Nihilism or existential nihilism argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2013/09/could-nihilism-be-true-in-principle.html?m=1

You are correct when you say that atheists often reject the idea of a deity but keep many of their prior traditions, habits and values intact. This is mostly a matter of self preservation for the farther one travels from those traditions the greater the potential for self harm.

There is nothing wrong with searching for a deeper truth but to characterize knowledge as a replacement for faith is error. At its most pure and fundamental level knowledge is faith and faith is knowledge.

You have rejected faith and are walking in search of 'light' to dispel darkness from the world. Are you certain you have not made a wrong turn and are instead walking deeper into shadow?

If you did not find the words of Buddha sufficient challenge to Mills lets draw on another eastern philosopher.

"Men's natures are alike; it is their habits that separate them."
― Confucius

The distinction between the deeply religious man and the ardent atheist is not that of man versus pig or Socrates versus fool. The true distinction is that of habit, tradition, and faith.

The religious man accepts a tradition of values and morals that has been the foundation of human existence for centuries. The atheist rejects these traditions. Since these habits and traditions are on whole healthy one would expect to see detrimental effects in atheists (as we do) when they select replacement habits inferior to those that have survived millennia of competitive selection. The choice of religion leads to happiness not because it is selfish but because it is healthy.

If it is possible for 'reason' to develop a new system of habits and traditions that actually work such a system would be its own cause.  It's own system of beliefs held to with ardor and faith. If it had merit it would not require the destruction or suppression of tradition but establish its own tradition welcoming those who voluntary wished to join. If it had value its practitioners would be more happy and healthy not less.

Buddhism is a nontheistic religion. In the Gallup data in the OP they fall under the catagory of non-Christian religion.

Given the target audience who better to challenge to words of one agnostic then those of a wiser agnostic.

http://www.religionfacts.com/theism/buddhism

Bruce Charlton who's blog I have been following since I ran across it a few weeks ago posted this article on despair in the modern world. I have copied an abridged version below.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2016/03/cultural-despair-evident-in-revealed.html?m=1

Hi rokki welcome

I am not the author of the two articles highlighted in the opening post. They were written by Anonymint who now goes by the handle TPTB_need_war.

You are the first person say they arrived here from Bing. Until recently this thread only came up on google searches but I just checked and see it comes up on Bing now too.

As of right now neither myself or Anonymint has an active web blog. Anonymint mostly confines his musings and insights here though I believe he is also sometimes active on Reddit as well. This thread is somewhat massive and has benefited from many very intelligent posters who have visited and contributed to the discussion. I have tried to highlight some of the major themes in my addendum to the opening post as well as in the CoinCube highlights section. Those are probably the best place to start to get up to speed.

"Our life is shaped by our mind; we become what we think. Joy follows a pure thought like a shadow that never leaves."

― Buddha

The problem with this approach is that religion is about far more then just abstract understanding. It's primary function is not understanding the universe but defining our purpose in that universe. Agnosticism may not suffer from the cognitive dissonance inherent in hard atheism but it is still a rejection of traditional morality and behavior without defined due consideration.

You can view religion as a moral code given to man by God or as an adaptive co-evolving behavioral code with the most functional the most true surviving to the present day. In either scenario religion would be expected to be highly optimized to promote healthy and sustainable group behavior. Large scale rejection of religion would likewise be expected to unmask unhealthy patterns of behavior previously suppressed.

I would argue that this is exactly what we see today. Much of the ills of modernity can be traced back to the cult of hedonism, personal expediency, and tribalism the 'firmware' of mankind. Indeed the data in the opening post could be looked at abstractly as a restoration of selective pressure on mankind not through violence and war but through hedonism and decadence. Voluntary and gradual euthanasia via pleasure.

KiwiParty I am sorry if I upset you for that was not my intention. Having been an agnostic/atheist for nearly the entirety of my adult life I can assure you that the intent of this post is not to stigmatize or brand. Nor is it some Machiavellian attack on human rights.

This post is about exploring whether adopting a certain philosophical view atheism could potentially be harmful to those who choose to adopt it. I believe the answer to that question is yes. Atheist like everyone else have a right to believe whatever they want. However, they also have a right to be informed of the data highlighting potential pros and cons of that decision.

A neutral 3rd party observer might have difficulty distinguishing between the voluntary adoption of an 'intellectual structure' whose adoption drove total fertility to zero and a spreadable physical ailment that did the same.

