Questions

[Anomalocaris]

I would argue truth is a artifact of an perceptive mechanism evolved for the purpose of organizing mental models of the material world. Without intelligence, the rest of the material world continue to exist, and continue to behave. But the organized perception would not exist and so truth would not exist. So truth does not exist regardless of whether god exists. Truth only exist because you exist, and truth appears to be shared only because the perceptive mechanisms of your peers are similar, and when conditioned by similar social programing, generate similar communicable artifact.

That makes truth contingent upon minds, if no perceptive mechanism exist then nothing is true.

If truth is contingent upon minds then without minds A =/= ~A would be "untrue", which is false.

The proposition that truth is contingent upon the mind seems to me to be far different from the proposition that what is determined to true by the mind would be false without the mind. The concept to which the mind assigns a truth value would not exist without the mind.

You might postulate that something which is true must be seen as true by adequately sophisticated mind of any construction different from ours. This is difficult to establish either observationally or deductively. But even the acceptance of this does not imply independent existence of truth outside the mind. It merely means perceptive mechanism might be under certain convergent evolutionary pressure.

[DeistPaladin]

1.) If someone is an Atheist and believes in materialism, how do they account for thought? Is human thought just a chemical reaction?

Materialism isn't the only option for atheists but, letting that go, the answer I would offer is "I don't know". It's not up to us to provide answers for what we don't know. It's up to the Christians to make their case as to why they do know.

2.) If someone is an Atheist how do they define morality?

As our actions impact other fellow sentient beings, questions of morality apply. The issue is complex and you'll have many different opinions on the subject, but what they all seem to have in common is wrestling with the idea that morality deals with our obligations to our fellow sentients, whatever they may be.

In this respect, secular morality is superior to religious morality because we have our eye on the ball, at least. We are not distracted by obligations to imaginary beings or adherence to ancient, outdated taboos. For example, why does love become "evil" when the body parts are similar?

[Thor]

If someone is an Atheist how do they define morality? Christianity's moral system is irrelevant to an Atheist, so how do they define what is right and wrong? Is there even a difference between right and wrong to an Atheist? If there is no creator of the universe, then there is no truth, so there can be no right and wrong for an Atheist, which means that an Atheist believes that cold blooded murder is just fine.

This is one of the Creationist's favorite things to trot out. How can you be moral if there is no god to tell you what is right and what is wrong?

Yeesh.

No, atheists do not feel that cold blooded murder is "just fine". And anyone who would suggest such a thing is a complete ass. I would ask how many atheists strap bombs to their body and blow themselves up in a crowd of strangers? How many atheists fly planes full of people into buildings full of people? How many atheists watch their children die as they deny life saving medical treatment in favor of appealing to a deity? How many atheists started wars to further a religious ideology? How many atheists tortured and burned other people because they were "heretics"? You see, throughout history it is religious people who have been "just fine" with cold blooded murder, not atheists.

I would also ask if their "creator" has given us moral absolutes. The twits would probably respond that we can find our morality by looking in the Bible (they might even specifically mention the Ten Commandments). I would then ask if their deity gave us moral guidelines, why is there disagreement among devout believers about what is moral? Many issues have these people at odds with each other. Capital punishment, stem cell research, abortion, homosexuality, euthenasia, gambling, etc.... These are all issues that believers will disagree on! If there is some absolute morality, then there should be NO disagreement. You'd think their deity would be clear on this stuff, but he's not.

Finally, if some pompous believer wants to ask where you get your morality, I would simply respond by telling them that I DON"T get my morality from a book that tells me I can own slaves.

[HigherLvlofThinking]

1 yes
2 For me i define it as how good and bad is pretty much common sense? I mean why would i need a book that thinks stoning a woman if she talks bad about god be my moral code? Thats just illogical? Also believers apperntly dont know what right and wrong is. They only know what "God" thinks is right and wrong. The ten commandments are the worst ten suggestions ive ever seen. If god is really that selfish, then why would i want to go to heaven? Once believers start making there own decsions and not rely on a pixie fairy that hasnt done anything for them ever, then maybe the world will be better. But anyways, right and wrong is pretty much common sense? Because would you want to die? Do you think that taking a life insted of your own is right? No. you have no right to do that.

[lilyannerose]

'DeistPaladin' pid='108830' dateline='1291820308']

In this respect, secular morality is superior to religious morality because we have our eye on the ball, at least. We are not distracted by obligations to imaginary beings or adherence to ancient, outdated taboos. For example, why does love become "evil" when the body parts are similar?

