"I am an atheist, although less confident in my atheism than most."
This reminded me of an eye opening incident I had around a decade ago. My brother asked me "What would make me believe in God?" it has concerned me, from then until now, that I do not have an answer to this question.
Most scenarios I can think of I would explain with hallucination or some other flaw of the human mind.
I like to consider myself open minded, but in some sense I couldn't be more closed minded. I can't even conceive of a way my mind could be changed on what many believe to be the most important question.
If I died and found myself in an afterlife that more or less fit conventional descriptions I might suspect for a while that it was a dream, but would eventually find it convincing. Short of that, a pattern of unlikely response to prayer would eventually shift my priors.
Or, of course, a really good argument that had never occurred to me.
Was just thinking about this again, you say you'd eventually find it convincing if you were in an afterlife that more or less fit the conventional descriptions.
If it didn't fit any of the descriptions of earthly religions, that would be better evidence for some sort of afterlife. It wouldn't be that surprisingly that a malfunctioning mind would dream the idea of heaven they were raised to believe in (my late grandmother had such an experience near the end of her life), but it seems unlikely that it would create a completely novel experience.
It seems plausible that I after a certain amount of time in the afterlife, even by an unconventional or non-existent description, I would start to believe in the supernatural.
Saying that, I have experienced significant time dilation on psychedelics so I can also imagine chalking it down to a flaw of the human mind either. Occam's razor would lean me towards believing a natural phenomena I have experience before rather than a supernatural experience which raises significantly more questions.
I guess the main issue is, I think insanity is more likely than the existence of a supernatural God. If my prayers just kept working reliably in seemingly impossible ways I'd think I was dreaming or insane?
I also appreciated this line. I have always felt like I understood atheists quite well, despite my lifetime adherence to a religious worldview and frequent practice. I could easily say, "I am a theist, although less confident in my theism than most." I have always felt that the choice between atheism and theism is not so much a matter of incontrovertible evidence one way or the other, but a personal choice; or even an expression of individualized metaphysical preference.
Do you read much about physicalist theories of consciousness? The two of greatest appeal to me are field theories of consciousness and Integrated Information Theory. My perspective is essentially that consciousness is both a physical phenomenon and an information processing schema, somewhere between these two types of theories, because this is what satisfies my intuition.
In Yudkowsky's sequences, he talks briefly about how nihilistic despair in the face of physicalism is prematurely reductive. We think that if things were physical, they would "merely" be physical. But the idea of "merely" is our own addition. It is not actually present. It is my opinion that everything we need to be there is there so it's our expectations that need to be managed.
As for moral realism, I think if you really bite the bullet on physicalism you realize that there are a bounded range of things people can want and enjoy. There is still no objective basis to prioritize them, but there are many mechanically objective systems for it. Furthermore, since most people want and would enjoy other people getting most of what they want and enjoy, the problem mostly takes care of itself, recursively, starting from almost anywhere. This is messy in the real world but individuals can seek to improve the situation if they so choose.
The fear that any moral system is possible is unrealistic if moral systems are limited to those compatible with physics, or more specific constraints like biology or human nature.
Why is theistic universal salvation not an option? God creates all things, some creatures need hell as plan B, since plan A didn’t bring them to God, and so God lets them feel the consequences of their actions, and has created the world in such a way where eventually, all people choose God? Hell is universal purgatory. There were plenty of Christian universalists in history, including several saints (Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzen, Maximus the Confessor, Isaac of Syria) and modern theologians (Sergius Bulgakov, Jacques Ellul, Jürgen Moltmann, David Hart). It’s a much better response to the problem of evil and suffering if eventually everything that God created is brought into union with Himself. There would be no waste in creation.
Understood. But as a market anarchist with other unconventional views, you know better than most that the minority report is often the best. George MacDonald, Lewis’s guide in The Great Divorce was another passionate universalist. As wonderful as Lewis was, I wish MacDonald had convinced him on this.
You don't think he did? You probably know Lewis's writing better than I do, but I view _The Great Divorce_ as leaving it open whether anyone at all remains in Hell/purgatory permanently.
So far as my position is concerned, if my first guess turns out to be wrong I have no basis for deciding which version of the second guess is most likely. C.S. Lewis and GKC were admirable intellects but so was Maimonides and probably others in other religious traditions I haven't read.
Honestly, I’ve never read all the way through The Great Divorce. I know a lot more about universalism than I do Lewis. I just remember seeing quotes from him about how he wished he could do away with the doctrine of eternal damnation but he saw it as taught in scripture. Looking briefly online, it looks like you’re right about The Great Divorce. Maybe he can be classified as a hopeful universalist. https://www.tentmaker.org/biographies/cs-lewis.htm
The problem with Christian morality is that it espouses a repulsive collectivist and inverted moral code:
Collectivist because "Christ died for our sins!" In other words, any sin by any human both before and since his death caused or contributed to his murder by Herod.
