ATHEISTS HAVE THE MOST SUSTAINABLE ETHICS

How often have we atheists been asked how atheists can have any
sense of "morality" since we have no godly law which supports our
ethical beliefs? I'm currently reading a collection of essays called,
The Sense of the Sixties, and in it, Robert Penn Warren (he wrote All
The King's Men) appeals to the same source for my guiding lights as do
most atheists and agnostics. Warren was writing an essay directed to
the situation between blacks and whites as they existed in the
mid-1960s, but his conclusions as to a good foundation for ethics is a
universal I also subscribe to.

"It would be an even more vicious illusion to think that in
trying to solve the problem he would be giving something away, would
be "'liberal," or would be performing an act of charity, Christian or
any other kind. The safest, soberest, most humble, and perhaps not the
most ignoble way for him to think of grounding action is not on
generosity, but on a proper awareness of self-interest.

"It is self-interest to want to live in a society operating by
the love of justice and the concept of law…. It is self-interest to
want all members of society to contribute as fully as possible to the
enrichment of that society…. It is self-interest to seek out friends
and companions who are congenial in temperament and whose experience
and capacities extend our own…. It is self-interest to want to escape
from the pressure to conform to values which we feel immoral or
antiquated…. It is self-interest to want to escape from the burden of
vanity into the hard and happy realization that in the diminishment of
others there is a deep diminishment of the self." —Robert Penn Warren

CONVICTION LEADS TO ERROR

The following paragraphs come from a book I'm reading presently, The Great Equations by Robert P. Crease. Laughing at Ehrenhaft, I'm forced to say that I'm 71 and I can't even find a podium. So my mumbling and grumbling about religion usually occurs in the presence of my lovely wife. Ehrenhaft, fundamentalist religious nuts of all religions and me...

"It took place in September 1946 in New York City at one of the first postwar annual meetings of the American Physical Society. At one session, the presentation by the young Dutch theorist Abraham Pais, who was struggling to explain the strange behavior of a puzzling, recently discovered new particle, was interrupted by Felix Ehrenhaft, an elderly Viennese physicist. Ever since 1910, Ehrenhaft had been claiming to have evidence for the existence of 'subelectrons,' charges whose values were smaller than the electron's, and his efforts to advance his claims had long ago exhausted the patience of the physics community. Now approaching seventy, Ehrenhaft was still seeking an audience, and approached the podium demanding to be heard.

"A young physicist named Herbert Goldstein—who told me the story—was sitting next to his mentor and former colleague from the MIT Radiation Laboratory, Arnold Siegert.

" 'Pais's theory is far crazier than Ehrenhaft's,' Goldstein asked Siegert. 'Why do we call Pais a physicist and Ehrenhaft a nut?'

"Siegert thought a moment. 'Because,' he said firmly, 'Ehrenhaft believes his theory.'
The strength of Ehrenhaft's conviction, Siegert meant, had interfered with the normally playful attitude that scientists require, an ability to risk and respond in carrying forward their dissatisfaction. (Conviction, Nietzsche said, is a greater enemy of truth than lies.) What makes a crackpot is not simply our prejudices, nor necessarily the claim, but our recognition of the disruptive effects of the author's conviction. For conviction tends to wipe out not only the dissatisfaction but also the playfulness, the combination of which produces such a powerful driving force in science." —Robert P. Crease