I would add that secular morality doesn't give one an "out" for commission of actions that cause harm to others so I would argue that there is more consideration on what the consequences of actions would be either to one's conscience or by their community and stated laws.

As is pointed out in the video I posted and as many of us already knew, when christians commit acts of harm to another they can simply be "saved" or "forgiven" by their god. Assuming that a crime is committed and the christian is not apprehended by the police, one simply utters a few magic words, is forgiven to go out and commit other harmful actions. One could murder a school room full of children, ask for salvation and forgiveness, put a gun to their head and be confident that there will be no punishment because god forgives. I think this concept of being forgiven and feeling "safe" makes the concept of moral limits so fluid to christians accounting for the higher crime rates within less secular nations.

[theVOID]

I would argue truth is a artifact of an perceptive mechanism evolved for the purpose of organizing mental models of the material world. Without intelligence, the rest of the material world continue to exist, and continue to behave. But the organized perception would not exist and so truth would not exist. So truth does not exist regardless of whether god exists. Truth only exist because you exist, and truth appears to be shared only because the perceptive mechanisms of your peers are similar, and when conditioned by similar social programing, generate similar communicable artifact.

That makes truth contingent upon minds, if no perceptive mechanism exist then nothing is true.

If truth is contingent upon minds then without minds A =/= ~A would be "untrue", which is false.

The proposition that truth is contingent upon the mind seems to me to be far different from the proposition that what is determined to true by the mind would be false without the mind. The concept to which the mind assigns a truth value would not exist without the mind.

I think you are making a mistake limiting truth to concepts relative to their consistency with reality, for instance, a mind determining that x is true has no impact on whether or not x is true, all it tells you is the opinion of the person evaluating x. For x to be true means that x is consistent with reality and that is something that is independent of mental processes.

I also think you might have contradicted yourself. For truth to be contingent upon a mind means that without minds there are no truths in the same way that water is contingent upon hydrogen and oxygen. Without hydrogen and oxygen there is no water, this is contingency. I suspect you had a different intent when you said contingent though.

You might postulate that something which is true must be seen as true by adequately sophisticated mind of any construction different from ours. This is difficult to establish either observationally or deductively. But even the acceptance of this does not imply independent existence of truth outside the mind. It merely means perceptive mechanism might be under certain convergent evolutionary pressure.

I would outright reject that notion. You can have two different mind-types or a million, what is true is still that which is consistent with reality, no matter how many different mind-types agree.

[Light of Truth]

Wow! There are indeed a lot of great minds on this forum!

I wish I could have responded to my Christian friend like that! Lol.

Anyway, if thought is merely a chemical reaction, how can two people sit and discuss thought? Is their discussion just random? Also, how can someone think about making plans for something a month away, and when the time comes they fulfill those plans. Is that also just random? To a Materialist, nothing can exist outside the material, right? If so, there could be no "mind."

I believe that thought is just a chemical reaction, but my friend asked me things similar to these (I can't quite recall everything we talked about) and I didn't have a proper response.

If morality to an Atheist is simply treating our fellow humans kindly, how do we come to that conclusion? Why should we not steal from the supermarket? It is beneficial to me; I gain something without having to suffer the loss of money. If morality is subjective to the person, why would Hitler killing the Jews be bad? To Nazi Germany it was perfectly fine under their own subjective morality.

Once again, I am trying to think like my friend when I ask these questions. I am just trying to further my knowledge of Atheism.

[theVOID]

Wow! There are indeed a lot of great minds on this forum!

I wish I could have responded to my Christian friend like that! Lol.

Anyway, if thought is merely a chemical reaction, how can two people sit and discuss thought? Is their discussion just random? Also, how can someone think about making plans for something a month away, and when the time comes they fulfill those plans. Is that also just random? To a Materialist, nothing can exist outside the material, right? If so, there could be no "mind."

I'm sure we all appreciate that

As for thought. The same way matter waves can be converted into electrical impulses down a telephone line and then back to a matter wave on the other end, my chemical/electrical thoughts can be converted into a matter wave via my voice box or into text via my pen or a keyboard, these mediums can be converted back into chemical/electrical signals by the person receiving them, at which point they are no longer my thoughts, but your thoughts about what you think I thought

It's clearly not random That's self evident.

