caseydorman

[caseydorman]

Science is, by its very nature, limited and often produces erroneous theories—probably more often than not—because it is limited by current knowledge and concepts. To argue that science can’t explain something is simply to argue that science hasn’t gotten there yet, not that science has inherent limitations. To take what science doesn’t currently explain or what scientists disagree about (e.g. the origin of the universe), and to insert god’s presence and actions as the explanation is to resort to a primitive mythical concept to fill the scientific gap. This is true even if the mythical concept is dressed up in modern scientific, technical language such as simulators producing simulations. To be an atheist means to be able to accept a lack of explanation for many profound events in the natural world without feeling the need to create a mythical or pseusoscientific explanation. Furthermore, to modify the concept of god beyond what is captured by known religions, so that it becomes some natural force that is, in principle, describable by mathematical or scientific terms, is to remove the concept of god from the equation of explanation (and leaving the math and science as being as adequate as we can get right now). It is entirely possible that the actual fact of the universe and its processes is, in principle subject to mathematical description, but that the mathematics is beyond any present or even future human capacity, and, even if such a mathematical description is possible, it will not be amenable to translation into verbal concepts understandable by human minds. This will always leave room for speculation about god to fill in what we don’t understand, but such speculation will remain a deficient verbal and conceptual hypothesis, capable of human understanding, but woefully short of an accurate description of the universe in which we live.

[caseydorman]

@simonpaynton- I’m afraid I differ with all of your points.

Evolution is a process of mutational changes that increase survival being selected by environmental conditions so that they have an advantage in reproductive success. There is no pressure to improve, raw or otherwise.  When environmental circumstances change, reproductive success is altered and sometimes improvements become liabilities. There is no forward purpose to the process.

evolution is not personal in that we, nor other creatures consciously strive for evolutionary improvement. Species show evolutionary progression  ( within a particular environment), but an individual does not- only his or her offspring.

transcendent and universal are not the same thing. Transcendent means above any particular while universal means shared by all. Nervous systems are universal among animals but not transcendent.

[caseydorman]

@simonpaynton  Good question and the answer is yes. In my book I provide some quotes by both Gandhi and MLK, Jr. with regard to their spirituality—one rooted in Hinduism and the other in Christianity—which underlay their  belief in nonviolence. I believe that most of the leaders of nonviolent movements have had a religious basis to their work (e.g. Quakers). Those who challenged my own ability to subscribe to nonviolence without  having a spiritual base comprised a group in which some members were Catholic and others had a more vague “transcendental force” definition of their spirituality, which they accessed partially through meditation. They expressed that, without some belief in a force higher than oneself, which provided an insight into the the true nature of humans and the world they lived in, it was not possible to justify a belief that people should not express violence toward one another, or to sustain the motivation to participate in nonviolent resistance. I’m sure their belief was more complex and deeper than I have characterized it, but we didn’t discuss it further. We ran into some difficulty when they insisted that all official pronouncements from our group contain reference to the spiritual basis of our mission and I objected that they could fail to gain the support of many nonviolent atheists in doing so. They insisted that there was no such thing as a nonviolent atheist and when I pointed at myself, they asserted that I might not be religious, but I was spiritual because I believed in nonviolence, and that my only problem was that I didn’t realize it. Their argument seemed circular to me.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 10 months ago by caseydorman.

[caseydorman]

@reg ,@simon—when I refer to spirituality, I am talking about a belief in a supernatural dimension (one that does not obey the laws of matter and energy), usually which is thought to provide order to the universe, but, in the past, this may have been restricted to one’s local environment (e.g  belief in the supernatural powers of local plants and animals in animistic cultures). Usually this is viewed as external to humans, but encompassing them in the sense that their lives are able to share it in some way.  Nonbelief in spirituality does not deny an overriding order to the universe (nor does it assert it), but only that if such order exists it is material (energy and matter and higher order complexity) and, in principle discoverable by scientific methods and does not represent a consciousness or purpose, both of which are confined to living beings.

For most people, spiriuality is related to religion, although for some it is more vague and not identifiable with any anthropomorphic entity, which most religions posit. A personal experience may be profound and life changing and even radically different from everyday experience as in having visions, drug experiences or sudden mathematical, musical or other types of insights. I believe that all of such experiences can, in principle,  be explained via biology, physics, and psychology and it is their interpretation as suggesting something outside of the normal workings of material substances, which might give them a spiritual dimension, but the spirituality, in such a case, is related to the interpretation, not to an explanation of the cause of the phenomena itself. This spiritual interpretation, as a belief, can and often does have an effect on behavior and that effect may be positive or negative, depending on one’s point of view. That said, this could well be an idiosyncratic definition of spirituality, since it appears to mean almost as many things as there are people who subscribe to it or deny it.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 10 months ago by caseydorman.
• This reply was modified 8 years, 10 months ago by caseydorman.

[caseydorman]

One doesn’t base his philosophy of nonviolence (or of many other things) on his atheism, since atheism is compatible with almost any nonreligious philosophy, including those that espouse violence. Instead, the atheist bases most of his personal philosophy on nonreligious ideas, which can include evolutionary ideas, humanistic ideas, politically liberal or conservative ideas, or even bigoted, racist ideas.

[caseydorman]

I think you are arguing against a position I have not taken. My argument is simply that spirituality is not a necessary condition for having a nonviolent moral philosophy. I take that position because many people have argued that one can’t have a moral philosophy that endorses nonviolence (or love or kindness), if one is an atheist, since spirituality must be the basis for such a philosophy. I disagree with that. I am not arguing that most people who endorse nonviolence are not spiritual, nor that most atheists are nonviolent, nor that atheism is superior to spirituality as a basis for a moral philosophy. The latter question depends upon one’s spritiual ideas and must acknowledge that being atheist is simply a state of nonbelief that does not imply any other belief system or philosophical position, since atheists are free to disagree with each other on everything except the existence of god.