Inverted because "god the father", as supreme judge of morality, views that all our collective sins are absolved, not by any punishment we receive, but because of a punishment (torture and death) of an innocent man.
Organized religion is an evolved adaptation supporting group cohesion and control. It operates as a mass delusion: even the leaders are true believers. The particulars of the doctrines are not relevant as long as they maintain a collective sense of fear and guilt.
You don’t have a problem with Christian morality, you have a problem with A Christian morality. Eastern Christian thought posits nothing of what you just described.
I think you should re-read what you wrote and make the necessary edits; I don't think you said what you meant to say. The first sentence is "Not A and A".
No, still looks right to me, though since there are no italics, I did add capitalization. There are many Christian moralities just as there are many Buddhisms and Islams. I have just as much of a problem with the Christian morality that he was speaking of as he does, and yet I am a Christian. Just one that subscribes to none of the beliefs he noted. The East has never had much patience for penal substitutionary atonement or a vengeful God. It’s good to be specific when one says “Christianity.” While there are commonalities across the board in some vital areas (the divinity and resurrection of Christ, the Trinity), there are significant divergences in others.
So you mean barry has a problem with one Christian morality but not with a different Christian morality? I can't help thinking there would have been a clearer way to express that, but all I can do is opine.
"One is atheism: There are no gods..." That is not how I understand atheism. Atheism = a-theism = lack of theistic belief. Similarly, I take "agnostic" NOT to mean "I'm not sure if there is a god" but rather "I do not know (cannot know) whether there is a god."
Even if you take atheism to mean a positive belief that there are no gods, the argument from evil is not as you put it in the first paragraph an argument for atheism. It is an argument against the existence of the Christian god. Obviously, that leaves many other gods as possibilities. There is no reason to believe in any of these but neither is there a strong disproof if they lack the omni-qualities of the Christian god.
As some put it: A Christian (Muslim, etc.) is an atheist about all gods but one.
Max, are you familiar with the concept of divine simplicity? Or David Bentley Hart’s “Being, Consciousness, Bliss”? God is not one god among others. Within Hinduism, the gods come forth FROM God, or Brahman, who is being, consciousness, bliss itself. The greek gods are not God, and neither are the gods of the Hindu pantheon. They presuppose a much more primordial and transcendental ground to existence than you indicate. This is God.
I wrote a couple of comments (before I read your comment) with a similar idea -- that the "god" of religion have no equivalent in the dharmas. We have "Sat, Chit, Ananda" -- translated "Existence, Consciousness, Bliss" -- which is the ultimate reality of Brahman.
The three religions -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- have essentially the same answer to life, the universe and everything. It starts with a god (only one, please) who created the world (about several thousand square miles) about 6,000 years ago; and created everything (that was known by people in the middle east around four thousand years ago) in it; then encoded the morality into commandments (that essentially say "obey and worship me or you suffer my wrath"), and then sits around judging people.
In contrast to that, the three dharmas -- Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism -- don't have any concept of god that is even roughly equivalent to the god of the religions. They don't have a god dictating commandments, don't have god judging and handing out rewards and punishments.
The three dharmas are often called "religions" but they are not religions. The devatas are often known as god or gods but they aren't that.
Westerners have a good understanding of the religions but know very little about the dharmas, and what is worse, what they know about the dharmas is mostly wrong.
I find discussions about god and hell and morality fascinating. It's like the serious discussions that people used to have about the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin; total waste of time. But you'd not think that if you believed in angels.
The point of this comment is that there's another, radically different, way of thinking about existence, about sentient beings, about morality, about consciousness. Perhaps it is worth a look; or perhaps it is not.
You are doing the same thing with angels dancing on the head of a pin that you complain about Westerners doing wrt the dharmas. Insofar as it was ever anything more than a Protestant slander of Catholic theologians it was a question that did not depend on belief an angels.
The Rig Veda, composed about 3,500 years ago, asks where did the universe come from. The "Hymn to Creation" ends thus:
“Who knows for certain? Who shall here declare it? Whence was it born? Whence came creation? The Gods are later than this world’s formation. Who then can know the origins of the world? None knows whence creation arose or whether he has or has not made it – he who surveys it from the highest regions. Only he knows, or perhaps he knows not.”
My take is Atheism and theism are both matters of faith, not testable, not provable. Hence the only reasonable, rational logical position is agnosticism, damnedifIknow.
Such would I think, be unarguable if all that we experience in the world, in the universe can be rationally, logically, reasonably explained.
I have to admit I've had many experiences that defy rational explanation, which has made me less confident in my agnosticism than most.
Theism makes a specific claim: the existence of god. Atheists say, "I don't see any evidence of the existence of god." The burden of proof therefore rests on theists.
I believe that the teapot that once belonged to Russell is now in orbit around the sun somewhere between the earth and Mars. I am a teapotist. Will you say that people who don't believe me -- the ateapotists -- have to prove that Russell's teapot does not exist?
