I’m trying hard to make videos as a regular habit, just to get back in the swing of things. In this one, I’m just monologuing about social justice and atheism.
Transcript below the fold.
I recently saw an atheist video by a guy calling himself Professor Plink,in which he effectively tore up a Christian YouTuber who was claiming that atheism was irrational. It was fine, but I see no point in repeating the argument — the Christian was an utter fool who came to his conclusions because…Pascal’s Wager. He thought it was irrational to disbelieve in Jesus because if you’re right, there is no reward in the afterlife, an argument that assumes the existence of an afterlife, and specifically a Christian afterlife, as its premise. Circular reasoning for the win!
Anyway, don’t bother with that debate…but I did think that Plink asked an interesting question. What Reasons Could You Possibly Have To Be An Atheist? I thought about that question for a bit, and thought…why would I need a reason? The underlying assumption is that for a belief to be valid, it must have a rational, logical, evidence based argument behind it, and that is, of course, a common idea in atheist circles. Also among religious apologists — there are so many Christian and Muslim videos out there that declare their beliefs are good and true, all built on finding a logical syllogism that gives them the answer they want, or fishing some scientific observation out of context and fitting it to their prior beliefs. If the atheist and scientific position of demanding evidence and reason is so wrong, why are the believers so eager to adopt it? And adopt it badly?
As I thought about it, though, I grew aware that many atheist arguments are also emotional and irrational…and that’s OK! Humans are not emotionless calculating engines, but creatures of squishy psychology and weird personal biases. We don’t reason ourselves into an intellectual position, much of our efforts along those lines are more rationalization than reasoning from an objective, verifiable premise, and that’s true of atheists and believers alike. We all start with an “ought” that is drawn from our personal subjective experience. And that’s fine. A good human philosophy ought to start with our humanity. I have to pity anyone who needs a logical syllogism to justify their experience.
This is not to argue that logical contradictions with reality is OK. I’m making an appeal to recognize that the roots of our preferred beliefs are constructed from our human preferences.
So, What Reasons Could I Possibly Have To Be An Atheist, without using reason?
*I was vaccinated against religion
One good explanation is chance. I grew up in a household lacking in religious indoctrination, and also lacking in atheist indoctrination — my family just didn’t care, except in the most superficial way. I simply fell into unbelief, and only later cared enough to try to justify a belief that differed so much from the mainstream. The little religion I was exposed to was primarily performative and token obedience, sufficient to immunize myself against superstition. There are people who reason themselves into atheism, but I wasn’t one of them, so it wasn’t a triumph of logic that led me here, although I am quite happy now to have not been trapped in dogma.
Most religious believers are in the same situation. They are Catholic, or Lutheran, or Baptist, because their parents were Catholic, or Lutheran, or Baptist. There was no reasoning involved. Getting hammered by dogmatic beliefs over and over again as a young child is sufficient to get the child to accept the weird beliefs by default. It’s effective at any age — take a teenager desperate for social acceptance, or a middle-aged person beset with personal trauma, and love-bomb them and you’ll get a convert.
That tactic can also work for atheists or any wacky culty belief you can imagine. Humans are irrational and susceptible to emotional situations.
*My people!
I’ve seen it in atheist communities! I’ve been to many atheist conferences, and one of the pleasures of those events are all the attendees who are thrilled to find themselve in a group of like-minded people, where you can let your guard down and just enjoy the fellowship. Christians use that word “fellowship” a lot, too, and they know the power of it in reinforcing ideas. I was a lonely atheist for most of my life — again, my family and friends were secular by default, so it wasn’t a major issue — but I remember the first time I found myself in an atheist meeting, sometime back in the 1980s. It was powerful, and not in any kind of logical way. They were my people, at last!
