My atheist philosophy overview

This is a continuation of a conversation begun on Mayfly's blog. Click here. Mayfly began by asking if there was something inherent about matter that drives it toward life and complexity.

This post has been bubbling about in my little brain for two weeks now. Tonight everything is frothing forth.

Q,

Let me preface this by saying that I respect your right to believe what you wish concerning these matters. I know firsthand how difficult and depressing it can be to have your entire world-view turned upside down. Like you, and Mayfly, and Arglor, I take no pleasure in undermining anyone's beliefs.

I do take pleasure in intelligent discussion and debate, and I think you do the same. I think we both value truth, even though we disagree about what is true. So I appreciate the courage you exibit in just listening to what I and others have to say, and I hope you realize it takes courage for me to lay bare my beliefs and have them openly criticized. I think that you, I, Arglor, Mayfly, and everyone that has taken part in this discussion has shown that courage.

In short, I think we are all commendable for trying to understand one another. I firmly believe that understanding must come before constructive dialogue.

Now, on to the substance. I think I understand where the miscommunication is this time. I will strive to make my points with concrete examples from now on, wherever I am able. And I will avoid all talk of turtles. ;-)

Q wrote: God is perfectly sufficient to explain the existence of the kind of complexity we have been discussing since Mayfly's original post.

You are quite right, God is sufficient to explain all kinds of instances of complexity. God can string nucleotides together all millenium long without batting an eyelash, more easily than I can assemble a child's bicycle. In this sense, you are absolutely correct.

Consider the implications of what are we saying, however, when we assert that because we don't know how something has happened, God must be responsible for it. No one was there to see how the amino acids and nucleotides formed. I don't know and you don't know; we don't know if God did it or not. One day we may figure it out, or we may never know. It doesn't follow from our lack of understanding that God had to have done it.

Suppose we can be sure that supernatural forces caused the amino acids and nucleotides to come together a certain way. If the transcendant realm does not usually interact with ours, then how do these forces cross over from that transcendant realm into our material realm, in order to coerce or manipulate matter into forms it can't (by hypothesis) take on in nature? We could assume these forces are from God, but how do we know? Are there many such transcendant realms, with other transcendant entities (angels or demons perhaps)? How do they exist? Of what do they consist? Does the transcendant realm follow laws, as our material realm seems to do? In the material world, we have noticed a marked correspondence between brain activity and human thought; is there some kind of activity in the transcendant realm that corresponds to the thoughts of transcendant beings? Do such beings even have thoughts?

There's no end to the questions we can ask about such a transcendant realm and the transcendant being/s that occupy it, and how they supposedly interact with us in the material realm. Following this train of thought, you can see that we have to introduce a whole new order of complexity, in the form of a transcendant realm and transcedant being/s, to explain just one perplexing instance of complexity, namely the formation of nucleotides and amino acid chains. Moreover, we have no good evidence for such a realm, other than the fact that we have an unexplained problem in evolutionary biology/chemistry.

On the other hand, we can investigate other options - matter and forces, physics and chemistry, things we do have some hope of understanding, because they are made up of much the same stuff as we are. We already have evidence, in the form of hundreds of years of scientific observation, hypotheses, repeated testing, and valid predictions, supporting our notions that they exist.

Q wrote: I'm building a list of challenges to a purely materialistic view of the universe:
(1) Where did matter/energy come from; or, if it is supposed to be eternal, how does that correspond to what we can observe about the universe?
(2) How did inanimate matter become living matter?
(3) How did human beings make the leap to consciousness?
(4) How do atheists adequately account for meaning and morality?

To your point 1: my understanding is that energy and matter are interchangeable and indestructible, the 2nd law notwithstanding. The 2nd law indicates that eventually no energy will be usable for work. It looks bleak, depressing even - but that doesn't mean it's not true. If it helps, there is hope in a theory according to which, as the universe expands, the unusable heat energy rarifies to a certain point, stretching space itself to the tearing point, which somehow causes another big bang (I don't know how it supposedly works). But even if this is true, the human race as we know it will be long gone. The way I see it, humanity is ignorant of many things and the future of the universe is uncertain. Personally, I like to think that our universe is one of many, but I don't think anyone knows.

