Is Life Really Absurd for the Atheist?

[rug]

By John Loftus
9/21/2016

In an interesting essay Taylor Carr argued, "Our condition is absurd whether God exists or not." I just happened to come across it while looking into existentialism again, having taught it as a philosophy instructor. His whipping boy is William Lane Craig with his contention that life is absurd without God. He contends "Craig under-appreciates the weight of absurdity - namely that he neglects a full treatment of the subject as it has been articulated in Camus, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard" since "absurdity of this sort does not undermine atheism, but recommends it, in that it reveals the absurdity of even life with God." For Craig's limited view of absurdity is

more of a mindset than a reality. It is a problem to be cured. The life of the atheist is absurd only in that she does not acknowledge God, and so has no claim to ultimate significance, purpose, and value. Absurdity on this view is practically a placeholder for irrationality. Craig says of the godless perspective that it is "utterly without reason." The absurd life is living with the irrational belief that we inhabit a godless universe.

By contrast Carr informs us "For Camus, the absurd is fundamental to who we are. Our consciousness is what separates us from the world, what gives rise to absurdity."

Camus finds significance only in accepting life on its own terms, which has everything to do with acknowledging its absurdity. In The Myth of Sisyphus (where Sisyphus is condemned to roll a rock uphill for eternity), Camus describes the absurd feeling as being divorced from one's life. We encounter a tragic divide between our desires for reality and reality as it really is, perhaps most of all in those humbling conscious moments of suffering and trauma. The desires we have for unity, purpose, and order clash with our experiences of a world that seems not to care about us, our dreams, or our plans. The absurdist finds herself a stranger adrift in a foreign world with no lights or illusions, unable to remember where she has come from and unaware of where she is heading. If she denies the absurd, she lives an inauthentic life, as if the world is so little different from her desires that the incongruities presented to her are not really incongruities at all.

Carr explains that

Camus' point is not just that the world has no seemingly in-built meaning to it, but that we, as the conscious and reasoning creatures we are, do not even belong to this world. The human condition is uniquely human in that we are consciously separated from the world in which we live. The same cognition that allows us to reason also isolates us from the rest of the universe...Seeing our condition as it is, seeing the absurdity of life, is not antithetical to happiness, it is, for Camus, paramount to happiness.

You can read Carr's piece right here. The thing that struck me most is that Carr sort of bites the bullet. Christian apologists like Craig argue that life is absurd for atheists. He and others apologists want to go back to the atheistic existentialists of the past who, they claim, truly understand the plight of atheism, as opposed to the so-called new atheists like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens, who are accused of being oblivious to it. I think Carr is on to something and I applaud it. He's correct that Christian apologists like Craig cannot use Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus in their apologetic, for they are first and foremost atheists. In Camus' case the absurd can only be denied through "philosophical suicide, "when we trade in the real world for comforting illusions" like religion (as one example), "which tells us our desires for purpose, order, and unity can be met by God, or by a world beyond this one..."

http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2016/09/is-life-really-absurd-for-atheist.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FypxUn+%28Debunking+Christianity%29

http://godless-skeptic.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2016-01-26T18:21:00-06:00&max-results=7

[Jim__]

1. "... the more we know the less life seems absurd." Really?

If Loftus wants to deny Camus' claim that life is absurd, he needs to be a lot clearer about how he arrives at that conclusion. The scientific knowlege and scientific speculations that he cites in his essay don't begin to address issue of meaning that is Camus' concern.

An excerpt from a short essay on Camus and absurdity:

His <Camus'> answer was perhaps a little depressing. He thought that life had no meaning, that nothing exists that could ever be a source of meaning, and hence there is something deeply absurd about the human quest to find meaning. Appropriately, then, his philosophical view was called (existentialist) absurdism.

...

The solution Camus arrives at is different from Nietzsche’s and is perhaps a more honest approach. The absurd hero takes no refuge in the illusions of art or religion. Yet neither does he despair in the face of absurdity—he doesn't just pack it all in. Instead, he openly embraces the absurdity of his condition. Sisyphus, condemned for all eternity to push a boulder up a mountain only to have it roll to the bottom again and again, fully recognizes the futility and pointlessness of his task. But he willingly pushes the boulder up the mountain every time it rolls down.

You might wonder how that counts as a solution. Here’s what I think Camus had in mind. We need to have an honest confrontation with the grim truth and, at the same time, be defiant in refusing to let that truth destroy life. At the end of Myth, Camus says that we have to “imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Denying the absurdity of life without actually addressing Camus' concerns make Loftus appear inauthentic as in his citation:

... The absurdist finds herself a stranger adrift in a foreign world with no lights or illusions, unable to remember where she has come from and unaware of where she is heading. If she denies the absurd, she lives an inauthentic life, as if the world is so little different from her desires that the incongruities presented to her are not really incongruities at all.

[rug]

4. Yes, he trivializes Camus' insight, the better to rebut it.

I wonder what he says about Sartre.

[Brettongarcia]

2. Life is absurd.

Things just come and go.

Any idea why?

[struggle4progress]

3. That's a rather superficial take on existentialism and suffers other deficiencies: for example,

We .. know that: Because science figured out evolution, Science will eventually figure out how the universe (and/or multiverse) originated is a gigantic logical gaffe and thoroughly misrepresents the nature of science

The situation worsens with that something exists in the first place isn't all that bizarre given an equilibrium of positive and negative energy, which is as close to nothingness as we can get. For such an initial state is utterly unstable. As Victor Stenger argued: "Since nothing is as simple as it gets, we cannot expect it to be very stable.” Given the laws of nature, “the probability for there being something rather than nothing can actually be calculated; it is over 60 percent”

This cannot be anything except high-falutin goobly-de-gook, because no probabilities apply to a single observation ("Is there something or nothing? Oh, look: there's something, and this confirms the theory that our finding something rather than nothing had a probability over 60%!&quot

Worse, all this jabber masks the crux of existentialism, which is the view that we define ourselves by our choices