Response to the Claim that Atheists Can’t Justify Believing in Free Will

Blogger Wintery Knight argues that atheists cannot ground the claim that we have libertarian free will.

Atheist Jerry Coyne explains why morality is impossible for atheists

He quotes atheist Jerry Coyne:

And that’s what neurobiology is telling us: Our brains are simply meat computers that, like real computers, are programmed by our genes and experiences to convert an array of inputs into a predetermined output. Recent experiments involving brain scans show that when a subject “decides” to push a button on the left or right side of a computer, the choice can be predicted by brain activity at least seven seconds before the subject is consciously aware of having made it. (These studies use crude imaging techniques based on blood flow, and I suspect that future understanding of the brain will allow us to predict many of our decisions far earlier than seven seconds in advance.) “Decisions” made like that aren’t conscious ones. And if our choices are unconscious, with some determined well before the moment we think we’ve made them, then we don’t have free will in any meaningful sense.

First of all, giving examples of atheists who believe that there is no free will does not establish a logical connection between the two positions. There is considerable diversity among atheists in terms of what they believe about free will. Two examples of atheists who believe in libertarian free will are Ayn Rand and John Searle. Robert Kane and E. J. Lowe have also presented accounts of libertarian free will that are consistent with atheism. So, quoting an atheist who happens to be a hard determinist doesn’t prove anything.

Secondly, this is bad evidence for determinism. The decision about which of two buttons on a computer to press is not a significant one, and there is no real basis for making the decision given the experimental setup, so subconscious influences may have a bigger role here than they would in a decision that something actually rode on.

Thirdly, it is self evident that we are capable of making decisions rationally, and the determinist’s own argument presupposes that he is capable of rational deliberation. If his conclusion is correct, then his own belief in determinism is merely the result of arbitrary subconscious influences, which means that it is invalid.

In conclusion, Wintery Knight has provided no reason to think that atheism is inconsistent with libertarian free will.

Plato’s Dialectic

Plato held that in philosophy, we arrive at the truth by means of a process of “dialectic.” Dialectic, for Plato, works as follows:

• We begin by having one person put forward an answer to the problem in question on the basis of certain arguments.
• Another person then comes along, points out flaws in the first person’s answer, and puts forward his own answer.
• Then a third person comes along, criticizes both viewpoints, and puts forward an answer that is better than either of them.
• etc.

Plato held that, over time, this process leads us closer and closer to the truth. This is illustrated by some of his dialogues.

Plato’s theory assumes that we have a way of rationally evaluating an answer to a philosophical question as plausible or implausible. Plato held that we could see this “intuitively,” but his account of intuition depends on his metaphysics, which most philosophers have rejected.

Another perspective on dialectic comes from David Hume. Hume agrees that it often happens in philosophy that one person puts a position forward, and then another person criticizes it and puts their own position forward. However, according to Hume, the intuitions that this process depends on are subjective products of “habit or custom.” So, while dialectic can arrive at conclusions that better appeal to a given person subjectively, it is not a source of objective truth like Plato thought.

I think the only way to answer Hume once and for all is to present a body of demonstrably true conclusions in philosophy. So long as philosophy is seen as an endless debate, many will be inclined to question whether it has any cognitive status at all. There have been a number of attempts to do this since Hume, and evaluating all of them is beyond my scope here.

Short Review of OPAR

Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff was one of the first philosophy books I read, back when I was a teenager. It persuaded me that philosophical questions had objective answers and provided a coherent framework that I could use to approach philosophical issues with.

The book is a distilled presentation of the essential theoretical structure of Objectivism. It starts at the foundation with metaphysics, then proceeds to concept formation, epistemology, the good, the moral virtues, politics, capitalism, and aesthetics. Each topic is explained clearly and linked to the foregoing and previous.

Peikoff’s presentation of Rand’s philosophy is very engaging and persuasive. I recommend it if you’re interested in a compelling, systematic challenge to your worldview.

How do atheists define good and evil?

Below is a post I wrote in response to the following question.

How do atheists define good and evil?

Atheists define good and evil differently, just like theists do. You’re probably familiar with Christians who have different beliefs about what good and evil are than you do. There are Christians who don’t think morality is based on God’s will, and even among Christians who do think morality is based on God’s will there isn’t complete agreement about what God’s will is, specifically. The situation with atheists is a lot like this – lots of different worldviews with no single set of principles between them.

Personally, I think Ayn Rand correctly defined good and evil in her essay “The Objectivist Ethics.” Ayn Rand thought that the purpose of morality was to have the best life for yourself and the people you love. This doesn’t mean exploiting other people, like Nietzsche thought it did, because the only way to become happy is to live a principled, productive life, neither sacrificing yourself to other people nor other people to yourself.

If you’re interested in looking into Ayn Rand’s own summary of her philosophy of Objectivism, you can read it at the link below:

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/objectivism.html

Let me know if you have any questions.

Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology: Chapter 1

In this post, I will summarize chapter 1 of Ayn Rand’s book, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. This chapter describes the stages a child goes through leading up to the ability to use concepts, as well as the basis for those steps in reality.

