The Problem with Atheists

Self-professed atheists think they have come to the conclusion that there is no god through a process of critical thinking and logical reasoning. They either make the positive intellectually-certain claim “there is no god” or what many believe to be the more “balanced”, “less radical” position of “I have absolutely no reason to believe in god but cannot rule his existence out altogether”. The problem with many atheists is that once they reach this position of god-denial, they think their reasoning is done, and become just as assured of their other positions as the theists they dislike so much, thinking of themselves as “rationalists”.

There is a difference between being an atheist and having a rational worldview though. Being an atheist just means you have taken a position on one particular matter of belief. Atheism is not a worldview or a belief system. It offers absolutely no other descriptive or prescriptive content apart from ‘this person doesn’t believe in god’. The problem with some atheists is that they do indeed think atheism is a worldview.

Atheism belongs only to the question of “god” – which is only one in the myriad field of questions, under the heading of belief. The problem with modern atheists is the same “problem” that plagues the worlds of philosophy and science. They tacitly or openly accept the notion that omniscience is necessary for absolute certainty. Philosophical scepticism permeates their worldview like a disease: we can never be sure of anything; our senses aren’t reliable; certainty is impossible; objectivity is naive; definite statements can’t be made in science; total knowledge is necessary for accurate claims. There is no greater exponent of this scepticism than the postmodern subjectivist with his diabolical multiculturalism. But the scientific community as well as the philosophical one as a rule accept this nihilism as the given.

As an example, how many times have you heard a theist say “you can’t call yourself an atheist – have you examined every part of the universe to see if god exists??” To which the atheist might respond: “I don’t need to examine the entire universe; there might be a god, but I see no reason to believe in one – and the burden of proof is on you.” The atheist is right that the burden of proof is on the theist – but he still cannot be 100% sure of his position, and he unwittingly accepts the philosophical scepticism that the theist smuggles into the question. In the same way that philosophical scepticism says that just because the sun rose yesterday doesn’t mean we can be sure it will rise tomorrow, the atheist who “is committed to reason and logic” refuses to rule out the supernatural, god, ghosts, vampires, goblins, elves, chi, astrology entirely – because he still accepts the nonsensical proposition that definite knowledge is impossible; that omniscience is necessary for certainty; that our senses can be fooling us one from minute to the next. So no matter how “rational” the atheist is, he still has to allow a modicum of irrationality in his worldview: that all the things he rejects might actually exist. But omniscience is not necessary to know that god is impossible and that the supernatural and paranormal are irrelevant anti-concepts that can be dismissed with 100% confidence.

Atheism is not a replacement for religion. That is why many deconvertees feel despondent and nihilistic when their worldview is shattered, as I once did. Religion is a complete worldview – it is an attempt to provide a complete philosophy, in that it attempts to account for knowledge, metaphysics, morality, politics, and aesthetics. It fails – but I think many atheists don’t realise how powerful religion is – it is powerful because it is important, and it is important because it represents a true human need: a philosophy for living. Religion doesn’t answer that need, because it is intellectually void and rejects reality – and places the primacy on consciousness and not existence itself. Atheism is not a worldview, and it is most certainly not a philosophy. The other “worldviews” that atheists turn to are not valid philosophies either. One example might be Humanism, a position that claims the universal value and worth of all people. However, Humanism does not give a definite objective definition of morality and it has no political agenda. Peter Singer as one example, a self-professioned Humanist, disagrees with many tenets of Humanism, such as the preferential treatment of human beings. Unfortunately, there is no way for Humanists to decide who is right on this issue. Secular Humanism has come to mean the rejection of religion in a political and moral setting, but it prescribes nothing objective in its place. For this, Humanists are free to discover any code of morality they choose, and are left to argue over what is right, morally and politically. Humanism has no objective definite positions on morality or politics, and what positions are generally accepted by humanists are usually based on some subjective collectivist notion of morality, such as utilitarianism – the idea that the whole is more important than any of its parts, and humans are cells in a superorganism that can and should be sacrificed for the good of the whole. In this respect, utilitarians merely substitute “god” for “society”. Atheists want religion gone, but offer nothing in its place that even resembles a proper philosophy and worldview.

