I read this good essay from the American Humanists. I agree with it, but I have some problems with it. I can do that; I have one foot in the atheist camp, and the other in the humanist camp.
Atheism is what we don’t believe; humanism is what we do believe.
Humanists are cultural progressives. When you make decisions based on rationality and scientific research, with an added dose of empathy, the effective answers to the issues of our day are the progressive answers. Science-based sex education is proven to be more effective than abstinence-based sex education. A strong middle class is best for a stable, resilient economy. Health care for all extends quality of life and strengthens economies. The civil rights of all must be protected because the only justification for seeing women and racial minority groups as inferior comes from bronze-age holy books and other outdated ideas. People who support progressive ideals most often do so because they see positive results and understand cause and effect.
While atheists and humanists reject the existence of any gods for lack of evidence, atheism and humanism are not synonymous. Most atheists and humanists are good people, but atheism in and of itself is not supported by an ethical system to guide behavior. Not all those who don’t believe in a god have fully moved past societal prejudices and old programming—and not all have cultivated empathy in a way that engenders compassion for others and builds a sense of egalitarianism.
Here’s my problem: the characterization of atheists is false.
I say that even though a lot of atheists will eagerly agree with it. Atheism doesn’t have a moral code, they will say, it’s nothing but the absence of a supernatural moral authority. That’s what they tell themselves, anyway, but it’s all a lie — they’re humans, and they’re simply loaded with moral assumptions. You cannot get away from them. Atheists have a tendency to declare that logic and reason are their sole moral absolutes (which in itself is a kind of moral code), and then, in an unsurprising twist, explain that their particular beliefs, no matter what they are, are the product of their logic and reason, and are therefore good. The same circular logic we laugh at in biblical rationalizations is just fine when we do it.
So we get a kind of free-for-all. Atheist dudebros, for example, can claim that Libertarian selfishness is the only rational ethical stance, that science is the arbiter of all truth, and that because the social relationship of men and women is the product of evolution, it is optimized to support male dominance and female submission. They do have an ethical system to guide their behavior! It’s a thoroughly fucked-up system, but really, they’re not all sitting there in a moral void, objectively pure and unbiased. They’re actually operating under a whole set of premises, largely unexamined and often superficial, with a goodly dollop of motivated reasoning propping them up.
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Science is true. How do we know? Science!
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Humans are evolved. Therefore, everything about us has a purpose and provides a benefit. How do we know? Because we’re here!
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Logic is the only right way to approach a problem, and the ideal human is objective, rational, and unemotional. How do we know? Well, there was this old Star Trek episode…
I like science, too, I know humans evolved, and I think logic is an excellent tool. It’s just that I also appreciate other ways of seeing the world (they’re inevitable, since we’re not robot clones), see evolution as a chaotic clusterfuck of chance with a ribbon of selection providing multiple ways forward, and also know that logic is a great tool for false rationalizations. Probably the most logical, successful, long-lived human institution on the planet is the Catholic church, and they are masters at using logic to back up odious, false, and harmful decisions.
So please, stop giving atheism the blank check they want, the claim of an absence of any kind of moral imperatives or any prior suppositions. It isn’t the case, it’s only that they want to pretend to have an absence of priors so they can assume the mantle of objective, bias-free decision making, which, by the assumptions they claim that they don’t have, makes their moral decisions superior.
It also drives me up a tree that whenever anyone proposes that atheists ought to recognize the consequences and obligations of their ideas, there will always be some pissy wanker who’ll tell them they should go join the humanists, because atheists don’t do that. Yeah, atheists do do that — it’s just that they prefer that their implicit biases be invisible. Humanists at least try to make the framework explicit.
There’s another thing that bugs me. This cartoon is a mashup of Calvin & Hobbes comic illustrations with quotes from the novel Dune. The quotes are in praise of individualism.
People, not commercial organizations or chains of command, are what make great civilizations work.
There is a truth in there. Ultimately, it’s people who do the work. But institutions enable or disable their endeavor. Good schools, for instance, are essential to give people the tools to do great things; and the greatest people in the world can be trapped in futility by institutional poverty or racism.
That cartoon represents a very common atheist way of looking at things. We don’t need structure or ideals or even other people; we are all individuals! My greatness is mine and mine alone! And yet the people saying those things are often privileged, middle-class Americans who have benefited every day of their life from social structures that favor them and give them the ability to live up to their potential.
I am also an atheist, and I’ve had lifelong advantages because of where I come from and because of the support of social institutions. Tempting as it is to abandon the institution of atheism (and it is an institution, a movement, a framework for thinking) and just say everyone ought to be a humanist, I can’t. There’s more than one way to live a godless life, none of them involve becoming an unfeeling computer, and I refuse to allow atheists the pretext of lacking a moral code. I think we’re better served by making it explicit and open.
It’d be really funny to use Paul’s quotes from dune as some kind of inspirational talk; he leads a galaxy-wide pogrom and even points out that he was orders of magnitude worse than Hitler or Genghis Khan.
He’s a protagonist, and his actions make sense in context, but still; if you share ideology with a character that has “Killed sixty-nine billion, sterilized nine planets, and demoralized five hundred others”, you might want to re-think that ideology.
i don’t know if I can live up to all that atheist dogma, maybe I really don’t have enough faith to be an atheist.
[crowd]: Yes, we are all individuals!
[small voice from back of crowd]: I’m not!
Sorry, I can’t help myself…
While I generally agree with PZ, and consider myself a humanist, I do think that a lot of this argument is really structured as being about how to define words. I remember some clown trying to argue that the concept of organic food was nonsense because pesticides and preservatives and artificial flavors are all (or nearly all) carbon compounds, and the word “organic” means carbon compounds. In some contexts that’s what it means, in others it isn’t.
You can certainly define atheism as “not believing in God,” and leave it at that. But what you’re really saying is, that’s not enough for you, affirmative beliefs — not just scientific beliefs, but an ethical structure — are essential. You are saying that willy nilly, atheists, like everybody else, have ethical impulses and most likely articulatable principles, and it matters a lot to you what those are. But people who don’t vibrate on your wavelength can still call themselves atheists. Getting bogged down over the rightful ownership of a word seems to me a distraction.
Regarding that cartoon/quote: From what I know of anthropology, people’s brains haven’t particularly changed much in the last three or four thousand years. Processes, governmental structures, and legal systems, however, have evolved considerably. Every convenience, luxury, and improvement that we enjoy today is therefore due mostly to the evolution of social structures — if all you’ve got is a bunch of smart people, we’d still be re-inventing the wheel every few years.
And if societies fail because people can’t achieve their potential for greatness — is that really due to over-regulation, or is it due to failure of institutions, like poor people who can’t attend college?
In other words, I think I disagree with every panel.
Dear PZ:
I know this is a recurring theme in your discourse. But I would certainly appreciate not being called – even indirectly – a liar. My lack of belief in supernatural bla simply does not inform my humanism. I feel there are many different and all valid ways to arrive at a humanistic and ethical philosophy and morality.
Especially for people who have never been burdened with religious belief in the first place, (a)theism just is not all that important.
Yes, I am a dictionary atheist. But do not throw me on the same pile as the “dudebros”, or right-wing libertarians. I share most of your philosophical sensitivities, such as your stances on feminism, social justice, science & rationality, etc. Just took a different route to get there. So can you please leave me some room in your worldview? Thank you.
Once again, have I ever said otherwise? Of course they are.
What I’m saying is that if an atheist tells you that all of their beliefs are objectively verifiable and empirically true, no matter what they are, they’re lying to you.
It is especially annoying when they try to claim that they are free of all ideology (“ideology” is evil, don’t you know) and that their atheism has zero implications in their life.
Well yes, they are making a category error in Jurgen Habermas’s terms (as I referred to in comments on an earlier thread). But I still think you’re muddling the issue a bit by making what seems at times to be a semantic claim. People keep responding by saying “look it up in the dictionary” and as long as that keeps happening, it seems to me evidence that you aren’t quite making yourself clear. That’s all I’m saying.
You really socked it to that strawman PZ. My hay fever can feel it all the way to here.
For American atheist institutions, there are very real consequences to the question of whether atheism is a positive belief system. Given its roots in opposing the establishment of religion (see the career of Madalyn Murray O’Hair), there were very real benefits to separating atheism qua atheism from atheist belief systems (e.g. objectivism, marxism, secular humanism, etc.). The religious right, for at least as long as I’ve been alive, has been trying to portray atheism as a rival religion. I don’t think you can have a meaningful discussion without taking into account the historical motivation for the insistence of dictionary atheism, and it’d be useful to also discuss the extent to which skeptic organizations (e.g. the NCSE) have strongly resisted endorsing atheism.
