Warning: Philosophy Ahead

Cory's had atheism on the brain in the last 24 hours after I interviewed Hemant Mehta on Between the Lines for his book I Sold My Soul on eBay.

Cory's concern goes something like this:

(And this is rough. I could be more precise here, but cut me some slack.)

1. If you are an atheist, you do not believe there is ultimate meaning in the world (If A then ~U.)

2. If ~U, then it is pointless to work toward human progress if you don't directly benefit. (If ~U, then ~P.)

(E.g. why work toward a cure for cancer if you know a cure is too far away for you to directly benefit? Why work to eradicate extreme poverty if a) you're not in extreme poverty and b) the likelihood of you or anyone you know ever being in extreme poverty is very low.)

3. If you are an atheist, it is pointless to work toward human progress if you don't directly benefit. (If A, then ~P [1, 2 - Transitivity].)

Therefore, an atheist should not work toward human progress if he does not directly benefit.

My Objection:

There is a distinction between ultimate meaning and proximate meaning.

An atheist can still find proximate meaning ('meaningfulness' perhaps) through family, academic pursuits enjoyed for their own sake, and through participating in the project of human progress. No, the atheist may not think there is an ultimate meaning to life, but he/she can still find meaningfulness in working toward a project he/she enjoys.

It's 'enjoyable' to work toward human progress, regardless of whether that matters 10, 100, or a million years from now.

So my objection, really, is to (2). At the very least, the atheist can directly benefit from participating in the project of human progress because he/she enjoys it, derives satisfaction from it, etc.

This is akin to someone watching 'Old School.' No, you're not going to learn any grand lessons from the movie, but you do it because frankly you enjoy it. And that should be enough.

Cory's Counter-Objection:

Okay, I'll grant you the atheist can still derive proximate meaning from participating in the project of human progress, but isn't ultimate meaning (U) strongly implied, if not entailed by proximate meaning (M)? (If M, then U.)

My Reaction:

I'm not sure . . . I would think not, but I can't say I've ever really considered it. However, if (If M, then U) is true, then the atheist is faced with two options:

1. Conceding there is ultimate meaning.
2. Rejecting proximate meaning, which best I can tell would simply lead to nihilism.

If the atheist picks (1), then she/he seems to have two options:

1'. There is ultimate meaning, and I have a story about how there can be ultimate meaning and no God.
1''. There is ultimate meaning, and I'll be damned (pun intended)! There is a God. Crap.

At the very least, if (If M, then U) is true, then the atheist must reject certain forms of atheism that hold to proximate meaning.

At worst, atheism might become internally incoherent if the atheist cannot produce (1').

Take Away:

Now, that sounds fine and dandy, but that's all predicated on whether or not (If M, then U) is true.

If have NO idea if an argument can be given for (If M, then U.), but we're at least going to work on it. If an argument can be made for it, that's a BIG TIME paper, and frankly, big time progress in philosophy.

We would LOVE your feedback on this. Any thoughts on arguments for (If M, then U)? Anybody think they can produce (1')? Anybody see any substanative flaw in the landscape I'm laying out?

Update: My initial thoughts after stepping away from this for 15 minutes are:

A. Would this work something like the Cosmological Argument (only hopefully better)?

B. Would an objection to (If M, then U) be that U is logically prior to M and therefore (If M, then U) can't be true? Obviously you'd need an argument as to why U is logically prior to M, but that might be a way to object if there turns out to actually be an argument for (If M, then U)! :)

Comments

[KJ]

A couple mistakes:

First you equivocate between “believing there is no ultimate meaning” in 1. and there being no ultimate meaning in 2. This is not detrimental to any side of the argument, but would be nice to clean up for clarity.

Second, there is a problem with the objection:

Jay points out that an atheist can still find proximate meaning in something by, essentially, finding it enjoyable. This, he says, is an objection to premise 2. But I don’t think it is. 2. is “if [there is no ultimate meaning] then it is pointless to work toward human progress if you don't directly benefit.” To object to this (to find it false), one would need to find a situation in which the antecedent is true but the consequent false…in this case a situation where there is no ultimate meaning and yet there was a point toward working toward human progress even though one didn’t directly benefit. However, in the above case the atheist does have direct benefit: s/he finds the activity enjoyable. Thus I fail to see this as an objection to 2.

But as an overall note: I’m inclined to think that proximate meaning (PM) entails ultimate meaning (UM). It seems to me that when someone assigns PM to something, it is because they are convinced that the thing measures up to some standard—that is why they value it. If this is the case, the UM is logically prior to PM. Really, I can’t say more about this without a better definition of PM—but that is my inclination.

But, if this is right, this pushes the atheist toward nihilism. And this is similar to problems in ethics that atheist—like Richard Dawkins—face. Dawkins wants to make sweeping ethical claims—claims about the immorality of the behavior of religions (for one thing); and yet he has nothing to ground his ethical norms in—since he does not believe in God. He claims that they can be grounded in ethical works (utility, duty theories, etc.)… but such things all have mounds of objections to them. They don’t work. In fact, they fail so badly that philosophers have nearly stopped defending them (and instead have moved on to easier questions like “how do you live a good life.”)

So, in sum: for the same reason that Dawkins can’t ground his ethical claims in anything, neither can the atheist ground their PM claims in anything.

At best, for the atheist, both ethical claims and PM claims just amount to emotive claims:

“X is morally bad” just means “I don’t like X”
“I find proximate meaning in X” just means “I like X.”
(At least if the atheist wants their statements to be true they must mean this; the meanings of statements are determined by the speaker. Dawkins, when he makes ethical statements about religion, might actually mean something more than “I don’t like that.” But if he does, he is either contradicting himself or just saying something straight out false.

KJ