Skip to main content

Moral atheism? The oppositions to narrative theism and to natural theology

Why does one call oneself an atheist?

One reason might be because one is opposed to the narrative of theism (OT stories, Inquisition)?  In as much as one could reject theism on this basis alone then one is a reactionary, inasmuch as one is opposing the theism of the Abrahamic faiths.

Or is one an atheist for principled, philosophical reasons (problem of evil; the alleged incoherence of the very notion of a transcedent personal being)  In such a case, one would also have to be a materialist.  But such an anti-metaphysics makes no room for a notion of the common good that would be adhered to by any virtuous person.  But atheists need not see this logical implication.  And inasmuch as they do not see it, they are inasmuch as they have virtuous convictions, inconsistent with their materialist convictions.  But inasmuch as they are consistently materialist (and I means consistent), they are either manifestly wicked OR the basis of their morality looks more like that of Thomas Hobbes (which leaves no room for nobility of spirit).  But we humans are not consistent.

By the way, while I grant that atheists may have some commendable moral convictions I would argue that what is commendable in these convictions is inconsistent with their atheism

So there are three ways of being atheistic: reactionary, selfish and inconsistent.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson.  He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal.  My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this.  I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true.  Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist.  In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...

Daniel Dennett, disqualifying qualia, softening up the hard problem, fullness of vacuity, dysfunctional functionalism

Around track 2 of disc 9 of Intuition Pumps , Dennett offers what I would call an argument from vacuity.  He argues that David Chalmers unwittingly plays a magic trick on himself and others by placing a set of issues under the one umbrella called the "hard problem of consciousness." None of these issues is really , in Dennett's opinion, a hard problem.  But in naming them thus, Chalmers (says Dennett) is like a magician who seems to be playing the same card trick over and over again, but is really playing several different ones.  In this analogy, expert magicians watch what they think is the same trick played over and over again.  They find it unusually difficult to determine which trick he is playing because they take these performances as iterations of the same trick when each is  in fact different from the one that came before.  Furthermore, each of the tricks that he plays is actually an easy one, so it is precisely because they are looki...

naturalism (or rather, anti-supernaturalism) and preternaturalism

I will use the term "preternaturalism" to designate a willingness to posit causes that are less than divine but which stand above and beyond those observable ones we see operating within the laws of nature. A naturalist might oppose theistic arguments from miracles or design by arguing for the possibility of preternatural causes.  Such an argument, however, would bring us back to Zeus and Hera, tree nymphs and  the like: a supernatural explanation would, by contrast, be more conducive toward a scientific approach to nature (i.e., positing only laws that are falsifiable when doing science).