Atheism, a Computer Model
nautil.us
nautil.us
Religion is a complex subject. So is atheism. Complex enough, that the idea of being able to model either of them for research purposes (as opposed to game purposes, like in Civ IV), just seems incredibly silly.
Incorporate all of the following into your model, and it will still be insufficient: kin altruism, war, banditry, social trust, epistemology, famine, genetic defects, mate selection and sexual strategies, the hedonic treadmill---and then, for each doctrine, incorporate signaling, countersignaling, hypocrisy.
Does it sound like I'm holding the model to impossible standards? Hey, I'm not the one who titled the article, "Atheism, a computer model."
Or you can just do boring projections from current trends, but who clicks on that?
If somebody watches 4 hours of TV a week and thinks without any critical examination that public school works, that person isn't an atheist.
What these researchers are modeling in 1700 isn't the emergence of modern ideas, it's the liberation of european academia from control of the church as printing proliferates. Anti-authority isn't a 'modern' idea, it's just an idea that is easy to suppress when the forces of authority control the media.
Also, in the realm of morality, everything atheism purports to be true is completely optional. We can all agree that murder is wrong, but what's to stop an independent person from asking the logical question "who says?". Objectively, why is murder wrong? Societies are very delicate things, and it does not take much to spin them out of control. When chaos rises, people will trade their freedoms for order, and there will be guns in the street. Just look at the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.
Have a look at the series "How Should We Then Live?" by the late Dr. Francis Schaeffer. His insights into art, music, and architecture being a reflector and record of history is fascinating. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0Hr0RLHxnI&list=PLl7doUcMOr...
So people may very well give up their beliefs, for a time, but then the pendulum will swing back the other way hard, and societies will be grasping at some other explanation to answer those basic questions: who am I? why am I here? where am I going?
This is all very well trodden territory. People chase their tails their entire lives trying to live without God, and end up being right back where they started at the end of their lives, just like Bertrand Russell did.
Well, no. Atheism does not purport anything to be true at all.
It's a lack of belief in one thing. I don't understand why that's so difficult for religious people to understand. Atheism is not a replacement for religion. There is no atheist rulebook, no set of beliefs, nothing.
Atheists can of course have morals but they don't derive from atheism and are not hindered by it either. They're unrelated.
*Edit, expanding...
Your argument presupposes that the only place morals can be derived from is religion where that the rules exist is the entire argument for why you should follow them. God says so, end of discussion.
There are better ways to derive morals based on day to day reality. There are better reasons not to murder than god says so.
This is the biggest misconception I see amongst atheists. They think they are rejecting one idea, so-called "God", when in fact they are rejecting 4.7 billion different ideas, without having even understood what 4.6 billion+ of them are. They reject the God of their parents, and then extrapolate to all the others, deeming them all "one idea".
Atheism is a hold-out of the old "single reality" idea. Ironically both atheists and strict religious fundamentalists share that property: the belief in one true way to understand reality, whether it's God or not-God. Rather than a willingness to allow others to define reality on their own terms.
There may be 4.6+ billion variants of the idea, but I rejected the root idea, magic.
You have supreme belief that your compression of these ideas into the concept "magic" was lossless compression with respect to accurately conserving 6 billion people's core beliefs...
That seems honesty crazy to me. And it resembles an article of faith on your part.
Philosophically I'm agnostic.
You are making the same leap about atheists that you say atheists make about deities.
Faith and belief are not the same thing.
> the belief in one true way to understand reality
Again, there are no tenants of atheism, no rules, no insistence that there's only one way everyone should define reality. We just don't believe in God and that's the entire thing. Some atheists may think that but I don't and it is not atheism.
We're not in a religion, a club, or anything. I don't get to tell another atheist they're doing it wrong because there's no affiliation between us.
With respect to erikpukinskis' statement, I believe you are trying to, though.
Meanwhile, enjoy this commentary from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on the existence of God:
Also I don't speak so good.
not exactly, because:
> where [the rules' existence] is the entire argument for why you should follow them.
also counts for secular law. Religions just suppose a common denominator for justice, and always via authority, in form of personification in priests, juges, elders, oneself and messages via koans, laws and other scripture.
The content of the message may be however debatable, because the argument of authority alone is not sufficient (as netiquette has it), but is not a fallacy that would subvert its message (except that power might corrupt).
>God says so, end of discussion
in context of social order the end of discussion means first of all that there are no further hints, so to speak, and you have to work out the hows and whys yourself.
All this is just life and atheists aren't free of it either. They prescribe to the opposition of a concrete religious ideal or otherwise don't care about it. But socially critical opinions especially can only be derived from social feedback, either way. Even if exclusive authority seems unacceptable, that can be helped by granting everyone some authority, instead of disregarding it for those offenders (ie. that god guy who I here so much about).
Edit: So of course, you are right, atheist do not fundamentally reject fundamentalism (you see, that would be paradox). I was just trying to say, I liked the first part of your comment better.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say maybe the answers are staring us in the face, and we're uncomfortable with them, and that's why we've historically made up such elaborate narratives to deny them.
Maybe not! Maybe they depend so much on current state the questions have to be adapted and repeated. Maybe we only find partial solutions and depend on other one's answers, and we deny the answers that we don't like or because they are outdated or still incomplete.
We believe these questions are unanswerable, or only answerable by an individual for his own self. We believe religions exist because people seek answers to these questions. This is hardly an argument against atheism, though. It's not obvious having false answers is better than having no answers.
We can all agree that murder is wrong, but what's to stop an independent person from asking the logical question "who says?". Objectively, why is murder wrong? Societies are very delicate things, and it does not take much to spin them out of control
This argument that religion is necessary to provide a basis for civilization (opium for the masses, if you will) is specious. If it were true you'd think you'd see a negative correlation between religiosity and crime. This hasn't been shown, and in fact the most secular places on the earth are some of the most desirable places to live.
But that's rather called skepticism. Atheism is a concrete antithesis to specific ideas. And why if not because of better answers. Or indeed because the answer seems rather arbitrary in the small picture and trivial in the big picture.
Edit: I'm not sure if skepticism can be seen as a form of atheism, for me it feels like it - I guess it's not black and white. But otherwise it should be called anti-theism.
Unfortunately, that has no bearing on whether it is true or not. It would be nice if there were ready answers, but if ready answers to these questions don't involve being true, then those answers aren't worth anything and it's better to have no answer.
> We can all agree that murder is wrong, but what's to stop an independent person from asking the logical question "who says?"
This is an excellent question. It seems like a hard question, and my answer would be that it seems like no one does, and emotions against murder are a part of our psychological instinct. It doesn't seem becoming an atheist removes this instinct, you remain moral and adhere to the norms of the society around you. It works out.
But! If it didn't work out, that would be too bad, because having no answer to "who says?" doesn't make religions true, it just makes reality scarier. In other words, even if atheism turned everyone into a murderous sociopath, if gods don't actually exist, then they don't exist. It's kind of like saying "I wish light speed wasn't a universal speed barrier. It would be cool to travel to other galaxies in a single lifetime". But wishing doesn't make light speed any faster. Luckily we're all here stuck at sublight speed together, which makes things a little easier to bear. And luckily those moral feelings seem to be programmed into us from birth, not from religion, so things work out on the atheism front as well.