As for the implications for moral philosophy, most people are so awful at it that it’s pretty pointless to try and understand their position. The vast majority of internet discussions end up with someone pounding a table and proclaiming that a particular moral truth they value is self-evident and not subject to examination.
What #6 Olav said. Just in case anyone’s counting.
Same as #6 here, atheist from an atheist family. I approve of PZ’s goals for society and humanity, so I don’t appreciate being conflated with MRAs and Libertarians just because I don’t want to take part in a specific American flavour of movement atheism for which there’s frankly no need in my native country.
This discussion reminds me of a debate that went on in the old Infidel Guy forums between an Objectivist and a pragmaticist. The former made the claim that so many atheists do that their morality is derived from some objective truth, whereas the latter made a really solid claim that not only is that claim false, but that there really isn’t anything that can be said to be derived objectively as humans really can’t know anything objectively, as we are subjective creatures.. He went on to make the claim that all morality, and all knowledge, is known intra-subjectively, basically from the shared experiences of all involved, ultimately agreed upon by the group. The overall discussion was pretty damn good, it’s too bad that the forum and that particular discussion is lost (potentially retrievable through the internet archives, but I haven’t checked).
I like to consider atheism as simply an aspect, not an entire ideology.
Humanism is much more a cogent philosophy. In that it focuses on humans and not only that god doesn’t exist.
Atheism is the first step. as in
(1) reject theism,
(2) recognize people exist,
(3) consider how to cooperate.
(…)
what we call dictionary atheists appear to get stuck after step (1) and refuse to move forward, clinging to …~stuff~
IMO
But that’s nonsensical. How could “is there or is there not anything out there that’ll do it for us or fix things after death if we don’t prevent people from being miserable” not inform humanism?
Crossposting from Daylight Atheism:
I cared about people’s well being even when I believed there was a god. Not because the God I believed in said to or because of supernatural reward/punishment, but because that was the right thing to do. (I fell in the God commands it because it is good camp, not the other way around).
@tsig
What dogma are you talking about? I suspect you just didn’t understand what PZ was trying to say. I myself have difficulty understanding, but it seems pretty clear that he isn’t proposing dogma.
@PZ #7
Are you sure they’re not mistaken, or deluded, or some other such term? Do they have to be lying? Are you implying that every atheist who (however mistakenly) ascribes their belief (or lack thereof) to pure logic knows better but is trying to trick us?
For what it’s worth, here’s how this old fool sees the atheism/humanism wars:
— Libertarian Atheist say: “We don’t need no stinking moral code. We ought to act as we wish, and then our personal satisfaction will grow.”
— Dictionary Atheists say: “Our lack of belief in the supernatural simply does not inform our ethical philosophy and morality. We ought to act according to a vaguely humanistic ethic, and not worry about why, and then the human mystery and incoherence will grow.
— Humanists say: “We have a rational moral code that has moved beyond old prejudices. We ought to act according to this strictly logical moral calculus, and then human welfare will grow.”
— Scientists say: “We have the facts, and they are moral-free. We ought to act according to these facts, and then our funding will grow.”
— Scientismists (like me) say: “We understand a little, probably. We must act in such a way that what is true can be verified to be so, and then both our factual and moral understanding just might grow.”
— Richard Feynman said: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”
.. And we all do it, and so our foolishness will, in all probability, grow. The moral task is to keep pointing out the foolishness on all sides (good for you, PZ!) so that maybe it won’t overwhelm us.
@17 qwints
Ya I was going to guess something similar because Olav’s says stuff like:
Azkyroth left out these statements that (I think) clarify the other statement about “informing”: humanism was basically arrived at even without being an atheist.
Thanks again for doing the challenge belief thing. What I hear you saying is stop with the pretense and admit out loud what your beliefs are and where they come from because everyone has them. Then question them honestly.
In a sense the dictionary atheist are correct that the disbelief in gods does not inform any other aspect of their life (at least that is what it sounds like they are saying) because they seem to still hold to all the rest of the conventional conservative values and prejudices of the conservative establishment religious believers.
it is self-serving bull shit
uncle frogy
Azkyroth #15:
But then how does the desire to prevent people from being miserable have anything to do with whether there is anything out there? To me, the question if G/god(s) exists frankly seems entirely irrelevant to the humanist cause, a proper non sequitur.
We are humanists because we value humanity – if you never believed in any religious dogma, in other words if God was never an option to begin with, you really don’t need more reason than that.
Or you could become a right-wing libertarian nihilist, the kind of atheist that PZ rightly attacks. Just wish he would not so carelessly lump many atheists with different experiences (than his own) all in with them. And call us liars even, which really does hurt a little bit.
@Olav
Ya, I was going to say, you were talking about “ends” (goals) while Azkyroth’s objection was all about means to achieve those ends (can a god achieve this goal for us or do we have find some other way to achieve it?). A moral goal will not change just because you have to find different means to achieve it.
Also you could apply the same kind of thing to a bad moral system. Would Azkyroth say that the lack of a god equally “informs” their bad belief system?
After all, there isn’t any god out there to screw over the poor for you. You gotta do that shit yourself!
seleukos @ 19:
In the main, they are tricking themselves. And they [we] don’t even have to try very hard.
Brian Pansky #21:
Not in my case, to be clear I simply never was a theist. But yes: that is also a route by which some people come to humanism. I personally know a few people who will say that their humanism is religiously inspired. Exactly how they did it I would not pretend to fully understand. But I get along with them quite a lot better than with the “greed is good & women are dumb & bomb everyone who looks at us funny because logical science” type atheists – and I believe PZ does too.
I dislike the positioning of humanism as just the good parts of atheism, because it seems to pre-empt criticism. Progressive atheists can at least admit that atheism has a problem. Are humanists so much better, when the Council for Secular Humanism is part of the same organization as the Richard Dawkins Foundation?
“Atheism doesn’t have a moral code, they will say, it’s nothing but the absence of a supernatural moral authority. That’s what they tell themselves, anyway, but it’s all a lie — they’re humans, and they’re simply loaded with moral assumptions.”
Read that again, only replacing “Atheism” with “stamp collecting” (mutatis mutandis). It doesn’t make sense. AtheisM has no moral code, atheisTs generally do. As to the claim that such a moral code is built on an objective basis, that surely is nonsense.
For me, atheism is what kicked my humanism into high gear because it’s when I realized that there is almost definitely no grand plan and nobody looking out for us except each other. I had naively assumed (briefly) that this would be the normal path for people losing a belief in higher powers. I saw the views in the bible which I found abhorrent (e.g. anti-women, anti-gay, etc.) and thought that removing biblical support would make people better. I eventually realized that people’s belief or lack-thereof had little impact on those other views. I had always tried to be supportive of women and gay people (not always effectively but I make an effort to learn because I give a crap), so it really shouldn’t have been a surprise that bigots would remain bigots when they stopped believing in gods.
My view in summary:
-Does atheism have a moral code? No.
-Do atheists have moral codes? Yes, highly varied between individuals.
-Are my beliefs “objectively verifiable and empirically true”? Only to the extent that I am able, which falls far short of absolute. I start with the premise that everything with a brain should be treated with compassion and that happiness should be maximized and suffering minimized. I then try to use my available tools to help reach those goals.
My main disagreement with the OP is:
You’re swapping “atheism” with “atheists”. If I ever meet an atheist who claims to not have any moral code, I’ll call bullshit.
Atheism certainly informs an individual’s moral code but is not the source of it. I’d argue that the same is true of religion, but to a lesser degree. My moral code aligns far more closely with my catholic in-laws than with a lot of atheists I know. The existence of god is pretty much the only thing we disagree on.
I really wish atheism was a better path to human decency but there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary.
@16 Azkyroth
That’s pretty much how i aproach it. Atheism has consequences just like if some physical property of the universe went away. It affects how the other properties manifest.
I absolutely do think that people do use “dictionary atheism” as an excuse to avoid being made accountable for very shitty ideas or actions. It’s the smokescreen feature in the asshole toolbet. Atheists, like anybody else, should be accountable and held to societal standards, and that means that when some douche harasses a woman on twitter and claims that that’s ok, they need to be told it’s fucking not, whether they are an atheist, a christian or a cosmic rabbit alien believer. As for movement atheism, if there’s going to be anything that deserves the title, it should be a movement that includes progressive social values, because there’s a name for social movements that don’t, they are called bad movements, movements that any decent person should be against.
