A post from Uncommon Descent demands refutation. I’ll be quoting it in its entirety, with my own comments interjected.
Bleak Conclusions
Barry ArringtonIn an earlier post I lamented the apparent extinction of what I called “Nietzsche atheists,” by which I meant atheists with the courage and honesty to accept the bleak conclusions logically compelled by their premises. Some of our atheist friends seemed to not know what bleak conclusions I was referring to.
Or, perhaps you’re not aware that your bleak conclusions are not warranted. To begin with, let’s take atheism as a starting point:
There is probably no God.
This is the position taken by most atheists with a bit of brain power. It’s the one I espouse, and for the purposes of most of this commentary, it is what I will be using as a foundation. However, to placate theists who want “hard atheism” addressed, I will note that the entirety of this post still makes perfect sense with the premise, “There is certainly no God.” I just don’t know why anyone with basic logic skills would try to make such an argument.
Back to the issue at hand. Let’s just nip this damn thing in the bud. Nothing at all follows logically from atheism. Nothing. Let’s make sure we’re really clear, ok? Atheism does not lead to any conclusions at all. None. Zero. Zip. Nada. I can prove it. Watch:
1. There is probably no god.
2. ???
3. Therefore, ????
See? Atheism, in and of itself, cannot possibly lead to anything because it is only a single premise. It is not an argument. The only way to reach a conclusion is to present an argument, and ATHEISM IS NOT AN ARGUMENT.
Anyway, this whole silly post has been defeated already, but let’s go on so that nobody accuses me of being flippant or dismissive.
Here is a comment that sums it up nicely. This post is adapted from kairosfocus’ comment to that earlier post. He refers to Hawthorne on ethics and evolutionary materialist atheism and writes:
Make two assumptions:
(1) That atheistic naturalism is true.
(2) One can’t infer an “ought” from an “is.” Richard Dawkins and many other atheists should grant both of these assumptions.
Premise number 1 does not follow from atheism. I know atheists who are not naturalists. I know atheists who believe in spirits. The two are not incompatible, of course. Spirits that exist without a God are part of a non-theistic worldview. Theism is the belief in God(s).
I’ll be happy to grant that premise number one is true, and I’m sure Richard Dawkins would, too, but let’s make sure of one very important point. We’re not granting naturalism as true because of atheism! Atheism is a natural result of granting that naturalism is true. Atheism is the logical effect, not the cause.
Why do we grant naturalism? For several reasons:
1) There is no evidence for a non-natural explanation for anything.
2) Non-naturalism is incoherent as an epistemological term.
3) Non-naturalism does not provide a universe of discourse, and so is a useless term.
4) Naturalism has a stellar success record as a means of acquiring knowledge, as compared to the abysmal (at or near 0%) record of theism.
On to premise number two. Why this trivial truth keeps getting bandied about as if it’s the end of evolutionary moral theory is quite beyond me. Evolution is blind, and as such, is not susceptible to “oughts.” Those creatures that are alive today are alive because their ancestors reproduced successfully. The reason humans (and chimps, and vampire bats) have morality is because the behavior patterns we label as “moral” were successful, while any of our ancestors who had other behavior patterns were unsuccessful.
We humans, out of all the animals, have the ability to think about our behavior patterns, and to recognize the inherent logic in them. Where theists misplace morality, however, is in thinking that our thinking about morality creates it. This is quite untrue. Our moral drives are the foundation upon which our moral reasoning rests. We do not need to reason from is to ought because we are not starting from zero. We are starting from having moral instincts which precede thought.
Given our second assumption, there is nothing in the natural world from which we can infer an “ought.” And given our first assumption, there is nothing that exists over and above the natural world; the natural world is all that there is. It follows logically that, for any action you care to pick, there’s nothing in the natural world from which we can infer that one ought to refrain from performing that action.
This line of reasoning would be compelling if there wasn’t an omitted premise — namely what I just explained. Morality does not derive from reason. It derives from blind evolution. It’s an interesting exercise in logic to demonstrate that given only logic, we cannot derive morality, but it’s a pointless exercise because we are not given only logic. We also have our own natures, which precede logic.
