Atheists are More Moral than Theists: Part 2

Religious leaders love to smugly claim moral superiority over us lowly atheists and humanists. Only God, they say, can possibly know right from wrong, and we atheists are too stupid to figure it out for ourselves. Worse, in their condescension, theists claim that without God’s moral guidance, society would fall into a murderous anarchy, with everyone killing, raping, and stealing to their heart’s content.

Not only is this childish, insulting, and ignorant, it’s also dead wrong.

To see why, let’s actually use theistic logic. (You’ll see pretty quickly that we don’t get far…)

Start with theist’s main claim: Morality can only come from God. Then add that God is omniscient, knows everything, so “everything” has to include what’s right and wrong. Sounds simple, right?

But as the Greeks discovered, there are some laws that even gods can’t evade. Two plus two is four, and even a god can’t make it otherwise; it’s the very definition of what “plus” means. Likewise, even an omnipotent god can’t change the rules of logic, such as “If A implies B, and B isn’t true, then A can’t be true.” If Jane’s father is Bob, it implies that Jane is Bob’s daughter. If Jane is not Bob’s daughter, then Bob can’t be Jane’s father. And even God can’t make it otherwise.

And one of those rules is, “No circular logic.” You can’t claim God knows something, and then “prove” he knows it because God says it’s right.

Now let’s say God “knows” that killing babies is immoral. How does he know that? Does he just make it up? If God decided killing babies is moral, and someone killed a baby, God would say it was moral, and it would be moral because God approved. There’s no foundation; God just makes things up, and whatever he makes up is by definition good.

“Ah, but there is a reason,” the theist might argue, “”because killing babies is obviously bad. We all know that!” At some point, you have to admit that “God is against killing babies because God just knows it’s a bad thing to do.” But how does God know?

“Well, because … I mean, seriously, does anyone really think killing babies isn’t a terrible crime?” says the theist. “It’s obvious, right?” Right. So why do we need God at all? If you say that baby killing is an axiom (something that requires no proof, it’s just a given), then God is a useless detail.

In other words, theists can’t answer the question of how God knows baby killing is bad. Their only escape is to resort to hand-waving and claims that God’s infinite wisdom is so incredible that we can’t possibly fathom it. In other words, a total cop-out. But … even an infinitely wise god has to follow the laws of logic.

It gets worse. Let’s look at the real-life morals of the Abrahamic (Christian, Jewish, Muslim) faiths. I’d divide these broadly into three categories:

1. Morals plagiarized from human nature, from our primate evolution. These are basic rules shared by all human societies (and many other mammal species): mating/marriage rules, stealing, lying, harming others, sharing, and so forth.
2. Morals based on lack of understanding, such as “don’t eat pork or shellfish.” The Israelites of biblical times knew these foods made you sick but didn’t know why, so they wrote these down as laws. Unfortunately, once they got into the Bible, these ignorance-based rules became “morals.”
3. Morals based on power structures, such as obeying God (and later Jesus). Religious hierarchies usually support the political structure, or they are the political structure. When people get accustomed to obeying God, they are also primed to obey a lord or king. (In fact, the Bible has lots of rules about how to be a good slave or a good master, some of which are clearly immoral by any measure.) Not surprisingly, when the Bible was written and assembled, the people in power made sure that these rules were included.

If you simply throw out all the rules that fall into categories 2 and 3 above, you’re left with human nature, the evolution-based ethics built into our genes and embodied in cultures worldwide (as discussed in Part 1 of this essay series).

But are secular morals really better than those the theists claim come from God? Or are religious and secular morals both founded on faith or opinion?.

Let’s look at a relevant analogy: science versus faith. The foundation of science, far more important than any particular discovery, is accountability: every scientific claim must be verifiable. As Richard Feynman famously said,

The first principle [of science] is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.

Science is the process of finding rational, consistent explanations for natural phenomena, explanations that can be written down and verified by others. Any fact, however trivial, that contradicts a scientific theory immediately requires that the theory be revised or rejected.

By contrast, faith-based explanations of natural phenomena (principally creationism and its relatives) have no accountability. They don’t have to match the facts, they don’t have to provide any deep insight, and they don’t have to be verifiable. Any claim, how ever implausible or ridiculous, carries the same weight.

Now back to morals.

Secular morality rests on the solid foundation built by the Greek Rationalists (Plato, Socrates, Aristotle and their intellectual followers) over 2,500 years ago. These amazing philosophers realized that morals had to start from a foundation that everyone could agree on, that is, an axiom that was plainly true.

So what was that foundation, that absolute truth? They selected happiness and improving the human condition as their axiom. Who could possibly dispute that happiness and health are good, and suffering and pain are bad? Notice that it’s not provable — we just accept this as a fact. But we say so. It is clear that this one, simple axiom is merely opinion. Nobody is taking anything on faith.

Based on this axiom, the Greek Rationalists built a set of moral principles, one that was based on sound logic, principles that anyone could examine for flaws. And many did. The earliest ethical treatises have been discussed, dissected, and improved since they were first proposed. Yet even today, Aristotle’s ethics stand as one of the greatest intellectual achievements of all time.

The key point here is that secular morality has accountability. You can’t just make stuff up. New claims about secular morality must rest on the foundation of improving the human condition and must have a logical connection to that foundation. Furthermore, like the scientific method, secular claims about morality are open to scrutiny. If you make a claim about morality, you have to explain it clearly, show how it is derived from the foundation, and be willing to defend your position.

An interesting modern twist, one that strengthens this argument, is that modern philosophers include all sentient creatures in the happiness equation, not just human happiness. Human happiness at the expense of animal suffering isn’t considered ethical at all, and this all flows from rational application of logic to the axiom. By contrast, religion can only say that harming animals is bad because God says so.

Thus, religious morality has no foundation. If you believe morality comes from God, then you fall into the trap that Plato discovered: what is the foundation of God’s morality? How does God know what is good and what is bad? If you argue that God just knows, then you’ve admitted that there are things that are axiomatic, and you’re back to the secular position – you don’t need God in the equation.

So don’t ever let condescending theists claim the moral high ground. The ancients who wrote the Bible were just humans like you and me, and codified a bunch of rules that were either obvious to everyone, or intended to keep the priests in charge and the rest of us obedient. And the theory that morals can only come from God is not only wrong, it shows an ignorance of basic logic.

See also: Part 1 of this essay series.