I think you are confusing “gratitude” with “thanks”.

I am grateful – for example – that my daughter is a healthy normal child, because I know that there could have been random occurences that would have led to a different result. I don’t feel I need to thank somebody for what is a random process, but I’m still grateful that it came out the way it did. To not be grateful for such things would, in my estimation, be less than human.

It’s an acknowledgement that my position on this earth is not related to the benevolence of some greater being, but due to a combination of the circumstances I find myself in, the way I got in those circumstances (some random, but a lot due to the efforts of other people), and partly due to what I have done in those circumstances.

Or, to put it another way, “grateful” is a state of mind.

Posted: October 16th 2008

See all questions answered by Eric_PK

I know exactly what feeling you are talking about and it’s wonderful. I don’t think it’s any different for atheists than for religious people.

It’s important to understand that the human mind isn’t perfect. It has flaws, biases and makes errors that we have to account for when thinking about philosophy.

One of these flaws is that we see agency in everything. Somebody has to be responsible for the thunder… Thor. Somebody has to be responsible for who wins a war… Mars. Somebody has to be responsible for the sun rising… Ra. Eventually, somebody had the idea that there could be one and the same being responsible for all these things. It’s a brilliant idea and makes for some great theology. But it still follows the same basic flaw: There doesn’t have to be a person for the sky to thunder, to decide who wins a war or for the sun to rise. It’s a trick our minds play on us.

So yes, maybe it’s difficult to just… be grateful. Not to a god and certainly not to the cosmos. No, just being. Grateful. It’s the thing I love most about atheism. It requires you to acknowledge the flaws of your own mind and then overcome them to achieve a greater wisdom.

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As an aside: Ironically, the very phrase “our minds are playing a trick on us” is an example of the same fallacy. Our minds aren’t actually doing it on purpose, yet that’s exactly how we phrase it. These artifacts are all over our language.

Posted: October 16th 2008

See all questions answered by Stefan

The word gratitude suggests that there should be a person who is the receiver of our gratitude. When an atheist thinks about existence, of course he’s not grateful or thankful to anyone for it.

But that certainly doesn’t mean that an atheist cannot be appreciative of the fact that a chain of events stretching back millions of years resulted in his or her existence. And it doesn’t mean that an atheist cannot look at the universe in awe and wonder.

So gratefulness for existence, in the cosmic sense, might not make sense in an atheistic universe. But appreciation and wonder are manifestations of the same kind of impulse that makes a theist want to give thanks to a creator, and they can be at least as satisfying.

Here’s a passage from Richard Dawkins’ book, Unweaving the Rainbow, that I think is relevant:

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die, because they are never going to be born. The number of people who could be here in my place outnumbers the sand grains of Sahara. If you think about all the different ways our genes could be permuted, you and I are quite grotesquely lucky to be here: the number of events that had to happen in order for you to exist, in order for me to exist. We are privileged to be alive and we should make the most of our time on this world.

Posted: October 15th 2008

See all questions answered by bitbutter