The scientific need for god
Donating = Loving
Bringing you atheist articles and building active godless communities takes hundreds of hours and resources each month. If you find any joy or stimulation at Atheist Republic, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner.
Log in or create an account to join the discussions on the Atheist Republic forums.
Nope. Science does not need gods. Sorry, but that's just stupid
Firstly I said as a result of science we humans need god as a prerequisite of morality. I didn't say science is in need of god. My reasoning was that in a purely scientific world we have no free will and if we have done something without actually having the free will decide what it is, we can not be held accountable for our actions ie. the holocaust would never be a bad thing because nobody had the choice to act differently. Now if you are stating "Sorry, but that's just stupid" as an argument which has no logos behind it (logos : actual reasoning). Then I am also allowed to be held to the same standard as you and say: "Nope. God does 100% exist. anything else, sorry, is just stupid" and I would (like you) not require any logos to defend my standpoint.
No we don't need a god(s) for morality. My morals come from me treating others how I want to be treated. We have free will, we use it every time make a choice(s) for are action(s). The holocaust happen due to free will being exercised by the nazis. What evidence do you have their is a god(s) responsible for are actions and no free will?
Your subconscious brain makes every decision before you consciously know about it. So will never be able to make a choice yourself. I'm remarking upon the fact that free will is a prerequisite to morality as Immanuel Kant put it. For an action to be able to be good or bad it must be free. If every inch of your body is being controlled not by you then you have no free will. And as Truett said up there most neurologists and scientists do agree upon the fact that we have no free will. Now my claim was because of these dilemma of having no free will (determinism) we can not be morally responsible for our actions lest there is a variable that can determine morality (I am arguing this variable must be god). Now you can deny the fact that there is no free will, like climate change deniers and anti-vaccers, or you could like truett argue that despite us having no free will we should be morally responsible for our actions and argue why still that morality isn't derived from god (for which you still need good arguments to support the thesis). Now which one will you be?
Even if are subconscious brain makes all the decisions before the consciously know about it we still have free will. Our brain is in control of are thoughts, so we have free will. If we don't have free will, what makes you think your god is in control? Your just it's puppet to play with. No god(s) are needed for morals, humans make up their own morals. Humans make laws to punish immoral behavior. If your god is in control, why do we have laws?
My friend god is dead. We have killed him in 1882.
Firstly if you have never been able to make a choice and every choice was a result of our pure biological brains then your person hood could be put away. Lets put this in simple terms. I hope you believe evolution as that is important to this argument.
If we have evolved, then mental faculties like intelligence and EQ must be hereditary. But we use those faculties—which some people have to a greater degree than others—to make decisions. So our ability to choose our fate is not free, but depends on our biological inheritance.
So if you still wish to further discuss the existence of free will I politely ask you to view this article and then argue about this topic as then we will at least be on the same page and can carry on with our rational debate.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/theres-no-such-thin...
Your god died in 1882? Do you have proof of that? I think some of your IQ is hereditary and some is learned. We have free will, and we are responsible for are actions. We have laws because of free will. If we don't have free will, why do we have laws?
(duplicate)
I don't think a lot about free will. Humans make choices all the time. So what? Free will is the excuse and explanation that theist give for an all-powerful and all-knowing god that permit death and sadness and suffering. Because without this excuse, everyone including theists would consider the god of the bible to be a cruel monster.
Firstly a all all-powerfull, omniscient and omnitemporal(exists in every time) god would mean there is no free will because god would know everything that will and has happened, that means you could do nothing that god doesn't know you will do so you would have as a result no free will and if you did do something that god didn't expect like eat a pack of chips and he didn't know you would then you just singlehandedly stripped him a few of his all-mighty powers. Therefore no theist should be able to use that argument lest their god is more like hero (ie. Loki, Poseidon, Odin and etc...). I also consider every holy book evil so you can't use that argument against me.
Now back to the need (not existence) of god!
Imagine someone where to hold your hand put it a gun in it and then physically force you to pull the trigger and kill someone. No matter how hard you try, you couldn't do anything else. You couldn't even kill yourself because the guy's so strong. You had inarguably no free choice to shoot the person and therefore can't be held responsible.