The problem with some atheists is that, in their rush to displace religion and espouse all that religion traditionally rejects, they turn their lives into a quest to “make the world a better place” – and just like the religious, only their definition of better is allowed, and, just like the religious, they want their notions enforced politically. To take just one example: the fundamentalist wants a global theocracy. The modern-day atheist wants a global democracy. Most atheists idealise democracy almost religiously – an absolute to be unquestioned, “the best government we have or can have”; a “necessary evil”, they might say. It never even occurs to many to even question the idea of “universal good”, “making the world a better place (even by force)”, “democracy”. And this is because, just like the theist, many atheists steal the concepts of “good”, “better”, “freedom” from their necessary antecedents and apply them out of context, not realising they are contradicting themselves.

Want some examples?

Animal rights. “Rights” are a moral principle that define freedom of thought and action. Animals are not moral beings and have no conscious freedom of thought and action. They cannot therefore have rights.

Free Democracy. Democracy is unlimited majority rule. It is the enforced demand of a majority that is necessarily at the expense of the minority. It holds the collective as the standard and purpose, and individuals as means to that end. As such, it cannot respect freedom, since freedom only applies to thought and action, and only an individual can think and act. “Free democracy” is an oxymoron.

Making the world a better place. This idealist notion holds other peoples’ lives and happiness as the purpose of one’s own. By this thinking, the only goal in your life should be to make other people happy or maximise happiness in general, even if at your own expense. If there is no one around to please or help, your life has no meanin therefore. What about those who don’t want your help? What about those you don’t subscribe to your collectivist mentality, an example of which is the redistribution of wealth? Do you take their property from them? Do you threaten to arrest them if they don’t share their wealth? “Well”, you rationalise to yourself, it’s for the “greater good”. Wrong. Again, more concept-stealing – how can you enforce a moral action?? It’s a contradiction in terms.

A perfect example of this Modern Atheist is the excellent Christopher Hitchens. I like Hitchens, and I love watching him speak and debate – but his idea of morality is evolved social behaviour. His political ideal is democracy (I believe he is still a socialist). His support of the invasion of Iraq is not grounded primarily on acting in American’s rational self-interest, viz, to remove a very real threat – but as an act of altruism to “save” the Iraqi people and make their lives better, even at the expense of thousands of American soldiers. When it came to justifying an objective epistemology and metaphysics based on atheism, Hitchens was put in the shade by the Dinesh D’Souza.

In a recent debate, I encountered several of these “New Atheists” who’d read a little Dawkins and Hitchens and considered themselves rational just because they rejected god. Being an atheist means NOTHING about having a rational worldview – it is only one possible corollary of having such a worldview. As theists love to point out, many atheists committed atrocities just like theists did. Many atheists like to fight on this issue, especially Hitchens and Dawkins, protesting “but they didn’t commit their crimes in the name of atheism!” Who cares? Some of them actually did – the point is that it doesn’t matter: they were atheists, so in and of itself atheism says nothing about a person’s rationality. The war to fight is not theism vs atheism, it is irrationalism vs rationalism, subjectivity vs objectivity. And then, the war is there to fight only if it is of value to YOU. It is not a purpose in itself; not a campaign to spend your life selflessly pursuing.

There is one philosophy that I accept to the best of my knowledge. One that rejects philosophical scepticism; one that refuses to fight on the nihilistic grounds of the irrationalist; one that knows what its foundations are; one that has an objective account of reality and knowledge; one that has an objective morality; objective politics; and defines the proper values and virtues of human life. One that states that “the highest moral purpose man can pursue is his own happiness”; that life is an end in itself; that our lives are not sacrificial objects for the sakes of others – they our lives are our own and belong to us and no one else. A philosophy that states that reason is our primary means for survival – and every else flows from this. This is of course Ayn Rand’s Objectivism.

It’s not my purpose in life to “convert” people, and I don’t live to win people over to Objectivism or do their thinking for them; I don’t live to “make the world a better place” – each of us must make our lives as good as possible, and that includes caring for those we value. All I would like to point out is that many atheists these days are confused about their philosophical premises, even the “experts” like Dawkins and Hitchens. A person who honestly seeks a rational worldview would do well to study Objectivism, especially those “rational” atheists out there who despise religion so much yet cannot justify many of their own subjective notions.

