morality
Follow up to atheist morals
I just read a painful post about A Christian Analysis of Atheism. I don’t know what I might have expected with a title like that, but the ideas in this misguided commentary make me cringe. I’m embarrassed for both of us. You because you don’t understand a lot of things, and me because we aren’t explaining it well (apparently).
This reminded me of a recent post I made about atheists and morals. This is, apparently, what some Christians think of when they hear the term “atheist”:
According to Chuck Colson in Against The Night: Living In The New Dark Ages, in the arena where relativism reigns supreme in opposition to the law of God, there is no legitimate ground in which one can exclude the arguments and proposals of Nazis, serial killers, and pedophiles (47). From today’s headlines, the nation is coming to realize in the most brutal of ways that these ideas do not confine themselves to academic journals or newspaper opinion pages. And in the case of school shootings such as Columbine High, this radical antipathy towards God can in fact turn deadly.
If the lawlessness of atheism can wreak havoc upon individual lives, just imagine its affects (sic) magnified across entire societies. The major dictatorships of the twentieth century testify to this blood-soaked historical truth. Founded upon assorted atheistic ideologies, these totalitarian regimes promised secular heavens on earth but instead dragged their nations down to the very borders of hell.
Unfettered by eternal external standards, those holding the reins of power in such societies had nothing to hamper the implementation of their most extreme policy whims, not even the value of innocent human lives.
Oh no. Really? The “lawlessness of atheism”? I get so tired of this argument. There is no lawlessness necessitated by atheism. Read that past post of mine for more of that. Atrocities have been committed in the name of many things, including CHRISTIANITY. Some people may try to blame the religion for them, but in general, I do not. It’s the people using what they can to rationalize what they want, nothing more. Blaming atheism for the Columbine shooting? I seem to remember that they picked that day to coincide with Hitler’s birthday (and lest we forget, he made numerous mentions of his Christian beliefs and motivations). So just drop it! Atheism is not about abandoning morality because you don’t have to answer to anyone. Would Mr. Meekins go on a shooting rampage if he wasn’t worried that he would be punished by an invisible man in the sky? Let’s hope not.
But my main point is this: Atheism is not inconsistent with morality, and it’s completely orthogonal. The discussion of belief in a god has nothing to do with if we lose our morality or not. It’s a complete non sequitur. Saying, “Christianity must be true, otherwise people will kill each other” is not arguing any point of truth about Christianity, it’s appealing to the emotions of listeners who don’t really want to die.
And I’m not done with this commentary. He wants to bring up science, so I’m happy to oblige.
The Laws of Thermodynamics declare that, left to themselves, systems degrade to the maximum level of entropy; or in laymen’s terms, things wear out. Employing this principle, one is forced to conclude that, if the universe is an infinitely-old closed system those like Sagan claim it to be, then the universe would have already wound down in eons past. Therefore, the universe must have had a beginning. And since something finite cannot come from nothing, the hypothesis of a divine creator provides the most plausible alternative.
Now, my thermodynamics is a little rusty, but if I remember from college, thermodynamics deals very heavily in probabilities. That is to say, all of the molecules of air in this room could rush to one corner all of a sudden, but that isn’t very likely. The laws of thermodynamics make predictions based on the fact that, over time, things tend to follow certain rules, because the probabilities of them not doing so are so small. But IF the universe is an infinitely-old closed system, you would need zero probability for an event before you could say it won’t ever happen. Don’t underestimate infinity, it’s quite a long time. I’m not claiming that this is true, but consider the possibility. Some 13.5 billion years ago was the last time that all the matter in the universe happened to get to a state that it was crunched down together so tightly and exploded. Can you say with certainty that this hasn’t happened before, or will again? In another 20 billion years? 20 billion billion? (20 billion billion)^(20 billion billion)?
One more comment on the cosmological argument in general, while we’re talking science and math. The argument is more or less a failure of semantics. We start with a premise: everything in motion has a cause. So, that cause must then have a cause, and so forth until we get to a “First Cause”, which must be God. There is a fallacy here that is less than obvious: you can’t use a timeline argument to discuss something that is not temporal. Give it some time to roll around in your brain. If you want to ask “What happened before time began?” you have already used language to make any answer meaningless. What does “before time began” mean? You’re asking what temporal relation something had when there was no measure of time at all. Time is a tricky thing to think about, but watch out for this mistake. “Before time” is meaningless.
It’s too bad so many people misunderstand these things. But I’ll keep doing my part, one post at a time.
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Sunday school teacher indicted for rape and murder
Original story here.
