Atheism’s Moral Bankruptcy
Of the many points of contention existing between atheists and theists, the topic of morality frequently takes center stage. Theists often insist that without a god to anchor objective moral obligations and duties, humans are free to behave anyway they please. Atheists counter that they too espouse ethical positions, and that to ground morality in a mythical god does nothing to address the problem of ethics in a post-Christian world. The debate ultimately turns upon the origins of morality and whether these origins provide sufficient reason to compel morally responsible behavior.
No one denies that atheists routinely behave ethically; in many cases their behavior is identical to that of theists, and the Christian community ought to acknowledge their sincere desire to live responsibly. What remains uncertain is the legitimacy of their intellectual justification for privileging any one moral system over another. While we may certainly commend atheists for their eagerness to seek goodness over evil, we must gently remind them that their worldview makes no allowance for the existence of objective moral duties, and if they oppose theism they must also relinquish any claim to a pervading moral reality.
Why Bother Arguing?
This tactic is difficult for even some Christians to understand. Isn’t it enough that atheists are trying to do good? Shouldn’t we encourage them to behave ethically and stop quibbling over philosophical nuances? All valid points, but I think it absolutely essential that we demonstrate the inability of the prevailing secular models – namely materialism or secular humanism – to provide a cogent account of one of the most fundamental concerns confronting humankind: ethics. When the atheistic paradigm is shown to fall short of satisfying our need to order our interactions with one another, the intellectually honest atheist must chose to either abandon ethics altogether, or to reconsider theism. Driving the debate toward this dichotomy seems to me both compassionate and intellectually responsible.
The Problem of Objective Moral Duties
Are atheists really in such a philosophical predicament? Let us quickly consider their limited options. Given secular naturalism, materialism, physicalism or any similar atheistic worldview which precludes the existence of anything beyond corporeal matter, an atheist must derive his or her moral system from the physical processes and chemical interactions which constitute the material world. The primary mechanism responsible for practically all of these phenomena, claims the materialist, is natural selection. If the atheist wishes to provide a credible argument for the existence of objective moral duties she must not only show how natural selection produces ethical inclinations in human beings, but also demonstrate why we ought to continue abiding by those conditioned behaviors even after we have discovered their contingent, biologically derived origin in a random process of mutation. The problem is that we can easily imagine how the environmental constraints which allegedly shaped the evolution of humankind could have been different, which would have resulted in a different ethical impulse other than the one we experience now. In other words, there is nothing at all necessary about morality if its origins reside in natural selection. Morality, as defined under this naturalistic model, might change with the evolution of the species, and no compelling argument for its universal application is available.
Alternatively, the atheist might argue that the human being’s capacity to reason has enabled her to make decisions which benefit the species as a whole, and that each of us is morally obligated to behave rationally in order to secure an orderly, just civilization. Reason is certainly a powerful resource by which to evaluate contending ethical claims, but only when working in the service of an explicit goal. Only when atheists posit a goal, such as securing social harmony, promoting equality or perpetuating the species can they then apply reason to determine how to achieve it. But an end goal, or teleology, is precisely what is missing in any naturalistic account of the universe. Science and natural selection offer no indication of there being any goal to its processes, only random, directionless replication of DNA. Without a goal to focus our ethical behavior, any atheistic preference for one moral system over another reflects an arbitrary whim and cannot be defended philosophically.
Nowhere Left to Turn
What else can the secular naturalist offer in defense of objective moral duties? Unfortunately, nothing else remains but a frighteningly indifferent universe which allows for no distinction between any sorts of behavior, ethical or otherwise. And while it’s true that I have simplified the arguments to permit a quick overview, we need only turn to one of atheism’s preeminent thinkers to arrive at the same conclusion. In his final book before his death, Richard Rorty wrote, “There is however nothing in existence to which our moral convictions should try to correspond. […] The answer to the question ‘Are some human desires bad?’ is: No […] There is no such thing as intrinsically evil desire.” This refreshingly candid confession by a world-renown atheistic philosopher promotes the only intellectually consistent position atheism has on offer, moral relativism.