Animal Welfare and Cloning

“The RSPCA has called for an immediate ban on cloning animals for food following a report questioning the ethical justification of doing so.” - http://news.uk.msn.com/Article.aspx?cp-documentid=7291435

The European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies (EGE) did not categorically rule out the idea but said: “Considering the current level of suffering and health problems of surrogate dams and animal clones, the Group has doubts as to whether cloning for food is justified.”

The EGE, following studies from the European Food Safety Authority and the US Food and Drug Administration, has concluded that food from cloned animals is safe to eat.

So the question of whether or not we can clone animals for food is settled: we can.

Nikki Osborne from the RSPCA however has said: “Cloning causes untold suffering to the animals in the process, but is purely for commercial benefit. The RSPCA believes that the cost in terms of animal welfare in no way justifies any perceived benefits of cloning.”

For a start, I don’t want the law of this country changed simply because of what the RSPCA or anyone else “believes”.

The EGE states: “In the Amsterdam Treaty animals are recognised as ’sentient’ beings and, therefore, while meat production is important in the human diet, and the slaughter of animals a necessity, it should always be clear that the way in which we treat animals should be in accordance with the already existing animal welfare and health standards required in EU legislation.”

This doesn’t quite follow: if it’s acceptable to eat animals for food, and if it’s acceptable to kill them for food, what does it matter if the animals are procreated through natural methods, or cloned? What is it about the process of cloning that somehow contravenes animal welfare?

“However, in addition to these standards, the Group believes that additional requirements should also be taken in intensive animal breeding, in particular the guidance in animal welfare provided by the World Organisation for Animal Health, namely the five freedoms, from hunger; thirst and malnutrition; from fear and distress; from physical and thermal discomfort; from pain, injury and disease; and freedom to express normal patterns of behaviour.”

This kind of reasoning is symptomatic of a warped-view of morality and freedom, and is rooted in our society’s altruistic and utilitarian mentality. To talk about freedom from hunger, thirst, malnutrition, fear and distress, physical and thermal discomfort, pain, injury and disease – is nonsensical. There can be no “freedom from starvation” unless you have the means to acquire food. There can be no “freedom from pain” unless you are protected from any person causing you harm. There is no such thing as “freedom from disease” – there is only the freedom to purchase medicine and healthcare to protect yourself from disease.

Freedom is a concept that applies to an entity’s actions. Specifically, it assumes an entity has the capacity to be free, that is, to choose its actions and course of life accordingly. Because human beings are rational volitional beings with free will, and the capacity to make moral decisions over a lifetime, freedom is a necessary Right that arises because of the type of beings we are. To be more precise, this fundamental freedom, this fundamental Right is this: the Right to life. Now, animals are not free-willed rational volitional beings, and have no capacity to make moral decisions. Unlike humans, animals are automatically equipped with the knowledge and instinct they need to survive. To take about freedom for animals ignores the very nature of freedom; because animals have no ability to make free rational moral choices, they have no “right” to freedom.

“Infringements of the above criteria would need to be balanced by important benefits to human beings. The EGE has however doubts whether infringements of these standards can be justified by the benefits obtained by current procedures in cloning animals for food production.”

The EGE is trying to balance animal “rights” with human benefits. But animals have no rights, so any attempt to balance human and animal rights will always produce a contradiction, and it is humans who will be seen as the criminals although no crime has been committed.

What really matters is this: cloning animals for food could produce (in theory) limitless free sources of nutrition for millions of humans. There is no need to compare the human benefit with anything else: only humans have rights, and what is moral here is what a rational being needs to do to sustain its life – if a human needs to kill an animal to eat, the moral thing is to kill it. If a human needs to clone an animal in order to kill it to eat, the moral thing is to clone it and kill it.

The problem with the RSPCA and EGE’s reasoning is this: their morality is based on the utilitarian notion that suffering is the standard for morality. But this is patently untrue: suffering, like happiness, is the end result of a course of action. Morality is our guide to a course of action – not the result. Morality is an objective code to help us make decisions, it is not determined post-action by weighing up the suffering and happiness of those concerned; (and who concerned? How many people? Which people? Anything that can suffer? How is this even measured?)

The morality of an action is not determined by some arbitrary measure of suffering or pleasure. According to Objectivism, morality is a code of values accepted by choice to guide decisions. Therefore, whatever is necessary and beneficial for the life of a rational being is good – whatever is inhibitive and detrimental to such a being is wrong.

