Without God, does morality mean whatever we want?

A favorite claim among Christian apologists is that, without God, morality can mean whatever we want. That’s what happens when good and evil is not grounded by a divine standard. All we have are individuals with personal preferences judging others with preferences that may well be very different. As best, an individual or group can only impose their rules and judgements on others with a show of force, often referred to as “might makes right.” Those human rules and judgements can not be said to have inherent validity. While I’d love to rebut this claim entirely I can not do that any more than I can grant them that they are fully correct. Language and ethics are very complicated and both are at play here.

At the most literal level, yes, moral terms like good, evil, right, and wrong can mean whatever we want. Why? Because moral terms aren’t special. Any word can mean whatever we want. This should go without saying, but languages are invented and maintained by the population of speakers. If enough speakers evolve English so that evil means good, that is how it shall be moving forward. A single speaker redefining words will find himself unable to effectively communicate with everyone who hasn't adopted his fringe definition. That's why the meanings of good and evil tend to remain roughly the same within cultures, secular or religious. It’s hard to get everyone on board for an arbitrary remapping of terms.

The secular definition of moral good is essentially to behave in a way that is beneficial to others. Regardless of the letters written or sounds made to communicate this concept, it would not change it’s value. In other words, if “good” is renamed “evil” tomorrow, that would just mean that we would start to value “evil” over “good.” Now the question is: do we value the concept we call good because a divine third party made us? There’s no way to know, but we do know that there are reasons for social beings to value the concept we call good independent of supernatural mandates.

1. Being good to others earns more opportunity for earn friends and make families. (Here I could argue that the odds of finding mates and living longer are increased with this behavior, making the instinct to be good a selected trait, but I think this argument is only additive and not required for my points. Since people who do not accept evolution will likely read this, I will not argue this further.)
2. Being good allows for the creation of culture and societies that provide benefits ranging from the division of labor to shared resources.
3. Being good, rather than evil, keeps animosity from others low and makes for a more safe and stress free life.

There are many more reasons to be good rather than evil, but evildoers still exist. Apologists argue that people who do wrong do so because they separate themselves from God or ignore that divine moral compass within them. Some even say that it’s an acceptance of moral relativism that swings open the door to sin. While it is always wrong for the slave to strike an owner, it may be right (in the owner’s mind) for the owner to strike a slave. The rapist isn’t wrong to rape because (in the rapist’s mind) what’s right and wrong are up to whatever we want and, the rapist wants to rape. While there are individual defectors who periodically discard their value of good to serve base desires, they are rarer exceptions. More common are those who maintain their value of good with a more narrow view of equality. The slave owner treats other whites as peers with the same understanding of good as you or I, but define blacks as a class in which the definition does not apply. The same could go for the rapist and how he sees women. It may not be the definition of good that’s a moving target, it could be the definition of human.

There is more to the secular meanings of good and evil after we take into account context, motives, consent, ect. What’s most important to the point is that every culture has a name for this concept and places a high value on it. Apologists who admit this attribute it to the aforementioned God-given moral compass within us. I’ll stick with the alternative that all humans share something else, a desire to not be alone. Don’t underestimate how lonely, and short, one’s life would be if they placed no value on being good.

Rights, Responsibilities, & Justice

So an apologist on Twitter put out a challenge and I thought, that seems easy enough. Not easy to convince her, per se, just easy to fulfill the task. Here it is:

Critics, here’s your homework assignment. Begin with the brute facts of existence and a bare minimum of defensible assumptions. Then, using meticulous logic, syllogistically arrive at a basis for:

1. rights
2. responsibilities
3. justice
4. systematic inquiry (science)
5. hope

— Sarah Salviander (@sarahsalviander) January 6, 2019

I can take on the first three at once. I'll address the other two if we reach some agreement on the first three. Off we go:

Premise 1. People exist.
Premise 2. Most people don’t want to be hurt.
Premise 3. Most people don’t want to be alone.
Premise 4. Hurting others tends to cause either retaliation or isolation.
Premise 5. Most people meet the minimum intellectual requirements to notice the validity of the above premises from social experience.
Conclusion 1. (From premises) Hurting others is avoided by most people.

