Why atheism is impractical
I have been thinking a lot lately about how to build an atheistic ethic. Sure, I can see how one could try to live so as to maximize one’s own pleasure or sense of fulfillment, and one could argue that a traditional ethic is the best way to do this, etc., etc. But I’m just not seeing it. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think so. If there is no God and no immortality, then I cannot see a way to develop a satisfying ethic, a meaningful rule of life.
It seems to me that things like honor, justice, and love disintegrate without God and immortality. They become the motions of atoms and molecules. I have even tried to imagine how they might be more than that in a materialistic universe. Perhaps, I have thought, they “emerged” from materialistic processes, but have become something more, a higher order, higher level law, but this to is unsatisfying. I don’t find it compelling that I should be “ethical” because some impersonal higher law demands it.
Granted, I may want to be ethical if that is the way to live with the most fulfillment or pleasure, but that is where it stops and that is all there is to it. For some reason I find an ethic that arises from a personal creator who will reward me in this life and the next for ethical behavior, and with whom I can have a personal relationship, to be much more satisfying.
Of course, none of this proves or disproves atheism and theism, but neither is it without value in considering the options.
Ralf Wilmes said,
March 14, 2008 at 11:13 am
Hi. I am not religious at all. You say that if there’s no immortality there is no way to develop an ethic. That is something to challenge. Why do you need an ethic in the first place. To be clear, I personally absolutely think that an ethic is necessary. But why would it need to serve the life after you die? Why do you exclude the possibility that ethics can serve for the time untill you die.
Famous question: what would you do if you only had a year to live, and you’d be sure that there’s no life after death? The answer to that says a lot about your highest values I think and also you might consider that ethics is exactly that: a set of values.
Thanks for your posting. Cheers, Ralf
Reinier Hill said,
March 14, 2008 at 11:37 am
I belief in God and my God is a product of my own imagination, I belief that Spinoza got that right and I lived with that understanding for more than 50 years. Spinoza’s views did not catch on because he could not have told us 350 years ago that life and nature are here for billions of years while we as humans are here for only millions of years. His statement had merit but it did not catch our imagination. So nature, encompassing life, came first and when humans started to use speech the nature phenomena got a name. Now our imagination can latch on and thank nature for being the source of our essential needs but also our source of inescapable misery and our eventual demise after living a lifetime. Simple as that!
I think an Atheist denies a personal God but they could not deny nature.
I describe my conclusions in http://www.community.beliefnet/langzaam
Reinier Hill
Reinier Hill said,
March 14, 2008 at 12:04 pm
To correct:
http://www.community.beliefnet.com/langzaam
elf said,
May 27, 2008 at 11:53 am
elf says : I absolutely agree with this !