Check out this thread where I am debating atheists on whether moral rules, moral choices, moral accountability, human dignity, human rights, and ultimate significance of moral actions are rationally grounded on the atheist worldview.Warning, the thread contains swearing!
Here is the original starting post for the thread:
I noticed that a tension between two positions taken by certain atheists. First, they say that morality is an illusion fobbed on us by our genes. Second, they say that the God of the Bible is immoral, or that the Christian church is immoral.
I have a question about this, and maybe you can help me to understand the apparent contradiction. If moral behavior evolved over time, then it seems to me that it varies by time and place. This means that the standards we have today in the place where we live now are not really better or worse than at any other time and any other place. The evolved moral standards are just arbitrary conventions.
If this is true, then in what sense can atheists consistently press the problem of evil, the immoral behavior of God, and the immorality of Christian church in history?
Here is what I have come up with so far:
1. The atheist is expressing his personal preferences (I wouldn’t do it that way)
2. The atheist is using the arbitrary standard of his time and place to judge God and the church (we in this time and place wouldn’t do it that way)
Here is one of their comments, which I thought was about as good as an atheist can do on atheism:
The morality we all appeal to when we make moral judgments is at least 90% the result of the social conditioning we have all received. Where that conditioning contains a strong religious component (most places throughout history), religious values will have a high place. In the modern West, the religious component is weaker, and we now condemn slavery, crusades, inquisitions, and wars between Catholics and Protestants, all of which were once firmly believed to be sanctified by God. (There is a whole thread on this subject just now under “Faith and Religion” above. So far only the person who started the thread and I have posted on it.)
The other 10% consists of personal views arrived at by reflective people on the kind of world they’d like to live in. That portion of it is personal preference. It differs from a personal preference for chocolate over broccoli in only two ways: (1) Its object involves the behavior of other people and their interactions rather than that of the individual alone; (2) when two people have different preferences, they cannot both have their way, and so they are in conflict.
If you want to learn about these issues at a deeper level, there is also a good paper by Bill Craig on the problem of rationally-grounding prescriptive morality here. My previous posts on this blog on this topic are here and here. The first post is about whether atheists can use a made-up standard to judge God for his perceived moral failures, the second one is on whether meaningful morality is rational on atheism.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
Non-theistic morality is provisional, just like science is provisional. Science accumulates knowledge over time, but there are also significant paradigm shifts from time to time. So with non-theistic philosophy.
With your belief in a book of rules containing the answers, you may be right if that book truly is divine, or you may be far off base if i’ts not. A critical look at the history of the Bible suggests that it is quite imperfect.
So provisionally, based on the accumulated knowledge of Western civilization, I think the execution of witches is a bad thing. The Bible says witches should not be allowed to live, and Puritans put that verse into execution (literally).
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TransparentEye, the question under debate is not moral epistemology, it’s moral ontology. What is the foundation for moral values, moral rules, and the intrinsic value and rights of humans? On atheism, how can there be moral choices and moral responsibility when there is no non-material soul, and therefore no free will?
Further why should I be moral on atheism, when it is not pleasurable for me and I can escape the social consequences of doing evil? What is the ultimate significance of adopting the moral point of view on atheism – what difference does it make to be moral, if the human race itself will die out in the heat death of the universe?
Also, how do atheists consistently make judgments against God, the Bible, the church in history, and individual Christians when their morality is an arbitrarily evolved standard that varies by time and place? How can you judge another society in another time and place, if there is no fixed standard? How can there be individual moral progress if there is no fixed standard by which to judge?
All of these moral questions cannot be answered consistently on atheism. Atheists end up having to borrow from the Christian worldview to justify free will and rational morality.
Stick to the questions. On atheism, justify for me why morality is rational. And remember, your next reply is the last word, I can’t rebut you and the discussion stops with your rebuttal.
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I applaud your efforts, WK but, speaking as a deist (yeah, I’m not a theist or an atheist, just one of the oddballs floating somewhere in the inky void between with Anthony Flew and co. which makes me every bit as ‘bad’ as a Christian in their bankrupt worldview), I can honestly say you are wasting your time engaging religious atheists on matters such as this. (I wager you are aware of this but, for some reason, enjoy smacking hornets’ nests with reckless abandon, albeit these hornets lack effective stingers and generally fly in circles–much like their arguments.)
They are not interested in honest discussion (at least 95%+ are not, in my experience) will obfuscate and change the subject every time you pin them down and, like politlical liberals (whether or not they are actually such, see: Charles Johnson at LGF for all the proof you need of that), will eventually degrade into profanity-spewing meme-bots (presumably manufactured at Dawkins & Meyers LLC).
Also, there’s somewhere around a 5% chance that you’ll ever hear from TransparentEye on this topic ever again.
Tip: I find calling militant atheism a religion drives them absolutely, Howard Dean scream, insane. Granted, it isn’t terribly productive but it does feel good, especially when, as is generally the case, their arguments boil down to one of three tautologies repeated over and over and over again…shortly before the profanity starts.
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ECM, that was the greatest comment this blog has seen, even better than “here I stand, in all my snarky glory”.
I’m going to surprise you, because I was thinking about your comment all morning. I think deism is a very rational view, given the evidence from the big bang, the fine-tuning of the initial constants, the Cambrian explosion, the DNA and the reality of non-physical minds and free will. Deism is a great view because it accounts for all this evidence.