My main beef with that essay from the American Humanists is that it very strongly implies that humanism is atheism with added moral thinking. This is simply not true. Many of the most important and influential humanists in history were religious believers: Avicenna, Gandhi, Kierkegaard, Weisel for instance, who between them cover Islam, Buddhism, Christianity and Judaism. Desiderius Erasmus, the 16th century “Prince of Humanism” was a Catholic Priest. Charles Francis Potter, founder of the First Humanist Society of New York, signatory to the Humanist Manifesto, and adviser to Clarence Darrow during the Scopes Trial, was a Baptist minister who left because the church was too restrictive…and moved to the Unitarians.
On other pages (i.e. this one), the AHA makes it clear that humanism is not the same as atheism, but this particular essay pretty much asserts that all humanists are atheists. “Atheism is what we don’t believe; humanism is what we do believe…Humanists don’t believe in gods…atheists and humanists reject the existence of any gods for lack of evidence.” NO, NO, AND NO! BIG RED CATEGORY ERROR!
I was under the impression that PZ, and most commenters here believe in objective moral truth, but I’m not sure. Best I could find was The “objective morality” gotcha. Regardless, you can’t dismiss moral realism with a “surely.”
On the topic of Star Trek, I find it amusing when Spock is used as support for passionless logic because that was never how I saw those stories (I don’t actually know what Roddenberry’s intent was). Firstly, Spock was half human. Secondly, he was often an example of the failings of logic without emotion. His logic was great at many things but he was only complete when he embraced both sides of who he was.
This was further explored in later series like in Voyager when they presented Vulcans as being so deeply emotional that they had to be in control or be destroyed. Or in Enterprise when pre-federation Vulcans were portrayed assholes who grew as a culture from exposure to human compassion.
Is it objectively true that there is no objective truth?
Siggy #28:
Who does this, because I haven’t seen it? To me, humanism and atheism are like non-intersecting objects on different planes of existence. They deal with completely different questions.
Atheism itself does not have a problem, being as it is just the concept of a lack of belief in any sort of deity (and by extension, any sort of supernatural bla). That is the dictionary definition and as far as I guess we can all agree here, the proper answer to the question of whether such deities and supernatural bla actually do exist or not.
Of course there are problems with many atheists. Like with many atheists who will say and do problematic and deeply unprogressive things. Perhaps it will happen even more when people organise themselves in Councils and Foundations and whatnot, who write their names in capital letters and appoint (or anoint) “leaders” who will then begin to believe that their shit is gold.
@ chrislawson #32,
Agreed. I label myself as an atheist humanist* because neither is a complete description. I think it was Tracie Harris on a Godless Bitches podcast who spoke of going to humanist meetings but that they were very cold to any discussion of atheism in the particular group she went to.
*I personally feel that “humanist” is the more important attribute when it comes to making the world a better place.
By the way I do remain a bit miffed at being (indirectly) called a liar, seeing as I tried to explain my position honestly.
Dr. Myers?
@Olav #27
Oh!
Come to think of it, better and better thinking related to morality was one of the strongest things that I was learning right before I became an atheist. Morality seems to have caused me to become an atheist, not the other way around…
I kinda was (briefly) a fairly humanistic theist. But that was thin ice, I don’t know how other people can stay there…
Well ya, Siggy doesn’t mean there’s a problem with that. Siggy means that there are problems in the atheist social groups and such (which are what get the label “Atheism” in these kinds of situations).
@Qwints #33
Ya I’m definitely a Moral Realist, but words like “objective” VS “subjective”are so vague and easy to equivocate or confuse that I usually avoid them entirely.
Atheism is a worldview. It explains (or attempts to explain) how we got to be here. It’s not an ideology, which proscribes what we should do from here.
Many religions, such as Christianity, are both worldviews (the Universe and everything in it were deliberately created by a loving god) and ideologies (we should behave in such a matter so as to conform to someone’s interpretation of a sacred text).
Atheism is just the assertion that there are no gods and that humans were unplanned. It doesn’t imply anything about future actions. For that you need an ideology, such as humanism. Or communism. Or whatever ideology you believe to be best.
@Keith Collyer #29
If you did take stamp collecting as a philosophy, then it also comes with certain implied behaviors. One who follows the path of stamp collecting, no matter how little devotion they show to that path, holds that there is some value – however slight – to collecting stamps, and even if they only have one or two stamps in their collection, stamp collecting is part of how they view life, and a part of how they view themselves. It changes how they think about stamps and things like stamps, if only just a little bit.
One could, if one wanted, really delve into WHY stamps should be collected, and what meaning stamps have, either individually or as a category.
The point is that even trivial philosophical positions have some effect on why we do what we do, and on how we think about the world around us, and our actions.
Atheism is a philosophical position that carries philosophical implications, and given the power that theism has had in our history, it’s not a small thing.
You’re not simply doing or not doing something by being an atheist. You’re taking a position on the existence of deities, and more importantly on how you will behave with regard to that position. Even if you go with weak atheism – the position that you don’t accept OR actively reject any god claims – you’re still using that belief/lack of belief to guide your activities.
HOW atheism guides our activities, and to what degree, will vary from person to person, depending on other philosophical positions held, but that doesn’t mean that atheism is without implications for how we conduct ourselves.
The moral code of atheism may not be very comprehensive, but it’s not nonexistent. At the VERY least, it means that our morality cannot come from deities, and must therefor come from somewhere else.
For those of us who further decline to accept any supernatural claims, it means that our system of ethics must come from the natural world, by default, which is what scares some fundies so much, since their (terrible) understanding of the natural world, and of what science says about the natural world leads them to think that morals based in the natural world must be some form of brutal “social Darwinism”.
They’re wrong about everything to do with that except about the fact that atheism does come with a very basic moral code – the rejection of THEIR moral code, based on their fictional god being(s).
Chris, #32, the meaning of words changes with time.
Humanism now implies secular Humanism, at least in places like the UK, (where I lived until fairly recently). I’m not sure about the situation this side of the pond. Humanism appears to have nowhere near the impact in Canada that it does in the UK, (IMO).
I think that North America would benefit if the Humanist movement grew stronger here. I imagine that most of PZ’s regular readers are in favour of Humanist ideals.
From the British Humanist Association website: ‘Many people are humanists without even knowing it. If you are non-religious and look to science, reason, empathy, and compassion in order to live an ethical and meaningful life, you’re probably a humanist.’
@Olav 36
The article quoted in the OP clearly contrasts atheism and humanism, and highlights humanism as the more important identity. You seem to be disagreeing with the article, but let us not deny its existence.
I don’t care what definition you use to justify your statement, because your definition was not the one I was using. Equivocating between different definitions of atheism is exactly how the atheist movement avoids taking responsibility for its problems. You should not be an enabler.
Class error:
‘Atheism’ and ‘Atheists’ are two different things. One has moral assumptions, one doesn’t.
It is certainly possible to be an atheist without being a humanist, especially if you tend to the view that homo sapiens is an unfortunate result of random evolutionary processes, and likely not to last as long as many other species have. I don’t see that view as meaning that atheists have to be assholes. I try not to be!
Initial comment: “Did you know that there is more in common among atheists than simple lack of belief of gods?”
Response repeated a few dozen times: “Well, actually, technically [wharglgarblgarbl]”
Its amazing, for a group so disparate and lacking in ideology and having no unifying qualities whatsoever to all sound so fucking similar.
You don’t *need* to focus on empathy to take down liberbros/Dawkins/et al. They fail spectacularly at logic and evidence and that should be rubbed in their faces at every opportunity.
If someone claims the right to be a selfish asshole and call themselves an atheist, the problem is not the “atheist” part.
(Besides, if they are playing the dictionary atheist card, it’s not like they can use it to justify anything).
Random thought: Anyone else notice the similarity between the characterization of dictionary atheism and the characterization of gamergate by gamergaters? A leaderless group of individuals who are independently involved in a movement, with varying degrees of conviction and passion, for a variety of totally wholesome reasons? A diverse group defined exclusively by one single belief, alledgedly transcending any definable ideology or political identity, and who cannot be held responsible for the actions and beliefs of the large factions of assholes that also just happen to associate with the label? Does this ring a bell to anyone else?
@anteprepro, 47
Hmm ya. Also, ahem, can you think of any other groups that have a similar pattern? Maybe a group that rhymes with “time mitt”?
Although of course they were already in the group of “dictionary atheists” already if I recall…
Siggy #42:
But it does not say that humanism is just the good parts of atheism. So that is your paraphrasing? I honestly had the impression that you were alluding to something that was said in the comments.
You did not give any definition in your #28. If you mean a specific thing then it would perhaps be helpful to be precise about it. Please remember we are not necessarily all on the same wavelength here. We all have different experiences that formed our views and we speak different languages.
(Quite literally too. I am confident enough writing in English but it is not my first language so I am still sometimes searching for words.)
