Posted on 09/30/2015 11:30:21 AM PDT by Heartlander
There are two atheist "memes" (to use a jargon term) that seem to me to be in prima facie conflict. I will not claim to be able to cite chapter and verse showing that the same atheist uses both of these memes. But I'm quite sure that there are atheists out there who have done so.
So these are not exact quotes from anyone but approximate statements that reflect things that I, and I suspect you, dear Reader, have heard and read.
Atheist meme #1: It is offensive to imply that being an atheist is in any way detrimental to being a moral person. Atheists can be just as moral as religious people.
Keep your eye on the ball. The question of what is meant by "just as moral" will be crucial.
Atheist meme #2: The idea that man is in any way special is speciesism derived from religious ideas like the image of God. Once we get rid of those religious concepts we can see that man is just another animal, though a highly evolved one. Man's continuity with the animals means that abortion, euthanasia, killing those in "vegetative states," and even infanticide are all "on the table" for ethical debate. The decision in specific cases should be made on the basis of utilitarian considerations without any notion that human life per se is valuable.
It should be pretty obvious that the proposals in atheist meme #2 are socially radical. They represent a departure from what a lot of people for a long time in Western society have thought of as moral behavior. Yet atheist meme #2 says that, once you are an atheist, you should consider them to be viable options.
Prima facie, this conflicts with atheist meme #1. It's pretty obvious that, if atheist meme #2 is true, atheist meme #1 is false: Atheism does make you a less moral person if atheism leads you to consider doing all those things or even advocating them.
Suppose someone wanted to hold both of these to be true. What could he say? He could try to say that, since the ethical system outlined in atheist meme #2 is actually correct, atheism doesn't really make you less moral. It just leads you to redefine what constitutes morality so that it allows things that previously (traditionally, according to Judeo-Christian morality, etc.) were not allowed.
The problem with that response is that it turns atheist meme #1 into a pointless tautology. If atheist meme #1 has a point in communication, it must be either to reassure people about atheist morals or to shame those who question them. Neither of these ends is served if "moral" in atheist meme #1 could mean "Moral according to norms radically redefined by atheists themselves." If that's the only meaning, atheist meme #1 is compatible with, say, finding that atheists are bank robbers at a much higher rate than the general populace, so long as they are following some atheist redefinition of morality that makes it okay to rob banks. But that would certainly undermine the point (at least if enough people noticed), because then people would decide that atheists qua atheists are less likely to be "nice people."
What this shows is that anyone who trots out atheist meme #1 but also plans to advocate atheist meme #2 is doing a bait and switch. Start by protesting about the morality of atheists. Trust that your audience will be lulled into accepting this claim by the fact that the intellectual atheists you intend to hold up for their consideration aren't right now breaking any laws or personally engaging in any gruesome actions (even if they are quietly, academically advocating them). They look like "nice people." Then later argue for the "enlightened," utilitarian ethics that you actually believe.
I have sometimes wondered, when atheists complain (a la meme #1) that others think they are less moral than theists, what they would say if asked, "What do you think of abortion, infanticide and euthanasia? Is your position on these matters at all influenced by your atheism? If yes, and if I consider your position grossly immoral, then why should you be offended to learn that I consider that your atheism makes you less moral?"
The funny thing is that I actually believe that the true positions on these issues are available by the natural light and hence do not require theism to understand. (Though theism helps. Human beings always find it useful to have more sources of information than strictly necessary.) I examined some of these issues in this essay. In Western society, however, the brand of atheism most commonly held is not some sort of virtuous, Platonic atheism that cleaves to the Good and accesses the natural light but rather some version of naturalism. And that is highly detrimental to moral insight.
I present my readers with the conflict between meme #1 and meme #2 in the hopes that it may be useful, either in talking with atheists or talking to others about atheism.
Do you believe that human conscience and consciousness ultimately came from mindlessness?
Current evidence says yes.
1. Functional InformationHow could such a system form randomly without any intelligence, and totally unguided?
2. Encoder
3. Error Correction
4. Decoder
What would come first - the encoder, error correction, or the decoder? How and where did the functional information originate?
Furthermore, DNA contains multi-layered information that reads both forward and backwards - DNA stores data more efficiently than anything we've created - and a majority of DNA contains metainformation (information about how to use the information in the context of the related data). The design inference is obvious.
To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometres in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the portholes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings with find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity. We would see endless highly organized corridors and conduits branching in every direction away from the perimeter of the cell, some leading to the central memory bank in the nucleus and others to assembly plants and processing units. The nucleus of itself would be a vast spherical chamber more than a kilometer in diameter, resembling a geodesic dome inside of which we would see, all neatly stacked together in ordered arrays, the miles of coiled chains of the DNA molecules. A huge range of products and raw materials would shuttle along all the manifold conduits in a highly ordered fashion to and from all the various assembly plants in the outer regions of the cell.We would wonder at the level of control implicit in the movement of so many objects down so many seemingly endless conduits, all in perfect unison. We would see all around us, in every direction we looked, all sorts of robot-like machines. We would notice that the simplest of the functional components of the cell, the protein molecules, were astonishingly, complex pieces of molecular machinery, each one consisting of about three thousand atoms arranged in highly organized 3-D spatial conformation. We would wonder even more as we watched the strangely purposeful activities of these weird molecular machines, particularly when we realized that, despite all our accumulated knowledge of physics and chemistry, the task of designing one such molecular machine – that is one single functional protein molecule – would be completely beyond our capacity at present and will probably not be achieved until at least the beginning of the next century. Yet the life of the cell depends on the integrated activities of thousands, certainly tens, and probably hundreds of thousands of different protein molecules.
