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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35515 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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I find it interesting that The Motte tends to treat atheism with kid gloves that are not reserved for other belief systems. For example, the idea that there is no difference in intelligence between different genetic groups of humans is widely called out here as being simply wrong. Which it almost certainly is, in my opinion. But consider the idea that methodological constraints actually are a metaphysical theory, or further implying that shoes are atheists. These ideas are, I think, even less likely to be true than the idea that there is no difference in intelligence between different genetic groups of humans (at least the latter can be empirically shown true or false; the former is just a category error). But atheism on The Motte is usually not met with accusations that it is as absurd, indeed perhaps more absurd, as any flavor of wokeism. Nor is the history acknowledged that New/Internet Atheists almost certainly led to a willingness to embrace relativism everywhere and ultimately wokeism by the masses of "laypeople". Wokeism gets often and in my opinion properly pilloried on here for being nonsensical on the level of correspondence to objective reality, but atheism typically gets a free pass. Even the philosophers on here mostly refuse to really call it out as being absurd when the topic comes up.

Does this happen because atheism is largely not viewed as a threat anymore (since its birth of wokeism is already in the past) and because since wokeism is this community's main out-group and atheism is vaguely internet-weirdo-aligned in the modern West, people here tend to follow the principle of "the enemy of an enemy is my friend"? Or, to be more charitable, maybe it is because wokeism can fairly easily be criticized on the level of normal scientific investigation, whereas the claims that atheism makes go so far beyond typical constraints of the scientific method that one actually does just quietly make an exception for it because its claims are fundamentally viewed as being orthogonal to scientific investigation (and people just fail to ever mention such)?

  • -36

If anyone else is a little confused, this is a callback of this post from the Sunday thread: https://www.themotte.org/post/409/smallscale-question-sunday-for-march-12/75569?context=8#context

Anyways, I think most atheists, if pressed, will say that they're technically agnostic. Which is the position that doesn't actually require much backup, being the effective null hypothesis.

How do you figure that atheism is as absurd as wokeism? (I don't actually think that being woke is absurd, but that's a comment for a different thread)

I think the atheist/agnostic distinction (outside of models where an explicitly unknowable god has meaning) is special pleading. Denying the existence of god, unicorns, Santa, Russel's teapot and Sagan's dragon are all in the same category of statement. But only one of them is so frequently met with "well, technically, you're only saying they probably don't exist".

Anyways, I think most atheists, if pressed, will say that they're technically agnostic.

So, why don't we ridicule the remaining atheists more?

  • -13

I dunno, what do you want to make fun of them for? What about atheism do you find risible?

There was a fedora-wearing Reddit atheist stereotype back in the 2010's, but that's mostly fallen by the wayside as atheism became a default position.

For example, the idea that methodological constraints actually are a metaphysical theory, or further implying that shoes are atheists. Or that New/Internet Atheists almost certainly led to a willingness to embrace relativism everywhere and ultimately wokeism by the masses of "laypeople". Or perhaps other things, I'm not sure how general the OP was, but I don't think we're allowed to hypothesize that they just want to bash the outgroup generally for the lulz. We probably want to keep it to the motte.

For example, the idea that methodological constraints actually are a metaphysical theory

My metaphysical theory is that it is unproductive to subscribe to (any other, esp. adversarially wrought) metaphysical theories that are untestable given my methodological constraints. The difference is subtle but I consider it pretty important.

implying that shoes are atheists

Is this some in-joke I am not privy to? I don't understand in what sense shoes can be modelled to hold beliefs, so the statement is a category error.

Or that New/Internet Atheists almost certainly led to a willingness to embrace relativism everywhere and ultimately wokeism by the masses of "laypeople".

That's an interesting theory and all, but that does not have any bearing on the correctness of atheism (any more than the horrors of global thermonuclear war should make you doubt the correctness of atomic theory). If you are concerned with instrumentality of beliefs regardless of their correctness, we are home to a great contingent of post-rationalists who I'm sure are receptive to arguments about which false beliefs are most conducive to human flourishing.

My metaphysical theory is that it is unproductive to subscribe to (any other, esp. adversarially wrought) metaphysical theories that are untestable given my methodological constraints.

How did you test that metaphysical theory?

Is this some in-joke I am not privy to?

Ohhh, shoes were all the rage. You do better than to fall into that hole, but it's mostly a funny dig.

that does not have any bearing on the correctness of atheism

I didn't say that it does. It's just a bonus that atheism likely enabled the very thing that OP was decrying.

How did you test that metaphysical theory?

I didn't. Metaphysical theories are those that can't be tested, right? It's really more like a religion, and I did the same thing that people did for their choice of religion since written history began, which is a mixture of copying that which people around me believed and siding with the camp whose prophets work the most impressive miracles.

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