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Matt Diamond
@mattdiamond
it's very interesting to me that losing faith in God is accompanied by losing faith in Goodness is believing in the reality of value equivalent in some sense to believing in God? can you be an atheist but also believe that love and goodness are objectively real?
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QC
@QiaochuYuan
ideological deconversion can be worse than that! i know a lot of ex-evangelicals, the kind who really believed. they'll tell you losing faith is like the world is ending. like there isn't goodness in the world anymore. like your parents never loved you because love isn't real
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Matt Diamond
@mattdiamond
Replying to
@arranrogerson
maybe I'm misreading you, but the atheist doesn't *really* believe in value in that case... they're just using it as a word for "behavioral phenomena that promotes reproductive success"
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Arran Rogerson
@arranrogerson
Replying to
@mattdiamond
The atheist has to go through a very difficult process of ‘reinventing the wheel’ i.e. recreating what belief in God achieves more efficiently. Ultimately they must still rely on a kind of ‘faith’ to assert higher order value structures, which they resist, hence valuelessness.
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Arran Rogerson
@arranrogerson
Replying to
@arranrogerson
and
@mattdiamond
So do they believe in value? I’d say yes and no. Some are reducing value into it’s supposed material components in order to substantiate it empirically (like what science does), but possibly failing to build it back up into something ‘real’—deconstruction without reconstruction.
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