Add a further uncontroversial assumption: an action is permissible if and only if it’s not the case that one ought to refrain from performing that action. This is just the standard inferential scheme for formal deontic logic. We’ve conformed to standard principles and inference rules of logic and we’ve started out with assumptions that atheists have conceded. And yet we reach the absurd conclusion: therefore, for any action you care to pick, it’s permissible to perform that action. If you’d like, you can take this as the meat behind the slogan “if atheism is true, all things are permitted.” For example if atheism is true, every action Hitler performed was permissible. Many atheists don’t like this consequence of their worldview. But they cannot escape it and insist that they are being logical at the same time.
God, I just love it when theists trot out Hitler… the Catholic… as an example of what’s so bad about atheism. Leaving that aside, I hope you can see that this last paragraph is not accurate. The writer has failed to account for the very thing he is trying to refute — the naturalist explanation for the existence of morality.
He has begged the question in reverse! First, he asserts that naturalism leads to amorality, then he omits the naturalist explanation for morality to prove that naturalism has no explanation for morality.
Sheer theist brilliance.
Of course, to the rest of us, it just looks like bad critical thinking.
A very successful debunking of the ridiculous false logic utilised by the person you quoted! The thought that further pains me is that, when they assume this to be true, the ensuing madness will usually tell of how religion is the only source of social stability and comfort, and such ‘benefits’ are enough to not even question its actual truth. Quite frankly, given global consistency, I’d rather our meaningless species was wiped out in self-destruction by its own ‘Nietzsche atheism’ than that it would perpetuate the danger of accepting ‘morality’ without reason, and deliberately deceive itself of the true nature of the universe.
Posted by polednice | April 24, 2009, 6:31 pmI have had similar debates with theists over the subject of morality. They find it difficult to find a reason for empathy and compassion because their vision is clouded by their false morality. Morality is not something that can be contained within laws or commands, it is simply beneficial to any social species for their survival. Empathy comes from the ability to understand or identify with the plight of others, without a desire to understand others we will likely revert to a “tribal mentality” or a view that is exclusive of certain peoples who do not conform to what we perceive as “normal”. We have learned that the we do better when we cooperate rather than compete and are fortunate to have the ability to share ideas on a very complex level which makes competition unnecessary. Someone who believes that morality cannot exist without “divine edict” is simply lost in a world void of meaning and sadly they are blind to that fact.
Posted by David Hawkins(Atheist Dave) | April 24, 2009, 6:47 pmIf atheism is true, then there is no external source of authority to render Hitler’s actions impermissible. We fulfil that role mutually. However, if theism is true, there is an external source of authority which may make such acts mandatory. From the Crusaders to the insurgency against the USSR in Afghanistan, history is replete with examples of those who felt their acts to be mandated by God. They are not uniformly good acts.
Of course, this argument is no more valid than that it reflects. It is an appeal to consequences. Not liking that there is no supernatural authority to prohibit the actions of a Hitler does not make one “poof” into existence. In the absence of such an authority it is up to us to exercise our own. It’s no good moaning about consequences; only actions to prohibit them validly follow from this appeal.
Posted by Elliott Bignell | April 25, 2009, 4:03 amThanks, Elliott. Another way of saying what you’re saying is that there isn’t a magical “force” called morality in the universe. All that exists is what humans feel, what they do, and what happens as a result. With our gift of foresight, we can predict consequences, and as a result, assign value to actions based on their potential result. In a nutshell, this is what we call morality.
Someone on my facebook (It’s Hamby Dammit if anyone’s trying to find me) commented that even if the original poster’s premise were true — that the consequences of atheism were necessarily bleak — when has bleakness been a mark of falsehood? There are some things about humans that are bleak and true. We will drive the whale and the tuna extinct despite the fact that on balance, we don’t want to. That is bleak, and yet true.
Take apart a theist argument, and all you ever get is appeal to emotion, or logical fallacy.
Posted by hambydammit | April 25, 2009, 10:03 amI have a kind of question or concern. If morality is based on a group consensus, is it then that morality can be controlled by proponents of the media? If the masses can be convinced that something is morally justifiable then does it become so? This seems dubious.
