So my finger is 2 inches from pressing the button..

[ollagram88]

..that will release nuclear bombs, destroying all of humanity.

What would be the atheist rationale to convince me not to push the button?

[QED]

ollagram88, I'm a bit pressed fro time right now so if you don't mind I'm only going to reply to your last post in which I see you have summed things up rather well.

according to QED, and i would think this makes great sense, we humans are so motivated towards NOT killing other humans (and other such moral actions) that we would NOT want to push the button.

to this i say, we're also motivated towards religion and other "nonsense" tendencies, yet the atheist rejects it. every human society has in one form or another created the concept of God. really really really old "non-civilized" human cultures buried humans which shows that they might have believed in the afterlife.

I'm suggesting however that we have a case of mistaken identity -- that the constraints we feel upon us come from within (our genome) rather than from without (God's words). While we continue to be mistaken about this we place too much emphasis on the cultural element (which is a rough transcription of what our common genome tells us) and lose sight of which parts reflect our essential, evolved knowledge and those that are arbitrary adornments serving the more selfish ends of a few. I feel a little bit uncomfortable talking in such general terms here, but it gives us the gist of the argument.

but as QED brings up, there are certain genetic tendencies (ex: the experience of pain) that statistically we could NOT do without, or else the evolution of humans would have probably been wiped off or messed up. whew. so things like pain, the appreciation for human suffering, regard for human life, are powerful concepts that just can't seem to leave us.

i must say it's very convincing from a logical standpoint. i could probably play devil's advocate and throw out a couple random ideas here (i just came up with these a few minutes ago):

-if the person found joy in DESTROYING human life, he'd push the button under the atheist rationale because it actually supports his pushing of the button. contrast this to a theist perspective, which by mere dogma, pushing the button is immoral. in the latter, the moral decision is theoretically ABSOLUTE.

Yep, that's why I mentioned psychopaths earlier on. Some people literally aren't "normal" as defined by the typical genetic recipe.

-a lot of people argue that our morals have evolutionary origins which undermines any sort of "moral law" as proposed by religion that claims it holds society together. couldn't you say, however, that the genetic tendency to value human life along with other morals is so overwhelming, that the argument actually supports religion to some extent?

Bear in mind that the shaping and arranging is done by natural selection. We're talking about the best overall strategy for human game-play, as worked out by evolution -- not ID.

otherwise, seeing the atheist logic as very reasonable, i have (as i admittedly planned) shifted the rest of the discussion to which is best for society - the atheist reason not to push the button or the religious reason not to push the button. from here we can extend this dilemma to which viewpoint is best for society - one which proposes a natural view of the world vs. one that is both natural and supernatural. we are now looking at the practical implications of our point of views. the meat of my arguments can be found in post 25.

Isn't it just wrong to live under a God Delusion when we have a thoroughly reasonable alternative that doesn't need any ad-hoc patching-up to cope with the problem of evil, the obvious arms-race that's called nature or the fundamental incompatibilities that exist between different religions?

[ollagram88]

Isn't it just wrong to live under a God Delusion when we have a thoroughly reasonable alternative that doesn't need any ad-hoc patching-up to cope with the problem of evil, the obvious arms-race that's called nature or the fundamental incompatibilities that exist between different religions?

i guess i should emphasize that it's really not about some intervening God in the sky. if you read my previous post you should get a better idea of where i'm coming from.

to offer the main gist: it's silly to think God caused lightning for we know where lightning comes from. besides, as far as we humans are concerned, the relevance of lightning is small in our grand scheme of things. what is central to our lives, however, is finding meaning, seeing something beyond this life of ours (as opposed to what science currently seems to say), however abstract or vague that may sound. not only does science not have the final say in this right now, but i feel this is something very essential to our experience. remember, we are speaking in the context of humans around the world, not a forum filled with intellectual elites or in scientific academia. if you get a chance, there's more meat in post 25.

[QED]

i guess i should emphasize that it's really not about some intervening God in the sky. if you read my previous post you should get a better idea of where i'm coming from.

