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

[ManMachine]

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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.

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LPS,

Thank you for the detailed response. I've read it and digested it but rather than split my debate up into fragments I'm going to provide what I hope is a comprehensive and coherent response. I'll deal with a few minor issues first.

I would imagine most atheists are not convinced of the existence of a cosmic telos, I’m certainly not. This is exactly what I’m challenging.

Just to clarify, I’m not familiar with Michael Greer’s blog, your mention of it is the first I’ve heard of it.

I am absolutely not suggesting that because we haven’t ‘created an absolutely perfect Heaven on Earth we have made no improvements at all.’ I’m suggesting that the whole idea of human progress through science and technology is false.

Whether or not I’m willing to trade places with a Visigoth is an irrelevance. There is no way I can fully know the difference between life today and what it might have been like in the distant past. I recognise there have been changes and I know a little about some of the technologies they had back then but nowhere near enough to make a meaningful comparison. It’s a ridiculous suggestion and underlines my point about the utter futility of tit-for-tat, good versus bad comparisons.

What I do know is that the past was different. I never lived in Visigoth times so I cannot say how satisfying a Visigoth life would be, but then neither can you.

Let’s examine the thought process behind the notion of human progress. You’ve mentioned a number of things over various posts. All of which you claim are progress. My point is, for you to make that statement you need a universal frame of reference. I’m not saying landing someone on the moon was not an amazing feat of engineering and Physics, it was, but it’s not human progress no matter how much you want it to be.

The Space Race came about as a result of the Cold War, it was politically driven. That’s not a problem, a lot of modern science is politically and commercially driven. The fact remains that the goal of the Space Race was to beat the Russians to the Moon. It served the USA very well, and we all got some useful technologies out of it.

On a Human level the picture is very different. If landing a person on the moon is progress then what has the Human race progressed against? To answer this you have to provide goals for the Human Race to measure this progress against. But we all know from Evolution and Biology that no such natural goals exist. There is no grand Universal design, there is no meaning to human life, all we have is a sequence of purely random events.

Any goals that are provided (like the many dotted throughout this thread) are provided by us to justify the notion of progress. Do animals measure themselves in terms of animal progress? No.

Triops cancriformis is a small shrimp like creature that has absolutely no concept of progress and yet it has been around for an estimated 200 million years, that completely knocks humans out the park in terms of genetic longevity. If it were a league table, humans would be quite low down the table, and let’s face it if we carry on the way we are going then we are going to change the environment that supports us and eventually extinct ourselves, all things considered we’re too species-centric to ever top the league.

This little bit of inter-species nonsense aside, it illustrates my point. Darwin showed us that Humans are just like any other animal, but to accept the notion that we can use science and technology to progress our species is to accept the Judao/Christian promise of salvation. That there is some natural design we can fulfil, some kind of meaning we can achieve, that there is a natural final cause for humanity, but to do this is to utterly betray Darwin.

In subscribing to the notion of human progress we are turning evolution on its head, and the fundamental mistake made by nearly all religions since records began is repeated - that humans are somehow different to other animals when we are not.

Scientifically there is no support for the notion of human progress, it’s just not there. We are no-more in control of the future of our species than any other animal, there is no such thing as human progress, it’s a myth, a fairy-tale, a mechanism designed to give us hope (maybe)… but it’s a lie.



MM

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Braha ahaha, just had to laugh at this one. You are too funny.

At least I amuse someone.

Just notice the reaction when MM says that he didn't care for the writings of Dawkins.

Forgive me, as I have a headache that started upon waking up at 6:00 this morning (it's now 13:25) and hasn't abated, hence me ignoring ManMachine right now since I don't feel like wading through the answers until it goes away (sorry, dude - by the way, you haven't seen toy chucking yet), but did I miss that portion of the thread where we defended Dawkins?

I personally avoided giving an opinion of him either way because I, 1) haven't read The God Delusion yet and 2) don't watch debates because I find them almost as much a waste of time as philosophy - as much a bunch of word masturbation as thought. Anything I have heard Dawkins say, which is limited, of course, I haven't found in the slightest bit embarrassing. The argument I hear from most people is that he's a biologist, not a theologian, and thus this isn't his field of expertise. I'd like to point out that Hitchens, as far as I knew, was a journalist - also not a theologian. No one ever seemed to have a problem with his debates, other than to complain about his drunkenness. Why is that? Is it because Hitchens was a better debater? I think we established in other threads that debate often has little to do with truth and more to do with what sounds good. Is what Dawkins saying any less true for not being well-spoken in the debate?

Anyway, to get back to what you said, there are plenty of people in this forum who also don't like Dawkins sticking his nose into atheistic affairs. I think it's a misrepresentation to say that Dawkins, or Penn, get overly protected here. I'm speaking with over two years time here though so I could be running on cumulative 'evidence' in which I missed key arguments, but I don't think either one is rabidly defended on this forum.

We save that sort of behavior for PZ's butt-buddies on his blogsite.

I was not attacking Dawkins himself, just his book, The God Delusion. I personally think The Selfish Gene is one of the more significant books to be published in the last 50 years. I was pointing out atheists who think The God Delusion is a more significant body of work than the Selfish Gene, which as you can see is not my opinion.



MM