Voluntarily choosing sub-replacement fertility is a rational choice when resources are insufficient to properly raise a additional child. It is also a rational choice if one foresees such a shortage in the future and acts preemptively with a discrete plan for ones descendants to return to at least replacement level fertility. Finally it is a rational choice perhaps a heroic one when an individual is a known carrier of severe genetic disease and chooses not to pass that to the next generation.

Absent these conditions voluntarily choosing sub-replacement fertility is not rational as it is not synonymous with sustained existence.

This issue came up earlier


As I mentioned in my response to anon_giraffe fertility rate like biological fitness is an empiric not a moral measurement and its relevance to this discussion can certainly be disputed. There are multiple definitions of fertility. The most relevant is the Fertility Rate.

Deciding if sub-replacement fertility is a good or a bad thing is a deep topic and beyond the scope of the the arguments in the opening post. I am content to leave this decision up to the reader but have no objections to anyone who wishes to promote their views on the matter.    

There is no evidence that theism increases IQ or protects you from making a verbal fool of yourself. There are dumb theists just as their are dumb atheists. If my arguments in the OP are correct their may actually be relatively fewer low IQ atheists.

I agree that Richard Dawkins would likely disagree with some of the arguments made in this thread especially the ones regarding group selection for he is on record as opposing this idea. Other evolutionary biologists disagree with Dawkins on this issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins

Edit: As an interesting aside from the wikipedia article it appears that Dawkins himself fulfills Charlton's triad.
Obviously high IQ        (yep)
Socialism                    (self identified feminist and on record support of liberal democrats)
Atheism                      (self identified)
Low Fertility               (only one child)

Imagine for a moment that this is not an abstract philosophical question but a walk down a twisting and branching alleyway. First there is a single way with no choice but soon we come across a fork and from the single path we find two. To the right there is carefully laid cobblestone engraved with the words of theism. To the left there is newly pressed brick and a crisp printed sign labeled atheism.

As we walk down these paths we find the walls of our alleyway glowing with living and undulating writings. These are runic words and assumptions indeed the core of each choice. As we accept them they detach themselves from alley walls gently merging with and setting over us forming a fine film over our skin, eyes and ears. Their function is that of a filter interpreting and cataloging the world around us.

If we choose the brick road we soon come across a second fork. Here we see a dark and shadowy opening into nihilism and a large and particularly well worn path into hedonism. Small branches into esoteric philosophies can also be found. The road of hedonism leads to a smaller opening into ethical hedonism and finally a tiny path into utilitarianism. Here the road ends and we find ourselves facing a brick wall covered with the words and beliefs of the choice we have made. This is were my own journey took me the blind alley where I spent 15 years thinking I had arrived at end of the road.

Does rejecting atheism on purely utilitarian grounds bother me? On the contrary it is the purest, cleanest, and most liberating rejection of atheism, ethical hedonism and utilitarianism that I can possibly imagine. It is the final realization that the complex writings on the brick wall translate into a single sentence. "Wrong way turn around!"

The arguments in this thread should not be thought of as strong theist arguments. Indeed a true and strong believer will likely find them all a little off and a little odd like a TV whose tuning is sort of correct but just a bit wrong throwing static into the picture. They would correctly argue that it is through faith not through happiness that creates a true belief in God.

The words of faith, however, cannot reach those far along the brick road. They are blocked or interpreted as nonsensical by the filter of assumptions those on this road have adopted. To grasp these deeper arguments one must first turn around travel back to the original fork in the road. Only then as the assumptions of atheism peel away is possible to hear and truly consider the deeper arguments of faith.

The arguments herein will not prove convincing to all atheist as the filter each atheist had adopted is different. My sense of self preservation kept me far away from the shadowy road of nihilism but there are branches there that teach that life has no intrinsic meaning or value. That life is insignificant without purpose and that even continued existence is meaningless. For those that have fully accepted this belief it is possible that even utilitarian arguments of health and happiness will be filtered out as nonsensical.

My argument is that atheism is false. As for what is true I cannot help you for I have only taken a few steps down the cobblestone road and do not yet know where it will take me.

This is certainly one way of looking at the world. It's one of many conclusions one can reach about the universe especially if one chooses to adopt the assumptions of nihilism.

However, this is far from the only logical conclusion one can reach. There are reasons to think that the universe is far more complex then we currently envision indeed that for all our science our understanding remains infantile.