The sooner atheists confront the unsettling consequences of their position the sooner they are likely to turn to theism for answers. Christians have a responsibility to exemplify compassion when debating atheists, but we can also leverage the intellectual inconsistencies of their moral prejudices to draw them into a deeper consideration of theism.
(More articles at www.ThinkingThroughChristianity.com)
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About The Author
Aaron Closson
Aaron Closson holds a Master's degree in Humanities, the History of Ideas, from the University of Texas at Dallas. His interests lie in nineteenth- and twentieth-century continental philosophy, especially Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Soren Kierkegaard.
3 Comments
The desire to live responsibly and morally is very likely to be an evolutionary thing. After all, societies that permits killing don’t propagate very long.
But that doesn’t address the issue of where morality comes from. I believe that, like physics, morality is objective as well as unauthored. Physics is not true because Newton wrote it down, and morality is similarly not true on anyone’s say-so.
Instead, morality can be measured. More precisely, wellbeing of conscious things can be measured and its net rise or fall can be measured and from that we can objectively evaluate actions as moral or immoral.
It’s worth noting–as this is the most common criticism–that I’m not talking about the wellbeing of an individual. If I were, then rape would be permissible because it increases the rapist’s wellbeing. I am talking about the net rise and fall of wellbeing of all affected people. The victim, the actor, the witnesses, the people that learn that this thing is going on in their neighbourhood, etc.
It’s also worth pointing out that there are secular reasons to value this system. This point is important because regardless of whether the system objective, valuing it is a subjective call. Note first that valuing it doesn’t affect its objectivity.
Secondly, the worst possible suffering for all living creatures is the worst imaginable world. If you think there can be a worse world, I don’t know what you mean. What could you add to a world where all creatures are suffering the most they possibly can to make it worse?
As soon as you realise that world is a world worth moving away from then the entire wellbeing-derived morality is valued.
However, even if a person decides not to value this system, so what? That issue is an issue religious morality equally carries. I can simply choose not to care about God’s morality. What is to stop me?
Both secularism and religion can give us objective morality. I think secular morality is capable of making a happier world because that is its goal. Where as religious morality has the goal of obedience. Happiness is not a variable in religious morality. (I do not pretend there is not a lot of overlap between these two models of morality.)
But there is nothing about religious morality to make it binding or compelling. Whether I care about religious morality is a subjective call.
So religion doesn’t get the upper-hand on this one.
AllAlt, thanks for your thoughtful comment. Correct me if I’m wrong, but the position you’re advocating sounds similar to the one outlined by Sam Harris in his book “The Moral Landscape.”
I’m glad to hear that you believe in objective moral duties; that’s something on which we can both agree. The difficultly comes, as you say, in determining where such a morality originates.
You write, “Instead, morality can be measured. More precisely, wellbeing of conscious things can be measured and its net rise or fall can be measured and from that we can objectively evaluate actions as moral or immoral.”
But how does one measure the net rise and fall of wellbeing? That beings suffer I do not dispute, but I don’t see how we can quantify that suffering. What unit of measurement do we use to gauge suffering?
Secondly, even if we could measure the wellbeing of conscious things, how do we bridge the gap between this measurement and morality? There is no necessary connection between suffering and morality. In fact, I would argue that, while suffering is certainly undesirable for conscious beings, the universe provides no prohibition against suffering or any reason to think it ought to be regulated.
You write, “the worst possible suffering for all living creatures is the worst imaginable world. If you think there can be a worse world, I don’t know what you mean. What could you add to a world where all creatures are suffering the most they possibly can to make it worse?”
