Atheist Q and A

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Notice that morality being a work in progress doesn't necessitate that morality is subjective. It could be that our epistemological morality progresses but objective ontological morality is indeed static.

But to the point about God, it illustrates that the reasoning does not follow that, if everyone agreed that killing innocent children are wrong, it does not make it wrong. From a consensus does not follow truth.

Essentially, there is no way morality can be said to be objective in any real sense (apart a kind of created illusion that it is). We aren't saying that it is intrinsically wrong to kill innocent kids, only that it is if we agree so. But what if we agree the negation? Let's say we rewound the clock and let evolution play again. Hypothetical, let's say it's advantageous to kill innocent children. You may even be able to think of examples within our own evolutionary history where it was advantageous for one group to kill the children of another to achieve long lasting protection from attack and free reign of the local resources. What's to stop me from replying with a mirror image of your point:

"If everyone agreed killing innocent children was right, why wouldn't it be right"?

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I never stated that it necessitated it, I'm simply pointing out an observation.

I can see no reason to conclude that there is a static morality.
Where does this supposed 'ontological morality' come from, in your opinion?
And if it is not revealed to us, why does it matter?

To those people, it would be right.
Our understanding differs from this hypothetical culture and we would disagree, stating reasons as to why it is wrong.

Reply 261

Scrappy-coco

Original post by Cremated_Spatula

No no, I wasn't accusing you of stating it. But it's a common misconception that because morality seems to change (perhaps we'll describe it in a linear fashion and use the word 'progress') this is evidence for morality being subjective. But that doesn't follow, at least not in a strong sense.

Epistemic morality is simply what we know of morality or what we believe regarding it. The ontology of morality deals with whether it actually exists or not, whether morality really is objective.

If you believe that an objective morality exists, then the next question is to account for it. Some account for the objective existence of morals through certain types of platonist theories, other anchor their existence in theism.

I certainly think we should all have some engagement with the question of morality. Its and important question which can be framework for how we interact individually and on national scales.

Take the example of whether killing children is wrong. If morality is ultimately objective, it was to be addressed why we should have any problem with people who believe it is right to do so.

Many disagree with the morals of Islam. Disagreement doesn't precede them being false, however. How can I tell a muslim killing apostates is wrong if morality is subjective? As you said, 'to these people it would be right'. Our understanding differs from theirs, and we disagree. But we have not right to say they are wrong.

These are important questions.

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Reply 262

Cremated_Spatula

Original post by Scrappy-coco

No no, I wasn't accusing you of stating it. But it's a common misconception that because morality seems to change (perhaps we'll describe it in a linear fashion and use the word 'progress' :wink:

this is evidence for morality being subjective. But that doesn't follow, at least not in a strong sense.

Epistemic morality is simply what we know of morality or what we believe regarding it. The ontology of morality deals with whether it actually exists or not, whether morality really is objective.

If you believe that an objective morality exists, then the next question is to account for it. Some account for the objective existence of morals through certain types of platonist theories, other anchor their existence in theism.

I certainly think we should all have some engagement with the question of morality. Its and important question which can be framework for how we interact individually and on national scales.

Take the example of whether killing children is wrong. If morality is ultimately objective, it was to be addressed why we should have any problem with people who believe it is right to do so.

Many disagree with the morals of Islam. Disagreement doesn't precede them being false, however. How can I tell a muslim killing apostates is wrong if morality is subjective? As you said, 'to these people it would be right'. Our understanding differs from theirs, and we disagree. But we have not right to say they are wrong.

These are important questions.

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Ohhh fair enough.

Hypothetically, you'd have your own reasons for thinking it's wrong?
If your reasons are simply, because someone said so or because this book said so, then no rational thinking person will take heed. It's when they can't be reasoned with... that is the real predicament.

I think then it is better to question why as a race we are so socially aware, and not more like psychopaths, psychopaths would not care about a child's life, unless that child had some value to them personally.

Anyway, nice chat but that's enough for me lol

Reply 263

frankieboy

I think I can safely sum up this dilema with a phrase I always use, which I find silences everyone in their awe of my intelligence, and I'm going to share it with you now :

If God can do anything then he can make a bowl of porridge that even he can't eat. But if he can do anything then he can eat it.

If that's not scientific enough for you, then I jolly well don't know what is.

Reply 264

gallen62

I think its annoying how atheists always slate religions by mocking. However you very rarely hear religious people slating atheists. Its almost like atheists care more about the "comedic" side to religion rather than actually expressing their view.
PS go and watch Richard Dawkins ted talk and you will see what i mean.

Reply 265

frankieboy

Original post by gallen62

However you very rarely hear religious people slating atheists.

I don't know about that. Plenty of that goes on.

Most obvious current example is Dawkins being accused of being the Devil himself by a number of American Christian fundamentalists.

Reply 266

Scrappy-coco

Original post by Cremated_Spatula

Yeah, good talk.

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Reply 267

Scrappy-coco

Original post by frankieboy

Who wants to talk about rocks he cannot lift? Porridge is much tastier :wink:

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Reply 268

champ_mc99

Original post by Plantagenet Crown

The chances are not tiny, I've made them in the lab using very mild and prebiotically plausible conditions...

Lol you have the knowledge so I wouldn't want to argue. :biggrin:

So would you say your human input in making them had negligible difference in chance than if they were created by nature billions of years ago?

Reply 269

frankieboy

Original post by Scrappy-coco

Who wants to talk about rocks he cannot lift? Porridge is much tastier :wink:

Ah rocks 'n porridge eh? Always dumbfounds the theists that combination.

That's what I'd say to him if I died and he was actually true, I'd look him straight in the eye and say :

(edited 8 years ago)

Reply 270

Copperknickers

Original post by Scrappy-coco

Ironically I think you have given an outline of the historical figure Jesus by describing crucial events of his life

We don't know any of the events of his life. The only thing we can be relatively sure of is that a religious preacher from Judaea called Jesus (Yeshua) was executed by the Romans during the reign of Tiberius. The rest is mythology and invented legend, which may or may not be an embellishment of a couple of things that Yeshua actually did and said.

and the things he taught. I can't be bothered going into the reliability of Jewish oral culture, but if you are interested in it I'd encourage you to research the topic!

I am not too interested in the Jewish and Christian sources because they are incredibly unhelpful, due to heavy bias and chronological distance from real events. Our only solid evidence for Yeshua the man comes from the Pagan Romans, and that tells us nothing except what I wrote above, and even that is not very conclusive.

Reply 271

Scrappy-coco

Original post by Copperknickers

We don't know any of the events of his life. The only thing we can be relatively sure of is that a religious preacher from Judaea called Jesus (Yeshua) was executed by the Romans during the reign of Tiberius. The rest is mythology and invented legend, which may or may not be an embellishment of a couple of things that Yeshua actually did and said.

I am not too interested in the Jewish and Christian sources because they are incredibly unhelpful, due to heavy bias and chronological distance from real events. Our only solid evidence for Yeshua the man comes from the Pagan Romans, and that tells us nothing except what I wrote above, and even that is not very conclusive.

How can you confidently claim the rest as mythology and legend? What evidence suggests it is?

OK. I should have read your second paragraph before replying. If we where to continue a conversation it would take up so much time.

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Reply 272

Benis

Original post by TheOpinion

This is for those of faith who want to ask atheists on TSR anything about Atheism, why they don't believe etc. You can ask anything you want, just be polite :smile:

POLITE debate is encouraged.

Thanks :smile:

I read a book a while ago called Religion For Atheists by Alain de Botton, and it got me thinking about certain aspects of religion being useful/positive. An example of this being Agape restaurants being used to help people discuss their troubles with strangers,

Do you think that certain aspects could be useful? Obviously with the "religion" part taking out

Reply 273

Copperknickers

Original post by Scrappy-coco

How can you confidently claim the rest as mythology and legend? What evidence suggests it is?

Parts of the gospels are directly stolen from Jewish prophetic literature, parts of them contradict each other, parts of them cannot possibly be true because they are invalidated by historical evidence, and parts of them consist of miracles and other supernatural phenomena which are obviously not true if you don't believe in the supernatural. The rest, including significant tracts of Jesus' life and teachings, might well be true, but might equally be the invention of storytellers. Still, it's difficult to trust anything someone says if they swear that a person turned water into wine and came back to life.