Well I've read and re-read what you've posted so far and I'm a little puzzled as to why you still seem to be "up in the air" about something. I understand why there seems to be a tension between what is "felt" and what reductionism has to say about the causes and reasons behind such feelings. But I thought there was some agreement that there's a mechanism within us that cannot easily be overridden by our conscious free-will (e.g. nature's clever trick that makes us feel pain). Given such tricks it seems to be of little wonder to me that we also experience strong emotions about meaning, seeing something beyond this life of ours, and other abstract notions. Like pain, and parental love, we probably couldn't do without them. Sure, a few intellectual elites might manage -- but not in a statistically significant way.

Of course you could argue that this is a good reason to discourage people from such reductionist activities before this kind of approach becomes the norm (tips the statistics) but I think this misses the point: it's already taken care of to a large degree by genetic and cultural conditioning. It would take a concerted, consensual, effort to buck the current status-quo and for what gain? Conversely if this sounds like an argument for religion and other forms of mysticism, these can rapidly swing things too far in the other direction causing us to be at the mercy of every conceivable superstition.

I can personally live in peace knowing that my innate sense of right and wrong is reasonably in balance with the rest of society such that if everyone were like me, I could still happily live in that society (note that this is actually realised unconsciously). Also, my parental instincts are fully compatible with projecting this kind of predisposition into future generations. Likewise my sense of purpose and meaning can be mapped onto the maintenance of such a present and future given that I can contribute in some small way to the construction of our technologically enabled civilization. None of this needs to be referenced to anything supernatural or mystical. But also note that it's all totally automated by what evolution has been doing to get us all this far.

In Douglas Hofstadter's book I am a strange loop he recounts a moving experience of how, shortly after his fathers death, his mother confronts him with a photo of his father and says something to the effect of what's the point of it -- it's only a collection of pigmented dots on paper. Hofstadter's response is to liken the dots with the notes from a Chopin piano score. He calls these (poetically) "soul shards": Fragments of the thoughts of another being that can be reanimated and re-experienced. I would say that we constantly deal in the "marketplace of being" with currencies like this. We create our own meaning from it and use it to satisfy some of the constraints imposed by our survival needs just as we need pain to stop us doing physically harmful things. As a rule of thumb I would suggest that all you need do is identify the dangers and work backwards to an evolved "remedy" to see why these things have such a powerful influence on us.

[QED]

i guess i should emphasize that it's really not about some intervening God in the sky. if you read my previous post you should get a better idea of where i'm coming from.

Well I've read and re-read what you've posted so far and I'm a little puzzled as to why you still seem to be "up in the air" about something. I understand why there seems to be a tension between what is "felt" and what reductionism has to say about the causes and reasons behind such feelings. But I thought there was some agreement that there's a mechanism within us that cannot easily be overridden by our conscious free-will (e.g. nature's clever trick that makes us feel pain). Given such tricks it seems to be of little wonder to me that we also experience strong emotions about meaning, seeing something beyond this life of ours, and other abstract notions. Like pain, and parental love, we probably couldn't do without them. Sure, a few intellectual elites might manage -- but not in a statistically significant way.

Of course you could argue that this is a good reason to discourage people from such reductionist activities before this kind of approach becomes the norm (tips the statistics) but I think this misses the point: it's already taken care of to a large degree by genetic and cultural conditioning. It would take a concerted, consensual, effort to buck the current status-quo and for what gain? Conversely if this sounds like an argument for religion and other forms of mysticism, these can rapidly swing things too far in the other direction causing us to be at the mercy of every conceivable superstition.

I can personally live in peace knowing that my innate sense of right and wrong is reasonably in balance with the rest of society such that if everyone were like me, I could still happily live in that society (note that this is actually realised unconsciously). Also, my parental instincts are fully compatible with projecting this kind of predisposition into future generations. Likewise my sense of purpose and meaning can be mapped onto the maintenance of such a present and future given that I can contribute in some small way to the construction of our technologically enabled civilization. None of this needs to be referenced to anything supernatural or mystical. But also note that it's all totally automated by what evolution has been doing to get us all this far.

In Douglas Hofstadter's book I am a strange loop he recounts a moving experience of how, shortly after his fathers death, his mother confronts him with a photo of his father and says something to the effect of what's the point of it -- it's only a collection of pigmented dots on paper. Hofstadter's response is to liken the dots with the notes from a Chopin piano score. He calls these (poetically) "soul shards": Fragments of the thoughts of another being that can be reanimated and re-experienced. I would say that we constantly deal in the "marketplace of being" with currencies like this. We create our own meaning from it and use it to satisfy some of the constraints imposed by our survival needs just as we need pain to stop us doing physically harmful things. As a rule of thumb I would suggest that all you need do is identify the dangers and work backwards to an evolved "remedy" to see why these things have such a powerful influence on us.

