Atheism is Nothingness

[meltzerboy]

Actually, relationships are one thing that you can “take with you.”

If you’re traveling together to the same destination!

 

[polytropos]

Seeing the beauty and meaning that are in life. Wouldn’t you say that your life has inherent value, in the natural material part of it, not just in the future after you die?

What do you mean by “meaning,” and what gives your life inherent value?

I would disagree with the premise of this thread. Until a few months ago, I’d been an atheist for many years and I was pretty contented between academic achievement, friendships, literature, video games, etc., so I don’t agree with the OP that atheism is limited to nothingness (and while I pursued these things mainly because I liked to, it’d probably be a stretch to say I was hedonistic). But I also would have hesitated to claim that I or any of those things had “inherent value.”

 

[meltzerboy]

What do you mean by “meaning,” and what gives your life inherent value?

I would disagree with the premise of this thread. Until a few months ago, I’d been an atheist for many years and I was pretty contented between academic achievement, friendships, literature, video games, etc., so I don’t agree with the OP that atheism is limited to nothingness (and while I pursued these things mainly because I liked to, it’d probably be a stretch to say I was hedonistic). But I also would have hesitated to claim that I or any of those things had “inherent value.”

Well, I don’t know about video games; but I think friendships, academic achievement or any kind of achievement, and literature do have inherent and lasting value. There is a rabbinical statement in Judaism, not doctrinal, that we’d better study and learn all we can in this life because we won’t be doing so in the next.

 

[polytropos]

Well, I don’t know about video games; but I think friendships, academic achievement or any kind of achievement, and literature do have inherent and lasting value. There is a rabbinical statement in Judaism, not doctrinal, that we’d better study and learn all we can in this life because we won’t be doing so in the next.

What do you mean by inherent value? I mean, those things seem pretty good, because I certainly enjoy friendships and academic achievement and (some) literature still. But the fact that I pursue them and they make me feel warm inside isn’t really inherent.

I was actually going to major in English because there were a handful of books that resonated very strongly with thoughts and experiences that I’d had (or even books that attacked x institution in a clever way - for a while, for some reason, that was very appealing to me, even if I had no relation to the attacked institution). But over time, as I read more, they became less satisfying because they all offered mutually exclusive value systems and so many of them don’t even touch upon reality. Their main aesthetic was to disguise subjectivity with eloquence and rhetoric.

You have also added the qualifier “lasting.” From the point of view of atheism, how are those things lasting?

 

[meltzerboy]

What do you mean by inherent value? I mean, those things seem pretty good, because I certainly enjoy friendships and academic achievement and (some) literature still. But the fact that I pursue them and they make me feel warm inside isn’t really inherent.

I was actually going to major in English because there were a handful of books that resonated very strongly with thoughts and experiences that I’d had (or even books that attacked x institution in a clever way - for a while, for some reason, that was very appealing to me, even if I had no relation to the attacked institution). But over time, as I read more, they became less satisfying because they all offered mutually exclusive value systems and so many of them don’t even touch upon reality. Their main aesthetic was to disguise subjectivity with eloquence and rhetoric.

You have also added the qualifier “lasting.” From the point of view of atheism, how are those things lasting?

I mean they have inherent worth and goodness. It is worthwhile to achieve in life, to master things, to gain insight, to take some risks, to conquer our fears. By doing so, we are putting to good use our G-d-given intellect and reason and we gain in understanding of ourselves, the world, and life. These things can last our whole lifetime and most likely beyond in that our thoughts and ideas have an influence on others around us and who come after us, and they can change society for the better for future generations.

 

[polytropos]

I mean they have inherent worth and goodness.

I mean, yes, “worth” and “goodness” are potential synonyms for “value.” But what are any of those things, and can they exist inherently from an atheistic standpoint?

It is worthwhile to achieve in life, to master things, to gain insight, to take some risks, to conquer our fears. By doing so, we are putting to good use our G-d-given intellect and reason and we gain in understanding of ourselves, the world, and life.