When you have two logical but competing and mutually exclusive intellectual structures both unfalsifiable from their starting assumptions what is the logical next step? How does one rationally choose between them?

One approach is to examine what happens to the individuals who chose to adopt these intellectual structures. This is approach that led me to gather the various data highlighted in the opening post.

BADecker I agree with the majority of your statement above. However, I disagree with the two sentences underlined.  

Group selection does not require randomness. The existence of infinite possibility and a mechanism to allow examination of possibility is sufficient. Thus group selection is not necessarily incompatible with an entirely cause and effect driven view of the universe.

Quantum Mechanics is not simply a mechanism for guessing things. It offers us a deep insight that the world is not as it appears to our senses. It is quantum mechanics that leads us to the conclusion that we may actually be living in a Holographic Universe. The idea the the the world around us indeed the entire universe is simply the projection of a deeper reality.  

In his essay The Universe Anonymint draws our attention to the the holographic principle. Specifically the fascinating notion that when you combine the the holographic principle with the thermodynamic quantities of heat and mechanical work it is relatively straightforward to derive Newton’s classical equation of gravity.

These ideas are difficult to grasp and at this stage they remain theoretical physics. However, there are a growing number of scientist who are taking them very seriously.

Below is a great introductory video on the topic. I recommend it for you BADecker to give you a appreciation of quantum mechanics. More importantly I recommend it to anyone who has difficulty accepting the possibility of a deeper fundamental truth and reality.  
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMBt_yfGKpU

 

The concept you are both approaching anon_giraffe from the perspective of reproducing intellectual structures and tvbcof from the idea of social evolution is the that of group selection.

Group selection is a very deep and mostly under-explored area of evolutionary biology. The most intriguing and active thinking that I have seen in this area is that of Charlton.  Below is an excerpt of his work.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
General properties of Group Selection and the 'group mind' (in relation to the adaptive production of geniuses)

The major function of group selection is presumably directly to promote the sustained reproductive success (lineal survival) of the group, in face of the spontaneous tendency for random change to promote the individual (and other lower level, below group) levels of selection.

For example, group selection would be of value in sustaining the cell in face of the tendency of cell components (for example the nucleus, or of evolvable organelles such as the mitochondria, chloroplast or centriole) to become 'free-riders' or parasites (taking net reproductive benefits from the cell, while contributing less than this to the cell, or nothing, or actively-harming the probability of the survival and ultimately reproduction of the cell).

A more clear cut example is the individual specialized cell in the context of a multicellular organism; there is a tendency for individual cells to evolve towards 'opting out' of the coordinated cooperation of the whole organism  - and taking more than they give. This is termed neoplastic change, and the tendency is what leads to cancers - cancers constitute an internally-generated cellular parasite.

But the main posited role for group selection has been in the context of animal society - especially in social animals (social insects such as ants or bees, and social mammals such as many primates including Man - as well as other mammals with differentiated social roles such as naked mole rats or meerkats).

The problem for the sustained survival of social animals over many generations is that individuals tend to evolve to enhance their personal reproductive success at the expense of the group - taking benefits from social living while avoiding the costs and duties of social living - thereby destroying the social structure.

The fact that social animals are known to have existed over many generations is evidence that his problem has been solved historically - and the underpinning mechanism is usually regarded to be kin selection (aka inclusive fitness) together with reciprocity (the mutual benefits of cooperation).




The difficulty with such individual level mechanisms as kin selection is that they must themselves evolve in a context where the spontaneous tendency is for adaptations to be lost - on top of the spontaneous tendency for kin selection and reciprocity to be damaged by spontaneous mutations. In other words it is very difficult to evolve a high level mechanism of social living on top of all the other layers of cooperation at sub-cellular and cellular levels - all of which are vulnerable to destruction by spontaneous mutations.

This is presumably one reason why social animals have been a late arrival on the evolutionary scene, in the past couple of hundred thousand years - however, once a stable and sustainable adaptation had arisen to enforce sociality, these animals have more-or-less taken over the earth by becoming the dominant species. Thus ants and termites dominate the tropical regions (in terms of biomass) while more recently humans have come to dominate the temperate zones.

Clearly sociality is a tremendous advantage - the difficulties are in evolving it, and sustaining it in the face of continued spontaneous mutations with each generation; and the tendency of sub-lethal deleterious mutations to accumulate generation-upon-generation; plus any environmental change and variety which is itself a consequence of the high adaptiveness of these species.

