Atheists and evolutionists have joined hands … and legs it seems.
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one. And whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity. From so simple a beginning endless forms most wonderful and most beautiful have been and are being evolved
Yep. From P.3
In speaking of the fear of religion, I don’t mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper–namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself. I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.
The essay is an expression of self-awareness, It is not the polemic you want. Indeed, the essay riles against the “Platonic harmony” to which you are sympathetic; as is shown by reading the whole of the first sentence dropped from your quote.
The essay just doesn’t do what you seem to think it does. It does not show that evolutionary accounts are false. The logic he sets out is not peculiar to evolutionary explanations; a theologian who argues that God is the source of reason faces the exact same circularity, in that in justifying such a conclusion they make use of reason.
But most importantly, Nagel is clearly rejecting the “Platonic harmony” on which you rely. He hopes atheism is true. He’s confessing a bias he wants to resist, not endorsing your picture.
Yep. As an explanation, it closes of enquiry.
And that’s why it ought be resisted.
Which is what? I provided the quote to illustrate what I think is a real, underlying dynamic in many thread about religion and atheism, as this one is. On the one hand, there are philosophical arguments, for and against, but there’s always a fair amount of invective which is clearly motivated by the fear (or loathing) of religion.
Secondly, Thomas Nagel doesn’t set out to show that ‘evolution is false’. The (clearly not grasped) point of the major part of the essay is to question the reliance that is put on evolutionary biology as an explanation for the faculty of reason. It’s a defense of the ‘sovereignty of reason’ against biological reductionism:
The only form that genuine reasoning can take consists in seeing the validity of the arguments, in virtue of what they say. As soon as one tries to step outside of such thoughts, one loses contact with their true content. And one cannot be outside and inside them at the same time: If one thinks in logic, one cannot simultaneously regard those thoughts as mere psychological dispositions, however caused or however biologically grounded. If one decides that some of one’s psychological dispositions are, as a contingent matter of fact, reliable methods of reaching the truth (as one may with perception, for example), then in doing so one must rely on other thoughts that one actually thinks, without regarding them as mere dispositions. One cannot embed all one’s reasoning in a psychological theory, including the reasonings that have led to that psychological theory. The epistemological buck must stop somewhere. By this I mean not that there must be some premises that are forever unrevisable but, rather, that in any process of reasoning or argument there must be some thoughts that one simply thinks from the inside–rather than thinking of them as biologically programmed dispositions.
The polemic, such as it is, is simply that the fear of, and hostility towards, religion, is a motivator for such biological reductionism. Which it clearly is.
That’s certainly true to those who don’t believe it. To those who don’t believe it, it is a slogan, a conversation-stopper, a false belief - as that is all it could be. Never mind that until very recently the history of ideas, a great deal of the progress in science was made by those who were trying to understand how ‘God did it’.
Who claimed that? Not I. Come one, Way.
Nagel makes a fair point, in rejecting psychological arguments both for and against theism.
He does not use this as an excuse not to give due consideration to the logical problems of theism. That’s just you.
Isn’t that what you said here?
Nagel didn’t write that essay to argue that evolutionary accounts are false, if by that you mean to cast doubt on evolutionary biology as a whole. But he does say that the ‘fear of religion’ is a motivation for evolutionary reductionism. And you will know that his subsequent book Mind and Cosmos was sub-titled Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (for which he was accused of providing ‘aid and comfort to creationists’ which rather illustrates his point!)
Evolutionary accounts of rationality… The topic at hand.
The thread is called ‘Definition of Atheism’.
Yep. So say something that is on topic.
That the fear of religion is often an unstated assumption behind the discussion.
I agree that this is a fascinating question and also fits in with views (I’ve raised) held by David Bentley Hart. I fondly remember a thread I started on how we can explain intelligibility under physicalism.
You don’t even believe in god like that. You’re more of a Neoplatonist. An atheist for many theists. And I think you’ll agree that that there’s no superbeing out there who sits down and makes things. The more credible forms of theism hold that God is not a being among beings, but the transcendent source of all being. But the reasoning that gets us there is not universally accepted because it depends on contested metaphysical assumptions and specialized concepts that many people do not share or regard as necessary.
You’re response to this seems to be that such people are to be pitied for their lack of sophistication. In practice, the idea of a “transcendent source of all being” is reachable only through particular traditions and styles of reasoning, rather than through anything universally compelling or demonstrable.
I really value engaging with these arguments and in exploring increasingly sophisticated accounts of higher consciousness and metaphysical order. But at present, neither the existence of God nor a Platonic realm has been demonstrated in a way that demands universal rational assent.
Care to explain how that is about the definition of atheism?
What are you on about here?
You are carefully constructing a series of threads that actively seek to leave a god-shaped hole in the middle of your explanations, in the hope that it lends succour to your faith. You are presenting a more sophisticated version of the “god did it” argument, the god of the gaps. Its poor stuff.
I do agree, and as you well know, that is also much nearer Hart’s understanding. But as for the metaphysics, it’s not such much a matter of specialised concepts, as a cultural change in the understanding of the nature of reality - specifically, the rejection of classical metaphysics.
Like Macbeth, Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions. Have we forgotten our encounter with the witches on the heath? It occurred in the late fourteenth century, and what the witches said to the protagonist of this drama was that man could realize himself more fully if he would only abandon his belief in the existence of transcendentals. The powers of darkness were working subtly, as always, and they couched this proposition in the seemingly innocent form of an attack upon universals. The defeat of logical realism in the great medieval debate was the crucial event in the history of Western culture; from this flowed those acts which issue now in modern decadence ~ Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences.
‘Transcendentals’ as defined in Aquinas ‘are properties of being (ens) that exceed Aristotle’s ten categories and are convertible with being itself. He primarily identifies six: ens (being), res (thing), unum (one), aliquid (something), verum (true), and bonum (good).’ Don’t press me on the technicalities, though.
It was a comment on the ensuing discussion, a small percentage of which has been about definitions. My comment was more about the presuppositions behind the debate.
Well, no, you took a well-balanced article by Nagel and misused it to cast irrelevant aspersions on the psychology of atheists. Pretty poor.
‘aspersions’. And I maintain its relevance.
I tend to cast nasturtiums when I’m on a roll.
Yep.
You’d be the first to complain if I were to say theism is explained by the father-projection. What you attempted here is no different.
My nasturtiums are still going, despite a few frosts.
If the best counter that can be offered is to point out a typo, I’ll count this as a win.
I’d be interested in a thread that carefully examines some aspects of classical metaphysics. I find Aquinas’ Five Ways arguments curious and I guess two of these keep coming up in “modernized” variations. The argument that being itself requires a transcendent source, and that contingent reality cannot explain its own existence. There are some obvious or familiar debunkings of these positions, but it might be interesting to get into it further. I’m skeptical about how far reason can really take us on questions of meaning, value, and existence. Thoughts?