After clarifying precisely what he will claim in his argument Rabbi Averick examines the moral philosophy (and confusions) of philosophers Michael Ruse, Jason Rosenhouse, and Joel Marks as well as biologist Jerry Coyne, all four of whom have been discussed here at VP over the last couple of years.
He begins with Ruse who wants to have it both ways. Ruse says in several places that morality is a purely subjective phenomenon, but then in the wake of the Sandusky revelations he insists that "I want to say that what Jerry Sandusky was reportedly doing to kids in the showers was morally wrong, and that this was not just an opinion or something based on subjective value judgments. The truth of its wrongness is as well taken as the truth of the heliocentric solar system.”
How can he say this? What does he base it on? Actually, as his fellow atheists point out and Rabbi Averick explains, he bases it on nothing more substantive than that he simply feels very strongly that abusing young boys is wrong.
Coyne, Rosenhouse and Marks are more faithful to their fundamental assumption that there is no God. They just deny that pedophilia is really wrong. Here's Marks, for example:
Even though words like ‘sinful’ and ‘evil’ come naturally to the tongue as a description of, say, child-molesting, they do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God…just so, I now maintain, nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality.He further explains his position in this passage:
The long and the short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality. [Some atheists] would hold that one could be an atheist and still believe in morality. And indeed, the whole crop of ‘New Atheists’ are softies of this kind. So was I, until I experienced my shocking epiphany that the religious fundamentalists are correct: without God, there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality.Averick closes his post with a plea to atheists:
The choices before us are clear: we will either seek a transcendent moral law to which we will all submit, or we will seek our own personal and societal indulgence. If we turn to God in our quest to create a moral and just world, we have a fighting chance; if not, we are doomed to spiral into the man-made hell of the human jungle.Ideas have consequences. Some people think that there's no difference between theists and atheists except that theists go to church, synagogue or mosque and believe a lot of crazy things. Nothing could be further from the case. There's a wide chasm between the two worldviews and Averick highlights it in this column.
Atheism stands for nothing, signifies nothing, and affirms nothing except for one thing: All the moral aspirations of the advanced primate we call a human being are nothing more than a cosmic joke….and not a very funny one at that.
The atheist has no basis for making moral judgments other than his own subjective, arbitrary feelings and tastes. When the atheist says pederasty is wrong he's saying nothing more than "I don't like pederasty." Any judgment based on one's personal tastes, however, has no more moral force than saying "I don't like sushi and you shouldn't like it either." One's personal preferences certainly don't make something morally wrong.
Here's the difficulty the atheist finds himself in: If there is no God then Sandusky's pedophilia is not morally wrong, but most atheists feel deep inside themselves that pedophilia is morally wrong. Thus they hold two mutually incompatible beliefs at the same time. Their problem is compounded in that despite holding simultaneous incompatible beliefs they also hold the belief that they're somehow more rational than the theist.
As more and more atheists realize where their disbelief logically leads them they find themselves confronted with the choice of either abandoning their disbelief or embracing moral nihilism which, as Averick notes, dooms them to a man-made hell of the human jungle where not even the sexual abuse of children can be said to be wrong.
Do read Rabbi Averick's post and also the comments. Some of them afford excellent examples of missing the point and other failed attempts to avoid the force of the rabbi's argument.
