In the early days of the German advance into Eastern Europe, before the possibility of Soviet retribution even entered their untroubled imagination, Nazi extermination squads would sweep into villages, and after forcing the villagers to dig their own graves, murder their victims with machine guns. On one such occasion somewhere in Eastern Europe, an SS officer watched languidly, his machine gun cradled, as an elderly and bearded Hasidic Jew laboriously dug what he knew to be his grave.That's an account recited by David Berlinski in his book Devil's Delusion. His point is that when men lose the belief that there is a God to whom we are accountable for how we treat each other then they will often treat each other atrociously. I might add that it is also the case that when men believe there is a God which expects us to treat each other atrociously, as some Christians did in centuries past and many Muslims do today, then they certainly will do so.
Standing up straight, he addressed his executioner. “God is watching what you are doing,” he said.
And then he was shot dead.
What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe and what the NKVD did not believe and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals, Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did not believe was that God was watching what they were doing.
And as far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either. That is, after all, the meaning of a secular society.
Nevertheless, there is a crucial difference. When Christians act barbarously toward the other they're betraying everything that the One they claim to follow taught. They're rejecting His commandment to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. They're rejecting the lesson of His Parable of the Good Samaritan. By elevating hate over love they're doing precisely the opposite of what He taught and how He lived.
On the other hand, when a Muslim kills "infidels," so far from betraying the one he claims to follow, he's actually following his prophet's example, and when an atheist commits murders like the one described by Berlinski or, for that matter, by atheist Devin Patrick Kelley who walked into a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas last November and murdered 26 people and wounded 20 more, or by atheist Stephen Paddock who slaughtered 58 and wounded nearly 500 from his hotel window at a Las Vegas concert in October, he's betraying nothing.
This is not to say that these men were motivated by their atheism any more than that German soldier was, but it is to say that in a world where "God is not watching" there's no real accountability, no genuine guilt, and nothing that's objectively wrong, no matter how horrible. That soldier believed his highest duty was to the Fuehrer, Kelley and Paddock believed they had no higher duty at all, and given their atheism, they were right.
We're horrified by what these men did, just as we're horrified when we watch a video of a lion kill a baby antelope, but the lion is not evil. It's not doing anything morally wrong, it's just doing what lions do. In the absence of God human predators are likewise just doing what human predators do. Our horror and revulsion at their crimes are misplaced. These reactions are simply non-rational emotional responses to events which are unpleasant or abhorrent to our sensibilities.
This conclusion, the notion that if atheism is true there are no moral wrongs and thus no moral guilt, offends our deepest intuitions, but that reaction confronts us with a choice: either our intuitions are wrong or atheism is wrong. One of the strangest facts about our modern age is that there are many who would sooner deny the legitimacy of their moral intuitions than consider that their atheism might be false.
