Canadian political philosopher George Grant argues that Liberalism is the political philosophy that makes freedom the absolute value of political life and if deeply embraced, the absolute value of personal life too. If freedom really is the essence of human existence, then based on this outlook one's priority will always be to seek to limit freedom to the least extent possible. But I wonder if this emphasis has a certain kind of fundamental risk to it related to the phenomenon of the tragedy of the commons.
John Stuart Mill certainly helped clarify the Liberal approach for the budding Whig and Liberal political parties of the 19th century. One's freedom should not be limited unless it could be seen to directly cause harms to others. "Liberal" democratic societies, therefore, should continuously experiment with withdrawing limitations on freedom. According to Mill, the happy byproduct of this approach would be a better society for everyone because individuals are better than governments to explore and understand the possibilities (plans of life) that can make them, and potentially others, more happy.
We have lived with this approach being the predominant approach in industrialized countries for last century and a half. With the aid of abundant fossil energy it has produced a global culture of affluence for many. But we also seem beset by a growing array of crises, that seem to have the hallmarks of instances of tragedies of the commons (soil crisis, fish crisis, water crisis, extinction crisis, debt crisis, pollution crisis, climate crisis, energy crisis, democratic deficit, automation crisis, obesity crisis, drug crisis, anxiety crisis, depression crisis).
Tragedies of the commons, as I understand them, occur whenever harms can result from actions undertaken for an individual's own benefit that are not born by that individual alone but are spread among some wider number of morally relevant parties. When such conditions are present, there must be some kind of formal response that can restrict the behaviour in a way that effectively (although not necessarily perfectly) prevents the harms from being offloaded (externalized) onto others. Unless these measures are reasonably effective, "defection" from responsibility will be continuously encouraged (to the point of absolute necessity) and growth of the harms will rise to unmanageable proportions for everyone.
Or, as the logical puzzle "the prisoner's dilemma" makes clear (especially if repeated over many iterations when modelling behaviours), simply pursuing self advantage as a strategy without mutual limits effectively imposed by all those affected by your decisions can never lead to optimal outcomes for all involved, but only sub-optimal outcomes. Reason demands binding rules on all parties negatively affected by each other's actions.
The problem as I see it is that Liberalism encourages us to always "push towards the red line" in terms of our society's allowance of behaviours that can turn out to trigger tragedies of the commons. The basic approach of Liberalism is always to seek and experiment with the removal of limits in order to discern if suspected harms are not actually real. In economics this takes the form of the goal of reaching Pareto Optimality or the maximally efficient economy in terms of the production that can be wrung from any given natural environment. This approach might not be a problem if human life and human societies are relatively simple. If this is the case then people in such societies could risk being continuously experimental about removing limits because they could relatively easily discern if missteps had occurred and pull back by re-instituting those limits or by creating new binding rules.
But societies today are not simple-- They are complex and rapidly evolving technological societies, in which new activities are continuously being added to human life in an ever changing and ever complex "technological ecology" as Marshall McLuhan might put it. The negative effects of such changes often take decades to manifest, as we can see with the impacts of DDT and automobiles. And technologies can interact in ways that can "synergize" completely new and unexpected negative effects, such as we are beginning to sense with various forms of social media. Running economies continuously at Pareto Optimality means that any declines in ecological conditions leave no room for adjustment.
But since our instinct in liberal societies is to leave people as free as possible and to have faith in democracy and our innovative ability to fix problems (i.e. technology), we generally assume that we will be able to create whatever limits or systems of management that might reveal themselves to be necessary. But might it be possible, if societies are complex enough for this ability to discern the sources of tragedies of the commons to be overwhelmed? If the number of new behaviours being introduced becomes so high we might reach a point that we cannot discern among the complexity the specific behaviours (technological activities) leading to the harms poised to runaway into tragedy.
Put another way, might Liberalism be a political and personal philosophy suitable only for relatively simple societies in which harms and their sources can be easily recognized (e.g. my fist hitting your nose) rather than the complex globally interconnected technological societies we live in today? In such societies problems unleashed by technological activities and the synergy between those activities might take so long to manifest themselves that by the time we notice they are problematic that they may have become so deeply embedded that they are effectively beyond practical control (cultural momentum/technological dependency). Perhaps, therefore, it is time for us to consider returning to being a society of laws (harm seekers, lawmakers and law enforcers). A cautionary philosophy, might be the only political philosophy that can adequately deal with the main threats of the present and the future.
But since we cannot name "technology" or our favourite political philosophy "liberalism" (aka neo-conservatism) as problems, we must find people to blame for our growing fears. So we blame immigrants, or we blame the supporters of opposing mainstream liberal/neo-conservative political parties, or we blame prominent public figures (Trump, etc), or nebulously defined sinister groups (terrorists of the right or left). We put faces to our growing fears and then see ourselves as being on the other team.