I guess I am a materialist (but as a conclusion and not a presupposition) but that's completely besides the point. We come up with these models to describe the same things, materialism and dualism both have explanations for the mind, to say that "materialism == no mind" is false.

Essentially, there is no reason why mind cannot be an emergent property of material processes and no evidence of anything else at all that could be responsible for it. We have extremely solid evidence for the link between material and mind, and if anyone disagrees then let me take a chunk our of their Forebrain, we'll soon see how much of a mind you have left...

If morality to an Atheist is simply treating our fellow humans kindly, how do we come to that conclusion? Why should we not steal from the supermarket? It is beneficial to me; I gain something without having to suffer the loss of money. If morality is subjective to the person, why would Hitler killing the Jews be bad? To Nazi Germany it was perfectly fine under their own subjective morality.

Subjective morality == Opinion.

There is no point talking about "subjective morality", anyone who does is just a Nihilist with a crutch.

[Light of Truth]

If morality cannot be subjective and there is an overall "true" morality, where does it come from? If the Big Bang created the Universe and everything since then has been random collisions of atoms, where does moral truth come from?

[Tony61]

Anyway, if thought is merely a chemical reaction, how can two people sit and discuss thought? Is their discussion just random? Also, how can someone think about making plans for something a month away, and when the time comes they fulfill those plans. Is that also just random? To a Materialist, nothing can exist outside the material, right? If so, there could be no "mind." ...

If morality to an Atheist is simply treating our fellow humans kindly, how do we come to that conclusion? Why should we not steal from the supermarket? It is beneficial to me; I gain something without having to suffer the loss of money. If morality is subjective to the person, why would Hitler killing the Jews be bad? To Nazi Germany it was perfectly fine under their own subjective morality.

All good questions that may or may not have answers. How can we discuss thought? Well, we are right now! That's how. Biologists talk about "emergent" phenomena that are greater than the chemical reactions at the foundation. Atheism does not have to equal Materialism, there is room for phenomena that are inexplicable and we shouldn't feel that we need to explain everything. When a theist friend asks "why this", it's okay to say "I don't know"... but quickly add "And neither do you.".

Can emergence be understood by everyone at all times, or by <i>anyone at all</i> for that matter? Maybe not. Even the Buddha said that Enlightenment is fleeting, one might only attain it for a brief moment in an entire lifetime. or maybe never at all after a lifetime of striving. None of this inability to explain and understand is a "proof" of an anthropomorphic god. You can call the answer "god" if you want, but it certainly does not resemble the God of the Bible or Koran, so it depends on what your definition of god is. For centuries we could not explain all manner of things: planetary movement, weather, animal behavior, ocean currents, human medicine and physiology, germ theory, etc, etc, etc and we gave "God" credit for intelligently designing the universe and controlling it. Ha! We know now through empiric scientific reductionist study that supernatural gods do NOT controls these things. The British science journal New Scientist listed "Consciousness" and "Mind" as phenomena that scientists will strive to explain in the next century, quite an undertaking-- but remember that only 160 years ago we didn't even know that bacteria caused disease or how vaccines worked.

Morality. Thich Nacht Hahn, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, says "Kindness is my only religion." Evolutionary biologists will say that morality is an adaptation encoded in our genes since those ancestors that were amoral were selected out when their social structures broke down, thus only the moral genes survived. Robert Wright, in his book The Moral Animal, explains this concept very eloquently. No man is an island and we rely on our strong social structure to survive, grow crops and hunt and protect each other. This is not to say that every single person acts morally all the time. Hardly. We all decide who is in our moral community and deserves our "kindness." Most would agree that supermarket owners fall within that category and thus we would conclude that we should not steal from the supermarket. Al Qaeda? Maybe not. Each of us may have different views about whether animals belong within our moral community as well. We are kind to dogs and even protect them with laws, yet we slaughter cows and pigs for food, for example.

One other item off topic. I hear many fellow atheists bemoan the failings of "religion" and equate all religion with theism, even monotheism. Firstly, a large plurality of religious people in the world count themselves as atheist, Buddhists for example. One can be religious, even devout, but not believe in god. Secondly, are religions perfect? No, but that does not mean that they are worthless... all religions have the potential to be beneficial.

(What happened to your "Atheist" screen-name? I rather like it.)

Cross-posted at kalamazoopost.blogspot.com
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