While I happen to mostly agree with you, at minimum people can be far to one side of agnosticism or far to the other side. I’m pretty close to DF’s side.
Being certain, I agree, is indeed a faith, and demonstrates at least some lack of epistemic humility.
My father, who described himself as an agnostic, had about the same views I do. I switched to describing myself as an atheist after being persuaded by George Smith that an atheist was someone who believed God didn't exist, not someone who was certain God doesn't exist. I believe lots of things of which I am not certain — for instance that I will still be alive next year.
I describe myself as an agnostic thisclose to atheist. So perhaps a distinction without a difference.
It would be fascinating to know what percentage of atheists fall under Smith’s definition, versus are certain - or at least proclaim a high degree of certainty that - God doesn’t exist.
A quick ChatGPT and google search led me to this decidedly non-definitive piece which *suggests* it is a minority position among atheists:
In Euthyphro, Plato attributed the classic argument against divine command theory to Socrates. In that dialogue, Socrates raises an interesting problem. A modern version of that problem is this: “Is an act right (or wrong) because God says so or does God say so because the act is right (or wrong)?” (For the sake of argument, I'll assume that the God of the Bible exists.) God could not have used “Because God says so” as his reason for believing that any given act is right or wrong. Either he had no reason at all or he had some reason independent of himself. The first alternative implies that God is arbitrary. If there is no reason for God's decision, it's just a matter of whim. If he had said it's morally obligatory to torture infants, we'd be morally obligated to torture infants. All inquiry into matters of right and wrong would end there for those who share that belief system. The second alternative implies that some acts would be right or wrong even if God did not exist and that God had reasons for his decision that we can seek to discover. If we discover what those reasons are, we can understand why certain acts are right or wrong and persuade others who may not share our religious beliefs.
Well my point is, how would you know that as Adam and Eve? It honestly reads as "God was working on creation. He got bored with deterministic beings like angels, and decided to build in some randomness in order to make things spicier. During his test run the final test of the new prototype was to check and see if they would do this thing he told them not to. He told one of his deterministic creations, the snake, to tell them to do this thing with neutral moral valence, and He told them not to. They ignored him. Test success! Now lets try and work on developing morality."
It just occurred to me as I was reading your article that it's fascinating that the very first commandment had neutral moral valence at face value as an action. Everything else lines up with morality or health or psychological health, and is generally beneficial in some way if followed, but this first test? It seems like a setup. And I wouldn't be the first one to point out, how could Adam and Eve know which of the two beings to listen to? The guy they walk and talk with, or the talking snake?
I think I subscribe to a kindof, sortof moral realism, tempered by the problem that in many cases, good and evil are contextual or worse. Too often, what helps one entity harms another, and the entities concerned naturally prefer to be the ones that benefit.
Is a god "good" if they destroy my enemies, and bestow all their property on me and my team? I'm pretty sure that my now deceased enemies would never think so. I may really like this god, and do whatever they want, hoping they'll continue to act as part of my team. I may even get together with my teammates and compose hymns praising this god's goodness and righteousness ... that might be useful for team cohesion, or for encouraging this god to continue to favor us. But that wouldn't make this god "good" in what I'd consider a useful moral sense.
We can find cases that are obviously evil (good is more difficult), and sometimes rank order selected examples on the good-evil dimension. So it seems as if there's something there, even if it's only an artefact of evolutionarily evolved human brain wiring. But when you poke it, it gets less and less coherent. And IMNSHO, when you create an overriding single principle to define good/evil, such as utillitarianism, you wind up with nonsense, much like any other "hedgehog" - whatever principle you pick.
Slightly tangential but there's actually a fairly decent exploration of morality in the pathfinder universe in planecrash, the most recent work of rationalist fiction by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
I think you’re overlooking how deep-rooted religious traditions are. They are not just going to bend to simple economic fixes, like viewing Hell as a behavioral nudge. People don’t believe in Hell because it’s a neat game theory construct. They believe it because it fits into their ideas about justice and a god's plan. Your fix sounds like something a rational person would come up with, not how someone with genuine faith would deal with the issue.
You make a valid point that just saying God exists doesn't really answer how we figure out what is right and wrong. Divine command theory just moves the question to why we think God's will is good. But the other side isn't completely clear either: if morals aren’t objective, are they just preferences?
I'll echo Max's comment that "the minority report is often the best."
One thing that's always frustrated me with many (but not all) atheists is how they'll take on the premises of the people they think are wrong when contemplating God, when they'd never do that for any other subject of contemplation. I'd analogize it to saying I don't believe in money because I disagree with most economists.
I believe in God in an experiential sort of way that's fairly closely tied to those moral instincts of right and wrong that you discuss. And my biggest heresy is probably that I believe "omnipotence only goes so far", that even God is dealing with a substantial reality where God might be able to do everything that's doable, but is nonetheless bound by cause and effect rather than dictating the effects of each cause. That pretty much does away with any paradoxes that require theodicy; God's not sending anyone to Hell so much as God's just suffering to save beloved people from the natural consequences of their own actions.