This strikes me as an unsubstantiated assertion. By what standard do you adjudicate existence? The worst possible suffering is, again, undesirable for the beings themselves, but a materialistic universe would seem entirely indifferent to such suffering. I think Harris is too anthropocentric in his view of suffering, too concerned with the perspective of human beings. That suffering strikes us as obviously “bad” does not mean that suffering is “wrong” in any meaningful way outside of our limited experience of it. Suffering may simply be a brute fact of existence, no more “wrong” or immoral than gravity. We need something meta- or extra- physical to argue that we ought to do something other than what is actually the case.
If the occurrence of life in the universe is purely accidental, then so too is the suffering of life. There can then be no objective scientific prohibition against accidents of this kind, as they certainly exist in complete harmony with natural laws.
We are left then with our distate for suffering and nothing more. But our distate, however strong, isn’t enough to ground objective moral values. Any moral system rooted in our species’ narrow preferences is necessarily relative when viewed in the broader context of universe. Why privilege the human perspective, why not other creatures’? Why not bacteria’s? Or inanimate objects? Why favor suffering as the determining factor in morality? Why not survival of the fittest, which is the only “ethic” we can logically derive from natural selection. Under that rubric, suffering would seem to be a necessary and perfectly natural fact of existence.
The objective moral claims of religion may be completely unwarranted, but at least they offer a plausible explanation of the origins of objective moral duties.
You write, “But there is nothing about religious morality to make it binding or compelling. Whether I care about religious morality is a subjective call.”
But the independent existence of god’s morality, unconditioned by your opinion, is precisely what would make it objective. The religious claim is that moral duties exist independent of your perspective of them, while Harris’ argument rests upon precisely your subjective opinion of suffering. So you may chose to ignore divine morality, but the religious claim offers reason to think that morality pervades your subjective appraisal of it.
Thanks again for your comment.
This is Sam Harris’ argument from The Moral Landscape. Although the examples are mine, I haven’t read the book in a long time.
I don’t think it’s anthropocentric, however I do acknowledge that it is consciousness-centred. But all of morality is consciousness centred–God doesn’t give rocks moral duties, does He? It’s also right to be conscious-centred, all animals experience and avoid (where possible) harm. Many have even been seen saving each other. (So the evolutionary power of a moral sense is difficult to deny… although a moral sense is not my point.)
The universe doesn’t describe what a colour is. In the universe “colour” is an electromagnetic wave (or a photon, depending on your interpretation of quantum mechanics) of a certain energy. It is only from the perspective of consciousness that a wave-length of 460 nano meters can be said to be “blue”.
Wellbeing exists and can be objectively measured by fMRI scanners and EEG machines (fMRI scanners are better). I’m not entirely sure of the metric we use, but suffering and pleasure can be identified in the brain.
The leap from an empirical fact of the universe–i.e. changes in one’s wellbeing–to an evaluation of morality is the same leap we make from ‘wavelength’ to ‘colour’.
What I am saying is that if you ask anyone a moral question the thing they will try to determine is changes in wellbeing (assuming there isn’t an immediate religious answer). Take animal testing for drugs trials for example: weigh up the potential lives saved and diseases ended and suffering stopped against the suffering caused to animals and human outrage.
This is the cost/benefit analysis people do when you challenge them with a moral question where there is not an immediate religious answer. It is the analysis that made me reconsider my position on fox hunting.
So the way you get from ‘lowered net wellbeing’ to ‘morally bad’ is that it is definitionally so. That is what we mean when we say morality.
“Morality” is not something so vague as “what we ought to do”, because depending on context, the thing you “ought to do” can be patently immoral. What should soldiers do? What should the Nazis who feared for their lives under Hitler’s command have done? If I want a bike I see on the street that isn’t locked up, what should I do? No where here is the answer a moral one, so that definition fails.
The fact of the matter is that when people use the word morality they are talking about affecting wellbeing. It is definitionally the case.
This is where the difficult question comes in: what possible other influences to our behaviour could take priority over avoiding the worst possible suffering?