The difference between ethical atheism and nihlism is that ethical atheists have more faith
March 1, 2013 at 3:00 pm
If naturalism is true e.g. there is no God and the material universe, more or less, is all that exists, the naturalist is faced with two possible stances:
1. Deny the existence of the reality of any morality at all - a human being is no more valuable than an amoeba
2. Ascribe some sort of arbitrary value to human beings
I believe that choice two, which is what the vast majority of atheists choose to do is epistemologically very similar to religious faith. In religious faith, people recognize a moral, teleological order of life in which value is ascribed to human beings as a consequence of them being created. In atheism, the value is simply ascribed to human life. The atheist might object that the value is not an objective fact, but only what is consider to be objective, but that completely denies the way that atheists use moral language (see, the language of liberalism).
I would argue, follow Alaisdair MacIntyre, that atheists have essentially a choice between Nietzschean nihilism or Aristotelian teleological ethics. Many atheists really in secret have a sort of Deist, teleological approach to ethics when they invoke evolutionary processes as grounding human life in some sort of goal driven process that confers moral worth on people. If they were honest atheists, they would simply call themselves Deists and accept that the way they talk about evolution is essentially giving a teleological property to it that it lacks in the naturalistic understanding. Evolution says nothing about why people should be considered more ethically valuable than rocks, to say so is to move from atheistic evolution to theistic or deistic evolution.
Ethical atheism requires faith. The language of physics, chemistry and biology cannot describe the moral worth of people. It cannot create a political philosophy, or tell people how to live the good life. Of course morality is related to biology, physics and chemistry, but none of these things ground atheist ethics in any kind of remotely rigorous way.
The reality, in the end, that the ethical, responsible atheist is just an atheist than happens to have more faith than the nihilist. The process of assigning values to human life is not a rigorous process. Someone might argue "people can feel pain, and I don't want to feel pain, and pain can be measured physiologically or sentience understood scientifically". This may be true, but there is no reason to associate pain with morality, unless people are designed to associate these things.
The honest atheist might as well go the whole way and either become a Deist and accept some sort of teleological universe that justifies the moral language that constantly refers to this universe, or become a nihilist and strip his vocabulary of all teleological concepts.
What the honest atheist cannot do is tell a Christian that he is corrupted epistemologically by his faith and then proceed to deny that God exists and talk about human rights. He must either choose to ground his ethical concepts in teleology and ethics that he cannot completely percieve that seem reasonable as a Deist or Christian or stop using ethical concepts at all.
The Christian is not irrational in grounding his beliefs in a supernatural religion (I myself have experienced many supernatural confirmations of the Christian faith). It is the atheist who is irrational in grounding his ethical concepts, the most important in life, in arbitrary ethical concepts that, no matter how much evidence is revealed, will never be found to have any value, because the concepts have no ground other than the opinions of the atheist.[/u][/i]
1. Deny the existence of the reality of any morality at all - a human being is no more valuable than an amoeba
2. Ascribe some sort of arbitrary value to human beings
I believe that choice two, which is what the vast majority of atheists choose to do is epistemologically very similar to religious faith. In religious faith, people recognize a moral, teleological order of life in which value is ascribed to human beings as a consequence of them being created. In atheism, the value is simply ascribed to human life. The atheist might object that the value is not an objective fact, but only what is consider to be objective, but that completely denies the way that atheists use moral language (see, the language of liberalism).
I would argue, follow Alaisdair MacIntyre, that atheists have essentially a choice between Nietzschean nihilism or Aristotelian teleological ethics. Many atheists really in secret have a sort of Deist, teleological approach to ethics when they invoke evolutionary processes as grounding human life in some sort of goal driven process that confers moral worth on people. If they were honest atheists, they would simply call themselves Deists and accept that the way they talk about evolution is essentially giving a teleological property to it that it lacks in the naturalistic understanding. Evolution says nothing about why people should be considered more ethically valuable than rocks, to say so is to move from atheistic evolution to theistic or deistic evolution.
Ethical atheism requires faith. The language of physics, chemistry and biology cannot describe the moral worth of people. It cannot create a political philosophy, or tell people how to live the good life. Of course morality is related to biology, physics and chemistry, but none of these things ground atheist ethics in any kind of remotely rigorous way.
The reality, in the end, that the ethical, responsible atheist is just an atheist than happens to have more faith than the nihilist. The process of assigning values to human life is not a rigorous process. Someone might argue "people can feel pain, and I don't want to feel pain, and pain can be measured physiologically or sentience understood scientifically". This may be true, but there is no reason to associate pain with morality, unless people are designed to associate these things.
The honest atheist might as well go the whole way and either become a Deist and accept some sort of teleological universe that justifies the moral language that constantly refers to this universe, or become a nihilist and strip his vocabulary of all teleological concepts.
What the honest atheist cannot do is tell a Christian that he is corrupted epistemologically by his faith and then proceed to deny that God exists and talk about human rights. He must either choose to ground his ethical concepts in teleology and ethics that he cannot completely percieve that seem reasonable as a Deist or Christian or stop using ethical concepts at all.
The Christian is not irrational in grounding his beliefs in a supernatural religion (I myself have experienced many supernatural confirmations of the Christian faith). It is the atheist who is irrational in grounding his ethical concepts, the most important in life, in arbitrary ethical concepts that, no matter how much evidence is revealed, will never be found to have any value, because the concepts have no ground other than the opinions of the atheist.[/u][/i]
