[Serious] Absolutes and Atheism

[Rev. Rye]

Reality with a combination of my own senses and experiences, and corroboration from people who study any sort of given experience. The former becomes less important the further things are from my own personal life.

Like most normal people.

[Silver]

I need a clarification on this question. It's too vague.

What part is unclear?

The turning to part. Is it a necessity to harness a personal idea to another source?

[Angrboda]

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

I am not asking trick questions. What non-theistic absolutes, if any, do you, as an atheist, believe in?

That's fine, I'm not playing gotcha. I just want to know what you're referring to by the term as thinking about it a moment suggests that it's very slippery. This isn't the first time you've used the term, either.

[The Grand Nudger]

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.

I think that is a slippery redefinition of “absolutes”.    Absolutes ought not to merely be a commitment to asserting something to be true under any circumstances.    Absolutes ought to be demonstrably true under any circumstances.

Moral absolutes are some of the oldest absolutes known to man.  I bet I believe a bunch of untrue things too.  Obviously, the fact that I don't believe in gods doesn't stop me from believing in absolutes or in untrue things.  There's a pattern here, I think.

[The Grand Nudger]

-----dubs

[Belacqua]

Also, god is dead doesn't equate to nihilism.

It does for Nietzsche.

He doesn't think of God as the Sunday School old-man-in-the-sky version of the popular imagination. He is a philosopher, so he thinks of God as the philosopher's version.

For philosophers, God is the ordering principle of the universe. The Logos. Nietzsche believes that at its deepest level the universe has no order, no laws of nature, no principles which we can discover through science. This is what he means by God being dead -- we can no longer believe in an order which exists independently of people. You'll see that this is pretty much just an extreme version of Kantian epistemology -- not only are mental phenomena constructed by the mind (as Kant said), but the noumena -- the things in themselves -- do not have true existences which we imperfectly discern.

All order, for Nietzsche, is made up by people, either through art or through science. It is useful. It is an illusion we need to keep from going mad. 

If I'm understanding him right, Neo's question here could be rephrased as "Why is Nietzsche wrong? What absolute ordering principles can we believe in absent God?"

[The Grand Nudger]

What could we hold to be true with a divine ordering principle?

[Fake Messiah]

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?

You do not understand what atheism is.

Let me explain it to you: Atheism is the absence of belief in a god or gods. That’s it.

You don't seem to realize that lack of belief doesn't factor into any philosophical viewpoint. It can't because it is a non-belief. Atheists have many wide and varying viewpoints which have nothing to do with atheism. Religion simply doesn't factor into our lives. At all.

The only reason the word atheism exists is because a word was necessary to say you don’t believe in a god. If there was no theists there would also be no atheists.

[Belacqua]

People here often point out that atheism per se is merely a lack, and doesn't itself necessitate any metaphysical beliefs.

This thread is probably helpful in clarifying two general sets of metaphysical beliefs that atheists have been known to hold.

Nietzschean atheists believe that no God = no order.

The more common type of atheist -- the vast majority I've seen on the Internet -- are naturalists or materialists. These type do believe in a Logos, although they wouldn't use that word. For them, the laws of nature are real and knowable. The laws of math are not mere dreams we have. Though we may be wrong about any number of things, such atheists do believe that there is a truth and an order in the world.

So the question for such people is: what do you hold to be unquestionably true about the world? What principle can we always rely on?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Have you forgotten that atheism is basically just the one thing? Either a disbelief or lack of belief in a deity

Not at all. Given that lack of belief, to what do you turn to ground your beliefs?

A requirement that has no requirements.