However, the very success of social animals, their dominance, would be expected to contain the seeds of destruction - since the conditions for free-riding and parasitism are greatly increased by the expansion in numbers and the relative autonomy from environmental constraints such as food supply and predation.

(This can be seen very clearly in modern human society, where the large surplus of modern economies above subsistence allows for unprecedented levels of parasitic behaviour by individuals, and also groups - such as bureaucracies.)




A successful social species can therefore find itself in the situation when the main proximate constraint on reproductive success is competition within the species - and this creates many niches for more-or-less parasitic and exploitative behaviours (the individual profiting at the expense of the group).

In the short-term, the fastest and most secure route to enhanced reproductive success is to exploit other humans (rather than cooperate with them) - and this would tend to destroy the social structure by reproductively favouring the least social individual animals.

Group selection entails that the group has an identity, that this identity must have integrity over time, and that it be transmissible between generations. This group identity must be able to sustain itself and should also be potentially further-adaptive to some extent.

Group identity needs to be of a cognitive and behavioural nature - in other words there must be strategizing knowledge and also some kind of reasoning from this knowledge. In sum, group selection requires a group identity; and group identity requires a teleology, aim or purpose; and that purpose should 'know' (with better than random probability) how to implement itself in individuals within that group.

This is probably the basis of the intense modern suspicion of and hostility to group selection - this idea that group selection entails something like a group purpose, memory and 'mind' - which superficially sounds like a non-biological, maybe even supernatural, kind of thing.




However, social animals are based on communications between networks of individuals, and the idea of conceptualizing the complex interactions of individuals in terms of being a type of 'computational' or 'cognitive' process is actually fairly mainstream - for instance in the theories of complex systems, the mathematics of chaos and complexity and elsewhere.

So, in principle, there is no reason to exclude the possibility that webs of complexly interacting social animals can be considered as higher level, group entities - which have a tendency to sustain and reproduce themselves.

Furthermore, these networks of communications fall into patterns, and these patterns may be self-sustaining and with a tendency to expand - so there is a potential mechanism for non-genetic inter-generation transmission.

In other words, the group-level entity is a pattern of communications which is both influenced by and also influences the communications (and behaviours) of the individual components of that patter: the individual organisms. And this pattern of communications will tend to fall into relatively stable forms, forms that resist change.

(Such a stability of forms is something which has cropped up in many areas of science over more than 2000 years - since at least the time of Aristotle with his elaboration of a finite number of archetypal 'forms' or relatively stable conformations into which all things will tend to 'fall; modern conceptualizations of the same basic idea include 'strange attractors' and 'morphic fields'.)




I do not see any fatal difficulty in supposing that relatively stable and 'cognitive' patterns of inter-individual, group communications would be transmissible between generations of social animals - given that these generations are overlapping (with new group members incrementally arriving and maturing, while others are leaving and dying - but without a break in the continuity of communications).

Such a concept of 'group mind' would have implicit purpose (survival and self-propagation) implemented by problem solving and strategizing properties including memory and intelligent processing.

Therefore, in principle, this group mind entity could identify problems among individuals within the group, and (to a significant extent) suppress selfishness at the individual level - also it could foresee (with better than random probability) the need for (or potential benefits from) certain types of individual which would be useful to the group survival and reproduction. Then individuals of this type might be induced to arise from the group - perhaps by the kind of developmental switching posited by Life History theory.

So, for the putative example of genius - it seems possible that the group mind might detect and appreciate the need for, or potential benefits from, an increase in the production of geniuses (i.e. those individuals characterized by what I have termed an Endogenous personality comprising a triad of high intelligence, intuitive thinking and inner motivation).

Having calculated that such individuals would probably be of value to the group - it seems possible that either the developmental trajectory of individuals might be directed towards becoming a genius - or more fundamentally that suitable pairs of individual parents (especially those characterized by high intelligence - low mutational load) might (perhaps by broadly 'epigenetic' means, by affecting gene switching, activation, suppression etc) lead to the sexual conception of more potential geniuses who are designed to benefit the group survival and reproduction, even when this tends to reduce the probability of reproductive success in the individual geniuses.

So this above scheme could, in broad brush terms, provide a group selection mechanism by which the group benefits of genius might be acquired when the group circumstances require, despite that many or most geniuses have below average reproductive success due to their energies and efforts being directed at non-reproductive, non-social goals.

