2 — Living Godless

It is very hard to know why.

I was about 15 when I became fully convinced that there was no God. I still remember very well the first night I went to sleep without praying: a sort of childish fear of doing something I might regret later, coupled with an adamant persistance to stay firm in my rebellion. It got easier and less dramatic over time, of course.

I was eager to debate any and everyone about this. I became the annoying atheist kid. No one escaped the wrath of my youtube video level arguments: not my family, my friends, my teachers — not even myself in the mirror.

For me, atheism was never a passive thing. As an atheist, I became, in fact, much more passionate and militant than I ever was as a christian. I felt I had tapped into a truth that a lot of people still hadn’t had access to. “So many people still live under the God Delusion”, I thought, “so many people still living restricted by imaginary commandments, being manipulated by ill-intentioned people, vulnerable because of their ignorance. I want to be part of the solution to this problem!”

And so begins my first effort into an intellectual preparation: I enmeshed myself into the God debate. I wanted to know every argument every side could make, every answer to every argument, every example to be given and how to interpret them. I was convinced that all the religious apologists could do was try to find some trick of rethoric to defend their untenable position — and I wanted to be able to counter every trick in the book.

A very common argument I found went like this: without God, there is no moral order; but there is a moral order; therefore God exists. I never have found this argument convincing, and still don’t, but it was very important for me.

The idea behind it is that what science gives us, even at its best, are descriptions of the world. Science is good at showing how the world is — it gives us facts. The thing is: morality is not about how the world is. It is about how the world should be. And there seems to be an abyss separating these two.

To say that slavery occurs to this day in Mauritania is simply to state a fact, to describe a state of affairs. This statement in itself says nothing about whether this is good or bad, whether this should or should not happen. That is a different matter entirely. No description about how the world is tells us about whether slavery should happen or not.

If we try to argue that people suffer under slavery, and that is enough of a reason for why it ought not to happen, we are missing the point. To describe suffering, regardless of the physiological detail that goes into the description, says nothing about what “ought” to happen. Science works with empirical proofs. There is no way to prove empirically whether something should or shouldn’t happen. It just doesn’t work that way.

One can’t derive and ought from an is. Through science, we may have reason to think something is or is not the case, but we have no reason to think something should or should not be the case. Therefore, science gives us reasons to believe, but not reasons to act.

When asked “why do you believe this?”, we can simply show our experiments and go: “look: the world agrees”. But when posed the question “why should you want this?”, the world remains silent. All you can do is to look inwards. Not to your reason, but to your feelings.

The best reason can do is to “explain” why I do want something, physiologically. I can show all the brain activity that goes into each one of my desires. I can state you facts that explain in detail why I may desire something. But I can say nothing of why I should desire it — of why that thing would be good.

Some try to “reduce” goodness into a merely subjective thing. Something is good insofar as it is desired. There are no “reasons” why something is good. Anything that is desired is good for the one who desires it. I desire food. Food is good. I desire sex, recognition, money. These are good. I desire to kill. Killing is good. By definition.

To say that there are no reasons why something is good is to say that “good” is not universal, in the same way scientific facts are. Anything that is rational, based on reasons, can be proven beyond doubt. Goodness, then, is not rational. It is impossible to rationally determine ends. All rationality can do is to determine means. “If …, then …” — that, rationality can do. Reason, as David Hume said, is a slave of the passions.

Reason is a tool — a very effective tool, but still just a tool. It will be directed towards wherever the passions point it to. It will describe things, pick them apart and put them back together, but never consider anything desireable in itself — that is the job of the passions.

So whatever we do, we do because we have physiological processes occuring inside our bodies that lead us to wish so. The only reason why we think things are desireable or good is because we have this built-in mechanism adapted for our survival. Desires, and morality by extension, are simply a by-product of our survival oriented perception apparatus.

In the same way nothing really has color, nothing really has value. Colors are not in the objects: they are the result of the interaction between the light refracted by objects and our eyes, which capture only a very specific spectre of light — the one that, along our evolutionary history, was relevant for our survival as a species. When we see colors, then, we are not seeing the world as it is, but rather as it appears to us to help us survive. Color is, ultimately, an illusion. This is why color perception is not universal. Some animals see way more colors than we do, some see way less. That is because color is not in the object. It is in us.

