purpose-of-lifeAs has been discussed here recently, belief in God is a successful strategy for feeling a bigger sense of importance and purpose in life. God created us as part of a bigger plan; we are all infused with God’s spirit; there is an absolute right and wrong; I am going to heaven; etc etc. As someone stated, a person with these beliefs is trading in their intellectual honesty in exchange for comfort and a perceived purpose to their lives.
A theist would argue you can only be moral if you believe in God (as morality is handed down from above). As atheists, we are quick to reject this notion and assert morality really comes from social norms and religion has merely adopted the same values, not dictated them. What remains is the implied and tacit agreement that we should be moral.
To me, if you want to be intellectually honest all the way down, you have to recognize that there is really and truly no higher purpose to anything. Therefore, there is no such thing as “should”. Otherwise, it seems that even atheists are still stuck in the pattern of trying to find significance and purpose where there is none.
Even when saying it is to be more “productive”, haven’t we still just shed one layer of intellectual dishonesty (that our purpose comes from God) while clinging to another layer (that we still have a purpose)?
Aversion to discomfort is a survival mechanism; this aversion generates my reactions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. It’s just my brain trying to induce me to avoid a situation that reduces my ability to spread my genes, because that’s what the mind evolved to do. The only reason I try to spread my genes is that I, as an organism, have evolved to try to spread my genes, nothing more.
Here’s where I think you’re getting hung up:
So it seems that even atheists are still stuck in the pattern of trying to find significance and purpose where there is [sic] none.
You’re right: our lives have no significance or purpose, any more than any animal’s does, or any plant’s.
So what?
Where’s the rule that says our lives need to have purpose? Let go of that, and you drop a lot of the “but I’m not really being intellectually honest about living in the Matrix, and if we accept that on a number of levels we don’t actually exist and we’re all just stardust blah blah blah fishcakes” angsting.
This was one of the first things I was able to iterate about my atheism (I’ve never been a theist, so I never had to unlearn any of that): that my purpose, the meaning of my life, its significance, is entirely up to me to determine. So my purpose is to live by a few simple rules:
If you enjoy all the philosophical Escher knots, by all means have at it. But dude, you don’t have to sweat all the details.
I can see two fallacies in your reasoning:
“Morality requires a purpose.” I see this a lot, but I don’t get it. To me, morality means to take responsibility for the (real, not imagined) consequences of one’s actions. It doesn’t matter what those actions or those consequences are. What does this have to do with “purpose”?
The fallacy fallacy. You correctly point out that there is nothing in the universe to say that we should be moral. But then you seem to imply that, therefore, we shouldn’t be. That is, of course, fallacious. If you’ve shown anything by this argument, it’s that we can do what we think is best, and if I think being moral (by my own standard) is best, then that’s perfectly intellectually honest. And now comes the important part (this is very subtle but important):
My own standard of morality may, on occasion, compel me to attempt to convince certain other people to act in a certain way, for example by convincing them that it is “moral” or that they “should” act that way, even if that makes me appear intellectually dishonest in their eyes (but not in mine).
Does that make sense? To give an example, suppose someone tells me in confidence that they are planning a murder. If I followed the gist of your post correctly, you think I should shrug and say it doesn’t matter because it is cosmically insignificant. But the consequence of that may be that the murder takes place which I could otherwise have prevented. Therefore, given the option, I prefer to put some effort into delivering a (possibly manipulative) lecture on morals and responsibility in the hopes that this may prevent the murder from occurring. Do you still think that this is intellectually dishonest?
I don’t have an ultimate answer for you, but maybe a semi-ultimate one.
We try to live a life of health and comfort, reach happiness and luck because it is a natural constant. It’s not just natural, but heavily influenced by culture too, but it’s a hard life to live in discomfort, illness and so on.
