Mick Hartley

Michael Gerson, looking at the success of recent anti-religion books by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, updates Dostoyevsky’s “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted“, in an attempt to show that atheists can’t deal with the problem of morality:

If God were dethroned as the arbiter of moral truth, it would not, of course, mean that everyone joins the Crips or reports to the Playboy mansion. On evidence found in every culture, human beings can be good without God. And Hitchens is himself part of the proof. I know him to be intellectually courageous and unfailingly kind, when not ruthlessly flaying opponents for taking minor exception to his arguments. There is something innate about morality that is distinct from theological conviction. This instinct may result from evolutionary biology, early childhood socialization or the chemistry of the brain, but human nature is somehow constructed for sympathy and cooperative purpose.

But there is a problem. Human nature, in other circumstances, is also clearly constructed for cruel exploitation, uncontrollable rage, icy selfishness and a range of other less desirable traits.

So the dilemma is this: How do we choose between good and bad instincts? Theism, for several millennia, has given one answer: We should cultivate the better angels of our nature because the God we love and respect requires it. While many of us fall tragically short, the ideal remains.

Atheism provides no answer to this dilemma. It cannot reply: “Obey your evolutionary instincts” because those instincts are conflicted. “Respect your brain chemistry” or “follow your mental wiring” don’t seem very compelling either. It would be perfectly rational for someone to respond: “To hell with my wiring and your socialization, I’m going to do whatever I please.” C.S. Lewis put the argument this way: “When all that says ‘it is good’ has been debunked, what says ‘I want’ remains.”

Well no. The assumption here is that in any given situation we view the requirement to behave morally from some position outside that morality: that we sit back, as it were, and decide whether or not in this instance to behave in an ethical fashion. But that’s not the case. We operate always within a morality. Our active selves exist in a moral world, not outside that world looking dispassionately on. So the situation we’re in is that we feel compelled to act – we feel we ought to act – in a moral way.

“To hell with my wiring and your socialization, I’m going to do whatever I please.” Gerson thinks it would be perfectly rational for an atheist to think on those lines. But whatever I please already has the moral factor included. What I please to do is to act according to my moral principles, because to act otherwise is to betray my sense of moral worth. It also isolates me from that network of obligations and responsibilities which marks me out as mature member of society, which is where I want to be. I don’t need the further pressure of a deity whose love and respect I’m trying to earn – or, more accurately given the way religion’s usually presented, whose displeasure and threats I’m trying to avoid. That’s infantile.

Here’s Gerson’s conclusion:

Atheists and theists seem to agree that human beings have an innate desire for morality and purpose. For the theist, this is perfectly understandable: We long for love, harmony and sympathy because we are intended by a Creator to find them. In a world without God, however, this desire for love and purpose is a cruel joke of nature — imprinted by evolution, but destined for disappointment, just as we are destined for oblivion, on a planet that will be consumed by fire before the sun grows dim and cold.

This form of “liberation” is like liberating a plant from the soil or a whale from the ocean. In this kind of freedom, something dies.

Is Gerson saying that outside of religion we can never find love, harmony and sympathy? Society, passion, friendship – it’s all a cruel joke of nature unless it’s been planned by some ethereal central committee and lasts for ever and ever and ever? Well then, yes, in this kind of freedom, something does die. It’s our immaturity.

[Hitchens supplies his own answer to Gerson’s “ancient chestnut of an argument” here.]