Scripture and much of theology are largely descriptivist--others sharing their experience of God and trying to make sense of it. I don't let attempts to discern true metaphysics bog me down when engaging with God any more than I let attempting to discern true physics stop me from engaging with the physical world; there's a point where model agnosticism is necessary for taking away the useful bits, whether we're talking about Newton or St. Paul.
Anyway, it's the "suffering to save beloved people from the natural consequences of their own actions" that really forms the core of what's so distinctive about Christianity as an ideological framework; it inverts so many of our other moral intuitions, but it's also something we can observe in action and value in practice. Please don't get so hung up on theological propositions you reject, that you miss out on that observable and valuable core.
"...without God they have no basis for morality, no way to know that some acts would be evil or to care, no reason to refrain from committing them."
I would assert that morality is an essentially societal construct. A shipwrecked man on an otherwise uninhabited island has no need of morality in any normal sense.
This gives us our basis for morality; our actions engender reactions by other people in our community. That feedback gets encoded into rules for living that we call morals.
Now, any given society may have its own unique set of these rules; as a result, two societies in competition will select for one set of mores over the other. Over time, those societies with the "best" morals will supplant the others. To put it another way, any given moral rule can be considered a meme (e.g., don't take other people's things) and, at a societal level, those memes evolve.
My personal suspicion is that this mechanism is the source of the Ten Commandments, along with the rest of Judeo-Christian moral philosophy. That philosophy doesn't work well because it's right; it's right because it works well (enough).
In this context, "best" is whatever displaces the competitors. I would define "working" to be "producing results that lead to the long-term survival of the society".
There is an alternate history series by S.M. Stirling, the Draka books, which describe a very successful and very ugly society in the process of conquering the world. You might want to read it or, if you have, think about whether that is really your criterion for "best."
I'll take a look. However, I suspect I'll find the success of that society's empire (?) unconvincing. In works of fiction, anything can happen; the real world is less flexible.
This sounds as though you believe that an ugly society cannot be successful. That was the only information you had about the Draka on which to base your conclusion about them, other than that they were conquering the world.
I would like to believe that is true, see no reason to think it is. Unfortunately.
My heart is happy with moral realism but my mind rebels against any simple explanation I have ever heard. To me, believing that morality exists independent of the human context seems as arbitrary and bottomless as belief in God. Did right and wrong exist three billion years ago, and if so where did it come from?
I trust you have read Blish's "A Case of Conscience", with the race of aliens who evolved to use the r-strategy rather than the K-strategy: They lay a ton of eggs on the beach, and on hatching night their pre-sentient offspring battle to the death, with the survivors who kill and eat the losers entitled to grow up and develop minds. Would we countenance a human culture that (somehow) did this to their children? Or is right and wrong for us different from right and wrong for them?
If moral realism means merely that there are things that contribute to human success and fulfillment and things that detract from them, and both those things are inarguably true but contingent on how human evolution progressed, I will accept it gladly but it's hard for me to see that it is profound enough to merit a high-faluting name. It would be like when people make a big deal about "fitness", as if being the survivor of the latest round of natural selection was in some way worthy or admirable.
Do you believe that one should act to contribute to human success and fulfillment? Why? Success in what? Success in killing oneself? Killing others? Piling up the largest possible pile of sand on the beach? Without some basis for judging things people do saying you are in favor of people's fulfillment is a pretend answer.
I don't know where right and wrong came from — or where the universe came from.
Of course I do. And I probably think the things that constitute human success and fulfillment are much the same as you do. We are both evolved from the same proto-humans and grew up in the same Enlightenment-derived polity, so it's quite unsurprising that we would so agree. But one of Blish's aliens, or even a person from Afghanistan, might disagree. I just don't see anything but contingency in what I believe, though I confess I believe it strongly.
If you want me to take a step back and say that the only real morality is "enhance human success and fulfillment", and you mean that I'm just quibbling about how best to do that, I can't argue with you. But such an unspecific morality seems of very little use. (And Blish's aliens would probably quibble even with that.)
"I am an atheist, although less confident in my atheism than most."
This reminded me of an eye opening incident I had around a decade ago. My brother asked me "What would make me believe in God?" it has concerned me, from then until now, that I do not have an answer to this question.
Most scenarios I can think of I would explain with hallucination or some other flaw of the human mind.
I like to consider myself open minded, but in some sense I couldn't be more closed minded. I can't even conceive of a way my mind could be changed on what many believe to be the most important question.
If I died and found myself in an afterlife that more or less fit conventional descriptions I might suspect for a while that it was a dream, but would eventually find it convincing. Short of that, a pattern of unlikely response to prayer would eventually shift my priors.
Or, of course, a really good argument that had never occurred to me.
