Tag Archives: Moral

Videos

Can there be moral accountability if there is no life after death?

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William Lane Craig answers a question.

You need moral accountability for morality to be rational, otherwise the only reason for being moral would be to have happy feelings and to avoid unhappy feelings – which is not prescriptive morality at all, but just self-interest. But that is only one of the things that you need for a person to have a rational basis for acting morally.

Here’s the full list:

1) Objective moral values

There needs to be a way to distinguish what is good from what is bad. For example, the moral standard might specify that being kind to children is good, but torturing them for fun is bad. If the standard is purely subjective, then people could believe anything and each person would be justified in doing right in their own eyes. Even a “social contract” is just based on people’s opinions. So we need a standard that applies regardless of what people’s individual and collective opinions are.

2) Objective moral duties

Moral duties (moral obligations) refer to the actions that are obligatory based on the moral values defined in 1). Suppose we spot you 1) as an atheist. Why are you obligated to do the good thing, rather than the bad thing? To whom is this obligation owed? Why is rational for you to limit your actions based upon this obligation when it is against your self-interest? Why let other people’s expectations decide what is good for you, especially if you can avoid the consequences of their disapproval?

3) Moral accountability

Suppose we spot you 1) and 2) as an atheist. What difference does it make to you if you just go ahead and disregard your moral obligations to whomever? Is there any reward or punishment for your choice to do right or do wrong? What’s in it for you?

4) Free will

In order for agents to make free moral choices, they must be able to act or abstain from acting by exercising their free will. If there is no free will, then moral choices are impossible. If there are no moral choices, then no one can be held responsible for anything they do. If there is no moral responsibility, then there can be no praise and blame. But then it becomes impossible to praise any action as good or evil.

5) Ultimate significance

Finally, beyond the concept of reward and punishment in 3), we can also ask the question “what does it matter?”. Suppose you do live a good life and you get a reward: 1000 chocolate sundaes. And when you’ve finished eating them, you die for real and that’s the end. In other words, the reward is satisfying, but not really meaningful, ultimately. It’s hard to see how moral actions can be meaningful, ultimately, unless their consequences last on into the future.

If you don’t have a rational basis for acting morally, then you will only do it when you want to feel happy, and avoid feeling unhappy. You’ll do it if you feel like it, if people are watching, etc. But you won’t do the right thing if it gets in the way of your selfishness.

For a really good debate on whether morality is real on Christianity and/or atheism, listen to this debate with Glenn Peoples against Cambridge philosopher Arif Ahmed.

If you would like to hear another good debate on whether Christianity and/or atheism can ground some of these requirements, then click here. This one features Sean McDowell.

And here’s a debate that I did with one of our best atheist commenters, Moo.

More about atheistic concepts of morality

Some debates on God and morality

News

Richard Dawkins’ atheist charity sues former Dawkins disciple for fraud

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The center-left UK Independent explains how one person who cannot ground morality rationally defrauded an organization of people who cannot ground morality rationally. (H/T Lex Communis)

Excerpt:

Josh Timonen was one of a small coterie of young protégés around Richard Dawkins, sharing his boss’s zealous atheism. But now he and the evolutionary theorist have fallen out spectacularly. Professor Dawkins’s charity has accused Mr Timonen of embezzling hundreds of thousands of pounds.

The two atheists had become close in recent years, with Dawkins, the best-selling author and Emeritus Professor of Biology at Oxford University, even dedicating his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, to him. But Mr Timonen and the Dawkins foundation are now preparing for a legal wrangle.

The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, has filed four lawsuits in a Californian court alleging that Mr Timonen, who ran its online operation in America, stole $375,000 (£239,000) over three years. It is claiming $950,000 in damages, while Mr Dawkins is suing him for $14,000 owed to him personally. Mr Timonen strongly denies the allegations.

[…]In documents filed at the court, the foundation says it spotted the alleged embezzlement this year when books were found detailing $500 meals, trips to Malibu Beach Inn and $314,000 in salaries paid to Mr Timonen and his girlfriend.

