As a ( in this case coincidentally ) religious elderly philosophy student I must reject this statement.
How does it relate to, say, Quine's ''on what exists'' or Peter Unger's ''I don't exist'' papers?
That you do not ( not you or me but an atheist ) accept God as a bound variable but instead paraphrase God away, does not compel you to abandon the notion that rectangles or numbers exist.
The imho more important problem is that I think Juval Harari nails it when he states that atheists must make incredible summersaults in order to salvage the belief they can make sense of the world at all.
We cannot function as human societies without intersubjective orders, imaginary or otherwise. Regardless of whether an atheist believes in God, he does attribute causal powers to the denied God. And if it has causal powers, it exists. ( Nothing that does not exist can have causal powers ) Insert Bohr's Horseshoe here, because our atheist friend has ended up accepting this existence without believing in it,
[ if an atheist claims that it is the belief in X that is the problem, then I roll out the Truthmaker Argument: your claim that Y believes in X CANNOT stand as meaningfull UNLESS there is an existant X to function as the Truthmaker of your claim. ]
''the Muslims logically disagree with the Christians because they have different moral authorities, in this case, they have different holy books.''
Your mileage may vary here. When I study medieval islamic theologians, I keep finding time and again the areas of MAJOR agreement. As a quite traditionalist Catholic, I think there are a lot of muslim theologians that I consider as fellow neo-Platonists committed to The Good/The One, from which all Creation including myself proceeds and to which all Creation including myself returns.
It depends on to what degree you think philosophical theology trumps canon.
''That sounds very nice and all, but despite all the fanfare and civics and ethics classes, the declaration of human rights still is just a piece of paper. And where do these rights come from? The paper? The ink?''
Ah - always my favourite Fuck You argument against the reds.
The Rights come from the Decision of the Politeia, and exist only in the context of the Social Contract of the Politeia.
Consequently, human rights do not apply to those who deny the validity of that social contract or the validity of representative goverance ( how does the Politeia rule itself otherwise? ).
Consequently, Reds, Terrorists and similar ilk cannot claim human rights, universal or otherwise. Personhood is the exclusive prerogative of the Free - nulla salus extra ecclesia....
I've been thinking along very similar lines so I don't have much to add but I hold honesty and authenticity in high regard. Theoretically there might of course be a right/correct action if only one can define the right goal/end state but practically we often run into complexity and its inherent optimisation-resistant nature. It also appears to me that true belief into metaphysical reality (god in this case) is at least today positively associated with biological survival and reproduction. This fact obviously makes no statement towards the actual existence of such realities. Therefore it might of course very well be the case, if the propensity for true belief is at least partially biologically determined, that the future might look very much more religious than the present. For everyone who is not ambivalent on the question of god but responds with a firm "no" this development would run counter to one's own (darwinian) self interest. A conundrum I can only imagine a few people being willing and capable to bear.
Now I'm wondering if honest atheists have more or less children than dishoneset atheists. That would be an interesting study to conduct I think.
One thing you didn't mention is how often atheists try to use Hume's moral sentimentalism. It's easy enough to refute (what if I personally don't naturally feel empathy, why are "moral" passions more important than carnal or artistic passions etc.) weirdly enough I've seen conservative Christians try for this tactic as well, which is really really weird. A particularly strange case is that of a Catholic apologist named Trent Horn, who tries to make his case for moral positions like pro life with typical slippery slope arguments, and if that falls through (If the opponent doesn't think the bottom of the "slope" is worse than the top) he tries to use this weird Humean sentimentalism to show that the bottom is bad and the intermediate stages needed to be avoided for that reason etc. It's easily the most bizarre exercise of ethical theory I have ever witnessed.
