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.

Why live?

Not too long ago one of my best friends, Jonathan Fenn, had a so-called epiphany. Out of nowhere, he said that the world doesn't matter and that nothing we do in this world matters because feelings of pleasure and pain are illusions. He asked a lot of very hypothetical questions wherein the entire world could be a part of a matrix or someone's imagination (or something to that extent) and nothing we did had any consequence or relevance because in the end we were all just going to die. Basically, it meant that our actions had no consequence and we were free to do as we wanted and nothing would matter because eventually we would just die. This renders life on Earth completely meaningless and full of deceit and illusion. I knew, as soon as I read his blog that I had to go talk to him to make sure that I was understanding him correctly and that he wasn't experiencing a severe mental breakdown. Immediately I felt like what he was saying was completely absurd and it needed to be clarified and discussed.

I think at one point in life everyone goes through this same kind of epiphany. However, it's important that in the end you draw the correct conclusion from it, because the concept that "nothing we do matters" and "nobody has feelings" is the type of methodology that murderers and insane criminals use. This isn't to say that there is a "right" and "wrong" way to think and perhaps the epiphany does have a hint of truth behind it, but I think we can all agree that living in a world where nobody has feelings and where nothing matters would be chaotic. Sounds to me like something out of the Book of Revelation, and we all know how that ended.

After a long debate, we've come to the conclusion that the world does in fact matter and it matters very much what we do and what we feel. Which gave me a sense of relief to know that I was able to talk some sense into him (although I think for the most part he talked the sense into himself). What we did was we laid out a very simple solution to the actions each person takes and then we were able to see that everything that comes before the action and everything that follows the action has a huge impact on the person doing the action and on the people that are around.

Click the image to see it full-scale:



We drew up a mental diagram, that in my head looked something like this (Fig. 1)

In this we can see that a person's actions really follow through 4 chronological steps: influences, characteristics, actions and results. The cycle then repeats indefinitely and grows in numbers of influences and in numbers of choices we have (possible actions).

It begins with an influence, which can be God, school, the science of evolution, your parents or any number of other things. You educate yourself, or get taught something, then this influence generates a certain feeling inside of you. It could be emotional, or it could be a simple characteristic. For instance, God could be an influence that would result in you obtaining the characteristic that says that you are defined by The 10 Commandments which say that you shouldn't kill. This then results in a series of choices. It means that you, as an individual, when presented with a situation, have several choices to choose from. Simply put, one could be to kill and the other could be to spare someone's life. Your characteristic (the one that was influenced by God) would then probably reason you to choose the path that would spare the individual (although this is another religious subject about God's mercy that can be discussed at a later time). This action then produces a result. In this case, you let the person live and don't kill them. So we've gone from an influence to a result via a decision in which choice we make. In Fig. 1, the example shows the influences contrasting between several choices and eventually resulting to a decision and the choice to ignore or put aside one of your influences for that particular action.

Sounds very simple, doesn't it? Well, for some reason it took us several hours to agree on this (and even still we have very opposing views when it comes to more detailed interpretations of this idea). And something that looks like common sense to me, seemed very confusing to my friend. However, you can see in Fig. 1 that certain influences will conflict with others. This is precisely what gives you the illusion of free will and choice. You must choose between going to school and not going to school. And in life you end up making a lot of choices. In this case, you simply choose to abandon one of your influences and choose to take the actions proposed by that particular influence. However, over time, when you are faced with a new decision, your original influences will still be there and you will again have to choose which one to abandon and which one to follow.

Of course it's never just that simple. It's almost never a simple choice between two things. There isn't just a wrong and a right way to do something. There is an infinite number of choices neither of which are more wrong or more right than the other. However certain ones will generate a greater number of positive results. Others will generate a lot of very negative results that will not be of much help to you or others. However, to say that there is a generic right and wrong way to do something (with a few options in between, or not) is incorrect.

So what does all of this have to do with living? Does the world matter? Is it important that we are alive? Certainly. Because if we can act and influence our environment and others through our actions, that means that there is a purpose for us being alive. Now some believe that this purpose is predefined by God, or a destiny of some sort, but I don't buy into that. I believe that the purpose is individual and could be as simple as just waking up the next day and eating breakfast. That sounds like a very reasonable and achievable purpose to me, even if it is very short-term.

Eventually of course, you end up wondering what your glabal purpose in life is. And most of the time people will either bring up religion, or some other fundamental belief system. Others will simply say that there is no ultimate purpose. And others don't know and don't really care as long as they can survive. Well, again, I really don't think that it's that complicated. For me, the global purpose is to live until the next day (it goes well with my need for food, water, and air), and learn as much as I can about our world and in that progress the human race as a whole. Now it seems like a very vague purpose, but in fact it's not. It defines very specifically what I have to do throughout my life. What it doesn't do is define specifically each of my daily tasks. This gives me a lot of room to explore and learn in my every day activities.

What's great about my individual purpose is that even if there is an "ultimate" purpose in life that was predefined by some deity, or even if there is a god, the fact that I'm doing my part in progressing the human race means that eventually we might get smart enough, or build sufficient technology to realize this "ultimate" purpose, or an "ultimate" being. So far, however, there is no reason for me to believe in their existence, so I don't have any tendency to follow them. I don't like walking around blind, or in blind faith (and with good reason). If some ultimate deities exist, then one day we will probably be sure of it, but until then, all evidence points to a world where secular humanism makes the most sense and will provide the most benefits and success. There is currently no evidence to show that a deity cannot be exposed and there is no evidence to show that a deity currently exists (more on this in future journals).