Ep. 96 - Without God There Can Be No Objective Morality
An atheist cannot logically make objective moral claims. He cannot logically say that any action at all is objectively right or objectively wrong. Yet, many atheists do make such claims. Many atheists do believe that things like rape, murder, theft, etc., are not just subjectively wrong, but actually wrong. Atheists seem to recognize a moral code, even though no such moral code could exist without God. What does that tell us about atheism, God, and morality? Let's talk about that now.
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So anytime I get into a subject like this, I'm always reminded by folks in the comments section that I'm not a theologian, I'm not a philosopher, I'm not a scientist, and thus I'm not qualified to discuss these sorts of matters.
And it's true that I am none of those things.
However, I do reject the idea that you have to be a specialist in order to think about and talk about the deeper questions in life.
I think that's a very sad way to view life and to go about life, you know, to view it as something that can only be discussed by highly qualified academics.
And the rest of us just have to sort of walk about our merry way and never think about these things.
That's not how I see it.
I think that even normal people like myself And you can and should have these discussions.
So here goes.
I've always thought that two of the best arguments for the existence of God are these.
The argument from consciousness and the argument from morality.
Now, I don't know if they are the best, To me, they're the best.
They are, to me, the most compelling.
So they're so compelling that even if every other argument for God was disproven, which wouldn't happen, but even if it did happen, I would still think that a belief in God is the most rational thing based on these two arguments.
Now, I'm not going to get into the whole argument from consciousness thing.
I think it's familiar enough to most people who've thought about these matters.
In essence, if God...
Does not exist, then only physical matter and physical processes exist.
Only the physical world exists.
But if that's the case, how could matter, by chance, without design, without intention, assemble itself in such a way as to create consciousness?
How do you get love from dust?
Even with, you start with dust, even if you add billions and billions of years on top of it, how does it ever become love?
What about anger, happiness, empathy, and so on?
How does a material thing derived from material and nothing more develop abstract ideas?
No other animal can do this.
Nothing else on earth can have abstract ideas.
Dolphins are very intelligent aquatic animals, but even the most intelligent dolphin cannot think about the idea of, say, freedom.
Much less can a dolphin desire freedom.
Much less can the dolphin look at itself and say, I'm a dolphin, I am me, but I wish I were more than me.
A dolphin can't do that.
But if there is no God, then this is kind of the entire story of mankind.
A man desiring to be free from himself, to be more than what he is, more than material.
It's a very sad, terrible story.
If there's no God, you have these biological creatures, which are ourselves, that have developed somehow this desire to be more than us.
But how could material develop a desire to be more than material?
And again, why hasn't any other material developed that desire?
Why hasn't any other material developed that capacity?
Most of all, how could a totally physical thing originating from stardust become aware of itself?
That's the trickiest thing for atheists, I think.
They might say that, well, the brain is a computer, and so all the things I mentioned, love, empathy, anger, sadness, so on, are just functions of the, you know, fancy computer system that we got in our heads.
But of course, there's already a problem with that argument, because computers are designed, designed we should say by humans, who have the capacity to design things like computers because of their consciousness.
So an atheist who discounts God by saying, well, the brain is just a computer might as well discount God by saying, well, the human body is just like a sculpture.
Yeah, and find me a sculpture that sculpted itself.
Find me a computer that built itself.
But even more to the point, we are aware of ourselves.
So it's not just awareness that the atheists have to explain, but self-awareness.
How could a clump of dust, however evolved, Ever come to know itself as a clump of dust?
And why is it that no other form of matter or assemblage of matter has ever developed this ability?
And why isn't there any computer, even the most advanced computer in the world, does not know itself as a computer?
So if this is a function of a computer system in our heads, then why can't other computers?
I'm not going to get into it, and then I did.
The other argument is the argument from morality.
And as that argument goes, we know that objective morality exists.
And objective morality cannot exist without a transcendent source.
There can be no transcendent source for morality without God, who is that source.
Thus, God exists. Now, I think that's a compelling argument, personally.
An atheist can go two general directions with that argument.
Maybe there are other directions.
This is all based on what I've encountered from atheism.
It seems to me that an atheist will generally go two directions without argument.
He can argue that objective morality does not exist.
Morality is subjective.
It's relative. So that's moral relativism, of course.
Or he can argue that objective morality does exist, but it has some other source that isn't God.
Now, here's the interesting thing I've noticed.
It seems that modern atheists and secular people are not as likely to be avowed relativists, that is, explicit pronounced moral relativists.
That seems to be kind of not as fashionable among atheists and secular people as it used to be.
It's not like it was in the 19th century.
What is more common now, what's most common, I think, is a kind of secular, objective morality that often expresses itself as a half-baked relativism.
It's very confused. So the average person in our culture is very fond of saying things like, this is my truth, or don't impose your morality on me.
