I'm an atheist and I positively affirm that I believe there are no gods, and am happy to defend that. — Pfhorrest

Hi Forest!

Just curious, how would you defend your belief system? For instance, which domain would you draw from ( logic/deductive or inductive reasoning, cosmology, phenomenology/consciousness, metaphysics, existentialism, cognitive science/psychology).

I would be happy to debate the EOG based upon all of the above disciplines, if you want to start a thread. Up to you. I'm just wondering how an Atheist thinks, since I'm obviously not one. — 3017amen

I don’t feel a need to start a thread of my own just to defend my own view, but I’m happy to explain myself if you want to start one to question it. I gave a brief summary of my view and some brief reasons for it at the end of the post you replied to, if you’d like to quote that in the OP of a new thread or something. I’ll quote it here again for ease of reference: — Pfhorrest

To cut a lot philosophical arguments short, my current position is that while it is possible that (a) very powerful, very knowledgeable, and very good being(s) could exist somewhere in the universe (but only in the universe, because physicalism; including in some layer of reality outside of what we falsely think is the universe if we are in something like a simulation, for instance), what you're talking about there now is basically an alien, and there is evidently (because Problem of Evil) no such being sufficiently powerful, knowledgeable, and good to fulfill the role of "God" here on Earth. So sure, I'm (weakly) agnostic about the generic existence of nice, smart super-aliens somewhere, but there is definitely no God in the usual sense around these parts. — Pfhorrest

Throughout my life, I had experienced now and then times of intense positive emotion, feelings of inspiration, of enlightenment and empowerment, understanding and acceptance, awe, of a kind of oneness and connection to the universe, where it seemed to me that the whole world was eminently reasonable, that it was all so perfectly understandable even with its yet-unanswered questions and it was all beautiful and acceptable even with its many flaws. I greatly enjoyed these states of mind, and I did find that they were also practically useful both in motivating me to get things done, even just mundane chores and tasks, and also in filling me with creative thoughts, novel ideas and new solutions to problems. But although I eventually learned that these were the kinds of mental states often called "mystical" or "religious" experiences, I never took them to be in any way magical or mysterious. I saw them as just a kind of emotional high, with both experiential and behavioral benefits. Friends who had experience with drugs like LSD would even describe my recounting of such experiences as sounding like a "really good trip", further enforcing my view that these were just biochemical states of my brain (even while some of those friends conversely took their own LSD trips and such to be of genuinely mystical significance). While in such states, some things would sometimes seem "meaningful", in the sense of "important", even when I could see no rational reason why, and I always just dismissed this as a pleasantly bizarre mental artifact of the emotional high I was on.

[...]

I have since dubbed [...] that experience of cosmic oneness, understanding, and acceptance, "ontophilia", Greek for the love of being [...] ontophilia generates a feeling of inherent meaningfulness. Meaning, in this sense, is like love: to ask whether "love is real" in any sense deeper than "do people feel love" is a malformed question, because there is nothing more to love that could be real or not than the feeling of it; love is just the feeling of loving or being loved. Likewise, to ask whether there is "really meaning" in any sense deeper than "do things feel meaningful to people" is also a malformed question, because there is nothing more to meaning that could be real or not than the feeling of meaningfulness, ontophilia, or meaninglessness, ontophobia. Neither feeling is rationally correct or incorrect about any actual philosophical question about meaningfulness, but ontophilia is clearly the better state of mind, both for its intrinsic experiential enjoyability, but also for the practical benefits it confers of enlightening the mind and empowering the will

[...]

I am of the opinion that ontophilia is the proper referent of the term "God" as used by theological noncognitivists, who are people that use religious terminology not for describing reality per se, but more for its emotional affect. Most theological noncognitivists do not identify as such and are not aware of this philosophical technicality in their use of language, but it it evident in expressions such as "God is love", whereby "believing in God" does not seem to mean so much a claim about the ontological existence of a particular being, but an expression of good will toward the world and of an expectation that the world generally reciprocates such goodness. It seems also plausibly equatable to the Buddhist concept of "nirvana", or the ancient Greek concept of "eudaimonia", which were the "meanings of life" of those respective traditions.

[...]

That is "the meaning of life", in the conventional sense of the question; that's what life is good for, what to live for: the enjoyment of it. Interestingly, as the ontophilic mood described above brings with it both an immensely greater enjoyment and alleviated suffering, and also, more practically, increases the power of the mind and the will and consequently aids the pursuit of both knowledge and justice, it could reasonably be said that pursuing, achieving, maintaining, and spreading that "meaning of life" feeling, ontophilia, is itself the practical meaning of life.

[...]

...the way to cultivate ontophilia is to practice the very same behaviors that it in turn inspires more of. Doing good things, either for others or just for oneself, and learning or teaching new truths, both seem to generate feelings of empowerment and enlightenment, respectively, and as those ramp up in a positive feedback loop, inspiring further such practices, an ontophilic state of mind can be cultivated. In this sense, it could be poetically said that the meaning of life is to love and be loved, to learn and to teach. Learning truths about the universe, and being the recipient of its goods, shows one how everything in the universe matters, how they fit together into the big picture; and doing goods for the rest of the universe, as well as being a font of truths, makes one matter to the rest of the universe. Learning many great truths and doing many great goods places one in a crucial position in the overall function of the universe, being influenced by as much of the universe as possible through one's experience, filtering true beliefs and good intentions out of it, and then influencing as much of the universe as possible through one's resultant behavior. Approaching such a position is also, on my account, approaching what it would mean to be a god — roughly all-knowing, all-good, and all-powerful...