Evolution has inclined us to respond in such ways. We evolved to manage threats from specific human individuals in small groups, not complex problems unleashed by synergizing technological ecologies and the abstractions of longstanding political philosophies working their way out in globalized societies. But we must be able to name the sources of the threats we are facing or we will be inevitably drawn towards the personalization of our problems. To "technology" I would add the name "liberalism" as a fundamental source of the growing cascade of unfolding global tragedies that we face today.
Is the rejection of nihilism the best argument in support of the consideration of the possibility of the existence of God? At the prompting of a number of students, I've been watching videos of Jordan Peterson vs. various New Atheists. Matt Dillahunty was Peterson's latest sparring partner. It was while watching this video that a thought struck me about these recent defenders of materialist-naturalist-scientific-atheism. Many of them, such as Dillahunty, describe how in the course of their lives they moved away from religious upbringings to embrace atheism. This is so alien to my own experience, since I was raised in a non-religious home, without any encouragement by my parents to believe in God. Not that I was actively discouraged. There was just a general lack of discussion of any serious sort, except for the occasional critical remark such as that "God was the opiate of the masses" or a "crutch." None of my close friends except for one went to Church.
The result was that for the earliest years of my life I found myself quite happily identifying with a kind of materialist-naturalist-scientific-atheism. In my early teens, I was attracted to Marxism and to the supposedly scientific outlook that Marx felt his outlook was based in. By my mid-teens I was also starting to explore the outlook of nihilism and was reading some Nietzsche. In my late teens, however, I began to question my commitment to nihilism and eventually found myself drawn into the life of a Christian community. That community transformed my life.
What I think many of the New Atheists don't seem to recognize is that their religious upbringing might immunize them from serious consideration of nihilism. Perhaps their religious upbringings, along with the support of lingering religious influences on culture provides an intellectual footing that prevents them from going deeper in their philosophical explorations. Whereas my own life experience started with a certain kind of vague leftist/liberal indifference towards theism, it eventually led to nihilism because one realizes that outlooks like Marxism, Positivism and scientism are not really scientific perspectives but quasi-religious worldviews. Marxism, for instance, is filled with a lingering earnestness for justice that one also hears in the Hebrew prophets. It has saints and music. I still know the words to the Internationale. What drove me towards nihilism was the inability of outlooks like Marxism, positivism, or naturalism to take seriously what committing oneself to a hard-nosed rational empiricism really entails. It involves accepting that only empirical statements are meaningful and capable of being ascertained as true or false. Seeing the world as a material system without supernatural elements means throwing out all the comforting ideas about meaning, purpose, freedom and morality. If one is truly to be a naturalist, this means not accepting subjective beliefs about realities beyond the straightforward operations of matter. As Nietzsche made clear, believing that God is dead must lead one to also wipe away the horizon of meaning which that concept enlightened.
My teenage brain was, of course, filled with certain anxieties about these thoughts. Was life essentially a joke? A meaningless struggle, with no guarantees whatsoever? Was morality a mugs game? Were all human endeavors essentially shams?-- Mere attempts to whistle past the graveyard? I accepted that the answers to these questions were most likely "yes." I still find myself sometimes inclining to these conclusions. I felt that scientific discovery shed no useful light on these issues. I was prepared to go forward in life in a stoic way without false and imaginary ideas clung to only to provide solace. This was what I felt all religious beliefs were really about. They were fantasies that helped people in the face of the stark reality of the meaninglessness of existence.
My reaction to folks like Dillahunty and Harris, who so easily spout variations of vaguely utilitarian/natural law outlooks and decry arguments that imply their positions must lead to immorality or amorality, is that they really don't take their atheism seriously enough. I might be one of the few Christians who reject their arguments not because they reject God, but because they reject atheism. They believe that atheism need not devolve to nihilism, whereas I believe that it must. So when they deny that atheism leads to immorality or amorality, I hear Nietzsche whispering in the background, have the courage of your convictions. Sure, you need not, nor are likely to, start killing people, or as Dillahunty quips to "shove Sam Harris off the stage", but don't try to justify still believing in non-empirical realities like "goodness" and "meaning." Don't suggest that "consciousness" and "freedom" are anything more than mere artifacts of an interesting picture-show of the deterministic operation of your synapses. If Matt doesn't shove Sam off the stage, admit that this has nothing to do with morality--nothing to do with Sam's worth, or Matt's sense of self-worth-- or the "self-evident goodness of happiness," but is simply the result of contingent biological instincts for self preservation. As Nietzsche jokes, "man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that." If one is prepared to jettison God because there is no compelling empirical evidence, one must also be prepared to jettison these other comforting concepts too. Don't make arbitrary exceptions for ones that you just happen to like or perhaps feel embarrassed to bring into public question.