Your morality. Talking about morality as if it's a thing that you can own and you have your very own version of it.
Or they'll say, just do what makes you happy.
You know, those kinds of things. And they'll say this especially when their own actions are challenged or when something that they personally find acceptable is criticized.
But often, these very same people will condemn Things like racism, rape, slavery, pollution, and do so by appealing very forcefully to some objective standard, condemning the wrongdoer for breaking some kind of moral code that apparently we're all supposed to abide by.
So in practice, I would say the average secular person is...
Really neither a moral absolutist nor a relativist, but kind of a mix, which by definition makes him a relativist.
Yet few people seem to want to embrace moral relativism the way that Richard Dawkins does.
Dawkins, who famously said that a bit of, quote, mild pedophilia isn't so bad if it happened a long time ago because the moral standards were different back then.
Which is a consistent, morally relativistic position to hold, even though it's also horrifying.
Most secular people, it seems, don't go that far.
They try to maintain the appearances, at least, of an objective morality, even if they abandon that argument whenever it suits them to abandon it.
Now, when an atheist...
And I keep saying atheist or secular person, by the way, so understand that I mean avowed atheists, as well as the average person in society who isn't necessarily settled on the God question, but lives and operates as if there isn't a God, so it's kind of a de facto atheist.
I'm calling them all atheists for the sake of this discussion.
So anyway, when an atheist tries to argue for objective morality, it seems the argument hinges almost always on utilitarian grounds.
That's almost always what it seems to come down to.
Now, there is another theory.
There's kind of a platonic theory of morality as an objective thing that exists in the abstract, just kind of floating out there in the ether.
And I think that theory is basically unintelligible, so I'm not going to focus on it.
Then a third option, of course, is the Darwinian idea of morality as a product of evolution.
Humans evolved a moral sense because it helps us live together as people in a cohesive society.
But this is still moral relativism.
It's not really objective morality.
Because in this view, morality is no more significant than opposable thumbs.
It's just a thing that developed biologically to make our lives easier.
So we have opposable thumbs, and opposable thumbs are helpful.
But nobody would say that we have some kind of obligation to use our thumbs.
Nobody would say that. They say, you have your thumbs, it's great.
Nobody says, you must use your thumbs.
You have to use them.
Yet morality is all about obligation.
It's all about ought.
You know, you ought to do such and such.
You ought not do such and such.
That's what morality is all about. So an evolved morality might partly explain how we got to this point without completely annihilating ourselves, only partially annihilating ourselves, but it doesn't explain why in the world I should actually act according to it now.
That's what it doesn't explain.
So evolved morality explains how we got here, but now that we're here, it doesn't explain why I should actually abide by this thing any more than explains why I would have some sort of obligation to use my thumbs throughout the day.
If I don't want to use them, I won't use them.
So that leaves us with the third option for atheists, something like what Sam Harris argues for He says that morality is basically that which brings about human flourishing.
A morally right action is an action that brings the greatest good to the greatest number of people.
I was listening to a debate with a moral philosopher, teaches philosophy at Yale, I believe, Shelley Kagan.
And he defined morality very simply as this.
He said, morally wrong action is action that hurts someone or fails to help them, and morally right action is action that helps someone or refrains from hurting them.
Now, I think this definition works pretty well with Sam Harris's definition, and I think they both fail to provide any basis at all for objective morality, and here's why.
First of all, to Kagan's point, It's true that it hurts someone when I steal their car, but the question is not whether a thing hurts someone.
The question is, why should I care that I hurt someone?
Why shouldn't I hurt someone?
So you haven't gotten to the ought, but you have to get to the ought because that's the whole point.
Second, to Harris's point, it's true that slavery does not lead to the human flourishing of slaves.
But why should I care about the slaves?
And who says that slaves are supposed to flourish?
And take the United States in the early 19th century.
Most citizens of the country weren't slaves.
What if it could have been argued that slavery helped the greatest number in that environment flourish?
Wouldn't that make it morally right by this standard?
On the atheistic view, why in the world should the greatest number sacrifice their own comfort for the sake of the minority?
But so often, in practice, that is what morality requires.
That's often when morality comes into focus and comes most into play.
It's when a person in a position of power has to make a sacrifice for someone who doesn't have power or when the majority has to sacrifice for the minority.
That's really when you get to, you know, that's when moral claims are the most relevant.
But it seems like on the atheistic view, there's just no scenario where that should ever happen.
Third, it seems that in order to establish an objective moral standard for human beings, You have to first establish that human beings themselves possess some kind of moral worth or moral value themselves.
So the only way to argue that I shouldn't steal, kill, enslave, etc., is to first argue that the people who would be hurt by such actions have themselves moral worth.
And unless you're a radical vegan or environmentalist, you have to argue that they have more moral worth than, say, a squirrel or a cockroach.
