Here’s a column from the radically-leftist UK Guardian by evolutionist Michael Ruse. (H/T Evolution News)
Excerpt:
God is dead, so why should I be good? The answer is that there are no grounds whatsoever for being good. There is no celestial headmaster who is going to give you six (or six billion, billion, billion) of the best if you are bad. Morality is flimflam.
[…]Morality is just a matter of emotions, like liking ice cream and sex and hating toothache and marking student papers. But it is, and has to be, a funny kind of emotion. It has to pretend that it is not that at all! If we thought that morality was no more than liking or not liking spinach, then pretty quickly it would break down.
[…]So morality has to come across as something that is more than emotion. It has to appear to be objective, even though really it is subjective.
[…]Now you know that morality is an illusion put in place by your genes to make you a social cooperator, what’s to stop you behaving like an ancient Roman? Well, nothing in an objective sense.
So what morality is, objectively, is a bad feeling you get as a result of biological evolution and social pressure. It’s just a feeling. An illusion.
But Ruse says that you have to pretend it’s real, or else we’ll all live like barbarians. But if morality is nonsense, then what REASON is there not to act like a barbarian individually as long as you can get away with it? Let the other fools who believe in God be honest. You do what you like in order to be happy in the few years you have to live – just don’t get caught and punished for breaking the arbitrary fashions of the culture in your time and place.
On atheism, your life, the lives of all other organisms, and the life of stars that provide heat and light to planets, will end eventually die in the heat death of the universe. In the end, it will not matter what we do, the universe will still end up cold, dark and inert.
So let’s re-cap the FACTS about Ruse’s atheistic worldview.
- Are humans worth more (objectively) than cockroaches on atheism? The answer is no.
- Is there any way humans ought to behave (objectively) on atheism? The answer is no.
- Is there any purpose to life (objectively) on atheism? The answer is no.
- Is there an objective standard of right and wrong on atheism? The answer is no.
- Is discourse on what is “right” and “wrong” meaningful on atheism? The answer is no.
- Is there free will so people can make moral choices on atheism? The answer is no.
- Is there any reason to sacrifice your happiness for others on atheism? The answer is no.
Atheism is the worldview of people who want to escape from morality. They pre-suppose materialism in order to 1) fit in with the educated class and/or 2) justify immoral hedonism. Later, atheists invent pious myths to put up a fig leaf of moral virtue, e.g. – vegetarianism, yoga, recycling, voting for universal health care, etc. That’s atheism. There is no intellectual content to it. It’s not based on arguments and evidence. It’s just a long-running tantrum against parental/church authority, covered over with faddish causes to whitewash the absurdity of life without God.
My posts on why atheism cannot ground morality rationally are here.