The concepts of rights, responsibilities, and justice all serve this conclusion. We collectively declare and acknowledge rights to each other, the most basic of which, the right to live, most obviously spawns from the syllogism. Responsibilities are then a drive to act acknowledging those rights. For example, I have the responsibility to acknowledge your right to live. Finally, justice is the method of enforcing adherence to responsibilities. If I cease to acknowledge your right to live and take your life, I face consequences. This tends to be physical punishment of imprisonment, an institutionalization of premise four.

I can’t hope to explain the entirety of ethics in a single post, but you can probably see how this same framework can be applied past a secular reason to not kill to a secular reason to not steal, rape, ect. It is indeed a deity-free basis for rights, responsibilities, and justice.

A Christian Scientist Camp Experience

Half way into high school I went to camp for the first time in my life. It was a Christian Science camp which would be a very odd choice if not for the fact that I was a Christian Scientist. The camp’s selling point to my parents was the promise to re-up my faith and to provide leadership opportunities as a Counselor-in-Training. The camp’s selling point to me was a canoeing trip in Canada and a three-day capture-the-flag tournament. That, and I just wanted to get out of the house.

I feel like a little background in Christian Science is needed here. CS is a religion that teaches the works of Jesus did could also be done by us providing that we have enough faith and live free from sin. In the Bible, the disciples healed and performed other miracles after JC’s death, the same premise applies to here. The implication is that, as Christian Scientists, material medicine should be avoided because using it diminishes our faith to heal thyself through God. If you need to see someone, CS has their own kind of doctors called “Practitioners” who basically talk the patient through the disease with prayer. The avoidance of medicine and the word “Science” in the name is why Christian Science is often confused with Scientology. This used to bother the hell out of me, but, in retrospect, I had little reason to be upset. The beliefs involved are no less crazy. Christian Science just seemed less crazy because it followed the legacy myth of Jesus rather than the start-up myth of aliens.

My first (and only) year at Camp Leelanau off the lovely coast of Lake Michigan happened to come at the transitional age between camper and counselor. Much of my days were spent in preparation of returning the following year as staff. Of course, that didn’t pan out, but all-in-all it was a better experience than I imagine it would have been as a proper camper. The camp’s official Practitioner was from my home church in Georgia. Both he and his two daughters were regulars of the camp and played no small part in my recruitment. I also noted upon arrival that the camp had a nurse on staff. Not so much a faith healing nurse as a nurse nurse. I remember thinking that was as odd addition. It turned out she was present to help with injuries during the camp’s more physical activities–broken bones, poison sumac rashes, the kind of stuff that leaves a mark. Although Christian Science teaches that God can heal anything, practically, it’s best to leave the invisible deity to the invisible ailments.

My class of CITs (counselor’s-in-training) was unusually small–five guys, myself included. This allowed for a tighter-nit fellowship and by the end I considered at least a few of them good friends. It also allowed for a more intimate adventure. We went to the middle of the Canadian wilderness where we canoed and camped all week. We never saw a trace of another human while we spotted wild moose, and had to hang our food and gear in trees nightly in case of bear (why we didn’t also sleep in trees is beyond me.) Every morning we’d hit the river, tie our canoes together and read from the bible and Christian Science’s companion book, Science & Health. I honestly didn’t mind the bible readings. Reading from a book about angels and demons made the trip seem more epic. Science & Health reads more like self-help than a holy text so it lessened that mood.

Long story slightly less long, we returned to camp and one of my new-found friends was hurt. He was cut up pretty bad while cutting wood or some such thing. I remember him rushing up the the nurse and being out of commission for almost the rest of our time in Michigan. Visits weren’t really allowed except for the Practitioner who, judging from the time my buddy was away and the very conventional stitches he returned with, did nothing in the way of faith healing. I imagine campers were discouraged to go see patients because the whole spiritual health scam would take a backseat to, “oh, hey, God isn’t doing anything for this guy.”

The camp experience was supposed to re-up my faith, but it only showed me reality. During one of our last Sunday meetings, a counselor enthusiastically testified that being a Christian Scientist was like being a Jedi; making the analogy that both we and the Star Wars heroes are small segments of the population who know how to demonstrate the power of their faith. After seeing failed demonstration after failed demonstration, I concluded that the real similarity a faith healing Christian Scientist has to a Jedi is that they are both works of fiction.