I agree about equivocating between different definitions of atheism which is why I am so against loading the term with unrelated (in my view) concepts. I am also not part of any atheist movement that I know of, and would not want to be exactly because of those problems you are referring to. So I cannot take responsibility for their words or actions. Nor am I very happy being held responsible for them.
Can you accept that people can in good faith have different opinions on this subject? If you can then perhaps you will understand why I was not so thrilled to be thrown on the heap of objectionable atheists by our host here.
That’s why I am calling myself a humanist atheist, I wrote it in my profile while registering here some time ago. Humanism alone is not enough because it does not require atheism as condicio sine qua non. On the other hand, atheism alone does not require empathy as a source (not the only one) of morality. In fact, rigourously speaking, atheism is not even a worldview, and even less a worldview based on science and rational thinking. It is just a rejection of existence of deities but it does not exlude a belief in homeopathy, for ex. So, when I want to be really accurate I use a triad: a rationalist humanist atheist :) And yet, it seems uncomplete without a materialist philosophy…
@Olav,
I don’t know you and I’m not going to tell you that you’re part of any atheist movement. However, I will say that the atheist movement consists of a collection of organizations, books, magazines, articles, celebrities, youtube channels, twitters, subreddits, facebook pages, blogs, and the people who support them or are significantly influenced by them. The secular humanist movement is a similar collection of same. The two movements are very much overlapping.
“Atheism/atheist” sometimes refers to the atheist movement, and sometimes it refers to people who don’t believe in gods. You can usually tell from context what people mean. I think this is obvious, except that there seems to be systematic denial of it among people who are unambiguously part of the atheist movement.
Olav, #23 (Not to pick on you, since of course others have said similar things numerous times here.):
Help me understand what you’re saying. (Or maybe you need to understand what you’re saying. Let’s find out.) Imagine you live in a different world. In it, there’s an evil supervillian, who has control over a vast amount of what happens on the planet. More or less on a whim, he could thwart any of your plans or alternatively help you with them if he feels like it. Maybe he wants people to obey him, to pay attention to him, or just to wreak havoc because he’s powerful enough that he can get away with it — it doesn’t matter. If he finds out you’re in the way of whatever he wants to do, he might try to punish you. Maybe you’ll be dead, or your family and friends, or it may be any other sort of punishment. It’s not up to you or anyone else, because that’s his choice as a competent agent.
He has an enormous number of followers across the globe, who do whatever they think would satisfy him, often out of fear but sometimes genuine admiration. And it doesn’t stop at individual followers: nations on every continent have created their laws to appease and enable this supervillian, in an attempt to make some kind of feeble alliance. Maybe you’d be one of those followers (because you agree with the supervillian or just because it’s useful or safe), maybe you’d try to resist, maybe you’d try to hide — whatever you might do, it’s conceivable that you could be motivated, given the information you’re able to gather, to have some kind of response to this state of affairs.
The supervillian doesn’t even need to be all that “super” or all that “villainous” — he is at minimum an agent, with a degree of power and knowledge, with any degree of benevolence you want to imagine (not necessarily “omni-” anything). What isn’t negotiable is that this agent’s actions actually (in this world you’re supposed to be imagining in which it exists) really do have effects in the real fucking world that you live in. The point is, you can tone this down a whole lot from supervillian/evil demon/mastermind in your imagination, to just somebody who does something, if that helps in any way.
And what you’re saying is that you would do precisely nothing differently in that world, compared to what you would do in this one. Not that it happens to be the case that you’d never interact with this person, but that there’s some deeper conceptual reason why that’s supposed to be the case. You would act as if you know there is no supervillian, as if you’re totally oblivious to what’s going on around you. That’s hard to believe. But even if that’s true about you personally, that you would act exactly the same, making all of the same decisions about everything, why should anybody think that’s a respectable and coherent position to have? Why are your decisions so utterly arbitrary and inflexible, that I’m allowed to change whatever fantastic things I want about the world and you wouldn’t budge an inch? And if that were the case, why would it be a good feature that your decisions are like that?
Because this objection has come up several times in my experience, since some of these tend to be conflated with the issues I’m asking about, let me add this: Notice that I’m not at all implying you’d necessarily agree (or disagree) with anything this supervillian thinks or says or does. You may still value the same things, have the same goals, and so forth (maybe because you’ve hit on the right things to value, or in any case because you’d still be caused to have some of them). Maybe you’d be manipulated by the supervillian and/or his followers (or for that matter, manipulated by those who want you to help resist him), but you would still of course be responsible for your own decisions. So when it comes to making those specific, concrete choices about what the fuck you ought to do in a particular circumstance, I very much doubt that the existence of the supervillian would have no effect whatsoever, none, zero, nothing (or that somehow it must necessarily be so, that it can’t possibly make a difference … because of a definition in a fucking dictionary? Because you were brought up not believing in one to begin with? Huh???). I’m also not saying that in reality you don’t truly disbelieve in this supervillian, like I do — another zinger that comes up quite a lot. You just have to be careful to think through what it means to say you know there isn’t a supervillian like the one I described, and some people don’t have a clear idea of that in the back of their head when they’re having a discussion like this. I can’t quite wrap my mind around the idea that this is really that hard to get, because it’s a pretty simple concept when you break it down — but, if anything, what is there that you don’t get?
Lack of belief informs belief.
1) Humans have hard-wired instincts for morality. We are not very good at defining them but based on compairsons with our cousins they are there (and they assume some common experiences like being role-modeled by our in-group and not locked in a closet for the first decade).
2) If you lose something that had previously guided your behavior you will look for something to replace it for the purposes of defending yourself, or to keep justifying what you are doing now the depended on it if nothing else (I have a more authoritarian psychology so your mileage may vary). Think our more libertarian/business associated atheist compatriots.
In short, if what you are used to has vanished, you will respond to that whether you like it or not.
(Is that the right “whether/weather/????, I suck at that one)
Just to toss a grenade on the gasoline,
…whenever I see or hear a religious person say “atheist just want an excuse to sin!” I can’t help but to think about the atheists we have seen here at FTB hindering (but not overtly supporting) things like dealing with sexual harassment and rape. As I have asked before, WHAT IS RELIGION INDEPENDENT OF APPEALS TO THE SUPERNATURAL?
Because religion objectively exists and the religious tend to be exquisitely sensitive to things like sex and gender. I just don’t think we have the collective wisdom to understand why just yet. But that and other questions are things atheists (and humanists, I need to investigate the label), should be thinking about more.
” see evolution as a chaotic clusterfuck of chance with a ribbon of selection providing multiple ways forward, and also know that logic is a great tool for false rationalizations”
– Even more than Trump, PZ, you “have all the good words”. Come for the biology, learn how to write; thanks!
@ consciousness razor #53
One flaw in your analogy. Believers near-universally think they are the good-guys (also true of non-believers) and that god agrees with them on every topic. They already think they are doing, or at least trying to do, exactly what god wants. I really doubt that there are significant numbers of believers who think their god is any kind of villain.
Even within the category of people who adopt the label “humanist”, I agree that belief/non-belief has an impact on worldview and actions taken, just not as significant as many other attributes. E.g. I suspect humanists (especially the secular variety) who are theist/atheist, are far more similar than atheists who are liberal/conservative/libertarian, western/eastern/middle-eastern, rich/poor, etc.
@ anteprepro #45
I think that most of the reason for this is because being a commenter here involves more selection pressures than just a shared rejection of god claims. If one were to post this in other venues, many of the similarities would disappear. Also, there’s actually considerable disagreement within this one post.
@ consciousness razor #53
Why did you suddenly start talking about Trump?
I think we should also hear from the “dictionary Christians”–those who believe in God and then forget about it and act however they want to. They would get along well with our dictionary atheists.
My younger brother is a part-time Methodist preacher and he used to send me his sermons to proof-read–until I got tired of his saying all the time “God wants you to . . . ” and asked him “How do you know what God wants? Don’t you mean what you want them to do?” He stopped sending them to me after that.
Golgafrinchan Captain:
Well, it’s possible that believers are wrong about what’s good or whether he isn’t a villain — they’re not infallible about that or anything else. You could say that’s a good reason to give him so many followers and so much political/institutional support, like I did (otherwise we’re changing too much about this alternate world for it to be useful), but you can imagine it lots of other ways without changing the point. Besides, I did allow for the person in question to be good too, in addition to not having such an incredible amount of influence as omnipotent/omniscient gods are supposed to have. Since there aren’t any, and believers don’t actually know anything about him/her/it/them, I wanted to leave that fairly open-ended. But given the descriptions of gods that I read about, it wouldn’t seem right to characterize those sorts of gods as actually good (despite what believers think), so a villain seemed more appropriate as a first pass. Maybe just a bumbling idiot who happens to have lots of power would be better… plenty of those around, so take your pick as an example.