It’s not impossible to act against natural and cultural powers, but it needs a strong will and an artificial concentration, to live a live, reaching for asceticism or even self punishment. This kind of live needs more belief than an atheistic, secularistic search for an easy living, and is therefore more often found in religious movements.
But the only reason I try to spread my genes is that I have evolved to try to spread my genes, nothing more.
I wouldn’t agree. The word ‘I’ is a psychological category which doesn’t make sense on a genetic level of observation. That’s a brain confusing intermix of levels of reflexion. Descartes already thought about the ‘I’, without knowing genes. You cannot explain genes on the level of atoms and molecules and you cannot explain categories of self confidence, plans, happiness or moral on the level of genes.
Humans are all intellectually dishonest. Being an atheist doesn’t make you special. To think that it does is an excellent example of intellectual dishonesty.
But morality is divorced from religion. We’re a community-oriented species. In order for us to function as such, certain norms need to be observed, respected, and enforced where necessary. “Should you be moral?” Only if you want society to embrace you, rather than exterminate you.
Maintaining that immoral behaviour has no consequences is not borne out in the real world. Sure, you can be immoral, or anti-social, but your disruption of the system is small and transient, since you’re not likely to breed.
Holding a self- or culture- or society-derived purpose is not intellectually dishonest just because our existence is fleeting. The picture you present is a simplistic and nihilistic one devoid of the wonderous experiences life has to offer. Our cosmological irrelevance is itself irrelevant to the meaning one finds in daily life.
The honest answer is that it doesn’t matter.
That’s true, ultimately, on a cosmological scalle. But that doesn’t matter because the question is wrong. The question of what is important cannot be answered by considering ultimate purpose or meaning.
Why should I be happier with lots of friends and money than I would be as a lonely bum in an alley?
Because that is the scale at which we live our lives. That is the scale at which we are most likely to find happiness. That is the scale at which it’s easiest to find happiness. The scale of friends and family and basic needs like shelter and food and gainful employment. One can analyse the reasons why such things are important, and to what degree, and in what circumstances. But it’s contrary to the totality of human experience to suggest that such things are not important because they’re ultimately irrelevant.
Part of being intellectually honest is recognising the influence one’s experiences has on one’s perspective, and one’s ability to reason about the human condition.
It seems your argument against significance stems from a belief in the cosmic insignificance of human life. Real or not, it is a matter of faith that you believe this. The intellectual dishonesty lies in placing one’s mind in some imaginary throne of cosmic intelligence. Remember that our primate minds have an organism’s truncated, egocentric view of time and significance.
I think you are confusing absolutes and relatives.
An atheist does not believe there is an absolute morality, absolute purpose in life or absolute meaning of life. This is true.
However, an atheist could also argue that there are such things as personal morality, personal purpose in life and personal meaning of life.
There is a big difference in saying that things are absolute and True, and things that are in the “works for me” category. Especially because if something “works for me” it does not have to be true for everybody necessarily and there is not hypocrisy in it. It’s just how our world works, how the human mind is rigged to live life.
You say the human race has no significance without God. But if you believe there is no God, and the Universe is like an enormous cosmic machine, with no overarching intelligence, then the only sources of significance are self-aware beings who observe this giant machine. Significance is a subjective quality, so it requires subjects to exist. The Universe is not a subject, it is an object. Human beings are subjects.
In other words, we are the measure of all things. We are ultimately significant. And yes, there is a chance we will disappear without having any wider cosmic impact, but this is not necessarily the case. Our species may exist for millions (or billions) of years to come in forms we can’t even imagine right now. The possibilities are endless. If that doesn’t imbue your life with a sense of purpose, I can’t imagine why some old mythology would.
You’re making meaning where there is none. Let’s look at this carefully.
“Meaning” - There is no meaning in life, or anywhere in life. There’s no meaning molecule or atom, there’s no access to external meaning.
Therefore, meaning inheres only in language.
