Moral Nihilism and the Existence of God

Great Debates
1

Classically (and etymologically) moral nihilism is the philosophy that nothing has value. Morality is dealt with by ethics, of course, but in the phrase, it is a mere adjective. It only modifies the word “value”, and value is a concept of aesthetics. So, moral nihilism in that sense is an aesthetical statement.

Quentin Smith, a modern eclectic atheist philosopher, believes that he has shown God does not exist by proving that moral nihilism is true. He has done this by redefining moral nihilism to mean “it does not morally matter what we do”. I don’t have a problem with a philosopher (or scientist, or whatever) borrowing terms from ordinary usage and redefining them for a new usage. It’s done all the time in every field of more than trivial technical complexity.

So, working with Smith’s definition, the first thing that pops out at us is that he has made a purely ethical statement of it. The second thing that pops out is that it seems to contradict what Smith himself has argued for some time: namely, that moral realism — in fact, global moral realism — is true, which means that he believes everything has value. And in fact, the noncontingent truth of global moral realism is the first premise of his proof.

Before getting too deeply into his rather complicated development of his proof (which includes the assumption that future time is infinite) I’m wondering whether there is any interest in discussing it. Would any atheists be interested in examining an argument that, if sound, directly implies that God does not exist? (Similar to the way in which Peano’s five axioms directly imply that 1 + 1 = 2.)

Theists are welcome to participate, of course. But be forewarned that if a flaw in the argument cannot be found, then the argument’s conclusion must be accepted. If Smith’s premises are true, and his inferences valid, then there can be no denial that God does not exist.

Here’s the relevant paper, for anyone interested: Moral Realism and Infinite Spacetime Imply Moral Nihilism

Anyone? Anyone? Beuller? Beuller?

2

I had trouble with the time thing. Time had a beginning .The big boom. It therefore has a start . Could you infer it then has an ending. ?
Our concept of time is a convenience to us. It is how we mark and compare events. Yet it changes with velocity and whether you are in it or an observer. This is pretty fundamental but I am not sure it changes much of the articles conclusions.

3

Smith has created an elaborate variation of Zeno’s Paradox. He assumes that because each location in the universe has a finite positive value and there are an infinite number of locations in the universe, that the sum of these values must also be infinite. This is false.

His specific error, I believe, is in assuming that there is a specific, finite, minimal value that a location can possess, i.e., that the range of possible values is mappable to the set of (positive) integers. If, however, the cardinality of the set of possible values is aleph-one, then it is possible that the sum of the values of the non-human locations on the universe is less than the value of a single human being. (The sum of an infinite series can be finite–Zeno’s paradox.)

He makes no argument that the cardinality of possible values is aleph-null as opposed to aleph-one, and in fact, such a position seems counterintuitive.

4

I think Alan Smithee Made the point I was going to make more elegantly. I was going to argue, from a debater’s standpoint, that he merely defines his opponent out of the round. His paper essentially states, “if my baseless assumption instead of your baseless assumption is true than my whole argument is true”. In my debating experience whenever anybody’s case rested on their given (and usually unprovable) definitions, they almost invariably lost to an opponent competent enough to challenge that definition.
Obviously, he has no more right to assert that the amount of “value” in the universe is aleph-null than anybody else has to make any other claim, including, say, that one can actually countably add value to the universe.

5

Let me read it and think about it and get back to you. My first reaction is the sae as enigm4tic: with carefully chosen assumptions / definitions, you can prove just about anything.

6

Having skimmed it, a few thoughts :

1 : It only “disproves” a version of God that already is clearly contradicted by the state of the world, and makes little logical sense to begin with.

2 : He lumps quantity and quality together. The time that I’ll be dead may very well be infinitely longer than the time that I’ll be alive, but life is a different order of being than death; no amount of time dead is as valuable as one second of life. You might as well claim that if you have enough steel, it’s better than mustard; since they are two entirely different things, one does not add up to the other.

3 : Morality is about how people live, and to make it better/more pleasant for each other, not abstract logic. Making up a system of morality that makes everyone unhappy and worse off but adheres to some abstract principle misses the whole point of morality.

4 : As I understand it, the infinite future he bases his theory on will be in an effectively empty, dead and therefore valueless universe, so the entire idea that the infinite future outweighs the finite present doesn’t work.