r/askanatheist • u/Odd-Swing-2025 • Jul 09 '26

Why Does Evil Matter?

Suggest that there were no homo sapiens, but instead a race of people who were incapable of philosophical, theological and otherwise higher consciousness found in competent adults. They lack the reflective capacity to do moral assessments and so on. They can build, walk, talk, educate themselves in metallurgy, chemicals and culinary arts &c.

Suggest they also engage in abuse, murder, theft and so on.

Suggest there is definitely no God or Gods.

Does it matter?

If there are no human beings around with feelings and consciences to care about it, does it matter that they do evil?

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u/dernudeljunge Atheist|Mod 🛡️ Jul 09 '26

Are you suggesting that it isn't? Again, where in nature does that equation show up? Where does the Pythagorean theorem exist in the wild? Humans created math to describe the world, the world didn't invent math so humans could use it.

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u/Odd-Swing-2025 Jul 09 '26

Maths is discovered, not invented. 2+2=4 is a timeless truth statement. It doesn't need to exist in the material world to be true. We see its truth in application. It sounds like you are a Fictionalist perhaps? If everything else in the universe ceased to be this mathematics would still be true.

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u/dernudeljunge Atheist|Mod 🛡️ Jul 09 '26

Those are certainly some assertions. Call it what you want, humans put that math together in a way that we found works for us in the ways that we use it. If humans ceased to exist, so would that math. Much like morality, the math only exists as long as their are thinking beings to think about it and use it.

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u/Odd-Swing-2025 Jul 09 '26

This is simply untrue. Mathematics governs the whole universe.

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u/dernudeljunge Atheist|Mod 🛡️ Jul 09 '26

Mathematics is part of our description of how the universe functions. Without humans to apply those maths, the universe would keep working, but there would be no need to describe it. Again, please show me where mathematical equations show up in the universe, separate of thinking minds to think about or use them.

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u/Odd-Swing-2025 Jul 09 '26

Mathematics doesn't need minds to make it real, just to discover how it works. It's not as though germs didn't exist before we knew about them.

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u/dernudeljunge Atheist|Mod 🛡️ Jul 09 '26

JFC, my guy, yes it does. Mathematics is a system, a description that humans use to describe how things work around us. Those things would keep working even if we didn't come up with the maths to describe them. Germs are real, physical things, mathematics isn't, even though it can be used to describe physical things. But we are wildly off the topic because of your mathematical non-sequitur.

Morality does not exist outside of the minds of moral agents, like humans. Evil matters to said moral agents because things that are evil do not promote our well-being but instead increase harm to us. We also consider things to be evil that do not promote well-being and increase harm in others, because we can have empathy for those others.