You know you don’t have to be confined to the false dichotomy of either the mental reducing to the material or vice versa? Back in college I found myself persuaded both by functionalist-physicalist philosophy of mind and by something in the area of Berkelian idealism, and from that apparent paradox of mind reducing to matter AND matter reducing to mind eventually settled on a kind of neutral monism, a physicalist phenomenalism, an empirical realism, where everything is made up equivalently of energy or information as its fundamental substrate, and particulars are differentiated by their functions, mapping energy or information in to energy or information out, mapping “experience” to “behavior” (where every experience is in turn OF its object’s behavior), in a way that trivially grants everything “mind” in the sense of just having an input to its function, while still meaningfully differentiating actual human minds from rocks and such by way of differences in their functions. Yet it’s still completely physicalist, empiricist, and independent of any kind of theism.

Thank you for the opportunity, that's exactly what I'm here for. :)

Just curiosity about the demographics here.

But what if you're with more than one person and they have conflicting needs? — bert1

@god must be atheist already covered this as far as Tolstoy is concerned (I was just summarizing the video for those who don't want to watch it), but as far as I'm concerned, "needs" as I would construe them technically cannot conflict, in the same way that observations of the world technically cannot conflict. They can suggest interpretations about what is or ought to be that conflict, but what actually is must account for all observations, even if it's a really difficult creative task to figure out how to do that, and what actually ought to be must account for all needs, even if it's a really difficult creative task to figure out how to do that.

(Consider the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Each one feels a different thing and interprets that as meaning there's a different object, and while all three of those interpretations cannot be simultaneously true, the actual reality is nevertheless compatible with the different things each of them feels to prompt those interpretations. Analogously, people's different feelings may prompt them to want different states of affairs, and those states of affairs may be incompatible, but what's actually a moral state of affairs will nevertheless account for everyone's different feelings, even if it means nobody gets any of the states of affairs that those feelings prompted them to want).

On the one hand I agree with you, but I think that these two distinctions make sense:

(1) Natural/artificial, or natural/made by persons, which is self-explanatory

and

(2) Natural/supernatural, where "supernatural" is simply denoting unusual, perhaps very rare and difficult-to-experience phenomena that we presently have no plausible natural explanation for. So "supernatural" would be relative to common, educated (mostly scientific) epistemological beliefs, and by its nature, it would be more dubious than natural phenomena until better-confirmed. — Terrapin Station

I agree that the first distinction is a useful one to make, but thought it was so self-explanatory as not to be worth mentioning. For the latter distinction, I would instead use the terms "normal"/"paranormal". Calling weird unexplained stuff "supernatural" suggests that it is somehow transcendent of the world that is amenable to having science done to it, but calling it "paranormal" is pretty much just calling it "weird", which is fine, nature is full of weird stuff, and we'll do science to it until it doesn't seem weird anymore.

If consciousness is a necessary type, it has no counterfactual. In this situation we have no context to claim a juxtaposition of the presence or absence of consciousness. This consciousness would be necessary and couldn't be any sort of account of instances which come in and out of being. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I think this is an interesting kind of... inverse, maybe?... of my view on supernaturalism. The way I would define "natural", everything is necessarily natural, so the very concept of anything supernatural is simply incoherent.

Although, I suppose it's also very similar to my view on phenomenal consciousness, and why I think access consciousness is the more interesting and useful concept. I'm a panpsychist about phenomenal consciousness, and that doesn't mean very much to me -- it just means that whatever metaphysical stuff is going on such that I have a first-person experience, that kind of thing doesn't magically appear at some point in my development, it's also going on in all the stuff I'm made of and the stuff that's made of and so on down to the quarks and such, and then everything else built out of those has that stuff going on too, which makes that kind of stuff-going-on not really of much interest because it doesn't differentiate between me and, say, a rock, or a wisp of cloud. The interesting stuff that can be used to differentiate things is functionality, which is what varies between me and rocks and clouds and so on. A rock may have a "first-person experience", but like its behavior, it's not a very interesting one, because both experience and behavior vary with function, as function is literally the map from one to the other, and rocks have a very uninteresting function.

In simple terms you suggest aiming for what I perceive to be the good, despite not having an objectively determination of what the good is. But the issue for me is that the good used to be clear and now ), I simply can't even perceive what the good is on a macro level. (such as the abortion example I discuss above) — dazed

The bit that I actually typed out in this thread is just the very start of my moral framework; it's just the reason not to give up and fall into nihilism completely. There is still a lot of work to be done to build up a complete moral framework that can answer "macro level" questions like that. My complete take on that is at the link I posted earlier, and far too long to type out here, but it's there is you want my full thoughts on that. A lot of it is just slight variations on other pre-existing philosophical works, a mix of universal prescriptivism, utilitarianism, liberal deontology, and philosophical anarchism.