Now I'm saying that nearly all scientist and neurologists are virtually unanimous in the belief that there is no free will and they have scientifically proven that statement. (You can see the Richard Dawkins foundation on more info on the exact reasoning but Truett and I have explained it up there too.)
So my question is how can we be held responsible for our actions if we have no actual say in them? Why is Hitler worse than Ghandi if both had no choice to be who they are and act as they did.
How do you know your god is the all powerful one? We have free will and are responsible for our actions.
My god is not all-powerful, I just stated that an all-powerful god would be a contradiction in itself. I say my god is more like mother-nature. So she is neither all-mighty, all-knowing or omnitemporal. Imagine this goddess of mine as being the laws of nature itself and understanding these laws and scientific research is the only way we can understand her better. Praying is also stupid. If life were to viewed as a game then praying is like saying : "I want to change this games rules." As you see the normal anti-theist arguments cease to be rational when confronted with analytical god or in this case goddess (the gender really doesn't matter).
If you are still arguing about us having free will I politely ask you to read this article or at least shed some light on why you think we have free will. You merely said my goddess does not exist and therefore we have free will. One does not actually prove the other. This article is also not about the existence of any god but the need of a god. Two completely different can of worms.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/theres-no-such-thin...
So your god is the laws of nature? Do you have a religion? If we don't have free will, why do we have laws?
That does not seem accurate.
I understand your healthy dose of skepticism but I wish you first research the accuracy of my claims and then claim that they are not based on scientific information. I wish not to make an analogy between you and climate-change deniers.
Evidence:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06/theres-no-such-thin...
http://io9.gizmodo.com/5975778/scientific-evidence-that-you-probably-don...
https://richarddawkins.net/2016/05/theres-no-such-thing-as-free-will/
and google
As you read what I write below, please keep this in mind, you did ask for it.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
You might notice, that 2 of the sources you presented didn't support your claim. Worse still the other source (gizmodo) explicitly contradicted your claim:
---------------------------
You might notice the source I provided also explicitly contradicts your claim.
---------------------------
You might notice the source I provided is peer reviewed while the 3 you provided are not (which ultimately doesn't matter much since the 3 you provided don't substantiate your claim anyway).
---------------------------
---------------------------
Now don't get me wrong. I'm not arguing for or against the existence of freewill. What I'm saying is the verdict is still out. I'd personally argue that the case hasn't even begun, since (as far as I can tell) we don't yet have a clear definition of freewill that is testable. Because in the current state of affairs, it is easy for one person to say freewill doesn't exist, and for another to say it does, yet not be in contradiction because freewill does not mean the same thing to each person. So until we have that meaningful definition, everything said on the matter is speculation, at best.
Let us then agree to withhold opinions till more substantial proof has been found.
Although the notion that free will isn't provable is only partially correct.
In Determinism and Moral Responsibility by Maurice Mandelbaum, the author makes two distinctions of free will. "Freedom in action"and "freedom in choice". Where "freedom in action" is if you have the ability to do something you choice as in do you have the capability to do something you want. This can be empirically tested and is widely accepted as a prerequisite of moral actions. "Freedom in choice" is the tricky part. Freedom in choice is the notion that you can choose your choice. (What we were debating) It is highly debated if we posses this and moreover if this is also a prerequisite of morality.
P.S. I'm sorry, I didn't know the blue "accurate" was actually link so I thought you merely said I am inaccurate with no reasoning. My fault.
Dividing a task that has been labelled as impossible into a series of smaller tasks then completing only some of the smaller tasks in no way demonstrates that the original task is possible. To be clear though, I'm only guessing that it is impossible (or at the very least we are very far away from doing it).
----------------------------------------
I'm disturbed by these two quotes. Are you suggesting they are somehow consistent with each other? Or did you change your mind between the time in which you wrote them?
----------------------------------------
Finally I'd like to present a dilemma/thought experiment:
Person A is brain damaged so that when presented with 2 options he always calculates which he thinks is best for him (with admittedly incomplete/incorrect information), then rolls a die and if he gets a 1 he picks the option he calculated is worse, and if he gets a 2 though 6 he picks the one he calculated is better. Does Person A have freewill? If no, what exactly do we need to add to him (assuming we could magically tinker with his head) to give him free will. If yes, what would we need to remove to destroy his freewill?
