Krauss has been active over the last ten years or so promoting atheism and debating theistic philosophers like William Lane Craig and Stephen Meyer. Whether Krauss is actually guilty of behaving boorishly or not I can't say, but I was interested in some of the readers' remarks in the article's combox, particularly one from an atheist named Jim MacIver who wrote this:
This [Krauss' alleged conduct] is disgusting. It is the sort of behavior I expect from god-worshippers but not Atheists. We are supposed to be the ones who lead for truth and justice, logic and reason. Harassing women is just not decent for anyone to do but especially if an Athieist [sic] does it. The religioniists [sic] will use this against us. This hurts us as a movement. This will hurt all Atheists, everywhere. Even more important, it hurts women who are victimized by men they thought they could trust.You may think that Mr. MacIver sounds a bit like a teenager here, but a link accompanying his comment takes you to his Facebook page, and it turns out that he really is an adult. Given what he has said above, another claim he makes on his page sounds weirdly paradoxical:
I have no morality myself. Morality is arbitrary rules made up by old men to control the sex lives of human beings, particularly women. I have ethics, which tells you whats [sic] right.Set aside his inapt distinction between morality and ethics, and set aside, too, the fact that on atheism, truth, justice and reason are all highly problematic notions. What I wonder about is how a man who claims to have no morals can say that "harassing women is just not decent for anyone to do".
I also wonder why it's especially indecent if the behavior is perpetrated by someone (i.e. an atheist like Krauss) whose worldview offers no basis for objective moral, or ethical, values and no reason to think that there's any ultimate accountability for anything one does in life.
On atheism, as Mr. MacIver acknowledges, there's no morally right or wrong conduct. The only criterion for assessing whether one should do something that one desires to do, if one is an atheist, is whether one can get away with it.
If someone's behavior hurts women, victimizes women, why, given atheism, should Mr. MacIver be upset about that? All he's doing is emoting, expressing his subjective dislike for behavior that he finds personally unpleasant, but that hardly makes it wrong for others to do.
To make a moral judgment of another person's conduct the atheist must piggy-back on a theistic worldview and hope that no one will notice that he's deriving his moral sustenance from a source that he in fact believes has no actual validity.
Whenever an atheist makes the sort of judgments Mr. MacIver does he's engaging in a kind of moral parasitism, drawing nourishment from the host of theism because his own metaphysical assumptions lack the resources to support those judgments.
This is dreadfully inconsistent, although it occurs with surprising frequency among atheists. If Mr. MacIver truly believes that sexual misconduct toward women is objectively wrong, and if he truly prizes reason and logic he might want to reassess his atheism. He might also reflect on these words from a few fellow atheists whose understanding of the implications of their atheism manifests a bit more clarity than does Mr. MacIver's:
Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear – and these are basically Darwin’s views. 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…. Cornell University biologist Will ProvineIf these luminaries, atheists all, are correct then it's very hard to see how anyone could say that Lawrence Krauss, if he really did that of which he's accused, was acting in any way inconsistently with his atheism. Nor can one say how what he is accused of doing is in any way objectively "wrong."
‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’ Nobel laureate biologist Francis Crick
...Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature....We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair. Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg
