Atheology

[JBS]

For discussing theology, atheism, etc.  Including the issue of whether there is something that might be called "atheology".

As a starting point, this post which originally was posted to the Trump thread.  Perhaps a moderator can transfer the other pertinent posts from that thread to this one.

I don't know whether the Universe always existed or if it was created. To argue that God music exist because something must have created the universe seems besides the point. (And by middle school we all should have learned the comeback, "then what created god?").

It seems evident to me that if there is a god, he does not concern himself with the doings of man. You can call whatever created the universe "God," but god is not in the heavens, keeping track of whether we say a little poem every Sunday, what we do with our little thing, whether he saw us sneak another refill of our soft drink cup at MacDonalds.

I'm not saying that the Universe must have been created, and that to think otherwise is illogical.  I'm saying that if the Universe was not created, then it is a totally random affair, and the apparent order we see in it is in fact simply a random bubble.  Kind of like all the monkeys typing all the time, and one of them produces Hamlet.  And furthermore, if the Universe is a random affair, then morality has no basis outside of oneself, and your choice of what is good and what is evil has no more validity than anyone else's.  It is not unreasonable to say there is no God, but it is unreasonable to say that, despite the non-existence of God, the Universe is not fundamentally random.

I don't see that the assumption that he is interested in such things helps to answer any of the pressing questions of life.

The assumption does in fact answer all the pressing questions of life, but that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish we can argue about another day.

[Zeus]

I'm not saying that the Universe must have been created, and that to think otherwise is illogical.  I'm saying that if the Universe was not created, then it is a totally random affair, and the apparent order we see in it is in fact simply a random bubble.  Kind of like all the monkeys typing all the time, and one of them produces Hamlet.  And furthermore, if the Universe is a random affair, then morality has no basis outside of oneself, and your choice of what is good and what is evil has no more validity than anyone else's.  It is not unreasonable to say there is no God, but it is unreasonable to say that, despite the non-existence of God, the Universe is not fundamentally random.
The assumption does in fact answer all the pressing questions of life, but that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish we can argue about another day.

This is pretty typical quasi-Christian apologetic thinking.

Re: the Universe must have been created by God

Plenty of attack vectors – here's one. 

I define the universe as everything that existed, exists, or will exist; including all features, properties, behaviors, perspectives, and whatnot.  So if a god did exist, he/she would exist within the universe.  It therefore would be hard for him/her to create the set of all things of which she is a member.  Put simply, god can't create himself.

You seem to want to bifurcate the universe into two components, a creator and everything else, with the assertion that the creator-part created the everything-else part.  Fine.  Whatever.  But that seems silly to me.

Re: a God is necessary to create an objective basis for morality

As for morality, this is a totally different topic, and completely independent of any speculation over the origin of the universe. In my opinion, an internal moral compass existed within people millenia before any organized religion appeared.  Moreover, that internal moral compass pretty clearly evolved in response to the need to cooperate socially.  Even new world monkeys have an easily-demonstrated sense of fairness.  My pets also have some basic feline or canine sense of right and wrong, and a (basic, but flawed !!!) understanding of how they should or shouldn't behave.

Note also that a moral compass does not require absolute good and evil, or clearly defined right and wrong.  For example, as I understand it, in Chinese culture, the moral compass is anchored by a Confucian sense of duty to obey one's parents and to bring honor to one's family and community, rather than by a belief that actions are easily classified as good or evil.

ADDED LATER:

Re: how morality could have evolved

see below

[Biffo]

For discussing theology, atheism, etc.  Including the issue of whether there is something that might be called "atheology".

As a starting point, this post which originally was posted to the Trump thread.  Perhaps a moderator can transfer the other pertinent posts from that thread to this one.

I'm not saying that the Universe must have been created, and that to think otherwise is illogical.  I'm saying that if the Universe was not created, then it is a totally random affair, and the apparent order we see in it is in fact simply a random bubble. Kind of like all the monkeys typing all the time, and one of them produces Hamlet. And furthermore, if the Universe is a random affair, then morality has no basis outside of oneself, and your choice of what is good and what is evil has no more validity than anyone else's.  It is not unreasonable to say there is no God, but it is unreasonable to say that, despite the non-existence of God, the Universe is not fundamentally random.
The assumption does in fact answer all the pressing questions of life, but that's a whole 'nother kettle of fish we can argue about another day.