Was just thinking about this again, you say you'd eventually find it convincing if you were in an afterlife that more or less fit the conventional descriptions.
If it didn't fit any of the descriptions of earthly religions, that would be better evidence for some sort of afterlife. It wouldn't be that surprisingly that a malfunctioning mind would dream the idea of heaven they were raised to believe in (my late grandmother had such an experience near the end of her life), but it seems unlikely that it would create a completely novel experience.
It seems plausible that I after a certain amount of time in the afterlife, even by an unconventional or non-existent description, I would start to believe in the supernatural.
Saying that, I have experienced significant time dilation on psychedelics so I can also imagine chalking it down to a flaw of the human mind either. Occam's razor would lean me towards believing a natural phenomena I have experience before rather than a supernatural experience which raises significantly more questions.
I guess the main issue is, I think insanity is more likely than the existence of a supernatural God. If my prayers just kept working reliably in seemingly impossible ways I'd think I was dreaming or insane?
Maybe I am just closed minded.
That's along the same lines as Hume on miracles. He thought witnesses lying was a more plausible explanation than an actual miracle.
I also appreciated this line. I have always felt like I understood atheists quite well, despite my lifetime adherence to a religious worldview and frequent practice. I could easily say, "I am a theist, although less confident in my theism than most." I have always felt that the choice between atheism and theism is not so much a matter of incontrovertible evidence one way or the other, but a personal choice; or even an expression of individualized metaphysical preference.
Do you read much about physicalist theories of consciousness? The two of greatest appeal to me are field theories of consciousness and Integrated Information Theory. My perspective is essentially that consciousness is both a physical phenomenon and an information processing schema, somewhere between these two types of theories, because this is what satisfies my intuition.
In Yudkowsky's sequences, he talks briefly about how nihilistic despair in the face of physicalism is prematurely reductive. We think that if things were physical, they would "merely" be physical. But the idea of "merely" is our own addition. It is not actually present. It is my opinion that everything we need to be there is there so it's our expectations that need to be managed.
As for moral realism, I think if you really bite the bullet on physicalism you realize that there are a bounded range of things people can want and enjoy. There is still no objective basis to prioritize them, but there are many mechanically objective systems for it. Furthermore, since most people want and would enjoy other people getting most of what they want and enjoy, the problem mostly takes care of itself, recursively, starting from almost anywhere. This is messy in the real world but individuals can seek to improve the situation if they so choose.
The fear that any moral system is possible is unrealistic if moral systems are limited to those compatible with physics, or more specific constraints like biology or human nature.
Why is theistic universal salvation not an option? God creates all things, some creatures need hell as plan B, since plan A didn’t bring them to God, and so God lets them feel the consequences of their actions, and has created the world in such a way where eventually, all people choose God? Hell is universal purgatory. There were plenty of Christian universalists in history, including several saints (Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzen, Maximus the Confessor, Isaac of Syria) and modern theologians (Sergius Bulgakov, Jacques Ellul, Jürgen Moltmann, David Hart). It’s a much better response to the problem of evil and suffering if eventually everything that God created is brought into union with Himself. There would be no waste in creation.
That is a possibility, one C.S. Lewis implies in _The Great Divorce_, but it is not the conventional Christian view nor the one I was discussing.
Understood. But as a market anarchist with other unconventional views, you know better than most that the minority report is often the best. George MacDonald, Lewis’s guide in The Great Divorce was another passionate universalist. As wonderful as Lewis was, I wish MacDonald had convinced him on this.
You don't think he did? You probably know Lewis's writing better than I do, but I view _The Great Divorce_ as leaving it open whether anyone at all remains in Hell/purgatory permanently.
So far as my position is concerned, if my first guess turns out to be wrong I have no basis for deciding which version of the second guess is most likely. C.S. Lewis and GKC were admirable intellects but so was Maimonides and probably others in other religious traditions I haven't read.
Honestly, I’ve never read all the way through The Great Divorce. I know a lot more about universalism than I do Lewis. I just remember seeing quotes from him about how he wished he could do away with the doctrine of eternal damnation but he saw it as taught in scripture. Looking briefly online, it looks like you’re right about The Great Divorce. Maybe he can be classified as a hopeful universalist. https://www.tentmaker.org/biographies/cs-lewis.htm
The problem with Christian morality is that it espouses a repulsive collectivist and inverted moral code:
Collectivist because "Christ died for our sins!" In other words, any sin by any human both before and since his death caused or contributed to his murder by Herod.
Inverted because "god the father", as supreme judge of morality, views that all our collective sins are absolved, not by any punishment we receive, but because of a punishment (torture and death) of an innocent man.
Organized religion is an evolved adaptation supporting group cohesion and control. It operates as a mass delusion: even the leaders are true believers. The particulars of the doctrines are not relevant as long as they maintain a collective sense of fear and guilt.
You don’t have a problem with Christian morality, you have a problem with A Christian morality. Eastern Christian thought posits nothing of what you just described.
