[Serious] Absolutes and Atheism

[Belacqua]

Right, well when you put it like that, I definitely disagree with him; it can't be chaos, or at least not total chaos, out there because our very existence relies on reliable causality, even if it's only a subset of the whole.

I agree that when Nietzsche posits chaos as the real state of the world, as an assertion about physics, then he can't be right. There is an important sense, though, in which he says important things.

We live almost entirely in a human world. It is made, tended, valued, organized, by people. The vast majority of what this world means to us is created by people. 

So think of a diamond ring, for example. It is a physical bit of stuff, and the gold and diamond are physical substances with scientifically knowable traits. But it isn't those traits we buy the ring for. What's important are:

~ the beauty, which is in the eye of the beholder.
~ the meaning, which is a social tradition: "we're engaged." 
~ the use value, which is to show social status.
~ the price, which comes from social relations.
~ the emotional value, which is purely from individual associations. 

If there were no more people in the world, all those things -- which are the important things about the ring -- would no longer exist. It's in this sense that the world is meaninglessness or chaotic unless and until people create mental phenomena. And if we were to suddenly lose our sense of all those things in the world as a whole, then (as he says in Tragedy) we would find life not worth living at all.

That may not have been relevant to what you mean though, except inasmuch as it refers to the point of 'accepting that some things which are untestable, non-empirical, and unquantifiable, are still real'. Ie God as untestable, non-empirical, and unquantifiable, even in principle, is I assume the sort of thing you're referring to? I can't rule it out entirely... it would indeed be unfalsifiable by such a definition... but no, as a materialist/physicalist, I certainly do not have the same 'comfort' with it as you do.

The God question is one of the big ones of course. I should probably work harder to reach some sort of conclusions about that. 

But also moral and aesthetic judgments. I think we can say things like "it's morally bad to kill infants for fun," or "Proust is better than Dan Brown," and reasonably hold that these are true statements. Not provable by science, but still true.