[Serious] Absolutes and Atheism

[Rev. Rye]

Hmmm...those are not really absolutes. My first candidates would be the Principle of Non-Contradiction and the existence of a Totality. And there are existential stances which cannot be IMHO justfied by either reason or appeal to experience. For example, the belief that reality has a rational order cannot be grounded in any more fundamental belief.

And neither of those first two candidates' truth seems to hinge on whether or not there's a God.

[brewer]

I will absoletely not believe in religious god(s) until concrete evidence is provided. No philosophy needed.

The 'no physical universe' is a non starter. You'll need to explain what you think 'all possible worlds' and your version of 'true' means. Most of the time here true and believe are used interchangeably, with or without evidence

[Belacqua]

Why didn't Nietzsche make himself clearer? 

That's a good and important question, which is in fact crucial to understanding Nietzsche's goals.

Is it my job to assume he meant a particular thing when he worded something a certain way?

If you want to understand Nietzsche, then it's a job you have to do.

And there's no way I'm believing someone else's interpretation just because they say so.

Nor should you, nor would Nietzsche want you to. 

But here's the thing. Is philosophy meant to be poetic, is it meant to be filled with metaphors and similies that cause your brain to bleed trying to figure out what's literal and what's aliteral?

It depends on the philosophy. Very roughly, we can say that there are two kinds. 

If a philosopher believes he has a clear and complete answer to a given problem, then it makes sense for him to lay out that answer in a logical, non-poetic way. 

Other philosophers are more about posing questions, or even suggesting that a particular problem has no answer. 

As with so many things in philosophy, the paradigm begins with Plato and Aristotle. Plato is poetic, full of metaphor, and leaves us with more questions than we started with. Aristotle, on the other hand, reads like a long logical set of lecture notes, meant to build up to a conclusion we can clearly define. 

As a writer, you know that form and content are not separate. Plato thinks that we come to truth through beauty, so it's important for him to make his language and dialogues beautiful. People who read Ancient Greek tell me that they are among the most beautiful texts ever written. Aristotle and most later philosophers want to come to truth through logic, so they build up clear (they hope) logical arguments step by step. 

Nietzsche, as always, is an extreme provocation. His prose is meant to provoke. It is intended to be difficult, because the world is difficult. He wants us to wrestle with it to pull out a meaning, because that is how we always get meaning -- by forcing ourselves to pull it from chaos. If you believe that the world is, at root, chaotic and meaningless, texts that are orderly and meaningful are automatically untrue. Producing a logical argument in an attempt to show that logic doesn't really work would be a contradiction at best, and possibly hypocritical.

[Belacqua]

I will absoletely not believe in religious god(s) until concrete evidence is provided. No philosophy needed.

The idea that we should only believe things for which we have concrete evidence is a philosophical idea.

You're already doing philosophy, like it or not.

[Angrboda]

Hmmm...those are not really absolutes. My first candidates would be the Principle of Non-Contradiction and the existence of a Totality. And there are existential stances which cannot be IMHO justfied by either reason or appeal to experience. For example, the belief that reality has a rational order cannot be grounded in any more fundamental belief.

What does it mean to say that reality has a rational order? What do you mean by rational order here?

[The Grand Nudger]

Regardless of whether my interpretation of Nietzsche is correct, the question remains whether a commitment to atheism allows one to develop a philosophy that includes some absolutes. If so, what are they?

I don't believe in gods.  I believe in all sorts of other things, including absolutes.  That a moral standard is a standard by which all moral agents can be judged - for one.

[Thumpalumpacus]

When Nietzsche wrote "God is dead," his point was clearly not simply that Christianity was unsalvagable but that its demise took with it any pretense of transcendant certitudes or absolutes. Was he right? Or are there absolutes that must be true in all possible worlds and true even if there were no physical universe at all?

Absolutes in the absence of any physical universe? Please define this term. And maybe tell us what you think about existence with no physical universe at all?

That's where the loading is, @BrianSoddingBoru4. He's trying to sneak in the numinous without having it questioned.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Regardless of whether my interpretation of Nietzsche is correct, the question remains whether a commitment to atheism allows one to develop a philosophy that includes some absolutes. If so, what are they?

I'm fond of breathing. Relativism is absolute. There's two for ya.

[The Grand Nudger]

Sure, I feel the sense of the numinous, too. So, moral absolutes, sense of the numinous....what else?

[Neo-Scholastic]

I only want to know what absolutes could an atheist believe in or does atheism entail a lack of belief in absolutes. If the former give me an example of an absolute. If not the god of classical theism, what fundamental principles are available to the atheist? How can one can be an atheist and justify not being a nihilist?