Hi Michael
You ask some challenging questions. I’ll try and tackle them one by one.
I think the classical response would be that without an ‘absolute’ standard of morality, one that does not derive from human beliefs, we have no real basis for calling any act ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Dostoyevsky said it in The Brothers Karamazov – “if God does not exist, everything is permitted”.
Indeed, without absolute moral standards, the words ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ lose their meaning. And that is because your idea of ‘good’ might differ from mine. To take an extreme example, if I have sex with a woman forcibly because I am attracted to her, but she does not reciprocate my feelings, I don’t think you’d get much argument that this act of rape is wrong, indeed downright wicked. But if there is no absolute standard of right and wrong, then I could argue that because the act benefitted me, because it made me feel good, then it was not in fact ‘wrong’ – at least not as far as I was concerned.
This is, so far as I understand it, one of the foundational principles of existentialism, as propounded by atheist philosophers such as Sartre and Camus. Because there is no God, and hence no ultimate meaning in life, they argue, the way we give our lives meaning is through the things we choose to do, our actions – whatever they may be. In Camus’s novel L’Etranger, the protagonist kills an Arab, for no real reason. But he feels no remorse for his ‘crime’; indeed, his crime, even though it leads to him being sentenced to death, actually makes him happy, because – I think (long time since I read the book!) – in committing it he is at least ‘being true to himself’, doing what he wants to do.
Now you might argue that moral standards can be determined through consensus within a particular society, without reference to God or moral absolutes. But that doesn’t really fly. To illustrate, the Nazis, for reasons I don’t really understand, decided that the world would be a better place if they exterminated the Jewish people. (I guess it had something to do with their political ideology of the so-called ‘master race’.) Now under traditional Judaeo-Christian morality, the holocaust was truly wicked. But again, with no absolute moral standard to appeal to, who is to say that the Nazis were ‘wrong’ to do what they did? Indeed, if you asked them they would say what they did was actually ‘right’!
Two more thoughts on this issue:
As CS Lewis argued in his book The Abolition of Man, it is a remarkable fact that all societies and all civilisations throughout history have basically adhered to the same moral standards – ie that murder, rape or cowardice, for example, are ‘bad’, and generosity, unselfishness and kindness are ‘good’. Of course, there have been aberrations, such as the aforementioned Nazis, but in essence, all human beings everywhere have held the same standards of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. Lewis argues, and I would agree with him, that this is because moral standards are innate in us, and are put there, in the form of our consciences, by our Creator.
You can’t tell me that the torture and murder of a child is only ‘wrong’ because our society chooses to define it as wrong, and that were we to believe differently it would not in fact be wrong. I know in my heart, know as deeply as I know myself, that such an action is fundamentally and unequivocally, always and everywhere, intrinsically wrong, wicked, ‘evil’ in the extreme. How do I know this? Not through evolution, surely. For evolutionary instinct may well tell me that killing another man’s babies is actually beneficial to the survival of my own children, as it eliminates competition for food or whatever.
And indeed, this is precisely the way lots of animal species behave. But of course, we don’t call a lion ‘evil’ because he kills a rival lion’s cubs. We say he is just obeying his instincts, doing what comes naturally. But if, as atheists believe, we are just highly evolved animals, why can’t we do the same? Why would it be any more ‘wrong’ for me to kill another man’s child than it would be for the lion?
This is basically the position adopted by people we call psychopaths. Moors murderer Ian Brady is one such example. He does not accept that his torturing, sexually abusing and murdering five children was ‘wrong’, because he rejects Judaeo-Christian moral standards in favour of his own self-defined ‘morality’. Hence he has never shown any remorse for his crimes, other than expressing regret that they led to him being locked up for life.
So, if our conscience was not produced via evolution, where then did it come from?
And of course, whether the atheists like it or not, the moral standards we all live by in western society are Judaeo-Christian moral standards. Camus and Sartre may have rejected the idea that morality derives from God, and yet they still lived their lives according to Christian moral standards (so far as I can tell).
I don’t see Richard Dawkins going around saying it’s okay to rape and murder as long as it makes you feel good. But that it is the inevitable logical conclusion of his beliefs: without God to ‘arbitrate’, we must each of use define our own moral standards. And you can bet your bottom dollar that if I went round to his house and nicked his car, or ran off with his wife, he’d be the first to protest that my actions were ‘wrong’ or ‘unfair’. Ah but Richard, I would say to him, by whose standards are my actions wrong? Why should I do something , or refrain from doing something, just because you don’t like it? The fact is that I want your expensive car, so I’m jolly well going to take it.
Bottom line: nearly all atheists are total hypocrites when it comes to this issue of morality. They reject the basis on which moral standards exist in the first place, and yet they continue to live by those very same moral standards. And thank God they do, otherwise society would collapse overnight.
I will try and respond to some of your other questions in a further post.
All the best
Johnny