Sense and Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism

by Richard C. Carrier

A generalization has a “compelling inductive force” when there is no trustworthy evidence that places it in doubt, and an overwhelming body of evidence from disparate fields or sources that implies it is true.

among the valid methods one thing is held in common: a thorough reliance on evidence and reason. Reason, because we must think carefully and not erroneously, and evidence, because by no other means do we have any access to the truth. Since our access to truth is therefore generally in direct proportion to the abundance and quality of evidence, we align our beliefs to this, and nothing else.

compatibilism makes more sense: free will is doing what you want—nothing more, nothing less. And being responsible is being the cause—nothing more, nothing less.

For it is wickedness we condemn and goodness we praise, not freedom from causation.

with libertarian free will, punishment and reward have no point or purpose, because they can have no practical effect. If the will is free of all causation, then nothing can really cause anyone to change or act differently. In contrast, determinism makes all this possible, and restores sense and goodness to punishing our villains and rewarding our heroes—because it alone makes our efforts to improve them matter, and it alone makes them the causes of their actions, rather than some mysterious unpredictable “something” devoid of all worthwhile properties, not at all resembling anything we’d recognize as a “person,” and ultimately governed by no sense or reason.

Once upon a time matter and energy were thought to be two different things. That has changed. The advent of the atomic age has demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt that matter is simply another form of energy, one among many. In fact, there is really only one fundamental substance out of which every material thing is made: energy. Light is energy. Heat is energy. A magnetic field is energy. Gravity is energy. An atom is energy, as is a proton or a quark. A Dodge Caravan is energy. So is a pencil. The only thing that makes each of these different from the others is the physical, spatio-temporal arrangement of that energy—the way it is bound up or set free.

Why have eyes if the soul can see without them? There would be an immense survival advantage to having eyes that can never be blinded, as well as a mind that was not as fragile or vulnerable to drugs or injury or asphyxiation as the brain is. And if we didn’t need all that brain, we could have a smaller head, and fewer mothers would die in labor. So there would be tremendous pressure over the ages for humans to become reliant on their souls for sensation and thought, while our brain tissue and sensory organs would atrophy as unnecessary expenditures of energy and serious points of vulnerability. But that hasn’t happened.

The evidence that is offered “against” the above conclusion differs in a very significant way from the evidence for it. The evidence for mind-body physicalism has been corroborated in laboratories and scientific field studies thousands and thousands of times in countless ways and is in fact the only evidence any reputable science has ever turned up or ever sees in regular medical practice. Indeed, the evidence has converged from numerous different directions on the same conclusion. In contrast, the evidence against mind-body physicalism is purely anecdotal, almost always ambiguous, and has often been shown to be outright fraudulent. It is thus clear that mind-body physicalism is proven by objective, rigorous investigation, whereas its denial rests on wishful thinking so powerful it even leads people to fabricate it, or to see what isn’t there.

Spiritualism and PLR have ready explanations in fraud, self-deceit, illusion, and “myth-making,” since in every case where they have been genuinely scientifically investigated in the past hundred years, if any truth to the story was discovered at all, one of these four mundane causes was proved to be at work.

The evidence seems clear: our mind, hence our very existence, depends entirely on the brain. As a mechanism, the brain must be kept healthy and active, so it can remain a system of coherent perception and thought, and we can remain “conscious” and experience life itself. But stop the brain from functioning, and we can experience nothing. Our “consciousness” ceases to exist.

Meaning can be found in our own existence, the here and now, but also in our hopes and dreams for the future, and not just our future but the future of others. In the simplest terms, the meaning of life is a healthy mind in a healthy body, pursuing and manifesting what it can most deeply love: the creation of good works, and the society of good people, in a well-tended world. Anything less is ultimately self-destructive or unfulfilling, and generally a complete waste of time, especially given the brief opportunity for living afforded us. And if we want even more, if it is important to us that something good be eternal, then we can make this so of the good society, and contribute our necessary part to realizing that society and laying the seeds for its endless progress and renewal. We thereby give the greatest gift of all to countless other beings who will know the world after us.

the sages have said it for millennia: it really is love that is key—love of learning, love of doing, love of others, love of ideals, love of country or cause, anything, everything, is the foundation of meaning. If we lacked that, we would certainly be miserable and our lives pointless, even if we lived forever. Indeed, even if we droned on with praises for a supreme being in heaven for all eternity, our existence would be superficial, trite, unsatisfying, and ultimately a torture. Thus, the key lies in finding your loves and pursuing them, manifesting that love in defiance of a universe that won’t.