The point is that they’re going to have some effects, however good they are, which you wouldn’t be completely isolated from. That is, they’re not just some random person on the other side of the planet who has no influence on your decisions, for better or worse — something like a god would have more of an impact than that, or else I don’t know why we’d say it’s a god that we’re disbelieving. Plus, that leaves it open for very big moral concerns, about the state of the whole planet or all of human society, as well as very small day-to-day interpersonal ones, because it could be relevant to any of them. Anyway, your moral reasoning should conform to reality in that case, just like it should in our actual case where there are no gods, or in any case. It’s going to make some kind of a difference, if you’re going to be responding at all to how the world is. Or if you think morality comes from nowhere, based on none of the factual circumstances you’re ostensibly making decisions about, then your views about morality don’t make any sense. It’s hard to diagnose what exactly the problem is with some people, but I think it’s clear enough that there’s a problem with a view like that.
Just happened to be on my mind, sorry. For the record, I’m not totally sure whether Trump’s a supervillain or a bumbling idiot who happens to have lots of power. Probably both.
consciousness razor @53, if you believe that the super villain’s only interaction is in the internal experience of his followers (like many moderate Christians) then whether the super villain exists makes surprisingly little differnce to one’s actions.
I’ve often made the point that many Gnu Atheists act in the Dudebro manner. I’ve also made the point that some atheists (notably Atheism plus) want to see more ethical positions taken by atheists.
Being part of a social species means that we have to act as members of such a species
Consciousness Razor #53:
It seems to me that the not-so-imaginary world you constructed is in dire need of some humanism and human rights. You know, like freedom of conscience and freedom of/from religion. Values that I believe we share.
Nothing to do with whether the supervillain actually exists or not.
Intaglio:
There is no such “have to”; there are consequences for being asocial, true… but to confuse a ‘should’ with a ‘must’ is a good way to frequently be surprised.
Olav, #63:
If you thought there was no supervillain, and you acted as if there was no supervillain, because you honestly believed the evidence supported the idea that there was no supervillain, how exactly would know what this world with a supervillain is actually in dire need of? How would you know what you can do about anything, what would be effective and what wouldn’t, what would probably backfire on you and what wouldn’t, if you don’t know what’s going on or who’s responsible for it in the first place? By hypothesis you’ve got this big blind spot in that world, but you’re telling me you’d see everything just as clearly. You can do all of your moral reasoning, not just with both hands tied behind your back, but without reference to how the world is and what could potentially be done about it. Why should I believe anything like that?
Now, is it the case that I changed so much that vague generalities like “freedom of conscience” and “freedom of/from religion” are no longer applicable? Probably not; I don’t see why things like that would be very different, although if we turned enough knobs that may not hold in all cases. But what should you do about it? What would you do about it? What would work? And why do you assume, by doing whatever you might do, that you’d be advancing the cause of “freedom of conscience,” let’s say, if you’re so oblivious to the world around you? You could be disrespecting others’ freedom of conscience, because you have no clue about what’s potentially motivating them to act in certain ways, because one thing that isn’t being stipulated is that they’d all necessarily be just as clueless about the supervillain as you are. That is, in other words, I assume you’re not also telling me, here in the real world, that I’m not able to make such decisions based on the fact that gods don’t exist — that I and everybody else can’t follow my own conscience here — simply because you think you can treat it as irrelevant in all of your moral reasoning.
Empathy suggests that we help irrespective of our state of religious belief; neither theism or atheism are requirements.
If the religion I was raised with is true, then Church is vastly more important for the good of mankind than School.
If it is false, the opposite is the case.
How can my belief, or lack of belief then not inform my humanism?
Religious people and secular people want different things for mankind, for the good of mankind. That’s because religion has different goals than the earthly good of mankind, kinda by definition.
If the earthly good of mankind is the only possible good for mankind, that’s very significant. If the earthly good of mankind is essentially irrelevant in the ‘big picture’ of good for mankind, that’s also incredibly significant.
These are not equivalent positions.
Accepting one or the other matters.
In other words, even if we assume that all people wish for the good of mankind, what that means varies with your acceptance of religion.
Even if your version of religion interferes with your vision of ethics (of which I am not fully convinced that it does but that is an entirely different matter), there are also many religious beliefs that do not interfere with how morality is determined. The moment I became an atheist, none of my moral values changed, because even when I believed, what made actions moral or immoral in my mind were the consequences that came with them. For many of my more ‘religious’ friends, the same applied. God was this vague thing that might or might not judge us for our actions in the afterlife, but that judgment was based on an intrinsic goodness of actions that did not derive from God, but from being good on its own merit. I never believed in heaven or hell, so when I became an atheist, none of my moral views changed.
On the other hand, the Atheist Experience was the start of my journey into seriously considering social justice, but that was more because I started seeing how society hides inequality in the way language and social norms are used etc, not in any specific thing inherent in my stance on the god proposition.
No matter what actually ends up being the case, this life is the only life I know I’ll have, so I act based on it, not on any other supernatural system for which no evidence can be presented. At this point, even if I somehow came to believe that a god existing was more likely than no god existing, my view of ethics won’t be changed by this belief anymore.
I get that for an atheist movement, especially one in the US, the impact of there being no belief in a god is large. A movement and community will always be in contact with forces outside that community, and for a lot of those, God is at least postulated as a driving force, or justifier for any number of things, so not having one means an atheistic organization or movement will have differences that flow (or should flow) from that.
But for someone who has never considered the existence of god to be something that influenced ethical questions, I dislike the idea that certain things about my ideas flow from my atheism, when they’d flow from my non-atheism all the same.
@Anri 67
I think you’re making a mistake in taking the typical claim of religious people — that their religion is the foundation of their ethics — at face value. Fortunately most believers don’t actually base their morality on any holy book, even if they claim they do, or the world would be in much worse shape than it is. Hell, most haven’t even *read* said holy books.
I really don’t get why the people who sneeringly use the term “dictionary atheism” keep describing a (perfectly good, mind) ideology which INCLUDES the simple proposition of atheism [as defined by a dictionary], and then insist that this ideology must be called “atheism”. And a refusal to do so somehow betrays an opposition to its goals, and puts me in the same camp as MRAs and Libertarians. I think your movement is fine! I just don’t appreciate the attempt to implicitly subsume me in it by kidnapping a term that I’ve used all my life to describe one frankly not terribly important aspect of myself.
It’s like insisting that Jainism must be called “vegetarianism”, because the Jain ideology includes and is informed by vegetarianism, an any vegetarian who isn’t Jain is a “dictionary vegetarian”.
What’s the utility of muddling these categories? There are plenty of words to go around, you don’t have to recycle old ones while they’re still in use.
Sorry about the triple post, but
I think some of the confusion in this debate also comes from a specific feature of American atheism compared to western European atheism — the experience of having actively REJECTED religion at some point in one’s life.
To someone who has always been an atheist, it doesn’t make much sense to say that “atheism informs my ethics”, any more than it makes sense to say “lack of a belief in a monster in my closet informs my ethics”. Sure, I act based on the assumption that there aren’t any gods/closet monsters, but none of my ethical propositions start with “There is no god/closet monster, therefore…”. And so calling my whole ethical system “atheism”, or claiming it is founded on atheism, is about as descriptive as calling it “a-closetmonsterism”. Gods and closet monsters both fall under the category of “things that don’t exist”, and as such are equally influential when it comes to my ethical calculus.
I think it’s also important that the specific flavours of religion involved are really quite different. Here in Europe, most common forms of religious belief have long since made their accommodations with the Enlightenment, and even the typical religious believer would find the idea that their ethics are fundamentally defined by their religious beliefs a strange one. We simply don’t have as much of that sort of fundamentalist / literalist belief over here (although it is spreading).
@71 Zappelin
Bullshit. There are a shitload of europeans being raised in religious environments. I rejected a religion when i was 11-12 years old, so did all of my friends at about the same time, we were ALL raised catholic. Yeah, there are probably more people who were never raised whithin a religion in europe than there are in the US, that doesn’t mean that the norm is for europeans to not be religious at any point in their lives.
It absolutely makes sense to say that a “lack of belief in a monster in my closet informs my ethics”. A worldview where closet monsters exist entails different properties, and everything is connected, sooner or later it is going to affect the parametres that you introduce in the equation for deriving ethical systems and moral decissions. Also, you may not start with “there is no god, therefore…”, but i bet you start with the acceptance that you live in a natural universe, which is basically the same proposition, differently worded, so in effect, you are in fact starting every ethical proposition with “there is no god” as one of the premises for the set of beliefs and positions that you factor in your worldview, just as much as “i’m a human being that’s dependent on other human beings”, or “the universe is governed by a set of natural laws and properties”.
sharkjack, #68:
I don’t have a problem with this generally, but it’s sort of missing the point in this context. Like I said about my analogy above, there’s no need for you to agree with a god or say that your values (or what is valuable) must derive from that somehow. We already knew that you can certainly be a theist who doesn’t subscribe to divine command theory or some such nonsense like that, and you also wouldn’t need to believe in heaven or hell, just to satisfy the condition that you believe there is a god.
