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Originally Posted by Original Position
This sidesteps the issue. Seeking an impossible to know god is not really objectionable to most atheists - in some sense that is also what I've been doing for the last twenty years as well. It is going beyond searching to belief with which atheists disagree.
I think your view is more charitable than the majority of atheist posters in this forum. Based on the types of antagonism expressed towards and about religion and religious adherents, it would seem that searching itself is perceived negatively by that population.
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For instance, I think none of the philosophical defenses of morality I'm aware of rise above plausibility. So I would hesitate to say that I believed that, say, consequentialism is true. But I do think of morality as forced - inaction is itself a morally significant act in most systems of morality. Thus, I might say that I am a consequentialist as a matter of moral commitment, without really thinking that I know enough to say I believe it to be true.
This is where I would start to lean in a bit to try to discuss something like "behaving as if X is true." This is different from some sort of mere abstract assent to consequentialism, in which you assert a belief but it has no practical application in how actually analyze your decisions. So if you take action X intending/expecting a positive outcome, but in reality the outcome is negative, your ability to intellectually/emotionally reckon that event as being a moral ill because your consequentialist commitment (instead of another analysis that takes into account all of the good things you had hoped would happen as a result of your action) would then stand as a way to measure your commitment to the belief.
This is a little bit of a stretch for a philosophical commitment of this type, as it's merely an analytic framework. But if you were to assent to something additional, such as a desire to make morally good decisions, then one might have a more robust way of measuring your philosophical commitment by also comparing your actual decisions with the abstract analysis.
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I can understand someone being a Christian in this commitment sense (e.g. Christian existentialism), but I don't see how the contingencies of human decision-making make a difference in whether a god actually exists. Thus, this seems to have little to do with the truth of the matter.
You might be correct under the view of human behaviors as merely being based on outcomes. The assessment becomes far less clear if you also view human behaviors in light of motivations and truth.
For example, you can take two identical situations of one person treating another person well. One might be doing it from a place of genuine care and concern for the other, and the other may be doing it with the future intention of doing something exploitative.
I agree that in the consequentialist perspective, these are the same as long as the point of future manipulation doesn't happen because the fact would be that the other person was only treated well.
But if one peels back that first layer and can see intent, it becomes less clear
that we should actually view these behaviors as being the same.
With regards to "truth" I would argue that motivations that are grounded in truth should fare generally better than those that are not. And if (for example) it is true that people are made in God's image and that a consequence of this is that people should be treated well, then it makes a moral difference between treating people well for that reason or treating them well because you intend to exploit the relationship in the future.
In this way, I would say that a purely consequentialist perspective is unnecessarily limiting in the same way that a goddidit explanation is unnecessarily limiting. It doesn't necessarily make the position right or wrong (or true or false) to adopt that position, but there are consequences to it.
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I view rationality as a tool. Thus, I would rather say that rationality is a function of a goal than a starting place. This means that if we talk about rational beliefs, we can do so only within the context of specific goals for having beliefs. I mostly keep to the goal of believing what is true and not believing what is false. For that goal, believing in the existence of the gods of religion seems irrational. However, I recognize that other people have different goals for belief, and that these other goals can rationally lead to a belief in god and religion. Nonetheless, I still reject these other goals as worthy of guiding belief.
In mathematical terms, it's possible to get entirely different universes of conclusions based on different assumptions, even if the general goals are the same. The classic example is Euclidean and Non-Euclidean geometry. You can have your goal as "understand the properties of triangles" in both situations and end up with two different sets of beliefs about triangles by just changing the assumptions and not changing the motivation.
So I don't reject that motivation matters (because the types of things you would end up believing would depend on the types of questions that motivate the pursuit), but it seems to me that assumptions matter more because these are the things that actually separate distinct belief systems from each other.