The atheist's dangerous delusion of moral superiority.

Going on secular/atheist blog's and websites today one can hardly ignore the growing sentiment that lacking belief in god, or believing that there is no god is conducive, in and of itself, to a more peaceful society. If only it were that simple. Unfortunately said atheists aren't all that familiar with history. They rightly claim, it would seem, that Hitler was not an atheist, but falsely attribute theistic beliefs to men like Stalin and Lenin. The fact is there is little to no evidence for such an assertion and even if it were true, it wouldn't negate the abhorrent atrocities committed by atheists against so man millions of civilians. Aha, they say, but those atheists didn't commit such atrocities because they were atheists, but because they were caught in the cult of communism where the state is worshiped with the same fervor as any god would be.

First things first, in giving this response the atheist is clearly moving the goalposts here. No longer are they claiming that atheism in and of itself is conducive to a peaceful society, but rather that atheism cannot be used as a motivation for atrocities such as those committed by the Soviet Union. But, putting that small point aside for now, the fact is this latter point is rather moot. Given some thought, its rather clear that only moral or ethical beliefs can really be motivations for committing atrocities. The Nazi's did not kill millions of Jews because they were theists, but because they thought Jews were evil, and they thought Jews were evil because they believed God (the god's?) ordained the Aryan race for world domination and made the Jews less than human. But these are all the realm of ethical/meta-ethical claims, not metaphysical claims.

Understanding this, it seems a bizarre thing to suggest that ethical beliefs, in conjunction with atheism, could not motivate immoral actions like rape or murder. Unfortunately history confirms the suspicion that this is not the case. From 1928-1941 the Soviet Union targeted clergy and members of the Russian Orthodox church, slaughtering them in the streets by the thousands and sending thousands more to labour camps. By 1942 there were only 500 Orthodox churches left intact in the entire Soviet Union. In 1937 alone 85 thousand clergymen were shot and killed. What's more, contrary to official pronouncements to the contrary, the complete dismantlement of the Russian Orthodox Church was not done for merely legal or political reasons, it was done for ideological reasons, to enforce state atheism. This was clearly seen in the propaganda of the time, which displayed religion and religious people as ignorant, sub-human, dangerous and silly. What is truly disturbing is just how similar these sentiments sound to modern atheists views of religion. 

Given these disturbing facts I would urge people of all worldviews to carefully moniter their ethical beliefs. It is far too easy for good intentions to have disastrous consequences.

Empiricism?

The question of knowledge is a very interesting one. What is it and how do we attain it? These are two fundamental questions in philosophy, but here I’m going to focus primarily on the latter, and a particular answer to it at that. This answer is empiricism, the theory that all knowledge comes via sensory experience. To make a few clarifications this theory isn’t quite the same as  hard scientism, which suggests that only the scientific method can verify or falsify that which is claimed to be true, although scientism could be thought of as a type of empiricism. Empiricism is simply the claim that all of our beliefs must be justified on the bases of sense perception/observation.

But is this true? It certainly seems to have some credence to it, after all, the natural sciences are certainly some of the most successful intellectual projects in the history of mankind. Even more so language, art and virtually all of our ideas and concepts seem to be based to varying degrees in what we have observed. Indeed, I think this is where much of the truth of empiricism lies.

It seems to me that while it may not be true that we could never think as an un-embodied mind devoid of all senses, it is nevertheless true that observation is a necessary step towards knowledge and reasoning. This is simply because of the basic fact that in order to perform analysis, or reasoning, we must first have data, but if this is true we must first gather data before we can analyze it, and what other data gathering tools do we have other than our senses? So observations allow us to form languages (even though those languages obviously won’t be directly based on our observations), ideas, art, science etc. But, notice, after data is gathered, it is reasoning that produces new information, new ways to use our senses to gather more information among many other things. Thus, observations by themselves are next to useless if there is no reason to interpret them. It is this fact that makes me doubt empiricism is true, for obviously we can use reason to justify beliefs, apart from mere observation.

Take Hilberts hotel for instance. Suppose we have a hotel with an infinite number of guests in it, filling the hotel. One day a bus, carrying an infinite number of new guests arrives, what is the hotel owner to do? Well, its quite simple, all he has to do is have every guest move to the room number which is double their own. Magically, this frees up an infinite number of rooms, thus infinity can be added to infinity and result in infinity. But it gets worse, as you could do this an infinite number of times. But it gets even worse than that, for what if an infinite number of guests decide to leave the hotel. Well, if the hotel owner has every room emptied there would be no one left in the hotel. However, if the owner of the hotel instead has everyone in an odd numbered room leave, he would still have an infinite number of people in his hotel in the even numbered rooms. So subtracting infinity from infinity can equal zero but it can also equal infinity. But it gets even worse than that, for if the owner has every one in a room with the number 1 in it leave, then has every one in a room with a number 2 in it leave etc on to infinity, the owner of the hotel could have an infinite number of people leave the hotel over and over again an infinite number of times, and still have an infinite number of people in his hotel. With this in mind, one must ask the question, how could an infinite number of anything really exist? I fail to see how.

This thought experiment is important because it demonstrates how useful reason can be without using observation as even supporting evidence. All observation does in this experiment is allow us to conceive of a hotel, people in the hotel etc. Therefore, given this I think any form of strong empiricism is unjustified.

But there is still weak empiricism, which could be framed as follows; observation provides the strongest possible support for our beliefs. And this I’ll investigate in another post.