I think you should re-read what you wrote and make the necessary edits; I don't think you said what you meant to say. The first sentence is "Not A and A".
No, still looks right to me, though since there are no italics, I did add capitalization. There are many Christian moralities just as there are many Buddhisms and Islams. I have just as much of a problem with the Christian morality that he was speaking of as he does, and yet I am a Christian. Just one that subscribes to none of the beliefs he noted. The East has never had much patience for penal substitutionary atonement or a vengeful God. It’s good to be specific when one says “Christianity.” While there are commonalities across the board in some vital areas (the divinity and resurrection of Christ, the Trinity), there are significant divergences in others.
So you mean barry has a problem with one Christian morality but not with a different Christian morality? I can't help thinking there would have been a clearer way to express that, but all I can do is opine.
I interpreted it as he meant it.
Well yeah, but you’re smarter than me!
"One is atheism: There are no gods..." That is not how I understand atheism. Atheism = a-theism = lack of theistic belief. Similarly, I take "agnostic" NOT to mean "I'm not sure if there is a god" but rather "I do not know (cannot know) whether there is a god."
Even if you take atheism to mean a positive belief that there are no gods, the argument from evil is not as you put it in the first paragraph an argument for atheism. It is an argument against the existence of the Christian god. Obviously, that leaves many other gods as possibilities. There is no reason to believe in any of these but neither is there a strong disproof if they lack the omni-qualities of the Christian god.
As some put it: A Christian (Muslim, etc.) is an atheist about all gods but one.
Max, are you familiar with the concept of divine simplicity? Or David Bentley Hart’s “Being, Consciousness, Bliss”? God is not one god among others. Within Hinduism, the gods come forth FROM God, or Brahman, who is being, consciousness, bliss itself. The greek gods are not God, and neither are the gods of the Hindu pantheon. They presuppose a much more primordial and transcendental ground to existence than you indicate. This is God.
Max:
I wrote a couple of comments (before I read your comment) with a similar idea -- that the "god" of religion have no equivalent in the dharmas. We have "Sat, Chit, Ananda" -- translated "Existence, Consciousness, Bliss" -- which is the ultimate reality of Brahman.
The three religions -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- have essentially the same answer to life, the universe and everything. It starts with a god (only one, please) who created the world (about several thousand square miles) about 6,000 years ago; and created everything (that was known by people in the middle east around four thousand years ago) in it; then encoded the morality into commandments (that essentially say "obey and worship me or you suffer my wrath"), and then sits around judging people.
In contrast to that, the three dharmas -- Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism -- don't have any concept of god that is even roughly equivalent to the god of the religions. They don't have a god dictating commandments, don't have god judging and handing out rewards and punishments.
The three dharmas are often called "religions" but they are not religions. The devatas are often known as god or gods but they aren't that.
Westerners have a good understanding of the religions but know very little about the dharmas, and what is worse, what they know about the dharmas is mostly wrong.
I find discussions about god and hell and morality fascinating. It's like the serious discussions that people used to have about the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin; total waste of time. But you'd not think that if you believed in angels.
The point of this comment is that there's another, radically different, way of thinking about existence, about sentient beings, about morality, about consciousness. Perhaps it is worth a look; or perhaps it is not.
You are doing the same thing with angels dancing on the head of a pin that you complain about Westerners doing wrt the dharmas. Insofar as it was ever anything more than a Protestant slander of Catholic theologians it was a question that did not depend on belief an angels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_many_angels_can_dance_on_the_head_of_a_pin%3F
The Rig Veda, composed about 3,500 years ago, asks where did the universe come from. The "Hymn to Creation" ends thus:
“Who knows for certain? Who shall here declare it? Whence was it born? Whence came creation? The Gods are later than this world’s formation. Who then can know the origins of the world? None knows whence creation arose or whether he has or has not made it – he who surveys it from the highest regions. Only he knows, or perhaps he knows not.”
My take is Atheism and theism are both matters of faith, not testable, not provable. Hence the only reasonable, rational logical position is agnosticism, damnedifIknow.
Such would I think, be unarguable if all that we experience in the world, in the universe can be rationally, logically, reasonably explained.
I have to admit I've had many experiences that defy rational explanation, which has made me less confident in my agnosticism than most.
Jim in Alaska:
Theism makes a specific claim: the existence of god. Atheists say, "I don't see any evidence of the existence of god." The burden of proof therefore rests on theists.
I believe that the teapot that once belonged to Russell is now in orbit around the sun somewhere between the earth and Mars. I am a teapotist. Will you say that people who don't believe me -- the ateapotists -- have to prove that Russell's teapot does not exist?
While I happen to mostly agree with you, at minimum people can be far to one side of agnosticism or far to the other side. I’m pretty close to DF’s side.
Being certain, I agree, is indeed a faith, and demonstrates at least some lack of epistemic humility.