It would appear that Jordan Peterson thinks along similar lines. You can see him probing Dillahunty in ways meant to prompt him to expose the various junctures in his thought where he holds empirically dubious commitments such as belief in free will, the intrinsic worth of human beings, the importance of being earnest as opposed to straightforwardly self-concerned, etc. One is left wondering why it is so important to ditch God but leave all these other non-empirical aspects of human life and thought untouched. Dillahunty is highly selective in his supposed empiricism and "rational" thinking. People's reports of their religious experiences are simply discounted, as are apparent somatic effects of such experiences, but their reports of consciousness, freedom and value and their supposedly amenable effects on societies (including science) are left untouched.
So I guess my argument is simple. If you are going to be a materialist-naturalist-scientific-atheist, you really must be a nihilist too. Non-nihilistic atheism unless *intensively* philosophically considered too often simply ends up being an incoherent mishmash of the cultural lingerings of moral outlooks that have grown out of essentially religious metaphysical commitments. The argument here is not that atheism necessarily leads to immoral behaviour. I think there are lots of instincts and social pressures that will keep most of us in line most of the time, and will likely continue to do so for quite some time, if not possibly indefinitely. The objection here is not about such practical matters. It's about whether one has an intellectually coherent metaphysical outlook that can make sense of one's desire for and respect of these instincts and social practices. But many of the New Atheists seem to wish to avoid such wider discussion of foundations, or what Charles Taylor calls "frameworks" of meaning. They are focused only on the issue of God, but seem uncomfortable and uninterested in discussion of other metaphysical beliefs (metaphorical substrates) and abstract issues of contemporary epistemology that inform critical aspects of their outlooks (including their respect for science).
Maybe the best way to proceed in a defense of theism is not directly by way of a defense of the existence of God. Maybe what one must first do is understand why nihilism is not acceptable. If this can be done, then the issue of faith might simply boil down to making a choice between nihilism vs. Non-nihilism (Anihilism?) If nihilism doesn't make sense, then one must find another outlook, with theism being one of the many possibilities to consider. Perhaps such consideration, if carried out honestly and sincerely over a lifetime, might be enough to allow one to count oneself a theist.
As a theist and member of a Christian religious community I cannot avoid the issues of divine revelation and scriptural authority. The issue of revelation is generally thought to pose questions of whether and how a God might communicate with us. It therefore seems to be a derivative issue of the issue of theism versus anti-theism. The reasoning behind its apparent derivative nature would seem to emerge naturally from the assumption that the question of whether and how a God might communicate with us presupposes an answer to the issue or whether there is a God or not. If there is no God, then one would have no need to consider the issue of whether and how such a being might communicate with us. What I want to argue here is that such an assumption is not well founded and is likely largely a byproduct of habits of thought born of the the long standing influence of theism on our society. Instead, I will argue that the issue of revelation is really centred on the question of whether there is a possibility for any meaningful insight to emerge from reality about the ultimate purpose and meaning of existence. "Revelation" in this sense can be seen to simply refer to the possibility for truths to emerge about these issues from our experience of existence. Given this definition, having a position on revelation is unavoidable.
If one believes there is a possibility for meaningful truths to emerge (manifest themselves) about the ultimate purpose and meaning of existence, then by my definition of "revelation," one can be described as a believer in revelation. This position can grow out of or be clarified by a position of theism, but it need not. Under such a view, it would be even possible to be an atheist and a believer in revelation. There is a minor grammatical issue here that must be addressed. In English the verb "to reveal" might typically suggest the operation of an agent of some sort, thus skewing the discussion inadvertently towards theism. However, it is certainly the case that one can write about an earthquake causing a rock to roll away "revealing" a hidden cave. It is that objective sense of "reveal" that I have in mind when I speak of revelation. Given these stipulations, the contrasting position to being a believer in revelation would be nihilism (the position that there are no ultimate purposes for or meanings of existence) or an extreme positivism (a position that only empirical statements are capable of being judged true or false).