[caseydorman]

Simon: You and I agree that cooperation is an evolved trait in humans, more so than in almost any other species (not sure about bees and ants, for instance), and that most of human interaction has favored cooperation, and often self-sacrifice over direct competition or aggression, despite the common view that evolution favors aggression. But, as I point out in my book, competition,dominance and aggressive violence are also part of our evolutionary genetic make up and are responsible for millions of human deaths in wars. Sometimes even the warlike behavior of individual soldiers is related to otherwise cooperative tendencies including sacrificing one’s life for the group. So both tendencies comprise the human personality. In terms of national policies, police behaviors, and reactions to strangers, much of our behavior historically and and present contains aggression and the question for those who espouse nonviolence is how to prevent the aggressive side from becoming the policy of our  communities. That is where culture comes in, since cultlural influences will determine whether or not we pursue violence, at least on a national scale, and even if cooperation is built into our genome, it will dominate or not dominate expression in our behavior in any particular situation based on cultural influences. Spiritual ideas are part of culture and have influenced both nonviolent and violent approaches to interpersonal and international relations. Most people have some spiritual ideas or intuitions and it may be a natural tendency to develop such, since it is hard to find cultures, historically, that have not had them, although they have often been a source of violence as well as kindness. But the fact that humans have a tendency to be spriritual, does not mean that being spiritual is either something that characterizes every human, or that it is necessary in order for one to have a moral or ethical theory that favors nonviolence over violence as a way of solving problems. I have tried to show that one can favor nonviolence as both a practical and an ethical stance without resorting to a spiritual justification for it. Most arguments for nonviolence are spiritual ones (as are many arguments for war, captial punishment, and honor killing), which leaves the impression among many that being atheist (not just nonreligious, but also nonspiritual) precludes having a moral basis for being nonviolent. That just isn’t so.

[caseydorman]

Michael Tomasello’s newest book, “A Natural History of Human Morality” (2016) gives a good evolutionary and historical cultural account of the development of human morality.

[caseydorman]

Simon: Thanks for the observations on my brief book. The volume by Fry sounds interesting and something I need to read. The evidence for one human killing another during the  hunter-gatherer period (which is probably more akin to murder than to war) comes from multiple sources and is conflicting, but suggestive, as summarized in Harari’s book “Sapiens” published in 2015, which cites archaeological studies from 1999-2007. I’m curious why you think that the “the goal of reducing overall violence sits well within a total overall theory of morality and ethics. This theory is, inevitably, spiritual, in a major sense,” since it is exactly my point that such a theory of morality or ethics does not need to be spiritual, which was also the topic of my earlier book, “Is God Really Necessary?” My point is that most theories of morality or ethics that support nonviolence have had a spiritual basis, but such a basis is not necessary. My arguments for a theory that relies upon both evolutionary and cultural influences, is an example of such a theory, which is not spiritually based.

[caseydorman]

email me at caseylostcoast@gmail.com and I will send you the PDF of “Atheistic Nonviolence” (as well as to anyone else who wants it). It should be available on the UK Amazon, but I don’t mind sending the PDF , not sure how to put it into one of the website replies. Designing a culture is what we do everyday when we write laws regarding behavior and when we engage in civic activities designed to affect the behavior of others or the lessons children in our culture learn as they grow up. More stringent design attempts have occurred in totalitarian societies and in utopian communities. UK and US have designed different societies around issues of gun possession and gun use as well as health care access. Skandinavian countries have designed different societies than the US around issues of taxation and public services. Switzerland has designed a society that embraces neutrality with regard to war. BF Skinner and Aldous Huxley, among others, designed societies on paper (Skinner tried his out for awhile). The Paris Climate agreements design societies around issues of carbon and methane emissions and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights designs a world society around issues of human rights. ISIS tried to design a society that fit fundamentalist interpretations of Sharia Law, etc.

[caseydorman]

Evolution, being change, is not the same as creation, which may be either change or the replacement of nothing by something. Evolution does not need a force to cause or guide it, as it is the shaping of survival outcomes of both nonrandom and random events according to their survival value in their environment. Creation may or may not need a force to cause it, since we do not know, in cases such as the universe or life, exactly how creation occurred. There may be a question about the original creation of the universe, but even witih regard to original creation, it is not clear that it was an event, as we currently view events (if it was a big bang, it probably was, but other models do not view it as a discrete event). In any case, positing an entity that was the force that caused creation, not only leads to an infinite regress, it  says nothing about the characteristics of that force  (it could have been a one-off, nanosecond long force, which no longer exists, for instance). Arriving at anything that resembles most humans current conceptions of God from either the original creation of the universe (again, assuming it meets our conception of an event) or from the course of evolution, is an exercise in imagination, with no evidence to support such a conception.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 10 months ago by caseydorman.
• This reply was modified 8 years, 10 months ago by caseydorman.

[caseydorman]

The will of the non-aggressive can become the rule of the people, both because we inherit the disposition to cooperate  and sacrifice for our neighbors (as well as the disposition to dominate and to be aggressive) and because we can design a culture that rewards nonviolent behavior. Read both Michael Tomasello (e.g. “A Natural History of Human Morality“) and my new small volume, “Atheistic Nonviolence.” (available as a $0.99 Kindle ebook on Amazon.

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