[Serious] Absolutes and Atheism

[Neo-Scholastic]

This is the part that stood out for me that I want to expand upon:

It's not a matter of sensing and knowing. For starters, sensing is not a valid approach toward perceiving reality. One can sense anything and believe it to be real merely with the notion of allowing the imagination to rule over reason. Further, knowing must carry with it the empiricism to back it up. Otherwise, the inward subjectivity of knowing is just a confusion due to an entanglement with sensing.

Glad you caught that. Good reading of my rant. Yes, the gap between sensing and knowing refers to the ability to connect sense data and felt experience to a valid conitive map, i.e. one that meaningfully connects the the personal existent with what is other that itself. My point is that for all its flaws, Christianity served that function until the modern period when the authority of Scripture is no longer respected. We lost not just a god-of-the gaps but god of THE gap... the bridge connecting all gaps. That is essentially what constitutes a Necessay Being. But we are starting with the premise that no being is necessary. So we are left with a problem because the connection between reality as experienced has no meaningful referent. A referent, the existence of which is accepted on faith..the existential choice to believe without evidence... that there is an intelligible order. Sure you can sense something, but how do you know if that something is significant?

[The Grand Nudger]

The same way you knew…or didn’t….if or when you believed in a god. It’s not as though, absent a belief in gods..we can’t distinguish night from day.

[Silver]

Sure you can sense something, but how do you know if that something is significant?

I believe one of the defining confusions is subjectivity. Subjectively, what is significant to one person is not necessarily going to be significant to someone else. What is subjective is personal, existing in the mind. Problems arise when someone tries to conceptualize the personal into an objective reality that doesn't support it. Further complications arise when others are told they must also find significance where they personally do not.

[Deesse23]

C'mon guys! I am getting really disappointed. Can't a couple atheists debate this instead of this being another boring tribal us and them atheist versus theist thread. Surely there is someone willing to make put up some cognito ergo sum. So lame. If atheism is interesting and worthy of discussing then why all this "what do you mean by that" knida replies. Flesh it out. Or maybe you can't and hence do not try.

Is that the reason you created this thread?...to come to the point of "atheists cant provide ULTIMATE, EXTERNAL, ETERNAL meaning, therefore...god...or at least therefore i am just as justified to believe in it than you are to not"?
Is that it?
If so, then spare us all the noise and be blunt and honest for a change and tell us so. Personally i am less offended by people being in open disagreement than someone weaseling around the issue. Saves both parties lots of time, you know

As for an Atheist´ fundamental princiiples. I do accept logic and reason. I cant prove they work, but they seem to, for everyone since we are using them. Second: Ethics (i am sure you will bring this up, sooner or later). Fundamentally i think health is better than harm, happyness is better than being unhappy. From there we can start and work towards a better world (in this case your hypothetical, godless world).

Nihilism/meaning of life:
You live, dont you? You will be here with the rest of us (and the nature around you) for statistically the next 80y. Make the best out of it, or just sit around being idle and die of dehydration after three days. Its all up to you. GO!
See, its that easy.
Oh, and if you would like to (argue that you would ) rape pillage and steal now, then i have two tips for you.

#1 Go back to christianity. Go to church, regularly please (!) and make sure you arent a danger to the rest of us
or
#2 Please consider that noone will stop you doing so (raping, pillaging n stuff) but you will be removed from our tribe. Either be casting you out of our settlement, so you are on your own vs all the wildlife out there, or we will put you in prison.

[The Grand Nudger]

There’s the rub. Anyone willing to posit that their life can’t have real meaning unless a god exists…or that moral propositions can only be true if a god exists…is telling us that they don’t believe their life has meaning. They don’t believe their moral propositions are true. Not even -with- a god. God is the meaning maker…not life. God is the morality maker, not facts.

[brewer]

There’s the rub.  Anyone willing to posit that their life can’t have real meaning unless a god exists…or that moral propositions can only be true if a god exists…is telling us that they don’t believe their life has meaning.  They don’t believe their moral propositions are true.  Not even -with- a god.  God is the meaning maker…not life.  God is the morality maker, not facts.

God is a human manipulation tool.

[Mister Agenda]

Your response tacit assumes that making a self-contradictory statements is an epistemic error. It suggests a necessary assumption yet why should we suppose that strongly felt intuitions of illogicalness actually correspond meaningfully with reality. IOW why must reality be logical?

I can make it explicit if you like. Our intuitions are founded on evolution and experience; our logic is founded on observation and testing. Like Newtonian physics, it may falter in extreme cases, but we don't suppose logic corresponds meaningfully with reality; it's constructed to correspond meaningfully with reality. Logic doesn't hang on imagination, it corresponds to reality by our design.