My father, who described himself as an agnostic, had about the same views I do. I switched to describing myself as an atheist after being persuaded by George Smith that an atheist was someone who believed God didn't exist, not someone who was certain God doesn't exist. I believe lots of things of which I am not certain — for instance that I will still be alive next year.
I describe myself as an agnostic thisclose to atheist. So perhaps a distinction without a difference.
It would be fascinating to know what percentage of atheists fall under Smith’s definition, versus are certain - or at least proclaim a high degree of certainty that - God doesn’t exist.
A quick ChatGPT and google search led me to this decidedly non-definitive piece which *suggests* it is a minority position among atheists:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/1iwxrzf/2024_debatereligion_survey_results/?rdt=52941
Though this 2019 AEI polling seems more solid evidence:
https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Doubting-Disbelievers.pdf
“Seventy-one percent of atheists are certain God does not exist…”
Usually, if people are certain of something, it means they haven’t thought about it hard enough. Goes for the religious and non-religious alike.
In Euthyphro, Plato attributed the classic argument against divine command theory to Socrates. In that dialogue, Socrates raises an interesting problem. A modern version of that problem is this: “Is an act right (or wrong) because God says so or does God say so because the act is right (or wrong)?” (For the sake of argument, I'll assume that the God of the Bible exists.) God could not have used “Because God says so” as his reason for believing that any given act is right or wrong. Either he had no reason at all or he had some reason independent of himself. The first alternative implies that God is arbitrary. If there is no reason for God's decision, it's just a matter of whim. If he had said it's morally obligatory to torture infants, we'd be morally obligated to torture infants. All inquiry into matters of right and wrong would end there for those who share that belief system. The second alternative implies that some acts would be right or wrong even if God did not exist and that God had reasons for his decision that we can seek to discover. If we discover what those reasons are, we can understand why certain acts are right or wrong and persuade others who may not share our religious beliefs.
The Euthyphro is the head shot to the argument. I am not a big Plato fan, but this one he got right.
Isn't it interesting that the first biblical test of humanity was one that had no internal moral valance at all?
"Eat the apple" vs. "Don't eat the apple". No way of using our sense of morality to determine which of the orders was from Good, and which from Evil.
But if you believe that God is good and omniscient, then his command is evidence that not eating the apple is good.
Well my point is, how would you know that as Adam and Eve? It honestly reads as "God was working on creation. He got bored with deterministic beings like angels, and decided to build in some randomness in order to make things spicier. During his test run the final test of the new prototype was to check and see if they would do this thing he told them not to. He told one of his deterministic creations, the snake, to tell them to do this thing with neutral moral valence, and He told them not to. They ignored him. Test success! Now lets try and work on developing morality."
It just occurred to me as I was reading your article that it's fascinating that the very first commandment had neutral moral valence at face value as an action. Everything else lines up with morality or health or psychological health, and is generally beneficial in some way if followed, but this first test? It seems like a setup. And I wouldn't be the first one to point out, how could Adam and Eve know which of the two beings to listen to? The guy they walk and talk with, or the talking snake?
David, you're in luck!
I've sorted all this out in my trilogy, forthcoming this year, _The Human Stigmergy_!
Stay tuned!
Excellent questions.
I think I subscribe to a kindof, sortof moral realism, tempered by the problem that in many cases, good and evil are contextual or worse. Too often, what helps one entity harms another, and the entities concerned naturally prefer to be the ones that benefit.
Is a god "good" if they destroy my enemies, and bestow all their property on me and my team? I'm pretty sure that my now deceased enemies would never think so. I may really like this god, and do whatever they want, hoping they'll continue to act as part of my team. I may even get together with my teammates and compose hymns praising this god's goodness and righteousness ... that might be useful for team cohesion, or for encouraging this god to continue to favor us. But that wouldn't make this god "good" in what I'd consider a useful moral sense.
We can find cases that are obviously evil (good is more difficult), and sometimes rank order selected examples on the good-evil dimension. So it seems as if there's something there, even if it's only an artefact of evolutionarily evolved human brain wiring. But when you poke it, it gets less and less coherent. And IMNSHO, when you create an overriding single principle to define good/evil, such as utillitarianism, you wind up with nonsense, much like any other "hedgehog" - whatever principle you pick.
Slightly tangential but there's actually a fairly decent exploration of morality in the pathfinder universe in planecrash, the most recent work of rationalist fiction by Eliezer Yudkowsky.
I think you’re overlooking how deep-rooted religious traditions are. They are not just going to bend to simple economic fixes, like viewing Hell as a behavioral nudge. People don’t believe in Hell because it’s a neat game theory construct. They believe it because it fits into their ideas about justice and a god's plan. Your fix sounds like something a rational person would come up with, not how someone with genuine faith would deal with the issue.
You make a valid point that just saying God exists doesn't really answer how we figure out what is right and wrong. Divine command theory just moves the question to why we think God's will is good. But the other side isn't completely clear either: if morals aren’t objective, are they just preferences?