The Apologists Appeal To Conditional Morality

The moral argument for God requires the existence of a moral realism that can only be sustained by a deity. To argue that moral facts exist, the apologist finds commonality between himself and the nonbeliever by highlighting mutual condemnation of certain actions. Common agreement does not prove a moral fact’s existence, it only shows a shared judgement, but thats the tactic that is most commonly used nevertheless. Commonality is usually reached with the condemnation of the act of murder.

What makes an act a murder? The act itself is killing. We could break it down further to the type of act be it stabbing or shooting or poisoning, but the method is not usually factored in. What makes a killing a murder are, at the minimum, four conditions.

1. The victim must be born human.

2. The victim has not expressed a specific desire to be killed.

3. The victim must not be posing a significant and direct threat to the acting party.

4. The acting party must have the intension to kill.

One could argue that the act being unlawful is another condition, but that could become circular in this context. One could also argue that malice is an essential aspect of the intension, but malice may be defined as “wrongful intension” which begs the question when the point of this is to determine the wrongness of the act. One could argue that a condition could take into account the guilt of the victim making capital punishment exempt from the label of murder. This last bit is perhaps a worthy condition, but I am omitting it for simplicity.

To demonstrate that the four conditions are required to reach consensus on the acts wrongfulness, here are examples that do not meet the conditions.

Example 1: An abortion does not meet condition one in that the human has not been born. Many consider abortion wrong, but very few consider it murder. 

Example 2: Assisted suicide is almost never considered murder, even if it is still illegal in some places.

Example 3: Killing in self-defense does not meet condition three and therefore is not considered murder.

Example 4: Accidentally running into a car that unexpectedly slammed the brakes is not considered murder even if someone in that car dies.

No we have an action with enough conditions built into it that the vast majority of people consider it wrong. Does commonality, or even universality, imply moral fact? No. To prove this I add one more condition.

5. The victim is oneself.

This hypothetical condition means that a killing is only a murder if you’re the one who is killed. I think we can all agree that we don’t want a world of people trying to kill us. Does this common agreement imply that the aversion of this extra specific murder is a moral fact? No. Survival instinct can account for it. Hell, becoming accustomed to life or being adverse to pain can account for it. Interestingly, this same reasonable aversion is enough even without condition five. Labeling the act of killing as something not allowed is the obvious move with just the first four conditions which make any co-habitat safer for all.

All the apologist has to point to a moral judgement being a moral fact, is the universality of it. As I’ve shown, we can get to universality (or near universality) with enough conditional baggage. Until the apologist can find some means to provide evidence for moral facts beyond appealing to the masses, their arguments for morality should never be taken seriously.

#notworthfollowing

It used to be that wearing a shirt with the headline “Atheist” was considered to be the gold standard in testing public reception of the label. Most of us never wore such shirts and assumed that non-atheists would be confrontational or, at the least, expect the shirt-wearer to be confrontational. Living in the bible belt, I get it. Don’t expect to see me wearing such a shirt to a job interview. Still, Americans came close to having our first non-Christian candidate for President this year with Bernie Sanders. This suggests that at least half the population of the US is more receptive than ever. So I made shirts.

They aren’t as explicit as a shirt with the big block letters A-T-H-E-I-S-T. Think of them as part of a campaign. Each shirt displays a passage of the bible, not unlike a Christian wearing John 3:16 across their chest. The primary difference is that the passages available here are the parts of the bible Christians don’t advertise. They are about God commanding the murder of kids, approving the institution of slavery and keeping women down. They highlight why the bible is #notworthfollowing.

Let me know what you think.

nwf.threadless.com

A Personal Relationship with Atheism

Atheism isn’t a worldview. It isn’t a belief system. It’s a single belief, or as many of us phrase it, a “lack of” a single belief. It’s not a religion, it has no dogma or doctrine, and it only unites us under the same wide umbrella as the label “theism” unites the rest. Theism, as many of you know, includes categories such as polytheism, monotheism, pantheism, and dystheism as well as specific faiths like Islam, Judaism, Hinduism and Christianity–some of which are further broken down into even more specific faiths. A diverse spectrum of belief systems falls under the “theist” label. Atheists don’t have this plethora of sub-genres because each of us are ideological free-agents. For the most part, we don’t bundle opinions, opting to make a belief system unique to the individual. There have been attempts to deviate from our ironically shared nonconformity, such as the formation of the Brights, Atheism+, and “New Atheism”–but I don’t know many proud members, and I’ve come to know a lot of atheists. I consider these groups valid for what they are–the vocal minority.

