Edward Feser thinks we atheists have overlooked a few things:
The mentality is summed up perfectly in the notorious “Atheist Bus Campaign” of 2009 and its preposterous slogan: “There’s probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” As if atheism promised only sweetness and light. As if the vast majority of human beings would not find the implications of atheism — that human existence has no purpose, that there is no postmortem reward to counterbalance the sufferings of this life, nor any hope for seeing dead loved ones again, etc. — far more depressing than any purported deficiencies in traditional religious belief. And as if the metaphysical assumptions underlying atheism would not cast into doubt the liberal and egalitarian values upheld by most atheists no less than the more traditional moral codes of the world religions.
Atheism implies we are free to find our own purposes in life. I find that very uplifting. Depressing, by contrast, is the idea that my every word, thought, and deed is monitored for future judgment by an omnipotent and capricious God.
I like the idea of postmortem rewards and punishments to redress the injustices of life, but Christianity has strange and frightening ideas about how such things get meted out. For example, in many versions of Christianity, simply having the wrong attitude toward God’s son earns you eternal damnation, regardless of your experiences or behavior in life. It is unclear what eternal damnation entails, but it is sometimes analogized to swimming in a lake of fire. That seems excessive. Compared to that conception of the afterlife, eternal sleep sounds pretty good.
As for not seeing dead loved ones again, yeah, that’s a bummer. Personally, though, I think that it is precisely the finitude of life that gives it meaning and savor. It is the knowledge that it will end that impels you to live life to the fullest and to not take the people in your life for granted.
More could be said, of course, but that’s not really the point of this post. It’s that part about atheism and liberalism that I want to look at.
Most of the Feser’s post is a string of quotations from Nietzsche in which he holds forth on the frightening consequences of atheism. Feser endorses these quotes, and uses them as a cudgel against atheists who, inexplicably in his view, don’t seem excessively depressed or nihilistic. Feser writes:
Consequently, a culture that doubts its religion comes to doubt itself and its own legitimacy. And a culture that repudiates that religion is, in effect, committing a kind of cultural suicide. The moral and social order to which the religion gave rise cannot survive its disappearance. The trouble, in Nietzsche’s view, is that too few see what this entails:
Much less may one suppose that many people know as yet what this event [the death of God] really means — and how much must collapse now that this faith has been undermined because it was built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it; for example, the whole of our European morality. (The Gay Science, p. 279)
The New Atheist, upon hearing this, may shrug, thinking only of the heady prospect of guilt-free porn surfing, transvestite bathroom access, rectal coitus, and the other strange obsessions of the modern liberal mind. But Nietzsche had somewhat higher ends in view. By “the whole of our European morality,” he was not talking merely or even primarily about the rules of traditional sexual ethics against which the modern liberal has such a weird animus (and which are not unique to Christianity or Europe in any event). He was talking about everything that has counted as morality in European culture, including the values modern egalitarian liberals still prize, and which Kant, Mill, and other modern ethicists of whom Nietzsche is harshly critical tried to give a secular foundation.
Charming. First of all, transvestite and transgender are not the same thing. More to the point, however, the modern liberal mind is obsessed with ensuring basic fairness and social justice for people who don’t fit some arbitrary religious conception of sex and gender. In this we differ from conservatives, who are instead obsessed with what other folks are doing in their bedrooms. Given the opportunity, they would happily legislate who you can do it with, the positions you are allowed to assume, and the social circumstances under which you can do it.
Liberals have healthier obsessions.
Later, Feser holds forth on egalitarianism:
Now, about this notion of the equal worth of all human beings, Nietzsche makes two main points. First, it loses all intellectual foundation with the demise of Christianity. He writes, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
[T]hus blinks the mob — “ there are no higher men, we are all equal, man is man; before God we are all equal.”
Before God! But now this god has died. And before the mob we do not want to be equal. (The Portable Nietzsche, p. 398)
And in Twilight of the Idols:
When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident… Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands… Christian morality is a command; its origin is transcendent… it stands and falls with faith in God. (The Portable Nietzsche, pp. 515-16)
This collapse of any reason to believe in the basic moral equality of all human beings is among the repercussions of the “death” of the Christian God that Nietzsche thinks European civilization has yet to face up to. Modern secular moralists presuppose this egalitarianism but they have no rational grounds for doing so. It is merely a prejudice they have inherited and refuse to question despite their rejection of its traditional basis…
Trying to look at this from Feser’s perspective, it’s hard to fathom what he thinks is going on. As he himself admits, we liberal atheist types are generally all in favor of egalitarianism, and, sexual questions aside, mostly have no trouble figuring out right from wrong. How does he think we do it? Isn’t it interesting that even after losing all rational foundation (in his view) for morality, somehow we still manage to get it right? What a strange coincidence that is! It’s as though we just guessed on every question of a multiple choice test, yet somehow managed to get close to a perfect score. Remarkable!