It is unavoidable for a reasonable thoughtful person to have some kind of position on this issue. As a nihilist or positivist one believes there is no possibility for such propositions ever being determined to be true, or one believes otherwise, either in the form of the possibility of such truths or that one has actually ascertained such truths. To recast this schema onto the debate about theism, it would seem to me that agnostics in their suspension of judgement about the issue of the non-existence or existence of God, commit themselves to the position that there is some possibility that God exists-- either perfectly balanced by the rational possibility that God does not exist, or that the exact balance of rational proof cannot be, as yet, determined. An agnostic might argue that her position is really the absence of a position and that suspension of judgement, as such, cannot convey anything of substance about the issue, but is not this just an evasion? If one's agnosticism is to represent anything more than an arbitrary decision not to participate in the discussion, in effect simply to put one's fingers in one's ears when theists and atheists are about, then one accepts some possibility for the existence of a God. And if one accepts such a possibility, one also accepts the possibility that truths about the ultimate purpose of existence might manifest themselves and thus would be a believer in revelation by my definition. Even Richard Dawkins has admitted that he cannot be absolutely sure that God does not exist, and he has spoken eloquently of how people can find meaning in life through the pursuit of scientific knowledge.
By my definition the only way one can avoid being a believer in revelation is by way of a defense of nihilism or positivism. If one accepts revelation in this sense, then the only question remaining is what kinds of answers one can expect to find about the issue of meanings and purposes of existence. This brings me to the issue of "scriptural authority" that I also mentioned at the beginning of this piece. Can the answers to questions about the ultimate meaning and purpose of existence be found in particular records of religious thought about such questions? This question is dependent on the secondary issue of revelation: How does it work? For some traditional theists, the answer is that God directs the thoughts and activities of certain individuals, such that they record God's thoughts directly in written form--so called "Automatic writing." More liberal groups, like my own United Church, generally teach these days that God communicates with the conscience of certain individuals. These individuals then write about their experiences. Under this view, written revelation is always a "secondary" witness to a "primary" experience in the mind of an individual.
Although this more modern way of expressing the nature of revelation is more in keeping with my own view, it is not fully satisfactory to me. I am too much of a naturalist materialist of a certain sort to find such a description to be helpful. It requires one to believe in a God of "magic" who arbitrarily interferes in the operations of nature and the inner conscious lives of only certain individuals. For me, revelation, if it is not to be arbitrary, must respect the law bound character of nature that we observe. And it must not grant "privileged" access to God. I think there are good moral reasons for avoiding both of these forms of arbitrariness on God's part. I think the New Testament expresses a similar position when it asserts that one of the ongoing gifts of the Spirit is the gift of prophesy:
And God has appointed these in the church: first apostles, second prophets (1 Corinthians 12:28).
Pursue love, and desire spiritual gifts, but especially that you may prophesy (1 Corinthians 14:1).
Similarly, the Calvinist tradition of which I partake also emphasizes the absolute authority of God over all of creation.
With these points in mind, I would say for me that God's revelation manifests itself in every aspect of creation. The creation as a whole is God's communication to conscious agents within that creation. Every atom and its motion is a part of God's work and thus a part of God's ultimate plan and purpose for creation. This is why the study of science is so important. I agree with Galileo that there is a "book" of nature. So what does such an expansive view suggest about the other book? Am I such a liberal Christian that I hardly can grant any authority to scripture written by human hands? No I would grant it more.
Like all the material aspects of the world scriptures represent the direct work of God. But scriptures also represent an account of an ongoing conversation among people about the issues of ultimate meaning and purpose (their experiences, imaginative leaps and debates drawing on such sources--which is what I mean by the process of "reason"), including their interactions with people of radically disparate viewpoints from their own. For theists, this conversation focuses on purported perceptions of God's works. The most ancient scripture reflect some part of these metaphysical discussions going back millennia into the oral traditions of various communities. Since I am also a follower of Socrates, for me the operation of reason demands the interaction of a multiplicity of viewpoints defending their positions in consideration of each other, with the most reasonable discourses being those that have taken into account the greatest number of the disparate points of view as possible. "Dialectic" is the fancy Greek-derived word for such processes.
For me the primary reason for looking to ancient writings as authorities is because they put us into contact with the views of others whose views might be the most radically different from our own. Someone living 2500 years ago is only available for me today as a potential interlocutor on issues of ultimate meaning in the form of the record they might have left, in some small part, through their influence on the creation of human writings like those we call "scriptures."
Works like the Vedas, the Dharmapada, the Tao de Ching, the Analects of Confucius, the Torah and the prophets and writings of the Hebrew scriptures, the New Testament or the Koran, are important to read because they put us in touch with the thoughts of people from long ago about these issues. I can go talk to any living person, or consult the millions of books published since the invention of the printing press, but if I want to consult people radically different from those who have lived since the 15th century on issues of ultimate meaning I must generally enter the realm of the great religious writings. This is a duty, because Socrates shows us how our arguments are only as good as the strongest criticisms they have been able to stand up to, and one finds the strongest criticisms by consulting people with radically different experiences and positions from one's own. Ancient people are likely to be the most different from people today as you can get, so excluding them from the conversation based on arbitrary assumptions that their views must be out-of-date, is simply not acceptable. It is for this reason that they are "mandatory" reading to some degree.
