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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35557 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

I think it's just an age thing. Atheism forces you to remain ignorant of substantial parts of human experience. It would be difficult to hold that level of ignorance for a very long time, especially with the internet. I think it's just hard to enforce that level of blindness in the age of the internet.

There do seem to be a few people in my life that never grew out of their atheism phase, but they seem generally uncurious.

Maybe I'm just way off? My suspicion is that there are very, very few atheist rationalists. I don't think that the curiosity involved in rationalism would be able to also support being an atheist. The cognitive dissonance would be too strong.

To expand on this: a religious person asks the question "what if there is no god" and spends a life exploring it. An atheist asks that question when they're a teenager (usually), figures that they know the answer, and then refuses to explore further.

  • -14

Maybe I'm just way off? My suspicion is that there are very, very few atheist rationalists.

We do have surveys. The five most common belief systems on that question in /r/themotte were, in order:

  • Atheist (humanist) 27.8 %

  • Agnostic 23 %

  • Other atheist 13.6 %

  • Atheist (antitheist) 12.7 %

  • Catholic 4.8 %

The remaining 20% are mostly theists of various faiths, they'd have trouble putting the same name on the ballot, so challenging even the third runner-up atheist subgroup would be a tall order.

Yeah I definitely believe I could be wrong. It seems like an extreme level of cognitive dissonance to me to constantly be posting about HBD and asking tough questions and wanting to kill sacred cows and all of that, but then just be absolutely unwilling to explore religion.

just be absolutely unwilling to explore religion

?

I thought that casual assertions of faith around here were accepted. Those who are faithful explore religion and plainly state that in comments and are not attacked by local atheists.

The theists making arguments in this thread seem to consider "What observations of reality indicate that your beliefs are true?" some sort of crazy question that shouldn't bear any weight as to whether their beliefs are true.

Well, we might reasonably think that the relevant question should be "What evidence indicates that your beliefs are true?" - the prickliness you're experiencing is a suspicion that saying "observations of reality" rather than a more generic term like "evidence" might amount to smuggling in an assumption about the validity or non-validity of certain forms of evidence with the effect of arbitrarily ruling out valid arguments.

There are plenty of theistic arguments from the history of philosophy that are interesting and worth thinking about. They cannot really said to be narrowly observational in nature; that's not to say they don't depend on certain observations, but the observation they rely on will be something like "There exists at least one contingent being," and the essential content of the argument is deriving what logically follows from the existence of such a contingent being based on an analysis of contingency, necessity, and causation, embodied in metaphysical principles like the principle of sufficient reason, ultimately aiming to establish that contingent being implies necessary being.

So in a strictly precise sense, the theist would respond to your question with: any observation at all indicates that my beliefs are true, because any observation is an observation of a contingent thing, and (the theist argues) the existence of any contingent thing ultimately entails the existence of a necessary and absolutely ultimate reality that explains the being of the observed contingent thing, and the existence of a necessary and absolutely ultimate reality is what theists are trying to establish.

The exact chain of reasoning that leads to this conclusion is not something I've set out here, both because I'm just trying to explain how the argument works to clarify the basic sort of claim that is being made, and because my philosophy is a bit rusty so I probably couldn't explain it here remotely as well as an academic work on the subject. I recognize that tends to kill discussion because who wants to be told to go get a book on something, but oh well.

We ask for observations of reality because that's what the question amounts to: how should our behavior change if the god of Thomas' five proofs exists? If the only difference between a universe with a god and the universe without one is that the former is more consistent with some metaphysical approach, why should I care?

It's similar to discussing consciousness: if you can't tell if someone is conscious or a p-zombie, why does it matter?

In the classical schema, the knowledge of God is presented as the apex of theoretical contemplation, which does not need any external justification but is itself the foundational good of human life. From Aristotle's Protrepticus:

To seek from all knowledge a result other than itself, and to demand that knowledge must be useful, is the act of one completely ignorant of the distance that from the start separates things good from things necessary; they stand at opposite extremes. For of the things without which life is impossible those that are loved for the sake of something else must be called necessities and contributing causes, but those that are loved for themselves even if nothing follows must be called goods in the strict sense. This is not desirable for the sake of that, and that for the sake of something else, and so ad infinitum; there is a stop somewhere. It is completely ridiculous, therefore, to demand from everything some benefit other than the thing itself, and to ask "What then is the gain to us?" and "What is the use?" For in truth, as we maintain, he who asks this is in no way like one who knows the noble and good, or who distinguishes causes from accompanying conditions.

One would see the supreme truth of what we are saying, if someone carried us in thought to the islands of the blest. There there would be need of nothing, no profit from anything; there remain only thought and contemplation, which even now we describe as the free life. If this be true, would not any of us be rightly ashamed if when the chance was given us to live in the islands of the blest, he were by his own fault unable to do so? Not to be despised, therefore, is the reward that knowledge brings to men, nor slight the good that comes from it. For as, according to the wise among the poets, we receive the gifts of justice in Hades, so (it seems) we gain those of wisdom in the islands of the blest.

It is nowise strange, then, if wisdom does not show itself useful or advantageous; we call it not advantageous but good, it should be chosen not for the sake of anything else, but for itself. For as we travel to Olympia for the sake of the spectacle itself, even if nothing were to follow from it (for the spectacle itself is worth more than much wealth), and as we view the Dionysia not in order to gain anything from the actors (indeed we spend money on them), and as there are many other spectacles we should prefer to much wealth, so too the contemplation of the universe is to be honoured above all the things that are thought useful. For surely it cannot be right that we should take great pains to go to see men imitating women and slaves, or fighting and running, just for the sake of the spectacle, and not think it right to view without payment the nature and reality of things.

Ironically given your point it is Religions that generally don't like it when you gore their (sometimes literal) sacred cows, so in my experience curious contrarians are much more likely to be atheist if only because when they started to ask tough questions about the religions they were probably raised in, the answers were things like "God moves in mysterious ways" and "Have faith" and the like. Not very satifying to the curious who want to know why.

And perhaps relevantly, the only religion present in even single digit numbers is the one that literally-and-not-just-figuratively invented apologetics and thus is most likely to be able to provide an actual answer(that is at least not facially stupid) to gored sacred cows.

Don’t beat yourself up, you just tried to apply a valid argument to the wrong group. Turns out the data shows that the scepticism involved in rationalism is rarely able to support also being a theist.

As far as HBD, wokism, feminism, most of the stuff we argue about is concerned, I consider these matters largely settled to my satisfaction, my arguing is more fine-tuning, as a hobby and public service than 'exploring' or 'seeking an answer'. So it is with the god question, I searched until I had an answer, then I moved on. I'm always open for business, but I don't go door-to-door.

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