Here, I can copy and paste a bit where I kind of sum up how I view ethics as analogous to science:

When it comes to tackling questions about reality, pursuing knowledge, we should not take some census or survey of people's beliefs, and either try to figure out how all those beliefs could all be held at once without conflict, or else (because that likely will not be possible) just declare that whatever the majority believes is true. Neither should we rather feed people's perceptions (instead of beliefs) into such a process, nor should we rather declare that some privileged authority's opinions (instead of the majority's) are correct. Instead, we should appeal to everyone's direct sensations or observations, free from any interpretation into perceptions or beliefs yet, and compare and contrast the empirical experiences of different people in different circumstances to come to a common ground on what experiences there are that need satisfying in order for a belief to be true. Then we should devise models, or theories, that purport to satisfy all those experiences, and test them against further experiences, rejecting those that fail to satisfy any of them, and selecting the simplest, most efficient of those that remain as what we tentatively hold to be true. This entire process should be carried out in an organized, collaborative, but intrinsically non-authoritarian academic structure.

When it comes to tackling questions about morality, pursuing justice, we should not take some census or survey of people's intentions, and either try to figure out how all those intentions could all be held at once without conflict, or else (because that likely will not be possible) just declare that whatever the majority intends is good. Neither should we rather feed people's desires (instead of intentions) into such a process, nor should we rather declare that some privileged authority's opinions (instead of the majority's) are correct. Instead, we should appeal to everyone's direct appetites, free from any interpretation into desires or intentions yet, and compare and contrast the hedonic experiences of different people in different circumstances to come to a common ground on what experiences there are that need satisfying in order for an intention to be good. Then we should devise models, or strategies, that purport to satisfy all those experiences, and test them against further experiences, rejecting those that fail to satisfy any of them, and selecting the simplest, most efficient of those that remain as what we tentatively hold to be good. This entire process should be carried out in an organized, collaborative, but intrinsically non-authoritarian political structure. — The Codex Quaerendae: A Note On Ethics

But, that's just my take on it; my answer to how to answer such questions. You might come up with something different if you try. The core message is that it's not hopeless, and you can figure something out, so you don't have to be a complete nihilist.

Of course, if you can manage to live your life just moment to moment happily and don't have to think about the big-picture stuff, that's fine too. That's probably more important for most people who aren't in big positions of power than figuring out the macro-level stuff. But if you want to engage in the bigger picture, there is hope that you can figure out a way to do so.

didn't watch the Tolstoy vid above but I would think that is the kind of thing he'd say. — Wayfarer

TL;DW for the Tolstoy vid: the most important time is now, the most important person is the one you're with right now, and the most important action is doing right by that person.

"Morally right action" is synonymous with "thing you should do". So whatever you think is morally right is the thing that you think you should do, and thinking that is the same thing as deciding to do it. An intention just is a "moral belief".

It's important to distinguish between what you think actually is morally right, and what you think is called morally right by others. There is no intrinsic reason to do something just because it's prescribed by some external system of morality. (There might be extrinsic reasons, like keeping favor with people or avoiding punishment, etc). But if you think it's the right thing to do, that just is the same thing as deciding to do it.

Why would you choose to complete a difficult but morally right task over an easier but morally wrong one? Because you think the easier one is morally wrong and so not the thing to do. Compare: why would you choose to complete a difficult day at work rather than take an easy day off with no excuses? Because you, for whatever reason, think that you ought to go to work; maybe that's a completely selfish reason, maybe it's not, your reasons don't matter for our purposes here, all that matters is that going to work achieves some goal that you think is important to achieve and worth the difficulty. Same thing with any decision, including moral ones. You do it because it's something that you think ought to happen.

On my evening walk tonight I was reflecting on this whole debate about existential questions being provoked by or provoking religious belief and something kind of interesting struck me. This is kind of a long personal narrative, with a relevant moral by the end.

For almost my entire life I've been a natural Absurdist, not in the sense that I'd read and endorsed Camus, but in that by the time I eventually did get around to reading him, his third approach to the Absurd, besides nihilism and existentialism, seemed a big "no duh" to me. Yeah, obviously, you don't just give up, or retreat into a happy fantasy, you do whatever you can with life in the moment and don't stress and worry about things you can't control. Or, in terms of the famous Serenity Prayer, having both the serenity to accept things I can't change and the courage to change things I can came easy to me (and the only point of stress was trying to tell the difference: is this a fight I should fight or something I should just let slide?)

So people fretting about "the meaning of life" always seemed silly to me, almost an anti-philosophical question, or a parody of real philosophy. You need a method of telling true from false and a method of telling good from bad, sure, and there's lots of interesting philosophical questions to investigate to figure out what's the right way of doing either of those, but those are things that can be done, there are solutions (even if not everybody agrees on which is the right one), and what more do you want besides that? What is this "meaning of life" you're looking for? Whats does "meaning" even mean to you!? (That interrobang is to convey past-me's frustration with this topic, not present-me).