We have no reason to fear death. Why fear the end of fear itself? We live for only one reason: because we love life, all of it, any of it. And if it disappoints us that there is not enough happiness in the world, not enough goodness, we can contribute to rectifying that. And that is what gives our lives meaning. The more good things we can create or teach and thus leave behind for others, the more problems and difficulties we can remove, the more lives we can light up with our effort and company and companionship, then the more precious our short existence will have been, and the more satisfied we will be that we used our bank account of life well, and thus deserved our measure.

But when despite such understanding, despite such a good life, you still seem trapped by depression, you are probably as unwell as you would be with a dangerous flu, and the reaction should be the same: to seek medical help. The cure often requires medicine or therapy. Certainly, it would be irrational to consider ending your existence without first trying every means at your disposal to get something out of life worth living for. Because you don’t get a second chance.

keep in mind the basic and essential home remedies. Eat well and exercise. Take long walks in nice places. Take up a cause you feel good about, and work to help others in some way that comes easily or comfortably to you. And above all, seek to maintain a happy, social interaction with other people. Studies have proven that people with a cause they care about, and who have even a small but enriching social life, live longer, happier, and healthier. And if it’s good for your health it’s good for your mind.

both reasons—incorrect beliefs and incorrect values—emotions can be incorrect. This is why we need reason and reflection to assess the accuracy of our emotions and thus decide whether we should really act on them or not.

the transformative power of religion is no indication of its truth, but rather of a universal human longing for a loving society where we can experience happiness and purpose. But we do not need any supernatural dogma to have that.

natural meaning, justified faith, humble self-reflection, and the awe-struck pursuit of wisdom. Put these together, and true spirituality is just around the corner. No god needed.

As history has shown that no other means of inquiry is as successful or as trustworthy, it follows that the mental culture of science is on to something—in other words, skepticism is a virtue. Science sets the highest bar, requiring the highest standards of verification, employing the most experienced and well-trained judges, who are encouraged to be as self-critical as they can be. And that is what makes science scientific.

Science and faith are not in conflict—unless you want them to be. If someone places faith before truth, then they are stepping out of bounds. But if faith is what one has because something is true, and not the other way around, science becomes the One True Faith. This is another counter-intuitive feature of science: it is thoroughly empirical, built on observation and evidence, yet “empiricism” is not observation and evidence alone, but a view of things that is constructed from observed facts, and the whole enterprise of science requires at least the provisional belief that those constructions are true. On the one hand science requires faith, a faith that certain principles and models and bodies of knowledge are true. On the other hand, this faith is not blind, but based on evidence. It is justified faith. Scientists build up faith in science’s concepts, principles, and conclusions through repeated practice or testing, and when this faith is challenged, they return again to examine the facts, to see if their faith is justified by them. This is what makes science an empirical enterprise, the fact that it ultimately grounds and justifies its faith by appeal to observable evidence. The idea of an empirically-based faith is hard for many people to grasp, especially if they are used to thinking that “faith” is only a reason for believing something when you don’t have evidence. The term “faith” does have both connotations, meaning “belief” in some cases, but also “reason to beli...

In scientific jargon, facts are what have been carefully observed to be the case. Theories are explanations of those facts. This differs from colloquial and philosophical jargon, where facts are ‘whatever is established’ and theories ‘whatever is speculated’. But to scientists fact is observation, theory is explanation.

Occam’s Razor aims at preventing you from claiming more than you know, of going beyond what the evidence proves. We have a bad tendency to get hung up on marvelously complex systems of thought that distract us from making real empirical progress, so we need to curb that fancy, look for evidence, and keep our claims modest.