Unfortunately, what we see with comments from the EU and RSPCA is a morality rooted in altruism, in sacrifice – because this is the underlying philosophy of society in general. This sort of ethics does not hold human life as the standard, but rather the standard of suffering, that is, death. Any ban on animal cloning would be an absolute travesty.

21/01/08 Edited to add:

Thanks to Leitmotif for pointing out several errors and ambiguous statements in my article:

When I said freedom applies to an entity’s action, freedom applies to action and thought – all freedom is a corollary of the Right to Life. It makes no sense to speak of one freedom without the other.

Also, forgive me for making it sound that freedom is the same thing as the Right to Life – this was not my intention. It is the Right to life that makes all other Rights possible. It is the Right to Life that makes freedom (intellectual and physical etc) a necessity for human beings.

Animals Have NO Rights

I’ve recently explained what morality is and where rights come from. When discussing what human rights mean, we must define exactly what we’re talking about, and justify our definition. When doing so, another interesting topic arises, which is that of animal rights. I have always held the belief that animals have rights, of a sort. For example, the right “not to suffer”. I was wrong, because animals have no rights at all.

First of all, consider individual rights. A human being is a creature that makes decisions based on reason. Unlike an animal which is automatically equipped with the knowledge to select its values, human beings must discover, through a process of reason, what is good for our lives and what is bad. We discover rational values with our ultimate value, life, as the standard. This code of values to guide our decisions is Objective Morality. Therefore, man, to function as a man, must be a moral being. If he is anything less he is living like a beast, not a human. But in order to make moral decisions he must be free to do so. A man who is coerced to do good or evil, at the point of a gun, is not being allowed to act like a rational being, in other words, like a human being. Where force is present, morality becomes impossible. A man needs his morality to guide his actions whether he is alone or in a crowd. However, when a man is in a social setting, he and the others around him need the freedom to act in order to function as rational beings. What guarantees a person the freedom to act without force in pursuit of his goals? Rights. Therefore, Rights are a moral principle that exist in a social setting to guarantee freedom of action for rational beings.

“There is only one fundamental right (all the others are its consequences or corollaries): a man’s right to his own life. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action; the right to life means the right to engage in self-sustaining and self-generated action—which means: the freedom to take all the actions required by the nature of a rational being for the support, the furtherance, the fulfilment and the enjoyment of his own life.” – The Virtue of Selfishness

Because Rights are moral principles they apply only to moral beings. The purpose of government, in fact the only morally legitimate role of government, is to protect the individual rights of its citizens. To violate the rights of another innocent individual is to be a criminal. Now, because animals do not act based on morality, to give them legally-enforceable rights to guarantee their freedom of action is an egregious contradiction in terms.

Rights apply only to action; to the right to act. For example, no one has the “right to love” – one has the right to seek a mate and win the heart of a member of the opposite sex, but no one has a free entitlement to love. One has the right to sustain one’s life by any means necessary, assuming one doesn’t violate the rights of others; in order to live one needs a job. One is free to act to seek a job; one has NO right to a job. The right to support your own life does not incur an obligation on other people to support your life. Rights only impose a negative obligation on other people, that is: you may not violate MY rights, and I may not violate YOURS.

There is no such thing as the Right “to not suffer”. To quote Leitmotif:

“So, say we grant these animals the right to “protection from torture.” Are we now going to arrest all other animals who break this law by inflicting “torture” on these protected group of animals whom we have just granted these rights? Or does this law only apply to humans, to restrict human activity so that animals can “enjoy” greater freedom and “rights”?”

Suffering is the end result of a course of action, just as happiness is. But, a course of action is dictated by one’s morality. So using suffering or happiness as the standard is to flip the nature of morality on its head. This is the problem with utilitarianism (suffering) and hedonism (happiness). Just because something causes happiness does not make it right, and just because something causes suffering does not make it wrong.

To use an example (I can’t remember the source so any readers are welcome to elucidate): suppose we encounter a sapient alien with all the rational faculty of a human being, but without the capacity to experience any pain or harm. Would this creature still have rights? Of course it would, so the capacity to feel pain (or any level of it) is an invalid standard from which to derive morality, and therefore Rights.

