Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
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.”
No. But what of it? The question is not whether human experience is significant to the universe (what would it even mean for something to be significant to the universe? The universe is not a conscious being able to perceive significance), is whether it's significant to humans. Which it pretty obviously is, since human experience might be a vanishingly small fraction of the universe, but it's the totality of, well, itself. Humans are the ones who decide how humans behave, so who or what but humans should be the judge of human significance? (I would also question whether the end of human existence is really the same as never having existed in the first place. From an eternalist perspective, which in my understanding is perfectly compatible with godless metaphysics, then the universe has always about to be affected by humans, and will forever have been affected by humans. If Joe Smith dies today, the statement "Joe Smith is alive the 16th of August 2023 CE is still forever true.)
And if they live five more years and then die? Does it still not matter? You can do plenty of stuff in five years. Human life may be short, but it's not zero; the way I saw it put somewhere, "the difference betwee zero and one is as reat as that between one and infinity". You are drawing a dichotomy in which either something has infinite value or it has none at all. It might make no difference to the galaxy of Andromeda, but... why should the kidney donor and the doctors care more about the perspective of the galaxy of Andromeda than that of the kidney receiver? (Why should they care less abut Andromeda, you may say. Well, it happens that they do, with or without the permission of gods and philosophers, and they can't help but do so. There's good practical, material reasons for that -- see below.)
What indeed? They were for feeling good. By that standard you should never enjoy vacations because eventually you return to work, never eat good food because eventually it's going to run out, never enjoy spending time with older loved ones who will die before you, etc. And yet people do enjoy these things. As a matter of fact about human psychology, eternity has never been a prerequisite for enjoyment. This whole argument starts from an assumption that happiness and human endeavours and whatnot are only worth experiencing if they last forever. This is not an assumption that everyone shares.
Which science? The science I found suggests that moral intuitions derive pretty logically from game theory and our evolutionary history, and are in fact very useful in order to put a society together. It's absolutey not an accident that parents love their children and that people dislike murderers (with all the imperfection you'd expect from a soul that runs on warm gristle). Will a cool pseudoNietzsche Free Spirit defector in a society of blithe cooperators end up maximizing their own hedonic pleasure? Groups of cooperators tend to be much stronger and lasting than lonely defectors. Plus, you and I are built out of the same goop, crawled out of the same pond and climbed down the same tree, so our fundamental moral drives are not likely to diverge much, barring actual pathology, which is not cured by prayer. We have moral instincts jury-rigged by evolution that are not easily discarded (even the Nazis had to put in effort to avoid pitying their victims), and we have self-interested reasons to use them. If you ask me, that's more than enough reason to at least attempt to behave morally. Deities seem to me wholly superfluous, much like they're superfluous to explain the shape of continents once you have plate tectonics. Perhaps you might think that an atheist who behaves well out of fear of punishment is not Really being moral, but...
... If you really only care about children or spouses or siblings or close friends or favorite artworks or landscapes or foodstuffs or pastimes or whatever because you're threatened into compliance, I don't see what makes you different from the hypothetical Nietzschean Ubermensch who behaves well because it's in their long-term self-interest. But I doubt that's the case. If God Almighty showed up and said to every being in the universe I reward only good pebblesorters, I don't care about this moral stuff, would you then behave like the "thinking atheist" you describe?
Thanks for the detailed and thoughtful response, I hope I managed to be at least a bit worthy of it.
I appreciate your responses a lot, they’re great.
I agree that humans can enjoy things and be motivated to enjoy things in the face of annihilation of the human race and a lack of objective judgment. I agree that humans will help others if it means they feel good. My disagreement is that things like the motivation to pursue the betterment of humanity and the amelioration of suffering and a general non-hedonic existence is greatly diminished in the atheist framework.
But maybe we should look at concrete examples. Let’s say two humans are deciding how to go about their career as doctors.
Theo believes that his conduct as a doctor will be judged by a powerful and important and loving Person. Theo believes this Person’s opinion of him is more important than any human being he knows. Theo loves this Person because this Person gave his life for him. As a result, Theo ignores the temptation to overcharge and over-medicate, he ignores the temptation to see too many patients to acquire money. The hospital’s management is upset with him; his coworkers are enjoying life more than him. But Theo believes that the Great Person is doubly proud of him for withstanding social pressure.
Athena believes that her conduct is never judged except by other people who are only privy to how she presents herself publicly. Athena believes that life is about enjoyment, that she will die and never live again, and that feeling good is the most important thing. She overcharges patients, she over-medicates, and she rushes appointments. She loves the praise she gets from her manager. If she ever feels guilty, she goes on social media and signals her virtue as a feminist doctor, and instantly she feels better. She knows that she can feel less guilty more effectively by ignoring the substance and focusing on appearances. A lot of people suffer because of her, but she can hide this from her mind easily, as the other people around her do.
We would certainly agree that Theo is greater than Athena here. I bet our disagreement solely lies in my description of Athena. I’m describing the worst possible atheist, or something. But I think my description is accurate for a “thinking atheist” who has plotted out all the consequences of her belief system. Theo has also plotted out the consequences of his belief system, and it leads to morality and a qualitatively different happiness predicated on human affection in the face of suffering. Perhaps there’s someone similar to Athena — let’s call him Athanasius — who believes that he must behave morally to better humanity. That would be an act of faith and does not follow from atheism. Athanasius is willing a new belief into existence in the same way Theo does. I would then just say that Athanasius should take a few more steps and try to imagine the most motivating belief system, and this would look awfully similar to theism — hell maybe he would develop something even better than religion.
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