Off the topic already but many years ago there was a cartoon in New Scientist in which a monkey seated at a typewriter was handing over a completed Hamlet. His trainer was livid - 'Fool! you've signed it Francis Bacon'

[Zeus]

^^ Nice !

[Christo]

I'm not saying that the Universe must have been created, and that to think otherwise is illogical.  I'm saying that if the Universe was not created, then it is a totally random affair, and the apparent order we see in it is in fact simply a random bubble.  Kind of like all the monkeys typing all the time, and one of them produces Hamlet.  And furthermore, if the Universe is a random affair, then morality has no basis outside of oneself, and your choice of what is good and what is evil has no more validity than anyone else's.  It is not unreasonable to say there is no God, but it is unreasonable to say that, despite the non-existence of God, the Universe is not fundamentally random.

Again, fully agreed.

As for morality, this is a totally different topic, and completely independent of any speculation over the origin of the universe.

No, it's one and the same.

In my opinion, an internal moral compass existed within people millenia before any organized religion appeared. Moreover, that internal moral compass pretty clearly evolved in response to the need to cooperate socially. 

Sure, if you're an atheist, the Nazis were right and there's nothing to blame them for (except perhaps weakness).

[Zeus]

Sure, if you're an atheist, the Nazis were right and there's nothing to blame them for (except perhaps weakness).

This is downright slanderous!  Obviously, I don't agree.

On the other hand, if you are a thinking Christian, maybe you must believe this about atheists?

[mc ukrneal]

No, it's one and the same.

Why? What is the thinking behind this?

[Christo]

Why? What is the thinking behind this?

Because there's basically but one question that bothers us: if we all die, what do we live for?

[Ghost of Baron Scarpia]

Because there's basically but one question that bothers us: if we all die, what do we live for?

Because it's fun?

[Zeus]

Was it Marcus Aurelius who quipped that the sins that we regret are the sins we didn't commit?

In a similar spirit, George Carlin quipped that Santa is always smiling because he knows where all the naughty girls live.

[Christo]

Because it's fun?

Correct answer. 

[Gurn Blanston]

One of the multitude of things I do believe as an atheist is that I don't need to justify anything to you fellows (or interested ladies).  Sorry for the lack of intellectual fodder this provides...

[Jo498]

The middle school attack: "and what created God?" is exactly that: A reply by someone who has not understood the arguments in the first place. (What is really frustrating for me is how people can seriously believe that for ca. 2400 years thinkers who were mostly rigourously trained in logic and argumentation would have missed these schoolboy "rebuttals" gleefully suggested by people like Dawkins.)
All these arguments start from very mundane premisses. Something exist. Something changes etc.
For all these separate existences or changes we often see or can deduce causes and conditions.
None of the things in the universe we ever encounter seem to exist or change uncaused or unconditioned.

(The notion of cause here is wide. Indeterministic events in Quantum Mechanics may seem "uncaused" in a narrow sense, such that there is no cause for the particle to take the upper rather than the lower path in some kind of experiment but there is still a particle with a momentum, it is following some statistical patterns etc., so there are lots of conditions for the change, just not sufficient ones in a mechanistic way. Note also that "laws of nature" are not "nothing". So conjuring a universe into existence from a "quantum vacuum" (not Nothing but teeming with virtual particles and whatever) and the laws of quantum field theory (not Nothing but either some mathematical entities or structures or formal properties or tendencies of material things (like the quantum vacuum) is most certainly not getting something from nothing. It is clearly getting something from something and not even addressing, much less solving the kind of questions traditional theistic arguments try to answer.)

But the very same methods of rational enquiry, namely looking for causes and conditions that we successfully apply in common sense and science demand that we go ever further in these chains of causes and conditions. Because nothing we ever encounter seems to be a necessary existent, that is something that is totally unconditioned and not only existed always (as in an infinitely backwards extended time) but could not fail to exist. (And also have the creative potential to cause all the other stuff. Numbers might be necessary existents but they are causally inert.)
But only a necessary existent could put an end to all these chains.
And this is what we call X.
Because X is not simply posited as another link of the chain but as the necessary beginning (or end, actually both... it is not about the temporal order) of the chain the question, what created/caused/conditioned X doesn't make sense. If it made sense we had not yet reached our necessary X or first cause, so we had to go further until we got there. It is not that some random X is simply put as first cause. It is the other way round: There has to be a a first cause to stop the regress and this X has to have certain properties (like necessary, infinitely creative etc.) to fulfil that role.

