The launch of the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies ”“ which the founders have agreed to shorten to the abbreviated AHS ”“ is the latest in a series of pro-secular movements that have sprung up to oppose what they believe is a growing pandering towards religious groups.
With scientists and rationalists celebrating the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth this year, the timing is more than apt. But the creation of this latest manifestation of atheism reveals a renaissance over the past three years for secular and humanist ideals that began with Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion and only recently manifested itself in the popular atheist bus campaign, in which double deckers carried the message: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”
There was once a time when those ideals were, of course, commonplace. Two centuries ago, progressive intellectuals of the post-Enlightenment age were all too happy to predict the end of religion, that the triumph of science and reason would win out and that man would turn away from God. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, meanwhile, student atheist groups were a vibrant and influential part of university life. Thinking the battle had been won, they largely died out two decades ago .
But, as religious conflict spreads once again throughout the world, throwing the Western world into a so-called clash of civilisations with radical Islam, the time is ripe, according to secularists, for a new religion ”“ a live-and-let-live brand of soft atheism.
Ok. But are they fully prepared to address and live within the implications of athiesm? How do they answer the 7 worldview questions:
1 What is the prime reality—the really real?
2 What is the nature of external reality, that is the world around us?
3 What is a human being?
4 What happens to a person at death?
5 Why is it possible to know anything at all?
6 How do we know what is right and wrong?
7 What is the meaning of human history?
I would also add that as they answer these questions (if they don’t simlply try to ignore them) in what way are their answers authoritative in such a way that others will find them binding or do we simply have a worldview anarchy with each person the center of his or her own unique universe and his or her own moral authortity?
For example the article states:
[blockquote] Chloë Clifford-Frith, who recently graduated from St Hilda’s in Oxford, said students today had a duty to promote atheist ideas: “We live in a world where religious governments execute adulterers and homosexuals, deny women and minority groups basic freedoms, circulate fraudulent claims about contraception and scientific research and create laws that protect them from criticism,” she said. “We are privileged, in such a world, to live in a country where we can even have this debate. As such, we have a duty to bring it into our universities and beyond.” [/blockquote]
Yet who is she, and by what authority is she able to say such a thing, to challenge what others are doing? She implies that religious governments are doing is wrong yet how does she know this and how is she able to say it is wrong? What is her moral measuring stick? And if there is one why should the others accept it? It seems that right from the start she is using a transcendent moral standard that she denies exixts.
My experience tells me that, when people say “live and let live,” they usually don’t.
Her world view is meaningless. All of her thoughts and emotions are just chemical reactions. There is no love, no hate, no independence of thought; just chemical reactions.
Her universe began about 13.7 +/- 0.2 billion years ago, for no particular reason, and has been subject to the relentless 2nd law of thermal dynamics since then. All life is completely accidental and meaningless.
Her meaningless universe will continue to expand and cool until it completely devolves and dissipates into the expanding nothingness. It will be as if nothing ever existed. There will be no matter, no observable energy, no observers, and time will stop. It will end in Nothing. Zil. All human endeavors, sacrifices, accomplishments will cease to exist and no evidence that they ever occurred will survive. Everything anyone has or will ever do will become completely pointless.
None of these folks lives consistently within their beliefs. There is no love, only chemistry. There is no free will, only chemistry. There is no friendship, only chemistry. There is no good (or evil), only chemistry. There is no hope for a future, only endless nothingness. There is no hope of meaning, only a certain knowledge that everything will be erased as if it never was. There is no ultimate meaning, therefore, there is no intermediate meaning, only the illusion of meaning. In a universe of meaninglessness, every thought and action is meaningless and therefore, not ultimately rational. It is an insane existence.
3, of course, but does she realize the (and knowlingly embrace) the nihilism of her world view? What is irritating is that so few reporters question nihilistic world views.
Re: #3 and #4 — nonsense. There is nothing about the atheistic worldview that has to lead to nihilistic despair.
Why does something become meaningless if there is no God and no eternity? I can give it meaning by caring about it. So what if it won’t make any difference fifteen billion years on? It makes a difference now.
