We’ve already explored supposed atheists who want the atheist community to acknowledge the benefits Christianity has provided to society and the powerful arguments in favor of Christianity. Why don’t such “atheists” just declare themselves Christian?

Here’s another example, an atheist who laments the consequences of the atheist worldview. Dozens of Christian articles gushed about this atheist attacking atheism, but the first was “The Inevitable Consequence of An Atheistic Worldview” (2014) at the Cold-Case Christianity blog. I’ll first respond to the atheist’s points and then consider Christian apologists’ reactions.

An odd atheist 

I’ll use a masculine pronoun for this anonymous atheist because he was dubbed “John” in the original article. He begins by stating the atheist’s position, with a goal of showing that we’re all alone.

We believe that the Universe is a great uncaused, random accident. All life in the Universe past and future are the results of random chance acting on itself.

Not exactly. It’s an accident in that there’s no evidence for it being intentional, but there are scientific laws which govern the formation of universes and the creation and evolution of life. Rolling dice is “random chance,” but natural selection tuning life to be well suited for millions of environmental niches is not.

While we acknowledge concepts like morality, politeness, [and] civility seem to exist, we know they do not.

Someone needs a dictionary. These words are clearly defined, and, as defined, they exist. What I think he means is that there are no objective forms of these traits, just the human-created ones.

This error is widespread among Christians, but from an atheist? Perhaps this atheist isn’t especially experienced in the typical Christian arguments and the fallacies to avoid.

John again:

But make no mistake: all our dreams, loves, opinions, and desires are figments of our primordial imagination. They are fleeting electrical signals that fire across our synapses for a moment in time. They served some purpose in the past. They got us here. That’s it.

I imagine John Nihilist sitting alone in a dim corner of a basement café, wearing a beret and a black turtleneck, reading Sartre or maybe Nietzsche and smoking Gauloises as he sips coffee and muses about the utter meaninglessness of it all. It’s a shame that only objective meaning would satisfy him, because the regular kind works well for the rest of us.

One could wonder if this is a parody (and it gets worse), but since the Christian community has taken it as an honest statement, I’ll interpret it that way, too.

See also: Does This Atheist Have a Point? Or Is This a Sycophantic Poe?

John fights reality

John describes those “dreams, loves, opinions, and desires” as “fleeting electrical signals that fire across our synapses … that’s it.” Humans nurture children, create, and build only because out genes tell us to. We’re just bags of DNA. “Eat, sleep, reproduce, die. That is our bible.”

He says this as if it’s a dark, embarrassing truth, but it’s just reality that well-adapted adults deal with easily. John’s problem is approaching the effect at the wrong level. Let me illustrate with another example. You could talk about love at the chemical level or, worse, at the quantum level, but why would you? Not much poetry about love is written at this low level—you focus instead on the personal level. We don’t disprove that love exists when we can explain the biology behind it.

Are you marveling at the importance of love, or is the topic neurobiology? Pick one.

Or another example: you can talk about how evolution works with the different species represented as game pieces that Evolution pushes around like pebbles pushed by mindless waves, but there is no human emotion or meaning at that level. Return to the level of the individual if you want to talk about laws, civility, and morals.

And back to John’s approach: yes, you can look under the hood to see how synapses, genes, and DNA work, but why then add dreams, love, creativity, and family to the same sentence? It’s like a magic show: you can enjoy the show in the audience, or you can peek behind the curtain to see how it’s all done, but these two approaches don’t mix.

This reminds me of Christian apologist William Lane Craig in anguish when, as a child, he learned that we all die. Yes, Dr. Craig, we all die, but that provides no evidence for Christianity. And yes, John, we can focus on synapses and DNA, but that doesn’t mean we can’t move on to consider love, dreams, and meaning.

And now, morality

John really jumps the shark when he moves on to morality.

Outside of my greedy little gene’s need to reproduce, there is nothing in my world that stops me from killing you and reproducing with your wife. Only the fear that I might be incarcerated and thus be deprived of the opportunity to do the same with the next guy’s wife stops me.

Nothing in your world stops you from raping and murdering? There is in mine. Penn Jillette nicely slaps this one down:

The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero.

John says that “there is nothing in my world that stops me from killing you and reproducing with your wife,” but he forgets that nothing in King David’s world stopped him from killing a man (Uriah) and reproducing with his wife (Bathsheba), either. The Christian could respond that God punished David for his sin, but that misses the point. John claimed to have found a weakness in the atheist worldview not shared by the Christian worldview, and he failed (h/t commenter epicurus).