Reply 274

Scrappy-coco

Original post by Copperknickers

Parts of the gospels are directly stolen from Jewish prophetic literature, parts of them contradict each other, parts of them cannot possibly be true because they are invalidated by historical evidence, and parts of them consist of miracles and other supernatural phenomena which are obviously not true if you don't believe in the supernatural. The rest, including significant tracts of Jesus' life and teachings, might well be true, but might equally be the invention of storytellers. Still, it's difficult to trust anything someone says if they swear that a person turned water into wine and came back to life.

Examples of stolen prophetic literature?

It's not like contradictions make texts legendary or mythic. Even first hand eye witness accounts have contradictions due to the nature of how people take notice of a scene/ event.

Examples which invalidate the Gospels by historical evidence?

Do you think any of these apply to Paul's epistles?

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Reply 275

TorpidPhil

Original post by frankieboy

To which they respond of course with the ontological argument that is equally silly.

The notion that a fact about reality can be proved merely by sitting around in one's armchair with no real previous insight about the world is definitely a very shady notion.

Reply 276

Copperknickers

Original post by Scrappy-coco

Examples of stolen prophetic literature?

The visitation of the wise men obviously could not have happened, and is the fulfillment of a couple of Old Testament prophecies. The massacre of the innocents episode is obviously lifted straight out of the story of Moses and the Pharoah's massacre of firstborn children, combined with the prophecies of Jeremiah. There are numerous other examples.

It's not like contradictions make texts legendary or mythic. Even first hand eye witness accounts have contradictions due to the nature of how people take notice of a scene/ event.

But the contradictions are beyond the differences found in eyewitness accounts. Matthew and Luke disagree on where Jesus lived: the former says he is from Bethlehem, the latter that he is from Nazareth. Those two towns are quite a way from each other. They also disagree on his genealogy.

Examples which invalidate the Gospels by historical evidence?

Too many to count. There was no Roman census which would have required Jesus to travel to Bethlehem, there was no recorded massacre of children by King Herod, there are numerous geographical inaccuracies. There was no eclipse during the period when Jesus is supposed to have been crucified, and 'the sky went dark'. Also, Pontius Pilate is depicted as being a kind and considerate man, when we have reliable records that he once had several hundred people brutally beaten because they complained when he looted the Jewish temple of its treasures.

Do you think any of these apply to Paul's epistles?

Paul's epistles don't really provide any new historical information that is not in the gospels, they are just intepretations of what Paul understood as the teachings of Christ. He never actually met Jesus, although he was contemporary with him. He does claim a whole host of supernatural nonsense though.

Reply 277

YesAllMen

Original post by StrawbAri

I'd like you to point me to any of these 'relevant experts' that have explicitly stated that they know for absolute certain that no god exists.

The philosophers do not claim, that they all have to a level of certainty or unity or 100% that that monotheistic Yahwehism is fallacious/false - they claim that to a very high level of reliability and confidence that monotheistic Yahwehism is fallacious/false, to the point where there's no point in keeping the lack of belief label since it's meaningless.

Anecdotally, most philosophers I know feel pretty confident to say that there can't be a God.

Who even are these 'relevant experts'? Surely you don't think random Reddit users are relevant experts.

these aren't random reddit users; all the flaired users you see have graduate degrees in philosophy with many of them being professors.

I'm not sure why this is necessary. I've already showed you how the IEP defines this -- the IEP is regularly checked and is a peer-reviewed resource. The same would apply to the SEP. What more do you want? Some quotes by prominent atheists? Here:

Spoiler

If you check the philpapers survey, then most of them are atheists:

Being philosophers, we have good reason to assume they follow the philosophical definition hence we would assume most of them hold the position that there is no God

And not all dictionaries define it like Huxely does.

No -- but most of them do.

What Huxley did was coin the term as a suitable 'label' for his stance. The term has been around since the ancient Greeks.

Indeed, and the label has widely been accepted to represent the position of agnosticism nowadays. However, the greek definition was was not used with atheism in the past. Atheos" (ἄθεος) was the greek adjective for "godlessness" (not simply lacking belief). This definition traces well though history. From Greek to Latin to French to English, the definition remained relatively similar.