As I said, atheists cannot live consistently. The illusion that something has “meaning” in a meaningless material universe because people experience delusional sensations called “caringâ€, the mere impulses of chemical reactions in their brains, is inconsistent with the reality that everything will disperse into the void.
Their lives are meaningless. They have no real free will. Their “emotions†are a cheat because they are actually just chemical reactions, not real feelings.
Entropy is relentless.
#6 S&ToN;reiterates:
Yes, you did say that, in pretty much those same words, and I called it nonsense. I can do it again if you like, but eventually one of us is going to have to hop off the merry-go-round and say something new.
Let me ask you this: why is “the reality that everything will disperse into the void” inconsistent with “meaning”? You seem to regard the proposition as self-evident, but it isn’t.
Perhaps it would be better to ask: what, in your eyes, constitutes “meaning”? And why — apparently — can meaning only reside in things that are eternal? (If that’s true, I observe that people on this blog spend a lot of time and energy arguing about things — money, banks, politics, governments — that are by this definition meaningless.)
Ross, because like you, most nihilists bail out. They can not face their own meaninglessness. You say, ” I can give it meaning by caring about it.” So what? Careing about what is meaningless does not make it meaningful. It is merely self-delusion.
But you still haven’t explained why you regard it as meaningless in the first place; you’ve simply assumed that it must be. Why?
Ross, I am a Christian thiest. I have meaning because God give it to me.
What meaning does a rock have? It just is.
Perhaps an example would be helpful.
There’s been an idea afoot that, due to the fact that the world’s human population exceeds certain criteria, that same should be reduced for the good of the environment to, say, around 500 million people. A little math will show how many lives would have to be snuffed out to achieve this objective.
Now we must ask ourselves two questions: what does this mean? And is this moral?
Although we know the physical results are certainly different, whether the earth has 500 million or 6+ billion inhabitants has no meaning in a purely materialistic frame of reference. It just is. Scientific arguments can be advanced one way or another, and they would be related to whatever technology is at hand (or potentially at hand.) But science cannot ultimately answer this question; it can only analyse the results and propose alternate solutions, depending upon how the problem is defined. Science cannot, for example, answer on its own whether developing the technology to support more inhabitants or eliminating inhabitants is the better solution. That answer ultimately comes from another source.
As far as morality is concerned, we have the same problem. Morality doesn’t have an objective reality in a purely materialistic framework either. Complicating the issue is the fact that there was a time when no self-respecting atheist would advance the concept of morality. Morality (especially sexual morality) for them was the province of religious fuddy-duddies who would be cast aside when a “scientific” regime came in place.
Well, the results of the application of this were, to put it mildly, not nice. So now we have the risible spectacle of atheists talking about morality when, in fact, they undermine the chief reason why, in the past at least, people found atheism attractive. And there’s no particular reason in its own framework why an atheistic morality is superior to morality from another source, or why we should suffer the imposition of it on society in place of what is there, or other alternatives being proposed.
12, well stated. As an existing organism I can give myself value, but why should any other person care, if value is self given? And why should I care about any other? If I take care of myself and the devil take the hind most, what is wrong with that (if the concept of right and wrong has any meaning.)?
I’m not going to dispute you on the morality front; it was in fact an argument along those lines, via C. S. Lewis, that nudged from from agnosticism back into the church some years ago.
But what I am objecting to is the idea that an atheist worldview must, if carried to its logical conclusion, succumb to nihilistic despair because everything is meaningless. Br. Michael suggests that only God can give meaning to anything. “Sick and Tired of Nuance” seems to have the view that anything that will eventually decay or vanish is therefore meaningless. What I am saying in response to them is that neither of these propositions is self-evident, and that someone who holds the atheistic worldview may — quite self-consistently — find meaning in their life without God and without eternity.
14, Ross I hear what you are saying, but on what true basis? If life is nothing but the result of pure blind random chance, what, on an objective basis, gives it any value? The mouse give itself great value, the cat only a meal.