So it is with value. When we desire something, we are not perceiving a quality of the object we desire. We are projecting “desirability” into the object from the outside. If we wanted to see what the world was really like, regardless of our evolutionary survival directed illusions, we would have to take our desires out of the picture. We would have to take goodness out of the picture. Again, we would have a description of how the world is — not of how is should be. Because in reality, there is no “how it should be”.

The idea of “how the world should be” is nothing but an individual’s desires disguised as a “moral fact”. There is no universal “ought” because each person has different desires. There is no moral law.

Let’s check on the argument from morality again: without God, there is no moral order; but there is a moral order; therefore God exists.

Despite being dubious, it has a correct intuition, I thought. It is true that, without God, there is no moral order. Without God, all we have is science, and science cannot give us moral reasons. The catch, though, is that accepting the first premise does not entail an acceptance of the conclusion. Because it is possible to deny the second premise: that there is a moral order at all.

If I understand “morality” as thinly disguised subjective desires, I can propose a different theory of how the world works. What people think are “moral laws” are nothing but other people’s desires. So morality is, essentially, manipulation — the attempt to impose one’s desires on others.

Nietzsche had a theory like this. Weak people don’t like to lose their fights, so they impose their desire that the strong don’t prey on them as a law of the universe, out of envy for the strenght they lack. Of course killing is not wrong — nothing is “wrong”. What we have is some people who can kill and some people who can’t, but don’t want to be killed. So they guilt the strong into submission, they force the strong to tame himself, they subjugate the strong and try to win through manipulation and other subversive means.

Morality, as Nietzsche saw it, was the history of the struggle of the weak against the strong. So what strong people should do is simply see things for what they are, realize that the only thing stopping them are mental games, understand that the only real criteria as to what they should or shound’t do is what they want. Things are not good and bad, but thinking makes it so. And the strong have everything to make their own vision the rule, instead of letting themselves be manipulated and taken for suckers.

There are no rules but the ones we make. And if we have that power, we make them as suits us best.

This idea was very appealing to me. It seemed to make a lot of sense. It seemed like the natural extension of all the previous ideas. It fits well with the evolutionary framework that converted me to atheism to begin with. Life is the game of survival — there are no rules in the jungle. A lot of days, I felt that way. But most times, I didn’t.

After all, I thought, why would I want to follow my desires? There is no rule that makes me. If I don’t want to follow them, I don’t have to. And yet, why would I not want to? There are also no reasons for that. Because there are no reasons at all. Whatever I do, I have no real reason for doing it. I simply do, I react. I produce an output. Whatever agency I may think I have, I am wrong in believing in it. Whatever beliefs I have about what I should do, I am wrong in having them. Despite that, though, I can’t help but having such beliefs. We are all condemned to be free, as Sartre put it.

There is no escape to the prision of life. In every single moment of my life, I am forced to make choices, which implicitly involve beliefs about the best course of action — beliefs which I know to be false. In every single moment of my life, I have to be painfully aware that I am deceiving myself. There are no reasons to do anything at all.

The only reasonable thing would be not to act, then. But that is impossible, unless one is dead. But dying on purpose is also an act — an act which I have no reasons to undertake. There are no reasons to believe that me being dead would be a better state of affairs. “I ought to die” is not a provable statement. Neither is “I ought to live”. What I do know is that my organism has mechanisms in place to make me make sure I do. But I also know that they can malfunciton.

So there I was: a malfuncioning human being, wishing he had never existed, so he wouldn’t have been forced to be confronted with his own filogenetic stupidity and chronic hallucinatory behaviour.

I couldn’t stop thinking about this. From 17 to 18, when this whole crisis reached its epitome, those thoughts tortured me every day. I couldn’t have a moment of rest, lest I remind myself again of the pointlessness of it all. I punished myself emotionally for wanting, feeling, believing. I deeply wanted to cease with all of that. I wanted to reach true neutrality. Whenever I found myself caring, I tried my hardest not to care. I knew there was no reason to. I knew I shouldn’t.

Yes, I knew “should statements” were all false. Of course it was not true that I shouldn’t care. That would pressupose that I should only do things when I have reasons to. But that is not true — despite being how my mind worked. So I thought: “perhaps if I reach a point of not caring at all, I will never be wrong again, I will break the cycle of illusion, and my psychological pain will end.” And so I tried. Unseccessfully, but I really did try. Religiously.