Moral Objectivity, where art thou?

1) If  God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
2) Objective moral values exist.
3) Therefore, God exists.

It is possible for me to conceive a creator god that does not lose sleep over the way we live our lives. What makes my conception less plausible than the Christian God? My conception actually seems more plausible when we take our moral experiences into consideration. However, implied in the argument is the idea of a God who is the ground for moral values. This argument is found in the ontological argument that God, by definition, is the greatest conceivable being. It is taken for granted that 'goodness' and 'existence' are great making qualities. Many, including myself, disagree with this wholeheartedly because 'great' is a subjective description of a thing and different people would have their own ideas of what makes a thing great. But hey, thank God that we have an accurate definition of God to work with.

Today, I make two arguments:
1) Divine Command Theory does not make morality objective.
2) Objective moral values do not seem to exist.

What is your name?

But, do you drink though? I know a cheap bar. 

Today, I gave myself a pat on the back because I think I am finally growing up. Last October, I became an atheist. By that I mean I stopped believing in the god that I used to and was left without a known deity that I could square with my knowledge of myself, others, and the universe. When a person gains a new identity, some new signifier that tells them what they are but also what they are not, they go through particular phases while growing into their new clothes.

There is the transitional stage where you are tempted to isolate yourself from everyone else. It seems as though we have a psychological bias toward believing we are alone in our existential problems. If fortunate enough to survive this desert period, we may happen across an online group of people who share unbelievably similar experiences with us. And so begins the adolescent idealism and group pride. We create an us vs them - us being the atheists, they, our enemies, theists. Fists are raised in the name of reason and war is waged on anything remotely resembling faith of any kind.

I am reminded of Erik Erikson's stages of psychosocial development. We enter unwillingly into these stages and we are not guaranteed to emerge in favourable psychological states. How we respond to all that each stage has to throw at us directly affects how well equipped we enter into the coming stage. For my fellow, heathens, how well have you been progressing?

I know an unfortunate few who have been atheists longer than I have, yet are more worked up about the thing than me, the newbie. I am not devoid of source material enough to burn fires of disgust and hatred toward religion myself after having been dealt an unfair hand by the godly institution. Though it was seldom been said to me directly, many believe that it is this unfair treatment that lead to my 'falling away' in the first place and not any intellectual reasons at all. I won't be naive or arrogant to say they are completely wrong. Still, they are not completely right. My conversion was the result of an unholy concoction of hurt and intellectual curiousity. Either way, I am here now and I do miss the emotional connections I had with the divine as a believer, but I cannot bring myself to bend a knee because I think doing so is foolish.

Some people may disagree with me and, of course, all are free to do so, but I no longer care for the label 'atheist.' Now, I find it and its definition tawdry, thin and glaringly unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Atheism is simply non-belief in a deity/deities. An atheist feels the same way a Christian feels about Allah, just this feeling is directed toward all gods. This is apparently an unimaginable fact to people who see the world through the eyes of faith. Even though their bosom buddy may not believe in their own god, at least he/she believes in some god and that seems to be enough. But to believe in none is ludicrous. But what does it matter, really?

There is a sub-community within the atheism camp that advocates the proclamation of the title 'atheist' from the rooftops. I was never comfortable with it, but I was never against it either. Today, I am still not against it, but I have grown enough to distance myself from it. The word 'atheist' says nothing that I consider important about me or anyone else. After all, the basic idea behind atheism is that theism has not yet presented persuasive evidence for their claim that their gods exist. But to think that I only possess this attitude toward the divine is misleading and the title 'atheist' does not help in bringing clarity.

Here is what I think causes this problem. Theism can be narrowly defined as a belief in a deity/deities. However, a belief in a deity hardly ever comes independent of a host of other things, eg. morality, philosophy, history. It is to be expected, then, that although atheism narrowly defined is non-belief in a deity/deities, atheists are lumped together on matters of morality, philosophy and history as well. This I am afraid of.

I have a skeptical eye and I look at all claims within my reach under the microscope of reason. Both gods and fossils have to make sense to me before I have anything to say about them. I am concerned about the future of the world. Questions like, how would religion and non-belief co-exist? Should I really be against the death penalty? What is important and how do we know? Should I lend my hand in the development of Trinidad and Tobago? If so, what is the best way to do so? These seem vastly more important than which side I stand on the thin line of belief. 'Atheist' just does not seem to do an effective job in conveying so deep a commitment to reason. I'm certainly not afraid of the term and if asked whether I am an atheist I would respond positively. But what am I going to call myself? By what name do I go? Do I need a name? I grow tired of the politics and label-gerrymandering and just wish to go on reading and writing.

Call me whatever you like. Ask me, however, and you may be met with this standard response.

"I'm batman."

The God of Intellectuals

Most of us have met our fair share of strange people, but each of us treats with these encounters differently. It is fortunate, then, that I have also met my share and I happen to be a collector of anomalous stories.