Now some people (e.g. Russell, AFAIR) have claimed that maybe the universe as a whole is a necessary existent. But this is a very doubtful stipulation. As the very premiss was that no subsystem of the universe we encounter is unconditioned and necessary, rather all these subsystems are contingent, arising and vanishing again, why on earth should the Whole suddenly acquire this feature? There is no reason at all why it should and while there are of course cases where a whole has different and new properties than its parts, I don't see how this should work in the case of the universe and how it could be demonstrated that and how the whole suddenly becomes necessary when the parts were not. It obviously does not work with necessary and contingent statements (the conjunction will not be necessary if the parts are not both).
And even if this could be shown, I believe we would arrive at something like a Spinoza-style pantheism (the Necessary Being and the Universe being two sides of the same or something like that), not a materialist universe like the one of modern physics.

In buddhism there is something called "dependent arising", IIRC. While I read a few books on buddhist philosophy years ago I am very shaky here. To my recollection, it is basically embracing the regress of causes and conditions and loving it. And thus denying the need for a first cause. I don't think that this works but I probably have not really understood the point. As buddhism seems to tend towards antirealism and loves paradoxes there may be not enough shared premisses to even compare this with the first cause argument.

[Karl Henning]

This is downright slanderous!  Obviously, I don't agree.

On the other hand, if you are a thinking Christian, maybe you must believe this about atheists?

I shouldn't think there's anything Christian about imputing to atheists a condonement of Nazism, let alone Nazi atrocities.

[lisa needs braces]

Because there's basically but one question that bothers us: if we all die, what do we live for?

Religion serves multiple purposes -- social cohesion, setting norms, etc, but undoubtedly one of its main appeals is to rescue us from the tormenting fact that existence is absurd in light of death. To not exist for billions and billions of years -- and to appear on this earth for a few decades -- and then return to non-existence -- this is absurd and scary. There will be no "you" to have memories of this life...which is sad. We all find ourselves in this situation and the appeal of religion for many is the assurance it gives people that this isn't in fact the tragic reality.

[Zeus]

An addendum to my first post above:

Re: how morality could have evolved

It may seem impossible that behavioral tendencies can be the product of evolutionary forces – how can behavior be encoded in DNA?  Obviously I don't know the full answer, but basic urges and repulsions clearly can evolve – many people are repulsed by spiders or snakes for fairly clear evolutionary reasons, and similar examples of repulsion (or attraction) can be found up and down the animal kingdom. Other behavioral tendencies – such as avoiding eating rotting animals – may be transmitted genetically or epigenetically or some combination of the two. 

Moving closer toward morality, an instinct amongst children to pay attention to their parents (rather than, say, trying to eat them) seems like something that could easily arise through evolution.  Likewise other similar tendencies toward cooperative social behavior would evolve. 

From here it may seem hard to imagine the appearance of a moral code – e.g. having a preference to not lie, cheat, steal, etc.  But keep in mind that at some point the emergence of consciousness, the development of language, and the population of concept space come into play.  Eventually people generate from vague biological urges as well as the wisdom of remembered experiences a communicable conception of how one ought to live.  The resulting "memes" are then subject to their own evolutionary selection process – mostly independent of the evolution of the underlying species (i.e. man).  Some beliefs are transmitted to the next generation, others are forgotten.

Our moral compass is nothing more nor less than our evolved set of beliefs about how we ought to behave, reinforced (one hopes) by an underlying evolved sense of revulsion toward various immoral/despicable acts, plus maybe a feeling of pleasure linked to doing good/useful/honorable deeds.  In other words, there is both a genetic and an epigenetic component to our evolving sense of morality.  But bear in mind however that our cultural beliefs evolve somewhat independently of and probably a good bit faster than our underlying biological instincts, so the two don't always perfectly coincide.

[JBS]

An addendum to my first post above:

Re: how morality could have evolved

It may seem odd that behavioral tendencies can be the product of evolutionary forces – how can behavior be encoded in DNA?  Obviously I don't know the full answer, but basic urges and repulsions clearly can evolve – many people are repulsed by spiders or snakes for fairly clear evolutionary reasons, and similar examples of repulsion (or attraction) can be found up and down the animal kingdom. Other behavioral tendencies – such as avoiding eating rotting animals – may be transmitted genetically or epigenetically or some combination of the two. 

Moving closer toward morality, an instinct amongst children to pay attention to their parents (rather than, say, trying to eat them) seems like something that could easily evolve through evolution.  Likewise other similar tendencies toward cooperative social behavior would evolve. 

