatonists (see Plotinus for example) the Buddhistic and Confucian system developed accretions of myth and lore and ritual — so we call these combinations of low superstition and high philosophy “religions.”
I hope you do not hint that anyone not believing in a Creator is an atheist: that would exclude most of the legends and mythologies (which Christians perhaps unintentionally ennoble by calling “religions”) that have enlivened with color the long and melancholy gloom of paganism either Eastern or Classical, African, Polynesian or American.
I think you overstate the case considerably. Perhaps 500 or even 200 years ago, atheism might have required exceptional integrity and clarity, but today, one merely needs to observe the successes of natural science, the vacuity of theology and apologetics, and the hostility of many of the religious to modern values.
Perhaps I overstate the atheist’s case, but, if so, you yourself overstate more than do I, my good sir. You imply a hostility rather than a dependence between the Christian religion and the success of the natural sciences, you dismiss apologetic as vacuous, and you contradistinguish religious and modern values almost as if the eternal verities of religion and philosophy could be outmoded by the fashions of the age. On my part, I regard modern values as one long and slow receding tide of falsehood, triviality, nonsense, where it is not pure corruption and thuggish ignorance, totalitarianism disguised as toleration, all rushing as a flood of offal and sewerage over the lip of the edge of sanity into the unrelieved darkness of an unechoing abyss called nihilism.
So, I note the irony of a triumphalist atheist saying I overstate the triumphalism of atheism.
Indeed I do.
True.
“Almost as if” is not accurate. I actually dobelieve that what you consider the “eternal verities of religion and philosophy” (and what I consider to be obsolete superstitions and delusions) actually are outmoded by progress of the modern age.
Triumphalism? I did not respond to any claim that we atheists are or are not (or do or do not feel) triumphant; I noted only that it does not require exceptional intelligence or character to reject belief in god. (And although the meaning of “irony” is subtle and complex, I would expect a professional author to have a better grasp on the concept.)
How charmingly poetic. May I steal that line? I think it could really rope in the chicks.
You cannot keep the sneering note of triumph out of your word even while you claim that my statement about atheist triumphalism is false. This inability on your part testifies to the truth of my comment better than does my comment.
My attention is arrested by this part of the comment: “I actually do believe that what you consider the “eternal verities of religion and philosophy” (and what I consider to be obsolete superstitions and delusions) actually are outmoded by progress of the modern age…”
Let us turn to the question of what makes a belief, any belief, dependent on the time in which it is held as opposed to independent?
If I believe, as Aristotle teaches, that the sun circles the Earth, it is safe to say that modern observations with instruments (such as the telescope) unavailable to Aristotle have made the belief in geocentrism incredible.
If I also believe, as Aristotle teaches, that the virtues of justice, prudence, moderation and fortitude are cardinal and paramount to the correct ordering of the soul, as well as pragmatic for increasing one’s chance and frequency of having happy days in this mortal life, it is safe to say that no modern observation has anything to contribute to the conversation on the topic pro or con, simply because the belief is not one which rests on some particular thing one can see with one’s eye for its persuasive value.
Do you grant that there is a difference between (at least) these two types of belief?
The heliocentric theory is “progress” over and above the geocentric theory because it fits the observations better; and relativity is better yet, for it has the advantage of intellectual elegance of explanation. On the other hand, the self-indulgence in vice which modern libertines, leftists, and libertarians would support as an ethical norm is not “progress” over and above Aristotelian and classical notions of self-control and temperance for it lacks the advantage of producing a happier and more virtuous life. It is, in fact, a peculiar type of slavery, spiritual or psychological bondage. This is a regress. The word “progress” only has meaning when use to refer to a goal being sought, and the stages which approach that goal are “progress.”
Obviously, the “progress” (using the word correctly) in the science of astronomy has no necessary connection to the “progress” (using the word incorrectly) from a culture which praised self-control to a cult which praises self-indulgence. These two variable seem to be independent.
If we now know that the Earth circles the Sun rather than visa versa, it does not follow that we now know drunkenness, wrath, gossip, slander, fortune-telling, cowardice, drug abuse, fornication, and suicide are admirable qualities to emulate, and temperance and fortitude are old-fashioned and despicable.