So it is completely accurate to say that “Life is empty and meaningless”, but that’s only half of the thing. The other half is that anything that you make the preceding statement mean, that life is bleak, or futile, or whatever is just more meaning - that you are adding.
The real statement is this: “Life is empty and meaningless, and it’s empty and meaningless that it’s empty and meaningless.” So you’re left at a state of zero. Anything that you add to what life is - is simply what you are adding, and not what is life.
The next question then becomes - “So if life is empty of meaning, and it’s meaningless that it’s empty of meaning, then what?”
Ah! That’s where the real simplicity comes in. This is where you can begin to deal with integrity. I don’t mean integrity as morality or good and bad, but integrity as a wholeness or a completeness. Integrity can be viewed as workability.
It doesn’t work to live in a house with a leaky roof, and it doesn’t work to live in a family that doesn’t communicate and who hate each other. It’s not that it’s good or bad, but it simply has a very low workability. If you look at the workability of things, and at the life you want to be living and how it impacts others and how that impact on them will impact you… then you’re working on living a life of workability.
And I’m not referring to a life without goals or objectives. If it’s clear to you that life can be more workable for more people if you invent the wheel, then common sense dictates that you improve the workability of your life by inventing the wheel.
In terms of morality- there are areas of the brain that control/create the feelings of empathy. I posit that even morality is a selfish thing- evolutionary as well- in that acting in accordance with our built in principles of empathy brings us to happiness (read release of chemicals in the brain that give us a sense of well-being.) Interesting that you bring up reproduction because it seems to me that a happy person makes a more suitable choice as mate. So I feel that I am being intellectually honest- I do what I am biologically/evolutionary driven to do- even if my mind abstracts such drives to philosophical principles- this abstraction is what my mind is supposed to do, as such examinations lead me to better understanding of what can make me happy. Does a sense of happiness come from me viewing that I having a “productive” life by doing what I “should” do? Yes- when I view productive as maximizing the potential in my genes and following my drives as what I should do. Are such things lending me to believe in some deeper or unnecessary structure of reality? I feel no as I accept merely the principles of Darwin. And on that note- evolution is not said to have a purpose (as purpose seems to imply a will) but it certainly drives things down the determined pathways of change and maximal utility.
Your question seems to hang more on “the meaning of life” then on the question of morality. I will try to answer that.
“Meaning of life” can only be applied to social constructs. We tend to forget that our individual mind (subject) is such a construct as is for instance a government or any other organization. This “Meaning of life” then comes close to the function of this construct (aka “societal system”).
If we see the totality of humanity as a social construct (doubtful) then the meaning (in the sense of goal) of humanity is just “to live”, to propagate itself, as is the “meaning” of all living systems. In the sense that the meaning of life for humanity has no end-goal this is correct. Parts of humanity, for instance yourself, most of the time do have some function-meaning-(end)goal in the whole. I ascribe the fact that you and many others feel a lack of meaning to: (a) The anonymous construct of our market society, where relations between people are objectified. (b) Our knowledge of the totality of humanity. Knowing too many things about the 7 billion people on the earth is enough to make you feel quite insignificant. (c) Many people, especially when out of work, are objectively seen as superfluous, witch of course does no good to you feeling you are any good.
I could expand on what this does to morality but I feel that this would be to much.
You need to think a little bit harder about what the word “morality” means. If you define morality as some set of edicts handed down by a supernatural being, then you have to throw away that morality (if you’re going to be intellectually honest) when you adopt atheism.
But you might also observe that humans are social primates, and social groups work better if individuals therein do not incessantly try to exploit the group (and other individuals) for their own ends. We might decide that morality is a perfectly good word to use to describe those issues pertaining to proper individual conduct within a group.