According to Rand, there are three stages that a child goes through:

First, the stage of sensations. Rand suggests that “an infant’s sensory experience is an undifferentiated chaos” which is forgotten by the time one becomes an adult. Adults can infer that they once experienced a sensation stage, but they cannot bring a sensation into their conscious awareness.

Second, the stage of percepts. Rand says “a percept is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism.” Adults are consciously aware of percepts, and they form the level at which we are directly aware of reality.

At the perceptual level, the child attains the (implicit, not yet explicit) concept of an existent, a thing that exists. This implicit concept develops through three sub-stages: “entity,” referring to the objects around him or her, “identity,” referring to the fact that he or she can distinguish these entities from the other things he or she sees, and “unit,” which refers to the fact that there are similarities and differences between these objects’ identities.

Rand next spends some time on the concept “unit.”

A unit is an existent regarded as a separate member of a group of two or more similar members. (Two stones are two units; so are two square feet of ground, if regarded as distinct parts of a continuous stretch of ground.) … Units are things viewed by a consciousness in certain existing relationships.

Rand points out that this concept allows us to extrapolate beyond our observations by defining a standard and thinking in terms of repetitions of the standard. I think what she has in mind here is primarily physics; physicists define a specific distance as the meter and then do physics in terms of repetitions or divisions of that standard meter. The point applies to any concept, though. For example, we can recognize more than one country as instances of the concept “country” because we can abstract from the specific number of people in the population, the specific geographic location, the specific system of government, etc. These are essentially just repetitions of the same thing, or of similar things we have seen elsewhere.

Summary in bullet points:

1. Sensation stage
2. Perceptual stage
   1. Existent
   2. Entity
   3. Identity
3. Unit (Entry to conceptual stage)

Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology: Forward

Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (ITOE) was Ayn Rand’s attempt to provide a foundation for her epistemology and, derivatively, the rest of her philosophy. In this post, I will summarize the forward of ITOE and comment on it.

In the forward, Rand repeatedly emphasizes the importance of the “problem of universals.” She takes the problem of universals to be the problem of what our concepts refer to in reality. For example, when I describe three men as “men,” what about those men am I referring to, if anything?

Why does Rand think that this problem is important? For one thing, since our knowledge is composed of concepts, the invalidity of concepts would entail the invalidity of all knowledge. If concepts are invalid, then there is no objective difference between mathematics and mysticism. She is probably also concerned about scientific methodology – if scientists don’t know where their concepts come from, then they might make conceptual mistakes without realizing it.

Rand lists four alleged solutions to the problem of universals that past philosophers have proposed: extreme realism, moderate realism, nominalism, conceptualism, and extreme nominalism. Rand expresses contempt for these solutions, but reminds the reader of the importance of the issue at stake for civilization.

It is worth noting that Rand introduces the problem of universals in roughly the same way the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy does:

Often we predicate properties of individuals. When we say that both cherries and rubies are red, for instance, we seem to say individuals share common properties, those that make cherries cherries, those that make rubies rubies, and those that make both red. Predicates are said of many subjects, then, but is there anything in reality to match the linguistic one-over-many? Are there general truths? Is there commonality in nature, in reality; or is commonality imagined and illusory, perhaps a mere product of language? If the latter, how can we accommodate the intuition that it is the world, and not our conventions, that make predications true or false? The Problem of Universals arises when we ask these questions. Attempts to solve this problem divide into three broad strategies: Realism, Nominalism, and Conceptualism. We’ll take these in turn, and consider the pros and cons of each.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/universa/#SH1c

Rand concludes by reminding the reader that she will be taking for granted the validity of the senses and the axiom that existence exists.

Atheists Should Not be Moral Subjectivists

An atheist on CARM posted the following as the OP of a thread:

Many Christians have argued that there are objective moral values. Yet it seems as if all humans get their morals from reality and that morals vary from culture to culture and sometimes from person to person within a culture. If there are objective moral values, how would we know it? And what purpose would it serve if we all have morals based on reality?

I posted this in response:

Hi, I’m an atheist and I am near the end of a BA in philosophy.

I think it is mistaken, on both rational and polemical grounds, for atheists to argue against the existence of objective morality.

All living things face the alternative of life or death, and every living thing has a means of survival to keep them alive in the face of this alternative. Plants have their automatic chemical functions, and the lower animals have instincts. Human beings, however, use reason as their means of survival, which means that they have to exert effort and think about the way they live, not depend on their automatic functions. It is necessary for a human being to define a set of moral principles to live by, and the only rational standard for a moral code is life.

Most people sense that morality has a life preserving function. As a result, they react strongly to the idea that morality is merely subjective, and see this idea as destructive, although they may lack the conceptual tools to articulate this properly. If people have to choose between religion and moral subjectivism, then they will choose religion, as the fundamentalists on this forum illustrate daily.

The only hope for atheists is to articulate a set of secular values that are based on life and disseminate these values into the culture. Such a set of values has been defined by Ayn Rand, and she has provided the means for disseminating them by presenting them in the form of art, i.e., her novels.

You can find elaboration on the argument I made in the above post here.

http://aynrandlexicon.com/ayn-rand-ideas/the-objectivist-ethics.html