I don’t say whether or not I am or feel triumphant; I say only that if I were to believe atheism triumphant, it would be a triumph that does not presently require exceptional ability to achieve or enjoy.
As to whether I am “sneering,” I do my best to ignore insults.
In general, I would not agree that this is safe to say. Much depends on what you mean by “believe.” If you mean simply to say that is the life you prefer, well, I can draw scientific conclusions about your preferences from the evidence of my senses.
If you mean to say that we know these virtues are in some sense “true” just because Aristotle revealed them to us, that would be to say then that had Aristotle extolled the virtues of “drunkenness, wrath, gossip, slander, fortune-telling, cowardice, drug abuse, fornication, and suicide,” you would now be equally a devotee of those virtues; you would have no way of telling the difference. I suspect that is not the position that you would take.
The only alternative, then, is that you can in some sense claim to know, in an objective way, that these virtues are correct, regardless of what Aristotle wrote; Aristotle deserves credit only for being the first to say what can be known by natural reason and observation, for example the observation that those who exemplify the Aristotelian values lead happier lives, or societies composed of those who exemplify those values are more stable and prosperous.
Aha. This is a definitional confusion. Triumphalism is the attitude or belief that a particular doctrine, religion, culture, or social system is superior to and should triumph over all others. I am a Catholic triumphalist. I believe the doctrines I follow are superior. When I say Atheists are triumphalist, I am saying that they do not believe it is good for any man to follow any other philosophy or way of life.
I give you credit for both sneering and for pretending umbrage when I point out that you are sneering. Your insouciance is admirable. I add one crackpot comment to your crackpot score for each such comment.
I also give you credit for correctly stating that if we do not take Aristotle on faith, we claim to know by some independent means a truth of which he is a discoverer. This is a sober comment, so I will subtract one crackpot comment from your crackpot score and take you seriously.
Hence I ask most seriously, on what ground of epistemology (whether observation of material elements or deductions from first principles or some other ground) do we know the classical virtues to be virtuous?
Or, in the alternate, if we know Aristotle’s formulation of the virtues to be inaccurate or false, on what ground do we know that?
I submit that the utility of virtue cannot be known by observation, or known solely by observation, since how we categorize human conduct is not itself open to observation. If a warrior from Borneo and missionary both witness an act of cannibalism, and the warrior calls it right and the missionary calls it wrong, they can agree on all sense data, such as the temperature of the flesh when consumed, the species of the cannibal’s victim and so on, but disagree on in which category to put the act. Likewise if a determinist and an indeterminist see an act which the one thinks deliberate and the other thinks beyond any control.
I further submit that even if such utility were known, no observation can logically lead to the conclusion that because something is useful ergo it should adopted as a moral imperative.
And on this basis I ask whether arguments and conclusions about the nature of the virtues are temporal or eternal? Are such arguments and conclusions tied to certain observations of certain times and places, or can any sober thinker anywhere in theory (barring accidents) come to true conclusions about this subject matter?
J.C.Wright: On the other hand, the self-indulgence in vice … is not “progress” over and above Aristotelian and classical notions of self-control and temperance ….
Actually, modern neuroscience supports Aristotelian temperance over the modern slavery to the appetites; viz., the “vulcanization” of neural pathways by repetition. Those neural pathways associated with indulgence of the sensory appetites originate in more primitive parts of the brain and, when “vulcanized,” override or interfere with patterns originating in the neural cortex. That is, they inhibit rational thought. Since man is a “rational animal,” this means that libertine behavior tends to make one less human, and this is objectively bad.
+ + +
Bum: I can draw scientific conclusions about your preferences from the evidence of my senses.
Actually, you cannot. There are always multiple explanations for observations. A person may act contrary to his preferences because there may be other preferences. That Adam hands over his money to Bruce may mean that Adam prefers that Bruce have the money. But it may also mean that Bruce has a gun, or the power of the State, or feels a social pressure to contribute to an office birthday pool, or….. There is no way to tell from the physical actions alone.
Because Mr. Wright seems obsessed not only with counting my “crackpot score” but also communicating that score, an exercise I find tedious, I will take the hint and respond in my own venue. You are free to join the discussion there if you choose.
