If it bothers you that morality is 'arbitrary', why is it more satisfying if it is the arbitrary preferences of god rather than the arbitrary preferences of humans?
I believe I can answer this question. The question is a misunderstanding of what "God" was supposed to be. (I think theists often have this misunderstanding as well.)
We live in a certain world, and it natural for some people (perhaps only certain personality types) to feel nihilistic about that world. There are many, many paths to this feeling -- the problem of evil, the problem of free will, the problem of objective value, the problem of death, etc. There doesn't seem to be any resolution within the material world so when we turn away from nihilism, as we must, we hope that there's some kind of solution outside the material. This trust, an innate hope, calls on something transcendental to provide meaning.
However you articulate that hope, if you have it, I think that is theism. Humans try and describe what this solution would be explictly, but then our solution is always limited by our current worldview of what the solution could be (God is the spirit in all living things; God is love and redemption from sin; God is an angry father teaching and exacting justice ). In my opinion, religion hasn't kept up with changes in our worldview and is ready for a complete remodeling.
Perhaps we are ready for a non-transcendent solution, as that would seem most appropriate given our worldview in non-religious areas, but I just don't see any solutions yet.
I've been listening carefully, and people who are satisfied with materialism seem to still possess this innate hope and trust; but they are either unable to examine the source of it or they attribute it to something inadequate. For example, someone once told me that for them, meaning came from the freedom to choose their own values instead of having them handed down by God.
But materialism tells us we don't get to choose. We need to learn to be satisfied with being a river, always choosing the path determined by our landscape. The ability to choose would indeed be transcendental. So I think some number of people realized that without something exceptional, we don't have freedom. In religions, this is codified as God is necessary for the possibility of free will.
So if I say 'there is no God', I'm not denying the existence of a supreme being that could possibly take offense. I'm giving up on freedom, value and purpose. I would like to see, in my lifetime, that those things are already embedded in the material world. Then I would still believe in God -- even more so -- but my belief would be intellectually justified and consistent within my current (scientific) world view.
But if the truth is that they're not there, anywhere, I do wonder what it would take to make me stop believing in them.
Without relaunching the whole discussion, there's one thing I'd like to know: Do you acknowledge that the concepts you're "giving up on" ('transcendental' freedom, value, and purpose, as you define them) are not merely things that don't exist, but things that can't exist, like square circles?
This website is devoted to the art of rationality, and as such, is a wonderful corrective to wrong facts and, more importantly, wrong procedures for finding out facts.
There is, however, another type of cognitive phenomenon that I’ve come to consider particularly troublesome, because it militates against rationality in the irrationalist, and fights against contentment and curiousity in the rationalist. For lack of a better word, I’ll call it perverse-mindedness.
The perverse-minded do not necessarily disagree with you about any fact questions. Rather, they feel the wrong emotions about fact questions, usually because they haven’t worked out all the corollaries.
Let’s make this less abstract. I think the following quote is preaching to the choir on a site like LW:
“The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
-Richard Dawkins, "God's Utility Function," Scientific American (November, 1995).
Am I posting that quote to disagree with it? No. Every jot and tittle of it is correct. But allow me to quote another point of view on this question.
“We are not born into this world, but grow out of it; for in the same way an apple tree apples, the Earth peoples.”
This quote came from an ingenious and misguided man named Alan Watts. You will not find him the paragon of rationality, to put it mildly. And yet, let’s consider this particular statement on its own. What exactly is wrong with it? Sure, you can pick some trivial holes in it – life would not have arisen without the sun, for example, and Homo sapiens was not inevitable in any way. But the basic idea – that life and consciousness is a natural and possibly inevitable consequence of the way the universe works – is indisputably correct.
So why would I be surprised to hear a rationalist say something like this? Note that it is empirically indistinguishable from the more common view of “mankind confronted by a hostile universe.” This is the message of the present post: it is not only our knowledge that matters, but also our attitude to that knowledge. I believe I share a desire with most others here to seek truth naively, swallowing the hard pills when it becomes necessary. However, there is no need to turn every single truth into a hard pill. Moreover, sometimes the hard pills also come in chewable form.
What other fact questions might people regard in a perverse way?
