(no subject)

[jack]

One of the thoughts about different aspects of atheist belief is that the natural one is not believing "God exists", but some people do believe something like "If He does exist, He's a bastard."

But it occurred to me, that's basically the point of the Northern Lights trilogy. The central message is "God doesn't exist because he's a bastard". If that sounds confusing, well, exactly, that's why the message the books send seems to be confusing :)

It's not a wrong way to go about it. Narnia could be described as partly carrying the message "God *does* exist because he's nice," and does it very well indeed. Using God's metaphorical absence as a metaphor for his literal absence is a good metaphor -- I can see if the books had clicked for me more, it might be quite exciting, if instead of having no unifying message, atheism was a crusade against an uncaring God and a malicious power-hungry arch-angel. Yay!

For that matter, in some sense, it's a real argument: if you say "If God were running the world, I don't like it," you might get from there to "then He isn't," via "if he's not doing it right, he's not God or not there".

But Pullman's presentation didn't really work for me, and so all the flaws in the presentation continued to bother me.

Contrariwise, sometimes people do over-seize on the second aspect of atheism, especially if they're used to their religion being the default and assume an atheist *is* not someone factually thinking God doesn't exist, but someone morally choosing not to follow Him.

Comments

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Logical deduction: I was speaking quickly, I didn't mean pure logical deduction, but observing, making (and stating) necessary assumptions, collating, analysing and concluding in a way that might be seen as rationalist, scientific, logical, etc.

But basically, yes, indeed.

However, it makes me uncomfortable, I think there's something in the process I can't put my finger on. Obviously, without any research, I probably would have no idea if theorem X was true or not -- and may well have incorrectly assumed it was one way or the other. But I feel like in theory I ought to be able to at least tell whether I know or not. Whereas, of course, in fact, I absorb lots of facts and memes from around me without being able to weigh all of them even if I'm inclined to.

The other thing to say is that there's a stereotype of atheists as unemotional, humourless and scientistic.

Oh yes, good point. I actually forget that, as I'm only really exposed to it second hand, in back-scatter from occasional responses to assumptions people I've never made to other people... :)

I think there's a grain of truth, in that atheists (particularly self-defining atheists) are often sceptics (that is, they say they don't believe in god because there's no evidence and so it doesn't make sense to). (And I think rainbows are MORE beautiful when you understand them, but understand how it doesn't seem that way sometimes.)

However, my current gut conception is that belief of *facts* should come from rationality and belief in *morals* should come from emotion/moral sense. But, as previous debates on my livejournal show, it's more complicated than that.

So I naturally feel it's good/necessary that "Thou shalt not X" comes from a moral, not logical stance. (Although supported with logical/observational things like, Xing causes a whole lot of indirect Y, etc.)

But am uncomfortable saying that because I like/dislike X, that has something to do with whether it exists or not. However, one theme this entire discussion seems to have thrown up is that it *does* have something to do with it, though I'm having difficulty putting words to exactly how.