I’ve experience the same thing with religious groups, especially when they fire up the strong passionate music. Not Lee Greenwood garbage, but you can’t help but feel uplifted by a good gospel choir, or the rhythms of a great preacher. At my university, we have strong native American connections, and I can assure you, a drum circle can be incredibly moving. You can’t deny it — we are social animals, and there a lot of irrational ways that the social connections can be reinforced.
*Christian & Muslim followers suck
Emotional tools can also be used to manipulate people in unhealthy ways. I will be among the first to declare to believers that their followers are often awful people, and that religious leaders are often con artists who are out to use their followers, using those same group socialization techniques.
This has become a useful tool for recruiting atheists. The first seed of doubt is planted by seeing the examples of religious apologists. We can see mild examples, like the damn fool Christian who made that video promoting Pascal’s Wager, or by our own family members who voted for Trump because they claim he was a good Christian man. Or we see extreme examples, like Joel Osteen building a multi-million dollar fortune with his megachurches, or politicians who foster hate with their religiously motivated legislation against gay and trans people. This triggers a justified emotional response, revulsion and disgust, against religious belief.
This isn’t just religious people, though. I feel the same way about some atheists who have tied their intellectual commitment to hateful support for hypothetical scenarios of bombing Mecca, or have become fanatical “patriots” promoting America First nonsense and hating immigrants. Disgust is another powerful emotional driver behind ideologies.
*Racism & misogyny are repugnant
Now wait a minute, you might say, opposing destructive religious tactics is an entirely rational, logical proposition. I would agree! Once you’ve decided that dogmatic beliefs that are contrary to human thriving are bad, it is logical to work against them. But how did you come to that premise in the first place? I would make the radical suggestion that it was a product of indoctrination — we get the ideals of equality and fairness dunned into us from an early age — and is an extension of human feelings of empathy for our social group. Those are not the product of logic and reason! They are also relatively recent ideas in human cultural development, and we still have a deplorable attitude to “kill the outsider” in our societies.
Religious people recognize our shared values as well. Unfortunately, one of ways they avoid the feelings of disgust at violations of those values is by crafting rationalizations. Look at Christian defenses of slavery, for instance. We don’t want to be slaves, we see it as an undesirable condition, and our natural empathy would lead us to resist it — so there are many people who defend Biblical and antebellum slavery by claiming that people were happy, contented, and well-cared-for in those conditions. Does a post-hoc claim that happy slaves existed make it justifiable? No it does not. We rightfully recognize that we would not want our freedom stolen away, especially not to enrich a slave owner.
It’s the same story with the subordination of women. It has a long, ugly, and continuing history, but MY priors, which emphasize equality and fairness drive me away from most religions…but there are many people, both atheist and religious, who consider the inequities to be justified. This just tells me that atheism is secondary to healthy social values, and repairing those values should come before we start shutting down the churches.
*Free inquiry is quite nice
Another value I favor is free inquiry and science. Science has huge material benefits, and from a pragmatic perspective we ought to be supporting research, and one prerequisite to science is the free exchange of ideas and the ability to question dogma. Interrogating religious ideas critically is part of the scientific mindset, so you might suggest that it would be a good idea to be an atheist as part of the scientific enterprise. Or, at least, if you’re a believer, to be open-minded and willing to consider that you might be wrong.
However, most scientists aren’t in the business because they have high-minded ideals about benefitting society by curing diseases or building bridges or making better fertilizers. We go into the sciences for less rational reasons. We like asking questions and figuring out ways to answer them. We’re keen on poking things and taking them apart and encountering novel phenomena. Yeah, we have to write grant proposals that lay out the good reasons our work ought to be funded, but deep down, we’re curious monkeys pushing back the foreskin of nature to find out what’s underneath for our own personal, sometimes rather weird goals.
I study spiders, for instance. Maybe someday there will be some vast societal significance to that, and I believe that simply acquiring knowledge is a virtue, but I can’t pretend that’s why I’m doing it. I just think spiders are neat.
