Please note that this is a re-post. The re-post is necessary to update both the table of contents and the link to the document containing my philosophy.
Over the past several years, I have formulated my philosophy of life. It is a 14-page document that may be found at the link at the bottom of this post. I welcome any constructive feedback you may have.
In my philosophy, I present and defend the following positions:
Atheism
Afterlife nihilism (the view that there is no afterlife)
Free will impossibilism
Moral skepticism
Existential skepticism
Belief that death is usually harmful for the one who dies, but is not to be feared
Negative hedonism (the view that peace of mind should be one’s primary goal)
Belief that peace of mind may best be achieved and maintained through Stoic, Epicurean and Eastern methods, among others
Political hedonism
The section on methods to achieve and maintain peace of mind comprises roughly half of the document.
So that this post (hopefully) won’t be moved or deleted, let me share one of my favorite techniques for promoting peace of mind. I call it “Elimination of Judgments”:
One should always keep in mind that events are interconnected through the operation of physical cause and effect. Thus, apparently negative events can precipitate positive events, and apparently positive events can precipitate negative events. Moreover, the connections between events can be very indirect and impossible to predict. Consequently, if one were able to go back in time and modify or eliminate a particular event, one’s entire life might change as a result, and whether it would change for the better or the worse would not be knowable. Therefore, one will generally never know whether an apparently negative event is truly negative in the overall context of one’s life, or whether an apparently positive event is truly positive in the overall context of one’s life. As a result, one should eliminate judgments with respect to whether any event is truly positive or negative. Such elimination of judgments strongly promotes equanimity and peace of mind—before, during and after one’s experiences.
This is one of roughly 20 techniques discussed in my philosophy. Again, I welcome any constructive feedback you may have. Please feel free to post here, or to e-mail me at philosofer123@yahoo.com.
My philosophy may be found at the following link. Enjoy!
Atheism probably isn’t true. There’s no good arguments for it, statistically almost nobody through history has believed it, and no halfway-decent political or moral systems require it or were built up from it. It’s a bizarre, outlier of a belief (much like solipsism or idealism) that happens to be in vogue right now, but despite that, requires really good justification, and there isn’t any.
I won’t criticize the rest because, as I’m sure you realize, they all kind of depend on atheism.
I Think it is odd that a moral skeptic would use should quite a few times in his thesis. For example around how one should have one’s own happiness as one’s primary or only goal.
It also seems hidden in the passive contruction about Death ‘is not to be feared’.
Political hedonism: do you not see the irony is saying that the only rational thing to do is pursue one’s happiness and since being politically Active might disturb your Peace it is rational to avoid it if it does. In the first part we are encouraged to follow our feeling - desire for happiness - and consider this rational. But if we follow other feelings and engage politicially, this is irrational if it disturbs our Peace. How did you rationally decide not only which desires are rational, but further how we should prioritize our desires?
Free Will Impossiblism would mean that your positions are in part not your responsibility. Also any evaluation of your own logic, in them, and your sense of what other people critique being valid or not. You can’t know if you are being rational.
there’s a few problem areas after a Quick run through.
But there is a greater all encompassing irony. If you are correct, then you have no way of knowing if it is better if people come to agree with you. If you could know this, then your would not be a moral and existential skeptic. But you are saying there is no way to know. Nevertheless it is clear you Think it would be a good thing if people listened to you. Even if you are right about all your ontological claims, you could be wrong about what is best for people to Believe and act like. In any case, your own ontological claims indicate that you can have no idea whether the consequences of telling other people your ideas is good for them. And then even if the only good is pleasure, you still cannot know, since you are guessing, basically about what makes humans thrive. Humans repeatedly choose to do things they consider meaningful rather than masturbating one more time - add in long sequences of other pleasure-giving activities. Beyond that the prioritization of Peace seems in direct denial of the fact that people often like more dynamic states of experience than simple Peace. Let’s say in a few years you can get hooked up to something that stimulates the pleasure centers of the brain and you can be fed via IV. Would people be wrong to NOT choose that Life? It seems like somehow, despite your claims about ontology, you seem to know they would be wrong.
The “shoulds” in my philosophy are rational shoulds, not moral shoulds. Therefore, there is no conflict with moral skepticism.
