Hate Mail

As I said a couple of days ago, if atheists want to raise "the question of evil" as a weapon against religion, to encourage the choice of atheism, they don't get to do that halfway.  They have to provide an alternative which is superior to what they want others to reject.   Here's the passage from Hans Kung you seek to turn around against religion. 

Of course the question constantly recurs, what sort of God is this incomprehensible, unconcerned, aloof from all suffering, who leaves man sitting, struggling, protesting, perishing in his immense desolation?  

As Kung said of that:

But this question too can be reversed.  

 If you think atheism provides for an alternative to the description of God in that which is more of an answer to the question of pain, the question of evil, where is it? 

Is it in Richard Dawkins or the myriads of atheists who would agree with his statement of atheist faith? 

In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

At least the incomprehensible God is said to, perhaps incomprehensibly to human discernment, posses good, to have purpose to command justice, to require the exact opposite of evil and pitiless indifference.  So, atheism doesn't score a point there. 

Is there some commandment to make moral choices, thus at least lessening pain in this life or even to take the pain of others seriously, as something we should care about in Jerry Coyne or those who would agree with this? 

Almost all of us agree that we’re meat automatons in the sense that all our actions are predetermined by the laws of physics as mediated through our genes and environments and expressed in brains.  We differ in how we interpret that fact vis-à-vis “free will and “moral responsibility,” though many of us seem to think that the truth of determinism should be quietly shelved for the good of the masses. 

If I thought he'd give me a straight answer, I would like to go through how Jerry Coyne, or any materialist determinist can tease out a "good of the masses" out of their ideological position.  I don't think it can be done, and, as a superior scientist there when he said that proved, they won't buy it.  It is remarkably in line with that passage mentioned here the other day from Danton's Death put in the mouth of the atheist hero Thomas Payne by Georg Buchner, if your nature is to be a nice guy you do that, if your nature is to be Adolf Eichmann, you do that. 

As an aside, never, ever, in a jillion years think that someone who calls the human population other than their elite "the masses" is ever going to do anything except try to use them as a natural resource for their own ends.  Under materialism everyone is material for use or disposal. 

How about the nuclear physicist whose snarky put-down of the moral dimension of religion has made him a minor idol in the pop-atheist hierarchy - even inspiring a D list rock band -Steven Weinberg?  Whose discourse dissolving moral responsibility I went to the bother of transcribing from the Youtube of  Sean Carroll's weekend camp for famous atheists a few years back, where I got Coyne on morality from, as well. 

... There are competing things which are all good like happiness and truth.  For example, we sacrifice some happiness when we accept the truth that we're not going to have life after death.  Should we tell other people that they're not going to live after they die?   It probably will reduce their happiness on the other hand truth has a value of its own how do you balance truth and happiness there isn't any algorithm for balancing that.   I think you just have to accept that there is  no postulate that allows you to judge how much happiness you're willing to give up for how much truth. 

Even people who accept all this will say, all right we're not going to agree on what is the good but at least we can agree on the fundamental principle of morality that something like Rawls original condition [I think he meant "Original Position"]  that we should not treat other people worse than we treat ourselves. Rebecca [Goldstein] was saying something like this that everyone equally deserves whatever is good, happiness or whatever it is.  That's not the way I feel either.   And I think it's probably not the way most of you feel if you think about it because. I could probably increase the total amount of happiness by making my family live on rice and beans and live in a one room apartment and just barely keep enough money to keep us alive and healthy and send all of the rest of the money to poor parts of the world where it would do to me.  I'm not going to do that I'm not going to ....  and I well, I'm not confessing immorality.  I'm saying that my moral feelings tell me I should be loyal to my family.

Similarly when my university tries to recruit a bright young star in physics I suppose I could calculate,  well,  he could do more good for some other university and the greater good would imply we shouldn't go after him let some other university go after him. I don't care, I care about my university I'm loyal to my university similarly.  So there loyalty is a value it's not an absolute value I wouldn't cause, like Edward the Third,  I wouldn't cause the hundred years war to advance the interests of my family.  But it is one of these things where we have no algorithm for balancing loyalty against distributive justice.

And I think we have to live with that.  I think we have to live with the fact that although we can reason and try to uncover what our moral feelings are.   And if we get into that I think a very good example would be arguing about abortion ...  maybe I'll come back to that in the discussion.  

We can reason, the reasoning uncovers how we feel morally and perhaps allows us to identify areas of agreement so we can cooperate with each other and bring about what we want. 

I think in the end we have to live with not having a moral philosophy that really works in a decisive way.  I think we have to live the unexamined life.  I think this is part of the tragedy of the human condition just like we have no absolute way of determining that Mozart is better than Led Zeppelin we feel it but it's not something that we can argue,  we can rationally show.  We have to live with the fact that...  this came up yesterday.... when we discover the fundamental laws of physics from which all in some sense follows, that all other principles follow,  we won't know why they're true.  This is something that we have to accept, that the position of human beings is tragic and part of the tragedy,  that there  is no way of deciding moral issues on the basis of - well there is no way of deciding moral postulates which should govern our actions.  And in fact we don't have moral postulates that govern our actions when we behave morally. 

That is vapid mush which I can assure you will do absolutely nothing to solve the question of evil, or pain - apart from, maybe, Steve Weinberg's nearest and dearest and HIS university department.  

That is what comes of making the choices that atheists, especially ideological, actively anti-religious make.  And they make it for various reasons.  Let's be honest about this, a huge part of that is because affluent people don't like to give their stuff to poor people, they don't like the egalitarian aspects of Christianity or Judaism but, since the revelation of the Shoah, it has not been as fashionable to attack Judaism as it still is to attack Christianity - no matter what lie you tell as you do so.  

Some of it, though not as much, is a result of insisting that reality is in line with materialistic scientism when those not only do absolutely nothing to come up with an explanation of the question of pain, as we can see above, they exacerbate the problem.  The worst regimes of the 20th century were materialistic in their ideologies, Marxist in those who explained themselves by Marxism,  Darwinist for the Nazis and various facists though all of those regimes were far more based in the merely vulgar materialism that is most universally named "gangsterism".   I think that the second thing that that atheist avatar of atheist ersatz moralism, Weinberg named as the only legitimate focus of his moral discernment, his university department, shares a bit in common with a gang mob.