OK, they’re also useful models for answering bigger, more general questions about development and ecology and behavior. The fact that it’s a useful endeavor doesn’t change the fact that I got into them out of simple curiosity.
*Death is final
I have to wrap this up by returning to the point brought up by the original theist: that if you don’t believe in an afterlife, there’s no point to living. This is a bad argument; just because something has bad consequences doesn’t mean it’s not true. Terrible calamaties happen all the time, and you can’t make them go away by closing your eyes and insisting that they can’t happen.
My background is in neurodevelopment, and I’ve delved deep into the structure and function of the nervous system. There’s nothing there but cells and fibers and chemicals and electrical activity, and behavior and consciousness are direct products of the physical and chemical properties of the brain. And the brain is incredibly fragile, and I’ve seen directly what happens when an organism dies.
In the past, I’ve done experiments where I insert microelectrodes into single cells in the nervous system of insects. I’ve watched how those cells respond over time. I’ve seen resting potentials gradually decline to zero, I’ve observed synaptic connections detaching, I’ve looked on as axons and dendrites break up while the cell is dying, and seen phagocytic cells cruise in and destroy the matrix of the ganglion. With death, the entire framework of the nervous system can decay within minutes and hours — the functional integration of the nervous system can fall apart irrevocably. When we die, there will be nothing of self left, only a disintegrating network of spasming, leaking, blebbing cells that will gradually fall into silence.
And that’s OK. Denial doesn’t change the underlying facts, and there’s no point in arguing over the facts. I wish I could say that when the theist dies and his brain turns to soup he’ll find out, but no, sorry, he won’t find out anything.
I have this irrational belief that the finality of death doesn’t preclude living a happy life. I also think that’s far more logical than believing a man could be dead for a day and a half and then rise up and have a conversation with his friends using his rotting brain, but logic isn’t the primary selling point of our beliefs about a hypothetical afterlife — it should be a focus on the reality of our existence right now.
And no matter how bad our situation gets, it’s still better than being dead. So I strive to be a good little atheist, living in the moment, and fighting to stay alive and improve the world for myself and everything else.
Ultimately, I haven’t logicked myself into that position, I haven’t developed a syllogism to prove that my way is the best way, I just follow my feelings.
Even chimpanzees have a sense of fairness, so that might be hardwired in. You give one chimp more grapes and the other will throw a fit and refuse in protest to eat even what grapes it’s been given. What’s unusual about some humans is that they are willing to tolerate some having much, much more under the delusion that they will in the future be in a position to have the same. So they don’t want those who have more now to have anything taken from them, expecting to be part of that elite one day.
Yeah. There have been some very unemotional people before (as the result of brain damage in some cases), and in general they have something in common: they’re crap at decision-making.
In many decision processes, you can often get to a point where two or more options are so close in end result as to be nearly indistinguishable, at least in terms of the results that you care about. Often at that point the best answer is ‘it doesn’t matter enough to spend more time on deciding it, just pick one and go, and if problems come up we’ll worry about it then’. People without emotional reactions can’t always seem to do that last ‘just pick one, it doesn’t matter’.
As for the start of this… gah, Pascal’s Wager? Really? People still use that? How about the other options, such as ‘God exists but he hates people who try to use legalistic tricks like that and anybody who used Pascal’s Wager ends up in Hell while the atheists at least only end up in Purgatory’. How does that affect the results of the Wager, hmm? It doesn’t just rely on the assumption of an afterlife, it relies in a really huge Excluded Middle in terms of all the other possible gods or options that aren’t part of the over-simplistic two presented.
More people should look up ‘Heaven is for Presbyterians’ by Canadian comedy troupe The Frantics.
Very nice indeed.
Reminds me of your salad days in this space.
(O happy atheist!)
[jenorafeuer, the Basilisk of Roko is in that category (an existential bet); of course, it’s a borrowing of the teleological motif of Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point]
Hey there. I’ve reading your posts via RSS for a while and finally got around to creating an account for commenting.