I do not see any inconsistency with (1) the view that it is rational to have happiness as one’s ultimate goal and (2) noting that in practice, political activity may disturb one’s mind.
Free will impossibilism does not prevent one from knowing whether one is being rational.
As stated at the top of page 1 of my philosophy: “The primary purpose of this document is to advise myself on how to live well.” It does not matter to me whether other people follow my philosophy. The reason I have posted it here is to solicit feedback so that the document may be improved.
Evidently you have not bothered to read the document. I present arguments for atheism, and counterarguments to theistic arguments, in my philosophy. If you cannot or will not refute my arguments, then I cannot take you seriously.
OK, if they are not moral shoulds, the problem comes in elsewhere, since we are still talking about values. You value Peace. Another person might value something else.
I read this sentence twice and I cannot see how it addressed the issues I raised. You simply restated your position.
Sure it does. Once you are admitting that your own thinking is compelled by previous mental states, themselves affected by external causes also, you are admitting cannot gain some kind of objectivity. It may seem rational to you, but you are compelled to Think this is the case. You may be right, but you cannot know if you are, since the conclusion is compulsory.
Then an improvement would be to de-universalize the document. This means that the priorities, explicit and implicit, are clearly only about you. That it is the ‘primary purpose’, of course, does not eliminate my criticism, given that one can have other purposes, and that the purported truths in the document apply to all is implicit throughout the document.
Everything in the document contributes toward achieving its purpose, as stated on page 1: “The primary purpose of this document is to advise myself on how to live well.”
My conclusion that one’s primary goal should be peace of mind is in part derived from moral skepticism. Read the section entitled “Negative hedonism”. What other people may value is irrelevant.
My point is that the so-called “issues” you raised neither demonstrate any inconsistency in my views nor show that any of my views are false. Therefore, your “issues” are irrelevant.
Define “knowledge” as reliably produced justified true belief. One’s true belief may be justified via a reliable cognitive process, which does not require contra-causal free will.
Again, it does not matter to me whether other people follow my philosophy, so your criticism is irrelevant.
Fair enough, we can go into more detail if you like.
You misunderstand Occam's Razor. You also need to explain why an utterance made by a 13th century franciscan theologian should be taken as the unassailable gospel when it comes to philosophical pursuit. You also need a good definition of 'simplicity'.
Your criticism of the Cosmological Argument makes it seem like you haven’t actually read it, you’ve only read other atheist’s (specifically, Richard Dawkins) criticisms of it, and copy-pasted their words into your paper. The original formulation of the Cosmological Argument doesn’t assume the universe needs a cause, it argues for it. The idea that God must be more complex than the universe is both unfounded and completely irrelevant to the cosmological argument.
Also, proposing that “the universe” might exist forever ignores that the Cosmological Argument doesn’t treat the universe as a single thing, it treats it as a series of things that all have their own explanation (which is how science treats the universe as well, most of the time). If you’re just going to skip the whole argument without defining what a “Universe” is, then we may as well say the Universe is just everything that happens to exist (including God, if there is one), and then your assertion that the Universe has always existed doesn’t conflict with the Cosmological Argument, it agrees with it. Sure, the Universe has always existed- in particular, the portion of the Universe called God has always existed. If you want to define ‘universe’ in some arbitrary way that is friendly to naturalism and excludes the possibility of a God, then you have a lot more work cut out for you.
Regarding the teleological argument, the existence of an explanation doesn’t make another explanation ‘unneeded’. A theist could just as easily say “Theism explains the existence of complex organisms, therefore natural selection isn’t needed”. In order for one explanation to make another unneeded, you need three things:
1.) Both explanations need to be explaining the same thing.
2.) One explanation has to be ‘better’ than the other in some crucial way, and
3.) Both explanations have to be mutually exclusive (they can’t both be true).
Notice that you completely fail on 3. It’s obviously possible that both theism and natural selection could explain the existence of complex organisms, in the same way that both physics and “because I was thirsty” can explain why a can of soda was opened.
They are two explanations covering two different levels of causation.
You also misunderstand the nature of theism by asserting (without defense) that it exists primarily as an explanation for something, and can be accepted or rejected on those grounds. This is more taking your cues from Dawkins, and he’s just as wrong about this as he is the rest.
