Atheism and Morality

A very popular attack on atheism (at least from the religious side) comes in the form of a question of morality. Atheists are accused of having either no morals or morals that are loose and weak. Because most other religions derive their morals from some form of moral code or sacred texts or religious figures, they expect atheists (which a lot of religious people believe atheism to be a religion in itself) to have some soft of moral code too. From childhood these individuals have been told not to do certain things because it was written in the Bible or the Koran or whatever, and so, they expect all people to derive their moral standards based on some sort of written laws or principles.

Of course the next leap of reasoning, which a lot (but certainly not all) religious people make, is this notion that, because atheism doesn't have a moral book, or some sort of moral document which tells us how we should act, all atheists are amoral and therefore a danger to society. The Roman Catholics love to bring up names like Stalin and Hitler and Mao (all atheists) as 'evidence' of this amorality. It is believed that a lack of morals leads to a life of violence, chaos and torment. And that's a reasonable claim. But who said atheists don't have their own morals?

Here's an interview that Richard Dawkins did with Bill O'Reilly this year. As far as interviews go, this is a typical scenario where the scientist gets repeatedly cut-off before he has a chance to explain his point-of-view and a case where the religious defendant briskly changes the subject once his opinions start to get jeopardized. But this interview clearly shows the attitude that a lot of fundamentalists Christians and other religious people have towards atheists:

I am certainly not the first atheist to tackle a response to this accusation. Many atheists have had to answer this question in their own lives, but I believe that most atheists are not providing very good explanations. And I sympathize with them. It's hard to explain why we do certain things the way we do. And it's not just atheists, this goes for everyone. Morality is not simple. Morality is not like mathematics where an equation has a determined number of possible answers. We run into social scenarios every day where there is an infinite number of possible outcomes and choices, a very large number of which are 'good' and a lot that are 'bad.

A few years ago a fellow classmate had asked me if I believe in a 'right' and 'wrong'. This is basically the same question of morality, but rephrased. At the time, I was positive that yes - there was a 'right' and a 'wrong' choice for every situation. My mate argued the other side. He was positive that a situation had more than one possible 'right' answer or perhaps no 'right' answer at all. This was a very difficult debate because, even though I had a good idea of why I was right, I had a hard time determining why he was wrong. It was only recently that I had come to realize that we had both been right.

The short answer is that our moral codes are both fundamental and numerous. This is possible because morality evolves. The longer answer, I will get to in just a second. First let's take a look at a popular poor response to the atheist morality question. This one comes from AskTheAtheist.com:

And although I agree with Jake's natural instincts to the feeling that there is some sort of "social contract" out there, this doesn't answer the question "where do people get their morals from?" and it doesn't answer more difficult moral questions (eg. abortion, capital punishment, etc...) The 'social contract' is great and so is the 'golden rule', but that simply is not enough. It does not answer all the questions. So where do we get the answers to more difficult moral issues? From a holy book? Certainly not.

To illustrate my point let me quote a passage from Moral Minds, a brilliant book about the origins of morality by Marc D. Hauser:

Consider the following scenarios:

1. A surgeon walks into the hospital as a nurse rushes forward with the following case. "Doctor! An ambulance just pulled in with five people in critical condition. Two have a damaged kidney, one a crushed heart, one a collapsed lung, and one a completely ruptured liver. We don't have time to search for possible organ donors, but a healthy young man just walked in to donate blood and is sitting in the lobby. We can save all five patients if we take the needed organs from this young man. Of course he won't survive, but we will save all five patients."

Is it morally permissible for the surgeon to take this young man's organs?

2. A train is moving at a speed of 150 miles per hour. All of a sudden the conductor notices a light on the panel indicating complete brake failure. Straight ahead of him on the track are five hikers, walking with their backs turned, apparently unaware of the train. The conductor notices that the track is about to form, and another hiker is on the side track. The conductor must make a decision: He can let the train continue on its current course, thereby killing the five hikers, or he can redirect the train onto the side track and thereby kill one hiker but save five.