I meant the crackpot score as a lighthearted way to remind you to stick to the topic, if you were interested in a serious discussion rather than interested in nothing more than displaying a set of vain imaginings, cracking jokes, scoffing, hooting, and so on. It was also meant to drive away anyone not interested in a serious discussion. I did not mean it to offend.
I suggest you study history. Far from a hostility, the Catholic church had for centuries funded scientific research and had gleefully continued the march of scientific progress.
In fact, much of the supposed conflict between the church and science has been manufactured in the decades since the American Civil War. A lot of it is outright fabrication. Steven Jay Gould does some documentation of this in his book Rocks of Ages.
I will note that hostility can coexist with cooperation. Showing instances of cooperation does not falsify instances of hostility. As Machiavelli (and others) note, no human or human institution is ever wholly good nor wholly bad. Even Hitler had his warm and sympathetic moments. I will also note that I was not referring specifically to Catholicism. I will acknowledge at least that the relationship between science and the Catholic church have been complicated, and one cannot honestly say that the Catholic church has been hostile to every scientific advance, without exception.
In any event, the idea that statements about the world can be held true or false by virtue of scripture or revelation is entirely at odds with scientific naturalism. To the extent that scientific naturalism must deny any epistemic privilege to every prophet, priest, and church, I cannot imagine any religious authority entirely embracing scientific naturalism.
What we now consider Catholicism was Christianity in the West for over a thousand years. Yes, you had the Eastern Orthodox, but that was it.
If someone was Christian in France in the 1100s, they were Catholic, and if they were Catholic, they were Christian.
(As a pagan, I find myself constantly amazed at the number of professed Christians who do not know this fact).
In either case, I refer again to Gould’s book, and his concept of magisteria.
And before the 1000′s the Orthodox and the Catholic were one church. In those days, the schismatics lived in areas since overrun by Muslims (another heresy, this one external rather than internal). The Nestorians and Monophysites of Libya and Egypt had broken away during disputes over the Nicene Council and after. As far as I know, the Malabar and Syriac Churches have never been in communion with the Ecumenical Church of the Roman Empire.
Just so we are clear: “Scientific Naturalism” is a philosophical posture concerning questions of epistemology and ontology, having nothing to with the scientific method. Agreed?
Congratulations. Another sober comment. Let me ask a sober question.
Can you name five scientific advances to which the Catholic Church has been hostile? And I mean the official magisterium of the Church, not the rantings of some crackpot who happened to be Catholic. And I mean advances in science, that is, in theoretical knowledge of the natural world and the applied knowledge of technology. If the Church opposes gassing Jews in ovens, this does not count as being ‘opposed’ to the science of genetics or the technology of plumbing, pipefitting or oven-making. In such cases it is the goal sought that the Church opposes, not the scientific or unscientific means used.
I can name five instances where the Catholic Church opposed slavery, starting with the sermon preached by St Gregory of Nicaea in AD 379, condemning the institution of slavery in and of itself. His contemporary St. John Chrysostom Patriarch of Constantinople, preached on the same theme. In 873, John VIII wrote to the rulers of Sardinia, ordering them to restore freedom to slaves bought from the Greeks. Pope Eugene IV condemned slavery in the Canary Islands in 1435 and ordered immediate manumission. In 1462 Pius II issued a condemnation of the slave trade. Other Popes condemning slavery included Gregory XIV (1591); Innocent XI (1686); Benedict XIV (1741), and Pius VII (1815). In 1537, Paul III excommunicated those who enslaved the Indians of America and confiscated their property. In 1838, Gregory XVI condemned all forms of colonial slavery and the slave trade.
Considering that the Church has been soundly and repeatedly condemned for her lukewarmness in abolishing the slavetrade, that I can list twice the number of instances of opposition to it than I am asking you to provide of her opposition to science is telling.
If the Catholic Church was at least as opposed to scientific advance as she is to slavery, then you should be able to come up with a list of five with minimal effort.
I’m not an historian; I have no particular position on the historical character of the Catholic church. As I mentioned in my previous post, I refer to the hostility of religion in general (which, in the present day, includes Creationism, Protestantism, Islam, Mormonism, as well as many other even weirder religions) in a specifically philosophical sense. But for all I know, the Catholic church is a wonderful bunch of guys. Regardless, I don’t recognize their moral, ethical, or epistemic authority.
