Are atheists able to perform the greatest moral duty?

J. Warner Wallace looks at what Jesus says the most important commandment is, and then asks whether atheists can be justified morally if Jesus is right.

He writes:

I was an atheist for the first thirty-five years of my life. While I was a committed (and often aggressive) non-believer, most people who knew me would probably have described me as a “nice guy”. My behavior wasn’t all that different than many of my Christian friends. I worked with many other atheist police officers. We were often suspicious of the Christians in our midst and the people we arrested who claimed to be Christians. Even as atheists we were familiar with Jesus’ directive to “love your neighbor as yourself.” My partner, Tim, used to say, “If there is a good God and a good Heaven, I think I will be there when it’s all over. I’m a good person. I try to ‘do the right thing’. I’m not a bad guy; I put bad people in jail. So I’m not worried about it.” Tim held a “works based” moral worldview and he was sure his good deeds would earn him a spot in Heaven if he was wrong about the existence of God. But Tim (and I) were unfamiliar with Jesus’ teaching in its full context, and now, years later as a Christian, I’ve come to understand why the first part of the “Greatest Command” is even more important than the second.

When approached by a skeptic, Jesus affirmed the greatest commandments of God in the following way:

Matthew 22:35-40
One of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question, testing Him, “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.”

Most unbelievers recognize the value of the second half of this command (“You shall love your neighbor as yourself”) but deny the value of the first part (“‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.”) There’s a reason, however, why Jesus listed these two commands in this specific order. The first command (loving God) is the “great and foremost commandment” because it is required to achieve the second command (loving others). You can’t truly do the right thing unless you understand the relationship between these two commands:

Read the rest at Cold Case Christianity.

I’ve made the same point here many times, but I have never been an atheist and I don’t make the point in the same winsome way that Wallace does.

I think his post is worth sending along to any atheists you may know who think themselves justified. I think it is a mistake for people to derive their own version of morality based on the time and place where they are, and then think that picking and choosing the parts they like will justify them with God. Remember, a recent survey of atheists found that 97% of them favor abortion rights. I think this is consistent with the atheist view that there are no human rights, including a right to life. Moreover, in my experience, I have found that most atheists have no problem with the government stomping all over the consciences of Christians when it comes to things like gay rights. It’s important to show them that there is a standard independent of their personal opinions, justifications and rationalizations. And that they don’t measure up to it. You can make up your own morality all you want,

5 thoughts on “Are atheists able to perform the greatest moral duty?”

Leave it to me to play devil’s advocate again (figuratively speaking of course I assure you):

There is no true free will if God commands his love for Him. There is a ‘choice’, yes, accept it or be damned. So if free will is simply choice between a Divine Command or self-inflicted damnation, that is one definition. Most sensible thinkers would call that coercion.

Choice is often portrayed as freedom, you’re not alone in committing this fallacy. If one has two options: escape a war torn country by boat and likely drown, or stay and be tortured to death, one has choice. Choice implies freedom of a kind. And yet most would hopefully agree that being stuck between a rock and a hard place is not true freedom.

An intelligent, considered reply would be most appreciated. We’re all here to learn!

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Wintery Knight says:

06/21/2015 at 1:11 PM

On atheism, matter is all there is, and everything that happens is a result of physical processes. There is no free will.

Here’s atheist Will Provine of Cornell:

Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear — and these are basically Darwin’s views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That’s the end of me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans, either. What an unintelligible idea.

Source:
http://www.arn.org/docs/orpages/or161/161main.htm

Here’s famous atheist professor Alex Rosenberg discussing his book on atheism in the NYT:

Consciousness is extremely misleading. Most of the chapters are about neuroscience and theories, experiments in neuroscience that show that our belief in free will is an illusion, that our belief in a continuing identical self over a lifetime is an illusion, that we get the nature of cognitive thought fundamentally wrong, and when we do we’re susceptible to the narratives of religion. A good chunk of the book is an attempt to explain what contemporary Nobel Prize-winning neuroscience tells us about the mind and telling us the truth about the mind dispels most of the illusions that make religious belief [exciting.]

Source:
http://www.indyweek.com/artery/archives/2011/10/05/in-praise-of-nice-nihilism-alex-rosenberg-discusses-his-new-book-on-atheism

On theism, human beings are non-material souls that have a physical body. The non-physical soul is not determined by physical processes, and hence, it makes free choices. You don’t get to choose the alternatives you have because you didn’t create the world. But you get to choose between them – on theism. In atheism, you’re just a computer made out of meat.

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Lindsay Harold says:

06/22/2015 at 2:15 PM

“So if free will is simply choice between a Divine Command or self-inflicted damnation, that is one definition. Most sensible thinkers would call that coercion.”

If you reject the source of goodness, you get something most unpleasant. Hell isn’t horrible because God is purposely torturing those in it. Hell is horrible because people there get their wish to be without God. God honors their choice to be without Him and has thus created a place where He is not present so that they can have what they chose. It would not be a free choice if they were forced into heaven against their will.

So it’s not coercion. It’s just the natural consequences of one’s choice. If one chooses not to eat, one will have some very unpleasant side-effects of that choice, but not because the food is trying to coerce you to eat it. Choices always have consequences. Some are good and some are bad, depending on what you choose. The fact that people find it unpleasant to be utterly without God certainly is good reason not to choose that fate, but does not constitute coercion on God’s part.

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I think his argument about being unable to do the right thing without knowing it is made much more powerful by his personal experience as a homicide detective. A lot of people can fail to take that argument seriously because they don’t understand what people are really capable of when they completely abandon morality.

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