I had a writing student in my Critical Thinking class who had recently come to California from Hungary. She told me her father, like her, was an atheist but had very strong morals. It was easy to believe her. She was a committed, assiduous student who appeared to have absorbed the strong values her father had given her.
I also had a Vietnamese student, a professed atheist, who had five brothers and sisters, all Christians, and all, in my student’s opinion, loathsome hypocrites. When their mother was dying of cancer in Vietnam, only my atheist student flew from California to tend to her mother till her mother’s death. That her Christian brothers and sisters didn’t lay a finger to help their mother intensified my student’s hatred of religion as a sham.
Perhaps my two atheist students could be used as evidence in the University of Michigan Philosophy Professor Elizabeth Anderson’s argument that we don’t need theism to develop a strong moral foundation. In her essay “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?” she presents the case that religion is not only unnecessary for developing a strong moral code in the individual and society but that religion is rife with so much malignancy that we are better off without it.
Anderson begins her essay at the Institute for Creation Research Museum in Santee, California, where the creationists argue that we can follow two paths: Creationism and “Evolutionism.” Creationism will bring us moral fruit. “Evolutionism,” on the other hand, is the “evil tree,” which will bring forth all kinds of moral filth: fornication, nihilism, addiction, humanism, Communism--every foul thing under the sun.
Anderson then writes: “The evil tree vividly displays two important ideas. First, the fundamental religious objection to the theory of evolution is not scientific but moral. Evolutionary theory must be opposed because it leads to rampant immorality, on both the personal and political scales. Second, the basic cause of this immorality is atheism. Evolutionary theory bears corrupt fruit because it is rooted in the denial of the existence of God.”
Belief in God--theism--therefore is rooted in the belief that we must believe in God to repel immorality. To embrace atheism is to embrace the reckless disregard for morality and live in a fever swamp of sin and moral debauchery.
This belief in the intrinsic immorality of atheism is so ingrained and reflexive that most theists have not, according to Anderson, considered a rational defense of atheism “because they think that without God, morality is impossible.” Or as Dostoyevsky famously did not say, “If God is dead, then everything is permitted.” In other words, belief in God is the cork that keeps the sinful champagne fizz from exploding in our faces.
Anderson then asks: Could we know the difference between right and wrong without a belief in God? Do we need the Ten Commandments to steer us in the direction of morality? She answers, “But that can’t be right” because every society, regardless of its religious or nonreligious status, creates a moral code: “Every stable society punishes murder, theft, and bearing false witness; teaches children to honor their parents; and condemns envy of one’s neighbor’s possessions, at least when such envy leads one to treat one’s neighbors badly.”
Moral codes are a natural byproduct of any thriving society. In the words of Anderson: “People figured out these rules long before they were exposed to any of the major monotheistic religions. This fact suggests that moral knowledge springs not from revelation but from people’s experiences in living together, in which they have learned that they must adjust their own conduct in light of others’ claims.”
To assert that we need a belief in God to have morality, then, is both arrogant and willfully ignorant. It requires a lot of hubris and impiety to dismiss the morality of other cultures that may demonstrate strong moral codes but not be built on theism.
So Anderson first counters the theist belief that a belief in God is necessary to build a moral code. Her second rebuttal addresses the religious belief that we need a belief in God and the enticements of heaven and the fear of hell to motivate us to care about the difference between right and wrong and doing the right thing. Anderson writes: “On this view, people must be goaded into behaving morally through divine sanction.” She refutes this notion. People are not motivated by God but by love, honor, and respect to care about the difference between right and wrong. In Anderson’s worldview, love, honor, and respect are attributes that flourish separately from a belief in God. An atheist world can be rich in morality and wholesome values.
Anderson’s third refutation is the argument that we need a belief in God to give authority to the moral values we wish to establish. We need God’s authority, for example, to tell us that murder is wrong. Her rebuttal states that we should not use claims of theism or atheism to object to “the basic moral rules”: it’s wrong to commit murder, rape, torture, slavery, and genocide, to name several examples. We know these things are wrong “with greater confidence,” Anderson states, than we can draw “from elaborate factual or logical reasoning.” In other words, we should not need tortuous legal reasoning to arrive at the conclusion that the aforementioned deeds are bad. Anderson writes, “If you find a train of reasoning that leads to the conclusion that everything, or even just these things, is permitted, this is a good reason for you to reject it. Call this ‘the moralistic argument.’ So, if it is true that atheism entails that everything is permitted, this is a strong reason to reject atheism.” She calls such reasoning “the moralistic argument.”
The moralistic argument, Anderson contends, “applies more forcefully to theism than to atheism.” If God’s laws are based on authority and not goodness, then “in principle anything is permitted.” For example, the Calvinistic notion of predestination in which God preselects a remnant of human souls to be saved at his discreet pleasure while damning billions in eternal fire is perfectly fine for Calvinists because such an arrangement is God’s will. Moral reasoning has nothing to do with it.
At this point in Anderson’s essay, she gets very serious in her dismantling of perhaps not all religions but what could be called fundamentalist religion. She writes, “I shall argue that if we take the evidence for theism with utmost seriousness, we will find ourselves committed to the proposition that the most heinous acts are permitted. Since we know that these acts are not morally permitted, we must therefore doubt the evidence for theism.”