Is it morally permissible for the conductor to take the side track?

If you said "no" to the first question and "yes" to the second, you are like most people I know or the thousands of subjects I have tested in experiments. Further, you most likely answered these questions immediately, with little to no reflection. What, however, determined your answer? What principles or facts distinguish these scenarios? If your judgment derives from religious doctrine or the deontological position that killing is wrong, then you have a coherent explanation for the first case but an incoherent explanation for the second. In the train case, it makes sense -- feels right -- to kill one person in order to save the lives of five people. In the hospital case, it feels wrong to kill one person to save five. You might explain the hospital case by saying that it is illegal to commit intentional homicide, especially if you are a responsible doctor. That is what the law says. That is what we have been raised to believe. Our culture inscribed this in our minds when we were young and impressionable blank slates. Now apply this bit of legalese to the train case. Here, you are willing to kill one person to save five. You are, in effect, willing to do something in the second case that you were unwilling to do in the first. Why the mental gymnastics? Something different is going on in the second scenario. For most people, the difference is difficult to articulate. In the hospital case, if there is no tissue-compatible person nearby, there is no way to save the five patients. In the train case, if the side track is empty, the conductor can still switch tracks; in fact, in this scenario, the conduction must switch tracks -- an obligatory act -- since there are no negative consequences to turning onto the side track.

Hauser goes on to explain why we act in one way and not the other, and goes on in detail to explain where exactly these moral ideas come from. But the facts are in - we do not get our morality from books or texts or "social contracts". We make these moral decisions instinctively, and usually with little or no reflection. If morality did in fact come only from the Bible or any other text, we would be required to think hard about these two cases because they are so different from anything encountered in the Bible and, in fact, most peoples' decisions tend to contradict the Bible's basic rules. The experiments done by Hauser also disprove the idea that all morality comes from a "social contract" because these two scenarios alone (and there are many more that have been tested) show that it's not simply a "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" case. In fact, it doesn't apply to this what-so-ever. Something else is behind our moral reasoning.

If we can get people from all corners of the world to take the same morality test and we can find enough evidence to show that most people will act in the same way independent of their religion, culture or location, then we can conclusively prove that religion, culture or where you are from has nothing to do with your moral decisions. And these kinds of tests have, surely enough, already been done. These include the works of the anthropologist Kim Hill, and economist Ken Binmore. Furthermore, studies have been done by the political scientists Norman Frohlich and Joe Oppenheimer show that for the most part, humans from all backgrounds generally respond in the same way to moral situations. There are slight variations here and there based on cultural differences. But those differences should be expected. The evidence is - religion has absolutely nothing to do with morality. Not only does it have nothing to do with morality, but religion is, craziest of all, a bad thing when it comes to morality because it tries to teach lessons based on irrational laws. The best example of this comes from Islam:

"The United Nations Commission on Human Rights reports five thousand honor killings per year... In the Arab world, more than two thousand women die every year from honor killings. In the West Bank Gaza Strip, Israel, and Jordan, nearly all murders of Palestinian women are the result of honor killings... In Islamic cultures, there is nothing in the Koran that would allow for or encourage honor killings. However, deep within Islamic tradition is the attitude that women are property. The owner has the power to do with property as he pleases."

Even today in the Western world, in some cases, passion crimes are sometimes forgiven and excused by the justice system. Something tells us that sometimes killing can be allowed. Even though our instincts tell us that all live is sacred and all murder is wrong, when situations come up, we adapt and modify our instincts. John Rawls suggests that perhaps we can deliver moral verdicts based on unconscious and inaccessible principles. It's the idea that we all have moral instincts and that morals are not rigid. They are flexible and change over time, much like languages.

For more insight into the question of morality I highly recommend Marc D. Hauser's book. It is life-changing.