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Bruce Charlton is a professor of theoretical medicine having completed a doctorate in neuroendocrinology with postgraduate training in psychiatry and public health.

He published a book this year on Genius titled The Genius Famine.

He has two blogs which are located here
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/
http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/

The United Soviet Socialist Republic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USSR_anti-religious_campaign_(1921%E2%80%931928)
The Soviet regime had an ostensible commitment to the complete annihilation of religious institutions and ideas. Militant atheism was central to the ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and a high priority of all Soviet leaders. Convinced atheists were considered to be more virtuous individuals than those of religious belief.
When church leaders demanded freedom of religion under the constitution, the Communists responded with terror. They murdered the metropolitan of Kiev and executed twenty-eight bishops and 6,775 priests. Despite mass demonstrations in support of the church, repression cowed most ecclesiastical leaders into submission.

The Nazi Regime
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Nazi_Germany#Plan_for_the_Roman_Catholic_Church
As Hitler rose to power, many Catholic bishops, priests, religious and lay leaders vociferously opposed Nazism on the grounds of its incompatibility with Christian morals. In early 1931, the German bishops issued an edict excommunicating all leaders of the Nazi Party and banned Catholics from membership.
In 1937 Pope Pius XI issued the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge condemning Nazi ideology. In 1941 the Nazi authorities decreed the dissolution of all monasteries and abbeys in the German Reich, many of them effectively being occupied and secularized by the Allgemeine SS under Himmler. Himmler saw a main task of the SS to be that of "acting as the vanguard in overcoming Christianity and restoring a Germanic way of living" as part of preparations for the coming conflict between "humans and subhumans". Hitler called a truce in the Church conflict with the outbreak of war, wanting to back away from policies likely to cause internal friction in Germany. He decreed at the outset of war that "no further action should be taken against the Evangelical and Catholic Churches for the duration of the war".

Khmer_Rouge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_Rouge_period_(1975%E2%80%931979)#Religious_communities
Many monks were executed; temples and pagodas were destroyed[14] or turned into storehouses or gaols. Images of the Buddha were defaced and dumped into rivers and lakes. People who were discovered praying or expressing religious sentiments were often killed. The Christian and Muslim communities also were even more persecuted, as they were labelled as part of a pro-Western cosmopolitan sphere, hindering Cambodian culture and society.
The Roman Catholic cathedral of Phnom Penh was completely razed.[14] The Khmer Rouge forced Muslims to eat pork, which they regard as forbidden (ḥarām). Many of those who refused were killed. Christian clergy and Muslim imams were executed. One hundred and thirty Cham mosques were destroyed.

Early Communist China
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/~geary20d/worldpolitics/maozedeng.html
During the beginning of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong and the Communists had seized control and 10,000 missionaries were forced to leave the country. Persecution of Christians proceeded at full throttle. Mao Zedong did not want any foreign influence on the people. In 1952 the last U.S. Presbyterian missionaries, Frank and Essie Price, were forced to leave China a mere three years after Mao Zedong assumes power. During the dark years of Mao's 'Great Leap Forward' (launched in 1958) and 'The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution' (launched in 1966), many of the Christian leaders were killed and imprisoned for their faith, and many others spent years in hard labor camps. According to an article in the Epoch Times, “The CCP (Chinese Communist Party) has lost all composure in the frantic persecution of religion. During the Cultural Revolution, numerous temples and mosques were torn down, and monks were paraded in humiliation through the streets

Mass extermination and genocide is the most toxic of the 'theologies' that atheists are prone to embrace. Thank you for the public demonstration of this principle.

I should add that I am not claiming that this can never happen only that it is a non-dominant effect. I remember reading The Scarlet Letter many years ago. It is an 1850 work of fiction Set in 17th-century Puritan Boston, Massachusetts, during the years 1642 to 1649.

In the story religion is used as a cudgel to punish and torture in a way that is grossly offensive to our inherrent 'built-in' moral system. The book itself was written 200 years after the period in question and can be seen as a repudiation of such religious interperations.

Religions are also subject to competitive pressures. If a religion strays too far from optimum behavior on the local level individuals can and will abandon it for other options. This was the fate of 17th-century Puritanism which is now essentially extinct.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Puritans_in_North_America#Decline_of_power_and_influence