But then early last winter something happened to me. I thought I caught some kind of horrible cold or flu at first, but then I feared it might be something worse. I was congested and nauseous, sure, but also short of breath, constipated, hungry and full at the same time, hot and cold at the same time, my limbs started going numb, I was dizzy, my heart was pounding and racing, and eventually I couldn't sleep, at all, for a week straight. I thought I was having some kind of heart problem, I was genuinely afraid I was about to die, so I went to my doctor, and she said... that's anxiety. Those are all symptoms of anxiety, the circulatory and respiratory problems are all from sympathetic nervous system activation, the digestive problems are all from the consequent suppression of the parasympathetic nervous system. I was having a panic attack. One big continuous panic attack that wouldn't stop, but still.

"But doc", I said, "I'm not anxious about anything, other than now I'm anxious about dying from whatever the fuck is happening to my body." I had thought that I had "had anxiety" for at least a decade prior, but it was never anything even remotely like this; I now think I never actually had anxiety at all until this winter, I just had stress about real problems in my life. But my life was going fine at the time this started, there was nothing to feel anxious about, and I didn't feel like I was anxious about anything, I just felt like my body was freaking out for no reason. She gave me some medicines and prescribed some lifestyle changes to help mitigate the problem, and I started sleeping some again, and digesting a little bit, and so being less congested, and most of the severe physical symptoms went away for the most part, but the baseline jitters remained, feelings that I could then recognize as clearly anxiety, now that the flu-like side-effects of that were gone.

So months and months wore on, and though I hadn't started out feeling anxious about anything, I found things to be anxious about. Things I had always known about, nothing new that I learned, just stuff I had always been aware of and prudently not stressed about because there's no point in stressing about it, I suddenly found consuming my every waking thought. Fear of sickness and aging and my own death, fear of the collapse of civilization due to things like climate change or nuclear war, fear of the death of the Earth itself over the natural evolution of the sun, and most of all fear of the "inevitable" heat death of the universe. Even though that's the most remote of those things to worry about, it's the one I fixated on the most.

I tried to turn my mind to unimportant things in the present to distract myself, but all of the media I consumed was full of tragedy and conflict and suffering and death, which I used to find poignant and beautiful, but now it just filled me with horror. Even cute little animals turned dark in my mind, as facts about the food chain and of how death drives evolution, which had just been abstract science facts to me before, suddenly made all of sentient existence open up like a gaping maw of horror, all of reality seeming like a terrifying pointless meat grinder, all beautiful young creatures being born full of hope and blissfully unaware of how they were already falling to their gruesome deaths. I found myself unable to stomach the thought of eating meat in light of that, and became a vegetarian because of it.

So I started searching for "the meaning of life". I didn't even know what I was looking for, just some thought to alleviate that anxiety about the horror of reality. I had always found myself fantasizing about things being better in whatever way was stressing me out before, but now I found myself unable to even think of what "better" could possibly be. I found myself wanting to turn to religion, wishing that I could believe, but I couldn't, not with everything I already knew about philosophy and science, and I couldn't even find comfort in fantasizing about what if religious beliefs were true, because they didn't offer any resolution to the fundamental problems that were really twisting me up inside.

I felt like my whole life I had been somehow ignoring this huge problem that now consumed me; I had known all the facts I knew now, about all of those things I was so worked up and afraid of, but the significance of them hadn't sunk in ever before, and now it was. A part of me wished that I could go back to that ignorant bliss, but then another part of me, the part of me that never turns away from a problem until it's solved, said "No! Keep thinking about this until you think of a way out of it!"

But then, over the course of this past year since that all started, sometimes, the anxiety would subside. I would go back to feeling the way I always used to feel, and look back on earlier that day or earlier that week when I was all worked up about all of that stuff, and feel like I had been silly to feel that way, and that the calm, relaxed attitude I now had toward the same facts, the kind of attitude I had always had my whole life, was a much more prudent way of thinking. I didn't feel like I was hiding in ignorant bliss, I was remembering exactly all of the thoughts that I had been so worked up about, but in my calm state of mind, I could see how pointless it was to worry about them, to worry about the "meaninglessness of life". And then when I went back into an anxious state again, I would try desperately to remember whatever it was that I had thought to clear my mind before, I felt like I had found some solution and then forgotten it and couldn't get it back now. But when I "got it back", and was clear-minded again, there wasn't any solution: rather, it was clear that it was a phantom problem that I was stressing about in my anxious state, a vaguely imagined non-question to which no answer could be satisfactory.

I'm still struggling with that anxiety condition even now. I haven't figured out what brought it on yet, and I haven't made it go away completely, though it seems to be going away for longer and longer stretches. Just three days ago I was crying inconsolably about nothing. Yesterday I was gripped with horror about how I would spend eternity even if I did get to live forever. This morning I could barely haul myself out of bed. But right now, I don't even know why I felt that way; it seems like such an obvious non-problem. Even writing all of the above didn't make my feel anxious, though I'm afraid re-reading it in the future when I'm not so clear-minded it might.

