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Notes -
I want to resurrect a variant of an old question that has got me wondering again. Is it possible for an atheist to think deeply about life without losing motivation to live well?
It’s trite to phrase it like this, but the atheistic model still seems utterly devoid of motivation or purpose when you dwell on it. Obviously, if you don’t dwell on the facts of life, you can distract yourself with various concerns and pursuits. But what if you don’t distract yourself? Someone with a religious model involving a loving God can ponder his existence forever and be motivated and purpose-filled, provided that they forever presuppose a loving God as an article of faith. But I’m trying to envision an atheist pondering life while still maintaining motivation to live vibrantly and maximally. How do they do it, do they do it, or are they just distracting themselves?
Eg, “an atheist believes they need to make life count” —> count for what? Your life does not count, by your own definition. You will cease to exist, like the dinosaurs, who surely did not count. So why are you programming your own Operating System as a hobby? It doesn’t count! “But it makes me happy” —> drugs will surely make you more happy. Why not do them?
Yes, plainly. There are many examples.
When Lacan said "there is no big Other", he didn't mean "God doesn't exist". He meant that, even if God exists, God is not the big Other either. God's just as confused as we are.
It's not clear why the introduction of God is supposed to make life more meaningful in the first place. He could torture us for eternity if we don't follow his commands; but that's just coercion. Similarly, you could be motivated to live virtuously so you can be rewarded with an eternity in Heaven, but it's hard to give an account of Heaven that doesn't reduce to either empty hedonism, or a simple continuation of the types of good things we already have on Earth. Pleasure and pain are things that we already know well; and if pleasure and pain aren't enough to make our finite earthly existence meaningful, why would an eternity of pleasure or pain make life suddenly change from not-meaningful to meaningful? Certainly anyone can see why you would be motivated to avoid eternal torture, but is that the same thing as meaning?
I think we can dispense with the idea that eternity by itself is what makes something meaningful. You can imagine a hypothetical universe that contains nothing but a single electron, and this electron persists for eternity. Is the electron's existence "meaningful"? Doesn't seem like it. So there has to be something else, beyond the mere fact of eternal duration, that makes an existence meaningful. But then we can start to question whether this "something else" might not be available to a finite existence as well.
A more sophisticated theist might say that God is the ground of certain sui generis facts about meaning and purpose, and these facts exist over and above any of his other properties or actions. God simply makes it the case that certain things just are meaningful, end of story. But if you endorse an internalist account of reasons for action, you might question whether such free-floating normative facts are coherent in the first place. Even if you've been informed that God has simply made it the case that some things are more meaningful than others, it seems like there will still always be an open question of why you should care. You might say, "that's very interesting that God has done that, but I don't see how that can be relevant to me personally. If God will torture me if I don't follow his commands, then I certainly should follow his commands; but in that case, I'm responding to the threat of torture, not the alleged 'meaningfulness' of the actions themselves."
All this is simply to say that God is not the big Other. God himself can always take a step back and ask "you know... what is it all for, really?"
An equivalent formulation might say, "there is no escape from philosophy".
But I think you need to start from the presupposition that God is maximally loving as an unquestionable dogma. As this was the dogma of Christianity since its advent, pun intended. Lacan’s construction of post-modern God should be of little interest to us, because a “theist-by-faith” can simply say he is wrong by the very first assumption. Once you define God as loving dogmatically, there’s no room for criticizing God by saying he is confused, evil, etc. Now, I accept that there is room for arguing against the epistemic leap to a God who finds us special and listens to our plea — that this forms something of a special pleading fallacy. But that’s a separate argument.
The angle I am coming at is that in the everyday life of a Christian theist, or some portion thereof, there is a willful belief and anticipation that they will meet their Loving Father and creator at the end of their days, and tell Him all about their life — though He already knows — and all things will be accounted for and made sense of. The description in the Gospel is of a heaven like a mansion with many rooms, which Christ the Friend goes to prepare for us. Now, I am not interested (personally) in the argument for this from deduction. I am just interested in how, if someone assents to a belief in this, they can think about their life forever without ever losing motivation and good spirit. Are they “wrong”? Well, from the atheistic angle it appears that there is no such thing as wrong, that in fact there is no significance whatsoever to being right or wrong because there is no Final Accounting. But the theist can make sense and ponder his whole life and even the nature of life (within the realm of faith) and spend an eternity writing poetry about this. As such, atheism is more wrong than theism, because only theism can define “wrong” from a vantage point of significance.