According to Feser, if you base your morality on fundamental and near-universal intuitions about fairness and decency, coupled with such insight as science can provide, then you have no rational basis for your moral beliefs. You are adrift in a sea of relativism and subjective preference. By contrast, if you arrive at precisely the same conclusions because you believe you have accurately interpreted an infallible revelation from God, then you’re on solid ground. You have objective morality, and can now hold forth with confidence on even the thorniest moral questions.
This is not a reasonable way of looking at things.
But this is not the weakest part of Feser’s argument. That honor goes to Feser’s preference for armchair philosophy. He is constantly telling us (or is quoting Nietzsche telling us) about the dire consequences that ensue when we abandon Christianity as the basis of morality. His long post is just assertion after melodramatic assertion to that effect. He seems not to appreciate, however, that the experiment has been done.
We do not need to speculate about what happens when a society freely loses its religious faith, since we have several modern societies to consider. The Scandinavian countries are majority atheist and agnostic, yet somehow manage to be among the most decent and socially conscious in the world. In several other European countries, the Church has lost most of its power as a social force, yet these countries have likewise managed to avoid the plunge into nihilism and debauchery. I guess it’s just dumb luck that they haven’t noticed the dire consequences of leaving Christianity behind.
We can look at this from the other side, too. What happens when we hand over the government to, say, the Roman Catholic Church? We’ve done that experiment too. For more than a thousand years the Church had the chance to show us what a just and moral regime looks like. Did they take advantage of this opportunity? Was their rule marked by a notable concern for egalitarianism, fairness, and justice? Sadly, no. They mostly spent their time justifying the enslavement of non-Christians, torturing and imprisoning heretics, and enforcing the boundaries of acceptable thought.
It was not until the Church started to lose its power, and secular philosophies became common, that governments started to value social equality and justice. In other words, both history and modern society reveal the exact opposite of what Feser (and apparently Nietszche) have told us to expect.
When the dictates of armchair theorizing run afoul of actual facts, it is the theorizing that must yield. In this case, it is not hard to find the error. Religion is not, and never has been, the actual source of people’s morality. The reality is that everyone bases their morality on those intuitions that Feser finds so arbitrary. People start out with a strong sense of right and wrong and then look for reasons to justify their beliefs. Some find religion to be a convenient crutch in that regard, but that does not reflect poorly on those of us who don’t.
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1PZZH5h
Edward Feser thinks we atheists have overlooked a few things:
The mentality is summed up perfectly in the notorious “Atheist Bus Campaign” of 2009 and its preposterous slogan: “There’s probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” As if atheism promised only sweetness and light. As if the vast majority of human beings would not find the implications of atheism — that human existence has no purpose, that there is no postmortem reward to counterbalance the sufferings of this life, nor any hope for seeing dead loved ones again, etc. — far more depressing than any purported deficiencies in traditional religious belief. And as if the metaphysical assumptions underlying atheism would not cast into doubt the liberal and egalitarian values upheld by most atheists no less than the more traditional moral codes of the world religions.
Atheism implies we are free to find our own purposes in life. I find that very uplifting. Depressing, by contrast, is the idea that my every word, thought, and deed is monitored for future judgment by an omnipotent and capricious God.
I like the idea of postmortem rewards and punishments to redress the injustices of life, but Christianity has strange and frightening ideas about how such things get meted out. For example, in many versions of Christianity, simply having the wrong attitude toward God’s son earns you eternal damnation, regardless of your experiences or behavior in life. It is unclear what eternal damnation entails, but it is sometimes analogized to swimming in a lake of fire. That seems excessive. Compared to that conception of the afterlife, eternal sleep sounds pretty good.
As for not seeing dead loved ones again, yeah, that’s a bummer. Personally, though, I think that it is precisely the finitude of life that gives it meaning and savor. It is the knowledge that it will end that impels you to live life to the fullest and to not take the people in your life for granted.
More could be said, of course, but that’s not really the point of this post. It’s that part about atheism and liberalism that I want to look at.
Most of the Feser’s post is a string of quotations from Nietzsche in which he holds forth on the frightening consequences of atheism. Feser endorses these quotes, and uses them as a cudgel against atheists who, inexplicably in his view, don’t seem excessively depressed or nihilistic. Feser writes:
Consequently, a culture that doubts its religion comes to doubt itself and its own legitimacy. And a culture that repudiates that religion is, in effect, committing a kind of cultural suicide. The moral and social order to which the religion gave rise cannot survive its disappearance. The trouble, in Nietzsche’s view, is that too few see what this entails:
Much less may one suppose that many people know as yet what this event [the death of God] really means — and how much must collapse now that this faith has been undermined because it was built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown into it; for example, the whole of our European morality. (The Gay Science, p. 279)
The New Atheist, upon hearing this, may shrug, thinking only of the heady prospect of guilt-free porn surfing, transvestite bathroom access, rectal coitus, and the other strange obsessions of the modern liberal mind. But Nietzsche had somewhat higher ends in view. By “the whole of our European morality,” he was not talking merely or even primarily about the rules of traditional sexual ethics against which the modern liberal has such a weird animus (and which are not unique to Christianity or Europe in any event). He was talking about everything that has counted as morality in European culture, including the values modern egalitarian liberals still prize, and which Kant, Mill, and other modern ethicists of whom Nietzsche is harshly critical tried to give a secular foundation.