The Three Wise Men

When it comes to atheism we have our role models too, but they're very different from those of religious faiths. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Daniel C. Dennett have emerged as the leaders of the atheist movement for the 21st century. So I thought that I would take this opportunity to really take a close look at these "Three Wise Men" and see what makes them unique and makes their message a powerful one. They are important figures, and they are people who've received their share of criticism too. In response to their movement Gary Wolf writes, "the irony of [...] New Atheism -- this prophetic attack on prophecy, this extremism in opposition to extremism -- is too much for me". And he's certainly not the only one who's given Dawkins, Harris and Dennett a hard time. Theists from all over are claiming that these guys are Satan-worshipers and to listen to them is to listen to temptation which is a sin. Well if truth is temptation and temptation is a sin - we've got a long way to go until we can "break the spell".

I'll begin by looking at the works of Sam Harris. Harris is what I would call an 'active atheist'. He believes that religious faith is not only uneducated, but more importantly that it's dangerous. He actively attacks religious fundamentalism, as well as religious moderation. I will let him speak now:


You can get the full transcript of Harris' speech at www.cfinyc.org/transcripts_pdf/sam_harris_transcript.pdf

"I am simply worried."

Here is the first of many differences between a religious activist and an atheist activist. Atheists do not attempt to convert, or manipulate, or spread propaganda. They do not have an agenda. A lot of religious people accuse atheists of being immoral, inconsiderate, intolerant, murderous people, but we are just the opposite. We have a problem with poor morals, and intolerance and murder and this worries and terrifies us to no end. We begin to ask ourselves, "where does this disrespect for life come from?" And the answer we often find is - religion.

"We have the marriage of, quiet literally, first century or earlier beliefs—literally Iron Age philosophy—with 21st Century destructive technology. This, on its face, should seem untenable to us."

I believe that this is a tremendously important point. Religion, no matter what our priests keep telling us, is greatly outdated. It simply does not belong in our world. It should have died out ages ago.

"We do not respect people's beliefs. We evaluate their reasons. If my reasons are good enough, you will helplessly believe what I believe. That is what it is to be a rational human being. Reasons are contagious."

This is Harris' response to a lot of religious questions. Questions such as, "Well if God doesn't exist, why don't you prove that?" and "Why can't you just let us believe what we want, what's it to you?". It's not enough to simply believe. No matter how you put it, in a modern society in the 21st century, simple, uneducated and blind belief in the supernatural should be considered a mental illness or just plain stupidity.

"All we need is a standard of intellectual honesty where people who pretend to be certain about things they're clearly not certain about receive some conversational pressure."

Again, note the difference between this statement, and the common response of a religious activist. Thankfully, I am from Canada which is one of the most atheistic countries in the world, and a country of free speech and tolerance of all faiths. But what if I were from a deeply Islamic country where speaking out about religion is punished by death? This is why I strongly advocate the notion of 'intolerance of intolerance'.

"Forty percent of scientists believe in a biblical God. That does not suggest that there are good scientific reasons to believe in a biblical God. That suggests that 60% of scientists are not doing their jobs. There really is an argument to be won here."

This is in response to my previous post about Religion and Science. Harris agrees that religion and science simply cannot live together.

"...there is no place in the books where God says, “When you get the new world and you develop your three branches of government and you have a civil society, you can just jettison all the barbarism I recommended in the first books.” These books really are engines of fundamentalism. They are engines of intolerance."

I often get criticized for criticizing the Bible. People often tell me that I'm way out of my league and that it's absurd to criticize the Bible because the Bible itself does no harm, it's the Church that causes harm. But although there is some truth in that, the Church is a whole separate issue. The book itself is an 'engine of fundamentalism and intolerance' and it must be dealt with.

We have this idea that the fact that we were burning heretics alive for five centuries in Europe, this represented some kind of departure — a civilizational departure into psychopathology. It didn't. It is perfectly reasonable to do this if you believe the books.