Ross, I am suggesting that in fact, an athiestic worldview must lead to nihilism. There is nothing in that worldview that can lead one ont of the pit. The only way out is to disavow that worldview, whether admited or not.
Hi Ross,
Are we discussing the world view of atheistic materialists or some other form of atheism?
Do you accept/believe the evidence for the expansion of the universe from the cosmic singularity…the Big Bang?
Do you accept/believe the evidence for the 1st and 2nd Laws of Thermal Dynamics and the concept of entropy?
#16:
Yes, of course I accept those things. Although I don’t remember what the current thinking is on whether there’s enough mass to close the universe or not.
But my point is: so the universe ends either in heat death or in a “Big Crunch.” So what? I’m alive now; I can laugh, and love, and pet puppies on the head. My experience of all those things may be mediated through chemical reactions in my brain… but again, so what? Does that make my experience false? And if so, why?
Taking your comment together with #15 from Br. Michael, it seems clear to me that there’s a foundational conceptual chasm between us. From your worldview, the impermance and randomness of things must lead to despair. From my worldview — and I’m not an atheist, but I understand their conceptual framework — those things simply aren’t relevant to the question of finding meaning in life.
So perhaps it’s true that a theist who became convinced that there was no God would indeed fall into despair — if you have a worldview that requires God to give meaning to everything, and God disappears, then of course you’re in trouble. And maybe you imagine atheists as having that worldview, because if you were to become atheists that’s the path you would have to take.
But to an atheist, whose worldview was not built upon God in the first place, there is no “hole” left by God vanishing. Indeed, to them your worldview is the terrible one.
Now I happen to think that atheists are wrong in fact, that God is very much real and that the universe is filled with things that cannot be accounted for in a materialistic schema. But I have been in the past at least agnostic, and I verged close to atheism now and again; and I assure you that I explored the implications carefully and despair was not one of them. It’s a very different world to live in, to be sure, but it is not the stark and brutal nightmare you imagine that it must be.
Perhaps once again a little different tack might get us into port sooner.
[url=http://www.paludavia.com/tenweeks/]In the course of writing this,[/url] I was “reintroduced” to an album I had heard a long time ago: the Moody Blues’ [i]Days of Future Passed[/i]. In the recitative at both ends of the album, one phrase is repeated: “But we decide which is right/and which is an illusion.”
That’s pretty much an atheist’s view of meaning. He or she sets it for him or herself, and moves on from there. But [i]Days of Future Passed[/i] isn’t the work of atheists, but an exposition of 1960’s style Eastern mysticism.
But, in listening to it again, I was struck at how pessimistic the whole album really is. The title itself implies that past, present and future are an endless cycle, out of which escape is problematic at best.
Any system–religious or otherwise–that doesn’t offer a way out leads to despair, especially if it underscores that by a rigidly cyclic view of history. Atheism, by trapping all life in the biological limitations of material existence, is such a system [i]par excellence[/i]. But it is not alone in creating despair.
It’s true that not all atheists are trapped in despair. I read a recent Q&A;by Camille Paglia along this line. But underneath the immediate optimism, over time, when the full implications of what atheism really means sinks in, so does despair. It may not be a despair vocalised as, say, a Christian would expect, but it’s despair just the same.
It seemed very sad to me to see people in the UK, where much of this silliness is coming out of, greet the recent New Year with such a record level of public, blotto drunkenness. It’s a sign that the only thing people on the earth can greet another year on it is with that ever-pain killer, alcohol. That’s pessimism.
In a materialistic, monistic universe, personality is an illusion (epiphenomenon). It is merely electrochemical reactions between molecules. Personality does not arise from the impersonal.
If personality is an epiphenomenon, how can “caring” asign meaning? A materialistic/monistic universe, by definition has no objective meaning, it just exists. In the words of Gump…it is there for “no particular reason”. If our own “personalities” are an epiphenomenon resulting from electrochemical reactions between molecules, how can there be any subjective meaning? Our personalities are an illusion, so any “caring” that the personality has is also an illusion. Any “meaning” we assign to anything is an illusion resulting from electrochemical reactions between molecules.
