I think I’ve been trying to say the same thing for a few years, but it’s good to see Feminace say it clearly.
On the other hand, it’s the sort of atheism that we need so badly. An atheism that goes beyond “I don’t believe in gods”. One that goes past the dictionary definition and into “Now what do I do about it?”.
That’s the atheism I’m interested in. The one that tries to make the world a better place without god. If that’s not yours, fine (okay, not fine, but I’m not going to waste time arguing with you), but get the fuck out of my way.
It’s always depressing to see how many people will wax indignant at the thought that they might be expected to make the world a better place without god. How dare we?
It’s sort of the atheist version of this cartoon.
Why bother doing anything about anything until someone invents a working Toynbee Convector…
“What do I owe my future self? Well, what’s he ever done for me?! NOTHING!”
What about archetypes? Buddhists have “gods” and “deities,” but the more sensible among us see them as (idealistic) representations of qualities that exist within all of us, to a greater or lesser degree.
It’s continually surprising to me how the dictionary-atheist hasn’t died out yet through sheer osmosis of information. Every philosopher worth their salt whose metaphysics eliminate or even marginalize gods has, almost always immediately, felt they had to deal with the aftermath of that calculation. And it’s really Epicurus right on down, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Beauvoir, and all their contemporaries…really the only exception is Kant whose excuse was promptly dying.
So really this isn’t anything new. There is a 2500 year tradition of atheists recognizing an ethics either inherent or corollary to their atheism. People who divorce atheism from ethics, whatever the ethics, are mind-bogglingly poorly-read people. I know this is the age of the ‘democratization of atheism’ and all that, but whether it’s Dawkins or kids in their downtime between playing call of duty and being angry at their parents, you’d think you could find time to crack open a book.
This is really the age of ‘armchair atheism’, and nobody wants to give credit to anyone before them, for anything, that they didn’t figure out for themselves.
To quote Carl Sagan from his “Pale Blue Dot” speech: “Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves… our responsibility [is] to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.” Sagan was not strictly talking about atheism per se but rather the perspective shifting experience of seeing our world for what it is in the cosmos: at once completely insignificant, and precious beyond all measure. No help will come from elsewhere. It is our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and protect our world. Those who claim to share Sagan’s worldview and preserve his legacy should remember that.
Well now that’s a thought. Sagan’s humanist ethics is certainly an ethics ‘of the fact’, and his humanism is certainly derived from observation, which is to say natural philosophy, which is to say science. I wonder whether an ethics of the fact is simply harder to communicate, or at least harder to prove to people, than ethics from metaphysics (and just to be clear of course atheism isn’t a religion, but it is a metaphyics).
That would mean people who derive their atheism from philosophical arguments would be more likely to link it to ethics than people who derive their atheism from scientific observation. There is the danger in communicating the latter perspective that atheism really is just a fact like any other, because in science implications that follow from the theory can take a long time to vet or even think to vet, whereas if you’re thinking in terms of replacing an absolutist model, or a theological one, or teleology, you’re replacing it by parts, and their ethical systems are leftovers which then become a matter for reevaluation rather than something new.
There’s more than one way to disprove gods, of course, but I can’t remember the last popular argument or arguer for atheism that made a metaphysical argument. The reason is science is much more demonstrable, of course, because it’s testable and you can actually hold up these tests on slides for people, and often its only requirement to understanding the point is any empirical background at all. I just wonder if the ethical link isn’t obscured by the same process.
As a scientist now working in the trenches of climate change research, and whose atheism grew very organically from my scientific origins in biology, I have to mildly disagree with PZ. It’s not “sort of the atheist version of this cartoon,” it’s exactly that cartoon, and so many others, including the Harris classic with a blackboard full of equations that includes the step “Here a miracle occurs.”
After 50 years in science, and 40 years in organized atheism and humanism, I have become convinced that how one came to their atheism matters a lot. I’ve been told by some humanist leaders that organized humanism would regret its support for science, since science is so limiting to an exploration of wider truths.
People can lose faith in a creator god and still believe that it is OK to fool yourself, and/or lie to others. But If you came to have a faith in naturalism, as the best working hypothesis we have, through an ethical commitment to a communal social project predicated on humans trying not to fool themselves, with the goal that we all might someday better know what’s really true about the world, so that we might have a better chance to make that world a better place; then you tend to think there are some behaviors that should be avoided as a betrayal of that commitment.
