Roald Hoffmann, basically an Ann Frank who lived, on his atheism, and some ruminations on the question of ethics.

[NNadir]

In Chemistry, there are a class of organic reactions known collectively as "sigmatropic rearrangements," or "cycloadditions" that are defined, in their geometric outcome, by certain rules of symmetry. Every undergraduate who takes a physical organic chemistry course will be familiar with these. They are often called "the Woodward-Hoffmann" rules, the discovery of which Roald Hoffman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1981.

He and R.B. Woodward (who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry before Hoffmann for something else) put together a nice little monograph that I haven't pulled off my shelf in years, The Conservation of Orbital Symmetry, because I'm no longer into organic synthesis; I'm an analytical chemist at the end of my life. That I said, I remember it as a powerful little book.

Hoffmann was born in Poland in 1936 and immigrated to the United States in 1949.

From his Wikipedia page:

Hoffmann was born in Złoczów, Poland (now Zolochiv, Ukraine), to a Polish-Jewish family, and was named in honor of the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. His parents were Clara (Rosen), a teacher, and Hillel Safran, a civil engineer.[7] After Germany invaded Poland and occupied the town, his family was placed in a labor camp where his father, who was familiar with much of the local infrastructure, was a valued prisoner. As the situation grew more dangerous, with prisoners being transferred to extermination camps, the family bribed guards to allow an escape. They arranged with a Ukrainian neighbor named Mykola Dyuk for Hoffmann, his mother, two uncles and an aunt to hide in the attic and a storeroom of the local schoolhouse, where they remained for eighteen months, from January 1943 to June 1944, while Hoffmann was aged 5 to 7.[8][9]

His father remained at the labor camp, but was able to occasionally visit, until he was tortured and killed by the Germans for his involvement in a plot to arm the camp prisoners...

I don't know why, but I found myself thinking of him today, and the time that I attended one of his lectures, where his kindliness and enthusiasm just oozed out of his presence, an expression of what I acknowledge as a cultural Jewish warmth of a type with which I am very familiar, having grown up on Long Island. (The lecture I attended was not on orbital symmetry but rather focused on the metallic properties of hydrogen at extreme pressures.) Wondering if he's still alive (he is), I went to the Wikipedia page just linked where I learned that he is an atheist, an atheist with a twist.

One of the references for the Wikipedia page is this one: Looking for Connections: An Interview with Roald Hoffmann

https://web.archive.org/web/20150407142259/http://www.roaldhoffmann.com/sites/all/files/documents/24/cardellini.pdf

From the text from the part of the interview that turned toward philosophy and Hoffmann's atheism, again, with a twist:

A final and more personal question: You defined yourself as “an atheist who is moved by religion” (6). Looking at the tenor of your life and the many goals you have achieved, one wonders where your inner force comes from.

The atheism and the respect for religion come form the same source. I observe that in every culture on Earth, absolutely every one, human beings have constructed religious systems. There is a need in us to try to understand, to see that there is something that unites us spiritually. So scientists who do not respect religion fail in their most basic task—observation. Human beings need the spiritual. The same observation reveals to me a multitude of religious constructions—gods of nature, spirits, the great monotheistic religions. It seems to me there can’t be a God or gods; there are just manifestations of a human-constructed spirituality.

I also found that I respond to ritual, be it of a Catholic Mass, the synagogues that are part of my Jewish background, or Afro-Brazilian possession rites. But that is not where my inner force comes from. It comes from survival and the joy of life. It comes from the struggle of trying to understand the world; beautiful and terrible as it is and seeing that everything is connected to everything else.

I'm not sure of how he defines "spiritually," and and "spirituality." I certainly have some problems with how those words are often, even generally, used, which is to assume some kind of semi-corporeal ether. (A triumph of science at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th is that ethers don't exist.)

Nevertheless, I feel there are cultural artifacts from my upbringing that do, I think, define my ethics.

When I was struggling with my atheism after my mother's death - atheism cannot be reasoned away but there was a certain psychological agony in my mother's angst over my atheism, which she recognized - I did some readings in religious history and one of the works I read was Elaine Pagel's The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans, and Heretics, the work of hers that, if I recall correctly, suggested that the idea expressed in the Declaration of Independence, more prominent in breach than in practice by the author of that famous fragment of text, that "We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal" is an artifact of Christianity. (I've always been amused by Samuel Johnson's retort: "How is that we hear such whelps about liberty from the drivers of negros (sic))." Most of the early Western Philosophers, she contended, would have found that idea absurd, "men are created equal." If, again, I recall correctly, she specifically referred to Aristotle. She extended this sense of absurdity to the claim that the idea of the worth of human beings, the right to life, liberty and happiness, is an artifact of Christian thought.

Nevertheless, as I noted above, some ethical cultural artifacts do grow out of religions to be sure. If Pagels is correct, that the idea of equality is absurd - and perhaps there are senses in which clearly it is, but certainly not in terms of human rights in my opinion - it is a derivative of Christian ethics.

Now of course, we can argue that one who does good in hopes of reward in some putative afterlife, is more questionable ethically than someone whose ethics derive without appeal to reward, that one guided by a morality based on a kind of casuistry, the word "casuistry" often assuming a negative connotation among those mired in religion, bad mouthed as "bad reasoning," as if the assumption of a extracorporeal judge ruling the universe is reasonable. It isn't.

Ethics of course, existed outside of Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions, but one might assume that some ethical postulates found their way back into these traditions, for instance, the idea that one should treat others as one wishes to be (not necessarily as one is)treated. I accept this postulate personally.

Many, perhaps most, religions engage in ethically highly dubious practices, as my sig line on this website from Max Born suggests. Clearly to my mind, there are religions that are quite supple at engaging in what can only be recognized as pure evil.

(It freaks me out, for instance, that people have been dying for decades in the Middle East because of a dispute over a "magic" rock in Jerusalem. It's lump of granite, largely made of two of the most common elements on Earth, silicon and oxygen.)

Still, as atheists and as Democrats, my sense is that most of us here are guided by a sense of ethics, a nebulous sense of something called "decency," this in an increasingly indecent world.

It raises the question of what ethical postulates should and perhaps do guide us. It's a huge philosophical question of course, in the broadest sense, what is the source of ethics, how does one choose to live an ethical life, and how and why does one do so. But perhaps among us, there is a simpler sense by which we live in the practical sphere. One need not be a philosopher to have a sense of it.

I'd be interested in hearing the thoughts of my fellow atheists on this question. Whence your personal ethics? What postulates inform them?

[biophile]

1. My thinking, when it occasionally happens, is nowhere near as deep as yours but

I get my ethics and morals from the universal golden rule and basic compassion, which do not require religion or belief in any god. Some version of the golden rule is expressed in all religions and while I was raised in a Protestant church, I have embraced parts of many teachings from other cultures. I no longer consider myself a Christian, nor an atheist. Not having a firm belief in God one way or another, I have to agree with Hoffman though - as humans, we seek spirituality. It’s part wonder, part inquiry, maybe even part fear (especially in early times, fear of unknown).
Thank you for providing some interesting insights and thoughts.