Yes the second one is true, now that I reflect upon my words. (I shall answer in the view of having no free will) I'd have to say no because the die can be calculated. What we would need to add to the human would be defiance to natural laws.
(From the view of belief in free will) Yes he has free will because he choose to throw the die. Even if the die is fake. You need not ad anything for him to have free will. And to take it away you must take his consciousness away or at least the ability to act upon that consciousness (The movie "a clockwork orange" represents this dilemma nicely if you have seen it).
Well if we replace the die with a true random source then he will have free will? Does that seem right to you?
Interesting comment, vfd.
Why should "choice" have any relevance to morality? If we accept that morality is "the good" for society, and that society is comprised of individuals, and that starvation is "bad" for individuals, wouldn't being purposefully starved to death by one who had no choice in doing so still be "bad"? And if we accept that "evil" is the surplus of the "bad", the infliction of unnecessary suffering on another, then wouldn't one who throws a feast in which the starving individual is forced to sit but not partake still evil?
I think the question is not of absolute morality as demanded of religion for its god, but of objective morality as defined for us by nature. We must eat, shelter, drink, reproduce - these are our biological imperatives as humans. As almost all living creatures, in fact. Meeting these imperatives I think must be considered the most basic form of "the good", of morality. If this is the case, doesn't nature itself obviate any need for supernature, for a god?
The reason free will is a prerequisite to morality is because how can we judge somebody if they had no choice in doing what they did. If somebody else forced you to kill somebody (as in literally held your hand and put gun in it) then your are not guilty of murdering someone because you never could've done anything else. And if Hitler never had a chance to do anything different why should he be judged by his actions?
You rob me. You do not have free will. You are just, by your nature, a robber. I can judge that you are a robber because that's what your actions tell me. Therefore, I will support your incarceration (once found guilty) to help keep society safe from robbery. It makes exactly zero difference if you robbed with or without free will.
What if two people robbed you. One was being forced by the other. He was being physically controlled by the other person. You can not judge him for the actions he did because he as a consciousness didn't act immoral only his body did something that couldn't resist. He is innocent or would you incarcerate him too? And if yes by which logic and moral law?
Did ya see the "if found guilty" in my post? Do I need to add "in a court of law" for you to understand the difference?
I think you're confusing morality with agency. The outcome of the situation in your example isn't determined by the lack of agency in the evildoer, but in the consequences of the act. Thus the harm done is immoral, and objective, whereas the capacity for agency or free will on the part of the evildoer is subjective and ultimately ( as free will ) unknowable. To argue ( as Kant did ) that morality requires agency is to argue that morality is fundamentally impossible to judge.
Your concern with guilt suggests a deeper interest in punishment, but as a measure of morality guilt and punishment are irrelevant. Such concepts result from cultural perspectives, and are by definition subjective and perhaps even arbitrary. Yet you are led by your demand for judgment to assert the ultimate cultural standard, which would be "god". But just as Kant's recipe for moral servitude relied on ingredients which cannot be obtained, so too does your wish for a god and judge. Not because god doesn't exist, mind you, but because free will is impossible to demonstrate, and resistant even to definition. So the basis of your standard of judgment will always be subjective, even if "god's", for whose god shall be the judge? God the judge is a projection of the judgment you yourself demand.
That last argument is ingenious, thank you very much. But I speak not of punishment. I merely mean to ask if this person can be moral or immoral. Judged not by god but by our rationality. If you can find a true and rational ethic that proves the immorality of Hitler even if he had no free will in doing so. Then there is no need for a goddess.
Now you argue that morality should nor be judged by the moral agents "free will" or "lack of free will" but it should only be the result of the actions that counts. Now here I must, not on a metaphysical level, but in a ethical level disagree. I do believe that a deontological ethic is needed for us humans as we are not omniscient.