Granting Rights to animals, that would be enforced by government, is to limit the activity of humans, in other words, to prevent the total freedom of mankind in doing whatever he sees necessary to further his life or allow him to flourish. But, remember that rights exist only to protect the action of moral beings. Granting rights to animals is necessarily to sacrifice the rights of humans, which is not only totally irrational, it is grossly immoral. It is immoral, because it treats humans like criminals.

This does not mean that it is “okay” for humans to torture animals. A human being who takes delight in torturing animals is immoral, and such people should be condemned. But there is a difference between the moral and the legal. Fox-hunting, bull-fighting, cock-fighting etc may be deemed immoral, but they are certainly not illegal.

 

(I’ve not gone into excessive detail here so that any minor issues can be settled in any discussion that follows…)

Edited to add the following, which I posted on a discussion forum on this topic. This is in response to the arguments from an environmentalist pro-animals rights position that tried to resort to evolutionary science to justify morality and animal rights:

“Misanthropic Scott is still ignoring everything I’ve said on this subject for the last few days. I have no problem with science explaining human behavioural trends from an evolutionary point of view. The problem, and this is the last time I’m going to say this, is that it is explaining the wrong thing.

Evolution selects for the success of procreation, whether right or wrong. It has side-effects, whether right or wrong. The affinity of humans to think magically and superstitiously is undeniable, and yet a side-effect of our pattern-recognition faculty in our brains. The very thing that has allowed us to evolve as pattern-seeking creatures and drive our intelligence, has an unfortunate side-effect: magical thinking. Now, no one would call magical thinking “moral”, it is a part of our behaviour that can be explained evolutionarily.

Now, animals that do not attack each other; animals that form social contracts; animals that remember acts of generosity; animals that sacrifice themselves for the “collective good” etc; are NOT, and I repeat NOT acting morally. They are NOT acting immorally. They are acting as a result of evolutionary pressure to behaviour in a way that their genes have selected for. Richard Dawkins has shown that “selfish” genes can produce affects that are apparently “altruistic”, because it indirectly furthers the propagation of particular genes; natural selection will favour any system this is evolutionary stable (ESS).

Now, human behaviour that some people call “moral” can be explained in evolutionary terms. However, this is a faulty use of the term “moral”, and here we are talking past each other. The Objectivist ethics holds that morality is a system to be DISCOVERED, it is a philosophy for living on this earth; for each man and for every man; it is a code of values to guide actions. Morality is a topic that belongs in philosophy, but in seeking to explain what morality is and its source, one must check one’s philosophical premises. If one’s premise is that morality is altruistic/collectivist behaviour, one will seek to explain it scientifically, and how evolution selected for this behaviour. But if one rejects the notion that morality is altruistic, and that MORALITY is the rational decision making and action of thinking beings, any attempt to explain it evolutionarily is irrelevant, because, as I keep explaining, one is trying to explain the wrong thing.

It comes down to the fundamentals of one’s philosophy; the basis of morality for example. Now, the morality of altruism etc is rife in society today, and that is why Humanists and atheists, even the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens etc, accept it. We have the likes of Kant to thank for altruistic “duty” ethics, and altruism is at the core of religion ethics; it is curious that atheists don’t even realise this themselves. Altruism/collectivist ethics are subjective, and any subjective ethics reduce to nihilism, in which case morality becomes impossible. Only an objective morality can make morality possible. That is why we must reject any system of ethics that is not objective and not derived from reality. But we must make sure we’re talking about the right thing.

This talk of brain studies and human behaviour is largely irrelevant; morality is not acting in a way that evolution has selected for. Humans largely have the capacity to control their behaviour; this is because we can think rationally, something no other creature can do. ONLY a rational being can act morally, so only a human being can be a moral being. Therefore, Rights (legal protection against the use of force) can ONLY apply to moral beings, because it is only moral beings that need freedom for force in order to act as the TYPE OF BEINGS THEY ARE.

I encourage any further discussion to be centred philosophically on the concept of morality and rights, and leave the beauty of evolutionary science (of which I’m a fan) out of the discussion. One must start with one’s premise of morality. Using evolution to explain morality begs the question; it assumes that you know what morality already is: I’ve explained what Objectivist morality is, what is YOUR alternative?; that is the proper focus for discussion here. Any other comments about evolution that ignore what I’ve written here will just be ignored by me.”