Let's call my friend Jim. Jim was not a very sociable person, but strangely enough, he was extremely likable. He would be invited to parties, limes, to play on the best football teams for the lunch time 'sweat', all without muttering more than a few inconsequential phrases and bad jokes. Once, during our weekly 'in -depth' classroom discussions, Jim shared what was his own religious philosophy. Jim believed that God was energy, and he referred to the Newtonian law of energy being un-created and indelible, but transformable. If I had the mind that I have now, then, I would have asked him if this energy desires our worship.

Now that you've met Jim, meet Suzy, whose story is more interesting. At the age of 16, around the time when the pouis trees were blooming or, more poignantly, CSEC was around the corner, she started having paranormal experiences. While folding her clothes one evening, her grandmother outside on the porch, she felt a 'thing' coiling around her left hand. This 'thing' was invisible. It slowly moved up her arm and eventually, the entire left side of her body. She rushed outside to tell her grandmother what was happening to her, and that's as far as she could remember.

Fortunately for my story, a memory was constructed for her by her grandmother. Her grandmother said that she, Suzy, fainted and began foaming at the mouth and trashing about on the floor. A doctor said, after all the checks and balances, that they could not find anything really wrong with her. Doctor after doctor said essentially the same until one finally diagnosed her with epilepsy. She got medication and returned to her 'normal' life.

The Arrogance of Philosophy(ers)

I'm not sure why we separate 'philosophical truths' from 'empirical truths'. Both epistemological systems are based on the same foundation of experience - our own existence and the usefulness of our five senses. All that we know, we know through our five senses. We have developed words that represent things we have experienced through our senses in order to communicate those experiences to other people and even communicate them to ourselves. 'Philosophical laws' like the law of non-contradiction, the law of identity and the validity of syllogisms, and even 'mathematical laws' of association and distribution have been discovered through our experience of the natural world, an experience that continues to grow. These laws do not come from some special, isolated part of the brain that reasons independent of experience.

I am not a linguist, nor have I studied the development of language in a university. However, from observing my own linguistic development and the development of people around me and having a bit of knowledge about the development of language as it relates to our brain, I have learnt a few things. When young, much of our experience is jumbled together in a few words. All trees are trees and trees alone. If you tell a child that this tree is a portugal (puteegal) tree and the other is a lime tree, it may be slightly confusing to them at first. They would either think that all of them are the same thing, or that they are all completely different. It is difficult for a child to appreciate subtlety. The ability to discriminate and categorise, analyse and synthesise are skills that develop with us as we grow and are aided by education. As our experience of the world increases, we create new words, and we apply the discovered laws of reasoning to these experiences to make sense of them.

Now, our brains have been able to take concepts from the natural world, combine them with others, expand them, twist them, turn them inside out to make them into something 'new'. However, these things are not new, but re-worked or re-done, exaggerated or reduced, old things. We call this ability 'imagination'. The end results of our imagination - like Superman, Batman, Pokemon or the Perfect Spouse - are built with old colours and concepts we have experienced but are not things we have experienced in themselves.

In and Out of God - How I try to live my life as an atheist

One of the most frequently asked questions I have had thrown in my direction since by de-conversion is "What is the point of your life now?" The question makes the assumption that I knew what the point of my life was when I was a believer and that that is different 'now', and it does so wrongly. When I was a Catholic, I never understood the idea of being made for a specific purpose. Although I didn't understand it, I did try to live my life guided by that belief and I surrendered all that I was to achieve this goal of doing God's will.

Obviously, God never came out and told me what he wanted me to do so I imagined that he was asking me to be a priest. I came to this conclusion because I was passionate about evangelisation, service, and leadership. It seemed like the perfect fit. I've given that up though because the whole concept of God having a plan for each of us is rendered implausible by the vast number of people who never achieve anything close to what they thought God planted in their hearts to do. Mother Teresa's crisis of faith shook my understanding of this from the core and I never turned back. We were told that 'peace' was the gift given to those who were doing God's will, and here was this usually inspirational woman, broken from within and questioning the existence of her beloved Saviour. Some call this the "dark night of the soul" and I love the poetry of the string of words, but having gone through it myself, I know it is the despair one feels confronting the unimaginable possibility that what you believed was truly unbelievable.

So just how do I gain meaning from my life? Well I must answer this question with another question. What do you mean by having a meaning for life? Usually, the belief in a divine purpose that was destined before we were born is the source of meaning. Even in the absence of clear knowledge of what that purpose is, the mere idea of the possibility gives a person hope. Now, not believing in a deity does not afford me this right to believe in a divine purpose for my life. I do not think that I am born to do a task that only I can do well, and frankly, I am relieved. I'd hate to have such a pivotal, historical role and fail. It may be hard to believe when you are a believer - it was hard for me to believe as well - that living without God can be 'meaningful', and that very human emotions like hope and love are seen as illusory. All of this is utterly untrue.