Your thoughts mirror mine a lot through I’ve recently moved towards agnosticism and away from strict atheism.
Also, as a very weird sort of Christian apologist, if there is a Quaker Meeting near you, I think you might like to check it out. The Friends are a lovely Christian denomination where the actual Christians are often in the minority (we practice Christian Anarchism and the Christians believe imposing one’s belief on others is blasphemy. Back in the 1600s, the Puritans actually hung three Quakers for preaching freedom of religion in Boston).
So, for atheists who are tired of New Atheism, there’s an almost 400 year old religion sitting around that welcomes atheists to become “Convinced Friends”. Though the only reason you actually have to join a Meeting is to serve on the Finance or Ministry & Counsel committees, want a Quaker Wedding (ie: no officiant), or be buried in a Quaker graveyard. Otherwise attenders are treated equally as members and plenty of people never actually join. (Because it requires writing a letter about why you want to be a member and who wants to do that so the Nominating Committee can make you in charge of fundraising?). 😉
“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” — David Hume, 1740.
A lot of skeptics talk as if they’ve answered all the questions that matter, on a completely rational basis (and of course, if you disagree with them on some sociopolitical point, then your judgment is obviously distorted by emotion). Such folks really, really need to do some serious introspection.
jenorafeuer@2
I recall David Eagleman highlighting such problems of emotional valence when making what should be simple decisions at the grocery store. Reminds me of Buridan’s ass.
John Morales @4
As much as I am NOT a fan of Teilhard how is his optimistic progressivism (evolutionary orthogenesis in the big picture) even remotely related to the Basilisk of Roko? Your own words and not your recent reliance upon an AI bubble bot buddy.
Perhaps the best argument for atheism is that it explains reality without relying on magic. I remember a debate with an atheist at work who believed that God created everything 6000 years ago. I asked him if that were the case, why can we see stars and galaxies billions of light years away? The light would have required at least that long to reach us. His answer was that maybe God just made it look that way to test our faith.
Correction: A debate with a creationist.
“As much as I am NOT a fan of Teilhard how is his optimistic progressivism (evolutionary orthogenesis in the big picture) even remotely related to the Basilisk of Roko?”
The teleological motif; was I somehow unclear?
Weakly god-like entity at the end of time with ideas about how things should go.
(Did you imagine it was original?)
—
“Your own words and not your recent reliance upon an AI bubble bot buddy.”
Given I have been using my own words, I already did.
Mind you, if we both say the same thing, what’s the difference?
(Other than saving me typing)
Anyway.
Relax — the nature of bubbles is to burst and be no more.
The Bubblebot will therefore surely *pop* any time now! ;)
—
BTW, the informal fallacy of dismissing what I get from it on the basis of its source alone has a name, you know.
Critique it (and thus me) all you want, but dismissing it outright informs me as to your character.
Apparently, most people who leave their faith do so because of the bad behavior of religious leaders/organizations/colleagues, while a minority does so because of logic/contradictory evidence/lack of evidence.
Other evidence indicates people stay in their religions for psychological and tangible support in times of insecurity or hardship, and drift away when they can meet such needs otherwise. (The rise of “nones” through decades of increasing economic pressure on the majority of the population challenges that concept, but possibly the greater exposure of clerical crimes explains much of it.)
Hemant Mehta has some interesting charts from the Pew Research Center about people who leave their childhood religions (more do so in S. Korea than any other nation surveyed: 50%!), with the (counterintuitive, to me) conclusion that many more of the “switchers” more to atheism/agnosticism/apatheism than to other supernatural beliefs. PRC reports that in the US, 6 people leave Christianism for every one who joins.