We would see that nearly every feature of our own advanced machines had its analogue in the cell: artificial languages and their decoding systems, memory banks for information storage and retrieval, elegant control systems regulating the automated assembly of parts and components, error fail-safe and proof-reading devices utilized for quality control, assembly processes involving the principle of prefabrication and modular construction. In fact, so deep would be the feeling of deja-vu, so persuasive the analogy, that much of the terminology we would use to describe this fascinating molecular reality would be borrowed from the world of late twentieth-century technology.
What we would be witnessing would be an object resembling an immense automated factory, a factory larger than a city and carrying out almost as many unique functions as all the manufacturing activities of man on earth. However, it would be a factory which would have one capacity not equalled in any of our own most advanced machines, for it would be capable of replicating its entire structure within a matter of a few hours. To witness such an act at a magnification of one thousand million times would be an awe-inspiring spectacle.
To gain a more objective grasp of the level of complexity the cell represents, consider the problem of constructing an atomic model. Altogether a typical cell contains about ten million million atoms. Suppose we choose to build an exact replica to a scale one thousand million times that of the cell so that each atom of the model would be the size of a tennis ball. Constructing such a model at the rate of one atom per minute, it would take fifty million years to finish, and the object we would end up with would be the giant factory, described above, some twenty kilometres in diameter, with a volume thousands of times that of the Great Pyramid.
Copying nature, we could speed up the construction of the model by using small molecules such as amino acids and nucleotides rather than individual atoms. Since individual amino acids and nucleotides are made up of between ten and twenty atoms each, this would enable us to finish the project in less than five million years. We could also speed up the project by mass producing those components in the cell which are present in many copies. Perhaps three-quarters of the cell’s mass can be accounted for by such components. But even if we could produce these very quickly we would still be faced with manufacturing a quarter of the cell’s mass which consists largely of components which only occur once or twice and which would have to be constructed, therefore, on an individual basis. The complexity of the cell, like that of any complex machine, cannot be reduced to any sort of simple pattern, nor can its manufacture be reduced to a simple set of algorithms or programmes. Working continually day and night it would still be difficult to finish the model in the space of one million years.
- Michael Denton’s Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (Adler and Adler, 1985)
And let me add my two cents to this astounding picture. The model that you would complete a million years later would be just that, a lifeless static model. For the cell to do its work this entire twenty kilometer structure and each of its trillions of components must be charged in specific ways, and at the level of the protein molecule, it must have an entire series of positive and negative charges and hydrophobic and hydrophilic parts all precisely shaped (at a level of precision far, far beyond our highest technical abilities) and charged in a whole series of ways: charged in a way to find other molecular components and combine with them; charged in a way to fold into a shape and maintain that most important shape, and charged in a way to be guided by other systems of charges to the precise spot in the cell where that particle must go. The pattern of charges and the movement of energy through the cell is easily as complex as the pattern of the physical particles themselves.Also, Denton, in his discussion, uses a tennis ball to stand in for an atom. But an atom is not a ball. It is not even a ‘tiny solar system’ of neutrons, protons and electrons’ as we once thought. Rather, it has now been revealed to be an enormously complex lattice of forces connected by a bewildering array of utterly miniscule subatomic particles including hadrons, leptons, bosons, fermions, mesons, baryons, quarks and anti-quarks, up and down quarks, top and bottom quarks, charm quarks, strange quarks, virtual quarks, valence quarks, gluons and sea quarks…
And let me remind you again, that what we are talking about, a living cell, is a microscopic dot and thousands of these entire factories including all the complexity that we discussed above could fit on the head of a pin. Or, going another way, let’s add to this model of twenty square kilometers of breath taking complexity another one hundred trillion equally complex factories all working in perfect synchronous coordination with each other; which would be a model of the one hundred trillion celled human body, your body, that thing that we lug around every day and complain about; that would, spread laterally at the height of one cell at this magnification, blanket the entire surface of the earth four thousand times over, every part of which would contain pumps and coils and conduits and memory banks and processing centers; all working in perfect harmony with each other, all engineered to an unimaginable level of precision and all there to deliver to us our ability to be conscious, to see, to hear, to smell, to taste, and to experience the world as we are so used to experiencing it, that we have taken it and the fantastic mechanisms that make it possible for granted.
My question is, “Why don’t we know this?” What Michael Denton has written and I have added to is a perfectly accurate, easily intelligible, non-hyperbolic view of the cell. Why is this not taught in every introductory biology class in our schools?