Charming. First of all, transvestite and transgender are not the same thing. More to the point, however, the modern liberal mind is obsessed with ensuring basic fairness and social justice for people who don’t fit some arbitrary religious conception of sex and gender. In this we differ from conservatives, who are instead obsessed with what other folks are doing in their bedrooms. Given the opportunity, they would happily legislate who you can do it with, the positions you are allowed to assume, and the social circumstances under which you can do it.
Liberals have healthier obsessions.
Later, Feser holds forth on egalitarianism:
Now, about this notion of the equal worth of all human beings, Nietzsche makes two main points. First, it loses all intellectual foundation with the demise of Christianity. He writes, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
[T]hus blinks the mob — “ there are no higher men, we are all equal, man is man; before God we are all equal.”
Before God! But now this god has died. And before the mob we do not want to be equal. (The Portable Nietzsche, p. 398)
And in Twilight of the Idols:
When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident… Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands… Christian morality is a command; its origin is transcendent… it stands and falls with faith in God. (The Portable Nietzsche, pp. 515-16)
This collapse of any reason to believe in the basic moral equality of all human beings is among the repercussions of the “death” of the Christian God that Nietzsche thinks European civilization has yet to face up to. Modern secular moralists presuppose this egalitarianism but they have no rational grounds for doing so. It is merely a prejudice they have inherited and refuse to question despite their rejection of its traditional basis…
Trying to look at this from Feser’s perspective, it’s hard to fathom what he thinks is going on. As he himself admits, we liberal atheist types are generally all in favor of egalitarianism, and, sexual questions aside, mostly have no trouble figuring out right from wrong. How does he think we do it? Isn’t it interesting that even after losing all rational foundation (in his view) for morality, somehow we still manage to get it right? What a strange coincidence that is! It’s as though we just guessed on every question of a multiple choice test, yet somehow managed to get close to a perfect score. Remarkable!
According to Feser, if you base your morality on fundamental and near-universal intuitions about fairness and decency, coupled with such insight as science can provide, then you have no rational basis for your moral beliefs. You are adrift in a sea of relativism and subjective preference. By contrast, if you arrive at precisely the same conclusions because you believe you have accurately interpreted an infallible revelation from God, then you’re on solid ground. You have objective morality, and can now hold forth with confidence on even the thorniest moral questions.
This is not a reasonable way of looking at things.
But this is not the weakest part of Feser’s argument. That honor goes to Feser’s preference for armchair philosophy. He is constantly telling us (or is quoting Nietzsche telling us) about the dire consequences that ensue when we abandon Christianity as the basis of morality. His long post is just assertion after melodramatic assertion to that effect. He seems not to appreciate, however, that the experiment has been done.
We do not need to speculate about what happens when a society freely loses its religious faith, since we have several modern societies to consider. The Scandinavian countries are majority atheist and agnostic, yet somehow manage to be among the most decent and socially conscious in the world. In several other European countries, the Church has lost most of its power as a social force, yet these countries have likewise managed to avoid the plunge into nihilism and debauchery. I guess it’s just dumb luck that they haven’t noticed the dire consequences of leaving Christianity behind.
We can look at this from the other side, too. What happens when we hand over the government to, say, the Roman Catholic Church? We’ve done that experiment too. For more than a thousand years the Church had the chance to show us what a just and moral regime looks like. Did they take advantage of this opportunity? Was their rule marked by a notable concern for egalitarianism, fairness, and justice? Sadly, no. They mostly spent their time justifying the enslavement of non-Christians, torturing and imprisoning heretics, and enforcing the boundaries of acceptable thought.
It was not until the Church started to lose its power, and secular philosophies became common, that governments started to value social equality and justice. In other words, both history and modern society reveal the exact opposite of what Feser (and apparently Nietszche) have told us to expect.
When the dictates of armchair theorizing run afoul of actual facts, it is the theorizing that must yield. In this case, it is not hard to find the error. Religion is not, and never has been, the actual source of people’s morality. The reality is that everyone bases their morality on those intuitions that Feser finds so arbitrary. People start out with a strong sense of right and wrong and then look for reasons to justify their beliefs. Some find religion to be a convenient crutch in that regard, but that does not reflect poorly on those of us who don’t.
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1PZZH5h
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