But what I’m saying doesn’t follow from considerations like this, and isn’t at all the same thing as what you’re saying above, is that the nonexistence of gods has no impact whatsoever about which moral decisions you should make. Because if there actually were one (or several), which would actually cause any number of things to happen (very much not like the world we live in), you’d have to contend with that fact somehow. Maybe by resisting it, maybe by hiding, maybe by falling in line and bowing down to it, whatever the fuck you want — but you’d better do something differently, especially if you’re going to care about the same things and expect to get similar results.
If you weren’t indoctrinated into a religion early in childhood, you might have implicitly assumed all along that a cosmic dictator wasn’t there to influence anything, including your own thought processes or decision making, that it wouldn’t do things like smite you with a lightning bolt or flood the planet or send you to hell if you disobey or hurt our economy/cause 911/whateverthefuck because we don’t send gays to prison, that there is nothing which does any of that. Good for you, that you weren’t mislead by a religion in that way. That doesn’t mean that there’s nothing you would’ve been mislead about, or that you were lead away from nothing about what an actual godless world is like. Maybe you were lucky enough to stumble onto the right sort of idea about the world to begin with — fanfuckingtastic that not everybody is wildly mistaken about it — but that’s got nothing to do with the fact that you need a fairly veridical worldview (at least broadly appropriate as opposed to radically delusional), in order to make good and reasonable decisions about what you take to be the case.
It makes no difference here whether you wanted to do good stuff or bad stuff: if you wanted to rob a bank and you believed there were no security guards at banks, or that bankers/security guards/police/lawyers/judges don’t care about bank robbery when in fact they do, you’re probably not going to be well prepared. The consequences you expect to happen because of your actions, whether they’re good or bad or anything else, will not need to be anything like what actually does happen. You do have to understand stupidly simple and obvious things like that, even if you don’t have to explicitly remind yourself of them every time they’re applied, as you do with much more complicated situations, if you’re going to act or respond appropriately to them.
This obviously isn’t specific to atheism: it’s just like many other facts about the world, that gods (demons, souls, ghosts, magical objects, unicorns, etc.) don’t exist, so they don’t do anything in it. So you can act accordingly. So there is some way of acting accordingly, which is different from acting as if those things do exist.
@Dreaming of an Atheist Newtopia: “It absolutely makes sense to say that a ‘lack of belief in a monster in my closet informs my ethics’.”
In that case I assume you would be on board with calling the movement PZ is advocating for “A-Closetmonsterism”, and I’m just a “dictionary a-closetmonsterist”? If not, why not?
By your argument, I am implicitly prefacing every ethical proposition I make with *every* belief I have about how the world works. Why then privilege one specific belief to such a degree that you name your whole system of ethics for the absence of it?
I live in a big German city, and currently know exactly zero Germans who go to church on Sunday. The most fervent religious belief I get exposed to personally is “I guess there might be something out there”. All four of my grandparents are atheists, as far as I can tell. At least I’ve never heard a religious sentiment from any of them. It’s just never come up.
Also, it is widely understood even by, say, politicians in the CDU (the centre-right party Christian Democratic Union, which has “christian” in its name) that using religious arguments like “homosexuality is a sin” in political or moral discourse is inappropriate. It’s a *very* different social climate. I have no need to defend my atheism, because it isn’t a controversial position, and so I also have no need to define my whole worldview by the absence of god-belief.
Correction, that should really read “The most fervent religious belief I get exposed to personally *from people you might expect to be Christians*”. — I do work with a fair number of muslims, some of which I know for a fact subscribe to creationism. But even they don’t normally bring up that sort of thing in conversation, because religion is typically considered a very private matter in Germany and they’re, you know, polite and well-integrated.
Zeppelin, #75:
There’s apparently no need for such a movement. Are there lots of adults who believe in closet monsters in Germany? I don’t know, maybe you need one there. I’m not familiar with the lore about closet monsters: if there were any, would that have any significant impact on the nature of reality or consequently what kind of moral decisions you’d have to make? Would they do any stuff at all that you could conceivably make a decision about, outside of existing in closets?
If you recognize there are all sorts of differences between a culture which isn’t so influenced by religious ideas, compared to one which is more influenced by them (or individuals within those cultures), then you’re making the point yourself that there are such differences which do matter. Atheism certainly can and does inform people’s ethical views to varying degrees, perhaps yours more than you realize or more than you’re willing to admit, and you shouldn’t have any reason to dispute that. Maybe religions aren’t so bad where you live, maybe they’re even worse, maybe they’re just different, but I don’t particularly care at the moment, nor do I get how you think that’s supposed to affect any of this or how you could sincerely not understand it. Just being stubborn? Worried about something else? What’s the problem?
A lot of the proposed god concepts do not manifest in reality. There are many whose existence/nonexistence would change the outcome of certain actions, like committing sins or conversions doing whatever pleases them.
Since we have no way to distinguish between any of them, they cannot by definition influence our ethical considerations. Someone who believed in one of them might have considered certain actions moral while others were considered immoral, but the actual status of existence vs nonexistence of any of them is of no importance to any ethical calculus. Since a huge set of theists believe in these kinds of gods, I find it absurd to say that atheism specifically informs any of my morality.
For those gods that supposedly do manifest in reality, my view of ethics would still Drumph any of them. Sure, my belief of their actions would influence my own. I would probably pray if I believed it would get me into heaven. I would probably not say certain phrases if I believed I might get struck with lightning for it. That’s all true, but those are not so much moral actions as subjection to authority. It is true that I have never been indoctrinated to consider authority and authorship over morality as the same thing, so my mind cannot parse their combination as anything other than an error.
And just so we’re clear. I don’t disagree with any of this:
In a practical sense, my moral beliefs and initial assumptions came from my upbringing and intuitions rooted in basic emotions. I didn’t choose not to be brought up in a religious household, I didn’t choose for terrible definitions of racism,sexism and homophobia to be jammed into my thinking without me even knowing. I didn’t get my sense of fairness, from a logical overview of all the possible options, it is just there, nagging.
Even without religion, society can implant a lot of disgusting ideas into your mind.
I am an atheist. It is a label I use to describe the fact that I don’t believe a god exists. That’s where it starts and ends. I can admonish people for being bad atheists because all atheists are persons, and I can judge people’s ethics all day long. I don’t need atheism to mean more than the label to call out assholes that use the label.
On a group level, atheism means more than just not believing in gods. PZ has done many posts on the atheist movement including science, skepticism, secularism, etc. It also should embrace social justice. The objection that those fall outside of the purview of atheism is as silly as PZ has made it out to be, because it is irrelevant. All groups should embrace social justice. Just because the original uniter was the lack of belief in a god, doesn’t mean the people that make up the group get to not have responsibilities as the people that make up the group.
no moral system flows from the lack of belief in a god. changes in what specific actions are and aren’t good? maybe, if you’re pushing it. But that is a very long way from the thing I was objecting to.
Since this can also easily be applied to my response, I’ ll respond to it now.
My main problem is this:
Morality does not flow from atheism, just as it does not flow from theism.
Obedience to authority flows from theism. Morality is only redirected through religion, it is obfuscated and replaced by obedience to authority in some cases, but it does not flow from it. Our sense of morality predates religion, especially monotheism, and it is religions inability to stamp out our primal intuitions about ethical foundations that ultimately wrecks its hold over so many peoples minds. Atheism can redirect that morality, but it cannot be the source of it. Since we’re talking about stuff that is mostly based in unconscious processes, I’m willing to accept that for people in an overtly religious culture, in a practical sense, their atheism can inform their morality.
I dislike giving theism any power over morality, because it doesn’t have any. Gods could ravage the earth daily, but they’d be no different from aliens doing the same. No system of ethics would change with their presence, just the actions that come out of the new state of reality. The fact that many people believe that religion and morality are linked is all the more reason for me to object to the notion, because they aren’t.
@consciousness razor
I would certainly raise my children very differently if I believed they were in danger of being eaten by a monster when near closets. But that isn’t at all my point. I am arguing about word usage here.