Humans are social animals, and evolution has favored pro-social behavior—trust, empathy, compassion, and so on. According to John, however, atheists like me who don’t ’fess up as sociopaths are “inferior” and “just a little bit less evolved.”

He’s so out of touch that I do wonder if this guy’s for real, but let’s set that aside. What’s more interesting is how he’s been received within the Christian community. They should instead poll atheists to see if many think this way. I know of none.

Study one religion, and you’ll be hooked for life.
Study two religions, and you’re done in an hour.
— Anon.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2017-8-28.)

A couple of years ago in a town in central England, a tragedy happened that could have been the archetypal “evil stepmother” fable, but this was no fabrication. A six-year-old boy was murdered by his stepmother, with help from his father. He was tortured by being fed salt-laced meals and being denied food and water, and his death was from a traumatic brain injury. The maternal grandmother said of the boy’s guardians: “I think they are cold, calculating, systematic torturers of a defenseless little boy. They’re wicked, evil.”

Christian apologist Jim Wallace pointed to this murder to ask how we know what “evil” is. He imagined an objective component of evil, and he sees morality as grounded outside humans. Humans aren’t necessary for objective moral truths to be in force.

(The story with the surprise conclusion is story #2, but I’ll use this brief look at the first story to make clear Wallace’s position.)

I see zero evidence for such an objective morality. Look up the word “evil” in Merriam-Webster and the first definition is “morally reprehensible.” There’s no objective anything here, no hint of a Big Book of Morals in God’s library that we can consult. This might surprise Jim Wallace the retired police detective, who seems to have trouble understanding how morals work in society—from how laws are made in a legislature to how they’re interpreted by the courts. Where do we find this morality that’s grounded outside humans? Where in the legislative or judicial process is any appeal to objective morality? That we share a moral sense is nicely explained by all of us being the same species and our species having been shaped by evolution.

Story #2: Does Google uphold its “Do no evil” motto? Should it?

So far, this is the standard apologist’s playbook: insist on objective morality and take it as a given or, at most, argue for it with nothing more convincing than, “I’m sure we all agree that X is wrong.” But with this second story, Wallace makes clear the weakness of his position.

This story, which broke at about the same time as that of the death of the boy, is Google being sued by several ex-employees for violating its “Don’t be evil” motto. Those employees had protested Google selling software to aid the work of U.S. immigration authorities, arguing that Google’s policies call for “acting honorably and treating each other with respect.” They claim that “Don’t be evil” wasn’t a throwaway line and that Google’s own employee contract made it binding on their work as employees.

Note the difference between these two stories. A six-year-old is tortured and then murdered. We bystanders conclude in an instant that evil was done. But the Google story is different. The court will decide after a long, boring trial, and it’s not obvious which side will prevail—perhaps even which side we want to prevail. No part of this trial will appeal to objective morality.

The podcast cohost outlined his approach to this case:

We need to look at something outside the employees and outside Google, some other, transcendent moral law. We need to look to that so we can compare the opinions of the people involved to the ultimate authority.  (@20:12)

The apologist demands to know how we ordinary humans can resolve moral problems. Answer: by God grounding objective moral truth. Look at the murder case—we all just know that evil was done, and that’s thanks to God.

Objective morality: put up or shut up

But with this claim about the Google case and ultimate authority, the Christian apologist’s fig leaf is torn away, and the flabby argument is made plain. If they have the secret recipe for resolving moral cases, they can demonstrate that by resolving the Google case! The resolution is not at all obvious, which makes it the perfect proving ground. That they don’t show how to judge the case is obviously because they can’t.

Compare these two cases. If there is an ultimate authority that shows us right from wrong, we don’t need it in the murder case. The moral judgment there is easy. But the Google case is messy, and an argument could be made for either side. This is precisely the opportunity to roll out that “ultimate authority.”

This reminds me of a carpenter’s workbench. Wallace could’ve laid out and explained the moral axioms needed for the task, like a neat row of carpenter’s tools. He’d show them to be objectively true and then apply them to the Google case to demonstrate how God as the ultimate authority can be reliably applied to thorny, real-world problems. But he doesn’t. He ends his episode making clear that he has no such technique. I’m sure he doesn’t even realize that we followed him to the brink and then watched him walk away, unable to make the demonstration on which his own examples insisted.

He’s preaching to the choir, and they let him get away with this, but we skeptics can see behind the curtain. The emptiness of apologists’ claims for objective morality is plainer than ever.

You don’t need religion to have morals.
If you can’t determine right from wrong
then you lack empathy, not religion.
— seen on the internet