As someone who was never convinced of religion, I’ve come to things like humanism completely independent from (and earlier than) realizing I was an atheist; it took me a while to understand what PZ’s “dictionary atheism” label was meant to address, because to me, atheism had nothing to do with my getting those other ideas. (And in fact, I had a lot of those ideas long before learning of labels like “humanism”, just as a part of growing up.)
#6 taraskan
… that would rather undermine my trust. Deriving atheism from philosophy alone seems to me equally as unsound as deriving theism from philosophy alone. You’re effectively making claims about the world not based on evidence from the world. Sounds like a fallacy to me.
Well, not so much an argument for atheism as destroying one for theism, but then most discussions about the first cause argument apply.
Without testability, and without (as in math) giving up all claims of compliance with anything (such as the real world) except logic and whatever premises you chose, for me, it cannot be demonstrable, period. (Which seems as if it might qualify as a philosophical argument … for demonstrability.)
Actually I have a deep distrust in ethics that isn’t heavily influenced by empiricism. Lots of bad ideologies in that space.
#7 Scientismist
I’ll admit that I’m more than a bit allergic about this particular use of “truth”. Plus, science is only limiting if you insist on making claims about the world, in which case I see that as very much a good thing.
When you talk about “a communal social project” there, do you mean science? Took me several rereadings to figure that one out. If so, then I have no problem with that, except that “betrayal of commitment” is not really close to vocabulary I might use :-) But if you have 50 years in science, then you’re likely about a decade older than I am. Vocabulary changes.
KHMS —
Thanks for your comment. Yes, the “communal project” is science. Sorry, I get sloppy and fear people will tire of hearing me repeat what I feel should be widely understood. But I suppose I should keep repeating it, since many people seem to be unaware that science is not a “collection of facts,” but a “method” that entails a human social project for validating (in a provisional, not absolutist sense) a set of communal knowledge. If there is a danger in communicating that “atheism really is just a fact like any other that comes from science”, then I would say the potential danger lies in the miscommunication of the nature of all of science. Yes, it is “just a fact like any other”, which means that it is the best provisional hypothesis we have.
I would be curious to know if you are right about the vocabulary change. Considering what Dreaming of an Atheistic Newtopia said, that might indeed be the case.
“Dreaming” didn’t like my use of the word “faith”; but I have “faith” that gravity will keep me from floating into space, or will kill me if I jump off a three hundred foot cliff; as in “complete trust or confidence in someone or something”. Though here, “complete” is more along the lines of “While I admit to the existence of possible exceptions , I am not going to worry too much about them at my age”.
There are probably better ways of putting it, but once again (deep breath..) I get tired of explaining that, for instance, since (as a scientist) I am an agnostic about everything, I cannot identify as a “religious agnostic” until agnosticism is recognized as a necessary part of the standard scientific attitude toward all purported knowledge, not just claims about the supernatural; but that this does not mean (as I have been told by both religious and irreligious, and by science “defenders” as well as detractors) that I must endorse some kind of absolute knowledge, or else lose all hope of finding a world that can be known with enough confidence to engage with it rationally.
My vocabulary for all of this comes largely from Jacob Bronowski. His on-camera style would probably be considered pompous and boring today, but I still think his “Ascent of Man” was the best use of television ever. I am extremely sad that his beautifully expressed thoughts on science and ethics, which were first broadcast on public television just as home video came into wide use, were nevertheless hidden away for so many years as copyrighted videos in a format only used by academic institutions, ans so was unavailable to the general public during those years when the need for them was, as he would have said, “crucial”.
I watched The Ascent of Man when it was first broadcast.
I was in high school. It helped hammer in the last nail in the coffin of my theism.
Scientismist:
That’s a reasonable way to describe science, but something has to be in the world, which this method is about, since it’s supposed to be about stuff like that. The latter (what there actually is) needs to be there at the foundation, because it simply isn’t going to be turtles or methodology all the way down, whether we’re doing ethics or science or whatever else. At the end of the day, people need to talk about the facts that we think we know (via some method or another), in order to discuss what we should or shouldn’t do about those facts (or anything else we might want to do with them). Empiricist philosophy, if that’s basically what you subscribe to, isn’t any kind of substitute for that, nor does it need to be. If we’re going to stick with a methodological sort of meaning for words like science, we had better stick with it, and then we still need to be able to refer (clearly and unapologetically) to those collections of facts and not how we think we obtained them. There’s just no sense at all in trying to do without them, nor do I get why anyone would want to try.
