Category: atheism

Beyond our needs: on spatial analogies for death

(for 3 Quarks Daily)

“Everyone feels it’s an unbearable thought, to be limited in time, – but what if you were spatially unlimited, would that not be […] as desolate as immortality? By Zeus, no one is ever depressed because they do not physically coincide with the universe, I at least have never heard a philosopher or poet about it”

I was reminded of this thought, expressed by a character in a novella by the Dutch writer Harry Mulisch, when I read Tim Sommers’s reflections about death here on 3QuarksDaily. Sommers suggests a similar symmetry between time and space: building on the idea that we can think of ourselves as four-dimensional creatures, he wonders why we should care more about being temporally limited than about being spatially limited.

Sommers presents his case, not as a clinching argument that demonstrates that death ought to be nothing to us, but as a therapeutic move that could make it lose some of its sting, changing our perspective on it by showing it to be like something we already accept. I think that is a fair strategy, although in the end I find neither Mulisch’s (character’s) nor Sommers’s version of this symmetry argument convincing.

More here

Angry Atheists

(for 3 Quarks Daily)

“Why, during the seventeenth century, did people who knew all the arguments that there is a God stop finding God’s reality intuitively obvious?” This, says Alec Ryrie in his Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt (2019), is the heart of the question of early modern unbelief (136).

Ryrie’s point is that arguments pro or contra theism, and the influence of philosophical and scientific developments upon these arguments, are not actually crucial to the possibility of unbelief. The currents that run underneath these arguments are instinctive, emotional, and these are what we should look at if we want to understand doubt and denial of Christian theism historically. The history of unbelief is not primarily the history of eighteenth-century Enlightenment radicals and nineteenth-century science warriors, but of premodern anger and anxiety.

More here

Nihilism in the 21st century

New 3quarksdaily column:

In a radio sketch by the British comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb, David Mitchell plays an interviewer trying to get a cabinet minister to say what he really thinks about the government’s funding cuts. At first, Robert Webb, playing the minister, says there is no disagreement between him and the cabinet, but the interviewer presses on, continually repeating the same question: “OK …. but what do you really think?”

At one point, the minister unrealistically breaks under these faux-critical questions, and admits:

“It’s all lies. I hate it, I’m against it, all right? […] That’s it, my career is over.”

You’d think that was enough. But after a pause, the interviewer replies:

-“Yes, but what do you really think?”

“Look, it’s all futile. We’re all nothing but specks of flesh going through this obscene dance of death for nothing. Everything is nothing.”

-“….Thank you minister.”

More here.

Atheism and Historical Awareness

My new 3QD-column (published last week) discusses atheism and historical awareness, departing from John Gray’s Seven Types of Atheism.

It is simultaneously awkward and exciting to read about your own consciously and responsibly adopted beliefs as something to be anatomized. It is also something atheists are not always much disposed to. On the contrary, perhaps: many forms of atheism present themselves as a consequence of free thought, of emancipation from tradition. The internal logic of their arguments prescribes that while religious beliefs, being non-rational, are in need of cultural or psychological explanation, atheism is really just what you will gravitate towards once you finally start thinking. One question here will be whether this is necessarily the case.

More here.

Atheïsme, moreel realisme, dystopieën, en de onvoorstelbaarheid van de dood Antwoord op en duiding van Emanuel Ruttens positie

Eerder deze maand debatteerde filosoof Emanuel Rutten, bekend van het construeren van een nieuw argument voor theïsme en recent bezig de houdbaarheid van al bestaande theïstische argumenten opnieuw te testen, in Groningen over theïsme, atheïsme en moraal. Een cruciaal onderdeel van zijn betoog (waar ik niet bij was, maar dat hij online heeft gezet) was het onvermogen van atheïsme om moreel realisme te verankeren. Moreel realisme definieert hij daarbij als de positie dat “morele waarden objectief geldig zijn”.

Dat is een argument dat in recente discussies vaker wordt gebruikt, onder meer ook door Rik Peels en Stefan Paas in hun boek God Bewijzen (hoofdstuk 4.1). Het lijkt mij uiteindelijk op een aantal misverstanden gebaseerd, maar die misverstanden zijn wel heel interessant, en erachter zit een wezenlijk verschil tussen het theïsme dat Rutten probeert te ondersteunen en het atheïsme waarmee ik me identificeer.

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