The reason is that if we judge only by the end result and not by the action itself, the following dilemma and others will arise:
There is a man dying in front of you. You can easily save him with no risk; and lets say you do. And unbenounced to you he is the great great great grandfather of a more evil Hitler who will kill billions of people. So did you do something ethically wrong by saving him? Human intellect is only so bright and we can only see so much of our consequences. So may I suggest we base morality on the action and not the result. So don't think that: this murder will save many more lives. Instead think: no matter what the reason is, the act of murder is wrong. The person dying and the consequences his life and death have should have no result on the morality of the action of murder.
Thanks for the well considered follow up. I think we move closer to the crux of the matter as we clarify our terms, and your clarification of the question as "if this person can be moral or immoral" is helpful indeed. I'm not sure I agree that a person can "be" moral or immoral, for if morality is "the good" then one can be in a state of greater or lesser morality, but one cannot be said to be "the good" itself. But Kant argued duty was necessary because one's motives exert some qualitative influence on the morality of our actions. One gets no credit for doing "good" in Kant's view if one is motivated to do good by the reward it brings oneself. Thus rule following is necessary to establish any kind of shared morality, and one's personal moral quality might be defined as the distance between one's desire and the rule one chooses to follow instead. So Kant needs an objective moral standard, and - like you - he settled on the concept of "god" to do it.
Kant didn't believe even god could be objective, however, unavailable as it is to our senses. So he argued that religion serves this purpose, and in so doing committed himself to the very error he tried to correct. It is perhaps forgivable for one so sublimely intelligent as Kant to make this mistake in an age in which Christianity was nearly universal to any extent he might travel, but the sheer number of religions and gods makes this approach as doomed to subjectivity as the subjective motivations themselves.
Perhaps Kant's dedication to pure reason blinded him to something rather more fundamentally objective than the absolute. 18th century Europeans were only just beginning to conceive of the body as a material and mechanical, rather than a spiritual and inspired organism. If he had considered this, I'm confident he would've been drawn to the fact that far more objective than religious claims is the hunger one feels when one hasn't eaten in too long, or the pain of exposure, and even of isolation. As this is true for all humans, of all religions, in all places, here we find an objective source for morality which can truly meet the needs he set out for deontology..
So enters your concern about free will: if we are truly materialistic, mechanistic beings then aren't our motivations simply determined? I don't actually propose answers for the question of free will and determination, only more questions. In this case I question the connection Kant tried to establish between morality and motives. If badly motivated but incompetent criminal intends harm but somehow benefits his victim instead, can the act be said to be immoral? Who shall judge the motivations of such a one anyway? There is no god on earth but only those who claim one as our deity, and they are all too willing to judge on their god's behalf. Consider the alternate, if a morally motivated individual seeks perfect morality according to an immoral rule, his actions will result in immorality despite his intentions.
I think these problems overwhelm any basis for deontology that one can invent for morality. Because motives cannot be known, and because they are subjective in the first place, no absolute moral standard can be devised, and because of this no set of rules can be known to be moral on this basis, and thus adherence to the rules cannot certify moral quality.
Note that I don't argue man is qualitatively moral or immoral, though he may be. I don't argue that motives are morally unimportant, though they might be. Nor even do I argue that only the result counts - the ends may or may not justify the means. My argument is that "the good" has a basis in biology, in nature, and as such is objectively true. We can fairly say that torture, murder, imprisonment, starvation, overwork, and deprivation are immoral for the human animal. These things are not good. We therefore have no need of a goddess to call Hitler the immoral monster he was, or any other murderer.
So to your example I say the only moral course of action is to save the dying man, and if he is to be the progenitor of Hitler it has no necessary moral connection to the savior. The more challenging scenario of course is if the savior specifically knows what will come of Hitler, but this leads to a quantitative model of morality that I should perhaps save for later.
Interesting conversation, vfd - thanks for hosting it!
Hey, TokyoJones. I really like your quote:
"if a morally motivated individual seeks perfect morality according to an immoral rule, his actions will result in immorality despite his intentions."
I've known so many good hearted, well meaning religious people who are none the less immoral in their actions due to their obedience to a cruel, ancient doctrine. It is one of my absolute least favorite things about religion. I fully expect cruelty from psychopaths and people similarly situated, but to see well meaning people dutifully act callusly toward others due to a set of teachings that advertises itself as the very foundation of morality is too much to bear.
Was it Stephen Weinberg who said it takes religion to make good people do bad things?
Pages