But just because such writings might be mandatory reading for the thoughtful person clearly does not fully encompass what most people mean be the idea of "scriptural authority." This concept usually speaks to some special ethical or doctrinal authority one is willing to grant to certain specific writings. For me, such a notion of authority arises simply from the necessities of logic. If certain claims conflict logically one simply must choose which claims one will accept as being more worthy of rational consideration. And when it comes to comprehensives works with comprehensive disagreements, one must be prepared to judge which work one will draw on as a resource when considering ones views in "dialogue" with others on issues of ultimate meaning. If rationality is as Socrates suggests, always something that can only manifest itself through a process of discourse between disparate points of view, but one, as a mere mortal, cannot read and/or verbally communicate with everyone, then practical choices will have to be made regarding the priority of who one will choose as one's discursive partners. Most of us cannot just read the Vedas, Dharmapada, Tao de Ching, the Analects of Confucius, Torah, prophets and writings of the Hebrew scriptures, New Testament and the Koran, let alone all the other interesting writings, when we need to make judgments touching on issues of ultimate meaning and purpose. We certainly can't do so if we find ourselves in a crisis. At such moments, hard decisions will have to be made regarding whose thoughts to commune with, and in truly dangerous times, whose thoughts to preserve for the use of others in the future, sometimes at the expense of one's own life.
For me scriptures are authoritative because they represent the crystallization of ongoing and potentially extremely ancient conversations (and efforts to preserve such conversations) about the meaning and purpose of existence. They are authoritative because I need to formulate my own positions in the light of as many disparate views as possible from my own, and the most ancient people are likely to be as disparate as one can get. The best scriptures, therefore, would be those which are most ancient or draw on ancient sources, which encompass the largest number of disparate views in their formation, and which preserve the greatest diversity of views. This is why I like the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. Each tacitly present a diversity of authors, including ones strongly influenced by vibrant oral traditions. And it is now better understood how even many of those "single" authors represent the work of multiplicity of authors and redactors. The land of Israel represents a crossroads of world cultures. The great libraries of the Hindu scriptures are similar in these respects. But ultimately logical judgments must be made between such conflicting sources. It is simply a matter of logic that I must create an ordering or precedence of trustworthiness. Unless one is simply happy to allow oneself to drift awash among the thoughts of great works, one must begin at some point to prioritize which among them will be one's primary interlocutors. For me my attempt to do so would go something like this:
Mark
Gospels
New Testament
Torah
Job/Ecclesiastes/Amos
Hebrew Scriptures
Bhagavad Gita (Thank you India!)
Vedas
Dhammapada
Pali Canon
...
"Letters Papers from Prison" by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"Common Sense" by Thomas Paine
...
The Koran
...
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
....
I think it might be possible for someone to hold a position that seeking to consider the views of ancient people is unnecessary in one's consideration of issues of the meaning and purpose of existence. But this would have to be based on a vigorously argued position for why such a category as a whole could be lopped off as a whole from the list of one's potential interlocutors. But one must, regardless of one's judgement, also be prepared for the unfortunate circumstance of having to make decisions about what must be given priority to pass along for the sake of others in the future. This might be less of a pressing issue in the modern age, but the moral obligation to consider this contingency still applies to some extent. This is a more pragmatic reason why the issue of revelation and "scriptural authority" cannot be avoided, even by atheists, or at least for those atheists who are not nihilists or positivists. Indeed such decisions are another aspect of what makes ancient scriptures so precious since it is almost certain that some of their parts had such vital, life sacrificing, decisions made about them so that they were passed along to us. This duty to help "draw the circle wide" in terms of the ongoing human conversation is another part of the process of the crystallization of traditions of discourse about ultimate meaning and purpose, which Christians call the Logos.
There is probably ground for much greater possible consensus to develop on the issues of revelation and scriptural authority, if we abandon the assumption that revelation is phenomenon of relevance only to theists.
This isn't really a moral argument for God's existence, at least in terms of the classical moral arguments, but rather an argument for why the issue of God's existence, as it relates to the more general question of the possible meaning of existence, inevitably creates moral conflict between theists and non-theists of a certain sort. This conclusion runs contrary to Richard Gale's contention that arguments regarding God's existence must not violate "the principle of the universality of moral propositions" (2007). So it is a possible beginning to a new line of argument in the tradition of moral arguments, but with elements from the philosophy of mind and semiology thrown into the mix. So far, I have not found any moral arguments quite like it (so if you know any, please let me know).
