[Serious] Absolutes and Atheism

[emjay]

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.

Wow, that actually really does sound interesting, so that's just bumped Tragedy to the top of my reading list.

Are you saying though that he's talking conditionally... ie 'counterfactually'; if if the world was different than it is, ie not social... not populated, then it would be meaningless? I would indeed really like to read this to see what sort of picture he paints, to see if I'd agree with his overall conclusion, in that situation. But as a (perhaps) roughly similar concept, I've often thought if you had say your visual field but no perception of meaning or beauty or anything, then no matter what maelstrom of inputs were presented to your senses, your experience would be meaningless. And indeed AFAIK in Buddhism one form of advanced meditation aims to get to a roughly similar state where objects are not even identified, ie to be able to recognise your visual field as shapes and colours etc rather than identified objects for instance, but don't quote me on that, that's just something I vaguely remember, and I don't know how plausible it is in practice.

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.

Maybe that would be a good idea, yeah Given your leanings, then depending on whatever conception of God you end up settling on, He may be more or less forgiving of your sitting on the fence for so long... especially if you get caught with your trousers down so to speak Ie I don't know what it would be like for the classical God, that you seem to lean towards the most, but for the sort of God I believed in, there were certain requirements, maybe being baptised, as well as accepting Jesus, so you'd want to be squared away on those issues to feel comfortable  

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.

Well hopefully this thread as a whole will explore these issues in more depth.