The moral of this long story is that, having quickly shifted back and forth between those two kinds of mindsets a lot over the past year, I'm coming around to the view that existential angst is literally just a mental health condition, and that "what is the meaning of life?" is not a meaningful question, and just asking it actually creates the unsolvable problem it's in search of a solution for. That the way my mind worked for most of my life, and is graciously working for the moment tonight, is the healthier, saner, more functional way for a mind to work, than the way that it has been working for too much of the past year, which seems to also be the way that many other people's minds have worked for much of their lives. I'm not saying that "all theists are crazy" or anything like that, but rather, with great sympathy for people who have maybe suffered from what's been afflicting me this year for all of their lives, I'm saying that maybe there's not a philosophical solution to that problem, maybe there's only a medical one.

(I've also found myself changing to be much more "like normal people" in other ways over the course of this year of anxiety. I used to be happiest alone with my own thoughts and in the dark of night, but now when I'm anxious the only little bit of respite is the company of other people and sunshine and flowers. I've actually noticed myself becoming more "like normal people" in various other ways slowly over the course of my life too, even before this year, in ways that I recognize as effects of the traumas of life; and things that I used to see as inherent deficiencies of "normal people" I now see more sympathetically as scars of the hard lives they've had to live).

On other notes:

For some reason, these discussions always seem to ignore ignosticism and it's twin sibling theological noncognitivism. — EricH

I would count ignosticism as a kind of atheism (because holding "God" to be a meaningless term implies you would not agree with the meaningless proposition "God exists"), and theological noncognitivism as a kind of theism (because you still hold that "God exists" is "true", even if that's not in the usual cognitive sense of the word; you would still assent when people say that phrase, agreeing with the emotive import of it).

But I hadn't before considered the dual relationship between those two positions, so thank you for pointing that out. Theological noncognitivism is basically theist ignosticism, or conversely ignoticism is atheist noncognitivism.

"They" are "what we are not" is simply the backwards description of atheists. Atheists lack positive belief in theism, god, or gods; nothing less, but sometimes more. — VagabondSpectre

True, but the "something more" is not definitionally relevant. People who don't play tennis may do many other activities, but none of those other activities are either necessary nor sufficient to be a "non-tennis player"; all that phrase means is that you don't play tennis.

And for the purposes of this thread at least, it doesn't matter what "tennis" really means, just whether or not you'd say you "play tennis", whatever that means to you.

Nothing ultimately matters also includes 'nothing ultimately matters'. ~180 Proof

I recently wrote something very similar to that as part of the final chapter of my philosophy book; something like "If nothing mattered, then it wouldn't matter that nothing mattered."

Of course I then go on to talk about why things matter anyway.

Depends on what you mean by "purpose" and "put here". I don't think humans were put anywhere on purpose, but something doesn't have to be made by some intelligent being with a purpose in mind in order to have a purpose; a thing's purpose is just whatever it's good for.

With that said, yes, a thing that humans can be good for, a purpose we can serve, is to create (and become one with) something that could roughly be called a god, something immensely more knowledgeable, powerful, and benevolent than anything else that exists in the universe, including ourselves.

Of course there's a lot of risk in that project and we might end up creating an "evil demon" or the like instead. Or we might fail at creating anything in that vicinity at all. But there's hope that we can create a powerful force for good, and that's a purpose humans should serve if we can.

Anyone who follows reason will come to the conclusion that nihilism is untenable. For the same reasons we cannot prove something has objective value, we cannot disprove it. — Tzeentch

I agree completely, and to save @dazed the reading of my whole philosophy work I linked earlier, maybe I should just paraphrase the most relevant part of it that's very similar to what you just said here: if we start from a place of complete ignorance, we can't know if anything is objectively good or bad, but in our actions we cannot help but tacitly act on an assumption either that there is (so we try to make our actions good and not bad) or that there isn't (so we don't try). If we want to end up doing good, should there turn out to be such a thing as objectively good, we must try; and if we (even tacitly) assume that there is no such thing as objectively good, we will not try, and so will guarantee failure at attaining it. It is therefore pragmatically best to assume that there is something objectively good, and then try to figure out what it is, and try to do that. We might still fail, either to do good or even to figure out what it is, and it might turn out that the whole endeavor was ultimately hopeless, but we can never be certain of that, and in the absence of that certainty the safe bet is to give it your best go anyway, just in case.

(Conversely, however, we cannot assume that good prevailing is a foregone conclusion, for then we will likewise have no reason to try and so guarantee failure; and we also cannot assume that certain things being the things that are objectively good is a foregone conclusion [i.e. accepting some moral doctrine on faith], because then we will not try to figure out what is good and so will guarantee failure at that. We must act always on the assumption that something is objectively right, but that nothing is completely certain to be that objectively right thing; any particular thing might always be shown to be the wrong thing, but it can never be shown that there is no such thing as the right or wrong thing.)

