Skip to main content

whose materialism? which atheism?

In the last couple of centuries there have been many different materialists with different moralities: Herbert Spenser, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche to name a few.  They didn't merely reject the supernatural while otherwise accepting the values of their culture: they changed the moral landscape in a way that cohered somewhat with their materialistic vision.  They differed, however, in the ways in which they changed the moral landscape.

This difference spawns a problem for one who who embraces materialism today.   He must ask his or her self how and whether this doctrine affects his view of human existence.  If he believes, for example, that humans are at some level equal in dignity, then he must ask why he thinks so when other materialists have not.  Suppose that he wanted to persuade a fellow materialist with whom he disagreed about morality:  would he argue on the basis of scientific evidence?  If so, how would that argument fare against a counterargument likewise based upon scientific data.

Consider the racism so apparent in Darwin's Descent of Man.  He takes it as obvious even that the Irish race is inferior to the Scots, and he all but approves of eugenics.  Consider how Herbert Spenser (for whom Darwin expressed his admiration) disapproves of the state's use of resources to help the poor and handicapped.  To what principles might a committed materialist appeal in arguing against these fellow materialist?

Might those principles also be used by someone else (namely moi) to support theism?

I propose that they would: as soon as an atheist tries to build up an adequate account of morality, he starts supplying claims that serve as premises supporting the conclusion that there is a transcendent  and provident Supreme Being.

Comments

Post a Comment

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 ...
Post a Comment
Read more

response to friend who suggested that the self is a democracy of neural parts

This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level.  No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies.  None of them thinks about the whole as such.  And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist).  None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well?  And why not parts of these parts, et...
6 comments
Read more

interesting article by Jimmy Akin on death before the Fall

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/jimmy-akin/did-animals-die-before-the-fall/ Akin below: Aquinas.... writes: In the opinion of some, those animals which now are fierce and kill others, would, in that state, have been tame, not only in regard to man, but also in regard to other animals. But this is quite unreasonable. For the nature of animals was not changed by man's sin, as if those whose nature now it is to devour the flesh of others, would then have lived on herbs, as the lion and falcon. Nor does Bede's gloss on Genesis 1:30, say that trees and herbs were given as food to all animals and birds, but to some. Thus there would have been a natural antipathy between some animals  [ Summa Theologiae I:96:1 ad 2 ].  Aquinas thus holds that it was not  all  death that entered the world through man's sin, but human  death.
Post a Comment
Read more