Does Atheism Lead to Nihilism?

[Mister Agenda]

So I have heard terms like instinct, survival, net advantage, cognitive threshold, chimps, same brains/needs. There are of course theories on how we arrive at our morality. Nothing to convincingly argue that morality is objective.

In your far-from-humble opinion.

If morality is subjective, you end up with moral anti-realism and that leads to the conclusion Dawkins wrote: "There is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference. … We are machines for propagating DNA. … It is every living object's sole reason for being."

You keep saying things lead to things without showing your work. You started with:

1. Atheism
2. No step 2.
3. Nihilism

Now you're at:

1. Moral anti-realism (the conclusion that morals exist in minds, not 'out there' in the laws of physics or unconscious matter)
2. No step 2.
3. Supposedly relevant Dawkins quote.

There IS pitiless indifference at the bottom. But we're not at the bottom, are we? WE are not pitilessly indifferent, are we?

As I pointed out, no one lives that way--not many people even THINK that way; they partake in the "noble lie".

What way do you think we're supposed to live if we think people care but the universe doesn't?

This leads back to the OP where I linked to the article on Adam: "There is no escaping the nihilism as an atheist" which he finds to be utterly depressing.

Maybe you should stop trying to figure out what leads to what on your own. You're not very good at it. Why do you suppose Adam to be representative of atheists while you dismiss everything we have to say that doesn't fit in with your mental picture of us out-of-hand?

The statement has been made that any morality from God is also subjective. From your favorite Christian philosopher WLC:

I presume you describe that huckster as our favorite Christian philosopher ironically.

"God's moral nature is expressed in relation to us in the form of divine commands which constitute our moral duties or obligations. Far from being arbitrary, these commands flow necessarily from His moral nature. In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the whole moral duty of man can be summed up in the two great commandments: First, you shall love the Lord your God with all your strength and with all your soul and with all your heart and with all your mind, and, second, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. On this foundation we can affirm the objective goodness and rightness of love, generosity, self-sacrifice, and equality, and condemn as objectively evil and wrong selfishness, hatred, abuse, discrimination, and oppression."

Thank you for another pile of assertions from WLC, the first problem with which is that there is no way he can know any of that.

If these attributes necessarily flow from the greatest conceivable being, they are not subjective.

If pigs could fly, they wouldn't have to get their trotters dirty.

If we are made in the image of God (having some of the same attributes: soul, personhood, sentient, capable of love, having free will, moral, etc.), we have within us an objective framework for moral values and duties.

If we're made in the image of God, God can't be as impressive as usually made out to be. And if the pigs could fly thing, too.

Consequently, this is also the reason I don't think atheists go around killing people but rather explains why we feel we have intrinsic meaning, value and purpose; why we know what is right and wrong; why there is self-sacrifice; and why we feel there are such things as universal truths (what the "noble lie" otherwise provides).

There are a lot of clues to the real source of all those qualities. It's understandable for that to be beyond the grasp of an iron age sage. The world was a much more mysterious place: it seemed like we often went somewhere else while we dreamed, leaving our bodies behind. We hardly knew the causes of anything that wasn't done by people or animals. Superficially, the sun seemed to rise in the East and set in the West while the earth remained still, and appeared like a giant disk if we went up to a mountain top and looked around. Everyone attributed the unknown to spirits and gods, which they hoped to placate, and often imagined to be like invisible mortal kings with super powers. But we lived in a society with rules and customs that were important and traditional even if we couldn't remember the purpose behind all of them. Writing them down would help make sure our descendants still followed the proper ways, and ascribing them to the gods would awe those descendants into being fearful of changing them. All of that is fairly reasonable, if not exactly rational, for an Iron Age sage.

Since then we've had millenia of trial and error to make improvements, despite those who clung to Iron Age scriptures trying to prevent every single one. We're not immune to any of those old crimes, but at least we've figured out that genocide, rape, and slavery are bad; something those old scriptures neglected to teach, because they actually did not have a real understanding that they were wrong or why they were wrong, because our moral philosophy was so undeveloped. When old Maori were asked why they wiped out all the inhabitants of a nearby island, they would say 'it was our way'. A lot of our moral behavior is instinctive, but much more of is learned and 'figured out'. It's one thing to care about the people we know, another to care about strangers. It's not all automatic. It's not 'written on our hearts'. It's a few chicken scratches on our brains, that give us a few pro-social impulses to go along with our anti-social ones, and we have to figure out the rest...and we seem to do a better job without supposed 'help from above'.