Maybe another angle is to read your comment, which is logical and well-argued, and say (politely), “so what?” If you have argued against God, you have lost the argument because you have now entered a realm where “right” and “wrong” are undefined. It’s a null zone. Nothing has been solved because there is no Ultimate Solution.
No, theism/atheism is orthogonal to the question of morality. An atheist can believe that some things are more morally right than others just as well as a theist can. That is, of course, unless you think that anyone who believes in morality is by definition a theist. But I do not think that this is what you mean in this thread when you refer to believing in god.
Certainly, one does not need to believe in eternal life to believe that some things are morally more right than others.
Can they do this while dwelling on the facts of their worldview? My point is more specifically that while an atheist may perform moral judgment in a distracted sense, being a social organism in a greater whole and internalizing moral judgment as such, their morality is inconsistent with dwelling on their worldview and actually deeply considering its consequences. This is in sharp contrast to theism, where continuing to dwell on one’s worldview is sought out and leads to more motivation and moral action.
Why?
Because ultimately all of humanity will be forgotten, meaning what happens has no greater significance, and when you die what you did will not matter, as you will cease existing. If humanity is a temporary blip in eternity, human actions do not matter in the grand scheme of things. Thus, when dwelling on the grand scheme of things, you cannot sincerely maintain motivation and purpose.
... Why? Why does moral importance require taking up a share of the universe's lifespan? Human experience is already 100% of what humans can ever experience. Whether you find that imporant or not, I do not see how a long existence of gas clouds before and afterward makes any difference. Do you think your life would be more "meaningful", whatever that means, if you found out that the universe was created 150 years ago and will be destroyed in another 150 years? Do you think a person who lived in the Upper Paleolithic, when there was only about a million people on Earth, had 8000x the moral value of a person living in the modern world, with its eight billion inhabitants?
If the whole human endeavor disappears without a trace, leaving no influence, and no one remembers them, then by definition it has no impact or significance on the universe. In human life, when something has no greater significance, like we make a medicine that was ineffective or we build a building that collapses, we say it was meaningless. If I give someone a kidney but they die immediately, it had no greater significance. In other words, it didn’t matter.
If I will die, and every human will die, then what I do has no greater significance because it is only temporarily affecting things that will disappear shortly. Those “good feelings” I create in others will cease to matter one day, so what were they for? It’s almost the same thing as if I do heroin and then face withdrawals — temporary happiness that doesn’t matter. What’s more, my moral intuitions have no greater purpose and are just an accident. This we know from science. So I have no need to listen to my moral impulse and can completely ignore it for my own gain, as if I’m playing GTA. The only duty remaining is to feel good, because only pleasure is real. If someone tries to shame me (which feels bad), I can pretend that he is wrong and that I am right. We already have humans doing this today in fact!
It’s a worldview that can’t help but breed dysfunction if you actually dwell on it. Like yeah, you can ignore the atheistic truth, but then you might as well develop some theistic view for fun. An atheistic man who confronts the ultimate purpose of things head on would say: “I exist as an accident, there is no greater significance to morality, morality is an accidental instinct that I can ignore, and I need not care about humankind because I won’t be judged for it.”
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There's no such thing as the grand scheme of things. We are our own infinities of the highest order.
There is a techno-optimist narrative that there is a real possibility, large enough that a VC would bet on it given the size of the payoff, that the Great Filter is in our past (or is in the near future, with a slim-but-real chance of crossing it - the Yudkowskian view on AI), we see no other signs of a civilization that has crossed it, and accordingly given the potential impact of a supercivilization, humanity is the most important thing in the observable universe. This is a major source of meaning to the longtermist-EA crowd in practice, and in a weaker form is a very obvious source of meaning that everyone involved is space exploration talks about.
The fundamental narrative is more general - most religious source-of-meaning narratives are of the form "humanity is special because God made us special" and this is a secular version. It can be relied on by anyone who is part of the load-bearing infrastructure of human civilization (including parents) or who thinks they are.
The old jaibot blog (jaibot was the bard of the early Berkeley rataionality community) recently disappeared, but he had some excellent inspirational posts of this type.
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