I would agree that many of these things are good. I presume that atheists would not use our creation in God’s image to determine their goodness, though. From the point of view of materialism, intellect and reason are accidents. Truth is not a virtue. It’s just something that some members of the human species have pursued.

You are just defining things. “It is worthwhile to…” Why? I mean without theology, why are those particular things worthwhile? You could formulate an answer from the standpoint of evolutionary psychology pretty easily, but that would not qualify as inherency. I don’t even mean to imply that such a formulation is insufficient because it is not inherent (although that would be my position, as a Catholic). I acknowledge that if there were no God, then accidental “purpose” would be all that there is. I mainly contest the use of the word “inherent” to describe it.

These things can last our whole lifetime and most likely beyond in that our thoughts and ideas have an influence on others around us and who come after us, and they can change society for the better for future generations.

Indeed they can. But if literature provides an incoherent value system and a meager aesthetic, it can hardly do much to change society for the better.

What would it even mean to “change society for the better”? Modern philosophers since Descartes, by way of their disagreements with each other, have demonstrated that the standards for a good society cannot be derived sola ratio.

 

[balto]

Based on some of the responses in this thread,I think atheists can have meaning in their lives, but in order to remain consistent with the philosophy of atheism it would seem that their meaning would only be relative to them. Most of my coworkers claim to be atheists (we’re scientists) and constantly are stating that all of reality is caused by purely random processes and there’s no reason to believe any of it was designed. But then they search for order in said randomness, which always confuses me. Maybe I’m wrong (and I’m sure the other posters will point it out if I am! ) but it seems like atheism is accepting that everything is really an illusion but it’s good to play along with the illusion.

I think there’s a lot of confusion over what is meant by God even among believers (I used to be one of them). The common view of God is that He is just a being that happens to be the greatest of all beings, but that’s not really what God is. Forget all the stuff you’ve ever learned about religion or God and ask yourself if objective truth, objective goodness, objective love, objective beauty, etc exist.

If they do, your question can be answered easily by a theist:

A some what related question for you. Let’s say you have a painting on the wall. Ultimately the painting will be destroyed whether from being discarded, damaged, decayed, or put through some other process. If this painting doesn’t contribute to your ultimate happiness then why have it? I ask this because questions like this come to mind when ever I read threads like this. So I figured I would share my question this time.

Simple. A theist believes that objective truth and beauty exist, so this painting either points to or away from the objective standard, which is God. If an objective standard exists, then everything has meaning. If you only accept relativity, then sure it might mean something to you, but you’re not the sum total of reality so it doesn’t actually mean anything more than that. But then you run into a lot of contradictions with a purely relative outlook.

I’d be interested in hearing the atheist’s response

 

[ngill09]

Based on some of the responses in this thread,I think atheists can have meaning in their lives, but in order to remain consistent with the philosophy of atheism it would seem that their meaning would only be relative to them. Most of my coworkers claim to be atheists (we’re scientists) and constantly are stating that all of reality is caused by purely random processes and there’s no reason to believe any of it was designed. But then they search for order in said randomness, which always confuses me. Maybe I’m wrong (and I’m sure the other posters will point it out if I am! ) but it seems like atheism is accepting that everything is really an illusion but it’s good to play along with the illusion.

I think there’s a lot of confusion over what is meant by God even among believers (I used to be one of them). The common view of God is that He is just a being that happens to be the greatest of all beings, but that’s not really what God is. Forget all the stuff you’ve ever learned about religion or God and ask yourself if objective truth, objective goodness, objective love, objective beauty, etc exist.

If they do, your question can be answered easily by a theist:

Simple. A theist believes that objective truth and beauty exist, so this painting either points to or away from the objective standard, which is God. If an objective standard exists, then everything has meaning. If you only accept relativity, then sure it might mean something to you, but you’re not the sum total of reality so it doesn’t actually mean anything more than that. But then you run into a lot of contradictions with a purely relative outlook.