Yeah the solution I think is to replace the lost principles with new ones. I am firmly of the opinion that there is actually an objective morality to strive for, though Sam Harris isn't a great exemplar of it, and you're right that utilitarianism per se has major flaws as a comprehensive moral system. But that doesn't mean that the problem is unsolvable.

This year I've been writing down my own comprehensive system of philosophy, which I hope might be of help to you in developing your own. It's meant to be read beginning-to-end but for your purposes you might like to start with the last chapter on the meaning of life and follow the links in there back to the earlier chapters as necessary.

Usually people get into philosophy because they're interested in something specific — VagabondSpectre

Not me. I got into philosophy specifically because I was interested in the most general and fundamental parts of everything else I was interested. For all my natural science interests, that boiled down to physics, and then to metaphysics; for all my social science interests, that boiled down to something in the area of economics or political science, and then to ethics; and when I discovered that those are both parts of the field of philosophy, I felt I'd finally found the field I had really been interest in the whole time.

The problem with the racism = power + prejudice model is that it rules out simple racial prejudice from the referents of "racism", whereas I'd expect most people would think of either that, or race essentialism, as the definition of racism. It's certainly much more sociologically significant when that kind of prejudice (whether or not supported by essentialist beliefs) is backed by power, but it seems more useful to have a more specific term for that, like "institutional racism" or something, and allow the broader range of colloquially "racist" attitudes and behaviors to still be included under the umbrella of racism proper. So if e.g. a poor white dirt farmer calls a black investment banker a racial slur, that's still racism, even though in that case there is no power advantage behind the prejudice (at least not without erasing all individuality and saying that a powerless member of a statistically powerful class is necessarily powerful by association, and vice versa).

And so, answering this checken-and-egg conundrum for myself, it seems very plausible that my preexisting atheism influenced the development of my philosophical ideas (that is what you consider to be philosophical ideas, which seems to be mostly limited to basic epistemology, — SophistiCat

I wouldn't characterize "what I consider to be philosophical ideas" as "basic epistemology". As I've listed several times here already, it includes a wide variety of topics from philosophy of language, ontology, philosophy of mind, epistemology yes, philosophy of will, various ethical subtopics that I refer to as teleology and deontology, and social implications of epistemology and deontology regarding education and governance.

but let's set this aside for the moment). Did the influence go in the other direction as well? Very much so: the more I examined the God question philosophically, the more confident I grew in my atheism. But this is hardly an argument for the primacy of philosophy [epistemology]. We naturally seek to rationalize our preexisting beliefs. And given that my preexisting beliefs were partly responsible for the way I was reasoning, this could have been little more than a self-reinforcing cycle. — SophistiCat

You and I seem to have very different histories of our atheism, and given the religious demographics I suspect most peoples' is more like mine than yours. I was raised in a religious household, with parents who believe in no uncertain terms that there definitely is a God and raised me like that was as obvious and uncontroversial a truth as the world being round, so atheism wasn't a preexisting belief when my philosophizing started.

I got into philosophy because my academic interests in natural sciences and social sciences over my childhood and adolescence lead me in search of the most fundamental parts of those fields, narrowing down to physics for the natural sciences and something in the realm of economics or political science for the social sciences. Trying to get deeper and more fundamental in those, I eventually ended up doing what I later learned were basically metaphysics and ethics, and then when I had an intro philosophy class as part of general ed requirements in college and realized that there's one field that studies the fundamentals of both of those things, found my love for philosophy.

As I learned more through all of that, without really thinking about it I pushed God further and further out of the limelight of my worldview, and by my adulthood had basically become an atheist as far as my beliefs were concerned, without ever claiming the title or really thinking about it. (I expect that this part is very different from most people's experiences, as I get the impression that most atheists who were raised religious had a strong rebellious breakaway from their religion).

I hadn't really decided that "God doesn't exist", it's more that I just "had no need for that hypothesis", relegating God to something beyond the normal world (about which I never really thought); and when I realized that there were adults who thought God was actively intervening in the normal world all the time, that seemed as weird to me as adults believing that Santa Claus delivered presents on Christmas, like the kind of story parents tell little kids but adults wouldn't genuinely believe themselves.

When I was around 17 or 18, I thought I had "proved the existence of God" through a now-laughable argument (more or less: infinity is inconceivable and therefore impossible, everything finite has a boundary, every boundary has things on both sides of it, therefore the universe is finite and bounded and there is something beyond it, and whatever that thing beyond the universe is, that's God). That fit fine with my basically-atheist worldview at the time, and fulfilled my growing desire to rise above all ideological conflicts with a creative middle position (that position being that the universe as we know it is basically materialist, but there's something beyond that universe that can be spiritual).

By the time I was 23ish I was identifying as a naturalistic pantheist, as a further refinement of that "creative middle position", after learning more philosophy and deciding that "thing beyond the universe" was an incoherent idea, and that things within the universe couldn't count as gods, deciding that the universe itself was the closest thing to God that could possibly exist, and deserved that name because reasons. (Edit to add because @Janus replied while I was typing: I was having what I understood as mystical experiences a lot around that time, a deep feeling of revelation and profundity, while thinking about the concept of pantheism.)

