Atheism and Materialsm

[Trailblazer]

Why has atheism so embraced materialism?

Another useful question is why theists embrace materialism, given most religions teach detachment from this world.
Frankly I consider this to be hypocrisy.

 

[Trailblazer]

No, certainly no more than most religious people are.

That's certainly true. I often wonder why nobody sees it.

 

[Trailblazer]

Pretty much everyone around me is an atheist. It's the default around here.

Pretty much everyone around me is a believer. It's the default around here.

 

[Rival]

Another useful question is why theists embrace materialism, given most religions teach detachment from this material world.
Frankly I consider this to be hypocrisy.

I mean physicalism.

 

[Trailblazer]

I mean physicalism.

So I guess you mean belief in what is physical as opposed to what is spiritual.
It seems to me that if believers believed in what is spiritual they would not be attached to what is physical.

 

[Rival]

So I guess you mean belief in what is physical as opposed to what is spiritual.
It seems to me that if believers believed in what is spiritual they would not be attached to what is physical.

I mean the belief that nothing beyond physical matter exists. So no souls or spirits or anything.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

I mean the belief that nothing beyond physical matter exists. So no souls or spirits or anything.

I think you're conflating two different things:

- what does someone believe exists or not?
- how many categories do they group the things they believe exist into?

A physicalist could believe in souls or spirits; they'd just believe that these things have a physical basis.

 

[blü 2]

Would you agree that to be an atheist is to be a materialist? So many of the atheists one encounters today seem not only to reject God, but the idea of the 'other' as a whole. Anything that cannot be discovered by one of any scientific methods is rejected. It is a very modern view, I think.

Why has atheism so embraced materialism? Would you say anyone in Antiquity or pre-Enlightenment who claimed to be an atheist would fit our modern definition of 'atheist'? Would they concur with materialism and reductionism? There also seems to be a disdain for Philosophy (see Stephen Hawking for 'Philosophy is dead').

Why is this?

I think it's the other way round. Certainly it is for me.

In my view "reality" is the world external to the self, which we know about through our senses. If God is "real" that means that God has objective existence, is found in nature just as my air, food, water, shelter, society, parents, partner, children, etc, are found in nature.

If God is not found in nature ─ and plainly [he]'s not, or we'd have endless videos, interviews, unambiguously real interactions with [him] ─ then the only way [he] can exist is purely as a concept, a thing imagined, in an individual brain. Indeed gods must be human artifacts, and no objective test can distinguish the manner in which "God" (or "a god") exists from the manner in which Donald Duck exists.

The same is true of the "spiritual", the "immaterial", the "supernatural" ─ they're only found as concepts / things imagined too.


I don't have a disdain for philosophy. There is a philosophy of science, for example. But Plato's "forms", Kant's "universals", and other appeals to things taken to be "real" but not found in nature, are simply not supported by any examinable evidence. Whereas those things are simply explained by the way humans have evolved to think in concepts. Thus abstractions and generalizations abound in the way we think. "This chair" is the concept of something real, while "a chair" is the concept of the abstraction "chairness". In such examples the link with reality is plain.

Likewise "love" is the name of patterns of human behavior, usually around the human tendency to bond, partner to partner, parent to child, family member to family member, group member to group member. This is the result of the brain's biochemistry, though I'd exaggerate if I said it was all fully understood. However, our reaction to our own biochemistry with testosterone (makes males and females randy), adrenaline (fight or flight), oxytocin (thought to be the common factor in bonding) and so on are parts of the process.

Meanwhile, mathematics, symbolic logic and similar systems deal in wholly conceptual things that have no real counterpart, which is why you never run over an uninstantiated 2 when you're driving. It follows that in physics I disagree with the mathematical Platonism of Roger Penrose, who thinks the manner in which physics can express the behavior of nature in terms of maths must mean that maths has some unexplained kind of objective existence. No it doesn't. It means that we can describe physical interactions in mathematical terms because those interactions are consistent ─ unless and until we find a case where they don't do what the maths says.

Reductionism is implicit in materialism and is definitely a work in progress. At present there are serious gaps in the project ─ but no realistic alternative to materialism.

 

[Pudding]

Would you agree that to be an atheist is to be a materialist?

No.

The definition of atheist is "a person who disbelieves or lacks belief in the existence of God or gods".

The definition of materialist is "a person who supports the theory that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications"

There is nowhere in the definition of atheist which states that people are require to become materialist in order to qualify themselves as an atheist.

So many of the atheists one encounters today seem not only to reject God, but the idea of the 'other' as a whole.

What 'other'? Please be specific.

How many atheists reject this unspecified 'other'? What is their percentage from all atheists?

