Iamthat, when you say “If humans lost or never had the capacity to believe in a god or higher power they would be “less” then they are now, actually they would be less human,” I think you point to the very “battleground” between atheists and theists – I believe, we will be “more human” when we embrace the truth of our existence, only then will we reach our destiny, it will happen, it is inevitable. You may say the same.
Your best guess is that there is a god, mine is that there is not.
And that’s what a world without a higher authority would be like.
I like the last few posts, I’d compliment MrO for saying just about exactly what I would’ve said had I been the first to reply to Shodan.
The “Golden Rule” isn’t an actual rule. A true rule is something like “Thou shall keep holy the Sabbath.” Nothing in particular backs the rule up, it’s just a commandment that must be followed because it is issued by an infallible source. We don’t know WHY the Sabbath is so important, we don’t know why we should keep it or what will happen if we don’t. The usual answer to part one is “god said so,” the other answers tend to involve some illusory eternal reward or punishment. The “Golden Rule,” on the other hand, offers a proposed manner of behaving with tangible rewards and costs: if you treat me kindly, you will be treated kindly and we will both benefit. If you do not, I will do the same and neither of us will benefit.
If you ask me, there’s no point in saying this code is invalid without a god, because (picking the Christian god for a moment) how many of the Christian maxims are universally followed anyway? I’d say none. And that’s always been true. The argument that morality has to come from a god might be valid if all the people who believed in a god - any god - unfailingly obeyed that god’s commandments, but that’s not the case.
Further, we don’t actually know god exists. If there’s no god, surely the case that morality must come from god doesn’t make any sense.
At this point we’re talking about the capacity to believe, to hold a belief.
No. As I said we’re talking about the ability to believe. If humans lost the ability to believe we would have lost something. What would that ‘something’ be?
It came up because you and many atheists appear to harbor the idea that ‘belief’ and “faith” exist exclusively in the realm of theology. They obviously don’t.
Yes, we have confidence in our creations, and confidence is a form of faith.
That a physical material world exists apart and separate from our perceptions of it cannot be proven nor shown to be true. In as much as one holds the idea that a physical world exists it is a belief. That matter exists is a belief, not a fact of knowledge. Take it from there.
That was never the question at hand, and if it is, it’s only because you insist that it is. The OP didn’t ask about the capacity to believe, and I don’t think the capacity to believe has any effect on morals and ethics.
That’s solipsism, and I think it’s goofy. I know Descartes said it, but I don’t buy it. Until such time as someone presents evidence that nothing exists apart from my perceptions, or gives me cayse to doubt everything I perceive, I’ll choose a more reasonable course than that.
Yee they are, there use is based on faith, belief, confidence etc.
The better we build something the more confidence we have in it and the greater our faith that it will work.
Mostly we don’t know, we take chances, we believe, we speculate. Sometimes we are right sometimes not.
You’re using a number of different words interchangeably to make them prove your point even though they don’t. “Faith” in technology is a poor choice of words. What you see going on with technology involves LARGE degrees of trial and error; testability is 100% necessary. Without rigorous standards of testing and proof, science and technology don’t work. Faith in god or the supernatural involves none of those things; belief is immune to, and antithetical to, testing and scientific standards and proof. Testing something thousands of times until you’re all but positive it will work isn’t the same as what you’re talking about by a long shot.
Exactly so. You have never justified or validated your morality. You simply state it, expect people to take it on faith, and pretend that you are doing something different from any fundamentalist.
And, again, begs the question as to why “the best interests of the group” has any meaning in the long run.
The group is no more immortal than any individual (according to atheists). Therefore, the same objections exist to basing a morality on that. People die, and groups cease to exist. Afterwards, nothing matters to that group, or those people.
And therefore a morality based on ephemera is meaningless.
No, you are probably correct. They would say that hurting people is wrong because “it just works out that way”, or
“because it isn’t in the best interests of the group”, or some other unproven assertion.
** Actually, I am trying to see why what your morality is based on is considered valid. So far, no luck.
By “letting go of it”, I assume you mean stop trying to examine its basis, and take it on faith. Just like those who ask us to have faith that the Bible is valid.
Perhaps you missed all the direct answers I have given to this question. If so, I will repeat my direct answer.
If there is no God, then it is not inappropriate to kill me, or anyone else. Nothing is either appropriate or inappropriate, unless and until you can establish that there is valid meaning to the words “appropriate” or “inappropriate”.
Probably for the same reasons that there is no real uniformity in the application of any morality. If you are arguing that inconsistent application of a moral system disproves the system, I will have to point out that you have disproved all morality, and made my point for me.
So, intelligence is often used in deciding whether or not to believe in a god or higher power. And sensitivity is a form of intelligence.
If the whole human race lost the capacity to believe in a god or higher power have we lost anything; attribute or capacity etc.? If so what is it that was lost?
I would say believing is a capacity, an ability which is an aspect of intelligence.
As I said above, The better we build something and test it’s performance the greater our confidence, the greater our faith that it will work.
I think we already agreed on this issue, i.e. that deciding where to place ones faith requires intelligence.
Very often we use our reasoning to decide where to place our faith. I agree choosing is not an act of faith, but we place our faith in that which is chosen. In fact we place greater faith in that which is chosen as it appears to have the greatest chance of success,… or whatever etc.
As I said awhile back there are informed and uninformed guesses, but they are all guesses none-the-less.
Sometimes we don’t make up an answer. Other times we are compelled to. We don’t know if something will go wrong which will prevent the astronaut’s ability to return safely to earth, as often times things do go wrong, but we are compelled to believing events will go according to plan. If we believed things would not go well we would not act, we would be foolish to act.
Yes we agree, things would be different. Now we are debating and discussing what that difference would be.
