The red A

Recently I was handing out flyers for our lunchtime series at Parliament station when I noticed someone walk past with a red atheist, ‘A’, pinned on his lapel. The red A is a fairly defining feature of the New Atheism. It is a symbol used quite widely and is endorsed by Richard Dawkins.

This prompted me to think about one of the claims of the new atheists that atheism is not a ‘belief’. The analogy is often posed against stamp collecting, the argument runs like this, atheism is as much a belief as not collecting stamps is a hobby. Richard Dawkins suggests the same logic in his book The God Delusion. On page 278 he asks who would ever go to war for the absence of a belief. It implies that atheism isn’t really a ‘belief’.

I find this hard to accept, and the pinning of the red A on the lapel confirms it. Why would anyone pin a red A on their lapel for the absence of a belief? The logic breaks down. Atheism is a belief and I find the attempts to reject this frustrating and illogical.

The delusion of atheist morality

I noticed a couple of interesting letters in the Sunday Age last week. They were responding to an article published a week earlier describing how our society is becoming more and more post-Christian (An Easter Miracle). The two letter writers make similar points concerning religion and morality and I’ll quote the relevant sections of the letters.

How much did Access Ministries pay for the ad on the front page of The Sunday Age? Are we to believe that the only way to learn to live and ethical and honest life is to know stories from the Bible? Robert Graham, Yarragon

Christopher Hitchens has devised a reasonable challenge “Name me an ethical action taken, or a moral statement made by a person of faith, that could not be made by an unbeliever’ He goes on, asking us to ‘Think of a wicked thing, said or done by a person of faith, because of their faith…because their god told me to do it. It’s easy to think up examples. Such are the perils of preaching ‘morals’ and ‘ethics’ via religion. Paul Fuller, Richmond.

These two letters touch on a broader question – can you be good without God? (the second letter also opens up another issue, that the morals and ethics of ‘religion’ are destructive, as interesting as this claim is, we’ll leave it for now)

This claim by modern atheists that you can be good without God is becoming increasingly popular. It is advocated by leading voices such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens (as one of the letter writers quotes). They claim that if we were all without religion, we’d all live in a peaceful, happy society because religion causes so much division and violence.

This is an important claim, yet I believe this is actually a delusion. There are several difficulties with this:

1. How do you determine the “good”? A belief in the God of the Bible brings with it belief in an objective set of moral values Though the exact relationship between God and these moral values is debated, Christians believe that God has inscribed into creation an objective morality. This establishment of these objective values determines morality, we can objectively say this is right and wrong because we have something to measure it against. An atheist removes this objective measure (for there is no god to create it) so how then do we measure right or wrong? How do you determine the good? There have been a variety of attempts by various atheists but they all end up being arbitrary and not everyone can agree that is right (there is a lot more to say on this issue, but I’ll have to leave this now).

2. Who determines the “good”? The next problem the atheist finds in developing an ethical framework is, ‘who determines the good? The common response is, ‘we can all agree on what a decent chap would do’, but this becomes too subjective and is prone to break down when disagreement emerges. Let’s consider a couple of examples. One hundred years ago I would suggest that our society would have almost universally agreed that homosexuality was wrong, and yet today opinions have changed. So who is right? The opinions of those one hundred years ago or those today? The ultimate out working of this is that we can never condemn an action as ‘wrong’ for society might change its mind in the future. So for example, paedophilia is (rightly) widely condemned today, but if there is no objective right or wrong, what happens in one hundred years if our society decides that it’s actually ok? How are we to enact any justice, when the measure of right and wrong keep changing? It appears that using ‘society’ to determine the ‘good’ fails.

It seems that in an atheistic framework the ‘good’ is likely to be determined by those with the most power. Consider the situation in Zimbabwe where those in power suggest that stealing the farms of white landholders is fine. Alternatively consider Nazi Germany where those in power asserted that the Jews were their biggest problem and they should all be exterminated. In these situations it appears that whoever holds the biggest guns determines morality.

Our present world values things like ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, but this is partly due to the impact and strength of the USA and the UN, which are historically influenced by Christian values. Imagine how the world would be different if communist China (a country where Christian values are not completely accepted) were to dominate the global economy. The moral landscape and the values most accepted would be very different.

In an atheistic world it appears that whoever is most powerful determines morality. It is very difficult to create a moral framework without objective moral values.

3. ‘Moral’ atheists are generally upholding Christian values. It is certainly true that atheists can live ‘moral’ lives. In fact, many non-religious people put many religious people to shame as they live far more virtuous lives. At this level I agree with the atheist who claims you don’t need God to be good. Yet the distinct irony of this is that the measure often used to uphold atheist morality is Christian morality, for example the fruit of the Spirit in the book of Galatians: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control. There are many atheists who are more kind, patient or gentle than many Christians, but why should kindness or patience be regarded as a virtue? I would suggest only an objective moral standard of morality could accept these as ‘virtues’, which is something a Christian moral framework offers, but an atheist one cannot.

4. Historically, atheistic societies lead to moral decay. This is a harder point to demonstrate and is more open to dispute, but Peter Hitchens (brother of Christopher) in a stunning recent book, The Rage against God, shows how decades of opposing and removing Christianity in the Soviet Union by an overtly atheist government, in his opinion, led to ‘the prevalence of organised crime, drunken disorder, universal dishonesty, cultural decay, devastated family life, and corruption’ (The Rage Against God, p213). He concludes by saying,

‘The League of the Militant Godless had done their work too well. In the names of reason, science and liberty they had proved, rather effectively, that good societies need God to survive and that when you have murdered him, starved him, silenced him, denied him to the children, and erased his festivals and memories, you have a gap that cannot indefinitely be filled by any human, nor anything made by human hands’ (p213).

In conclusion I would suggest that we do need God to be good. The only way to be truly virtuous is to know the stories of the Bible and we should teach ‘morals’ and ‘ethics’ via religion.