It wasn't until I was maybe 28 or 29 that I really realized that my worldview had basically been completely godless for as long as I could remember, and that calling myself a naturalistic pantheist didn't at all distinguish anything about my beliefs from those of atheists, it just emotively expressed a kind of "religious" reverence for the universe. Which I still had, but so did plenty of people who called themselves atheists, so I finally decided to stop being confusing and just call myself what I had already been for a long time.

God might mean your family's love and your inclusion in your community; sin might mean the destruction of many things you care about. — fdrake

I find that kind of theological noncognitivism really hard to discuss. That seems to be what my mom believes, and she'll try to talk "philosophy" with me and tell me how to her, God means believing in beauty and a kind of inner light permeating the world and uplifting people, doing good and trying to create good and beauty for other people, and she'll ask me don't I believe in that, and... I don't know how to respond, because it's not a propositionally coherent question. I agree completely with the goals of creating good and beauty, and uplifting people, and generally being positive and optimistic, but I don't know how to translate agreement with that goal into an answer to a question about what exists. It's really frustrating.

(I'm also reminded of a bus driver I talked to one on my way home from a philosophy class in college, who asked what I studied and then wanted to talk "philosophy" with me, offering his opinion that the cause of all of the bad things in the world was "sin", which word I had always taken as equivalent to bad deeds, but which to him seemed to mean some kind of metaphysical essence of evil that caused people to do bad deeds, or something).

I'm not sure why I was tagged in this response? I'm not arguing against any of that. Sounds like that's all meant to address Hallucinogen, whom I was also arguing against.

we now have true equality of opportunity. And under these circumstances, you get to see what people's TRUE differences in ability really are — Hallucinogen

Given that outcome is the product of ability and opportunity, if you assume there is equality of opportunity, then differences in outcome are indicative of differences in ability. But it's equally possible that differences in outcome indicate differences in opportunity.

We have independent means of measuring human ability, which generally show results that are normally distributed (i.e. on a Gaussian curve). If opportunity was distributed uniformly (equally), we would expect a normal (Gaussian) distribution of outcomes as well. But instead, outcomes are far from normally distributed. That indicates that opportunity is not, in fact, uniformly distributed.

I think there is a trade-off when it comes to knowledge, of both reality and morality.

On the one hand, the better we know what is true and what is good, the better we are able to bridge the difference between the two: to make good things true, and bad things false.

But knowledge of both sorts is a narrowing-down of the available possibilities: when you know nothing, then so far as you know anything could be true, anything could be good, and the more about each you learn, the more you find that things are either impossible or impermissible, and so the remaining domain of things that both should be and could be gets narrower and narrower and narrower.

So greater knowledge leads to better behavior, to more effective bringing-about of good things. But lesser knowledge leads to better experience, to more innocence and less hopelessness.

What would be best would be if we could live our lives in that hopeful innocence, while something else that didn't have the capacity to suffer like we do handled all of the dreadful knowing and acted on that knowledge to our benefit.

I'm still waiting for an answer to my earlier question for the people who consider themselves “against colorblindness”: is treating everyone the same regardless of their race “colorblindness” in your book?

I don't agree (at all) with OP that diversity training is some kind of malevolent cancer of society or anything like that, but I do generally think that policies ought to treat people without regard for race, and that that doesn't mean denying the history of racial injustice. And I'm wondering if that counts as "colorblindness" in the eyes of those who oppose that.

(I do think that policies ought to treat people differently according to their needs, and that that will automatically treat people of historically disadvantaged races better, exactly in proportion to the present legacy of that disadvantage, without ever having to explicitly discriminate on the grounds of race).

I'm guessing you're one of the people who voted option #3? If so, thank you for explaining your manner of thinking, that's exactly the kind of thing I was wondering about. I disagree pretty vehemently, but at least I see where you're coming from now.

Yeah, this whole argument seems to hinge on a supposed right of retribution that one is waiving in being merciful. I'd argue instead that there is no right to retribution, only to restitution, and mercy is acknowledging that truth and not acting in contravention of it. Mercy is restraining your irrational emotional desires for retribution and recognizing that two wrongs don't make a right. You have a right to having whatever was done to you undone to the extent that that's possible, but mercy isn't waiving that, only the claim to anything beyond that.

I don't disagree; that's why I said it would make an an enormous practical difference in how to live one's life. But though how to live your life in practice is the ultimate upshot of philosophy, most of the questions of philosophy are building the groundwork for how to figure that out, and particulars about what exactly does or doesn't exist and what they're like are all subsequent to all of that philosophizing. What does it mean to exist? What does is mean for something to be good? These kinds of questions, and a bunch of adjacent ones, need to be answered before we can even ask whether god exists and whether we ought to do what he says. That's most of philosophy right there. And then if it turns out that god does exist and we ought to do what he says, in light of the answers to all that earlier philosophizing about reality and morality, then yeah, that makes a big difference to what in particular is real and moral. But not to any of the philosophical groundwork we'd already done to get to that point.

