Are humans insignificant if God does not exist? (WLC quote).

by bohm 4 Replies latest jw friends

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  bohm

  I wonder if anyone here would agree with this quote by WLC:

  Naturalists are typically materialists or physicalists who regard man as merely an animal organism. But if man has no immaterial aspect to his being, whether you call it a soul or mind or whatever, then we’re not qualitatively di?erent from other animal species. On a materialistic anthropology there’s no reason to think that human beings are objectively more valuable than rats. When a terrorist bomb rips through a market in Baghdad, all that really happens is a rearrangement of the molecules that used to be a little girl (Craig & Antony (2008) ).

  I would strongly object along the line that the "immaterial aspect" which make us special (the soul if you will), make us special because it give us certain properties. for instance that we can love, or wonder, or enjoy music, and be conscious and so on. If these are things which make the soul special, and we (according to the naturalistic world-view) can have them without a soul, then we must be special too.
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  OnTheWayOut

  There is some level of me that wants to agree. The universe as a whole, for that matter- even the planet, will go on just fine without people when we are gone.

  But that is not what this is about. This is an attempt to say that unless something higher than ourselves assigned value to us, then we are valueless. Rats are not assigned value by humans, therefore they are valueless. Even within the community of rats, one dead rat can be replaced.

  But rats miss a rat that dies. Oh, it's brief. Their brains haven't developed as much as ours have. I don't know much about rats, but I have seen wild chickens roaming around in St. Thomas. I have seen the hen with chicks. I have seen the chick stepped on by a person and killed (on accident). The hen is horrified and tries to revive the chick. Within minutes, the hen has to go on and care for the remaining chicks and go on without another thought to the dead one.

  Well as humans, we give more than a few moments thoughts to our fellow humans. Still, eventually the girl blown to bits and the terrorist who did it will be just molecules. But just as chickens or rats don't need to concern themselves with being assigned value by humans, we don't need to concern ourselves with being assigned value by God. We can assign ourselves value.

  A human will have a pet. The pet will feel valued because the human gives it value. That's what the thinking in that quote makes me think of. Instead of independent animals assigning themselves value, many people prefer to be the "pet" of God and/or religion. Part of that is that they want more than the life they have. They hope God will care for them always and into eternity past this life. They want more value than they can assign to themselves.

  Not me, baby. It's possible that other people will only give a passing thought about me when I am gone, but I no longer need God to give me a higher value because I give it to myself. As for eternity, I will be gone so I will just worry about now. I can return to being simply molecules to satisfy the universe later.
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  NomadSoul

  OTWO
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  d

  Humans are just specks of dust. We really are nothing.
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  unshackled

  then we’re not qualitatively different from other animal species.

  Why the need to consider ourselves qualitatively different? Doesn't that stem from a stance of arrogant superiority? We are all part of the same thing...nature. We are the most consciously advanced and intelligent creatures on this planet, which brings with it advanced emotions such as love and caring. But we see similar caring emotions in the rest of the animal kingdom, increasingly as to the higher intelligence. We can learn a lot about ourselves and the roots of human nature from our cousins. Chimpanzees mourn the death of their own...as in the pic below, mourning the passing of an elder. Doesn't this very act add value to the passed elderly chimp's life? Why do we need god to assign value to our lives? Don't we do that already with and for eachother and ourselves?