Most people want to think that their lives have meaning. But the human heart can also long for more. Some don't wish for simply a temporary meaning, significant only for themselves. Rather, they long for a wider and enduring meaning that can make ultimate sense of the individual struggles of their lives. Bertrand Russell might be satisfied with the temporary significance of a "thinking reed" blowing in the wind-- here today-- dried up and blown away tomorrow, but some people prefer to see the puzzle piece of their life fitting into some grander enduring structure of meaning.
But for such a grander structure to "have meaning," in a practical sense, there must be an agent to comprehend that meaning. And for that meaning to be enduring, there must be an agent who (that?) is enduring so that meaning can exist in an enduring way. For meaning to be truly enduring it is not enough that the existence of finite agents might be an ongoing possibility of some infinite natural process. For those wishing for ultimate meaning it would not be good enough that that there is a mere possibility for more reeds to emerge, comprehend and find significance in their finite corner of reality. Rather, if the whole is to have enduring ultimate meaning then one must posit the possibility of an agent capable of comprehending the process in its entirety, and powerful enough that it would be impossible for it to disappear and leave the whole without an agent to comprehend its meaning. In other words, the possibility of the emergence of finite agency is always also the possibility that there might be no further agents and thus the possibility that the meaning of the whole, in practical terms, might cease to exist, possibly forever.
Typically those desiring such ultimate meaning long not just for the world to have meaning, but for that meaning to reflect goodness in some fashion. The entirety, should not just have significance, but that significance should be edifying and worthwhile. It should somehow explain the sufferings of finite agents within the process. All human beings faced with the inevitable destruction of one's hopes and dreams have had to contemplate such issues. Whether a Neanderthal or modern homo sapien sapien, we all will ponder such questions at some point in our lives. At that point, one is forced to choose between two fundamental options. Either there is a possibility for agency to disappear forever and any thread of meaning to be broken. Or some form of agency must exist that is capable of reflecting on the whole and understanding its significance forever.
Why is an agent necessary for meaning to exist? Because most of us would accept, based on our own experience, that meaning is something that only occurs for agents. Rocks, plants or air are incapable of comprehension and understanding. They are incapable of ascertaining significance. Only agents, like ourselves can do that. So for meaning to exist, in a practical sense, there must be some form of agent for whom some pattern or story can be meaningful. And for a meaning of the whole to exist eternally there must be some kind of eternal agent (whether single or multiple) who can comprehend it. Polytheists and Monotheists share in this basic conclusion.
Monotheism, as many have argued, is probably just an elaboration of this basic metaphysical conclusion that draws on a sense that morality requires some ultimate authority who can decide between a conflicting views about the good. The axial age discussed by Karl Jaspers, might well represent a period in human history when human societies began to turn against pluralism and began to assert that good must take some ultimately unified form. This conclusion led to the demise of the multiple gods who could bicker and disagree about the nature of good. In their place, new ideas developed of a single God, but a basic role remained-- to bear witness to the meaningful order, which its absolute power could ensure would continue in its significance in an eternal way.
The alternative is to believe in the possibility that reality as a whole can in practical terms cease to have meaning. In nature's coming and goings, it might indeed end up being a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing because in the end there might be no agency for who any significance could register. Clearly nihilists and some atheists believe in this possibility. Many of them feel the evidence points to such a possibility being more likely. They also think it is more noble to simply face up to this possibility and accept that at best only finite meanings for the whole can exist. They might be right.
But human beings must make such a metaphysical judgement without full knowledge of the whole. The arguments for atheism and theism are ongoing. The more practical matter is how do we live in the interim. What attitude should we adopt towards the meaning of reality given the uncertainty of the issue of the possibility for an enduring meaning of the whole?
Regarding this question various defenders of theism have made practical arguments moral arguments for the belief in God. They have argued that adopting a theistic perspective was necessary to help make each of us a better person. Some theists argue that embracing the postulate of enduring ultimate meaning provides a firmer foundation/motivation for moral responsibility. They worry that the possibility of ultimate meaninglessness might well allow individuals under extreme conditions and temptations to make choices for purely fleeting and selfish goals. Atheists of course, contend that such temptation makes the struggle for moral responsibility more monumental for finite beings and hence more noble when achieved. Ultimately, it remains an open question about how ethical responsibility can be best founded and effectively lived out.
I believe that it is possible for individuals to intellectually grasp the main demands of morality without having fully decided the issue of the foundations of ultimate meaning. As for the issue of how motivation for leading a moral life is influenced by such possibilities, this remains obscured in the mists of sociological research into the influence of religion on individuals and societies, as well as the mists of meta-ethical debate. But certainly each person has a personal responsibility to consider the question of whether they can judge whether they are likely to be a better person given a choice about which metaphysical view they should posit. But such a judgement is an ethical judgement, not a purely metaphysical judgement. Since this kind of judgement about oneself, and one's possibilities for goodness emerges from a personal assessment of one's character based on intimate knowledge of one's inner life, it is not a judgment that can be completely open to public scrutiny and assessment. But such issues of personality and motivation ultimately still boil down to purely moral arguments for God's existence, based in something like the following postulate: If and only if God exists, am I really obliged to uphold some objective moral principle. In other words, theism is a superior grounds for moral realism.