I would say that the scientific method is definitely an important component of scientific naturalism. See my post I linked to above for more information.
It is the alleged hostility of religion in general I question. Of your list that rejects science, only Creationism and arguable Islam fits on that list.
The scientific method can and is used by any number of people who, with no self-inconsistency, are not materialists and do not hold that the scientific method is the only method of reasoning available to the human mind.
Since you cannot name five examples of hostility between the Roman Church and scientific progress, I hope you will be man enough to admit this is a hasty judgment of yours, which, discovering it has no foundation, you without further ado will rectify.
Bum: I cannot imagine any religious authority entirely embracing scientific naturalism.
You need not imagine; you need only study. A tour:
or running ahead, a modern echo of William of Conches….
Scientific naturalism in fact arose from the doctrine of secondary causation and the machina mundi (“the universe as a machine”) originated by this religious tradition. Insofar as explaining “the common course of nature” only the powers of nature were to be invoked.
Scientific naturalism, obviously, does not apply outside of natural science.
Hope this helps your imagination.
rushing as a flood of offal and sewerage over the lip of the edge of sanity into the unrelieved darkness of an unechoing abyss called nihilism.
Sure, I love your gentle understatments.
The success of the natural sciences have nothing to do with the supposed clarity of atheism. They are non-intersecting sets. The main problem has to do with explaining why the natural sciences have been so successful. E.g., on what basis can we ground the expectation that Nature behaves in a lawful manner? It cannot be mere experience, since as atheists like Hume and Russell have assured us, no finite set of observations can ever establish a truth. That a methodology that restricts itself to the metric properties of material bodies is unable to find non-metric properties of material bodies, let alone non-material bodies, is no more astonishing than that a metal detector cannot find wood.
Does nature behave in a lawful manner?
Quantum mechanics with its interpretation of uncaused fundamental processes amount essentially to a confusion of being and non-being, as Father Jaki pointed out. He was not heard by even theistic physicists, such as Prof Barr who use the quantum indeterminacy to argue for existence of immaterial minds (as if the classical arguments to the effect were wrong).
I hope you will not take offense if I refrain from participating further in this discussion. I am not going to present myself as a member of a class whose members views I can be pretty certain I share none of except for on this single question. The mention of Harris and the statement that religion and philosophy are “outmoded by modern progress” already tells me I’d be ditching one side to go to the other.
And I hope you will not take offense if I urge you to reconsider, and to participate in the discussion and remind us of how level-headed and sober an atheist can be.
Alright, thanks. But I have to wonder how level headed and sober people think I would be when I am making devil horns at my own side. Let me be more blunt. I, with rare exceptions, do not like atheists, and think what comes out of 98% of their mouths is s*h*i*t*. That includes the entirety of the New Atheists “Brights” and whatever fashionable hipsters of the moment make such mockery of their own souls as to treat it with the same gravity as the latest escapades of the Kardashians.
But, lest anyone think I am bipolar, remember that Robert Tilton is in your camp! Ha! Ha!
Worse than that, Judas Iscariot and the Devil Himself are in our camp, not to mention every Borgia Pope and lying hypocrite who believes in God. The Devil believes God exists.
No, the Church is the terminal ward for sinners, not the playground of the healthy and sinless men. We are not astonished to find men of despicable character in our midst. We hold it to be a divine miracle that our Church still exists, considering that it is formed all of men of despicable character. We are Christians because we are sinners, like all Sons of Adam.
The paradox here is that the “brights” are not bright because they are sinners, but because they regard themselves (intellectually, at least) as saints, as superior people. The difference between their self assessment of their intellectual capacities and the reality is comical, and shocking. Many of them — I am tempted to say most — cannot even perform the simplest of mental operations, such as defining their terms, using a syllogism, answering an argument, or perform the simplest of moral operations, such as keeping one’s even temper during an intellectual discussion.
Arguably, atheism is default for humanity, theism being an elite or at most, a respectable opinion.
Buddhism, about which Chesterton wrote so ignorantly, is atheist, having no God.
Much of Hinduism is atheist and all of Africa and New World too.