My issue with Pascal’s Wager is that it fails due to diversity of sects. Fora Christian, it would have worked–more or less–before the schism between the eastern and western rites. Strictly within middle to western Europe, it would have worked–more or less–before the Protestant Reformation. Now with literally 10s of thousands of Christian sects, the Wager becomes not, belief vs. disbelief, but disbelief or a choice among thousands of possible beliefs, thus shifting the “odds” to near zero no matter what choice one makes.
I hypothesize a god that rewards honest disbelief in the afterlife and punishes smarmy wannabe-suck-ups with an eternity of classifying Donald Trump’s coprolites. Pascal’s wager that god, suckers!
That said, one of the reasons I ended up a disbeliever is that no self-proclaimed believer I ever encountered behaved like they actually believed. I was raised jewish and went to jewish day school through 8th grade, and that’s a a matter that only became much more pronounced when I started encountering more christians who very clearly did not actually believe in the heaven and hell they professed to believe in. Jews may fast on Yom Kippur, but none actually believe in the book of life. Christians cry at funerals, and not because they believe their dearly departed are about to be punished. If the people telling me that I should believe clearly don’t believe, why would I ever even consider believing?
Yup. People are irrational by nature – and often made even more irrational bu nurture & (esp religious or spiritual) nurture as well.
Also emotion and reason are NOT incompatiable and being emotional does NOT mean we cannot also be rational too. The whole (massively similified, overgeneralised and often misunderstood) “Vulcan” (ST) thing where logic is supposedly everything and emotion is to be rejected simply doesn’t work.
Pascal’s Wager is what some call a Zombie Fallacy — no matter how many times it gets killed, it rises from the grave to walk again. There are many logical flaws in it, but as others have pointed out above, the big obvious flaw is the great gaping False Dichotomy, an error so obvious that it’s embarrassing anyone falls for Pascal’s Wager for more than a few moment’s thought.
Emotion is what motivates action. For instance (using the simplest example), without hunger or thirst, we would just sit down and die. Mr. Spock is not a viable organism.
But we need much more introspection to be “good” people, and that means distrusting our emotional reactions.
jenorafeuer @2
I don’t think that is the problem in making decisions for unemotional people. The problem is that without emotions, you cannot have value at all. Value is essentially an emotional concept. So determining the relative value of two approaches is only possible with emotion. And of course that decision may be different for different people. Let one approach give a higher return (however measured) on average but with less certainty than the other. Which to choose. Well, it depends on your risk aversion, which will be different for different people.
Birger,
“For instance (using the simplest example), without hunger or thirst, we would just sit down and die.”
You’ve never heard of people who eat though they are not hungry, or drink when they’re not thirsty?
“Mr. Spock is not a viable organism.”
First, Vulcans actually do experience powerful emotions, but are inculcated into actively suppressing them through a discipline called Kolinahr, and second, hunger and thirst are not emotions, so they are not relevant to Star Trek Vulcans.
None of which has anything to do with the Wager of Pascal.
John Morales @18
Are you topic dragging Birger? I don’t think PZ’s video itself was entirely about the Wager, though I can see how that could parallel your Basilisk of Roko.
PZ said:
Which I think merits plenty of discussion in itself outside Pascal’s Wager or Roko’s Basilisk or Teilhard’s transhumanism.
Jim Brady @17
May seem like silly word play, but I am struck by how value is right there in the word evaluation. Facts and values almost cry out for a distinction between them.
Hemidactylus:
“Are you topic dragging Birger?”
I don’t even know what that is. So, no.
“I don’t think PZ’s video itself was entirely about the Wager, though I can see how that could parallel your Basilisk of Roko.”
#4 was a riff of a comment, not about the video.
Most people should be able to tell, given it began “jenorafeuer, the Basilisk of Roko is in that category (an existential bet)”.
Why you imagined I somehow thought PZ’s video itself was entirely about the Wager is not clear to me.
“[blah] Which I think merits plenty of discussion in itself outside Pascal’s Wager or Roko’s Basilisk or Teilhard’s transhumanism.”
It was an offhand, meta comment (thus the square brackets, part of my markup).