The Problem of Evil doesn’t work, it was defeated as a logical argument in the 80’s. You are right to phrase it as a much, much weaker position- ‘theistic attempts to reconcile seem this way and that way’. The Problem of Evil is good for evoking emotional responses, but not so good for philosophical rigor.
On that subject, asking a ‘why’ question in general doesn’t show a conflict. “People not having wings conflicts with classical evolution- if flight is an adaptive advantage for birds, why not for people?” See how that doesn’t work? Similarly, just saying “Why didn’t God do this? Why didn’t God do that?” doesn’t actually make a philosophical point. What it does, is create an open-ended question that you don’t attempt to answer, and the lack of an answer creates a psychological void that promotes skepticism. It’s a mind-game, not philosophy, in other words.
Pretty much all of your ‘arguments for atheism’ take that form- “Why didn’t God do things the way I would do them?” That doesn’t constitute an argument for anything.
Positive evidence for the existence of God is primarily historical and personal - almost everybody, everywhere, throughout time and culture, has found the existence of a Supreme Being to be an obvious truth. Theism is the best explanation for that. Theism is the best explanation for the occurrences around Jesus’ life and the Church that followed, too. Note that there’s a difference between an explanation of a historical matter of fact, and a scientific matter of fact- incidence rather than mechanism and all that.
I also disagree that theism has any special burden of proof on it that atheism doesn’t have, mainly because of history. Theists might be proposing something to the atheist, but to the world at large, all they are proposing is that things are as they seem, and have seemed to pretty much every human being who has ever lived. The atheist is the one that wants people to see the universe and their place in it in a completely new way, and that has a substantial burden of proof that you certainly haven’t reached.
Uccisore, thank you for engaging more closely with the atheism section of my document.
Occam’s Razor is not “unassailable gospel”, and nor does it need to be. The God hypothesis adds an major type of entity, God, to what we know already exists (the natural universe). So, as I state in the document, theists bear the burden of proof. They make an extraordinary claim (that the God of classical theism exists), and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
By referring to “the Cosmological Argument”, you appear to be unaware that cosmological arguments are actually a family of arguments. Your comments are useless without a presentation of the particular cosmological argument to which you are referring.
Also, as I note in my philosophy, cosmological arguments, even if successful, would not show that the God of classical theism exists.
Actually, 3 is not required. As noted above, theists bear the burden of proof. If our observations can be explained without reference to God, then there is no reason to believe that God exists, and teleological arguments fail.
Also, as noted in my philosophy, teleological arguments, even if successful, would not show that the God of classical theism exists.
I do not assert that theism “exists primarily as an explanation for something”.
Your repeated references to Dawkins are a rhetorical distraction, and I do not include any works by Dawkins in my recommended readings.
None of your comments reduce the force of the argument from suffering, which is presented with philosophical rigor in a number of works. You have not even tried to show how the presence of widespread and apparently preventable suffering is consistent with the existence of a tri-omni God.
On the contrary, the arguments from suffering, design and non-belief provide ample evidence against the existence of the God of classical theism, and the arguments from inconsistency demonstrate that theism is an inconsistent position. You have said nothing to reduce the force of these arguments. I summarize the arguments as questions in order to be concise, but they could be expanded into premise/conclusion form.
The “historical and personal evidence” for the existence of God that you cite has been debunked by naturalistic accounts of the rise of religion and religious belief. And there is no convincing evidence regarding any event surrounding Jesus or the Church that would require a supernatural explanation.
Your claim that theism seems true to “pretty much every human being who has ever lived” is patently false. Feel free to check out the history of atheism at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_atheism
And even though atheism does not bear the burden of proof, I have summarized compelling arguments for atheism that you have failed to refute.
On the contrary, there is almost overwhelming evidence in the old testament regarding the coming of Jesus. That testament retroactively shows direct lines of generational goal with Jesus as it’s object.
A backward glance can validate the coming of Jesus.
The failure of Greco Roman humanism turned the world into barbarism. If it was not for christianity, the barbaric elements may not have turned around in Western civilisation, and we would most probably be followers of All ah.
The determinism of historical inevitability dictated a historical progression which determined the character and the personality of Jesus, even apart from the supernatural happenings, claiming to accompanie this process, makes this doubly convincing.
Even if there were specific details of the coming of Jesus in the old testament that match those of the new testament, there are no good reasons to believe that such details in the new testament are historically accurate. Therefore, such “evidence” is hardly convincing.