There are also, of course, mathematical facts, which aren’t determined empirically or scientifically, yet they can nevertheless be a valid sort of “communal knowledge” and just as indispensable when trying to formulate ethical concepts or propositions. (Obviously, math is useful for scientific claims too, and it’s fantastically useful in all sorts of other ways while we’re at it — I’d be lost trying to analyze music without it, for instance.) But notice that we have no reason to be particularly worried about what numbers are or “where they come from,” even though they’re not physical or natural objects, because that isn’t actually the concern with alleged supernatural entities. There is no assumption that numbers could think, that they could interact with or intervene in the world, or that they have any of the problematic features that a god or a soul (or wizards, ghosts, etc.) is supposed to have. So claiming that everything, without exception and with no further qualification, is a physical object would be awfully silly, but in any case it just isn’t the name of the game here.
Why not say something like “confidently believe,” if for no other reason than to avoid confusion with the numerous other meanings of the word “faith”? You confidently believe that gravity will keep you from floating into outer space. (Or “you’re very sure that….”) I would say it’s the ground that kills you when you hit it in such circumstances, not gravity (or you killed yourself, if you intended to make the jump, no matter what you expected about the landing), but never mind that.
That sort of formulation also eliminates confusion about words like “trust,” since you’re presumably not saying you trust in gravity, as if it were a person (or deity) who you actually and literally deem to be trustworthy on the basis of their previous actions. I wouldn’t even say it “acts” or “behaves” with regard to you or me or anything — because it’s just gravity for fuck’s sake. Instead, the idea is simply that you’re sure about your belief (e.g., that you won’t float into outer space). That’s what you’re confident about (your belief), and that’s what the word is supposed to be qualifying (how highly you estimate your degree of belief), not saying something about the nature of gravity, nor your “relationship” with some kind of personification of it like you would say about your relationship with a person whom you trust. And if gravity happens not to do that sometime, well then you were still sure. Meanwhile, if you really told me that you “trust me just like you trust gravity” (or “have faith…” etc.), I don’t think either of us would want that to be taken literally.
So, if you get that it’s metaphorical and doesn’t make the sentiment any clearer or more meaningful than plainly saying what you really mean, then I don’t see how it’s useful to just insist on doing it anyway. Maybe acknowledging the obvious reasons why someone “didn’t like your use of the word” would help more than just doubling-down on it. Talking about how uncertain you are, I hope you’ll notice, isn’t especially relevant to why it’s an inappropriate choice of words. The main problem is that you’re describing it as if it were a person with whom you have a relationship, not that you sound too certain — as well as the ambiguity in whether you’re trying to characterize your belief (the thing in your head) or to characterize the thing the belief is about (which isn’t all in your head).
Ascent of Man was great. But it did need a better title.
Marcus Ranum nailed the way so many people reason.
(also, there is a South Park episode dedicated to the subject, but their solution was pretty gross)
BTW once we acknowledge that no gods will save us, does it not make a kind of sense that we are even more obliged to be responsible than if we had gods judging what we do?
Now that life expectancy begins to exceed 80, our mistakes are so much more likely to catch up with us. So we do not need to invoke altruism.
“So really this isn’t anything new.”
and the sophists of Athens predated Ayn Rand by 2500 years.
Knowng Rand, she just ripped off some old scroll and did not give credit to the source.
I guess I’m still a dictionary atheist, even though I’m ALSO a social justice warrior. (More of a social justice wizard/rogue, really. I’m a lawyer after all.)
But I had my strong feelings about what is moral and right well before I finally tossed off the god thing, and my atheism didn’t really change how I feel about right and wrong. As such, it strikes me as very plausible that morality really does precede atheism; our attempts to make atheism into a program for social justice is really just shoehorning atheism into our preconceived notions.
I don’t disagree that there are certain forms of morality that are absolutely incommensurate with atheism, but that’s the elimination of a negative, not the creation of a positive. Atheism on its own doesn’t provide sufficient information to be of great assistance in forming one’s morality.
If you want to peer into the rabbit hole to see how deep it goes, Google “Agenda 21.”
The thought that people can take as laudable a goal as creating a document filled with good advice on sustainable development and turn it into a conspiracy theory about the destruction of America makes me want to weep.