(Everything must seem so confusing to you! I feel lucky)
Following up my comment at @5, I follow Wittgenstein and believe language breaks down at a certain point and, one of those points is the belief in the divine. As a sceptic, there is no way to know whether there is a god or not so the choice to be an atheist is as much an act of faith as the choice to be a Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, Jew, Hindu, animist, or any other religion. And, as an agnostic, culturally Ashkenazi Quaker, I find wisdom and understanding in much religious writing and rhetoric—I just filter it through my own understanding of what “God” means (it’s probably some form of collective unconscious that developed because we are intensely social organisms and cultural evolution occurs over a more shorter timescale than biological evolution. Whatever proto-religious beliefs early humans used to understand the world around them probably underwent a Cambrian Explosion during the Neolithic, so by the end of pre-history, we see a huge diversity of religions that, as cultural evolutionary forces continued to work, eventually consolidated into the major faith traditions that remain today).
My major problem with New Atheism is that it pre-supposes past humans were stupid. There were vanishingly few atheists until the scientific revolution had really got going and that’s because religious belief did a relatively good job of explaining how the world worked. Isaac Newton was a practicing Christian and an alchemist. The co-inventor of calculus and modern physics did not see any incompatibility between understanding the world and believing that God created it and acted upon it.
So, from a scientific perspective, one cannot understand atheism without also understanding the religious context that allowed it to develop as a viable belief system. And that religious context includes the development of human rights, feminism, religious toleration, abolitionism, “liberty and equality for all”, science, modern medicine, and every other good thing about the modern world (as well as every bad thing about the modern world. The example of New Atheism itself is evidence that human’s are naturally “religious” and, in the absence of countervailing forces, will eventually develop an evangelical dogmatic belief system). As someone’s whose ancestors were confined to ghettos and shetls, I am quite grateful to the Christian and Islamic traditions of religious freedom that led to the First Amendment of the US Constitution and the idea of complete religious freedom that made atheism legal.
I highly recommend Bret Devereaux’s series on Practical Polytheism (https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polytheism-part-i-knowledge/). It really informed my thinking of why so many people believe in the divine. Bret is a military historian focused on the ancient Mediterranean through a material lens (his dissertation and forthcoming book on about why Rome became the military hegemon of the ancient Mediterranean. His thesis is that it had to do with a material and political culture that created a massive manpower advantage that only Carthage came close to matching. Once the Punic Wars ended, there were no peer states to contain Rome and it proceeded to conquer an empire while internally remaining a citizen’s democratic republic. And, while he doesn’t write that much about politics on his blog, he definitely believes that there are lessons to be learned from Rome’s transition from a citizen’s democratic republic to an authoritarian regime with the trappings of a democratic republic).
Bret’s blog, “A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry” is an excellent premier on historical thinking and has series on everything from the Battle of Helm’s Deep to pre-modern textile production (basically until the invention of the spinning wheel, every woman, from Empresses to slaves, spent much of their waking lives spinning yarn. Without the continual labor of half of humanity, people wouldn’t have been able to produce new clothes for the entire population on a yearly basis. You can’t understand pre-modern economics or the Industrial Revolution itself without understanding how central women’s labor was to producing clothing).
mykroft @8: “Perhaps the best argument for atheism is that it explains reality without relying on magic.”
Trouble is, what one considers “magic” depends on your background. C.1600, force fields like gravity and electromagnetism seemed like magic — obviously, stuff only happened because things (maybe microscopic things) are ricocheting off each other all the time. Mind OTOH was something one might take for granted (I’m unclear on how that would have fit with the previous sentence. It’s one of the obvious holes in Descartes’ argument).
“Pascal’s Wager is what some call a Zombie Fallacy — no matter how many times it gets killed, it rises from the grave to walk again.”