All the lights may be on, but no one is home.
17, maybe you are right and there is a great chasim. Jesus addressed this in the parable of the rich man who built barns to hold his riches and whose life was demanded that night. You say:
[blockquote] So what? I’m alive now; I can laugh, and love, and pet puppies on the head. My experience of all those things may be mediated through chemical reactions in my brain… but again, so what? Does that make my experience false? And if so, why? [/blockquote]
And if there is nothing more than your experience then, Yes, there is nothing. Personal experience does not equal truth. Where is the truth in athiesm? They come from nothing and return to nothing. Where is there anything in that?
#18 vulcanhammer says:
All I can say is that this does not match my experience with the atheists I have known.
#19 Sick & Tired of Nuance says:
You make a leap from “electrochemical reactions between molecules” to “illusion” that you do not justify. Why can’t “electrochemical reactions” have “subjective meaning”? The mind, in a materialistic worldview, is an emergent system arising from those very chemical reactions; nestled in the subtle interactions of the system that arises from those simple reactions is consciousness.
#20 Br. Michael says:
In the middle, of course; in between coming from nothing and returning to nothing. Where else would it be?
… On a side note, do you want to know the irony in this discussion? For years, when I was agnostic, I was in various online forums populated by many atheists, and some few of them were the militant religion-is-evil Dawkins-style atheists. I always ended up arguing for religion against them — not that I was a believer myself at the time, but I could tell when they were talking a load of nonsense about Christianity (somehow it was always the Christian God they specifically didn’t believe in) and I felt compelled to stand up in opposition to them. Now, here I am, a believer and posting in a Christian forum… arguing on the side of atheism. Perhaps I am simply fated to contrarianism 🙂
Ross, I think that they just refuse to accept the implications of their worldview. They can’t be consistant and avoid the implicit nihilism. They have to manufacture meaning, which by the terms of their worldview does not exist. It seems to me that your arguments point to the various defense mechanisms that they use to avoid their worldview.
I appreciate your defense of a worldview which you do not hold.
Hi Ross,
Here is a quote from your citation:
[blockquote]”Although strong emergence is logically possible, it is uncomfortably like magic. How does an irreducible but supervenient downward causal power arise, since by definition it cannot be due to the aggregation of the micro-level potentialities? Such causal powers would be quite unlike anything within our scientific ken. This not only indicates how they will discomfort reasonable forms of materialism. Their mysteriousness will only heighten the traditional worry that emergence entails illegitimately getting something from nothing.”(Bedau 1997)[/blockquote]
How is “emergence” different from a guiding intellect, divine intervention, or even magic? When one starts using emergence and synergy, one is leaving the realm of materialism. If one is an atheist monist and begins believing in the “magic” of things like emergence and synergy (or the Force in Star Wars), one has stopped being consistent with materialism.
The leap is not mine. The leap is done by those arguing that personality and self-awarenesss originate from a collection of inanimate chemicals. Simply calling the magic “emergence” does not change it’s magical properties. BTW, a very similar problem is at the heart of atheistic evolution. How does life originate from a random collection of molecules? One might explain the mechanism of DNA chromosome pairs in a naturalistic way, but where did the information encoded in those pairs, required to create life, come from? Encoded information does not arise from random sequencing. Personality does not arise from the impersonal.
(BTW, what protected the early homopolymers prior to encapsulation?)
Calling the magic “emergence” does not explain the magic.
Bedau can be uncomfortable with the idea of emergent behaviors if he likes, but the fact is that it is demonstrably true even in non-living systems such as cellular automota.
However, I think the time has come to concede that this is yet another matter in which communication across the conceptual gap is not likely to happen. We’ve come more or less down to the level of stating our basic axioms at each other, and beyond that there’s really nowhere fruitful to go. Clearly by your worldview what I’m saying is absurd nonsense; by mine, what you’re saying is equally so. Best time to move on.