So only the interests of immortal entities are valid? The expression “best interests” is meaningless unless it can be called “eternal best interests”? Bizarre. I’ve never heard this theory before.
I’ll admit that ultimately, nothing really matters. It will all disappear someday, the sun will burn out, or something. The writer of Ecclesiastes agreed: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. . . . For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever; seeing that which now is in the days to come shall all be forgotten. And how dieth the wise man? as the fool.”
Does this mean that in the meanwhile, nothing matters? Well, it matters to me. After we all cease to exist, I’d say you’re right. Nothing matters.
**
Still riding the “unproven assertion,” eh? I am still curious about why “the best interests of the group” needs proof. Can you prove that it needs proof, or is that just an unproven assertion? (Yes, that last question was a little silly, like your continued insistence that there is no proof for the proposition that it’s bad to hurt each other.) “It just works out that way” is another one of those atheists arguments that I’ve never heard.
**
I know this was not directed at me, but if you’ve offered any answers to the questions I asked you in my previous post, I certainly missed them.
Shodan, you still haven’t taken a swipe at the $64 question. If it were proved to you tomorrow that god does not exist, how many people would you kill on the first day?
I guess I can’t see why you would hold that something as real as morals would depend on something for which there is absolutely zero evidence, namely the existence of god. I mean, you could take your argument, that morals can’t exist without god, and the fact that morals exist, and have a watertight proof of the existence of god. Right? Or is there something missing logically somewhere?
Iamthat, I believe you are confusing faith with confidence. The former is sometimes used to mean the same as the latter, but not in the context of this debate.
I can’t speak for other atheists, of course, but actually I agree with part of what (I think) Shodan is saying. My morality, which can be summarised in the Golden Rule, is based on - nothing. No external authority, no objective proof, no rational argument. (It is possible to argue rationally that my morality is good for human beings, but that’s as far as it goes. I can’t argue that a code of behaviour which promotes happiness for human beings is objectively better than one which promotes - say happiness for sheep, or boredom for human beings. It’s subjectively better, from my standpoint as a human being, but I’m obviously biased. )
Rather, my morality is what I (try to) base my behaviour on. It’s not turtles all the way down, my morality is the turtle at the bottom.
So, if I talked with someone who didn’t see human beings as especially significant - perhaps a space alien, a cockroach, or a god - I couldn’t use reason to explain why that being should see it as morally worse to kill me than to kill a wasp, or to scratch an itch.
But here I part company with Shodan, because even if the basis for my morality is nothing, that doesn’t mean that my morality itself is nothing. It’s there, it exists - as thoughts in my head, as feelings in my gut. From some theoretical objective standpoint, torturing puppies and singing arias may be morally equivalent, but from my subjective standpoint, it’s not. If I meet someone whose morality conflicts with “happiness is good, suffering is bad” (for instance “suffering isn’t bad if the person doing the suffering hasn’t pink skin”), I can’t argue that this other kind of morality is objectively wrong, but I can and will say that I find it wrong, and I can and will try to stop actions I find grossly immoral.
Viewed from outside humanity, the word “moral” may very well be meaningless. But we exist inside humanity, where it has meaning. If I kill Shodan, I cause suffering for those who love him/her, and I cut short what is (I believe) his/her only existence and only chance for happiness. In a thousand years, that will probably be insignificant, but we live now. My morality doesn’t have to be true for all time, for all imaginable beings. It works here and now - that’s enough for me.
I agree but I suspect from quite a different perspective and orientation etc.
I think there’s a significant difference between the words, “god” and “higher power”. I believe/guess/suspect/ that there is a higher power, or a truth to this existence which is not apparent or obvious to most, which resides in the nature of consciousness; ‘consciousness’ being the ‘self’ as opposed to the ego/body.
So in terms of whether there is or is not a god I am agnostic.
If as to the OP, no human believed in any god or higher power I think we would have turned away from a vital avenue to that which is true. I think we would be devolving.
I’m not sure what you mean. And I don’t know about the word “authority”.
But there are too many unanswered questions about the true nature of this existence etc. for humans to stop believing and guessing.
Wow! Excellent, excellent arguments here - from both sides, really, although I’m seeing more logical thought in the atheist side…
I’m not as quick as some of you, so I need to break things down a little bit.
The atheist version of “morality” is based on, very broadly, survival (of the individual, the “tribe”, and the species).
Religious “morality” is based on following the word of God (or a god, or goddess, etc).
Almost every culture in the world has, at some point, come up with some version of “God”, and followed what they perceived to be his/her/its “commands”, whether this was “Thou shalt have no God before me”, or “Present me with human sacrifice so I’m happy and will let the crops flourish”.
I posit that EVERY version of morality is centered around self-interest: religious morality is centered around not pissing off the deity in question. Atheistic morality is centered around not dying sooner than necessary (as an individual or a group).
I further posit that even pre-Judeochristian religious morality made more sense than what Shodan, for example, is preaching, since it at least was concerned with the livelihood of the tribe, rather than the individual’s acheiving grace in the afterlife.
FWIW, I’m a devout agnostic. I have yet to see/hear/read any convincing argument either for or against any sort of “man in the sky”. I was rather disappointed (although not surprised) to find that Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker (which Douglas Adams talked up so vehemently in his posthumous The Salmon of Doubt) still left holes for me in the atheist viewpoint.
Not to say that the ancient Greeks or the Aztecs had a better line on the nature of God, but rather that their “morality” was based on their understanding of what would further benefit the tribe, rather than just provide individual gain.
Also, the bit about being a “devout agnostic” is meant to convey that I not only have not been convinced that anyone really knows, but I am firmly convinced that proof one way or the other cannot and will not be produced on this side of the big sleep.
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