But I still think you should leave Christianity open, and here’s why. Even though the resurrection can only be defended historically, and not scientifically, I think a good case can be made for certain minimal facts that defy naturalistic explanation. I’ll be writing on this shortly, but for now, take a look at some of William Lane Craig’s debates on the resurrection, especially the one with Roy Hoover. Hoover is stronger than Crossan, Borg, Ludemann and Ehrman: Craig vs Hoover debate on the resurrection
Look, ECM. I was raised in a home with an agnostic and a Muslim for parents! We never ever went to church of any kind. I am really uncomfortable in church. I hate singing. I go only when I am asked to go, (and I wear a white shirt, black pants and a black retro tie, such as you might see on Miami Vice or Hawaii Five-0). I really don’t like rituals, mysticism, or even reports of miracles. And I really don’t like popularity contests and hypocritical Christians.
But Christianity is not church. Christianity is intended for you. God wants to be reconciled with you. Do not judge God on the basis of what you see in church. Those people are weird and silly and totally out of touch with what the Bible actually teaches. You should not consider them at all when you are considering Christianity. If I were you, I would only consider the historical Jesus when judging Christianity.
The problem with Christians is that you never get to meet the really heroic ones, like Walter L. Bradley or William Wilberforce. Please give us a chance. We have some great people. Go and listen to this lecture “Giants in the Land” with Walter Bradley here. And go and watch the movie “Amazing Grace” about William Wilberforce. And “The Passion” if you can stand the violence.
And most important of all, try to read the New Testament and understand what it means for the God of the universe to become a lowly creature and to speak to us about himself and experience our suffering. Think about what it means when the God of the universe experiences the same suffering and evil that we experience. Think about what it means that Jesus was willing to die for us while we were still rebelling against him in order to cancel out that the penalty for that rebellion.
By the way, I have known TransparentEye since 2002 when we worked together. We exchange at least 1-5 e-mails per day, he is a good friend. I knew a guy in high school who was an atheist from a Muslim background. He wrote to me at work last year at 6:30 in the evening to get my best case for the resurrection. I wrote it up in 90 minutes and sent him the minimal facts case based on Mark and 1 Cor 15:3-7. A few weeks later, he accepted Christ after 15 years of questioning! And the right way – strictly on the evidence.
Also, I blame lazy, uninformed Christians who don’t know apologetics for the angry atheists. It’s our fault that they are angry – because we did not prepare to answer them, as 1 Pet 3:15 commands us to. It’s not their fault, although I think they should be better.
I never give up, (unless I am asked to), and I have all the time in the world for you and people like you. God has seen to it that I am amply supplied in time and money, so that I am available to you. In fact, that is the whole purpose of life on Christianity, I have nothing else to do here! To know God and to help others to know him, if they want to know.
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Wintery,
For those who don’t believe in retribution in an afterlife (non-theists and non-karma believers) the incentives for behavior deemed moral in society are:
1. The criminal justice system.
2. Social pressure and ostracism.
3. Habits. Drum a precept into a child when its young, and the child will tend to follow it whether it is in their immediate self-interest or not. Many Jewish atheists, for instance, avoid pork because a digust for pigs was drummed into them as a child, and wouldn’t eat a free BLT if you offered it to them.
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I appreciate your long, detailed, response WK, but I was raised Catholic and, while I am sympathetic to a lot of your arguments (really, I am and I find them far, far more compelling than those of religious atheists) I just am not convinced, at least at this point in my life (and based on the evidence at hand) that a god of revelation is ‘out there.’ (I should also note that I did my time in the atheist gulag, but the actual raw evidence (some of which you already mentioned) made that position untenable after some cursory thought and research.)
In any event, I’ve personally grappled with this issue for going on two decades, having done a staggering amount of reading on all fronts (theist, deist, atheist) and, while there are many compelling arguments to be made for at least the former–especially deism, as you noted, purely from a logical standpoint it surely must be so which is why I have to scoff at atheists wrapping themselves in desperate pseudo-science to justify their illogical stances and views–I can’t quite bring myself to make the leap back to theism due to a lack of compelling, empirical, evidence!
As one example, I find Frank Tipler’s writings on the matter quite intriguing and well-reasoned (if almost sci-fi, even though he goes out of his way to ground it all in physics, at least as far as our current, feeble, grasp allows), but I find myself still hung up on the problem of evil and, to a greater extent, the problem of *which* faith is the ‘real’ one since, if we’re being honest, any faith that claims to have the Truth must be, by definition, mutually-exclusive with all others (which is why I find ecumenicalism a bit daft; almost a politics of religion which I find utterly abhorrent). And, besides, there is simply no way the God of Islam is even remotely compatible with, say, the God of Christianity, despite what the soft-headed would love to believe (despite not actually believing in much of anything, more often than not).
So, I suppose, if it can be proven that Christianity (and all its myriad flavors adding a further layer of complexity/abstraction) is the one, true, faith then I might be able to get over this intellectual roadblock. The problem is, despite everyting I’ve read and despite the simple fact that, if nothing else, a Christian life is certainly preferable to almost all other faiths*, I still don’t see the rock-solid proof of it (and, yes, I know: I am setting down an impossible-to-meet goal since faith, by definintion, can’t be proven–and certainly not by a corrupt and denatured scientific establishment that refuses to even enterain the idea that something as benign and uncontroversial as ID *should* be is treated with derision and is the target of pogroms by religious atheists).
*Which is what really bothers me about religious atheists: not only can’t they win on the merits of their arguments (nor, most of the time, without descending into ad hominem, see: anything by Richard Dawkins, PZ Meyers, or John, ‘The Village Atheist’ Derbyshire at NRO), they can’t even bring themselves to admit the fairly obvious: that simply following the lessons outlined in the Bible can lead to a sane, objectively good, life even if you strip all of the ‘God’ out of it. This, to me, speaks volumes about their intellectual and moral vapidity.
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Thank you so much for this fine comment. You enrich my readers with your wisdom. Stop by any time! You are welcome here.
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Thank you for your kind words–they’re a bit atypical from what I’m used to when dealing with this topic (as you can well imagine).
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