[Furrowed Brow]

1/ Pushing the button will only prove you’re a w*nk*r.
2/ By pushing the button - have you any idea what you will be doing?……let’s sit down and work out the math.
3/ If there is no god then you are 100% responsible for your actions and the consequnce of you’re actions. Be a grown up and face those consequences, look those children in the eye that you rob of the chance of making their own mistakes and finding their own way.
4/ If you push that button don’t kid yourself it ain’t going to hurt.
5/ If you push the button you will be the last one to know if anyone survives.
6/ If there is no god then life has no meaning and thus there is no meaning to pushing that button. All that suffering and wastes for no reason at all. Sure you ain’t got a better reason than that?
7/ Give it 100,000 years or so for the radiation to subside and evolution’s gonna start it all over again. In another billion years or so there is gonna be another crazy guy with another button. Don’t give him a chance.

[ollagram88]

But I thought there was some agreement that there's a mechanism within us that cannot easily be overridden by our conscious free-will (e.g. nature's clever trick that makes us feel pain). Given such tricks it seems to be of little wonder to me that we also experience strong emotions about meaning, seeing something beyond this life of ours, and other abstract notions. Like pain, and parental love, we probably couldn't do without them. Sure, a few intellectual elites might manage -- but not in a statistically significant way.

agreed. until...

Of course you could argue that this is a good reason to discourage people from such reductionist activities before this kind of approach becomes the norm (tips the statistics) but I think this misses the point: it's already taken care of to a large degree by genetic and cultural conditioning.

i'm quite fearful (in a thoughtful sense) that the cultural conditioning might be swayed by the imposition of rational thought. kind of like the prominence of the socially constructed "self" that has emerged within the past 100 or so years (as talked about by Mead), secularization, evolution, etc... i think it's quite possible that our conscious experience can be significantly shifted with regards to how the human condition as a whole views itself. it's not so much an issue of us "turning off" certain evolutionary mechanisms/tendencies as is the issue of how it impacts humanity itself. this "last frontier of the soul" that science is entering seems to be the final slash (at least based on a lot of current scientific research), and once that happens, it seems the human is destroyed. that, however, is just my guess (based on history, such as evolution continually destroying religion to a large extent). how exactly society would adapt is beyond my grasp, and so i raised the question.

i also have a little personal anecdotal evidence: i feel that i don't see eye to eye with most of my peers on how we consciously experience life. i attribute this feeling to all the scientific stuff i've read that has revealed a lot about the way life REALLY works. this is often to the point where i find it difficult to relate to many people. art becomes destroyed. passion becomes meaningless. stories of inspiration look like bad psychology articles. i cringe when i hear girls say "oh, everything happens for a reason!" or when someone is depressed and someone attempts to help them by saying "don't worry, good things happen to good people." my occasional feelings of alienation are not so much the issue here as showing how vastly different we consciously experience life. to put this on a practical level, i would never tell my aging parents all that i truly know of religion because i recognize and consider the value that religion holds in their lives. the same with my religious friends.

Likewise my sense of purpose and meaning can be mapped onto the maintenance of such a present and future given that I can contribute in some small way to the construction of our technologically enabled civilization. None of this needs to be referenced to anything supernatural or mystical. But also note that it's all totally automated by what evolution has been doing to get us all this far.

with that said, i'd like to also personally ask this question out of interest, if it is possible to answer to any extent. given the anti-ID arguments that state it is possible for different sorts of non-carbon based life to emerge despite any change in the precise constants of our universe (this has to do with the whole multiverse theory or the resetting of constants with the next big bang), do you think "other" life would evolve with strikingly similar "human" societies and cultures given the "ingeneous" mechanisms evolution has created?

[Nick_A]

..that will release nuclear bombs, destroying all of humanity.

What would be the atheist rationale to convince me not to push the button?

The pen we know is mightier than the sword. What then to do with this finger? Give the world the finger as an honest expression of your opinion which is far more ethical than using this finger to explode bombs. This way both you and your finger become satisfied.