And we do believe the books. We still believe the books. And in some places we still burn heretics alive. This is a problem.

You have probably noticed that Harris isn't really a great speaker. He certainly doesn't have the punch and the presence that, say, a preacher would. Keep that in mind as we move on to Daniel C. Dennett:



Daniel Clement Dennett is a prominent American philosopher and atheist advocate. Dennett's research centers on philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently a professor at Tufts University.

"I don't think there is a God so I'm an atheist, but I don't make a deal of it. It's not that I passionately believe there is no God. Of course there isn't a God, so what?"

Daniel C. Dennett has a very different approach from someone like Harris in the sense that he doesn't "make a deal of it". He approaches religion from a very philosophical point of view. He uses reason and thought rather than science and evidence to discredit God and what God does. This, of course, isn't to say that Dennett isn't a man of science and evidence - he is very much so and has written several books about it.

"I have a feeling that not that many people actually believe in God. Many people believe in belief in God. That is, they think it's a good thing. And they either try to believe in God, they hope they can believe in God, they wish they could believe in God and they say they believe in God. They go through all the motions, they try very hard to be devout and sometimes they succeed. For periods of their life they actually do, in some sense, believe that there's a God and they think they are the better for it. Otherwise they behave like people who probably don't believe in God. Very few people behave as if they really believe in God. A lot of people behave as if they believe they should believe in God.

Dennett tries to reason out God through the individual. He concentrates on the person and the person's belief in God and the person, rather than on the character of God Himself. He avoids, what I call, the "religious bubble". Outside the bubble God doesn't exist and it's all good, but most religious people won't listen to you because they do believe in God. They live in a different world than you. In order for you to be able to communicate with them, you need to step into their little bubble in which their God does exist. This means having to put your atheistic beliefs aside and hypothesize, for the next few minutes, that there is a God, and its their God. Dennett says - nonsense. There is no God, and I know it and most people already know it. They just won't admit it to themselves because they believe that belief in God is necessary. People need a God.

In his book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon he tries to break the conviction that religion is off-limits to scientific inquiry. And this is precisely what Sam Harris was talking about and what I'm trying to advocate. For some reason, as soon as you begin to question religion, religious people go wild and take it as some sort of personal attack. I've always liked Dennett because he reminds me of what God looks like in most religious icons and it creates a very pleasant sense of irony. :)

Unfortunately, the video I originally posted for Richard Dawkins (The Root of All Evil?) was removed for some unknown reason. It was previous found here: http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=6169720917221820689. So if per chance it comes back online, I highly recommend it. But for now, instead I'll use this one:



Richard Dawkins asserts that belief in God is irrational and inflicts great harm upon societies. Jeremy Paxman interviews Professor Dawkins as part of the Newsnight book club.

"I'm wound up about the truth. I care passionately about the truth as a scientist and I do regard religious claims about the universe as alternative scientific claims."

Here we have the great atheist and speaker Richard Dawkins. He has lately come up to the forefront of the atheist movement, mostly due to his highly popular best-selling book "The God Delusion". Dawkins is a scientist, and a highly respect one. That's probably why people listen to him.

Of course, the other reason why he's become such a popular figure in the discussion of religion is because he makes wild claims which really get on religious peoples' nerves, such as saying that the feeling of God is probably a simulation in brain. Which to me, another atheist, sounds like a brilliant deduction, but to a religious person might sound like a direct attack because it implies their stupidity and ignorance.

And to finish off this entry I'll let Dawkins read a little bit from his book. Pay attention to the way atheists talk in comparison to evangelicals you usually see on TV. Or even in comparison to preachers at church. I agree with every single thing Dawkins has said, so I'd love to hear your opinions.



Richard Dawkins reads excerpts from "The God Delusion" and anwsers questions at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia on October 23, 2006. This Q&A features many questions from Jerry Falwell's Liberty "University" students.