The Problem with True Atheism

So, I've promised to write this out sometime, and here it is, at least in part. I have a bunch of things I want to talk about, and it will, in all likelihood, take more than one blog. I also will be talking about some Chicago machine politics soon, which should be fairly interesting - but is a totally separate topic.



Well, the title sort of says it all, and I am in part responding to a number of comments by friends about constructing a "rational" system of morality. I have already detailed a number of problems with this approach, and I will reiterate some of them here. I will also detail the history of the growth of the "atheist" movement in America (and, to a lesser extent, worldwide).



And note that I did put atheist in quotes, as this is my first point. Most people who claim to be atheists are, as far as I am concerned, agnostic. The may not acknowledge this or even be aware of it themselves, this seems to me to be the case. The reason that I say this is because they do not embrace the full ramifications of the nonexistence of any transcendent nature. The true ramifications of this are really fully explore by Nietzsche (and Machiavelli did significant work in this direction as well). Nietzsche is one of very few philosophers who truly embraced all the ramifications of the fact that there is no God.



Before I go much further, I must say this - I am nominally Latin Catholic (most people call it Roman Catholic, but it's correct name is the Latin Catholic Rite, one of what I believe is 13 Catholic rites), still practicing to a certain extent, and very well educated on the philosophy of my religion. This is not to say that I blindly follow dogma - much of the dogmatic has been removed from the religion with the advent of the Second Vatican Council, though there is still some dogma. One of the main responsibilities of adult Catholics is to be "persons of conscience" - meaning that each person is an individual moral agent, and they are responsible to their own conscience, which should be informed by the teachings of the church. I make this point so that you do not think that I am blindly trying to verify the existence of God because I have my beliefs.

Of course, in part this is true - my belief must extend in part from my upbringing in this tradition, but I have gone through a protracted period of non-belief; the main issue in this is that I have, over a number of years rediscovered my belief (which I still sometimes question) and looked at the ramifications of trying to construct a moral system without some kind of divinity.

And here is the crux of the issue. If we remove the sense of "specialness" from humanity, if we are just animals, and if existence is merely a random coincidence, there is no absolute morality. While this does not seem to be a problem on its face, it is quite a huge problem in trying to decide what can make something right or wrong. In fact, the very concept of right and wrong must be thrown out if you believe this. We must then, as Nietzsche says, move "beyond good and evil". The labels become ridiculous without some kind of transcendent nature. Try and define these terms without reference to God or to humanity being "special" in some way.

What is "good"? What is "evil"? If one tries to define these in a purely rational way, it is totally impossible. I challenge anyone to attempt this, and I can find fault with it. And please do not bother quoting from John Stuart Mill and Utilitarianism - he makes a number of mistakes that are easily observed, and in fact the mistakes that he makes are many of the same ones that modern atheists make.

Most people feel that there is no longer a need for God because people are basically good, and that blind adherence to dogma diminishes people because they are not allowed to think. In part they are correct - complete adherence to dogma does diminish people - but complete rejection of it is just as foolish. Belief that because people are currently good regardless of the hundreds of years of social history that molded their morality is giving yourself an enormous blind spot.

Let me give you an example in terms of science - obviously, this is simply an analogy, not an attempt to say that faith and science are interchangeable - they are not. If every generation decides that because we have more knowledge than the previous generation we can simply discard everything that they have done, there would never be any growth in society. If, for example, Jonas Salk discovered the polio vaccine and moved the world of vaccinations forward by leaps and bounds. If we just assumed that we know more now than he did then, we could discard all of his work. Same in terms of space exploration - they got to the moon with calculations on slide rules using Newton's laws. If we did not keep using the good that has been previously discovered, we cannot progress forward.

The same does work on a moral level. If we simply discard all that previous generations have done in terms of morality, our social and moral systems wouold never advance. One of the best examples of this is in the case of Martin Luther King, Jr. The reason his message caught hold so well all over is not because it was new, but because it was founded on the moral and religious principles that many people already claimed allegiance to. (and yes I know I ended with a preposition, I just don't want to rewrite it) He called people to task on their original religious beliefs and called them to look at how they were treating other people and how it was inconsistent with their professed faith.

I have to stop for now, and I really have not finished (I've barely even begun) but I will continue soon.