I’d be interested in hearing the atheist’s response

Well I’m not “the atheist” but I’ll give it a shot.

The difference between your position and my own is that if I think something is beautiful, I think it is beautiful. Beauty being in the eye of the beholder and all that. And that’s fine for me. You, on the other hand, are not content to say “I think this is beautiful.” You need to be able to plaster “… and God thinks so, too!” to your opinions, to call them "objective’.

Ask yourself this, how can you tell the difference between a painting which is “objectively” beautiful, and one which you just subjectively find beautiful?

On randomness: Very few non-Christians I know would describe the nature of the universe as “random”. There is a big difference between “non-random” and “intelligently designed.”

Also, atheists may have an objective standard for things like truth. The objective standard is the same as yours - the “sum total of reality”. We just don’t call the “sum total of reality” a person.

 

[Julian0404]

I see it like this: all we have right now, is right now. Even if we could live forever, life would be an infinite series of nows, so if the nows aren’t worth anything, than neither would an infinite number of them be, right? So I try to live for the life I do have. My dreams and my goals and my hopes are real. Even if they’ll all be nothingness one day. And I try to live for other people, to be around people and have relationships with them and help them, that’s what makes life really worthwhile to me. I think in a way, people are infinite. They each have an entire experience of life, just like my entire everything I’ve experienced, but different, with thoughts, personalities, and needs different from mine. Also, every little thing I do, even when it seems like it makes no difference, is like a ripple in the ocean that gets bigger and bigger and effects things in ways I could never know, maybe a long time after I’m dead.

Yeah, sometimes I wish that there was a definite meaning to life, that I could know. Especially when there’s so much suffering in the world and no logical reason to believe good will come from it. I just kinda hope good will come from bad things anyway. And I try to believe that, no matter all the bad things that happen, the good things and the amazingness of existence itself will always be greater.

Thank you for your response, it helps me begin to understand. And actually, I was surprised as you sound very Christian in your life journey as you defined it. The primary separation is your not knowing a definite meaning for life, while Christians know definitely that GOD is the meaning of life, “to know, to love and to serve HIM”.
And your response to the illogical suffering in the world is exactly Christian in nature, as we ourselves do not know or can explain why bad things happen to good people, but like you, as you hope that good will come from the bad things, we know that GOD can work all things to good, even the bad.
I believe you are close to GOD. Call out to HIM, if you are ever in need to know.

 

[Faith_is_bad]

Perhaps an atheist can share with me how it is they wake every morning, proceed through the day, achieve goals and milestones in life and all the time be looking forward to “Nothingness” when they die.

What can motivate a person to continue with the struggle if they truly believe that at the end, it will amount to “Nothingness”?

The “moment” is meaningless, if in the next moment death can remove you to “Nothingness”.

I can only imagine that the total existence and purpose of living as an atheist is to embrace as much of the material product of life as one can, believing that tomorrow may be “Nothingness”. But wouldn’t such a life become stale after the 1,000th bottle of the best wine, best cars, best food, best entertainment, best whatever you can afford ?

Is “Nothingness” the ultimate goal and achievement of a life led as an atheist ?

You have made so many assumptions… Embrace as much of the material product of life as one can? How about enjoying the time you have however you please? You know: friends, family, adventure, bittersweet moments, a good book, and maybe a little bit of material products. (nothing wrong with good food and wine) If anything, death makes life more meaningful. You assume a dreary outlook where there is none.

 

[gnfd92]

Atheism doesn’t necessitate “nothingness;” often it just involves the replacement of a religiously-derived set of values and beliefs with a non-religious source.

I personally find a sense of purpose in my place in society; I am capable of contributing towards the success of the species through education and dedicated work. My value system is based on what best serves the interest of all living things: seek out knowledge to understand the world around me and to help my species continue to be prosperous (preferably without doing harm to any group within or species without its bounds). While it can be difficult to acknowledge that my actions, however helpful for the species, will be erased by time and the nature of a chaotic universe, I think it better to work for the present and future of living things than not to do so. I feel that I would be an evolutionary failure to not attempt such things. I live for these feelings and concepts that I hold dear, even while acknowledging that there is foolishness even in selflessness.
I also enjoy chocolate and good music, but that’s just the way my brain is wired.

