I must say I really enjoy reading about your position in this and, to be honest, would wish nothing more than to be in agreement with it. I was a devout Christian for much of my life and I still feel the loss. But my reason for quitting this search and need for capital-T truth was that the Christian version of it (as well as the few others I explored) just wasn't convincing. It felt like a convenient lie to give meaning to my life rather than some Truth I happened to have figured out.
But all this doesn't mean that I now spend my life an exhausted nihilist. There's plenty of room for values and truth in a world-view that holds that ultimately the Objective nature of these things is probably unknowable. By the standards I used to hold as a devout Christian, I'm quite possible a better Christian now than I was back then. Plus I'm happier.
Anyways. I see your point, and I respect it for the most part, but I think it's a bit overreaching and arrogant to argue that a materialist cannot be a romantic in any meaningful sense. By my definition of meaningful, my romantic relationships are very meaningful. And practically speaking, I'm pretty sure my experience of romance is not so different from that of a Christian anyways.
Eventually, I would run into a philosophy B.A. who was also a Christian. I constantly pressed them for justification of their belief and their main response was this quote by Kierkegaard: "If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?" -- If there were no God, life would be despair (and Siddhartha would be right) so we believe. This line of thought upset me. What I wanted was to know what was actually the case, how the world actually was and not how we might like it to be. Truth at any cost no matter how inconvenient, bewildering, or painful.
I studied Buddhism and Eastern philosophies (which are basically methods of coming to terms with and accepting nihilism). But I retained an idea that human suffering was bad and humans somehow had value. Reading Hume is what changed me. Unless an outside rubric existed that would declare human suffering bad, human suffering never actually had been bad at all. But I believed internally stronger than any other belief that somehow it truly was bad and this instinct seemed to be a self-evident truth. What Hume shows is that this instinct that we feel is either placed in us in relation to a Supreme Being and its existence functions as a unit of evidence called natural revelation or it is a strange delusion we invent and we delude ourselves that human suffering matters.
A liberating realisation was that, in light of this, if the second scenario were the case, it was also not morally 'wrong' anytime humans proclaimed suffering was wrong, one would have merely paid the universe a compliment it would not have deserved. If the unempirical does not exist, then proclaiming it does is not wrong. In the words of philosopher Thomas Nagel: "If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either".
As far as quitting the search and holding logically untenable positions, I suggest this remark by Walker Percy: "This life is too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what you make of it and have to answer “Scientific humanism.” That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less. I don’t see why anyone should settle for less than Jacob, who actually grabbed aholt of God and would not let go until God identified himself and blessed him." He portrays a worldview known as the supernatural existential, desiderium naturale, or Man as Wayfarer in his book The Moviegoer explained here: http://liamk.org/moviegoer/
>>What Hume shows is that this instinct that we feel is either placed in us in relation to a Supreme Being
You seem lost in that you think what atheists I doesn't come from something more despite us not having a name for it. You may call it a god, Yahweh, etc, I call it a feeling of existential validity. I believe also that my instinctual feelings come from something beyond, something greater, a higher order, whatever you want to call it but it's far beyond what we have knowledge of and so far from Christian mythology that I refuse to call it "god" or "gods". I prefer not to be linked to that.
And your mentioning of suffering, beauty, love, etc over and over makes it seem to me that you're coming from an emotional point, not a logical one. Not all love is good. Sometimes doing without love makes us stronger. Sometimes suffering is good, it builds strength and character. Sometimes feeling "bad" is "good", sometimes the opposite. You'll never find real logical truth when you base it on such ambiguities. Life is way too complex to just say 'I like love, therefore god".
If life is good and meant to be, then that which nurtures and perpetuates it is good. Sometimes it's suffering to strengthen oneself, sometimes it's suffering to strengthen humanity and weed out the weak so that in the end, we have left ones who don't suffer so much. Love for oneself and humanity is an emotion that in itself, can be a weakness. Too much and you have vanity and pride, which can be a weakness of successful living and leadership. If love is mercy and tolerance, sometimes what's needed for living isn't mercy and tolerance. You seem to praise certain emotions and instincts as if they're infallible. Believing in gods is also a weakness when you count on those gods to look out for you when you should be looking out for yourself. Some don't care what we do to the Earth because they count on their gods to save them or about space travel because they rely too much on their gods not throwing balls of fire at us, or they pray to their gods to save them from medical illness. All this is predicated on the presupposed notion of life being good so we should perpetuate it. And it takes your love of love, beauty, suffering, etc out for a proverbial spin because life sometimes needs needs what it doesn't wish for, for it to flourish.
>>What Hume shows is that this instinct that we feel is either placed in us in relation to a Supreme Being
You seem lost in that you think what atheists reason about the universe doesn't come from something more despite us not having a name for it. You may call it a god, Yahweh, etc, I call it a feeling of existential validity. I believe also that my instinctual feelings come from something beyond, something greater, a higher order, whatever you want to call it but it's far beyond what we have knowledge of and so far from Christian mythology that I refuse to call it "god" or "gods". I prefer not to be linked to that.
