August 21, 2007
The Morality of the Atheist - Same as it Ever Was
A familiar pattern arises in every atheism v. religion debate (which arises in a host of contexts, but I'm generalizing a great deal here so I'll not restrict myself to one); reduced to its essentials, the argument looks like this:
Christian: Because atheists believe don't believe in God, they believe in nothing. They owe no allegiance to a higher power and therefore do not subscribe to a universal morality. Morality is entirely relative to the atheist -- he makes his own rules.
I could go on, but it's a tired exercise. The argument is easily countered a number of ways: regions where atheism predominates (like Western Europe) share the greatest concern for human rights; science is beginning to strongly suggest that we each have, to varying degrees, an ingrained moral sensibility, and studies have routinely demonstrated that the outcomes of moral hypotheticals given to test subjects have no correlation to whether the test subject is religious or non-religious.
Brian Tamahana delves deeper into this subject here, but I want to extract a simple thought experiment that demonstrates his larger point more succinctly:
Imagine that your longstanding belief in God is destroyed owing to some precipitating event (say, an inexplicable, arbitrary, unjust, tragedy happens to a family member). In the dark of the night, you come to the conclusion that you no longer believe in God. The next day, when you venture into the world, will you suddenly feel tempted to freeload off your friends, cheat strangers, stop taking care of your children, or steal from, rob, rape, or kill someone? Of course not. You considered all of these things immoral the day before, and you will still see them as such. You may well experience the throes of an existential crisis (asking yourself what matters in life), but that will not of itself penetrate or dissolve your routine moral beliefs.
I bring this up because it seems insane to me that we're still having this debate, especially since we've had this debate before. Up until around the Civil War, most states prohibited atheists from testifying in court. The reasoning then is remarkably similar to the present-day musings of modern Fundamentalists:
The theory held that, since they did not fear the retribution of any god at all, they could not be trusted to tell the truth. Thus, in the early common law, the atheist was excluded because he did not fear the judgment of God, and the defendant was excluded because everyone feared the judgment of man.
- Paul W. Kaufman, Disbelieving Nonbelievers: Atheism, Competence, and Credibility in the Turn of the Century American Courtroom, 15 Yale J.L. & Human. 395 (2003).
posted by scott pilutik at August 21, 2007 07:05 PM