- Matt Chait
Can an atheist be moral? Sure. How long will it last? What’s your fixed point on remaining moral or defining what is moral? Why would you remain moral?
A straw man is a common form of argument and is an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while actually refuting an argument which was not advanced by that opponent.[1]
I will say that her postulated Atheist meme #1 is, in my experience, accurate. Many atheists I know do say this or something like it.
She introduces the straw man in her Meme #2. Where have atheists proposed this? No where that I've ever seen.
There are attempts to create moral systems not based on the divine. The author doesn't sight any of them, or their key axioms. The one I am most familiar with is Humanism. As the name implies Humanism values Humans, and Humanists have as an axiom "all Human life has value". This is widely understood by anyone who has bothered to study the subject, so I assume the author is just creating junk memes for her own joy in destroying them.
Disapointing. Having created the straw man, she does a good job of ritualistic burning of it. We can all feel purified now by the destruction of atheist morality!
let me offer a more balanced alternative:
An atheist may choose to subscribe to a codified ethical system created by someone else, which typically lack an appeal to a diving being. For instance they may consider themselves a "Humanist" and follow the teachings of humanist philosophy.
A religious person chooses to subscribe to the codified ethical system, typically handed down from ancient times, which ascribes its ultimate origin as divine. For instance they may consider themselves a Christian and subscribe to the moral codes contained in the Bible and interpreted by their particular sects teachings.
(For the sake of simplicity and symmetry I'm going to take both believers and non-believers at their word and not try to impose external definitions on them ("anyone who says that isn't really a Christian")
I would say that many of the atheists I know have struggled with questions of morality and have reached some clear conclusions. For instance many libertarian atheists view the Non Aggression Principle as very important axiom of their own behavior and look for it in others.
I think many people professing Christianity are functional nihilists, whose understanding of Christian morality is shallow. Many of these people in fact use Christianity to assuage their conscience. Jesus forgives, only belief in him is needed for eternal life.
As Jim's Free Republic Credo thoughtfully posted above says FR stands against "government enforced atheism". The track record for that is truly horrible.
On the other hand the track record of doubting, skeptical, agnostic and philosophical atheist people is not horrible, in fact data suggests that atheists are among the least likely to be convicted of serious crimes (second only to Pentecostal Christians). Here is
Self-professed atheists are less likely than the general population to be convicted of serious crimes, and second only to Pentacostal Christians in this regard. (It's interesting how badly self-identified "pagans" do in this measure).
I tend to think our society would be far better off if more people held moral beliefs, and took them more seriously. I once asked five men I was having dinner with to name the 10 commandments. Three of them claimed to be Christians. Between them they could only name 8.
Belief in religion (not just superficial branding, which far too many have today) is the most tried and true way to inculcate moral beliefs into people, particularly in children. It does have the problem that if ones morals are tied to belief in a specific religion and one for whatever reason stops believing one may be (at least temporarily) without a moral code.
I think it's incorrect to assert, as a fact, that atheists are intrinsically immoral. The authors attempt to do so is facile, and as I say fails for flagrant violation of the straw man argument logical fallacy.
The only people who say evolution is random are creationists.
Interesting.
I would suggest that a “self-proclaimed” atheist that has morals is proof of God.
Morals being “Objective” and not “Subjective”
To make that big leap that atheists do not value human life makes no sense and is groundless, as you say.
Further, plenty of theists do not value human life. Look at the supposedly religious folks who are fine with abortion.
Consider this, to remove any ‘creator’ from our very existence including the beginning of our universe is to remove any ‘thought or intelligence’ from the equation. By definition, you are ultimately left with an existence from stupidity.
Morals being “Objective” and not “Subjective”
Funny you should say that. I have a close friend who is an atheist who says that human conscience is inherent. And that people are naturally good, but societies and upbringings pervert them to be evil.
I tell him that he really does believe in God, but he doesn't get what I'm saying.
The absence of intelligence is non-intelligence, which isn't the same as stupidity.
A rock isn't intelligent, but it's not stupid. It's merely non-intelligent. The universe is full of non-intelligent matter. There is only a little big of intelligent matter that we can see, starting in the animal kingdom and reaching its pinnacle in man.
We may live to see true Artificial Intelligence, which would be interesting.
And now you’ve been reduced to ad hominems, thus showing you know facts and logic don’t support you. So we’re done. Bye.
You may find this interesting
Presuppositional Apologetics Dr. Jason Lisle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-j9-cyRbFcs
It’s 57 minutes long, but for some reason I don’t think that you would have an issue with that.
You might say your dog was stupid, you probably wouldn't say your goldfish was, or kitchen counter was.
PS: I have found the on-line Merrian-Webster to be far superior to the Google or other on-line dictionaries.
Much appreciated. I shall put it on my viewing list and watch it soon!
The natural law, which is pre-political, is imprinted on the souls of every human being by God. An atheist can live a moral life by recognizing and living by the natural law, even if they don’t know God. IAW, they can live a moral life because of the gift God has given them.
Fascinating comment. Thanks.
Could you theorize about natural law in the absence of God's existence. (even though you may not hold that position)? This seems to be my friends position, which I find puzzling.
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