And again, my LACK of belief in one thing informs my worldview TO THE EXACT SAME DEGREE as my lack of belief in any other thing — namely, not at all. What I think you mean is that my worldview will be very *different* compared to that of someone who *does* hold that belief. But the same is true of any crazy belief you could make up. It’s not an argument for naming your whole ethical system after the absence of one specific belief.
That’s what I was getting at – the insistence on COMPARING your ethical system to religion is very American. I just have my ethics, they aren’t constructed in conscious opposition to things I *don’t* believe in. I’m not an “a-geocentrist”, I just don’t hold geocentrist beliefs.
I’ve repeatedly tried to made it very clear that I am in no way opposed to the social movement PZ is advocating for, nor do I consider anti-religious movements to be unnecessary! What I am objecting to, and what my argument is about, is the insistence that this movement should be called “atheism”, because it’s not “atheism”, it’s a social justice movement of atheists. Please read my “Jainism”–“vegetarianism” analogy again. That’s the core of my complaint.
“Atheist” is a term I have (quite innocently, I think) identified with all my life, and I don’t enjoy the attempts of a specific American social movement to take it away from me, then insult me for using it when I’m not interested in joining them.
Basically, Consciousness Razor, I think you may be conflating me with the kind of “skeptic” who wants to “keep social issues out of atheist organisations”. In fact I am ABSOLUTELY in favour of atheist organisations also advocating for social justice. That’s a great idea. I don’t think an organisation that’s purely devoted to disputing religious claims is very useful.
It’s the smug no-true-scotsmanning everyone else, and using a perfectly good word with a clear definition and long history of usage in philosophy in a way that will hopelessly muddle its definition if it catches on that I dislike, despecially since it would be so, so easy to avoid by just picking a proper name for your movement. It’s a cheap and dishonest attempt to twist language usage in a way that supports a specific propaganda line (“we’re the only proper atheists, everyone else is doing it wrong”), and even when the cause is good, I’m not comfortable with that.
I think the people who are saying that belief/non-belief has ZERO impact on how they act are overstating it, but I still reject that “atheism” leads to any specific moral decisions (agreeing with the part of the essay that PZ quoted, disagreeing with PZ). Sure there are moral codes for which atheism is a key element but those moral codes are all over the frigging map (also true of moral codes with theism as a key element). Atheist humanists and objectivists both agree on the lack of gods but have very different ideas on what makes a healthy society (or even just the smaller scale of what makes them happy, ignoring the effects on society).
I think trying to tie specific moral conclusions (e.g. treat people with empathy) to “atheism” is a silly hill to die on. There are good reasons to treat people with empathy but they don’t come from atheism specifically. That said, I think it’s really important that pro-social atheists make themselves known, since selfish jackasses are very prominent in the “movement”. But they aren’t doing atheism wrong, they just have additional aspects to their worldview (aside from atheism) which say their behaviour is the correct way to do things.
Just because I think this way doesn’t make me a “dictionary atheist”, it just means I identify with more labels than atheist alone. In fact, using labels as shorthand is a dangerous practice to begin with. To borrow from the Atheist Experience, it’s far more useful to start with “What do you believe, and why?” (I believe Jeff Dee came up with the question). To take an example outside of atheism, I suspect that CHS & Dawkins actually consider themselves to be feminists and nobody is ever going to convince them that they’re not. Any useful discussion must dig at what’s packaged in that label for all parties involved.
@ Brony #54, (if you even see this)
OT but, whenever you’re confused about weather/whether, type it into your search bar and add the word “forecast”. Google will fix it up for you.
sharkjack:
What’s “they”? Gods don’t influence them because gods don’t exist. The natural world we live in, which does exist and doesn’t have any gods, influences our ethical considerations. Or rather it should, if you’re going to make choices (choices about it, because it’s the thing you’re a part of) that could make any sense.
What are you talking about? There are no gods.
You mean you’d be better than a magical dictator in the sky? Good to know. That’s not the point.
Maybe you wouldn’t. Why would it be right to pray in order to get into heaven? Sure, it’s easy enough to use other words to avoid getting struck by lightning, that seems prudent. But I’m not saying you should otherwise act like a believer because they must be doing the right thing morally. We need to separate the question of which decisions are good, from the question of what we need to have simply to make anything like a reasonable decision. You need reliable information about the world to make those.
It’s not the case that all of your possible responses are like that. Avoiding lightning strikes is one thing. But if you knew a god was going to do something, you’re not subjecting yourself to anything by using that knowledge. You simply know about that, like you know things about how other people behave or think, what they’re likely to do, etc.
You’re not in any sense “subjecting” yourself to me right now, by expecting that I’ll probably reply to this comment, that I’ll probably still comprehend English so you shouldn’t translate yours into another a language, or whatever else you can reliably know about a person. Why did you think I would understand what your comment says? It’s not because I have some kind of authority over you (and yes, that of course that has nothing to do with morality). It’s because you’re intelligent enough to gather the relevant information which you need and use it, sometimes without having to consciously think about it. And because obviously I exist and we’re interacting, unlike a god, there is information about me that you can get and use. If there were a god, you’d be able to do the same sort of thing. That’s as far as it goes, but even if it seems trivial (I deliberately tried to dumb it down with these examples) that’s actually quite a lot.
I don’t care what you need for calling out assholes. If we’re right as plain and simple atheists, it’s a fact that gods don’t exist, which has all sorts of implications like I’ve said. If we’re not right, we should be able to express that clearly as well, in terms of what tangible things in the world are consistent with the fact that gods exist. It doesn’t just stop at your personal lack of belief, because the ideology we have in common (which we both get to use and both believe is correct) is a description of the whole fucking natural world and its lack of gods, not a description of you.
So? I’m not saying it’s the “source” of morality. I don’t even know what that would mean. It’s relevant what the facts are, and the nonexistence of gods is a fact, just like the existence of god would be a fact. There’s a difference.
Zeppelin:
Who’s doing anything like that?
Also, by the way, it isn’t an absence of a belief. That’s some ridiculous sophistry too, and it’s about time that bullshit died. We’re not talking about a hole in your brain, where a belief used to go (or might have gone) but now there’s nothing but empty space. If you agree that the natural world doesn’t have gods, you’re aware that you agree with me about that, you could articulate what that would mean, you could recognize when other people are talking about it and when they’ve said something that conforms to your understanding of it, you can tell me the name of this thing that you agree with, and you can find your way to a blog about it and write comments there, offering your personal history of having some kind of association with this thing…. Then what we’re referring to is a fucking belief that fucking you have, which is actively doing quite a few things in your thought processes, not one that you don’t have and does nothing. In contrast, you really do lack a belief that the moon is made of unicorns, because I just made that shit up right now. But that’s evidently not the situation you’re in with respect to atheism.
Zeppelin:
I honestly didn’t think that you were.
Agreed. However, there is use in disputing them, along with many other things. I don’t think you’d argue otherwise.
Uh, what? Philosophers tend to not just use a word and take its definition at face value, as if that were enough. They often like to analyze concepts and see what follows from them. If something’s true, they’d like to know what that means (about the world, how we should act, whether it’s consistent with other facts being the case, whatever the issue might be). We’re not at the stage yet, where we’re even talking about social movements.
It’s just the case that a fact, like the existence of electromagnetism, can help you understand how you ought to behave. Not in every case about everything, but about some things. Who gives a fuck if you do or don’t think it would be useful to build a movement around it — you still shouldn’t electrocute people, and in order to follow that you have to understand what it means.
Most philosophers would also agree that “should implies can,” to give this another layer of context. If you’re going to make a moral claim that I should do something, it damn well better be possible for me to do it. What’s possible for me to do depends on what there is and how it works. Similarly, it would be unreasonable to claim I should know something when I don’t have access to that information. There’s no sense in avoiding that or denying it.
@ consciousness razor #83
Zeppelin:
consciousness razor:
My impression, and I think what others are saying, is that PZ is doing this in the OP when he conflates atheism with atheists.
PZ:
Atheism doesn’t have a moral code but atheists do. I absolutely grant that atheism has an impact on those moral codes, but the end results could hardly be more varied. Atheism and humanism aren’t synonymous (from American Humanists essay) but neither are they mutually exclusive. A person can be both, only one, or neither. I’m happy that there are many atheists whose moral codes are similar to mine but I don’t think that lack of belief in gods (or belief in a lack of gods) is a big factor for that. There are many theists whose moral codes align more closely with mine than a good chunk of atheists. I still think the theists are wrong to believe and that religion is harmful to individuals and to societies, but I’d rather work with a theistic humanist than an objectivist.
I have, on rare occasion, seen people who claim to have no moral code and I think they’re deluding themselves (different than lying). That’s not by beef with the OP. I really wish it were true that atheism universally (or even mostly) led to better people, but that would be an even bigger delusion, IMO. The evidence to the contrary is overwhelming. Note: I know that societies with a higher incidence of atheism tend to be healthier across many metrics but I think the causal relationship is the other way around (i,e, healthy society = less need for sky-daddy).