How about materialism, the view that reality consists, at bottom, in the interplay of matter and energy? This, to my mind, is the biggie. To come to facilely gloomy conclusions based on materialism seems to be practically a cottage industry among Christian apologists and New Agers alike. Since the claims are all so similar to each other, I will address them collectively.
“If we are nothing but matter in motion, mere chemicals, then:
The usual response from materialists is to say that an argument from consequences isn’t valid – if you don’t like the fact that X is just matter in motion, that doesn’t make it false. While eminently true, as a rhetorical strategy for convincing people who aren’t already on board with our programme, it’s borderline suicidal.
I have already hinted at what I think the response ought to be. It is not necessarily a point-by-point refutation of each of these issues individually. The simple fact is, not only is materialism true, but it shouldn’t bother anyone who isn’t being perverse about it, and it wouldn’t bother us if it had always been the standard view.
There are multiple levels of analysis in the lives of human beings. We can speak of societies, move to individual psychology, thence to biology, then chemistry… this is such a trope that I needn’t even finish the sentence.
However, the concerns of, say, human psychology (as distinct from neuroscience), or morality, or politics, or love, are not directly informed by physics. Some concepts only work meaningfully on one level of analysis. If you were trying to predict the weather, would you start by modeling quarks? Reductionism in principle I will argue for until the second coming (i.e., forever). Reductionism in practice is not always useful. This is the difference between proximate and ultimate causation. The perverse-mindedness I speak of consists in leaping straight from behaviour or phenomenon X to its ultimate cause in physics or chemistry. Then – here’s the “ingenious” part – declaring that, since the ultimate level is devoid of meaning, morality, and general warm-and-fuzziness, so too must be all the higher levels.
What can we make of someone who says that materialism implies meaninglessness? I can only conclude that if I took them to see Seurat’s painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte," they would earnestly ask me what on earth the purpose of all the little dots was. Matter is what we’re made of, in the same way as a painting is made of dried pigments on canvas. Big deal! What would you prefer to be made of, if not matter?
It is only by the contrived unfavourable contrast of matter with something that doesn’t actually exist – soul or spirit or élan vital or whatever – that somebody can pull off the astounding trick of spoiling your experience of a perfectly good reality, one that you should feel lucky to inhabit.
I worry that some rationalists, while rejecting wooly dualist ideas about ghosts in the machine, have tacitly accepted the dualists’ baseless assumptions about the gloomy consequences of materialism. There really is no hard pill to swallow.
What are some other examples of perversity? Eliezer has written extensively on another important one, which we might call the disappointment of explicability. “A rainbow is just light refracting.” “The aurora is only a bunch of protons hitting the earth’s magnetic field.” Rationalists are, sadly, not immune to this nasty little meme. It can be easily spotted by tuning your ears to the words “just” and “merely.” By saying, for example, that sexual attraction is “merely” biochemistry, you are telling the truth and deceiving at the same time. You are making a (more or less) correct factual statement, while Trojan-horsing an extraneous value judgment into your listener’s mind as well: “chemicals are unworthy.” On behalf of chemicals everywhere, I say: Screw you! Where would you be without us?
What about the final fate of the universe, to take another example? Many of us probably remember the opening scene of Annie Hall, where little Alfie tells the family doctor he’s become depressed because everything will end in expansion and heat death. “He doesn’t do his homework!” cries his mother. “What’s the point?” asks Alfie.
Although I found that scene hilarious, I have actually heard several smart people po-facedly lament the fact that the universe will end with a whimper. If this seriously bothers you psychologically, then your psychology is severely divorced from the reality that you inhabit. By all means, be depressed about your chronic indigestion or the Liberal Media or teenagers on your lawn, but not about an event that will happen in 1014 years, involving a dramatis personae of burnt-out star remnants. Puh-lease. There is infinitely more tragedy happening every second in a cup of buttermilk.
The art of not being perverse consists in seeing the same reality as others and agreeing about facts, but perceiving more in an aesthetic sense. It is the joy of learning something that’s been known for centuries; it is appreciating the consilience of knowledge without moaning about reductionism; it is accepting nature on her own terms, without fatuous navel-gazing about how unimportant you are on the cosmic scale. If there is a fact question at stake, take no prisoners; but you don’t get extra points for unnecessary angst.