A belief in supernatural does not make one a theist.
Very arguably. Such an arugment:
1. Presumes no such thing as the Garden, and that
2. Man did not begin with an awareness that he was very small, or that
3. Strange, whimsical forces ruled his life from the very beginning.
Hurrah, I suppose.
The theists presume the Garden, the atheists have no need for this hypothesis.
“Strange, whimsical forces ruled his life from the very beginning.”
They do.
To beg the question, you have to make an argument. “Theists” did not just make this argument. You did. Therefore you begged the question and “theists” did not.
Buddhism is “atheist” only in the same way New Age belief is atheist, in that the godhead in which all souls participate is transcendent but not immanent. I am not a Buddhist nor an expert in Buddhism, but I have been to a Zendo, read their sacred writings, talked to those who know more than I, and they are most definitively not atheists in any legitimate sense of the term. Atheism is logically incompatible with a world ruled by gods and spirits and ghosts, and chained in endless cycles of reincarnation, enlightened by saints who return from higher worlds to instruct the benighted, and lit by a rapturous vision of reunion with divinity.
There is a place in Buddhist sacred writings where the Enlightened One speaks of indifference to questions of whether the soul is mortal or immortal, but I (and others) interpret that to be a rebuke against he who would ponder philosophy rather than meditate to free himself from self-illusion.
Chesterton knew whereof he spoke. Perhaps you are the ignorant one.
“Arguably, atheism is default for humanity”
I’ve never, ever heard it argued anywhere. So, at least, perhaps the argument that a primeval atheism is a default position is not itself a default.
And if it were a tradition, it seems atheism is a tradition in the sense that wearing diapers is a tradition – it seems to be one almost reflexively discarded in the presence of philosophies more complimentary to human development.
Actually, Larry the Barefoot bum might be more willing to listen to you than to me, since he seems to be suffering a number of comically simplistic ideas about religious folk. Maybe you can convert him from braindead materialism to thoughtful Objectivism. I mean no offense, but I regard your philosophy as much higher on the great Ladder of Socratic Truth than his.
Well, I don’t gamble, but I would be willing to do a gentleman’s philosophical wager.
Let’s ask Larry the Barefoot Bum what worldview he would choose if only able to choose between yours and mine.
I predict this on the basis of my general experience, not so much on Larry the Barefoot Bum of whom I know quite little.
I predict he would 1. reject both out of hand but with some derisive comment about Rand personally or the Randroid comment, or the other knee-slappers 2. take your faith with some derisive comment about Rand personally or the Randroid comment, or the other knee-slappers.
And if he is a materialist, I don’t even speak the same language. What do I say to someone who does not believe in soul, or, at least, Mind, and the derivatives such as knowledge and free-will etc? A materialist is only the other side of the coin that a complete idealist occupies. The man that says everything is merely the figment of some consciousness’ imagination (like a solipsist) is countered by his brother that all that exists is material in motion.
Kicking the rock isn’t going to prove the point to the idealist, anymore than the materialist will believe that you decided to lift your arm. Except for the intervention of a miracle that I don’t believe in, these are terminal philosophical positions that are damned near irreversible.
I haven’t tried to convert someone in years upon years, it is a miserable little act of Kantian self-sacrifice. I put it out there, but as an active pursuit – nope, I’ll take the cross over that.
Interestingly the most impossible person to convert was an ex-Catholic. I tried to convert my wife (when I was an ass and we were still young) who went to some 12 years of Catholic school and Catechism class (I think that is what she called it). She didn’t disagree with the ideas so much, but you were not bringing her under anything – no school, no unified anything, no orthodoxy – uh-uh, no.
Well, the point is moot, since Larry seems to have found my toting up the tally of which comments were serious and which were not too offensive, or, perhaps, tedious. It is too bad, since he had seventeen left to go, and could lower the tally at any time by making any comment logically related to the topic. I assume everyone does this sort of think unconsciously, deciding who is worth answering and who is not, but it was in questionable taste on my part to have done so consciously.
I think it is bad taste. Imagine if your good wife started scoring your own comments, with a public tally.
But poor you. You starts out writing an apology to atheists and, when Larry the Atheist shows up, you proceed to scare him away with rude displays of logic and of vulgar rationality.