Just wanted to chime in with my two cents as a somewhat mathematically mature person that numbers don't really exist, since people would be privy to point to those as metaphysical entities that sure do feel real. Mathematics and science has been successful because the material universe seems to be modeled well by mathematics and mathematical models. If the universe were somehow different, math and science could look entirely different. Even then, the fact that paradoxes like Banach-Tarski exist — which in part has to do with the uncountability of the reals and our leveraging of the choice axiom to deal with that — show us that the material world does not conform to the laws of mathematics in its full rigor. Rather, mathematics is its own world, facets of which comport well with reality as a model. Even when we're dealing with computers, the reason that they seemingly obey the laws of mathematics is because we set them up that way. When, in the case of data compression, you seem to get more out than you put in, that was because there was an encoding in which the smaller parcel of data implies how the rest of the data is to be constructed because the original signal may have been in a form conducive to mathematical explanation (e.g., waves or periodic functions in general).
To me it seems like this essay might be heavily inspired by the worldview of Jordan Peterson as that is the main line of thinking he uses to criticize atheistic worldviews (atheistic in the way you defined it). However, I think there is an underlying assumption on which the whole argument depends and that assumption explains the discrepancy between what Jordan Peterson believes and what many in the New Atheist movement believe.
There is what one might describe as the religious worldview (or the spiritual worldview) as you described it. It tries to make sense of the world using transcendental entities that have irreducible essence and are independent of the physical world. One could think of terms with spiritual connotation like "meaning", "love", "value" and so on, that people with a spiritual worldview will usually describe as irreducible to the material.
Then we can get to how that relates to the worldview of someone like Peterson. Of course I can't be sure what he exactly believes and don't want to put words in his mouth but I think he believes something like this: The religious worldview is what allow humans to think in a higher mode of abstraction and to get deeper understanding of the human existence and the world. It is what gives humans the ability to conceptualize advanced and abstract ideas like "meaning", "love", "value" and to incorporate them in their worldviews. It is what allows humans to create complex mental systems like the concept of "morality" and to see them as something that is important and carries weight in their lives. That is why Peterson very often would describe atheistic worldviews as "religion in disguise" or as "God in disguise". To him the religious way of thinking is itself the source of the ability to think about these advanced concepts.
However, I and probably many atheists will fundamentally disagree with the above assumption and argue that it is wrong. To me the real source of our advanced concepts about the world is simply the human ability to think in abstraction. Humans can naturally conceptualize complex systems by identifying what are the important parts and the important relationships between them. For example, a chair is just a bunch of solid matter arranged in a certain way. Yet, people quite easily make an intuitive distinction between a "chair" and "non-chair" based mainly on the instrumental relationship of whether they would be able to sit comfortably on this bunch of matter (chairs have shared identifying similarity despite the fact that no two chairs are truly identical to each other in their physical composition). Humans also can easily apply abstraction to mental phenomena like distinguishing the emotion of "anger" from everything else that could be described as "non-anger" (there is shared identifying similarity despite the fact that no two bursts of anger are truly identical to each other). To me it is not hard to see that even high-level concepts like "meaning", "love", "value", "morality" are simply abstractions that humans use to try to give structure to the way they see the world. I think the religious worldview is just a single product of this ability to abstract rather than being the source of it. What we may call "religious" concepts is simply one attempt that people have used to codify their inderstanding of the world. The ancient mythologies and spiritual systems were probably the best attempt that people of the past could try to make sense of the world and give some structure to it given their very limited knowledge and understanding at the time. However, since the ability to abstract is the one that is fundamental and the religious worldview is just one spin on it, there is nothing stopping a materialist reductionist from talking about concepts like "meaning", "love", "value", "morality" in a meaningful way. These still could be useful abstractions even if one aknowledges that they could be reduced to some physical configuration of matter (like that a "chair" is a physical configuration of matter with certain properties or "anger" is a physical configuration of the brain with certain properties). The main challenge is that for these highly personal abstractions it is harder to create a shared understanding between different people for what they represent. That is why some people in the New Atheist movement mainly focus on trying to reduce complex concepts like "morality" to more basic concepts like "well-being" and "logical consistency". These basic concepts are largely shared between humans because of the similarities in which their brains process the world. As such, I think this offers far more systematic and communicative way of building a moral framework.