 

[Blinky]

Mark 8:36

 

[Portofino]

What do you mean by inherent value? I mean, those things seem pretty good, because I certainly enjoy friendships and academic achievement and (some) literature still. But the fact that I pursue them and they make me feel warm inside isn’t really inherent.

I think we human beings tend to reason backwards. That is, human beings originally discovered things like friendship, or beauty, or social laws, because they felt good – and because the lack of them caused pain – and because their desire for life was as fundamental to them as the fact of their breathing.

It then seems as if, after the fact, we reasoned this things into being divine commandments, something we were morally enjoined to value.

Take the case of suicide. Staying alive is a construed as a divine commandment, as something that is mandated from on high.

Do most individuals rely on a divine commandment, to stay alive? Probably not, believer and non-believer alike. There is the fear of the death; there is the pleasure one takes in life; these things are instinctive, indeed a “survival instinct.” They’ve existed since time immemorial.
If the human race needed a divine commandment to preserve itself, the human race would have long been extinct, because a divine commandment could not have been articulated prior to human speech, and could not have been codified prior to the invention of writing! It preceded any awareness or understanding of God.

Also, humans conceived it as a divine commandment to “be fruitful and multiply” – one could make a case that they did so, retrospectively, to ground and to warrant what humans had always done (kind of like the way that creation myths explain what is already before our eyes, and we thus create a “backstory” or explanation for what we already know exists). It did not take a divine commandment for humans to be fruitful and multiply; invocation of a divine commandment was a way of sanctioning – and, perhaps, understanding – what we were already doing, by nature.

First we did it; then we started thinking about it. We were doing it, before we were thinking about it.

Many conceive of it as a commandment to love one’s parents, but we’ve all observed infants, toddlers, and know that affective bonds with their parents is something that happens by nature, without reflection. They are not old enough to know that it is a commandment. Even the commandment is refining what is already there – the raw material. Refining it. We didn’t need divine commandments, to take steps to preserve one’s life and to prevent death; nor to feel satisfied when nursing at our mother’s breast, or to cry when our mother left us alone.

Just so, it wouldn’t matter that murder was considered immoral, and illegal, if the vast majority of human beings, from time immemorial, enjoyed being killed. The fact that human beings do not want to be murdered – which has nothing to do with abstract moral duties, per se – is a pragmatic prerequisite, for our having the morality that we have.

Moral commandment is not enough; nature is also necessary, and nature includes things such as desire and aversion, pleasure and pain.

I guess my point is that a naturalistic argument – natural law, or otherwise – offers the best possibility for common ground between believers and non-believers, which I suppose is what “natural law” teaching – not invented by Catholicism, but by pagan Rome – would agree about. It offers great potential of grounding a humanistic ethic that does not invoke divine commandment.

One could say, “without divine commandment, your humanistic ethic derived from nature, is meaningless, of no inherent value.” Yet the non-believer could say, “without nature, your “divine commandment” would never have been conceived of; you are putting the cart before the horse, reasoning backwards from what is natural to what is morally commanded, believing first and then working backwards to find justifications for your belief.”

 

[Portofino]

Simple. A theist believes that objective truth and beauty exist, so this painting either points to or away from the objective standard, which is God. If an objective standard exists, then everything has meaning. If you only accept relativity, then sure it might mean something to you, but you’re not the sum total of reality so it doesn’t actually mean anything more than that. But then you run into a lot of contradictions with a purely relative outlook.

I’d be interested in hearing the atheist’s response

This question of objective aesthetics is even more interesting to me – in a certain sense, at least – than the question of objective morality.