To be fair to Pascal it was never meant to be serious. It was an illustration in statistics– nothing more. He wanted a hypothetical case where a payoff could be “infinite” which would mean as a “bet” you should take it no matter how scanty the probabilities are (Betting $10 on a hundred to one event is considered a “good” bet if the payoff is $1,000 or more)… so an infinite rewards is always a good bet even if the probability is tens of millions to one) One thing I find ironic about people espousing it, is the argument assumes and requires the probability of the existence of God to be very very low (but not zero… but a thousand to one say).
But on the other hand….. we can reword the wager as an argument for “believing” (and NOT for the actuality of the belief) as: If believing in a false thing makes one comfortable and happy where believing in the true thing makes one miserable shouldn’t the rational thing be to believe in the false thing. Can’t really refute that except…. I still want to know what is real.
(On the third hand avoidance is arguably an acceptable, and in my old age necessary, compromise [death still scares and upsets me every bit as it ever did but… hey, don’t think about it! seems actually… to be a good and reasonable way of dealing with it… it’s not like I’ll ever have to face up to my avoidance… in my lifetime.])
@14 StevoR wrote: emotion and reason are NOT incompatiable and being emotional does NOT mean we cannot also be rational too.
I reply: I agree wholeheartedly. Our organization stipulates that we value ‘Logic with Love, in a balance sublime’. Which embraces both rationality and loving emotion. We know we all experience emotions, but, what is important is how you act on those emotions. As our Imperative Precepts state, do you control your emotions or do your emotions control you.
We are atheistic in that we reject the irrational belief in magical and supernatural fantasies. Our Enchiridion states, We value Knowledge, Intelligence and Wisdom as strongly as we eschew beliefs, which are feelings, notions, popular opinions or vague ideas which have no basis in fact or reason, but in which some form of confidence or fanciful faith is placed by some people.
bruceld:
“As a sceptic, there is no way to know whether there is a god or not so the choice to be an atheist is as much an act of faith as the choice to be a Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, Jew, Hindu, animist, or any other religion.”
That is a remarkably stupid claim.
Atheism is not a religion, and it needs no faith whatsoever.
Think of the null value in programming.
(Or: not having a hobby is not having a hobby, rather than itself a hobby)
You don’t need a reason to think something does not exist if there is no evidence such a thing exists. If someone asks you to believe in the Easter bunny, ask what reason/evidence is there for such a thing. It’s the same thing with (name your god). And the next question would be: Why should I think your god exists and all the other ones do not? Unless you can provide credible, verifiable evidence something exists, why should I take you seriously?
As FYIs: The legal basis for English/Colonial slavery, given by English judges in at least 3 17th-century lawsuits, was that Africans were pagans, therefore Christians could lawfully enslave them. This is based on centuries of Christian thinking, part of which was that non-Christians are perpetual enemies (perpetui inimici) of Christians and the Christian god. The word “slave” comes from “Slav,” due to Christians enslaving so many Slavic pagans in centuries of brutal wars in northern Europe and the Baltic states that Slav was synonymous with forced labor. When Christians began sailing out from Europe after exterminating all the pagan cultures there, they found the world full of dark-skinned pagans who “chose”: for worship Satan by refusing to become Christians. The rationalizations of slavery PZ mentions came later to uphold the original religious reason.
Pascal did not invent his “wager” it came from older arguments. Thomas More used a version of it a century earlier. A 3rd-century writer, Arnobius of Sicca, made the oldest Christian version I know of. It might come from an older pagan argument.
Very good video, PZ!
I believe that our evolved instincts for survival can lead objectively to morals. If you want to survive look around at threats and opportunities. Turns out cooperating with other humans both reduces a threat and provides opportunities.
Add in instincts for mating and child protection to some degree and the whole ball flows on.
You then end up developing trust structures, reputation systems and so on.
Empathy seems to encode some of that thinking, making it more likely a person will fit in. However I would be willing to bet its not universal simply due to it being something “defectors” can take advantage of.