In his essay titled Without God physicist Stephen Weinberg says this:
[I] do not think we have to worry that giving up religion will lead to a moral decline. There are plenty of people without religious faith who live exemplary moral lives (as for example, me), and though religion has sometimes inspired admirable ethical standards, it has also often fostered the most hideous crimes. Anyway, belief in an omnipotent omniscient creator of the world does not in itself have any moral implications-it's still up to you to decide whether it is right to obey His commands.
Set aside the pomposity and self-righteousness implied by his claim to be a moral exemplar. He's being hopelessly naive when he says that belief in a transcendent creator has no moral implications. Unless there is a transcendent moral authority there simply is nothing that obligates or binds us to act in any way beyond how we feel like acting. There's nothing that makes kindness better than cruelty. Both kindness and cruelty are simply things some people prefer, like they prefer a particular flavor of ice cream. We may like or dislike the behaviors we label kind and cruel, just as we like or dislike a particular flavor of ice cream, but as with the ice cream, there's nothing wrong with them.
Weinberg then adds this:
As religious belief weakens, more and more of us know that after death there is nothing....Living without God isn't easy. But its very difficulty offers one other consolation-that there is a certain honor, or perhaps just a grim satisfaction, in facing up to our condition without despair and without wishful thinking-with good humor, but without God.
So atheism amounts to this: We are like a lone man lost in a wilderness and facing certain death. We can face our predicament bravely or not, but which we choose isn't going to change anything and doesn't much matter. And why worry about bravery? What makes bravery a virtue? The fact that other people admire it? People admire a lot of things in others that are not virtuous, what makes bravery different?
Atheists like Weinberg adjure us to face the absurdity of life with a smile on our face, but it's the smile of a clown. It's there but there's an incongruity between the smile and the emptiness and despair that lurks behind it. The smile is a mask that tries to send the message that one's life means something when in fact anyone who thinks about it knows that it doesn't.
Thanks to Logan Gage at EN&N for calling Weinberg's essay to our attention. See here and here for additional posts on Weinberg's Without God.
RLC
