I ran across this little gem from the Richard Dawkins blog while I was reading Reddit or Digg (can’t remember which): “Atheists in Jail” by Scott Adams (the same one who created Dilbert).
Scott’s comments are a response to some ignorant fundamentalist Christians (note: yes, that is my team) who made the indefensible assertion that atheists are not moral. He rightly says that this clearly is not true: atheists tend to be more law-abiding than Christians. Although they won’t acknowledge this to be a matter of biblical import, Scott & Co. actually understand the Bible better than these moronic Christians do.
Romans 1 teaches that we know God but we suppress the knowledge of him. And being created in his image, it is no surprise that atheists are just as (if not more) moral than Christians. We all naturally know what right and wrong are because we are made in the image of God, and we live in a way that shows that we know who God is and that he has standards that we are to obey. So we should expect that everybody would be moral. They are made in the image of God – and God has a profound sense of right, wrong, and justice, and thus it only makes sense that we all try to be moral.
The real problem with atheists lugging around this argument like it was a dead horse (and it is, and they kicked it to death, and they’ve kept on kicking it) is that the truth of what they’re saying defeats them on two levels.
First, as already noted, Christians can easily turn this around and say, “Ah, you have a morals! That is just one evidence you’re made in the image of God and bear his likeness in your everyday actions.”1 And second, Christians can then quite reasonably argue that while atheists are moral because they bear the image of God, these atheists have no foundation for those morals aside from the existence of God – they have what Ralph Smith has called a “Christian hangover”.
There aren’t any foundational truths that will allow the atheist to argue from the truth of the natural order down to why we should or should not do some particular act. So atheists understand what morality is at a basic level, but have no logical reason to be moral. Understand me clearly here: This does not mean that we might not explain how a sense of morality evolved. Dawkins, Dennett, and others have all made quite capable attempts at this, and these explanations are both creative and plausible given their assumption of the truth of evolutionary theory. But this point must also assume that there is something beyond the natural that makes certain acts absolutely right and others absolutely wrong. There is no way to logically argue that I should not violate this moral conscience that has come about by natural processes. Even if we have practical reasons against murder (i.e., “If you try to kill me, I will kill you, so you shouldn’t try to kill me”), this will not work because it only moves the necessity of an answer one step back. Instead of asking why we should or shouldn’t do a certain act, we are now stuck with answering why we should care about whether we are harmed by our own actions. What happens when I stop caring? The atheist loses their only ground to apathy.
I would be glad to hear attempts to give an atheist foundation for morals, though. Comments?
Notes
1. But one important difference between a Christian and a pagan (atheists in this case) is that Christians have stopped believing the fancy lie that we’re capable of ceasing to sin, even if we are the most moral person on earth. So atheists – even if they are more moral than Christians – are incapable of ceasing to sin. Even in doing the right thing, they’re doing it from a heart of evil that cannot worship God.
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The Demos Critic