As Gale notes about this general way of arguing for belief in God, it "violates the principle of the universality of moral propositions" (On the Philosophy of Religion 2007, 136). If acceptance of the metaphysical postulate of the existence of God is psychologically necessary for a full appreciation of the nature of moral obligation, then perhaps this provides some individuals with a practical psychological and ethical justification of their belief in God. But as Gale points out then we can have different moral obligations for different people based on arbitrary elements of their psychology. If they need the boost of belief to do right, then those individuals are justified in believing on moral grounds. But other people who don't need such a boost, are not justified in believing. But for Gale the ethics regarding the acceptance of metaphysical beliefs should not be different for different kinds of people, such as those inclined to postulate atheism and those inclined to postulate theism.
However, we must consider the suggestion in Charles Taylor's book Sources of the Self that morality also has to do with our sense of personal identity and how we view and assess ourselves ontologically: What ought we "to be" for our lives to have meaning, not just what ought we "to do" to avoid doing wrong and compromising my contribution to goodness. It is the former ontological aspect of ethics that we must consider more deeply.
This aspect is very different from the "apodictic" aspect of figuring out what conduct is obligatory. It must address the individuality of human persons and the value that can be found in that individuality. Such judgments will not necessarily resolve to simple recommendations for action. Could it be possible for a person, in principle, to carry out all objective moral obligations, but none-the-less to see their own life as lacking significance? If this is so, then we must consider the possibility that a certain kind of moral argument for the existence of God, based on the issue of the significance and meaning of the universe as a whole, can possibly be detached from the more traditional moral arguments for God's existence.
What can it mean for one's life to have significance or meaning and can this just be reduced to questions about carrying out objective moral duties? There is reason to consider the possibility that the issue of significance does not just reduce to a question of moral duty. If it is possible to carry out all of one's objective moral duties, but still conclude that one's life does not have significance or meaning, then the issue of significance is separate from the issue of the foundations of morality.
For meaning to exist, in a practical sense, means some kind of agent must exist. And therefore for meaning to exist in some enduring way, some kind of agent that is persistent must exist. This is not an issue of morality, but of pure metaphysical necessity. The moving parts of the issue draw on the still controversial matters of the nature of agency regarding consciousness and will of the simple sort that we are all subjectively privy too as individuals. I can't prove my consciousness to you, and you can't prove yours to me. What even is consciousness? Even as someone with the experience of agency, it is a difficult question. But at least we are on known territory. The question of whether there can be a super agency certainly adds new practical metaphysical issues regarding the nature of that specific kind of agency. However, we can see that there is a distinct issue in the field of metaphysics about which we can debate, can reality in its totality have enduring significance?
Douglas Adams puts this issue poignantly in his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. Can the answer to "life the universe and everything" be comprehended by finite beings? What if some finite agent, like Douglas' "Deep Thought" were to actually comprehend the ultimate meaning of the universe understood in its traditional sense of all of reality (i.e. putting the issue of multiple universes aside). Let's just say that the answer was something simple like "42" and that Deep Thought also eventually calculates the question to which that is the answer. Now, that meaning would exist for Deep Thought, but cease to as soon as that agent ceased to exist. That meaning, as significance, can be lost if all the agents capable of understanding it are lost.
So what would it mean to say that the universe "has meaning" beyond such itinerant meanings? We should just speak of the universe as having certain meanings at certain points. And if it should come to be that no agents exist and never will exist again, then we should acknowledge that at such a point, the universe in practical terms would cease to have any meaning. Its significance would be for all practical purposes lost. Even if reality were to persist physically, we would have to acknowledge that there can be reality without meaning, for how could one speak of reality as a whole having a meaning while it continued to change in ways that could not ever be comprehended and understood? If reality as a whole is to have meaning, then there must be an agency capable of comprehending its meaning as a whole.
But consider Plato's dialogue the Meno and his theory of knowledge as recollection (anamnesis). This theory suggests that knowledge can in some sense persist without an agent's conscious awareness, which can always in principle be brought back by a process of reflection. The mathematical understanding of the slave boy, which Socrates elicits through conversation, is not conscious awareness, but mere implicit knowledge until Socrates helps elicit it.. The theorem the boy comes to understand, is not meaningful to him initially. In a similar fashion, we can speculate that even in a universe without agents and no possibility for agents to ever develop again, the knowledge of "42" as the meaning of the whole might be able to persist, even into eternity, at least in the form of such implicit knowledge. But could such knowledge really be called "meaningful"? For something to be meaningful, there must be something for which that meaning can be register as meaning. Can the universe as whole really be meaningful without agents?
