Benjamin Cain
2 min readNov 9, 2022

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But that's just a strawman, right?

No, knowledge doesn't have to be "absolute" to be meaningful and useful. Imperfection is relative to ideals that live in our imagination, which we needn't reify and personify in the childlike theistic manner. And objective imperfections might be based on a pantheistic view of nature's evident creativity. At least, that atheistic reconstruction of objective morality is something I'm exploring.

Do you really think there could be no such thing as suffering in a godless universe? We know life evolved naturally, and life developed the ability to feel pleasure and pain. We protect ourselves with those warnings and attractions. But things can go haywire and we sometimes feel too much pain precisely because there's no referee on the field.

Who says everything must be "random and chaotic" in a godless universe? That's not what physics and cosmology show. There's a natural order which you think testifies to God's existence. But there's no need for that religious hypothesis.

We know things, under atheism, because the universe has been busy organizing itself for billions of years, generating emergent levels of complexity that correspond to chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, and epistemology.

Who says subjectivity must be "unintelligible"? Are your states of self-awareness really chaotic and meaningless? Isn't your brain working hard to make your experience seem coherent? Didn't your human parents teach you to understand the world in a cultured way? But you'd rather thank an invisible deity for all that, overlooking the facts that are right in front of your face. Seems rather ungrateful.

And no, your strawmen count for little against the rationality of atheism.

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Benjamin Cain
Benjamin Cain

Written by Benjamin Cain

Ph.D. in philosophy / Knowledge condemns. Art redeems. / https://benjamincain.substack.com / https://ko-fi.com/benjamincain / benjamincain8@gmailDOTcom

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