What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason!
Back when I was an atheist, the other atheists who spoke in public were reasonable men, like Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov, who made the quite rational argument that, of matters relating to physical nature, the scientific method was the only method to uproot erroneous theories, and that Occam’s razor precluded the need to assume a supernatural cause for natural events.
Whether or not there was a world beyond the reach of man’s senses or above the scope of his reason was and would always be a moot point, because, by definition, neither eyesight would confirm, nor would reason grasp, any extra-sensory or supra-rational world.
Nice argument, no? Makes sense? Yes, makes sense. Dignified, reasonable, indubitable.
Having been converted against my will to the Sunny Side of the Force, the atheists who speak in public now sound like moral retards. They talk as if human life has no value.
I said moral, not mental. Moral retards are often bright and well spoken. But the same way a brain-damaged child simply cannot perform the basic mental functions of speech and reason is said to be mentally retarded, a man whose conscience cannot reach the most obvious, practical and necessary conclusions of moral law is morally retarded.
Moral retardation can be detected when man’s conscience is not telling him the moral information he needs to live his day-to-day life. If your conscience tells you human life is no more valuable than that of a cat or pig, then, logically, you should be able to castrate your son with no more moral ramifications than gelding your tomcat, or likewise cut up your wife for bacon. This is not a practical way to live.
The idea that human life is of no particular value is a belief found in most (but not all)strands of secularism. Objectivists, for example, regard human life as uniquely valuable, human reason as the source of values. But the opposite view is in the majority—
(This is from NewScientist.Com, Imagine Earth without People, an article appearing here. http://www.newscientist.com/channel/life/mg19225731.100)
All things considered, it will only take a few tens of thousands of years at most before almost every trace of our present dominance has vanished completely. Alien visitors coming to Earth 100,000 years hence will find no obvious signs that an advanced civilisation ever lived here.
Yet if the aliens had good enough scientific tools they could still find a few hints of our presence. For a start, the fossil record would show a mass extinction centred on the present day, including the sudden disappearance of large mammals across North America at the end of the last ice age. A little digging might also turn up intriguing signs of a long-lost intelligent civilisation, such as dense concentrations of skeletons of a large bipedal ape, clearly deliberately buried, some with gold teeth or grave goods such as jewellery.[…]Finally a brief, century-long pulse of radio waves will forever radiate out across the galaxy and beyond, proof – for anything that cares and is able to listen – that we once had something to say and a way to say it.
But these will be flimsy souvenirs, almost pathetic reminders of a civilisation that once thought itself the pinnacle of achievement. Within a few million years, erosion and possibly another ice age or two will have obliterated most of even these faint traces. If another intelligent species ever evolves on the Earth – and that is by no means certain, given how long life flourished before we came along – it may well have no inkling that we were ever here save for a few peculiar fossils and ossified relics. The humbling – and perversely comforting – reality is that the Earth will forget us remarkably quickly.
Now, dear readers, notice the difference between a Saganesque argument that supernaturalism is unneeded for a rational grasp of the universe, and the kind of cynical, evil, anti-life, anti-rational off-the-cuff comment like “…pathetic reminders of a civilisation that once thought itself the pinnacle of achievement.”
Oho? Are we not the pinnacle of achievement? Are we not? By the standards of Darwinian nature, the war of life against life bloody in nail and tooth, we are indeed. By Darwin’s standards, even the weakest of us has a very good chance of surviving and reproducing, and no serious challenger to human predominance of the Earth is visible.
The only hope any animal has for departing from the battlefield of nature, where every bloodstained hour holds the terror of starvation and predation, is to become domesticated.
The most ferocious of nature, lions and tigers and bears, we keep in cages to amuse the idle hours of our children. They are hardly on the brink of overtoppling us: indeed, were it not for the compassion (a sentiment only known to humans), the creatures would be extinct. Out victory over nature is so complete, that the serious debate among our species now is how to take steps to preserve our utterly routed and defeated competition. If the tigers were about to wipe our species out with their claws, we would not stop to admire them for their stripes.