If we can agree that it's a greater evil to kill a child than a cockroach, you have to explain what actually makes the child more valuable objectively.
Not just what makes him more valuable to me, but what makes him objectively more valuable.
So that even if I didn't recognize his moral worth, he would still have it.
So you have to explain what makes it more valuable, what makes life in general valuable, and then what creates this kind of hierarchy.
It seems that atheist arguments for morality, all of them sort of start by assuming the moral value of human beings without explaining how they arrived at that assumption.
It seems to me that if human beings are only a random assemblage of matter, then they have no claim, no objective claim, to being any more important than any other kind of matter.
In the atheistic view, we are all tiny little clumps of stuff wandering around on a tiny speck called Earth, which itself is hurtling through the endless abyss of space, and soon in the blink of an eye, from the cosmic view, we're going to fade back into the nothingness from whence we came.
So, if that's the case, you would have a hard time convincing me that my own life matters.
But someone else's?
Why? Just like that, they're going to be gone anyway.
And if I could zoom out and see the Earth from another solar system, none of us would matter at all.
We're all just little ants on this little ball that's spinning around in space.
Who cares? Why should I care about them?
And again, from the cosmic standpoint, soon enough the entire Earth itself will be destroyed.
So why does it matter?
Now, you can point out that I do care about other people's lives, even though I'm saying all of this.
You can point out that life is easier for all of us most of the time if we act like we care about other people's lives.
But you haven't explained why I have some sort of objective duty to care about other people.
Because a duty, by definition, is something given to us, assigned to us, right?
That's what a duty is. Which is why anytime anyone says to you, do this, or don't do that, you always have the instinct to respond, says who?
Anytime someone tells you not to do something or to do something, you always want to know by what authority are they telling you that?
So the question to atheists, again, when it comes to morality is, says who?
Fourth point, Kagan, in that same debate, he grapples with this question.
He says that, well, if every commandment needs a commander, if every requirement needs a requirer, Then the commander and the requirer would be us, society.
It's wrong to kill, rape, steal, etc., because we all say so.
That's what makes it wrong. It is the consensus of a civilized society.
But there's an obvious and very significant problem here.
If morality is decided by democratic consensus, on what basis can we condemn historical slavery?
Considering that almost everyone in the world for thousands of years thought that slavery was fine.
In fact, how can the minority, I go back to this point again, how can the minority ever make a moral criticism of the majority if morality is decided by majority consensus?
How can a person ever claim that something most people do or most people support is wrong?
How could you go to a fundamentalist Muslim country and say that it's wrong to execute homosexuals when everyone there thinks it's right?
Fifth point, every atheistic system of morality that I've ever encountered Seems to completely ignore the moral implications of our private actions and our private thoughts.
And this isn't a point that I hear even Christians when they're arguing this, you know, about objective morality and everything.
I don't often hear them bring this point up.
I mean, everything I've said so far, you know, you get William Lane Craig or someone like that has already made these points way better than I've made them.
So it's like, you don't even need to listen to anything I've just said.
Just listen to him. But now this next part, I don't, unless I missed it, I don't often hear this point brought up.
So maybe it's a bad argument that I'm about to make.
But to me, it's just something I think about.
And I haven't heard atheists really address it.
So I'm going to go with it.
So, you have the issue of private actions and private thoughts, okay?
If morality is only what helps people, and immorality is only what hurts people, well, again, you haven't explained why I should care about hurting or helping people, or why people are worth helping, or why they're so valuable that I shouldn't hurt them.
But even putting all that aside, What about the private and interior lives of people?
What about everything that goes on inside me?
Is all of that outside of the moral framework entirely?
Is it completely morally irrelevant?
What I think?
Now, you may say that it is.
Okay, well, let's take some extreme examples.
Extreme, though not at all...
Though not at all...
So take, for instance, a person who indulges in rape fantasies in his head.
A person who doesn't just have a thought pop into his head about raping someone, but actually indulges the thought and enjoys thinking about it.
Or take a man who indulges in pedophilic fantasies.
Take even a man who watches child pornography.
And I know there you might argue that watching child pornography is wrong because you are in some way supporting the child porn industry, which is true, so fine.
But let's just say, hypothetically, you got a man who stumbles across a DVD lying on the street filled with child porn.
He stumbles across a laptop that's got a bunch of child porn downloaded on it, and so he watches it.
Now, you would probably, even as an atheist, I think you would instinctively say that he's wrong for watching it.
But why? It's not hurting anybody.
People were hurt in the production of that pornography, but that's already happened.
He isn't lending any material support to it whatsoever.
He isn't practically adding to the misery of the victims.
So why is it wrong? And what about the pedophilic fantasies which he engages with in his mind?
Or the man with the rape fantasies?
Or a woman who sits around all day dreaming of all the violent things she'd like to do to the people that she hates?