Holding to a particular objective aesthetics runs the danger of becoming rather rigid, constraining, with an aesthetic conservatism becoming stagnant to creativity (“all the standards of beauty have already been discovered; we can only follow what others have already done”). There it is obvious that what was perceived as beautiful in 18th century France, for example (a plump figure in women, pale skin, powdered white hair) is very different from what is predominantly perceived as beautiful in early 21st century France (a slender figure in women, sun-tanned skin, not a fleck of gray hair).
There is much variation in taste and in standards of beauty, even though we all agree that there is something we describe as “beauty.” It’s simply that perceptions of beauty differ not only from one society to another, but from one individual to another.

It’s only in going to the greatest extremes, that one can find some notion of consensus – a face burned away by acid, for example, would not be considered beautiful. And yet, even there, there is a certain quality of perception that could perceive the beauty, even in a face burned by acid – a beauty that goes beyond what meets the eye.

Is a sunset inherently beautiful? Most human beings seem to find a sunset to be inherently beautiful, though we’ve also been programmed, in a way, to find it beautiful, to make an effort to find it beautiful. Romantic love may be the same; the French writer La Rochefoucauld once wrote, “there are some who would never be in love, if they had never heard of love.”

Then there are folks who find a raging storm to be beautiful – sublime.

So it could be argued that human beings are prone to find everything beautiful, are capable of declaring everything, and its opposite, to be beautiful.

Harmony is beautiful, but dissonance can be beautiful, as well. In fact, dissonance can be more beautiful than harmony, ultimately more satisfying, just as someone might prefer the overture to Wagner’s Tristan – which can be jarring to the ears, on first hearing – to the more immediately pleasant harmonies of Mozart or Haydn.

When something new is introduced in the arts – whether it be Impressionist painting, or the paintings of Pollock, or jazz, or atonal music, or rock 'n roll, or heavy metal – it is decried as being ugly, until such time as its own unique beauties are appreciated…

 

[balto]

The difference between your position and my own is that if I think something is beautiful, I think it is beautiful. Beauty being in the eye of the beholder and all that. And that’s fine for me. You, on the other hand, are not content to say “I think this is beautiful.” You need to be able to plaster “… and God thinks so, too!” to your opinions, to call them "objective’.

Ask yourself this, how can you tell the difference between a painting which is “objectively” beautiful, and one which you just subjectively find beautiful?

On randomness: Very few non-Christians I know would describe the nature of the universe as “random”. There is a big difference between “non-random” and “intelligently designed.”

Also, atheists may have an objective standard for things like truth. The objective standard is the same as yours - the “sum total of reality”. We just don’t call the “sum total of reality” a person.

Thanks for your response! You’re right, I should have clarified the randomness statement. What I meant was that they acknowledge that reality operates according to defined laws but why are the laws the way they are when they could have been anything? That’s what seems random to me.

I somehow knew I would get this response about beauty . I don’t know that it’s entirely accurate to say that something is objectively beautiful (or truthful or good for that matter) because God says so. That would imply that these qualities are above God and He is just recognizing them, which contradicts the nature of God because God is the highest form of reality. Rather, I would say I think something is beautiful because it is beautiful. If God is the objective standard of truth, goodness, and beauty, then these standards just are the way they are and we’re recognizing them.

I realize that atheists can have objective standards but then wouldn’t it be correct to call them “deists” or “pantheists” at a very minimum? I hesitate to include agnostics because an agnostic wouldn’t know if these standards exist. I could ask the same question of how they know what the objective standards are. A theist would say that we know them by faith and reason. For instance, we all seem to know instinctively that murder is immoral and it takes an active willpower to transgress this law. Once you’ve accepted that law you could rationalize why it makes sense (other humans have lives that shouldn’t be taken from them without ample reason, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, murdering engenders hatred towards yourself, etc). But I don’t know how you get to this law without some element of faith because either you get pushed back to an “it just is” point or end up in circular reasoning.

 

[polytropos]

Just so, it wouldn’t matter that murder was considered immoral, and illegal, if the vast majority of human beings, from time immemorial, enjoyed being killed. The fact that human beings do not want to be murdered – which has nothing to do with abstract moral duties, per se – is a pragmatic prerequisite, for our having the morality that we have.