Given all of this, there are some parts of the essay that seem to me to be quite misguided as a criticism. For example, in the essay you stated that "...you must believe that we are nothing other than a smarter, generally less hairy version of a chimpanzee. In such a case, there is no uniform value to all human beings", but that seems like a strange criticism to me. For one thing, nobody really acts as if (or even believes that) humans truly have "uniform value". Regardless of what a person may personally claim to believe, people naturally tend to care more about a neighbour that is suffering or a close kin that is suffering that about a person on the other side of the world that is suffering; people naturally value more highly an individual that is contributing positively to their community than a criminal that is contributing negatively; even most religions are quite hypocritical on that note because despite claims of "uniform value" it is perfectly acceptable for different individuals to be treated very differently in the afterlife based on that individual's life, which admits that there is different worth to different people. On another note, the reduction of humans' value to their position relative to other animals already pressuposes a narrow understanding of what it means to be "valuable". Since "value" is just an abstraction that an individual has in their mind about what they personally consider important, there is nothing stopping someone from considering the mere property of being a "human" as something valuable. This is not, in fact, some arbitrary choice since humans are social animals and naturally have positive affinity towards other members of their species. I think many people could be convinced of this view just by appealing to their intuition and presenting it as an axiomatic truth (in fact, I would argue most people already subconsciously accept this idea to some extend even if they may not have an explicit belief in it). Of course, one also may see this view as unsatisfactory (like yourself and myself) and try to reduce the idea of "value" further to what really is "valuable" to being a "human". In that regard, one could step on a different, more basic grounding like the concept of "sentience" (and therefore include some not human animals) - this is the position that I personally accept and also I don't find it problematic since I reject the idea of ascribing "uniform value". There are other possible groundings as well. Ultimatelly, there is not really some "true" way to define "value" as each individual will have their own idea of what it means, but there is still the fact that people will be convinced by different definitions to different extend based on their natural intuition and way of perceiving the world. In that regard, I think that if one wants to have a shared understanding of the concept "value" in a society, the best candidate for a grounding of it is probably the one that is the most convincing for the most amount of people.
''negation of all metaphysical claims''
As a ( in this case coincidentally ) religious elderly philosophy student I must reject this statement.
How does it relate to, say, Quine's ''on what exists'' or Peter Unger's ''I don't exist'' papers?
That you do not ( not you or me but an atheist ) accept God as a bound variable but instead paraphrase God away, does not compel you to abandon the notion that rectangles or numbers exist.
The imho more important problem is that I think Juval Harari nails it when he states that atheists must make incredible summersaults in order to salvage the belief they can make sense of the world at all.
We cannot function as human societies without intersubjective orders, imaginary or otherwise. Regardless of whether an atheist believes in God, he does attribute causal powers to the denied God. And if it has causal powers, it exists. ( Nothing that does not exist can have causal powers ) Insert Bohr's Horseshoe here, because our atheist friend has ended up accepting this existence without believing in it,
[ if an atheist claims that it is the belief in X that is the problem, then I roll out the Truthmaker Argument: your claim that Y believes in X CANNOT stand as meaningfull UNLESS there is an existant X to function as the Truthmaker of your claim. ]
''the Muslims logically disagree with the Christians because they have different moral authorities, in this case, they have different holy books.''
Your mileage may vary here. When I study medieval islamic theologians, I keep finding time and again the areas of MAJOR agreement. As a quite traditionalist Catholic, I think there are a lot of muslim theologians that I consider as fellow neo-Platonists committed to The Good/The One, from which all Creation including myself proceeds and to which all Creation including myself returns.
It depends on to what degree you think philosophical theology trumps canon.
''That sounds very nice and all, but despite all the fanfare and civics and ethics classes, the declaration of human rights still is just a piece of paper. And where do these rights come from? The paper? The ink?''
Ah - always my favourite Fuck You argument against the reds.
The Rights come from the Decision of the Politeia, and exist only in the context of the Social Contract of the Politeia.
Consequently, human rights do not apply to those who deny the validity of that social contract or the validity of representative goverance ( how does the Politeia rule itself otherwise? ).