I used to wonder why uniting atheists is like herding cats. I’ve concluded (correctly or not) that it’s because the disbelief of God is based on doubt while the belief in God is based on faith. Atheism is a very skeptical mindset that is a product of nurture and nature. I see it as nurture in that critical thinking is a learned skill that is more often valued in the secular communities that atheists were either raised in or happened upon during a deconversion. I see it as nature in that genes for both skepticism and gullibility are likely selected for different reasons from an evolutionary standpoint. For example, an early man who thinks twice about berry consumption will likely survive longer than one who concludes that if one berry is a good food source, they all must be equally good. Conversely, it will benefit that man’s friend to believe his theory of dangerous berries. This results in a population that has varying degrees of a trusting and a questioning instinct. I have the more skeptical variety.

Speaking of evolution, I’ve heard claims that belief in science is a part of the alleged atheist belief system. First, I’ll say that’s not necessarily true. There are those who don’t believe in God, and thereby textbook atheists, while having significant doubts about accepted scientific discoveries. For example, you’ll have a hard time finding a more outspoken atheist than Bill Maher, but he doesn’t accept germ theory and is sympathetic to the anti-vaccination community. Still, I realize that there is significant overlap between atheists and science enthusiasts. To this I’d point out that accepting observable data is only a part of a belief system in the same way that trusting our own senses is part of a belief system. Anything demonstrated to work repeatedly and consistently on reality’s terms requires no belief…but you might as well believe it. The tendency for theists to deny science is a product of their need to cling to the dogma that runs counter to the way things are, or at the very least, the way things appear.

Generalizations of atheists are no more informative than stereotypes of any other diverse group. If nothing else, this should be the takeaway from this post. We’re all unique snowflakes. That said, I’d now like to provide as much insight into me personally as I can. The following traits and tendencies all contribute to my dismissal of the God hypothesis.

I am comfortable with the unknown. I’ve often heard Christians say that divine creation makes more sense than “something from nothing”–as if that is the generally accepted atheist view. It is not. I imagine this started as an innocent straw man that captured the imaginations of apologists across the globe. I’d blame William Lane Craig, but then I always blame William Lane Craig. The most accurate model for our early universe is the Big Bang Theory, which most atheists and many theists accept. However, this model only explains the early expansion of the universe, not its ultimate origin. It can be fun to speculate…but you know what you do when you assume. Therein lies the problem with the so-call Cosmological Arguments. Like much apologetic reasoning, it relies on a gap of human knowledge and either inserts a new claim or retrofits old claims. As we advance, the gaps keep closing, but I’ll be the first to admit that many still exist. I’m simply comfortable with my lack of omniscience.

I am comfortable with chance. To quote a prolific philosopher, “s#!t happens.” God provides meaning and worth to a life that can’t possibly matter in the grand scheme of a natural reality. Regardless of how many lives you touch or how much wealth you accumulate, in a million years your only legacy will be atoms dispersed across the galaxy. I see the appeal of God, I really do, but desire doesn’t dictate reality. We used to think there was a design to life, but now we know that we are products of evolutionary trial-and-error. The most successful organisms live long enough to find similarly successful mates to pass the best genes on for future generations to build. At the most fundamental scales of matter, we see particles that can only be represented as probabilities as predicted by the uncertainty principle. Our concept of “God’s plan” has been continuously altered to conform to new information. I have to ask at what point will the goalpost be so moved that the game is no longer relevant? For me, that moment has already passed.

There are other reasons an unplanned existence is more reasonable. An unguided world allows for answers to huge theological dilemmas, most notably the Problem of Evil–which is only a problem when a divine puppeteer is held responsible. The Problem of Evil can be distilled down to a Problem of Fairness in which everything from natural disasters to drunk drivers can ruin the lives of good people. If this occurs according to God’s plan (according to all but the most deistic theists) then they are decidedly unjust by every human standard. Saying that God’s standard is higher than ours or that he works in “mysterious ways” is an admission of a problem with the only solution boiling down to turning a blind eye. When I am posed a complex moral dilemma, I weigh who is harmed against who benefits and make the most informed decision possible — knowing that there may be no objectively right answer. In my eyes it’s a more honest than artificially raising the contrast of a gray world to black and white.

