Doggerel #85: "You Can't Find an Atom of Love!"

Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.

Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet you act, like there was some sort of rightness in the universe by which it may be judged... -Hogfather by Terry Pratchett

One of the annoying bits of Doggerel that often comes up is that there are supposedly things that can't be reduced to particles, like consciousness, love, life, etcetera, or that materialists are incapable of believing in any of those things because they aren't made of atoms. The problem is, many of these things are not that different from fire:

Despite protests from the early proposers of atomic theory and phlogiston fanatics, you won't find any atoms, molecules, or particles of fire in the universe. That's because fire isn't a distinct object: It's a process. When we look at a burning object, what we see is a series of chemical reactions taking place in a manner that emits light and heat. It may not be as complicated (and I'm willing to defer to any pyrotechnics experts who can describe nuances I may not be aware of) as consciousness, emotion, and so forth, but that's essentially what they are: Chemical processes, not distinct objects.

Of course, whether we feel love by chemical reactions or Cupid's arrow is often irrelevant if the topic is morality. Why supernatural sources of morality would be superior to natural ones is something that never seems to come up: Divine Command Theorists and such simply expect their special pleading to be accepted without question.

What's also annoying is that woos who go on about solved 'mysteries' of consciousness often use this to claim that we don't know what we know, namely why people perform charity and such. Time and again, I wind up explaining that helping other people is an effective, if indirect, means of helping ourselves: If people like you, and know you're going to help them, they'll be more amendable to helping you. Teamwork works. Sometimes our instincts towards helpfulness go further than would be beneficial for selfish ends. Even then, it's often a good thing for families and the species as a whole. And then it turns out to be a hit-and-run troll, or they completely ignore the post, and they eventually go on somewhere else to post about the materialists' alleged inability to answer the question.

---

Doggerel Index