Let us remember Larry for his inimitable mots.
For example, the Riemann Hypothesis denies the existence of certain zeros: it is a negative statement. Thus, it has no consequences.
I don’t dare ask what are “modern values”. I am too young to be exposed to such things.
On the good side of the Catholic Church.
Oops, how did that slip in?
But see what Larry is doing here? When he can’t marshal any facts in support of his beliefs, he is still sure that all the experts support him.
And here I thought that was a wife’s job in life!
Ah, but my error was in overgeneralization. I was arguing that atheism causes pride because it overthrows all previous tradition; but the same argument could be leveled against the Antenicene Fathers, who defied the Imperial civilization of Rome and all the pagan wisdom and sorrow of their ancestors, and with baptism washed aeons away.
I was not arguing that some men are jerks. Heck, I am a jerk myself.
I just spent a little time on his site. I was exactly right. There is no freaking way I’m touching that. It would be a hideous Kantian self-sacrifice, pure nihilism.
Alas, you are too insightful for the good of your own philosophy, sir! We Christians expend tremendous effort to proselytize our belief to young and old, crooked and straight, wise and foolish, high and low — but what can a poor believer in a doctrine of enlightened selfishness do when asked to work without reward to save another man’s soul? What can he do but scoff?
I am sure there is some Darwinian principle at work here, where any “meme” (as the materialists call all ideas save their own) which has the mental equivalent of a reproductive mechanism, an imperative to spread itself, much outpace the more refined and self-centered memes.
But all kidding aside, you are bolder man than I am. I had not the heart to go look at his blog. I’ve been disappointed by materialists crackpots before, and modernists, and subjectivists.
I an no longer a fan of Ayn Rand, but I salute her for her precise and insightful autopsy of the spiritual nature of the semi-savage creatures who call themselves modern intellectuals: they are looters of the realm of ideas, second-hand thinkers, kleptomaniacs of ideas who want the prestige of being deep thinkers without doing the actual hard work of, you know, thinking. (I am not saying Larry is one such as these; but I do suspect he is, because one too many of his comments implied or echoed with their crackpot illogic.)
In short, I do not mind, and in many ways respect, atheism as a philosophy. It is atheism as a religion I hold in contempt, men who worship rather than use the intellect. The whole point of atheism is that you bow to nothing but logical necessity, and worship nothing, and hold man to be the measure of all things.
Am I wrong about my definition? Has the definition of atheism changed since I left your camp? I do not see how anyone who worships inanimate matter as a god can have any respect for Man.
I used to proselytize all the time. The open hostility and vacuous ad hominem was the entirety of my experience. Never really got to a discussion of ideas – Objectivist or otherwise.
As to the definition of atheism, I think that is a good question. There seems to be some confusion on what we mean by the term. If you think it would have a benefit of some kind, it may pay to have it ironed out.
I would say this much. A bunch of mal-informed have swarmed in under this banner and made it sort of fashionable to certain people. Out of ignorance they have made it a faith.
The people who occupy the religious camp have not helped. What stands out there in many people’s minds is the Bakkers, Swaggerts, and Osama, the Church’s not so great PR about its problem priests (and yes, I have seen the statistics, but their pr is still terrible), etc, etc.
What I usually understand most users of the term “atheism” to mean is this: The belief that no conscious, self-aware beings exist in the universe which are not physical material entities, or not subject to the physical laws of the material universe. Entailed in this belief is usually the following sub-beliefs:
- Attribution of information claims, moral principle, or moral superiority intrinsically deserving of reverence and submission, to any such presumed supernatural entity is a category error by definition;
- Attribution of individual events in the universe, or the existence of the universe as a whole, to the actions of any such presumed supernatural entity is a category error by definition;
- Attribution of human decisions and experiences to a presumed supernatural aspect of human awareness/existence (the “soul”) is likewise a definitional category error.
This is meant to account for the fact that most Western atheists I’ve read are almost always eliminative materialists as well.
I suppose you could be an atheist if you believed in the supernatural but not the Judeo-Christian concept of God — perhaps a variant on Gnosticism where the Godhead was metaphorically understood as the self, or something, or a postmodern pagan who believed in the literal existence of powerful transphysical beings known as “gods” but denied that they needed or deserved to be revered by humans. But I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who I knew to actually fall under these definitions.
