Materialism and value - another atheist screed
Posted by diogenes on 2025-June-29 11:50:39, Sunday|
The existence of a single animal being tortured is enough to prove that there is no God anywhere in the universe. Or is the idea that the deity looks on, and even 'feels pity', but does nothing? What use would such a deity be to either man or beast? Such a being would be a completely useless piece of metaphysical flotsam, and would not be an entity that could be the object of our interest or allegiance; which is to say, it would not be God. The universe, in fact, goes its way without the slightest concern for the living creatures it accidentally brings into existence. Nature has not the slightest appearance of teleology, except in a very superficial way that is easily refuted by Darwinism. Even a hundred years before Darwin, Hume recognised this truth: Look round this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organized, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! How contemptible or odious to the spectator! The whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children! (Dialogues concerning natural religion, Part XI)So let us accept that this is the way the universe is, and discard once and for all the childish anthropocentric illusions of theism. We discern that there are certain patterns in the sequences of phenomena on which we can normally rely, though they are not absolutely invariable. Through investigations we find that these variable regularities are based on certain regularities in matter which are absolutely invariable. We may even go on to posit that every event is absolutely determined to be the way it is. The discovery of these regularities grants us an unexpected power over nature. Each event is explained by reference to the whole sequence of events in its past light-cone. But the ultimate regularities of sequence cannot themselves be further explained. The universe in its entirety is without any rational explanation; it is simply a fact. The notion that a God could somehow explain the universe was comprehensively demolished by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason. As Kant there showed, all such reasoning presupposes the soundness of the ontological proof, and one has to have a faith greater than that in the deity to believe in the validity of this argument. Of course, we must recognise that we are biological creatures who can only grasp the universe in a manner adapted to our perceptual and cognitive apparatus. As Russell wrote: We all start from "naive realism”, i.e., the doctrine that things are what they seem. We think that grass is green, that stones are hard, and that snow is cold. But physics assures us that the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow, are not the greenness, hardness, and coldness that we know in our own experience, but something very different. The observer, when he seems to himself to be observing a stone, is really, if physics is to be believed, observing the effects of the stone upon himself. … Naive realism leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naive realism is false. Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false. (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, Unwin, 1950, p. 15)This is a perfectly decisive refutation of naïve realism, but does not, I believe, preclude the possibility of a critical realism (such as Russell himself adopted). It is nevertheless the case that I don't know what matter actually is; I do not know the heart of being itself, but merely its effects on my sense organs and nervous system. But I do know that whatever being itself is, it is not spiritual. For it is characteristic of mind or spirit that its reactions are not stereotyped. Even quite primitive creatures can form conditioned reflexes, that is, their response to the same stimulus can be different on different occasions. Nature, by contrast, is governed by law. Given the exact same causes, the exact same effect will follow without fail. Without this, exact science would scarcely be possible. (There are those who hold that indeterminism nevertheless has scope in the quantum world. The whole matter is too involved to go into here, but even if true, the probabilities of outcomes, the statistical frequency with which various outcomes occur given certain initial conditions, can still be predicted with complete exactness, indicating the same stereotyped, and thus non-mental, causation as in the rest of the universe.) So there is no Berekelyan Spirit underlying the order of nature - all causation is mechanistic; and on this ground we must refer to the underlying reality as matter rather than as spirit. Earlier, LaudateAgno characterised me as “nihilist”. Though he did not specify which particular doctrine, in his view, justified this ascription (maybe it was just my rejection of theism), I don't think it is entirely accurate. For a nihilist believes in nothing. He will not only reject “absolute value”, as I do (or rather, regard the term as unintelligible), but he will also reject any moral judgements in consequence. I, however, do not reject moral judgements. On the contrary, I have a very important moral belief – or perhaps I should say a moral commitment, since we are dealing not with facts but with our response to the facts – and this is our obligation to those with whom we share nothing in common beyond our capacity for joy or pain, the moral community of all human beings, and indeed all sentient animals – in fact, the community of life. I see no reason why this should not be a sufficient foundation for morality. When I see the patterns that raindrops make in a pool of water, or the gathering of storm clouds overhead, or the soft rustle of the breeze through the trees at night, with the stars twinkling through the branches, I know that this material universe is not only all that there is, but is our true home, from which religious myths have sought to alienate us. Can we not find enchantment in the heart of the real, in nature, in all its grandeur, terror and beauty?  |
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