[Mister Agenda]

Seriously, though, what's the question again?

If we are going to build a productive atheistic philosophy what are its starting points?

We don't expect theists to only have one religion in common, why would you expect atheists to only have one philosophy in common? There are plenty of philosophical works that don't rely on deities, they are all atheistic for purposes of this discussion. An atheist can adopt any of them, modify them as they see fit, mix and match them, or come up with their own. Just like theists can do with religon.

Personally I'm a rational skeptic epistemologically (or at least I try) a humanist morally, a moderate/progressive liberal politically, and I suppose a classicist when it comes to logic; but I'm probably limited by my education in that regard. I've not always been a humanist rational skeptic moderate/progressive liberal; I will modify them as needed based on evidence or reasoning new to me.

That said, I suppose a lot of Western atheists would fit a similar profile.

[Mister Agenda]

C'mon guys! I am getting really disappointed. Can't a couple atheists debate this instead of this being another boring tribal us and them atheist versus theist thread. Surely there is someone willing to make put up some cognito ergo sum. So lame. If atheism is interesting and worthy of discussing then why all this "what do you mean by that" knida replies. Flesh it out. Or maybe you can't and hence do not try.

Atheism isn't really interesting or worthy of discussion. It's not that complicated. Neither is theism. It's a category error to compare atheism and Christianity rather than atheism and theism. It's one opinion on one topic, nothing to flesh out. A theist believes at least one god or God is real, full stop. Not that interesting. The question 'why are you an atheist' or 'why are you a theist' is more interesting, and if I was asking a random sample from around the globe, I would expect many different answers. Why are you a Christian could give interesting answers, but atheists rarely get asked 'why are you a humanist or theological noncognitivist or whatever'. It's unusual for theists to query beyond our atheism, and at least you're trying to do that. Anyway, none of those answers I get for those why questions would affect what atheism and theism are. Heck, I could confine my questions to Christianity and get many different answers.

Arguably, the most interesting thing about atheism is how hard it is for many people to grasp it and how many different ways they can get it wrong, usually by over-generalizing from a non-representative sample of atheists. I mean, a good chunk of the world's population of atheists are in China; and except for not believing in any deities I probably have more in common with you than I do with them.

See, people who aren't atheists generaly stop cold at the word 'atheist'. It's rare for a theist to drill down past that to philosophy. I think the problem you're having is that you're trying to drill deeper into atheism, and there's no there, there. The philosophy is in addition to the atheism, not part of it. Just like the specific religion of a theist is in addition to the theism, not a part of it. You can't drill deep enough into theism and get Sufi Islam. You've just drilled into a Muslim of a particular sect. The theism isn't the interesting part.

[Mister Agenda]

This is the part that stood out for me that I want to expand upon:

It's not a matter of sensing and knowing. For starters, sensing is not a valid approach toward perceiving reality. One can sense anything and believe it to be real merely with the notion of allowing the imagination to rule over reason. Further, knowing must carry with it the empiricism to back it up. Otherwise, the inward subjectivity of knowing is just a confusion due to an entanglement with sensing.

Glad you caught that. Good reading of my rant. Yes, the gap between sensing and knowing refers to the ability to connect sense data and felt experience to a valid conitive map, i.e. one that meaningfully connects the the personal existent with what is other that itself. My point is that for all its flaws, Christianity served that function until the modern period when the authority of Scripture is no longer respected. We lost not just a god-of-the gaps but  god of THE gap... the bridge connecting all gaps. That is essentially what constitutes a Necessay Being. But we are starting with the premise that no being is necessary. So we are left with a problem because the connection between reality as experienced has no meaningful referent. A referent, the existence of which is accepted on faith..the existential choice to believe without evidence... that there is an intelligible order. Sure you can sense something, but how do you know if that something is significant?

It sounds like, just like the God of the gaps, the God of THE gap is a placeholder for our ignorance. I see you're defining the referent, which you deem very important, must be accepted on faith. The problem is you can accpet ANYTHING on faith.

It doesn't seem to me that you have to believe without evidence that there is an intelligible order. To a great degree, we've found inteligible order in nature. Physics, chemistry, and biology are predictable. Quantum physics is the wild west in comparison to things on a human scale, but it's still statistically predictable. Maybe all is chaos out past the observable universe, and it may even be the tiniest bits of everything that everything is made of are in some sense not really real; but it's not a leap of faith to discern order in the universe. It might be a leap of faith to assume order all the way down; but it doesn't damage me in any way not to take that as a given, on faith.

I think you want Chrisitainity to be more critically important than it is. It's not unimportant, it's a major influence on history and current events, but most of the world gets along fine without it. And I believe the pagan Greeks ought to get more credit for Western logic than many Christians tend to give them.