The fact that the old and new testament were written thousands of years apart, and the prophet's predictions are borne witness by te events going down in the new testament, can mean one of two things: either they were authentic predictions, or false ones post scripting these predicated events.
Even if post scripted, and arbitrarily choosing a type of person which would fit the bill necessary for the type of required postscription, the movement of consciousness toward redemption, is a very significant one.
From the point of view of gross historical movements: redemption probably was a necessary stage in the developmental consciousness of western civilisation. What needed to be redeemed? It was civilisation as was known in those days: a combination of judeo-greco-roman elements. Would you agree to this form of analysis from a historically backward analysis?
Why not? The classical theism defines god as a literal projection of man, in all his insecurities, fears; I.e an anthroprophormism of man himself. Of what is man’s quest of redemption comprise! In modern terms the lack of an internalised godhead, an understanding of the Platonic notion of the “Good”.
This lack of the Platonic good, generated an ontological guilt, of which the original guilt is an archaic relic. Redemption is a necessary process, away from this dialectical opposition.
They are relevant as long as you use general terms that cover everyone. If someone has a the desire to engage in politics or prioritize challenges instead of Peace of mind, and they consider life better if not happier or more peaceful, than the onus is on you to demonstrate they are wrong, somehow, about what they really should want. Why are their desires wrong? If you are simply talking about yourself fine, but, again, your document generalizes.
Again, you do nothing but claim you are write. In a philosophical discussion one makes Points and supports them. If one disagrees one tries to show why. To the issues I raised you have now restated your first assertion and now announced that I am wrong without making any argument - one that might, for example, show that you understand my Points while disagreeing with them. That is how a discussion advances. If you manage to integrate my objections into an argument I can determine if I communicated poorly, if you have misunderstood me, if my arguments were weak for reason X or Z or whatever, and then grant your argument or support my earlier arguments or clarify them. What you are doing here leaves no room for advancing the discussion.
Right, I already acknowledged that you might be correct. The Point was that is that once you have argued that all your thoughts and arguments are utterly determined, you are also admitting that you cannot be objective about them. You could simply be being compelled by a quale ‘that seems correct’. You would have no way of determining what is causing you to be sure.
OK. you are a poor reader. I specifically addressed the issue of your document being written as if it is applicable in general to all people. I am not saying you should or do care if other people are convinced your philosophy is correct. I am saying that your document asserts it holds for everyone.
Since existence has been provided ample evidence of progressing through all the way to the death of god, the existence of the conscious progression of necessity is all I wanted to demonstrate. Weather the essential god as a literal pro morphism has any reality, is not what I implied by this progression. The essential superceeds the existential, but even this becomes a possibility, although not as yet demonstrateable.
As an important aside: atheists should stop referring to the OR. Occam considered God the only entity that could not be questioned. IOW it would be beyond parsimonious to not posit God. So atheists are actually using a rule of parsimony.
It should also be noted that Occam was suggesting a methodology, but atheists, when God is the topic, Think that he was suggesting his razor as ontology.
Once you realize it is methodology, then the issue becomes, amongst other things, do the people involved have the same experiences?
This is very important, because for some it might (seem like) their Y set of experiences can be explained by X number of entities, but for others with Y + 23 types of experiences, X may be inadequate.
The OR is one of the most abused ideas in online discussions.
EDIT: burden of proof is also a rather abused and in this case confused idea. Anyone who wants to convince anyone else of anything has a practical burden. But I notice that a good number of people seem to Think this burden actually exists, rather than it is a task taken on by some and a burden that varies, given that it is part of an interpersonal process. In the OP, ironically, and in defense of it, the OP writer, who for example denies the existence or morals, speaks of this burden of proof as it had some existence. I wonder what it is made of?
And where would the issue of burden of proof come up regarding a document where one person is outlining his own beliefs. I have repeatedly called him on the way his paper includes everyone, to which he responds that it is only for him and applicable to him. I can’t see where burden of proof would be an issue then. He is not convinced there is a God. Theists have no burden of proof, unless they approach him and try to convince him there is a God. Then they are likely to have a challenge of some kind - a process that is, which will have to be gone through - no ‘thing’. But theists Walking around not talking to him have no burden relevent to his document.