Cue the outraged atheists…. now! This is one of those tricky issues that we really need to watch. Rapists and murderers have a funny habit of commiting crimes whether we like it or not. So, did religion play a role here, or is it a coincidence? First, let’s all agree that if we make a huge deal about her connection to religion, we’ll just get more “well, HITLER was an atheist, so there!” responses. That may be false, but we need to criticize the right thing. You can’t run around screaming “religion is evil in all ways”, because someone’s just going to find one way that it’s not and call that a complete argument.
No, the real problem here is the trust that people put in church-appointed authority figures. What kind of background check did we do on this woman? What kind of trust did the parents put in her just because she was a Sunday school teacher? I would be willing to bet that most parents spend ten times the energy picking out a babysitter they trust than they do thinking about who takes their kids for a few hours a week. You can’t tell your kids to trust someone you don’t know anything about and expect them to be different than the rest of the people out there (who they probably don’t trust at all). I’ve never seen any statistics that show that religious people are any less likely to commit a crime. The only difference is that they have someone waiting at the church to listen to it, forgive them, and go on with their lives.
An atheist’s morality is not disproved by one philosopher. Sorry.
Below I’ve posted a “video” of a response to another video (who knows how far back that goes, I just picked this one up). While I completely disagree with what he’s saying, it wasn’t an offensive video, so give it a quick watch.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bss9T2EJ0W4
He says at 1:05:
While it is true that some atheists can be moral, it is not true that one can be logically consistent and be an atheist and moral realist at the same time.
Uh oh. My B.S. sense is acting up again. Time to set a few things straight. I’ll begin with his first point. He cites the philosopher David Hume’s famous assertion that you cannot derive an OUGHT from an IS, meaning that if your belief system is such that you build up only from what you know IS, there is no way to make the jump to what that implies you OUGHT to do.
I don’t want to detract from Hume’s results or his very influential philosophy career, but anyone that has done more than pick and choose his philosophical quotes will know, the field is awash in extremely different ideas that exist because it’s not a hard science. This is philosophy. So while we’re choosing whatever quotes we want to, it’s my turn. I invite you all to also read one of Plato’s great works, Euthyfro. This is especially apt given his claim that there is no morality unless it is given by God. To paraprase the paradox in terms that make sense for Christianity, does God command things because they are moral, or is it moral because God commands it? It’s a simple question, but opens up quite the can of worms.
Does God command what he does because those things are moral? If this were the case, it seems to imply that God is not actually the source of morals. He may know about the morals, but isn’t the moral authority himself. He just passes the info on down to us. (And it’s a good thing we’ve only got 1 god in the “telephone” chain, as opposed to what Plato had. Have you ever played that game with more than about 3 kids? Who knows what moral commands we’d get!)
Ok, so are things moral because God commands them? Yikes, what consequences could this have? The first word that comes to mind is “crusades”… Are we saying that, assuming that it’s true, if God commanded killing some huge number of people, we would not only be allowed, but morally imposed to go out and do so? And how do we filter out the people that really heard God make this out of the ordinary command and those who just wanted to get away with it, or who were crazy in the first place?
So I think we already have some philosophical issues with assuming that God is the source (or deliverer) of morality. Let’s not put too much trust behind one claim of one philosopher.
But let’s investigate this issue from the side of an atheist wondering how he ought to act. There are huge branches of philosophy that deal with this. The most broad is simply Normative Ethics, philosophy trying to deal with exactly this question. From the vantage point of an atheist who values above all else reason and verifiable reality ( “IS” statements, to use our previous terminology), I would say that consequentialism provides the best theories. We have, in basic descriptions, a few to choose from:
- Utilitarianism – Moral worth is derived by maximizing the good done to the most people.
- Egoism – Moral worth is derived by maximizing the good done to the self.
- Situation ethics – Moral worth is derived by maximizing the love of the consequence.
- Negative consequentialism – Moral worth is derived by minimizing bad consequences.
And there are more. I may also add that none of these are inconsistent with atheism. They are completely orthogonal topics. This isn’t the place to get into a huge breakdown of every possible ethical theory, so I’ll just take one as an example.
Utilitarianism – we determine the moral worth of something by the good done to the most number of people. So essentially we are deciding what we OUGHT to do based on what we predict will happen. Here’s where we get into what I think this video’s poster would claim is a sticking point. How do we know something will happen, so that we can make a moral judgement? This question is more or less immaterial. For a reasonably rational person, prediction is at the heart of nearly every action that we make. Science is built upon predicting results. I claim that tomorrow I’ll see the sun in the sky just like I did today. This doesn’t have to be true, strictly speaking, but throwing out predictive power is ridiculous. And if you try to do it, you’ll become an actionless pile of mush on the floor.
We are very experienced with actions and consequences. Using a small amount of predictive power, we can estimate the outcome of our actions, and thus derive morality.
And to dust off a tired old hat: If you’re only not killing your neighbor because your God threatened you with eternal torment, well, that scares me more than someone thinking for himself.