Since theism usually involves the idea that there is an afterlife, divine judgement, the possibility of redemption or salvation and a much more robust notion of personal responsibility, it seems obvious that the presence or absence of belief in these theistic ideas would involve significant differences in philosophical attitudes. — Janus

I don't think that's necessarily true. Those things make a significant practical difference in life, in the same way that scientific and political questions can make a significant practical difference in life. But as I've already said upthread, once you've build a robust enough philosophy to even have a way of answering questions like "does god exist?", the answer to such questions doesn't make any difference to the rest of that philosophy. Looking at my philosophy again for example, I cover topics about language, art, math, being, mind, knowledge, education, purpose, will, justice, and government, all without having an answer yet as to whether or not god exists; so far as all of that philosophy is concerned, the answer could go either way. Only in the last chapter, on more or less "the meaning of life", do I then investigate whether or not god exists, and find that the answer is no. But if it had then turned out that god did exist, that might make an enormous practical difference in how to live one's life, but it wouldn't change anything about any of that foregoing philosophy.

'What if, at the point of death, I were to discover that in some sense I am still conscious?' 'What if the way I have lived my life is subjected to judgement, or has consequences in some way that I could never have anticipated?' — Wayfarer

Thank you for giving some concise and to-the-point questions, as requested.

However, I disagree that those are questions that would not have been asked without first adopting religious beliefs. They seem, instead, like the kind of question that might (but not necessarily) lead a person into religious belief.

Myself, I find the "what if" format of them makes them not particularly useful questions at all; all answers would just be speculation on something that may or may not be true. More useful to know would be whether those things are true. Is there life after death? Is there some kind of moral judgement then? And even more so, how can we find out the answers to those kinds of things? That last one is where the line of inquiry gets actually philosophical, as I understand the word. Answering questions about how to answer questions is where the bulk of philosophy takes place -- from answering what our questions even mean to answering what our goal is in asking them -- and only once you've got that all worked out, can you then ask and maybe answer questions like "is there a God?", "is there life after death?", etc.

The answers I find after doing all that philosophical ground work are generally "no". But it's conceivable to me that someone might arrive at different answers through a similar process, and I'm curious to hear if that is the case for anyone. So far it looks like most of the people who have answered "theist" have said that they don't get there through a similar process; they start with a belief in God and then use that to answer all the questions that I would ask first in order to be able to answer the question of whether God exists. Even more curious to me though (and what prompted my to start this thread) are the atheists who have said that that's a core principle of their philosophy, in a way similar to theists.

I'm curious to hear from some of those who have picked that answer (#3) how their thought process works in that regard.

The History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russel gives a kind of neat narrative overview of how the whole field has unfolded over time.

On a much lighter note, there's a YouTube channel called Philosophy Tube that covers a lot of the basics in brief in their early videos. Newer videos are more deep dives on particular political or existential topics than general academic philosophy though.

Where is the "I'm an atheist, and it is of no consequence in the rest of my philosophy" option? — VagabondSpectre

The fourth option should cover that. Saying that atheism is an incidental consequence is not saying that it is of consequence. Being of consequence would be more like option 3: the atheism comes first and other things follow from that. Being a consequence means the other way around: the rest of your philosophy just is what it is independent of (a)theism, and then when the question "is there a god?" gets posed your philosophy just says "nope".

Without rules on marriage and divorce, a system of morality is incomplete, say, even crippled. — alcontali

A system of morality that doesn't have anything to say about marriage and divorce implicitly considers them morally irrelevant. Just like a system of morality that doesn't impose any dietary restrictions implicitly considers diet morally irrelevant. A "completely system of morality" doesn't have to either oblige or prohibit every single action: it can leave wide swathes of behavior merely permissible, without saying either that you must or must not do such-and-such with regard to so-and-so.

Kant may have been religious sure (but see the rest of this thread since), but his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals never says anything like “...and here is where you inset the Law and the Prophets” or anything like that. It makes no references to God for its system of morality, and the world is full of self-avowed Kantian philosophers who are also atheists. You can argued that their system of morality fails somehow, but not that there aren’t systemic moral philosophies that don’t depend on theism. Same story with Bentham and Mill and utilitarianism, Aristotle and his virtue ethics, etc.

But it sounds like you’ve now moved the goalposts and want an example of a whole social group who unanimously adhere to one such system, not just of a system that is independent of theism.

By no means have I read all or most or even a sizeable amount of the scriptures or of Greek mythology and philosophy, but the readings I've done showed up no connection between the scriptures and Greek stuff. — god must be atheist

The actual scriptures predate the Christian philosophy I'm talking about, which as other have mentioned adopted a lot of Platonist and Neoplatonist thought. I'm not saying that Christianity really has its roots in Greek polytheism, but making a reductio against the claim that science has its roots in Christianity. Science has its roots in philosophy that was passed down (and added to) by Christians, but those Christians likewise got their philosophy from Greeks. It's absurd to say Christianity is rooted in Greek religion, and it's likewise absurd to say science is rooted in Christianity.