Thank you, Zeppelin and Golgafrinchan Captain, for continuing this discussion where I got tired of it some hours ago. Also had some interference from the alternate reality known as “work”.
@84 consciousness razor
Please demonstrate some characteristics that necessarily differ between universes where atleast one god exists and universes where no gods exist. Until you can do that, your argument makes no sense.
@40 Alteredstory
It’s surprising to me that you can get to this statement and not realize the glaring problem with the anti dictionary-atheism position. Rejecting a moral code is not in itself a moral code, even a rudimentary one. moral_code_a – moral_code_a = 42 – 42 = 0. After this action you’re still left with NO moral code, except any you’ve gotten from somewhere else.
@39 bachfiend
It’s not even necessarily that, simply not believing gods exists is enough to qualify. Its perfectly reasonable to be an agnostic atheist or apatheist etc.
Erik333 #89:
Funny that you should say that. Agnostic atheist is what I am. Agnostic because you have to admit, you can’t prove a negative. Atheist because I still don’t believe in any G/god(s). Show us the evidence, theists.
consciousness razor
You’re missing a huge step here – knowing how the world works helps you understand how you ought to behave GIVEN YOUR ETHICS. Assuming you accept that you can’t derive an ought from an is, an empirical understanding of the mechanics of reality does nothing to establish your ethics. For example, the question of whether gaining knowledge justifies harming animals can’t be answered by empirical knowledge. I don’t mean to criticize you or PZ in particular here, pretty much everyone hand waves this stuff (see especially Sam Harris ‘my ultimate value is self-evident, and the ethics I advocate easily leads to countless absurdities doesn’t matter’).
@Quints, 91
Actually you can derive an ought from an is. You can theoretically get moral facts from empirical facts. I wouldn’t recommend Sam Harris though. Here’s the article that convinced me of this (especially the section called “Breaking It Down Into Easier To Follow Units”):
https://www.facebook.com/groups/ProgessiveAlberta/
It talks about how we get an ought from an is, then talks about which of those “oughts” will be the moral ones. Basically all “ought” statements that can be true are based on the goals that a person has. Finding the goal that they do have which supersedes all their other goals is how you find out what the moral goal is. He addresses so many objections too (the comment section is full of them, and his responses helped to convince me he was right, since I initially had some of the same objections).
*Woops! Somehow I copied the wrong link. Here’s the correct one:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/4498
Zeppelin @ 69:
I didn’t actually say that faith was the foundation of their ethics, I said it informed their ethics – that’s not the same thing. (Actually I was speaking pretty much for myself, but I have trouble believing I’m an utterly unique case, so…)
I believe that many people think religion, religious leaders, and religious organizations deserve respect and obedience.
I believe that many people consider people outside of their own (or similar) faith to be unfit to govern.
I believe that many people are of the opinion that atheists are morally lacking.
I believe that many people refuse to accept scientific explanations of things such as the diversity of life.
Religion (or lack thereof) informs all of these concerns.
I don’t have to believe that theists follow all, or most, or even some of the tenets of the faith as described in their chosen holy book to be pretty sure that their theism is informing their worldview, and because of that, their morality.
I would also argue that someone who claims to believe in a religious worldview but who acts as if they don’t, doesn’t actually believe, they just want to believe. This desire to believe, I suspect, comes from a combination of social pressure against avowed atheism and, far more importantly, a heavily ingrained belief that religion is more moral than atheism.
This latter is a clear example of religious thinking influencing morality entirely separate from any given doctrine of any given faith.
“Atheism doesn’t have a moral code, they will say, it’s nothing but the absence of a supernatural moral authority. That’s what they tell themselves, anyway, but it’s all a lie — they’re humans, and they’re simply loaded with moral assumptions. ”
Well this fell apart in an awful hurry. The entire thing is based on a false dichotomy.
Atheism doesn’t have a moral code. That is true, it’s simply a lack of belief in a god or gods.
People have moral codes. Sometimes they’re filtered through religion, often society, parents, etc. But because people (even atheists) have a moral code it doesn’t mean atheism has a moral code.
Then you add this pile of WTF and claim it’s some set of atheistic premises:
“Science is true. How do we know? Science!” Eh… no. No one that understands science thinks that at least. Science is a methodology used to explain the natural world. It’s not true because it’s true, it’s “true” because the methodology works time and again.
“Humans are evolved. Therefore, everything about us has a purpose and provides a benefit. How do we know? Because we’re here!” Eh… no. This is more of a religious argument if I ever heard one. Yes, humans are evolved, so is every other lifeform on the planet. Tying it to “Therefore everything about us has a purpose yada yada” is ridiculous. There’s no relationship between the two sentences. It’s anthropomorphizing, nothing more.
“Logic is the only right way to approach a problem, and the ideal human is objective, rational, and unemotional. How do we know? Well, there was this old Star Trek episode…” Again… no. While the rational approach to problems tends to be the better way to solve them, you’re again falsely relating the two halves of the sentence to where somehow being rational requires cold, emotionless human beings. You can be a warm, empathic person and still use reason and common sense. To make it worse, you then try and hyper-emotionalize it by making some lame Star Trek comparison as well.
“So please, stop giving atheism the blank check they want, the claim of an absence of any kind of moral imperatives or any prior suppositions. It isn’t the case,…” You’re right… it’s a straw man argument at best. Atheists, like all human beings, have moral “imperatives” handed down through their parents, society and their own life experience. The difference is that atheists tend to not also have their morals filtered heavily through religious beliefs as well. This false comparison again can’t be allowed to stand. People have morals. Atheists are a subset of people. You cannot conclude that therefore atheism has a set of morals because of this. Atheists have morals because we’re people, not because atheism.
Gd dmn, y’r fckng dt pz. thsm nd thsts r nt th sm thng y mrn.
Dd y vn rd yr wn trp bfr y pblshd t?
‘m gld tht y r s mch ldr thn s t’s lkly gt t xprnc yr dth nd cn g tk pss n yr grv.
“If you did take stamp collecting as a philosophy, then it also comes with certain implied behaviors. One who follows the path of stamp collecting, no matter how little devotion they show to that path, holds that there is some value – however slight – to collecting stamps, and even if they only have one or two stamps in their collection, stamp collecting is part of how they view life, and a part of how they view themselves. It changes how they think about stamps and things like stamps, if only just a little bit.
One could, if one wanted, really delve into WHY stamps should be collected, and what meaning stamps have, either individually or as a category.
The point is that even trivial philosophical positions have some effect on why we do what we do, and on how we think about the world around us, and our actions.
Atheism is a philosophical position…”
To use your stamp-collecting analogy properly, the atheist would be the guy that never even considered collecting stamps and can’t figure out what you see in doing so. Therefore stamps have no bearing on the atheists personal philosophy.
There were a lot of good comments here, but I did not have time to read them all. So I will ask – am I the only one who noticed how completely this post missed the point? The article he addressed spoke not a word about the existence of ethical systems or assumptions of ATHEISTS – it said that ATHEISM has no moral code or ethical assumptions. That is an absolutely correct statement, and it in no way mischaracterizes ATHEISTS. I have a moral system, and one that does use reason and logic to reach conclusions. This in no way means that there are not underlying assumptions and values that are beyond empirical proof.
But when atheists talk about using reason and logic to reach moral conclusions, that is a contrast to authoritarian moral systems. It is to distinguish between those who think things are good just because their god or their priest or their holy book says so, and people like us who choose values of human survival and well being as a basis, or better yet, a goal that allows us to evaluate or moral decisions logically in the light of achieving those goals, as opposed to those who do NOT apply reason to the questions.
A perfect example might be the abstinence only programs so popular with Christians. The intent of these programs is manifold – to try to prevent or minimize sexual activity among people usually too immature to be ready for it. To prevent teen pregnancy. To prevent the spread of STDs. Their bible gives them a simple method, or moral proclamation on this subject – abstinence until marriage. This might have worked in a time when not being a virgin on your wedding night meant death by stoning, but today we see that these programs are having an effect that is opposite the goals, yet the Christians cannot reason about this because their book TELLS them that abstinence is THE answer. We can bring reason and logic to bear on the problem. Even though the idea that it is “bad” to have disease ridden, pregnant children involved in relationships they are ill-equipped to handle cannot be empirically proven (because that would require an objective standard, that PZ admits does not exist) we as humans value the health and well being of our offspring so we call this “bad”. So, we can then apply logic and reason to find a more “moral” solution to these problems than telling girls to keep an aspirin in between their knees throughout puberty.