Again, I think instinctively, you'd say that these thoughts are wrong, and it's wrong to indulge those thoughts.
But on what basis?
It's not hurting anyone.
And atheistic morality seems always—I mean, there's a million versions of it, but it always basically comes down to don't hurt people.
Sixth point. You might try to argue that it isn't wrong to indulge in hateful thoughts or violent thoughts or pedophilic thoughts or whatever.
If you're an atheist, then I guess you'd have to say that, even if you don't fully believe it yourself.
I think instinctively, you know that these thoughts are wrong.
But if you're forced to engage with this argument, I assume you'll probably say, well, you know, it's not really wrong.
But then there's another problem.
Why would a person feel guilty for those thoughts?
Where does the guilt come from?
Now, if you've ever had a very hateful thought about someone, if you've ever had someone that you really hate, and you had a thought where you wish harm to fall upon them, right?
If you've ever had that thought in your head, then you've probably felt guilty for that thought.
But why? It seems that guilt in such a circumstance is a biological anomaly, in the atheistic view anyway, because you didn't hurt anyone with your thoughts.
You didn't do anything to society.
Nobody knows about it.
Nobody's affected by it at all.
It's just you and your thoughts.
And according to atheists, that's it.
I mean, you're completely alone with your thoughts.
Nobody else knows. It has no effect on anybody.
So why would guilt ever come into play?
Now, you might say that it's a biological response, but a biological response to what?
If morality is all about evolution, or all about what society says, or all about what hurts people, or any other atheist definition of the term, then how in the world and why in the world did guilt for thoughts ever arise?
Doesn't hurt anyone, doesn't affect society, so why is the guilt there?
I think that's an interesting question for atheists, because not only do you have to explain, to go to the first thing I mentioned, you have to explain where do these abstract concepts come up?
An abstract idea, how did we develop that ability?
But then we have a guilt for an abstract idea, and where did that come from?
Here's the point, I think.
Atheists will say that I think when it comes down to it, most atheists, the average atheists, if they're being honest and if they're just speaking from their heart, I think that they will instinctively, as I said, they will instinctively say that the person who indulges in hateful thoughts is doing something wrong.
Just as they will call the man with the child porn immoral.
They'll say he's doing something immoral.
Just as they'll condemn slavery, even when the slavery benefits most people in society.
Just as they'll call homophobia wrong, even when most people in a society have agreed that it's right.
Just as they'll probably condemn the Aztecs who engaged in human sacrifice on an unprecedented scale.
And most people were not sacrificed, and the non-sacrificed people considered the sacrifices to be something that helped them flourish.
Yet I think atheists would probably condemn that.
Just as they'll certainly condemn the Nazis, even though only a minority were herded into camps and everyone else could have lived prosperously under Nazi rule if it weren't for Hitler's world domination goals.
If he hadn't done all that, then things probably would have worked out okay for the rest of the Germans.
Yet atheists would condemn that as wrong.
Just as most of them presumably would condemn the systematic extermination of the mentally ill and criminals, Even though the existence of those types of people in some ways detracts from the pleasure and well-being of everyone else, and also the lives of those people, by the atheistic view, could not possibly have as much value as the life of a healthy and law-abiding person.
Yet, that's the stance that most atheist people seem to take.
Why? Why won't these atheists and these secular people just embrace moral relativism and admit that nothing is objectively immoral?
There are things that, for collective convenience, we should outlaw, but that doesn't mean that they're actually wrong in some objective way.
Why won't most of them take that view?
I think it's because the objective nature of morality is clearly apparent to everyone.
Even Richard Dawkins, the avowed relativist.
Now, keep in mind the...
The qualifier that he put on his statement about, well, pedophilia was okay back when everyone thought it was okay.
That's moral relativism.
But even then, he says mild pedophilia.
He puts that really weird qualifier on it.
Well, mild pedophilia was okay.
But beyond that, that wasn't okay.
So he felt the need to stipulate mild.
Even as he tears down the moral law, he can't bring himself to tear it all the way down.
So it's clear to me that everyone, whether they admit it or not, looks at the moral code as a thing that exists, as a real objective thing, as a thing we ought to follow, as a thing that we live under, as a thing that we should live according to, as a thing that would still be there intact even if nobody in the world recognized it.
As a thing that says that slavery is wrong, and so slavery will always be wrong, even if tomorrow everyone in the world thinks it's okay, it's still wrong.
It seems like basically everyone views morality in that light.
They view it, in a word, as a transcendent thing.
But there is nothing transcendent in a purely material world.
Which to me tells us that we are not living in a purely material world.
So that's why I think objective morality is pretty good evidence for the existence of God.
All right, I got that in exactly 30 minutes.
I feel pretty good about that as well.
Thanks for watching, everybody. Thanks for listening.