Moral commandment is not enough; nature is also necessary, and nature includes things such as desire and aversion, pleasure and pain.

Indeed, the argument that without divine commandment we might as well commit suicide or murder people or steal whatever we want holds very little water. Regardless of what we believe we have human nature, which suffices for many obvious (and especially mutually beneficial) moral decisions.

I guess my point is that a naturalistic argument – natural law, or otherwise – offers the best possibility for common ground between believers and non-believers, which I suppose is what “natural law” teaching – not invented by Catholicism, but by pagan Rome – would agree about. It offers great potential of grounding a humanistic ethic that does not invoke divine commandment.

I wouldn’t think of naturalism and belief in natural law as the same thing. Correct me if you have a different definition, but naturalism is materialism, ie. nature/the material is all there is. Natural law gains its force by insisting that there is a human nature that is valuable, ie. there is something inhered in the material human body so that the human body is not just material. Natural law and materialism are antithetical.

Our moral common grounds are good, of course. But they are not sufficient, since there are moral issues that are not as clear cut as murder and theft. If morality is “natural” in the sense that it’s only wrong to do things that humans have always agreed not to do, then there is no solution to issues like abortion, and whether it is legally defined as murder is a matter of choice and whim, because evolutionarily humans never had to confront such an issue and have no intuitive response.

Granted, I’m not arguing that naturalism’s inability to deal with all moral circumstances makes it necessarily false. If naturalism were true, then most of our actions would have no moral consequences, and those actions that we think of as immoral would be immoral insofar that they make us feel bad and are discouraged by their community. Appeals to logic in moral debate would be incoherent.

One could say, “without divine commandment, your humanistic ethic derived from nature, is meaningless, of no inherent value.” Yet the non-believer could say, “without nature, your “divine commandment” would never have been conceived of; you are putting the cart before the horse, reasoning backwards from what is natural to what is morally commanded, believing first and then working backwards to find justifications for your belief.”

As I just mentioned, inherent value by definition requires that some value is inhered in the material human body. So an atheistic humanistic ethic has no inherent value. That doesn’t mean it’s worthless, because one can’t expect to obtain value from Weber’s disenchanted world, and holding onto a value system that enshrines “humanistic values” might still have an appeal even if those values can’t exist.

I’d agree with your characterization of divine commandments if I were an atheist. If you view our recording of “divine commandments” from an anthropological view, as you do, then they are of course secondary to nature because they could not have been abstracted from anything other than nature. They are divine commandments in name and human laws in practice. If you believe in God, then divine commandments (as one would expect) correspond with and inform nature, enabling believers to process more complex moral circumstances. Divine commandment does not come into being when it is “conceived.” It is.

 

[ThinkingSapien]

I realize that atheists can have objective standards but then wouldn’t it be correct to call them “deists” or “pantheists” at a very minimum?

Only if said “objective standard” was dependent on the perspective of a deity. If it is something that could be described algorithmically (just as an example) then the answer would be “no.”

A theist would say that we know them by faith and reason.

That sounds like something that is specifically in line with Catholic teaching, but not necessarily specific to other forms of Christianity or non-Christian theistic religions.

 

[ngill09]

Thanks for your response! You’re right, I should have clarified the randomness statement. What I meant was that they acknowledge that reality operates according to defined laws but why are the laws the way they are when they could have been anything? That’s what seems random to me.

I somehow knew I would get this response about beauty . I don’t know that it’s entirely accurate to say that something is objectively beautiful (or truthful or good for that matter) because God says so. That would imply that these qualities are above God and He is just recognizing them, which contradicts the nature of God because God is the highest form of reality. Rather, I would say I think something is beautiful because it is beautiful. If God is the objective standard of truth, goodness, and beauty, then these standards just are the way they are and we’re recognizing them.