Beside his work for Professor Dawkins, Mr Timonen has been employed by fellow atheist Christopher Hitchens and the British Humanist Foundation, according to his website.

I actually wrote an entire series of posts on how atheists cannot rationally ground objective moral standards, free will, moral accountability, moral obligations and moral significance. If it turns out that Timonen is guilty, it would be interesting to hear what he thinks about the question “Why should I be moral?” from his atheist perspective.

Commentary

Richard Dawkins’ rhetoric about religion and child abuse

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Vic Reppert wrote an interesting post a while back on Richard Dawkins’ view that parents teaching their religion to children is child abuse.

First, this is what Dawkins said:

“God Delusion” author Richard Dawkins complains that “Our society, including the nonreligious sector, has accepted the preposterous idea that it is normal and right to indoctrinate tiny children in the religion of their parents, and to slap religious labels on them — ‘Catholic child,’ ‘Protestant child,’ ‘Jewish child,’ ‘Muslim child,’ etc.”

Dawkins says those “labels” are “always a form of child abuse” and concludes:

“Maybe some children need to be protected from indoctrination by their own parents.”

Then Reppert writes:

The thinking that leads to religious persecution goes like this: those guys over there who are teaching false religious claims are exposing others to a greater likelihood of eternal damnation. So we have to stop these people no matter what it takes. Maybe people need to be protected from false teaching. Believe me, religious persecutors have everyone’s best interests at heart.

So do anti-religious persecutors. Removing eternal damnation from the picture doesn’t eliminate the temptation to persecute. They will say that these religious people may not be exposing people to hell, but they are spreading scientific illiteracy and possibly ushering in a new dark age, and they just have to be stopped.

If I were told that I could not teach Christianity to my children, you can bet I would consider myself to be a victim of persecution. (Unfortunately for Dawkins, we already “indoctrinated” our kids, and they are dedicated Christian adults now.)

Yes, yes, I know, Dawkins says maybe. And the next atheist that comes along will say definitely. And it will be more tempting for these people to say definitely the closer they are to acquiring political power.

I don’t agree with Vic Reppert on many things, but he’s right about this. And I think Dawkins’ views are particularly alarming given the moral relativism, anti-reason and anti-science ideas so dominant on the secular left. I posted recently about the atheist philosopher Arif Ahmed’s denial of moral facts, which is the view that is consistent with atheism and an accidental, materialistic universe. It was interesting to see how Ahmed’s denial of moral realism did not stop him from being politically active on the basis of his personal preferences. And he was perfectly happy forcing his personal preferences on other people despite admitting that morality is illusory when considered objectively.

Atheists don’t believe in moral realism, but they do believe in pursuing pleasure and avoiding moral sanctions from those who disagree with them. And the more militant ones liek Dawkins and Ahmed will use political power to pursue those ends. If you are religious, and you teach your children that some actions are objectively immoral, then your children may grow up and judge atheists or vote in policies that limit their hedonism. Then the more militant atheists would feel bad, or be prevented from doing things that make them happy – like killing inconvenient babies who appear after recreational sex. And the more militant atheists may want to put a stop to you making them feel bad. There is nothing in their worldview that prevents them from using violence to stop you from making them feel bad. On their view, the universe is an accident, and you have no “natural rights” like the right to life, objectively speaking.

So you can see how the denial of objective moral values and duties leads to things like abortion today. Their victims today are weak, and small. Many people are therefore inclined to agree with them that the right to happiness of the strong trumps the right-to-life of the weak, (a right not grounded by the atheism worldview, which denies objective human rights). Tomorrow, if they had more political power, perhaps the more militant atheists would graduate to more draconian acts, like other atheists (Stalin, Mao, etc.) have in the past.

Atheist Aldous Huxley explains what atheists believe about morality and why they believe it:

For myself as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation.The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality.We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.

Atheism is just the denial of objective moral duties, achieved by denying the existence of the objective moral duty prescriber, also known as God.

Atheists oppose science and evidence

Theists support science and evidence