Draft Rant

It never fails to amaze me how in this day and age the majority of people, including the non-religious, seem to believe that moral properties exist as objective, natural properties in the universe. That is, that there are objectively good and bad actions/outcomes/features of the universe. A related fact is that the majority of people seem to believe that there is some purpose to the universe, that things happen "for a reason", or whatever sort of spiritual nonsense you might arbitrarily choose to believe with no reference to logical or empirical constraints.

While the prevalence of such beliefs among those with little political or academic clout normally doesn't bother me that much, it does bother me when these beliefs are held either by those with power/influence or by those with which I usually agree and feel like they are harming a common cause by their flawed views.

It is the latter that I want to address here. First, some background.


II

There is a tendency of science writers and communicators to emphasize the positive aspects of a scientific worldview while ignoring the negative aspect. In numerous texts I have read popular science writers, for example, Richard Dawkins, defend the notion that a scientific worldview leads to a richer view of life and in no way is "depressing" or "nihilistic". While it may be that such writers feel the need to emphasise the positive in order to counteract criticism and curry favor for their position, I suspect that they genuinely believe it. I think this is largely a foolish position to take. Science has led us to discover many positive and negative aspects of human nature and the universe. For instance, humans often behave altruistically, but this altruism is often conditional on reciprication, biased towards kin, used to maintain a social standing or other ignoble ends. Humans have a long and bloody history of violence that appears to be trending significantly downwards in the long term, from timespans of the millenia to the decade. Humans have a tendency towards prejudice and aggression towards outgroups and never cease to disappoint in their ceaseless conformity on a societal to friend-group level. Human sexual attraction is not as distance from the raping and plundering of the animal and early human kingdoms as we would choose to believe. While many believe that modern sexuality is influenced by modern pornography, I believe that the influence of innate sexual drives on pornography is larger than the reciprocal effect of pornography on sexuality. So if you want to know what the majority of people (Albeit, largely males) want in sex, just click the "Top Rated' videos on any porn site.

There is more to the demoralising effect of science than simply social psychology. Science reduces (correctly) human experience to electrical, neurobiological circuits. It presumes determinism (correctly), which in itself is fucking depressing. I have yet to come across any argument that satisfactorily defends the idea that determinism and free-will are compatible. This mechanistic, physicalist view of the mind involves no possibility of eternal life, no ultimate purpose. As I remarked in an earlier chapter, a scientific worldview necessarily leads to nihilism about moral properties despite the fallacious cries that somehow science can inform us that a broadly utilitarian position is the "correct" moral position.

There are numerous positive aspects of the scientific worldview. It frees us from dogma, except (as detractors may not) the dogma of the scientific method itself. However, I suspect that if you truly believe that the building and testing of fallible theories that are constantly being revised and improved constitutes a dogma, I don't believe that there is more common ground on us to work with. There are many interesting (at least to me, I don't want to claim that they are innately interesting, nothing is innately interesting) facts about the world we have discovered and only a fool would reject the proposition that living conditions have been improved by the Enlightenment. Nevertheless, the fact that there are positive aspects of a scientific worldview for individuals and society does not dismiss that there are the aforementioned detriments of a scientific worldview both on a philosophical level (through the necessary conclusion of nihilism) and an empirical level (through revealing the negative qualities of human nature, not to mention the reduction of art and beauty to evolution by natural selection).

I do think that science is important for human progress and I try to accept the facts of the universe as they appear to be, but this doesn't mean that life in this universe is not a fucking miserable meaningless piece of shit, even for the most privileged.