Meliorism - The rise of neo-atheism and the fall of reason

[Lord Privy Seal]

Yes, we are teleological entities, but that does not mean it cannot be questioned, there is no empirical support for a meaning to life.

Not for some cosmically-determined Meaning of Life, if that's what you're arguing against. I'm not convinced of the existence of any Cosmic telos, like an arc of capital-H History that "bends toward justice" or leads inevitably to us becoming jetpack-wearing super-enhanced cybernetic beings using our nanotech utility fogs to turn the Cosmos into computronium (matter organized into an optimal computing substrate) when the Kingdom of G--er, the Singularity cometh.

Arguments can be made for this sort of thing (see Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature or Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity is Near for examples), but I'm not making that sort of claim. I do not think Universe is obligated to insure that every new discovery, invention, or social movement result in a betterment of the human condition, or to prevent an asteroid, peak oil, climate change, whatever from wiping us out. If we want to make things better, it's up to us.

It is possible to recognise this and explore it's implications in a modern context.

It is obvious to me, at least, that the teleological thought process we use to frame our illusion of progress is Judao/Christian in origin. In an atheist context, that is definitely worthy of debate.

Just curious, are you a reader of John Michael Greer's blog "The Archdruid Report?" He is currently going through a series of posts critiquing what he calls "the religion of progress," and making the case that it is on its last legs. He thinks that the shrinking availability of fossil fuels after peak oil, climate change, unsustainable levels of technological and cultural complexity, and political paralysis will ultimately cause the decline and fall of modern civilization, resulting in a "deindustrial" world similar in many ways to the world prior to the industrial age. Basically, Napoleon or the Tokogawa Shogunate, but perhaps with a few remnant technologies that can be supported on mostly muscle power (simple crystal radios and the like). I'm not sure I agree with him either, but I think he does a good job of making his case.

We can stand here at this moment in time and look back into history, from this point it is easy to identify change, I have absolutely no issues with that, but, change is not progress.

Of course, it is easy to see how short term material change can be interpreted as an imporovement in our lives. In the examples you have given, you have selected elements that support your notion of progress, also, we could both select elements that would not support your notion of progress e.g. Visigoths never had to worry about dirty-bombs, radioactive waste or paying the electricity bill.

I'd take those worries over the ones people had in the days of the Visigoths any day. You seem to be suggesting that, since we haven't created an absolutely perfect Heaven on Earth, we have made no improvements at all. Would you be willing to trade places with a randomly selected person from any culture or era prior to the Enlightenment?

Also, this does not take into consideration the environmental changes that occur as a result of our behaviour the Egyptian Kings would never have had to face,

They had to worry about insufficient Nile floods, foreign invasions, or dying in agony from things like abscessed teeth, infected battle wounds and other things we can treat with relative ease. Egypt was uniquely fortunate to have the Nile with its usually-abundant flood waters, but other ancient civilizations (Mesopotamia, the Indus river civilization, the Maya, the Anasazi, etc.) had to face environmental changes occurring as a result of their behavior (salting of soil due to irrigation, population overshoot, depletion of soils, and so forth). So it's not as if we traded a lack of dentistry, prenatal care, and sanitation for resource limits and climate change, resulting in zero net improvement.

If that's the sort of thing you're arguing for, that too is a cosmological telos: Universe makes sure that humans can't make things any better. Perhaps it's even mean enough to make sure things always continually get worse?

HIV, drug resistant bacteria,

And the ancients had plain old bacteria, without any drugs. And half our life expectancy.

CJD, swine flu, brid flu,

CJD has a rate of one case per million of population per year according to the CDC's website (sorry, I'm a newb, so I can't post website links yet IIRC, but it's the first Google hit for "CJD"). If Universe felt a need to conjure that to punish us for curing smallpox, I'd still call that progress. Swine flu and bird flu are basically media hype, at least so far. Maybe they'll become pandemics, but a "maybe" problem beats the pants off of routine outbreaks of cholera.

climate change,

Climate change is definitely a very serious problem. It would not be the problem it is if our civilization had been willing to put in the effort necessary to make progress in dealing with it. We've known for decades that pumping billions of tons of fossil CO2 into the atmosphere would cause a greenhouse effect. We've just spent those decades deciding not to try to reduce our carbon emissions and get off of fossil fuels.

etc. there are still plenty of issues that can lead to a 'miserable death'.

Oh, sure. But there are fewer such issues, especially in the developed world. We've doubled average life expectancy compared to pre-industrial times.

We can debate tit-for-tat all night, suffice it to say the notion of progress is a very selective thought process.

So? "Progress" is a measure of change in the direction of achieving a goal. If your goal is to land men on the Moon and bring them back to Earth, the development of a new type of sneaker isn't "progress"--building a Saturn V rocket is. If your goal is to increase market share for your sneaker company, the new sneaker might well be "progress." When we talk about progress in general, we are talking about progress toward things most humans can agree on. I think most people would agree that worrying that bird flu might, maybe, become a pandemic some day is an improvement over watching the Black Death wipe out a third of the population of Europe. I think most people can agree that trial by jury with a presumption of innocence and a right to a lawyer is better than trial by combat.

If you disagree, which previous age would you be willing to live in, trading places with a randomly-selected person? Also, how would the Cosmos know to spawn some new problem in response to the development of anesthesia, to make sure that the human condition doesn't improve? How precisely can it calibrate the new problem to the reduction in suffering anesthesia brings, to make sure that no progress happens?

I'm not disputing that scientific method had led to some wonderful discoveries, we know more about the material nature of our Universe than ever but, again, this is not progress, it is change.

Why is it not "progress" to know more about the nature of our Universe than ever, when that is what the scientific method is meant to accomplish? Can I take it that if you're driving from New York to Los Angeles, and you pass through Phoenix, Arizona, that you would say, "Nope. That's just change. I'm not any closer to Los Angeles than I was when I left, and I'm certainly not making any progress toward getting there"?

I'm not a pessimistic person and I recognise that my questioning can come across as pessimistic, even more so because it is not my intention to provide solution here, just raise the question and see what, if anything, we can arrive at as a group through debate.

Your apparent belief that it is inherently impossible to ever accomplish anything sure seems pessimistic to me. Of course it's not your intention to provide a solution. You apparently believe there's no such thing as "solutions." If people could ever solve a problem without a malevolent Universe creating an equivalent or worse one in its place, that would be progress.