Posted by:
Henry Bemis
(
)
Date: June 09, 2023 02:52PM
I very much like and appreciate your perspective here. I just have a couple of comments:
"I think atheism can make people nihilistic but in my experience and from my individual point of view, the values that I have selected for myself and chosen to live by, I've become more humanist."
COMMENT: What makes the scientifically minded atheist 'disposed' toward moral nihilism is the lack of any scientifically identifiable moral foundations. An atheist can still insist on some vague notion of moral objectivity, but if God is denied based upon lack of scientific evidence, or a commitment to scientific materialism, arguably so must other metaphysically questionable assumptions, including any objective metaphysically existent morality.
Since you are an atheist, but presumably not a nihilist, you might ask yourself what moral authority --other than your own moral intuitions -- demands that you to act in accordance with your own moral values? Like the nihilist, you are now faced with your own metaphysical quandary. And, as an atheist, you are in the same boat as the nihilist--except you are (apparently) willing to subscribe to some personal moral illusion, where the nihilist is not. Yours seems to be a sort of pragmatic morality, but as a theory of moral truth, or moral objectivity, it is entirely vacuous, leaving you without recourse to make moral judgments outside of your own behavior.
Moreover, your view does not fit into what is generally identified as Humanism. Humanism insists that human beings (individually and as a social group) have free will to genuinely change things--their own lives and society--for the better, and that some actions are objectively morally right and others morally wrong--even though they have no underlying philosophical commitments to support such a view. The fact that many atheists are also self-proclaimed "Humanists" seems inconsistent. Atheists reject God because of its metaphysical commitments, and the lack of scientific evidence. Nonetheless, they subscribe to a Humanist morality that also is ultimately lacking in scientific evidence. In short, it is a hard logical walk from atheism to morality, and thus to Humanism. That's why most scientifically minded atheists are moral nihilists, or at best hard-core relativists, which to my mind amounts to essentially the same thing.
_________________________________________
"I felt much more nihilistic as a Mormon. Nothing mattered because it was all a part of God's plan."
COMMENT: Religion is a constraint on "what matters." But certainly "God's Plan" in a religious context still matters a great deal. (Unfortunately for us atheists!) In Mormonism, the "Plan of Salvation" is centered on individual choices between what is deemed morally right and wrong within the Mormon worldview. Again, such choices (and agency) matter a great deal, even though Mormonism constrains such choices.
Notice the trade off when one's atheism is based upon scientific materialism (scientism) where the metaphysical constraints deny morality and free will altogether, making the human moral sense, and all human actions based thereon, illusory as to any genuine moral content. These implications associated with scientific atheism can be a tough philosophical pill to swallow.