And your mentioning of suffering, beauty, love, etc over and over makes it seem to me that you're coming from an emotional point, not a logical one. Not all love is good. Sometimes doing without love makes us stronger. Sometimes suffering is good, it builds strength and character. Sometimes feeling "bad" is "good", sometimes the opposite. You'll never find real logical truth when you base it on such ambiguities. Life is way too complex to just say 'I like love, therefore god".
If life is good and meant to be, then that which nurtures and perpetuates it is good. Sometimes it's suffering to strengthen oneself, sometimes it's suffering to strengthen humanity and weed out the weak so that in the end, we have left ones who don't suffer so much. Love for oneself and humanity is an emotion that in itself, can be a weakness. Too much and you have vanity and pride, which can be a weakness of successful living and leadership. If love is mercy and tolerance, sometimes what's needed for living isn't mercy and tolerance as they can disintegrate the core foundations of the merciful and tolerant. You seem to praise certain emotions and instincts as if they're infallible. Believing in gods is also a weakness when you count on those gods to look out for you when you should be looking out for yourself. Some don't care what we do to the Earth because they count on their gods to save them or about space travel because they rely too much on their gods not throwing balls of fire at us, or they pray to their gods to save them from medical illness. All this is predicated on the presupposed notion of life being good so we should perpetuate it. And it takes your love of love, beauty, suffering, etc out for a proverbial spin because life sometimes needs what it doesn't wish for, for it to flourish.
I'm a lurker, not used to commenting so I don't know why but I can't edit comments.
If one gave as one's reason for seeking truth "humans sometimes happen to seek truth" you are correct, this would be an invalid reason because of the Is-Ought limitation. That cannot be the reason one seeks truth.
>you think what atheists reason about the universe doesn't come from something more...I call it a feeling of existential validity. I believe also that my instinctual feelings come from something beyond, something greater, a higher order, whatever you want to call it but it's far beyond what we have knowledge of
Discussing this issue is tricky because ultimately, being a Christian, I don't disagree with your experience in which you intuit something greater or with Hume's pinning of essences on a Supreme Being or with almost every person of every belief system I have ever met who feels very deeply something is actually going on here and I might refer to this universal experience as the supernatural existential or desiderium naturale. Ultimately I am not arguing against morals actually existing and so don't mean to put down this feeling you have, only let you know what is required for such a feeling to not to be dismissed as delusion. Strict Empiricism cannot account for it and must reject it but you, I, and even Sam Harris (cf. http://www.newsweek.com/rationalist-sam-harris-believes-god-... ) seem to reject this Empiricism. The Empiricist says your feelings here are a delusion but I'm saying they are not--quite the opposite.
>mentioning of suffering, beauty, love
The inclusion of terms like beauty and love is not at all illogical. What the "Is-Ought" Facts-Values gap shows us is that nothing is truly Immoral unless it holds such a quality objectively. In other words, unless murder objectively holds the quality:'immoral', when an individual says "Murder is Wrong" the meaning of that sentence is nothing more than "I dislike murder" -- a subjective opinion. The limitation is extended not only to 'shoulds' but to values generally. That is, we see the difficulty in locating 'beauty'. A sunset is not truly beautiful unless something about it objectively holds the quality:'beautiful'. If this is not the case, when an individual says "that sunset is beautiful"—even if 99% of humans agree with him (ad populum)—the meaning of that sentence is nothing more than "I like this sunset" -- another subjective opinion. In subjectivism, no one can ever be truly wrong about any value statement (what is moral, what has beauty, what deserves value/love) and so a sunset carries the same objectively neutral quality as excrement. Only if conditions are endowed with objective/mind-independent values, which cannot be located using empiricism, can something be understood to truly be beautiful or worth loving.
>If life is good and meant to be
A oft-assumed contingent that Empiricists do not have evidence for. And that pure Reason does not insist upon. As Hume writes "It is not contrary to Reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger".
As far as others suggesting you resolve inconsistencies and hold logically consistent conclusions: yes, to arrive at Truth by examining what logically follows from true and sound reasoning you are going to have to first adopt the 'dependency' of Western logic. But, indeed, you only need do this if you care to know Truth. Many humans reject the use of Western logic (eg, the New Age community) and prefer vague, unexamined existence but I agree this ultimately is each individual's prerogative.
Your perspective seems to be "humans often hold untenable positions and Earth has not yet been destroyed because of this (or apparently impacted in any significant way from it) therefore I may (without impact) hold untenable positions", a position I and your Christian interlocutors I think unsurprisingly reject. My most sincere advice to you and to all everywhere is found in Rousseau's echo of Juvenal's motto "Vitam impendre vero"—you must stake your life on Truth.
Re: your ability to be a romantic you'll note that the conclusion in Vladimir Solovyov's truncated syllogism "Man is descended from the apes; therefore we must love one another" does not follow. Materialists can practice what looks like romance but cannot be romantics in any meaningful sense of the word.