Consequently, Reds, Terrorists and similar ilk cannot claim human rights, universal or otherwise. Personhood is the exclusive prerogative of the Free - nulla salus extra ecclesia....
I've been thinking along very similar lines so I don't have much to add but I hold honesty and authenticity in high regard. Theoretically there might of course be a right/correct action if only one can define the right goal/end state but practically we often run into complexity and its inherent optimisation-resistant nature. It also appears to me that true belief into metaphysical reality (god in this case) is at least today positively associated with biological survival and reproduction. This fact obviously makes no statement towards the actual existence of such realities. Therefore it might of course very well be the case, if the propensity for true belief is at least partially biologically determined, that the future might look very much more religious than the present. For everyone who is not ambivalent on the question of god but responds with a firm "no" this development would run counter to one's own (darwinian) self interest. A conundrum I can only imagine a few people being willing and capable to bear.
Now I'm wondering if honest atheists have more or less children than dishoneset atheists. That would be an interesting study to conduct I think.
One thing you didn't mention is how often atheists try to use Hume's moral sentimentalism. It's easy enough to refute (what if I personally don't naturally feel empathy, why are "moral" passions more important than carnal or artistic passions etc.) weirdly enough I've seen conservative Christians try for this tactic as well, which is really really weird. A particularly strange case is that of a Catholic apologist named Trent Horn, who tries to make his case for moral positions like pro life with typical slippery slope arguments, and if that falls through (If the opponent doesn't think the bottom of the "slope" is worse than the top) he tries to use this weird Humean sentimentalism to show that the bottom is bad and the intermediate stages needed to be avoided for that reason etc. It's easily the most bizarre exercise of ethical theory I have ever witnessed.
Just wanted to chime in with my two cents as a somewhat mathematically mature person that numbers don't really exist, since people would be privy to point to those as metaphysical entities that sure do feel real. Mathematics and science has been successful because the material universe seems to be modeled well by mathematics and mathematical models. If the universe were somehow different, math and science could look entirely different. Even then, the fact that paradoxes like Banach-Tarski exist — which in part has to do with the uncountability of the reals and our leveraging of the choice axiom to deal with that — show us that the material world does not conform to the laws of mathematics in its full rigor. Rather, mathematics is its own world, facets of which comport well with reality as a model. Even when we're dealing with computers, the reason that they seemingly obey the laws of mathematics is because we set them up that way. When, in the case of data compression, you seem to get more out than you put in, that was because there was an encoding in which the smaller parcel of data implies how the rest of the data is to be constructed because the original signal may have been in a form conducive to mathematical explanation (e.g., waves or periodic functions in general).
To me it seems like this essay might be heavily inspired by the worldview of Jordan Peterson as that is the main line of thinking he uses to criticize atheistic worldviews (atheistic in the way you defined it). However, I think there is an underlying assumption on which the whole argument depends and that assumption explains the discrepancy between what Jordan Peterson believes and what many in the New Atheist movement believe.
There is what one might describe as the religious worldview (or the spiritual worldview) as you described it. It tries to make sense of the world using transcendental entities that have irreducible essence and are independent of the physical world. One could think of terms with spiritual connotation like "meaning", "love", "value" and so on, that people with a spiritual worldview will usually describe as irreducible to the material.
Then we can get to how that relates to the worldview of someone like Peterson. Of course I can't be sure what he exactly believes and don't want to put words in his mouth but I think he believes something like this: The religious worldview is what allow humans to think in a higher mode of abstraction and to get deeper understanding of the human existence and the world. It is what gives humans the ability to conceptualize advanced and abstract ideas like "meaning", "love", "value" and to incorporate them in their worldviews. It is what allows humans to create complex mental systems like the concept of "morality" and to see them as something that is important and carries weight in their lives. That is why Peterson very often would describe atheistic worldviews as "religion in disguise" or as "God in disguise". To him the religious way of thinking is itself the source of the ability to think about these advanced concepts.