Aha, you might say–but there is no meaning to it all, so it’s all pointless! Well, again, depends what you mean by meaning. There is a curiously powerful semi-tautological meaning in the life process. First, notice that natural selection has shaped us to be exquisitely good self-replicators (in a very complex way, not the bacterial “let’s eat everything as fast as we possibly can!” way–though on the largest scale, we have a tendency to revert to that behavior). We act as though the most important thing to us is perpetuating our genes–and given that our genes are shared to an astounding extent between us, one can argue that our more noble aspirations to embrace the brotherhood of mankind is just an intuition that matches up with the biological reality: some genetic differences are important, but for the most part, we’re all pretty similar, and we’re all built to want to propagate our genes / our tribe’s genes / our species’ genes. You don’t get the overarching morality of religion from this observation, but if we have been selected and have all the instincts and desires and so on to want to continue the species, you’d have to conclude that it was at the very least pretty wrong-headed for anyone to do anything that would seriously jeopardize that. (Start a global thermonuclear war, for example.)
And then you might notice that if you really don’t care about it all, and don’t bother taking part in the continuation of the species (either directly, by having children, or indirectly, by contributing to society and trying to avoid some of our worst excesses that threaten our future), and die, then you’re gone, and what you did pretty much didn’t matter: a self-fulfilling prophecy. And those people who do care about keeping humanity going, to the extent that they manage to do it, also get their prophecy fulfilled: their offspring (collectively, not of each individual necessarily) are still around, and thus what they did mattered (inasmuch as anything matters to anyone ever, by virtue of it mattering to individuals who are present at various times).
So, put simply: we are a type of creature who tries to perpetuate the species. Embracing this and using it to guide one’s morality is about as non-controversial of a move as you can get. I’m not sure that if you fail to do that one can say that you’re wrong, but one could make a good case that you’re broken (in the “evolutionary unfit” sense).
Fortunately, we don’t really need to make the logical step–our instincts do most of the work for us. (We care about our children, even to the point of sacrificing our lives for them at times, for example.) But it’s a weird and complex world that we’ve built for ourselves these days, and our instincts don’t always get it right any more. Acknowledging the goal explicitly is probably a good idea too.
For me, atheism is the ineluctable result of the fundamental principle of doubt. That is, being rigorous about the limits of our knowledge. One reasonable way of justifying atheism is: “there is no argument or evidence to support a belief that a supernatural being designed the universe with a purpose.” However, that doesn’t mean that I categorically rule out a purpose or designer. As evidence is lacking, I don’t form a belief either way. Will we ever have evidence on this matter? I have no idea, but we must be open to the possibility.
So I think it’s a bad idea to live your life based on the assumption that nothing really matters. We don’t know for sure that that is true. But then how do we figure out what is important in life? Each of us just has to do his or her best to figure that out. But I’m convinced that the religious approach of faith, revelation and dogma is worse than useless in this endeavor.
The philosopher's pursuit is an attempt at self-gratification that follows from the pre-philosophical statement found -->here.
Merely engaging in questioning "what is" and trying to make order of it is an attempt to avoid loss.
Which is what we're all doing here.
I was going to say, “great insight”, but I am simply happy to see someone who shares my view. Yay intellectual honesty. Please downvote me in exchange.
I do not think atheism equals intellectual honesty. And I do not think religion prohibits people from reaching it, either. In my view, spirituality simply means knowing yourself as you are, which ultimately includes God or lack thereof, guiding or not guiding your steps, penetrating or missing from your world.
The realization you call “bleak”, Buddhists call “nirvana”. Seeing things as they truly are. Can you?
Doing good even if there is absolutely no reason for it is fun. It really does not matter whether you do bad or good anyway, so why not do good - for no reason? I find this thought very liberating and empowering.
And so on and so forth.
I’ve always thought of myself as an intellectual person…my passion is actually computer programming…and I’m 15. The kids at my school are very unintelligent and I debate with them all of the time anyway…I actually just saw this when scrolling through stack exchange websites and here’s my take. I’m personally a Christian (and since I’m on an atheist website I know I’m probably just going to be bashed with a bunch of hating comments but I feel like I have a rather rational point that I should share…)
So the fundamental difference between Christianity and Atheism could be defined as this:
Atheists believe that the ever-changing matter we see today has been around forever.