Is there some other standard to use aside from mere Darwinian generation and population? Aha, but assuming any other standard would be an act of rational abstraction, an act unique to the human species.
Are we pre-eminent above other species in acts of justice, charity, oblative love, beauty, in pomp and circumstances, in the building of cathedrals, the writing of symphonies, the launching of moonshots? The question is absurd in the asking. No animal cares about these things, or has the capacity to understand them. You can have a space race between Uncle Sam and Uncle Joe Stalin. We are not competing with the bears to see who puts the first pawprint on Mars.
So in what sense is it “perversely comforting” to contemplate the annihilation of our species and the vanity of all human hopes and aspirations? Only someone who looks on man with a shudder of distaste is comforted.
Someone who is rooting for mankind, a human, would not ask these things. Someone who is cheering for the death of humanity, a monster, to him it is the most natural thing in the world.
So here is my question. When did the atheists suddenly turn into monsters?
It is just an illusion caused by my change in perspective? Were we always that way, and I never saw it? Were there monsters among my camp, praising death and unreason, and I never noticed? Or has there been some strange sea-change in the last four years, and the reasonable atheists are retired or dead, and their places in the public forum taken up by the zealots of some perverted secular death-cult?
If you think I am reading too much into this one article, let me reinforce the point from the comments section of the same article. One reader writes in:
The truly hilarious thing in this thread is that those offended by the article actually imagine that they (or the human race in general) are important or worthwhile or are more deserving of existence on Earth than a Grizzly Bear or a mosquito or a Blue-Footed Booby. What a howler.
Guess what? You’re wrong.
God didn’t create the Earth for you. You aren’t superior to, or even more interesting than, any other life form. You have no more value or worth than anything else, but you do have gigantic egos and a twisted perspective.
When you die or Homo sapiens goes extinct, it won’t mean anything and will have no more cosmic significance than the extinction of the Dodo Bird. In fact, the persons who are offended by this article are the least rational among us, and therefore the most animalistic, the most degraded, and the least “superior” to other life forms. Ooga Booga!
What irony! Did you know that you’re walking cartoons?
Hahahahahah!
Let me see if I got this straight, Johnny Swift. We’re all yahoos, so it does not matter if we live or die, and only the most rational people know that life means nothing, and that my young child, beautiful beyond words, is of no more value than the egg of a digger-wasp.
And you are claiming that I am the one who is irrational for holding human life to be of value? Me?
If the life of a man means no more than the life of a pig, than the comments of a man, including yours, sir, mean no more than the squealing of a swine.
Now, if that sounds like I just insulted you, then you do not, deep down, really believe your own thesis. No one is offended when told his words are no more significant than his brother’s. The offence comes if and only if you are told something lower than you is a brother to you.
Likewise, the act of valuation is a rational act: only a rational creature can change the value he places on things. Ergo to place a low value on rationality, or on a rational species, is a manifest self-contradiction, since the reasoning faculty must be valued in order to be used, and must be used in order to make the valuation.
Let us try another bit of logic:
If rocks could talk, they might have a right to scoff at the egotism of animate matter; if pigs could reason, they could argue that human life was no more valuable than swine-life; but only in Fairytale-land can rocks and pigs talk. Here is a man who has adopted the case of Fairytale-land, explaining how and why he knows God made the world for worms and not for us; or perhaps he means that blind Nature made it. But unless he knows the mind and intention of God, we have no reason to believe him. And if he pretends to know the mind and intention of blind nature, which by definition has neither mind nor intention, they he is merely indulging in a droll paradox.
There is either an objective chain of valuation or there is not. If there is, then humans do not lack the capacity to perceive it and discover their place in it, which, from the testimony of all the sages of all the ages, from the evident throne of our victory, is high. If there is not, then the question of valuation is simply moot, and we may assign what value to human life we will, high or low, as suits our self-interest rightly understood. But the pursuit of self-interest governed by the understanding is itself a rational act, and cannot be served by undervaluation. In neither case can our value be equal or below that of a worm. Either the value of human life is above that of brute beasts, or the question of valuation itself is meaningless.
What do they teach children in school these days? Do they teach logic? Do they?
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
