Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
I appreciate your responses a lot, they’re great.
I agree that humans can enjoy things and be motivated to enjoy things in the face of annihilation of the human race and a lack of objective judgment. I agree that humans will help others if it means they feel good. My disagreement is that things like the motivation to pursue the betterment of humanity and the amelioration of suffering and a general non-hedonic existence is greatly diminished in the atheist framework.
But maybe we should look at concrete examples. Let’s say two humans are deciding how to go about their career as doctors.
Theo believes that his conduct as a doctor will be judged by a powerful and important and loving Person. Theo believes this Person’s opinion of him is more important than any human being he knows. Theo loves this Person because this Person gave his life for him. As a result, Theo ignores the temptation to overcharge and over-medicate, he ignores the temptation to see too many patients to acquire money. The hospital’s management is upset with him; his coworkers are enjoying life more than him. But Theo believes that the Great Person is doubly proud of him for withstanding social pressure.
Athena believes that her conduct is never judged except by other people who are only privy to how she presents herself publicly. Athena believes that life is about enjoyment, that she will die and never live again, and that feeling good is the most important thing. She overcharges patients, she over-medicates, and she rushes appointments. She loves the praise she gets from her manager. If she ever feels guilty, she goes on social media and signals her virtue as a feminist doctor, and instantly she feels better. She knows that she can feel less guilty more effectively by ignoring the substance and focusing on appearances. A lot of people suffer because of her, but she can hide this from her mind easily, as the other people around her do.
We would certainly agree that Theo is greater than Athena here. I bet our disagreement solely lies in my description of Athena. I’m describing the worst possible atheist, or something. But I think my description is accurate for a “thinking atheist” who has plotted out all the consequences of her belief system. Theo has also plotted out the consequences of his belief system, and it leads to morality and a qualitatively different happiness predicated on human affection in the face of suffering. Perhaps there’s someone similar to Athena — let’s call him Athanasius — who believes that he must behave morally to better humanity. That would be an act of faith and does not follow from atheism. Athanasius is willing a new belief into existence in the same way Theo does. I would then just say that Athanasius should take a few more steps and try to imagine the most motivating belief system, and this would look awfully similar to theism — hell maybe he would develop something even better than religion.
Thanks. I'm enjoying this opportunity to have a little debate; I'm always worried I come off as too hostile.
Well, of course it wouldn't. But the thing is, the nihilism and hedonism you attribute to the "thinking atheist" do not follow either. Per se, atheism comports precisely one belief: that there is no god, for commonly used definitions of "god". Any other belief, assumption, axiom, or statement has to be added on top of that -- and then you can be Karl Marx, Ayn Rand, or Peter Singer. If your worldview is formed of atheism alone (as opposed to having atheism as a component), then you end up with no beliefs about values and ethics at all, and that is not the same as having the belief "Nothing has value" or "I should act only for my own pleasure" (which, in turn, are not the same as each other). Those are no less additional assumptions than "I should care about other people's wellbeing"; pure atheism does not favor the former two over the last one.
Perhaps so. If you asked me to develop the most motivating belief system I can, I'd come up with some variety of pantheism in which all conscious beings are actually the same, like in that The Egg short story (and actually I'm doing something like that in a scifi setting I've been working on), but then I'm far from an expert in philosophy or psychology. At any rate, as I argued in other posts, I'd be wary of taking up false beliefs because they are expedient. Much like naive hedonism and naive act utilitarianism, it ends up undermining itself.
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Not only that, but also your theist is not doing nearly as much thinking as you demand from a "thinking atheist". You describe a simplistic (and only slightly less contradictory) version of Christianity. That's not a belief born from dwelling on the nature of God and trying to arrive at the truth assuming there's God - it's just motivationmaxxing, no more enlightened than an "unthinking" atheist who sticks his fingers into his ears and goes "la la la, can't hear you, secular morality is worth following because it just is!".
I mean, I might just agree. Why shouldn’t we motivationmax? If we admit all three characters are making leaps then we might as well judge which one has the superior leap. Which athlete is motivated to leap the highest? Now we just have to ask who has the most satisfying “why”. Is it the person who believes humanity should be maximized as an article of faith, or a person who believes there is a greatest possible being to conceive who has decided that humanity ought to be maximized as an article of faith and who judged you. Which one is, well, better for maximizing humanity? I vote against the mere “humanity maximizer” because there is no judgement apart from social standard and self-guilt, which is inferior to judgment from the perfect being.
There is no real judgment from the perfect being here, though. What we're looking at is anticipated judgment from an imagined perfect being, which is not the real thing.
At this point you might as well skip the middleman of convincing yourself that there is a God and he will judge you even though he does love you because he sacrificed himself to himself and still remained alive etc etc... There is too much doublethink overhead to be reliable. Speaking of athletes, they go for every advantage they can get away with and I haven't ever heard of religion being recommended as doping. Instead what gets emphasized is Willpower. Internal motivation and internal judgement. As long as you're hacking your reward function, why bother building up fragile constructions of divinity rather than hardcode "do good thing = good"?
Contrary to the Bible hiding from God is a lot easier than hiding from yourself, and judgment is quite immediate instead of being promised ~60 years later.
If you’re anticipating the judgment of an imagined perfect Being, that is phenomenologically the same as anticipating the judgment of a perfect being. Provided that you actually buy into it, of course.
Re: athletics, there’s probably nothing more “animalistically” motivating than college athletics. As in, the motivations are very primitive. Money, women, war. It’s the least civilized thing we still do in civilization. The problem is that the rest of civilized life actually requires effort in motivation. Certainly morality requires this. It also happens to be the case that student athletes are more religious than non-athletes. Probably because the stress reduction of belief allows more focus on the sport.
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