I am comfortable with the possibility of nonexistence. When I tell people that I don’t think anything happens to us when we die, my audience usually perceives me as the ultimate pessimist. Somehow, this is true even when my audience thinks hell is a real option. This baffles me. I think, “how narcissistic is it to think ceasing to be is less favorable than eternal torture?” I’m aware that many theists overlook the fire and brimstone of their holy book, hoping their God relies more on a reward system for obedience. That’s fine. I honestly don’t have a problem with belief in heaven, but I, personally, don’t have it. I’m comfortable with returning to my preconception state knowing that, while I may not be happy about it, I’ll be incapable of being sad. I’m of the opinion that there is no point worrying about something I can’t control and I’m as certain as I can be that my belief in heaven isn’t going to change my prospects of the hereafter. I see no good reason to believe in an afterlife and until there is, I won’t. That’s how I form every belief. Besides, by lowering my expectations I save room to be pleasantly surprised.

I am uncomfortable with absolute authority. If there is anything we can learn from history, it’s that leaders often do horrible things when no checks or balances are in place. In fact, there is no one there to tell them what they are doing is horrible–because if anyone did, something horrible would happen to them. This is a function of relative power and authority. God, if He exists, has ultimate power and authority. The authors of the bible knew this and have depicted Yahweh and/or Jehovah accordingly. Both experience and scripture inform my aversion to absolute authority, but it doesn’t contribute to my disbelief in God. It contributes to why I wouldn’t worship Him even if He did exist.

Lastly, and I think most importantly, I am uncomfortable with the supernatural. I am skeptical of the accounts in most holy books because they come from a time before photography, video, the printing press, and widely adopted reading and writing proficiency. I’m skeptical of holy books because their authors and distributors had a vested interest in maintaining and gaining control by leveraging the power of legend. I’m skeptical of holy books because scholars have reached little or no consensus as to which books were forged, exaggerated, plagiarized, misinformed, or authentic. However, all this could be overlooked if I really wanted to believe. What I can’t overlook is the miracles. There’s the splitting of the Red Sea, walking on water, resurrections, talking snakes and donkeys and shrubbery, water turns to wine and sometimes blood, the divine duplication of seafood and baked goods — I seriously don’t see how anyone can believe this and not be just as credulous reading tales of Dracula and King Arthur? The rotation of the earth stops at some point so Joshua can have more daylight to kill Amorites. It just stops.

I don’t want to come off as insulting, but I see this as fantasy and I have a hard time understanding how other adults do not. The above applies mostly to Christianity, but only because I know my audience. Other religious texts take just as many liberties with our experience of reality. I believe everything has a rational, natural explanation free of magic and divine intervention only because it’s been true (or looks like it will be true) for everything anyone has investigated in my lifetime. If you don’t feel the same, fine, but please try to understand. This isn’t a hurdle an apologetic argument can or should overcome. It requires a childlike faith. I just don’t have it anymore. I’m glad I don’t.

Religious Semantics

Words are ultimately invented, with definitions that were chosen arbitrarily. They are meaningful today, because most of us have a common understanding of the context of each set of letters. They are meaningful because those definitions are relevant to most of us in that they correspond to something in our consensus reality or experience.

Not, I find, when talking to religious apologists. They use theological jargon under the guise of common vernacular. Morality is defined, in part, as "that which can only exist with God." I've seen reason defined as "that which can only be accessed through God." I've often thought of making a master list of words apologists frame in terms of their deity, but it would always be incomplete.

Words are invented, with definitions that were chosen arbitrarily. The apologists break no cosmic rule by creating their own language, but when they try to communicate in secular society with these identically constructed variants, they hold value. Their definitions are not relevant to me. They do not correspond to anything in reality as I observe it. They match nothing that I've ever experienced.

When I use "morality" or "reason" I am not grounding them in anything I don't believe exists. The assumption that I do is irrational. The sooner apologists understand this and accept this, the sooner we can have a mutually beneficial dialogue.