Christians believe that a never-changing God that doesn’t reveal himself so blatantly as matter has been around forever.
Now for a second let’s think about time. We use seconds and minutes etc to express time, but basically time is a way of defining the change in something. For example…what do people think of when you think “time stopping”…there’s no change in anything.
Since everything we know of that changes so far has a beginning and end, wouldn’t it be more logical to assume that something that never changes would be our only hope for something that wouldn’t have a beginning and/or end?
Also…you’d know if you’d ever had a personal relationship with God that you are rewarded with logical explanations for your beliefs for the more faith you have.
“We have shed one layer of intellectual dishonesty - that our purpose comes from God - but still cling to a lower layer - that we still have a purpose”
This is a perfectly legitimate argument, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with the authenticity question you’re raising.
We are certainly not hypocrites for imagining our knowledge about science to be superior to a confused creationist’s ignorance.
Furthermore, it is a little naive to assume that this has anything to do with the meaning of life or existence.
To create a new meaning for the earth or to give one to Life is not something that can really be thought in a religious context, the creation of a new concept of ethics or even a re-evaluation of morality is something that is not effectively possible within religion – and always seems to earn the name “evil” – but already indicates a transition to a critical perspective, a wider context of meaning that than established by God.
In short atheism is not simply about an individual overcoming, but about the species as a whole, and ultimately the movement towards new horizons of value, new universes of meaning than those prescribed by God.
Of course we affirm contingency, a delirium and drift beneath everything – that’s the entire point of existentialism, and in a way modernity. But it need not imply a miserablism; you don’t have to be depressed to think critically!
How can anyone be so completely ignorant and still function? Take the time to learn a few facts before exposing yourself to some richly deserved ridicule. Some time learning about logical fallacies would be well spent.
Which god do we need to give us morals? You have thousands to choose from unless you are saying any god from any culture is good enough.
Your statement that atheism is only 100 years old is patently false. I have atheist ancestors who died more than 100 years ago. Look up John Stuart Mill if you need an example.
I consider myself an Atheist because I do not believe deities exist. I can only speak for myself……
Atheism is supposedly a break from that self-deception. We value intellectual honesty above a false sense of purpose. But is that contradicted by upholding morality? By disallowing one specific higher purpose, some Godly righteousness, are we deceiving ourselves when we attempt to perpetuate some other sense of purpose?
Believing that there is a higher purpose without supporting data would be odd for an Atheist…and intellectually dishonest.
If we reject heaven’s higher purpose, why should we not reject the compulsion that we should be moral?
I have no compulsion to be moral. I don’t even have morals. Believing morals exist as a function of nature is intellectually dishonest.
Even when saying it is to be more “productive”, haven’t we still just shed one layer of intellectual dishonesty (that our purpose comes from God) while clinging to another layer (that we still have a purpose)?
Yes…Being “productive” is not good or bad thing. If you enjoy being productive then be productive..Being productive because it is the right is intellectually dishonest. We do not have a purpose. The universe does not have a purpose.
Is being a good citizen and friend, and creating an environment that is better for yourself inherently valuable to justify spending one’s limited time and energy (by adhering to social norms, trying to be “good”, etc)?
Humans should do things by choice…not to be “good”. You cannot be “good”… A bottle of wine can be, humans cannot.
Is a better life really just the sum of pursuing this survival mechanism?
Not for me. I peruse “a better life” because I enjoy a better life.
How does that stack up against the negligibility of humankind’s impact on scale with the Universe?
The Universe is very, very big and humans do not of any impact on it. Until 1920’s we didn’t even know there was a Universe.
Considering some of comments on this thread….
Good and evil do not exist in nature, they are purely human constructs.
Lacking morals I do not consider Murder to be wrong/good/bad/etc.
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