An anonymous New Yorker has forked over $25,000 in order to place ads in city subway stations stating that "A million New Yorkers are good without God. Are you?"
I think this is great, actually. It should afford numerous opportunities for intelligent theists to ask in all sorts of venues what such a claim means and to call attention to those who may not be aware of it the utter moral bankruptcy of the atheist worldview.
It would be great fun, for example, to ask someone who agrees with the ad what they mean by the phrase "good without God." What makes an act "good," anyway? Why, exactly, is kindness good and cruelty bad? Why, if atheism is true, is it good to preserve resources for future generations and why is squandering them on ourselves bad?
When all the smoke is blown away from the flustered and confused responses the atheist would make to these questions what remains is the claim that what's right is just whatever feels right to him or her. In a world without God there's nothing that makes kindness or conservation good and nothing that makes cruelty and profligacy bad. The preference for one rather than the other is simply a biochemical reaction occurring in our brains. It has no real significance and no authority. It can certainly impose no obligation upon us to live one way rather than another.
Listen to a few atheists on the matter of whether there's any moral good or bad in their world:
"If God is dead everything is permitted." - (Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov)
"One who does not believe in God or an afterlife can have for his rule of life...only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best." - Charles Darwin (Autobiography)
"Ethics is just an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate." - biologist E. O. Wilson and philosopher Michael Ruse
"Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear .... There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death....There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will...." - Will Provine, professor of biology at Cornell
"There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it." Voldemort (Harry Potter)
"There is no good or bad there is only the law." Inspector Javert in Les Miserables (Movie, 1980)
I rather doubt that the organization placing the ads in the Manhattan subway stations will put up any of these quotes among them. Better to stick to bumper sticker slogans and hope that no one thinks too deeply about them.
RLC