However, I and probably many atheists will fundamentally disagree with the above assumption and argue that it is wrong. To me the real source of our advanced concepts about the world is simply the human ability to think in abstraction. Humans can naturally conceptualize complex systems by identifying what are the important parts and the important relationships between them. For example, a chair is just a bunch of solid matter arranged in a certain way. Yet, people quite easily make an intuitive distinction between a "chair" and "non-chair" based mainly on the instrumental relationship of whether they would be able to sit comfortably on this bunch of matter (chairs have shared identifying similarity despite the fact that no two chairs are truly identical to each other in their physical composition). Humans also can easily apply abstraction to mental phenomena like distinguishing the emotion of "anger" from everything else that could be described as "non-anger" (there is shared identifying similarity despite the fact that no two bursts of anger are truly identical to each other). To me it is not hard to see that even high-level concepts like "meaning", "love", "value", "morality" are simply abstractions that humans use to try to give structure to the way they see the world. I think the religious worldview is just a single product of this ability to abstract rather than being the source of it. What we may call "religious" concepts is simply one attempt that people have used to codify their inderstanding of the world. The ancient mythologies and spiritual systems were probably the best attempt that people of the past could try to make sense of the world and give some structure to it given their very limited knowledge and understanding at the time. However, since the ability to abstract is the one that is fundamental and the religious worldview is just one spin on it, there is nothing stopping a materialist reductionist from talking about concepts like "meaning", "love", "value", "morality" in a meaningful way. These still could be useful abstractions even if one aknowledges that they could be reduced to some physical configuration of matter (like that a "chair" is a physical configuration of matter with certain properties or "anger" is a physical configuration of the brain with certain properties). The main challenge is that for these highly personal abstractions it is harder to create a shared understanding between different people for what they represent. That is why some people in the New Atheist movement mainly focus on trying to reduce complex concepts like "morality" to more basic concepts like "well-being" and "logical consistency". These basic concepts are largely shared between humans because of the similarities in which their brains process the world. As such, I think this offers far more systematic and communicative way of building a moral framework.
Given all of this, there are some parts of the essay that seem to me to be quite misguided as a criticism. For example, in the essay you stated that "...you must believe that we are nothing other than a smarter, generally less hairy version of a chimpanzee. In such a case, there is no uniform value to all human beings", but that seems like a strange criticism to me. For one thing, nobody really acts as if (or even believes that) humans truly have "uniform value". Regardless of what a person may personally claim to believe, people naturally tend to care more about a neighbour that is suffering or a close kin that is suffering that about a person on the other side of the world that is suffering; people naturally value more highly an individual that is contributing positively to their community than a criminal that is contributing negatively; even most religions are quite hypocritical on that note because despite claims of "uniform value" it is perfectly acceptable for different individuals to be treated very differently in the afterlife based on that individual's life, which admits that there is different worth to different people. On another note, the reduction of humans' value to their position relative to other animals already pressuposes a narrow understanding of what it means to be "valuable". Since "value" is just an abstraction that an individual has in their mind about what they personally consider important, there is nothing stopping someone from considering the mere property of being a "human" as something valuable. This is not, in fact, some arbitrary choice since humans are social animals and naturally have positive affinity towards other members of their species. I think many people could be convinced of this view just by appealing to their intuition and presenting it as an axiomatic truth (in fact, I would argue most people already subconsciously accept this idea to some extend even if they may not have an explicit belief in it). Of course, one also may see this view as unsatisfactory (like yourself and myself) and try to reduce the idea of "value" further to what really is "valuable" to being a "human". In that regard, one could step on a different, more basic grounding like the concept of "sentience" (and therefore include some not human animals) - this is the position that I personally accept and also I don't find it problematic since I reject the idea of ascribing "uniform value". There are other possible groundings as well. Ultimatelly, there is not really some "true" way to define "value" as each individual will have their own idea of what it means, but there is still the fact that people will be convinced by different definitions to different extend based on their natural intuition and way of perceiving the world. In that regard, I think that if one wants to have a shared understanding of the concept "value" in a society, the best candidate for a grounding of it is probably the one that is the most convincing for the most amount of people.