The most archetypical kind of transcendentalist opinion is belief in the supernatural. "Natural" in the relevant sense here is roughly equivalent to "empirical": the natural world is the world that we can observe with our senses, directly or indirectly. That "indirectly" part is important for establishing the transcendence of the supernatural. We cannot, for example, see wind directly, but we can see that leaves move in response to the wind, and so find reason to suppose that wind exists, to cause that effect. Much about the natural world posited by modern science has been discovered through increasingly sophisticated indirect observation of that sort. We cannot directly see, or hear, or touch, or otherwise observe, many subtle facets of the world that are posited by science today, but we can see the effects they have on other things that we can directly observe, including special instruments built for that purpose, and so we can indirectly observe those things.

Anything that has any effect on the observable world is consequently indirectly observable through that very effect, and is therefore itself to be reckoned as much a part of the natural world as anything else that we can indirectly observe. For something to be truly supernatural, then, it would have to have no observable effect at all on any observable thing. Consequently, we would have no way to tell whether that supernatural thing actually existed, as the world that we experience would seem exactly the same one way or the other, so there could be no reason to suppose its existence, no test that could be done to suggest any answer to the question of its existence. And so if we held a belief in it anyway, we would have to do so only on faith; and if we reject appeals to faith, we consequently have to reject claims of the supernatural.

If we pick our initial opinions arbitrarily — which, as I have said, I think is fine, and as I elaborate elsewhere in these essays, even unavoidable — we then have a very high chance of those initial opinions just happening to be wrong. If we go on to hold those arbitrary opinions (that we just happened into for no solid reason) to be above question, which is the defining characteristic of fideism as I mean it here, then we will never change away from those wrong opinions, and will remain wrong forever. Only by rejecting fideism, and remaining always open to the possibility that there may be reasons to reject our current opinions, do we open up the possibility of our opinions becoming more correct over time. So if we ever want to have more than an arbitrary chance of our opinions being right, we must always acknowledge that there is a chance that our opinions are wrong.

The usual cornerstone of western religious belief, and the source of the hope that it brings, is belief in a god that is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good, who therefore could and would right all wrongs and make everything okay; a very comforting idea that I sincerely wish was true. (I would slightly reinterpret these criteria, in the framework of my preceding philosophy, as such a god having: total awareness, or perfectly accurate experience of the universe, which "all-knowing" approximates; perfect processing of those experiences into true beliefs and good intentions to drive its subsequent behaviors, which "all-good" approximates; and total control, or perfectly effective behavior upon the universe, which "all-powerful" approximates). As my position against transcendentalism rules out the possibility of a truly supernatural god, the closest thing to that traditional idea that could possibly exist would have to be a natural being in the universe, not something beyond it, which I expect most would say would not truly count as a god: that would be, in effect, an alien. And a being in the universe could not be all-knowing or all-powerful about that universe, but they could in principle be all-good, and they could be very knowledgeable and very powerful, enough for that to still be something to hope for. There does not at present appear to be any evidence of alien life at all (though it seems statistically probable that there is some of it somewhere), much less alien life that has interacted with our world, but the existence of a very knowledgeable, very powerful, all-good alien being is strictly a possibility one could hope for. It is even strictly possible that what we think of as the universe is something like a simulation set within a larger universe, and that such an alien being resides out there in the larger universe, and is in fact all-knowing and all-powerful over the smaller part of it that we presently think is the whole thing. Such a being could even have created that smaller part that we think is the whole universe. That would be the closest thing to the traditional conception of a god that would actually be possible, and though I don't believe there really is such a being, because there is no evidence I have seen to suggest such a thing, I don't deny that it is technically possible.

But I cannot find hope in that possibility, because such a powerful and knowledgeable being must not be all good, or else an all-good alien being must not be sufficiently knowledgeable or powerful even if it is very knowledgeable and powerful, because if there were a sufficiently knowledgeable, sufficiently powerful, and sufficiently good being, there would be no excuse for the continued presence of bad things in the world, for it would have fixed them already. If it does not know that they need fixing, that would explain why they continue to occur; likewise if it is not able to fix them, or simply is not inclined to do so. This is a very old philosophical issue called the "Problem of Evil": the existence of "evil" (taken to mean bad things generally) in the world implies that anything like a god that exists must be ignorant, impotent, or apathetic (at best, malicious at worst), because if it were not then the "evil" would have been eradicated. Various excuses, called theodicies, have been offered for why an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good being could allow "evil" to exist anyway. The most popular of them is called the free will theodicy, which argues that a god could not guarantee the elimination of all evil without eliminating free will, which would itself be evil, making it logically impossible for such a god to do any better than what we have now. But I think that that argument fails on technical grounds because it rests on an incompatibilist conception of what free will is, which I have already argued against in my essay on the will. On my conception of will, freedom of the will consists in your moral judgement being causally effective on your actions, so that when you judge that something is the right course of action, that causes you to do that, in contrast with cases where something else causes you to do something that you judge is not the best thing for you to do. On that conception of free will, if a god had created people with greater free will, that would have made them behave more morally, so there is no contradiction between creating people who would always behave morally and also have free will, making the existence of free will no excuse for the existence of "evil".