From here it may seem hard to imagine the appearance of a moral code – e.g. having a preference to not lie, cheat, steal, etc.  But keep in mind that at some point the emergence of consciousness, the development of language, and the population of concept space come into play.  Eventually people generate from vague biological urges as well as the wisdom of experience a communicable conception of how one ought to live.  The resulting "memes" are then subject to their own evolutionary selection process – mostly independent of the evolution of the underlying species (i.e. man).  Some beliefs are transmitted to the next generation, others are forgotten.

Our moral compass is nothing more nor less than our evolved set of beliefs about how we ought to behave, reinforced (one hopes) by an underlying evolved sense of revulsion toward various immoral/despicable acts, plus maybe a feeling of pleasure linked to doing good/useful/honorable deeds.  In other words, there is both a genetic and an epigenetic component to our evolving sense of morality.  But bear in mind that our cultural beliefs evolve somewhat independently of and probably a good bit faster than our underlying biological instincts. Thus the two don't always perfectly coincide.

As clear an exposition of the theory as any. Certainly clear enough to show that if that is the basis of molarity, then molarity is   utilitarian. An act is good or moral because it is useful to attaining a certain goal..whether that be survival of the individual, the community, or the species, or something else.  Acts that conflict with that goal are bad, acts that help achieve that goal are good, acts that do neither are morally indifferent. One crucial thing about such systems of morality is that they ultimately leave up to the person to select for himself the basis of morality. There is no exterior standard so your concept of good is just as valid as mine and just as valid as Donald Trump's.

I might add that a morality that classes acts based on whether or not they help a person achieve Heaven or be saved, is also utilitarian.

Opposed to this is morality that is based on the premise that actions should be based on some concept or standard which is extrinsic and not connected to usefulness. What is Good is something that is not changeable, but is knowable and connected to reality in some fundamental way.  One acts morally in order to conform to that Good whether or not it is useful. This is not a religious idea per se, since it can be found in Greek philosophy  and in some Chinese philosophy. But it does imply that something exists which is the source of the Good (however  you define it) and which is external to the Universe, or at least to the level of existence which we experience.

My position is that if you don't accept the idea of Creation and Creator, then any system of morality you come up with is  the first type, utilitarian.

[JBS]

In buddhism there is something called "dependent arising", IIRC. While I read a few books on buddhist philosophy years ago I am very shaky here. To my recollection, it is basically embracing the regress of causes and conditions and loving it. And thus denying the need for a first cause. I don't think that this works but I probably have not really understood the point. As buddhism seems to tend towards antirealism and loves paradoxes there may be not enough shared premisses to even compare this with the first cause argument.

Re Buddhism...the classic response to the question of Creation/what caused the Universe to exist is that of the Buddha, who said in effect it's not worth the bother of figuring it out because the answer won't help you break the chain of karma, suffering, and rebirth. The Universe is what it is, and we have more important things to worry about.

[Zeus]

A psychologically healthy person can't arbitrarily pick his own definition of morality because he is also subject to an evolved set of revulsions and rewards.  He can make a few choices at the margins – for example, for or against abortion, or for or against polygamy, etc – but he can't watch someone getting murdered without throwing up.

I don't know what you mean by utilitarian, but I suppose a utilitarian choice is a choice intended to maximize "utility".  Since we have no control over the genetic component of our morality, I don't see (that component of) morality as a utilitarian choice because there is no choice.

I'm not sure I completely understand your overall post, but that's my first reaction.

––

Re Buddhism – tread carefully. That religion evolved quite a bit.  The Buddhism you find in Sri Lanka (small vehicle?) is quite different from what emerged in northern India (big vehicle?), which is different again from what emerged in China and Korea, which differs yet again from the Japanese incarnation (Zen).  I would be hesitant to make any claim about any specific belief of Buddhism without specifying which flavor of Buddhism I meant.

[amw]

When It Is Good to Deny the Existence of God

Rabbi Moshe Leib said:

"There is no quality and there is no power of man that was created to no purpose. And even base and corrupt qualities can be uplifted to serve God. When, for example, haughty self-assurance is uplifted it changes into high assurance in the ways of God. But to what end can the denial of God have been created? This too can be uplifted through deeds of charity. For if someone comes to you and asks your help, you shall not turn him off with pious words, saying: 'Have faith and take your troubles to God!' You shall act as if there were no God, as if there were only one person in all the world who could help this man - only yourself."

This story also appears in numerous other guises attributed to various Hasidic rabbis but this is the version that seems to have circulated most widely on the internet.