Anderson is very specific about what she means by theism: “I mean belief in the God of Scripture.” She includes the Old and New Testaments and the Koran in her critique. We must judge the morality of God based on Scripture as taken as inerrant. In interpreting Scripture as the inerrant word of God, we will, Anderson argues, be forced to conclude that Scripture is rife with evil and depravity, much of which comes from the personality of Scripture’s God. At this juncture, Anderson gives a litany of God’s cruel actions and moral abominations. He “routinely punishes people for the sins of others.” He hardens hearts and therefore “thwarts their free will.” He kills firstborn sons. He orders genocide.
Additionally, Anderson observes that God permits slavery, allows for female captives in war to be “raped or seized as wives.” God allows for men to amass a stable of concubines. “Children may be sacrificed to God in return for His aid in battle (2 Kings 3:26-27, Judg. n), or to persuade Him to end a famine (2 Sam. 21).”
Anderson anticipates that Christian apologists will point out that “these transgressions occur in the Old Testament” and that we must find God’s true glory and moral superiority in the New Testament. Anderson is equally if not more harsh in her judgment of the New Testament. She is opposed to Jesus’ love for humans, based on choosing Jesus over their parents. Loyalty to Jesus will require that family members hate each other. She cites Matthew and Mark to show that disobedient children must suffer more than the rod; they must be killed. She mocks all of these things as Jesus’ “family values.”
Worse than the Old Testament, the New Testament brings eternal damnation to most people. The basis, Anderson charges, is not only inhumane but inconsistent. Paul sometimes preaches predestination as an “arbitrary gift from God” and sometimes salvation is promised to people who abandon their families for Christ or for helping the poor.
Anderson is equally offended by the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, the idea that Jesus is a scapegoat who must endure God’s wrath otherwise reserved for the human race of sinners.
In sum, Anderson writes: “I find it hard to resist the conclusion that the God of the Bible is cruel and unjust and commands and permits us to be cruel and unjust to others.”
At this point in her essay, Anderson would like to address “thoughtful Christians and Jews,” those who struggle with the above cruelties and moral atrocities. She gives these thoughtful theists a list of untenable options. The first is “to bite the bullet” and accept the atrocities as they are. After all, some preachers will tell us Scripture is a sweet watermelon and we must as true believers swallow the hunks of delicious fruit and bitter seeds. We cannot pick and choose what we eat. The Bible has plenty of bitter seeds resulting in racism, tribalism, ethno-nationalism, the Crusades, the Inquisition, cultural genocide, ethnic cleansing, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust.
The second way to deal with the above calamities is to rely on “a stopgap measure.” Say these extreme behaviors no longer are sanctioned now that Scripture has been written. God may have spoken that way to people in biblical times, but he will not command us to perform such barbarism today. This doesn’t work because Anderson points out the whole purpose of being a believer is to have a communication with God.
A third strategy is to excuse God’s depravity. We can come up with rationalizations for God’s testing of Abraham and Job and slaughtering seventy thousand of David’s men. She writes that such rationalizations are dangerous and “invite applications of similar reasoning to future actions.”
Anderson concludes that there is no way to “soft-pedal the reprehensible moral implications” of God's ordered atrocities. “They must be categorically rejected as false and depraved moral teachings. Morally decent theists have always done so in practice. Nevertheless, they insist that there is much worthy moral teaching that can be salvaged from the Bible.”
Anderson concedes that the Bible is rich in beautiful moral lessons, but that these lessons are mixed in a mire of depravity and therefore it is “morally inconsistent.”
Better than being a liberal theist who “soft-pedals” all the hideous things in Scripture, Anderson argues that we should abandon theological claims for building a moral code. Citing the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, Anderson argues that God should not be worshiped out of fear of his raw power, his arbitrary love of some and not others, and his moral inconsistencies. Fear of raw power is not love or a sound basis for morality.
Secondly, ascribing good and bad events to God in the absence of scientific explanation is unworthy of making any kind of moral claims. Anderson writes: “So the tendency, in the absence of scientific knowledge, to ascribe events having good and bad consequences for human beings to corresponding benevolent and malevolent intentions of unseen spirits” reflects the biases of those who interpret these events.
Third, Anderson rejects so-called divine revelation as a basis for making claims about morality. Anderson presents the summer art fair in her town of Ann Arbor, Michigan, where all kinds of religious sects show up, the conventional ones all the way to the fringe ones, including Wiccans and New Agers. She writes: “The believers in each booth offer evidence of exactly the same kind to advance their religion. Every faith points to its own holy texts and oral traditions, its spiritual experiences, miracles and prophets, its testimonies of wayward lives turned around by conversion, rebirth of faith, or return to the church.”
Anderson concludes that we cannot base moral authority on any god or gods. What, then, should morality be built on if one has rejected the belief in God and is an atheist? Her answer is that morality is built on each of us: “We each have moral authority with respect to one another. This authority is, of course, not absolute. No one has the authority to order anyone else to blind obedience. Rather, each of us has the authority to make claims on others, to call upon people to heed our interests and concerns.”
For Anderson, morality is “a system of reciprocal claim making, in which everyone is accountable to everyone else, [and] does not need its authority underwritten by some higher, external authority.”
Whenever I read Anderson’s essay, I think to those two atheist students who were enrolled in my classes. Their decency, their courage, and their moral core indeed seem to be one of the strongest arguments ever presented to me for how unnecessary it is to believe in God to have morals.
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