The same what? Unreferenced pronoun. No clear antecedent. Actually, no antecedent at all. Please provide. Thanks. — god must be atheist

The whole post I was replying to:

The church first destroyed all other cultures that provided education. Naturally, there was no alternative. This is not a merit of the church, it is, instead, its shame. — god must be atheist

Existing states first destroyed all other systems of governance in their territories, and that's as bad as what the church did to other systems of education, but given that that happened, it's still good that there is some form of governance / education, even if it needs major improvement and got there in a bad way. If I was in medieval Europe I would advocate for reforming the church-centric university system to be more freethinking (as happened in reality), rather than abolishing it for being religious; just like I presently advocate for the reform of governments to be more anarchic, rather than abolishing them because they're statist.

The same (or analogous) is true of all modern states and equally a (major) problem, but nevertheless I am still glad to have some government rather than none, even if I’d prefer it be better and have come about a better way.

The relationship of the medieval Christian church to education strikes me as analogous to the relationship between modern states and government. I’m a philosophical anarchist and think we should eventually do away with states as they are unjustified authorities, but a non-authoritarian form of governance is good, and I’m glad that there is presently some form of governance, even if I want it to become less authoritarian and eventually not at all. Likewise, I think churches especially of the medieval model are unjustified epistemic authorities that we were right to move away from, but I do still support there being some form of non-authoritarian education and I’m thankful for the medieval churches for providing some form of education when there was none other even though I’m glad we’ve since moved on to a better model (mostly).

The philosophical tradition that gave rise to modern science passed down through a phase of Christian heritage, sure, but it also predates it, at least back to ancient Greece. To say that science is somehow rooted in a hollowed out Christianity is thus akin to saying that Christianity is rooted in a hollowed out Greek polytheism, because Christianity adopted philosophical thoughts that originated with Greeks who were polytheists.

I don’t see where you’re coming from with this whole “atheists don’t have systems” thing. For myself, my philosophy is extremely systemic, probably more so than is academically popular in Anglophone countries today, and I end up being an atheist as a consequence of that system. I obliquely referenced this earlier in the thread, and in the OP. I start off asking what questions about reality and morality mean, then what we would judge answers to those against, how we would apply those criteria, what we need to do that, and who should be in charge of doing all that — along the way elaborating on topics of language, art, math, being, mind, knowledge, education, purpose, will, justice, and government — and only after all that, never even touching on the concept of god all the while, when I get to the question of what’s the point of any of it, do I even consider whether or not there’s a god, try to justify the existence closest thing to a god that could possibly exist given all the preceding, and end up concluding that what might possibly exist probably wouldn’t count as god even if it did exist (which it probably doesn’t), and wouldn’t matter much even if it did.

FWIW, I was raised in a religious family (evangelical even) but grew out of it along with Santa Claus etc, and it wasn’t until early adulthood that I realized that the religious stuff wasn’t treated by my adult family as the same kind of stories-for-children as Santa etc were, but as something that they sincerely believed. And that came as quite a shock and disappointment to me, much like realizing that your parents actually believed in Santa would be.

That is historically true, but not relevant to the point at hand. We are asking if you buy into the theist message or not. There’s a special term for “not” because theism was historically so dominant, and as someone who winds up not agreeing with theists as an incidental consequence of the rest of my philosophy (in my 20-chapter book on my philosophy I don’t even raise the question until halfway through the last chapter), I agree that it’s a little weird to have a special word for not holding a particular belief. But that is kind of the topic of this thread: how many of those who don’t hold that belief start out from that as a first principle and how many just happen into it as an aside, and vice versa, and also both questions for the believers too?

This is turning into a debate more about terminology than the topic it’s meant to convey. I’ve clarified what I meant by the terms in the question, and I can’t edit the question to rephrase it more clearly, so that’s the best I can do now. You either do positively think there is at least one god, or not. For every X, either X or not. What you’re calling “agnosticism” clearly falls on the “not” side of this X.

But on the terminology, strictly speaking agnosticism is orthogonal to atheism. You can believe in god or not, and you can hold that belief to be knowledge or not, in any combination. Furthermore those who simply don’t believe in god (weak atheists) can positively believe there is no god (strong atheism), and those who don’t claim to know (weak agnosticism) can claim that knowledgeable is impossible (strong agnosticism).

You sound like someone who doesn’t believe that god exists, but doesn’t positively believe that god doesn’t exist either (a weak atheist), and someone who not only claims not to know, but claims knowledge is impossible (a strong agnostic).

A question for the people who consider themselves “against colorblindness”: is treating everyone the same regardless of their race “colorblindness” in your book?

Yes of course. Anyone who is not a theist is an atheist, so anyone who was never a theist is still an atheist.