According to sociologist Phil Zuckerman, broad estimates of those who have an absence of belief in a deity range from 500 to 750 million people worldwide.[5] Other estimates state that there are 200 million to 240 million self-identified atheists worldwide, with China and Russia being major contributors to those figures.[3] According to sociologists Ariela Keysar and Juhem Navarro-Rivera's review of numerous global studies on atheism, there are 450 to 500 million positive atheists and agnostics worldwide (7% of the world's population) with China alone accounting for 200 million of that demographic.
Link

Anything that cannot be discovered by one of any scientific methods is rejected.

That's good. Holy Unicorn, Flying Spaghetti Monster and Banana God also cannot be discovered by one of any scientific methods, so that's why i reject to believe they exists as real being.

Do you also reject Holy Unicorn, Flying Spaghetti Monster and Banana God? If you do reject them, why? Is it because they cannot be discovered by one of any scientific methods?

It is a very modern view, I think.

As long as it's a correct view, then whatever whether it's modern or not modern.

Why has atheism so embraced materialism?

How many atheist embraced materialism? What is their percentage from all atheists?

Would you say anyone in Antiquity or pre-Enlightenment who claimed to be an atheist would fit our modern definition of 'atheist'?

If they don't believe at least one god exists as real being, then sure, they would fit our modern definition of 'atheist'.

List of god: Yahweh, Zeus, Athena, Odin, Apollo...etc.

Would they concur with materialism and reductionism?

If they concur with materialism and reductionism, then they would concur with materialism and reductionism. Vice versa.

There also seems to be a disdain for Philosophy (see Stephen Hawking for 'Philosophy is dead').

So what?

 

[Yerda]

Here is the difficulty I see with your analogy. In the case of the empirical world, the world itself isn't changing. A tree is a tree, a rock a rock, the same celestial bodies move in the same relative way to each other. What is being refined, is our understanding of why and how.

Ok. We could say that an act is an act. An event is an event. Whether it is morally right or wrong, should and shouldn't etc is what is refined and that seems to me to be analagous to the empirical situation.

In the case of morals, we do not have a uniform and unchanging set that we are trying to decide whether they originate from some universal externals source, or that they are created by human beings internally. Ethical systems made up of morals, morays, and taboos appear to correlate more closely to cultural and political factors and group size, with some aspects seeming quite arbitrary yet persistent.

As to convergence through learning and growing, this speaks to me of trial and error. It would not speak to me of either internal or external universal moral facts. Convergence could be explained in terms of evolutionary fitness. Certain common rules might be required for groups to remain intact given the set of instinctual behaviors possessed by human beings. That would certainly still make it a human derived cause.

Just my thoughts regarding moral facts.

Fair points. I have a slightly different view of this that is the result of what I've read and learned. I imagine you have come to your view by a similar process.

To some extent what I believe about morality is motivated by a desire to be able to call things wrong when I see them as such but I'm happy to admit I don't have solid answers. Just kind of winging it on the impression I've developed over time.

It's worth adding that moral and ethical systems could all be totally wide of the mark while moral facts are still a thing.

 

[MikeF]

IMO

It's worth adding that moral and ethical systems could all be totally wide of the mark while moral facts are still a thing.

Yes, perhaps. They certainly do not feel as if they have been perfected yet.

To some extent what I believe about morality is motivated by a desire to be able to call things wrong when I see them as such but I'm happy to admit I don't have solid answers.

You are by no mean alone in this view. Many share this desire.

For my part, I try if I can, to set my preferences aside in hopes of seeing things as they are. My strong sense is that we have been making it up all along. If that is the case (and this is where preference comes back into the equation), it behooves us to create a progressive ethical system that can adapt and improve as we continue to grow and change as a species. And as you say, I could be totally off the mark.

 

[PearlSeeker]

If there's anything I disdain it's deontology and virtue ethics where rules for social conduct are set based on things like religious rules or cultural virtues, rejecting consideration for social conduct based on its impact, rather than on its virtue. I find it presumptuous, sometimes willfully ignorant and wishful thinking over practicality.

Considering impact of conduct (prudence) and practicality are virtues itself, aren't they?

 

[PearlSeeker]

Would you agree that to be an atheist is to be a materialist?

No. Thomas Nagel is an example of the opposite.

Thomas Nagel - Wikipedia

 

[Augustus]

For instance, Lucretius wrote, a few decades before Jesus Birth in His De Rerum Natura. Long before Rutherford and Darwin.

(the atoms).. moving randomly through space, like dust motes in a sunbeam, colliding, hooking together, forming complex structures, breaking apart again, in a ceaseless process of creation and destruction. There is no escape from this process. ... There is no master plan, no divine architect, no intelligent design.

All things, including the species to which you belong, have evolved over vast stretches of time. The evolution is random, though in the case of living organisms, it involves a principle of natural selection. That is, species that are suited to survive and to reproduce successfully, endure, at least for a time; those that are not so well suited, die off quickly. But nothing — from our own species, to the planet on which we live, to the sun that lights our day — lasts forever. Only the atoms are immortal ...