Posted by meaningthief | April 26, 2009, 5:57 pmWell, you have to be careful with your terms here, because there are a couple of traps in what you’re saying, and they can only be avoided if we’re really clear about what we mean.
First, morality is not based on group consensus. Please read my recent post on morality, where I explain that morality is inherent in humans. We have very basic moral principles which have been instilled in us by natural selection. This isn’t really all that astonishing if you just forget that the Sunday School teacher told you morality is impossible without god. Just look around the animal kingdom. All animals have rules by which they live, and none of them have written out social contracts.
Anyway, most, if not all human morals boil down to our genetically inherited instinctual desire to be treated equitably. Very young children naturally share without being taught, as do apes and chimps. We desire reciprocal altruism, and we naturally act kindly towards others in our “in-group,” whether that’s our family, extended family, tribe, or whatever.
Now, this is a very basic trait, and human society is very complex. Like many of our other instincts, our moral drive can “misfire” when presented with situations we haven’t been evolutionarily designed for. (Many scientists believe, as do I, that religion itself is a misfiring of several instinctive traits in humans.) The fact is, the media does have a certain amount of influence over our morality. Notice that there is only one openly atheist congressmen in the whole country? The media has been telling us since the Red Scare that it is immoral to trust an atheist with the reins of the country. Notice all the teens wearing purity rings? Sexual abstinence before marriage is a socially constructed moral value.
So to answer the first part of your question, the media has a limited ability to actively alter our moral beliefs. It cannot convince us of things so basic that they are self-evidently true. For instance, without some kind of bizarre brainwashing, it’s impossible to convince someone that it is genuinely moral to torture one’s own newborn baby ten hours a day for the first six months of its life. We are so strongly genetically programmed to love and nurture babies that no amount of media manipulation can alter that programming in us.
Now, when the media convinces us that say, exterminating 6 million Jews is the right thing to do, does that make it right? You’ve answered your own question already. No, it doesn’t. Humans have the capacity for great good and great evil, and we can be manipulated far more easily than we like to think. (We are not nearly so free-willed as we have been led to believe. Look up the Milgram experiments.) Just because lots of people believe a thing to be good, it isn’t necessarily good. The same thing applies to morality. Some things are inherently moral because of their “closeness” to our instinctive moral “programming.” Others are entirely subjective, even though we believe them to be matters of great moral import. In between is a lot of gray area where things are neither definitely good nor definitely bad. At the far end are things which, by their extreme opposition to our moral instincts, are going to be nearly always wrong. The existence of a group that has been brainwashed into believing that one of these things is right doesn’t change human instinct. It just illustrates our capacity to be brainwashed.
Posted by hambydammit | April 27, 2009, 11:28 am“For example if atheism is true, every action Hitler performed was permissible. Many atheists don’t like this consequence of their worldview. But they cannot escape it and insist that they are being logical at the same time.”
*Sigh*
…If atheism ‘is true’ (what does that even mean?), somehow that also makes the dagger stab legend true?
I don’t often nitpick on semantics, but this is just atrocious. I imagine what he *meant* to say is that if God doesn’t exist, then he could not have provided us with commandments; without these commandments as a benchmark, an atheist cannot say what the Nazis did was wrong.
…But of course I can. ‘What the Nazis did was wrong and repulsive’. See? I just did. I even went a step further.
This notion of, ‘Well if it’s just from us then we can just be brainwashed and then everything changes, just like in X or Y’s dictatorship’ is ridiculous. To take a contemporary example, look at North Korea. Do the majority of North Koreans feel that, yes, they do deserve little more than to suffer at the hands of their ‘Dear Leader’ and that he deserves their endless praise? Of course not. They simply know the penalty of being caught in a position of insubordination:
Death for themselves, imprisonment and torment for their family.
It’s easy to label people as brainwashed dupes when you aren’t the one staring down the barrel of a proverbial pistol and being told what to do to have the best chance of not being shot.
Posted by Kevin R Brown | May 1, 2009, 5:49 pm