To your point 2: Following fundamental, universal laws governing matter and energy, matter was arranged in complex forms, eventually culminating in life. We can observe the same kinds of reactions going on today, as the Urey-Miller experiment and other experiments show. We don't have to know every single detail and step in the process to come to this conclusion.

point 3 - I believe that over millions of years life evolved to the point of consciousness. I observe behavior in humans and other animals that indicates consciousness not unlike my own, and generally speaking the more sophisticated an animal's nervous system, the more conscious they seem to me. A plant is not conscious at all, a worm reacts to stimulii, a dog can be friendly or mean. I believe that consciousness is the product of complex biochemical and bioelectrical activity, and I believe that consciousness stops when that activity stops.

point 4 - I think that there is a rational basis for morality. I think morality arises as a consequence of physical, conscious, rational (or at least semi-rational) agents being in relationship and being able to affect one another. I believe morality is objective, not subjective, because moral rules are independant of what any moral agent or group of moral agents think or believe (even the postulated entity known as God). Morality is a consequence of what and who we are; it is not a decision made by us, and it does not issue from a higher power or plane of existence.

I think ethics stems from human nature, not God's nature. I cannot emphasize enough that this does not mean that morality is arbitrary or subjective. It means that morality is dictated by states-of-affairs in the real, physical world, and as such is flexible. What I mean by this, by way of example, is that killing is wrong when it's murder, but it's all right in self-defense. If we humans had natural body armor, it might be morally acceptable to go around hitting each other hard with baseball bats, but we're not, so it's not. It is a real, objective fact that all of our actions have consequences, and some of the consequences are good and some of them bad. Good is to be embraced and encouraged, and bad or evil is to be avoided and discouraged.

Even if God exists, I would believe the same things about ethics. I think God would abide by moral rules for the same reasons that we human beings should abide by them - because they are good. I believe that goodness is it's own reward, I don't believe that we should be threatened or cajoled by false promises into doing it.

Goodness is not God. Goodness is an abstraction, no matter how it exists, not a person. Good is good because it is beneficial to someone. Evil is evil because it harms someone, not because God arbitrarily dictates certain activities off-limits.

We all have a choice to live selfishly or to live selflessly. Most people strike a balance between the two, and I think that's good and appropriate.

Q wrote: I understand your position to be, "human existence is meaningful because humans exist."

I don't think mere existence is enough to create meaning. I think that we are able to assign meanings to things, like this string of letters that you are reading, because of our intellectual capacity to reflect on ideas and communicate. Not unlike morality, "meanings" come about by virtue of the relationships between things. Our ancestors survived by seeing relationships between things, and we instinctively look for new ways of understanding, new relationships.

Whereas I am saying that God, who transcends the material universe, and who is the source of human beings and everything else that exists — that this God validates human existence. Why doesn't God need another [validation of] her existence? Because God is existence. Whereas this material universe cannot be equated with existence. Once, it did not exist. Eventually it will once again cease to exist; or at least, all living beings will cease to exist.

In my view, validation is completely irrelevant. I know I exist - I have no good evidence that God exists, but I do have evidence that God does not exist. My own existence is a brute fact, one I cannot ignore. To me, the evidence is quite clear. I am a highly complex being, made up of constituent parts. The universe operates according to laws that humans are able to discover, and my existence is in virtue of these things that make up my body, which is me. When my body is gone, I will be gone too.

When you say that God is existence, then I must reply that when you assert that God exists, it seems to me that you are saying Existence exists. Being the totality of all that exists, God must include evil and tragedy and pain just as much as it includes good and hope and all things pleasant.

Just a few of the many reasons that people will not want to accept what I have outlined here are: 1) it means we are mortal, 2) it means our loved ones who have passed away are truly gone, 3) it means that our actions have real, irrevocable consequences 4) it means that humans are animals.

I am under no illusions that anyone will be convinced by this - I fully expect disagreement. It is my hope that by posting this I will further understanding and dialogue, and foster tolerance.

I hope this clears the air somewhat. No longer can I be accused of merely hinting around at my philosophical position. There is material here (no pun intended) for many a lengthy dialogue to come. Or, it could be the case that my theistic friends will avoid discussing these things with me from now on. If so, I understand and respect that, too.