Making the Wrong Point

At the website culturcidal.com John Hawkins puts up a couple of frames from a movie in which one character says that, "If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward, then, brother, rhat person is a piece of [crap]."

Hawkins goes on to write that "The majority of comments [to this movie scene] seemed to be, unsurprisingly, from atheists. Here are some fairly representative comments from those people:"

• "I met a man like that once, the only thing keeping him from hurting others was that his religion told him not to, those folks are truly terrifying that they even exist."
• "As an atheist I hear this often. "Well how do you live without morals and values?" As if living in fear of burning for eternity is the only thing that could make a person have values."
• "You can still have morals and not have faith. If you need a book to tell you how to be kind to people, you are the problem!"

The assumption, obviously, is that one need not be religious or believe in God in order to be good. Now, this is of course true, and I don't know any reasonably thoughtful person who would deny it. It's a truth, however, that wholly misses the point.

It's not a question of whether people can be good without belief in God. People can be loving, caring, generous, and honest whether they believe in God or not, whether they're religious or not. The question is whether, if there's no objective basis for moral right and wrong beyond the consensus of humanity, had someone chosen to be unloving, selfish, cruel, dishonest, would they be doing anything morally wrong?

Indeed, if there's no objective moral authority, no accountability for how we live, what does it even mean to say that something is morally "wrong"?

There may be behaviors that most people in a culture don't like, but why does what people like make a behavior wrong in a moral sense? Without an objective moral law to serve as a reference point we're like astronauts floating in space trying to decide which direction is up.

How can it be wrong to be racist, hateful, egoistic, callous, or exploitative of others if there's no moral law against such behavior? As the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky writes in his magnificent novel The Brothers Karamazov, "If God is dead, everything is permitted."

Consider the third quote above:"You can still have morals and not have faith. If you need a book to tell you how to be kind to people, you are the problem!" Of course, you can be kind if your personality inclines you to kindness, but suppose someone's personality inclines them to cruelty. In such a case we should ask the above commenter to tell us why that person's cruelty is morally wrong?

It's not that people need a book to tell them how to be kind, that's an absurdity. Rather we need the book (or something) to tell us that we have a moral obligation to be kind and that we'll be held accountable for whether we are or not.

The following short film illustrates the inability of the man without God to give a compelling answer to the question why cruelty is wrong, even when his life depends upon it. Caution: the film is not for the squeamish: