In that class that I guest-lectured in I fielded some questions from atheists. I’ve been reflecting on atheism since then, and I’d like to offer a refinement of my thoughts.
First, a disclaimer. It is possible that someone could find this hurtful or offensive. I do not seek to deliberately offend, but I do seek to be honest. It seems to me that atheism has several serious problems, and I am about to address one of them: atheism’s intrinisic divorce from morality. This is not a personal attack on anyone–in fact, you can be an atheist and also be quite a moral person. But if you are an atheist you do not have a compelling reason to be moral (or even to believe that morality is a meaningful concept), and that is what I want to address.
I can sum up what I’ve been thinking in one phrase: atheism is amoral. Amorality flows directly from a rejection of all nonmaterial reality.
Allow me to explain: a moral law is an entirely different sort of thing than a law of physics. You cannot get a moral ‘ought’ from a material ‘is.’
If all we are is a collection of particles arranged in a complicated fashion, then there is no compelling reason to suppose that any motion of those particles is logically preferable to any other. Say, for instance, a collection of particles driving a knife through another collection of particles versus a collection of particles nursing another, smaller collection of particles.
Every effort that I have ever seen to make the leap from natural ‘is’ to moral ‘ought’ (such as Ayn Rand’s attempt in Objectivism) falters at one point or another. Usually, such efforts err in relying on moral sentiment to cover up shoddy logic (no one wants to argue that abusing others could be considered logical, rational, and in one’s long-term self-interest given the right set of presuppositions about the universe and the right combination of circumstances and so the atheistic moralist prevails in argument even though their argument doesn’t hold water).
No—if there is nothing other than matter and the forces which operate on it then there is no provision for morality, for how can a rock be immoral? And if a rock cannot be immoral, then how can we? We are the same stuff arranged differently.
Hence, atheism is amoral.
Note that I said amoral and not immoral. While I do believe that there is one sense in which atheism is immoral (we all ought to believe in and trust God), I do not mean to imply that atheists are necessarily immoral in the way that most people would understand that phrase.
There are many atheists who strive to live by codes of conduct that I find admirable (and there are many more who do not).
In either case, their choice of a moral code is arbitrary.
They may be able to present plausible reasons for adopting it, but there is nothing that truly justifies a belief in a binding, non-arbitrary, universal moral framework.
Once morality is shifted to the grounds of expedience (which it inevitably must be—in a naturalistic worldview the human condition is the only conceivable grounding for a moral code applying to humans) then it becomes hollow. What is good is only good as long as it is expedient, convenient, or gratifying to me in either the long or short term.
I suppose I can best express this problem with atheism by borrowing an illustration from Ravi Zacharias—atheists cannot be hypocrites. Say what you will about people like Hitler and Stalin, you cannot say that they acted at odds with their philosophical underpinnings.
Most atheists find what these brutes did vile, but none of them can rightly say, “they should not have done these things because they were atheists.”
And there’s the rub. Any purely materialistic view of humanity will at best construe an arbitrary morality.
Why? Because any sense of the laws of morality as somehow real and non-arbitrary is firmly embedded in a supernatural worldview. It takes us to another part of reality than the one the laws of physics operates in—the reality of the transcendent.
It also presupposes that humans (as opposed to rocks) dwell partly in that realm, or else how could the laws of morality apply to us?
And that is one of the reasons I am not an atheist.
The primary (and more compelling) reason is, of course, that God exists.