(for only Adam was created in His image).

Incorrect. Image og God in Genesis is male and female.

Whatever reason you offer for anyone to be moral, when we keep asking “Why?” eventually you will land on “because it is necessary for your happiness.” If it wasn’t, no one would really care.

in general form: “You ought to be moral, if you want to find true, lasting happiness and to avoid various forms of misery.” The form for any particular moral statement is complex but always derived from this,

ethics falls within the umbrella of scientific investigation, and I suggest that “ethicology” should become a bona fide branch of scientific research, the last great scientific field yet to be endeavored.

Ethicists have been in the armchair too long, and must start collaborating with scientists and gathering actual facts. Ethicology would answer that call, leading to a “real revolution in ethics stemming from the infusion of a more empirically informed understanding of psychology, anthropology, or history” (MDAP, p. 35).

There are thus at least four types of moral error: errors of reasoning in particular cases, and mistakes of fact in such cases, then errors of reasoning in the construction of our value system, and mistakes of fact in such constructions. And these four kinds of error are inevitably frequent and intertwined: for we are often ignorant of or incorrect about relevant facts or deductions in any given case of moral decision (as many of us are in the construction of our worldview, from which we derive our value system). It is the role of the ethical philosopher and moral critic to spot and correct these errors, pointing out how individual human happiness is not served by certain defective values, and how beliefs that are correctly aligned with true facts entail different conclusions, not only about the proper values to adopt, but about all moral subjects, no matter what values one has adopted.

In simple terms, the good is that which helps people, heals or nourishes or improves or protects them, while evil is that which hurts people. This is simply how human convention has categorized things, and logically so. It is vain to argue that people can’t talk like that if there is no God. Obviously they can use language any way they want to. The distinctions being described are real, and human reaction to those distinctions is naturally explicable.

there is a role for moral reason as a check upon, and as a practice for, moral intuition.

“intuition” is just another word for skill, and though skill can “think” faster than reason, it does not always think as well—especially if it was trained incorrectly to begin with. So having reason as a check on ourselves is essential, and equally necessary for guiding us in the development of our moral intuition in the first place.

scientists have only just recently begun to explore this issue, plumbing the biology behind the beauty experience. Their results so far are basically this: the feeling of beauty is an appraisal mechanism that is useful for survival and is thus inborn, but it keys on certain patterns in experience that can be reproduced in many different ways, and how humans exploit this response in their appreciation and production of art is largely cultural.

art can carry deep cognitive meaning. And truly good art, art that is genuinely good for the human race, art of which we can be most proud, will do this. This is especially true in the art of cinema, which can deploy the most media to a common end, merging the visual with the auditory and written, the moving and the static.

Nothing is so ugly as apathy.

The success of human communities especially depends on two different aspects of their culture. The first is the sphere of morality; the other, that of politics. The difference between them is that moral science (and its underlying philosophy) is the study of how we should behave in order to achieve real happiness in harmony with all other beings. It informs our conduct at all times, and it relates to how we as individuals should decide and act. It is a practical art of everyday behavior. In contrast, political science (and its philosophy) is the study of the use and distribution of power, and how this can best be achieved in any society so that all individuals may achieve their own happiness.

ethics is the science of living, but politics is the science of governing.

the moderate is the most rational political animal in any society. It is most unfortunate that in the United States moderates have not seen the merit of uniting behind that principle, to form a power party to be reckoned with, one where disagreements are not only allowed, but encouraged, so long as members acknowledge the virtues of moderation in all things, the avoidance of extreme measures or allegiances, and the superior importance of facts and evidence in making political decisions, trumping any ideology that would argue the contrary. But above all, the moderate desires to cultivate a civil society, rather than impose his will upon the people.

logic can never and must never be used to replace the need for facts and evidence to support any position. When it comes time for proof, arguments are hollow. Evidence is king.

reality must guide us, not ideology.

the government should interfere in our lives as little as possible.

The only defense against tyranny in a modern free society is participation in government.