Modern secularists find themselves in a troublesome spot when it comes to talking about matters such as these. They want very much to say that behaviors like child abuse, sexual assault, torture, and environmental destruction are objectively immoral, but they realize, if only subliminally, that such language implies an objective standard of morality, which in turn implies the existence of a personal God.
Unwilling to follow their intuitions to their logical conclusion they have to limit their rhetoric to emotional but weak expressions of personal distaste for the behavior in question.
Thus we hear people declare that a given act is "inappropriate", or "not okay", or "unacceptable", or "not cool", but what they can't bring themselves to say is that it's objectively, morally, wrong or evil.
Listening to people in the media, for example, attempting to express their personal disapproval of something like the sexual depredations of a Harvey Weinstein without using moral language is as amusing as the attempt is ridiculous.
The shallowness of much contemporary "moral" discourse is compounded by the fact that many of the same folks who are willing to judge the behavior of others as "inappropriate" will, in other contexts, be heard touting the need to refrain from being "judgmental" and to be tolerant of other people's conduct.
Aside from the fact that there's something absurd about judging others for being judgmental and refusing to tolerate intolerance, there's a further problem. Being judgmental or intolerant can only be wrong if there's an objective standard of right and wrong in the first place. When someone criticizes another for being judgmental or intolerant they're implying, even if they're unaware of it, that they believe these things violate an objective standard of right and wrong, and, by extension, that there's a transcendent personal moral authority, a God, who has established that standard.
The only alternative to this awkward tacit admission on their part is to give up morality altogether, and many thoughtful secularists agree. Consider these statements, from among the dozens which could be cited, from some prominent atheists:
- "What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler was right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question." Biologist Richard Dawkins
- "What’s moral is what you feel good after and what’s immoral is what you feel bad after." Writer Ernest Hemingway
- “This philosopher (Joel Marks) has been laboring under an unexamined assumption, namely that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I now believe there isn’t…The long and short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality….
I experienced my shocking epiphany that 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….Even though words like “sinful” and “evil” come naturally to the tongue as, say, a description of 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…nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality.” Philosopher Joel Marks - "Morality is nothing but the sum total, the net residuum, of social habits, the codification of customs….The only immoral person, in any country, is he who fails to observe the current folkways." Feminist Margaret Sanger
- "For the secular man there's no answer to the question, why not be cruel." Philosopher Richard Rorty.
- "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
- "As evolutionists, we see that no justification of the traditional kind is possible. Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends....
In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding… Ethics is illusory inasmuch as it persuades us that it has an objective reference." E. O. Wilson and Michael Ruse
The problem is that very few people, including those quoted above, can forego moral judgments. Each of us just knows that some things, like torturing children, are profoundly wrong. This isn't simply a matter of subjective inclination, but on atheism it must be.
Thus the atheist, unless he's an utter moral nihilist, finds that he can't live consistently with his worldview, but rather than give up his atheism he chooses instead to live with the inconsistency. Even if it means withholding any and all moral judgments.
Anything, he reasons, is better than accepting the existence of God.