“But I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who I knew to actually fall under these definitions.”
Really? I thought it basically went without saying that this agnosticism is the perennial posture of belief that most people, religious or otherwise but especially Christian folks, find themselves in most of the time.
You’ve said some pretty overblown things on this site in the past, but then you go out of your way to demonstrate that you know exactly what you’re talking about. Bravo, RJW.
Actually there is a clue as to Larry’s views on Christians vs Randians on his website. And I quote…
Ah, I am below a murderous religion of mad men. F’ing typical. Mr. Wright gets the job of conversion then? Very good, I’ll be drooling in a corner somewhere!
LARRY: THE ORIGIN
So, I’m in the bank, looking to make a withdrawal, see. And the teller says my account is empty. Cleaned out. Busted. No dollars exist in my account.
Well, now, of course, I realize that it doesn’t matter. The non-existence of something, like God or of cash or of a girlfriend or of personal hygiene; these have no consequences. You cannot deduce anything at all about the universe as it actually is, as opposed to the Omega-cardinality, Aleph-null, continuum hypothesis [insert more poorly-understood science jargon here] infinity of counterfactual possible worlds. That’s just so obvious.
Perhaps 500 or even 200 years ago, this insight might have required exceptional integrity and clarity, but today, now that we have scientific naturalism , one merely needs to observe. Nothing can be deduced from a negative statement…at least not easily, not without thinking a bit. And thinking burns. It burns, I say!
But, for some reason, there in the bank, I didn’t quite grasp these consoling insights, so plain to me now. My heart began to pound. Spots danced before my eyes. “Are you all right, sir” cried the teller. She pushed an alarm. The security guard approached.
I groped in my pocket for my meds. My precious heart pills. But the bottle was empty. I was out. My cardiac meds did not exist.
Well, of course, the non-existence of my heart medication could not possibly have any consequences. How could anything, anything real, be deduced from non-existence? But for some reason, my knees buckled. It all went black. And blessed oblivion, consequence-free unconsciousness rolled over me.
Now I am on the Neurology ward. The doctors whisper that my case is unique. A focal infarct, they say, leaving my reason entirely intact, except for an inability to draw conclusions from statements when they are phrased in the negative. They say there is hope for recovery. They want me to return to my blog. I need to explain that atheism is the null hypothesis. So, of course, there is no God. I say that in my heart, over and over, with each beat. But when I try to list the consequences of atheism, I just stop. There aren’t any consequences. There can’t be.
You are seriously my favorite poster here.
Mine, too.
For more goodness, click here, especially here, here, here, here, even here, a slighter one here, a whole string beginning here, several here, here and immediately afterward, and one last one here for good measure.
Finishing it off, here’s a classic.
Ah! And a few more. There’re two here with a follow-up here, another here, two more here, a more serious one here, another here, here, here, and one very last one here.
This should be understood to only represent his most interesting, droll, or laugh-out-loud output, and only on this version of this blog. Still, it’s fairly substantial.
Delightful!
Well, gosh! Shucks. (Blushes).
I actually think I was a little harsh on Larry. I now think he was just trying to say something like “The breadth of comprehension in such a use of the term [atheism] admits of divisions and cross-divisions being framed under it”. I am in complete agreement with this. (The quotation is taken from the Catholic Encyclopedia.)
But , Larry made an overly-broad denial that anything much can be deduced from negatives. Then, I looked at his blog entry on Mr Wright and he seems to state rather tersely that atheism must be true because it is the null hypothesis.
He has now, in a new entry, fleshed this out to an argument that tries to estimate the probability of God’s existence by Bayesian calculation. I think there are problems with his argument but at least it is an argument.
So, maybe he just expressed himself unclearly, and doesn’t deserve the full satirical treatment.
Eid mubarak to you all!
He pulled the Bayesian thingie from Richard Carrier, who thinks he has discovered something wonderful. Other philosophers have used Bayesian statistics to show that there probably is a God, so you pays yer money and you takes yer chances.
Statisticians laugh themselves silly over it, if it crosses their radar screen at all: http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=5404