I realize that atheists can have objective standards but then wouldn’t it be correct to call them “deists” or “pantheists” at a very minimum? I hesitate to include agnostics because an agnostic wouldn’t know if these standards exist. I could ask the same question of how they know what the objective standards are. A theist would say that we know them by faith and reason. For instance, we all seem to know instinctively that murder is immoral and it takes an active willpower to transgress this law. Once you’ve accepted that law you could rationalize why it makes sense (other humans have lives that shouldn’t be taken from them without ample reason, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, murdering engenders hatred towards yourself, etc). But I don’t know how you get to this law without some element of faith because either you get pushed back to an “it just is” point or end up in circular reasoning.

It seems like you’re not defining the objective standard as God, but defining God as an objective standard - so that any objective standard would be called “God” even if it had no personality whatsoever. For example, I would call mathematical coherence an objective standard by which to measure the truth of certain propositions. Does that mean that mathematics is a God?

 

[balto]

Holding to a particular objective aesthetics runs the danger of becoming rather rigid, constraining, with an aesthetic conservatism becoming stagnant to creativity (“all the standards of beauty have already been discovered; we can only follow what others have already done”).

I don’t think that holding to an objective standard of beauty stifles creativity. Maybe holding an objective standard of art does but I think one would have to clarify what one finds beautiful in something. I think there’s an objective standard there.

It’s only in going to the greatest extremes, that one can find some notion of consensus – a face burned away by acid, for example, would not be considered beautiful. And yet, even there, there is a certain quality of perception that could perceive the beauty, even in a face burned by acid – a beauty that goes beyond what meets the eye.

Yes, but this seems to suggest that beauty is more than physical appearance, because there would be a consensus that the physical appearance alone is not what makes something beautiful. The beauty transcends the physical world, which makes it timeless and unchanging, or did I commit a logical fallacy somewhere around here .

Is a sunset inherently beautiful? Most human beings seem to find a sunset to be inherently beautiful, though we’ve also been programmed, in a way, to find it beautiful, to make an effort to find it beautiful.

This is the classic example of beauty that I would have used . But if we’re being conditioned to find it beautiful, why is that? That would imply that it’s somehow right to find it beautiful but if there’s no objective standard of beauty then it’s just an accident. Anything we find beautiful is an accident and meaningless, which is related to the point originally made in the OP.

So it could be argued that human beings are prone to find everything beautiful, are capable of declaring everything, and its opposite, to be beautiful.

Harmony is beautiful, but dissonance can be beautiful, as well. In fact, dissonance can be more beautiful than harmony, ultimately more satisfying, just as someone might prefer the overture to Wagner’s Tristan – which can be jarring to the ears, on first hearing – to the more immediately pleasant harmonies of Mozart or Haydn.

But isn’t this a classic case of something being both A and not A at the same time? How can two opposite things both be beautiful? I’m asking not because you’re wrong but because I don’t know. I think maybe you’d have to ascertain the reasons why somebody would find dissonance beautiful and the underlying reason may converge with someone finding harmony beautiful. But you’ve certainly given me things to think about since I usually only think about objective truth and goodness

 

[Equites_Christi]

I think it boils down to the question of meaning, which it seems all people desire in some manner.

Meaning seems to be inherently tied to the ideas of design and intent, which can only come from an intelligence.

For example, we say a knife is meant to cut, since it was created and designed for that end. If we use it to scoop ice cream, we say it wasn’t meant for that.

Now if humans are not designed or created by an intelligence, they don’t have meaning, since they aren’t intended for anything. You can later impose external meanings, such as “My role is to sweep the floor” but it isn’t tied to the very existence of the human, the way that cutting is to a knife. Instead it was chosen after the human being came into existence, and is not part of the human’s essence.

So without a creator we can have circumstantial meaning, but not inherent meaning. Many atheists seem to focus on the circumstantial side and not dwell much on the ‘bigger picture’ that the whole context of their meaning (doing a job, serving humanity, etc.) is meaningless if humanity itself does not have some inherent meaning.