He didn't write that though. It was written a few years ago by Steven Greenblatt in his book The Swerve. You are only wrong by a couple of thousand years though, and about the author

At best it is a very generous, hindsight driven summary of Lucretius that tries to make him seem as modern as possible and in accordance with the author's person ideological preferences (more cynically it's a deliberate misrepresentation to help sell a book).


A review of the book if you like:

"Simply put, The Swerve did not deserve the awards it received because it is filled with factual inaccuracies and founded upon a view of history not shared by serious scholars of the periods Greenblatt studies"

Los Angeles Review of Books

 

[Rival]

He didn't write that though. It was written a few years ago by Steven Greenblatt in his book The Swerve. You are only wrong by a couple of thousand years though, and about the author

At best it is a very generous, hindsight driven summary of Lucretius that tries to make him seem as modern as possible and in accordance with the author's person ideological preferences (more cynically it's a deliberate misrepresentation to help sell a book).


A review of the book if you like:

"Simply put, The Swerve did not deserve the awards it received because it is filled with factual inaccuracies and founded upon a view of history not shared by serious scholars of the periods Greenblatt studies"

Los Angeles Review of Books

I didn't even know I was waiting for this but I was waiting for this.

 

[Colt]

Would you agree that to be an atheist is to be a materialist? So many of the atheists one encounters today seem not only to reject God, but the idea of the 'other' as a whole. Anything that cannot be discovered by one of any scientific methods is rejected. It is a very modern view, I think.

Why has atheism so embraced materialism? Would you say anyone in Antiquity or pre-Enlightenment who claimed to be an atheist would fit our modern definition of 'atheist'? Would they concur with materialism and reductionism? There also seems to be a disdain for Philosophy (see Stephen Hawking for 'Philosophy is dead').

Why is this?

On the matter of materialism from one of my favorite books:


“To say that mind “emerged” from matter explains nothing. If the universe were merely a mechanism and mind were unapart from matter, we would never have two differing interpretations of any observed phenomenon. The concepts of truth, beauty, and goodness are not inherent in either physics or chemistry. A machine cannot know, much less know truth, hunger for righteousness, and cherish goodness.

Science may be physical, but the mind of the truth-discerning scientist is at once supermaterial. Matter knows not truth, neither can it love mercy nor delight in spiritual realities. Moral convictions based on spiritual enlightenment and rooted in human experience are just as real and certain as mathematical deductions based on physical observations, but on another and higher level.

If men were only machines, they would react more or less uniformly to a material universe. Individuality, much less personality, would be nonexistent.“. Urantia Book 1955

Materialist seem to be unaware that while we have our being within the material realm, observation and speculations about the material is to be apart from it.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

I think it's the other way round. Certainly it is for me.

In my view "reality" is the world external to the self, ...

Your view is not external to your self. So your system starts with a functional contradiction,
So let us play the standard absurd version of reality. What you wrote as it connects back to your self/view, is not real and it didn't happen in reality, because it is not reality. In fact your thoughts and you don't exist as real. Rather you only exist as real non-existence for which in practice, you are irrelevant, meaningless, worthless, useless, irrational and all of that jazz, because you are not in reality.
Further I didn't actually write this, because if you are really in non-reality,so I wouldn't know that you wrote it.

As long as you insist on starting your system like that and them claim you and I agree on that, because you then claim a we, I am one of them. for which I am with really reality evidence irrelevant, meaningless, worthless, useless, irrational and all of that jazz and I will continue to answer you from non-reality.

So the rest is meaningless as garbage in garbage out, because you don't actually start with how the everyday world works for humans.
You are in reality with your self, because otherwise you couldn't do what you do.

 

[Altfish]

Really? You think just as high a percentage of religious people are materialists as atheists are materialists?

To date I've met zero religious materialists. Are they all in England?

I have just checked the meaning of Materialistic: "excessively concerned with material possessions; money-oriented"

May I give you the party of god, aka the GOP as a group of religious people who fall firmly into that category.
All those mega church preachers with multiple cars, houses and private jets
The Catholic Church and the Church of England are not poor either

 

[Rival]

I have just checked the meaning of Materialistic: "excessively concerned with material possessions; money-oriented"

May I give you the party of god, aka the GOP as a group of religious people who fall firmly into that category.
All those mega church preachers with multiple cars, houses and private jets
The Catholic Church and the Church of England are not poor either

This isn't the kind of materialism I am talking about, though. I'm talking about the philosophy of materialism - scientific naturalism, physicalism, whatever one decides to call it.

 

[blü 2]

Your view is not external to your self. So your system starts with a functional contradiction,

My view doesn't assume my view is external to my self. My view is that my senses are capable of informing me of the world external to me.

So let us play the standard absurd version of reality. What you wrote as it connects back to your self/view, is not real and it didn't happen in reality, because it is not reality.

How then do you define reality? Are you asserting I'm not real?

In fact your thoughts and you don't exist as real.

My thoughts exist as real brain states. The contents of my thoughts are my subjective reality, not objective reality.

If you don't think I'm also objectively real, why do you bother posting?