To assume that being an agnostic is simply a third option to atheism or theism is to misunderstand the definition of atheism.

...this is asserted without any evidence and is very wrong. This is confusing and incorrect, since there are certainly people who are in a middle ground, either with no strong opinions or even who have levels of belief that are low enough that they fluctuate but remain agnostic to the idea. Its not the same position as thinking there's no god, or even the confusingly worded not thinking there's a god. Since how much the atheists humor the idea, and how you approach it is up for grabs. So there's no reason to assume that we should erase the word agnostic as its own stance, and try to lump agnostics in with people with another stance. The outlook and worldview are not even the same.

Most academics would agree that agnosticism is fine and hence people are going to continue to identify as that without any worry. You're just pulling this nonsense from nowhere. Btw, 'atheism.about' no way qualifies as an academic source

"[Let] us consider the appropriateness or otherwise of someone (call him ‘Philo’) describing himself as a theist, atheist or agnostic. I would suggest that if Philo estimates the various plausibilities to be such that on the evidence before him the probability of theism comes out near to one he should describe himself as a theist and if it comes out near zero he should call himself an atheist, and if it comes out somewhere in the middle he should call himself an agnostic."

From the ****ing SEP; nothing you've shown goes against that.

Likewise, one can reject the position that commits to "the coin will lands heads" without affirming the position that commits to "the coin will not land heads", as presumably we all do when we are uncertain about how the coin will land--even though we know that in fact one or the other position is ultimately correct.

According...

Huxley, hardly inclined to deference towards religion, likewise cited as one of the reasons to be suspicious of atheism that "existence, motion, and law-abiding operation in nature are more stupendous miracles than any recounted by the mythologies."

From your posts there seems to be a lack of understanding of Huxley's position. In his "Agnosticism", he characterized himself as having "neither art nor part" with atheism, a characterization he does not qualify with any remark suggesting he means to be an "atheistic agnostic"; And he cites Kant's Critique of Pure Reason as the paradigmatic source for the kind of position he's referring to--a work written with the express intention to refute atheism.

His objections to atheists being "quite sure they had attained a certain 'gnosis,'–had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence" hasn't any connotation of a reference to claims of infallibility, but rather refers only to that relative degree of certainty needed to assert that one knows enough about the ultimate origins of the cosmos to have good reason to say it involves no God.

Huxley's agnosticism isn't motivated by the belief that we can be reasonably but not absolutely certain there is no God, as if the only thing the theist had going for them was the mere gap between well-informed human understanding and infallibility, but rather is motivated by the belief that the godless accounts of the ultimate origins of the cosmos are just as dubious as ones involving a God. In his "Agnosticism: A Symposium", he references the cosmological argument as giving us a good reason to find the godless accounts dubious, writing that "agnosticism will not forget that existence, motion, and law-abiding operation in nature are more stupendous miracles than any recounted by the mythologies", and deriding with equal scorn the godless accounts of the cosmos which make it into "a 'dirt-pie' made by the two blind children, Law and Force", as he has for the theistic ones which make the cosmos into "a conjuror's house." And this makes sense given his reference to the Critique of Pure Reason, where this line of argument is elaborated at great length.

The Huxley that confronts us in his own text is clearly and expressly rejecting atheism, not a small fraction of atheism which doesn't even really count because it's based on an epistemological error, but atheism as such.

Further, nothing said in this quote contradicts what has been said. Of course, it's quite hard to be impartially agnostic, so some people might feel some form of skeptical / theistic tendencies without fully saying that they belief or don't believe in any form of god.

(edited 8 years ago)

Reply 278

WarriorOfPeace

Original post by Scrappy-coco

You can read Hebrew and Greek?

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so are you able to read in these languages?

Reply 279

WarriorOfPeace

Original post by HumzaAsad97

Results for what?! Empiricism is used to gain knowledge. Science argues that this knowledge is true. But the tool to search for this knowledge/truth is purely faith based. Surely this is equivalent to religious beliefs of God. Religion argues that it provides knowledge which is true. But the belief of God is faith based.

So understanding and knowledge of anything is based purely on faith. What is then the distinction between science and religion?