Which leads us to the well-know paradox of naturalistic atheism. Naturalistic atheists can assert that all the parts of reality represent potentially comprehensible systems, the meaning of which can be deciphered understood in coherent scientific terms, except for the existence of the natural system of reality as whole, which is without purpose, significance or meaning. It is simply a brute fact. This fact can be taken by naturalistic atheists as one of the reasons that we must reject the postulate of God. No enduring meaning perceiving entity exists, because the universe simply is not a place capable of having a meaning as a whole.
So atheists and theists can set the issue of the moral implications of belief aside and simply ask the question, does the universe as a whole, in practical fact, possibly have enduring meaning? In practical terms, unless there is an agent, then the answer is no. Even if that issue has no impact on one's moral conduct and the objective moral principles that hold true, one must consider what the one's answer to the possible meaningfulness of reality will be.
As Adams notes, people like to think that the universe can some ultimate meaning. However, if one rejects theism, such a position is not just a rejection of a controversial metaphysical entity. It also can involve the rejection of the possibility of there being an enduring meaning for the whole. The entire quest to find such meaning would be rendered pointless by such a metaphysical postulate. Any sense that one's finite meanings might connect up with some meaning of the whole would be deluded and any quest to find an enduring meaning of the whole would be forlorn. Which brings us back to the issue of morality. Such a conclusion about the futility of seeking an enduring ultimate meaning would put one at odds with others who think such a quest can be worthwhile. What is the correct moral position on disagreements about the practical issue of the utility of the pursuit of an answer to that question? Is it worth speculating about the ultimate meaning of things? Can inquiry about such matters have any value?
So there are two views on ultimate meaning that atheists might be defending. They could claim that a meaning of the whole could exist, and be comprehendible by finite beings within reality, but that meaning might cease to exist, in practical terms, if all finite beings were to cease to exist once and for all. Or, they could be claiming that there can be no meaning for the whole, both in practical terms of there being a being who could eternally comprehend such meaning, or the ability of reality itself to manifest such meaning. In other words, in regard to the issue of the meaning of reality there are 3 possibilities:
1. The whole can have a meaning but only in a finite way
2. The whole can have a meaning in an eternal way
3. The whole can have neither a meaning in a finite way nor in an eternal way
Some important things to note:
a. Some atheists could hold 1.
b. If reality were to happen to have purely natural qualities, absent a God, that there always will be finite conscious beings within it who can understand its meaning, this would work out effectively to option 2 absent a God.
d. And finally, if one asserts 3, one will be inevitably and unavoidable in moral conflict with people holding to the prior 2 options.
Conclusion d suggests certain limits to Gale's criticism of moral arguments regarding the existence of God. If one comes to the metaphysical conclusion that the universe as a whole cannot have an eternal meaning, then one inescapably will run into conflict with others on issues of whether the pursuit of such meanings can be worthwhile and not ultimately wasteful. If all can agree that it is objectively a moral principle that it is wrong to waste, then this can be combined with the purely metaphysical judgement that seeking after an eternal meaning for the whole is unattainable, and derive the moral conclusion that one should not waste time on the pursuit of such meaning. The disagreement about such a matter between people of type 3 and those of types 1 and 2, is not really a disagreement about fundamental ethical principles or the nature of primary ethical obligation. It is a difference of opinion about metaphysics. However, this differences in metaphysical belief does lead to a derivative ethical conclusion, that the pursuit of ultimate meaning is wrong, to the degree that it promotes any morally unacceptable waste. But the major moral principle used to derive this conclusion can be agreed on by all parties. The cause of the conflicting moral conclusion, is a result of a difference in metaphysical belief, not basic moral principle.
However, the moral judgement derived from basic moral principle raise interesting moral issues of its own. Atheists of such a point of view must provide some explanation for how objective morality could lead to the conclusion that non-theistic dreamers and people of faith are guilty of immorality simply in virtue of pursuing a possible answer to the meaning of existence. It seems a little strange that objective morality should lead to such a conclusion. If moral propositions regarding our acceptance of beliefs must be universal, then this conclusion must hold for all. So dreamers and people of faith must conclude that it is intrinsically wasteful and wrong, to some degree, to act on their belief in the possibility of the existence of ultimate meaning. Or is this possibly a reductio ad absurdum? If it is, what is the false premise? It must either be Gale's assumption about universalizability or the metaphysical assertion that reality cannot have an ultimate meaning.