I'll echo Max's comment that "the minority report is often the best."
One thing that's always frustrated me with many (but not all) atheists is how they'll take on the premises of the people they think are wrong when contemplating God, when they'd never do that for any other subject of contemplation. I'd analogize it to saying I don't believe in money because I disagree with most economists.
I believe in God in an experiential sort of way that's fairly closely tied to those moral instincts of right and wrong that you discuss. And my biggest heresy is probably that I believe "omnipotence only goes so far", that even God is dealing with a substantial reality where God might be able to do everything that's doable, but is nonetheless bound by cause and effect rather than dictating the effects of each cause. That pretty much does away with any paradoxes that require theodicy; God's not sending anyone to Hell so much as God's just suffering to save beloved people from the natural consequences of their own actions.
Scripture and much of theology are largely descriptivist--others sharing their experience of God and trying to make sense of it. I don't let attempts to discern true metaphysics bog me down when engaging with God any more than I let attempting to discern true physics stop me from engaging with the physical world; there's a point where model agnosticism is necessary for taking away the useful bits, whether we're talking about Newton or St. Paul.
Anyway, it's the "suffering to save beloved people from the natural consequences of their own actions" that really forms the core of what's so distinctive about Christianity as an ideological framework; it inverts so many of our other moral intuitions, but it's also something we can observe in action and value in practice. Please don't get so hung up on theological propositions you reject, that you miss out on that observable and valuable core.
"...without God they have no basis for morality, no way to know that some acts would be evil or to care, no reason to refrain from committing them."
I would assert that morality is an essentially societal construct. A shipwrecked man on an otherwise uninhabited island has no need of morality in any normal sense.
This gives us our basis for morality; our actions engender reactions by other people in our community. That feedback gets encoded into rules for living that we call morals.
Now, any given society may have its own unique set of these rules; as a result, two societies in competition will select for one set of mores over the other. Over time, those societies with the "best" morals will supplant the others. To put it another way, any given moral rule can be considered a meme (e.g., don't take other people's things) and, at a societal level, those memes evolve.
My personal suspicion is that this mechanism is the source of the Ten Commandments, along with the rest of Judeo-Christian moral philosophy. That philosophy doesn't work well because it's right; it's right because it works well (enough).
What does "best" mean here?What defines working?
In this context, "best" is whatever displaces the competitors. I would define "working" to be "producing results that lead to the long-term survival of the society".
There is an alternate history series by S.M. Stirling, the Draka books, which describe a very successful and very ugly society in the process of conquering the world. You might want to read it or, if you have, think about whether that is really your criterion for "best."
I'll take a look. However, I suspect I'll find the success of that society's empire (?) unconvincing. In works of fiction, anything can happen; the real world is less flexible.
This sounds as though you believe that an ugly society cannot be successful. That was the only information you had about the Draka on which to base your conclusion about them, other than that they were conquering the world.
I would like to believe that is true, see no reason to think it is. Unfortunately.
What I found depressing about the books was that I did find it convincing.
My heart is happy with moral realism but my mind rebels against any simple explanation I have ever heard. To me, believing that morality exists independent of the human context seems as arbitrary and bottomless as belief in God. Did right and wrong exist three billion years ago, and if so where did it come from?
I trust you have read Blish's "A Case of Conscience", with the race of aliens who evolved to use the r-strategy rather than the K-strategy: They lay a ton of eggs on the beach, and on hatching night their pre-sentient offspring battle to the death, with the survivors who kill and eat the losers entitled to grow up and develop minds. Would we countenance a human culture that (somehow) did this to their children? Or is right and wrong for us different from right and wrong for them?
If moral realism means merely that there are things that contribute to human success and fulfillment and things that detract from them, and both those things are inarguably true but contingent on how human evolution progressed, I will accept it gladly but it's hard for me to see that it is profound enough to merit a high-faluting name. It would be like when people make a big deal about "fitness", as if being the survivor of the latest round of natural selection was in some way worthy or admirable.
Do you believe that one should act to contribute to human success and fulfillment? Why? Success in what? Success in killing oneself? Killing others? Piling up the largest possible pile of sand on the beach? Without some basis for judging things people do saying you are in favor of people's fulfillment is a pretend answer.
I don't know where right and wrong came from — or where the universe came from.
Of course I do. And I probably think the things that constitute human success and fulfillment are much the same as you do. We are both evolved from the same proto-humans and grew up in the same Enlightenment-derived polity, so it's quite unsurprising that we would so agree. But one of Blish's aliens, or even a person from Afghanistan, might disagree. I just don't see anything but contingency in what I believe, though I confess I believe it strongly.
If you want me to take a step back and say that the only real morality is "enhance human success and fulfillment", and you mean that I'm just quibbling about how best to do that, I can't argue with you. But such an unspecific morality seems of very little use. (And Blish's aliens would probably quibble even with that.)