fleetmouse wrote:Sarge, you have this habit of taking everything to an extreme until everything means everything else and nothing means anything
Why fleetmouse, that's positively one of the nicest complements I've ever been paid. =)
The problem of evil is that the culturally acceptable means of curtailing it are not convergent upon any one solution and many solutions are mutual exclusive. So the real problem of evil is that without an objective framework to ground the experience of reality, there is no such thing as objective evil to which action can be taken. Therefore, the dilemma of resolving the problem of evil in an atheistic worldview is that evil must be perpetrated upon others in order to realize an end to evil for a different (dominant) group.
There is no other possible participation in reality for an atheist. Some may simply choose not to pursue a universal end to evil and settle for resolving evil within their own culture (which logically will be reduced to a culture of one lone individual when this philosophy is pursued to its end, which it won't, therefore the problem of evil is always accommodated to allow for people to have relationships with one another).
I don't think we're all talking about the same "problem of evil" in this thread. I was asking whether a naturalistic / non-theistic worldview is inadequate to explain the existence of evil. It's a philosophical problem. What you're talking about sounds more like a political or sociological problem. And there is much overlap, but also a great deal of difference, between these things.
Anyhow, I don't think you're taking into account the human facility to learn, grow, adapt and change. You're setting up a scenario in which man runs along like a little robot obeying certain precepts unquestioningly. However, when we encounter other people with a different moral and cultural framework, we don't necessarily engage in a war of civilizations, because we can reflect and learn and adapt, and find common ground - because we are, after all, distant cousins - biologically almost identical, living in the same universe on the same planet and coping with many of the same problems and emotional responses.
What principles do we rely upon to grow and accommodate other cultures? This is what I am exploring and categorizing. For consistency, I am trying to identify where the concept of good/evil emanates from in both the theistic and atheistic sense. The common principle is that morality has to refer to something beyond one's self as an authoritative standard to which everything must conform. There is no objective standard in an atheistic worldview that can serve this function, except for the culturally relevant definition in the moment. This is also present in the theistic worldview, however it is not the ONLY possible basis for morality.
My proposition has nothing to do with what in particular we think is good, or common about our experience. So I would assert that an atheistic worldview is inadequate to express evil as anything other than a cultural construct. There is no deeper meaning to be found, nor can any such notion be expressed within that worldview. Any attempt otherwise connotes religious behaviour, even if the "god" isn't a familiar one (the patter of belief is).
Therefore, the simplest way to resolve evil in an atheistic worldview, is to define it out of existence once a tolerable level of group cohesion has been reached.
Or to put it a different way, sometimes we modify or abandon old ideas when we discover new and better ones.
There is no such things as better or worse in an atheistic worldview, just differences. Only individuals perceive better and worse alternatives, and groups collectively converge on the same behaviour, but in no sense is an old idea abandoned because it was worse than a new one in the absolute moral sense. There is no direction or destiny to mankind; just options.
This is the only consistent worldview for an atheist to hold.
I don't think so. Your conception of man and morality, or your conception of the nontheist's conception of man and morality - are too simplistic. People don't begin with a goal and follow blindly. They learn things along the way and change direction. And besides, who said that consistency was the highest virtue?
No, they are as simple as necessary in order to arrive at a consistent vocabulary. Of course, their ability to describe real people is diminished at the same time as their power to explain a philosophical proposition increases.
So I am not talking about a particular worldview of a particular Atheist Joe. Good and Evil for Atheist Joe are trivial matters. I chose to look, instead, on how it would be possible for entire cultures to arrive at common definitions for "good" and "evil".
In an atheistic worldview, the only orientation to good and evil is aesthetics...aka, how I feel at the moment. However, over time, the only part about morality that matters is what works. Pragmatism is the only common moral ground across all atheistic worldviews and therefore it is the only trait being "selected for" in cultural "evolution". That is why I identify consistency as the lone virtue. Whatever remains consistent over time becomes the defacto good, because whatever society diminished is "evil" and whatever it pursued is "good" because that is the only consistent way to define those terms across all cultural incarnations. It's a tautology from that perspective, but it makes perfect sense in the moment - the chain of authority in an atheistic/aesthetic worldview is arbitrary.
If any of us want to attempt to describe the real morality of real people, I suggest we just copy and paste one of the hundreds of great novels that explore this subject in its proper medium (prose).
Peace,
-sgttomas