1. Rebuttal:
Argument from Morality
Argument from Morality
Summary:
A. True objective moral obligation exists.
B. Either god exists or god does not exist.
C. Objective morality requires an ultimate being to create it. Otherwise morality would be subjective.
D. Therefore, god exists.
B. Either god exists or god does not exist.
C. Objective morality requires an ultimate being to create it. Otherwise morality would be subjective.
D. Therefore, god exists.
There is no support for moral absolutism. The specifics of moral systems are not consistent around the world, which counters the claim that morality can be defined objectively.
Sam Harris, PhD, American philosopher & neuroscientist, 1967-
“The fact that people of different times and cultures disagree about ethical questions should not trouble us. It suggests nothing at all about the status of moral truth. Imagine what it would be like to consult the finest thinkers of antiquity on questions of basic science...? We would surely encounter a bewildering lack of consensus on these matters... they simply lacked the physical and conceptual tools to answer questions of this sort. Their lack of consensus signified their ignorance of certain physical truths, not that no such truths exist.
“If there are right and wrong answers to ethical questions, these answers will be best sought in the living present: ‘What,’ we may ask, ‘is fire? And how do living systems reproduce themselves? And what are the various lights we see in the night sky?’ If ethics represents a genuine sphere of knowledge, it represents a sphere of potential progress (and regress). The relevance of tradition to this area of discourse, as to all others, will be as a support for present inquiry. Where our traditions are not supportive, they become mere vehicles of ignorance. The pervasive idea that religion is somehow the source of our deepest ethical intuitions is absurd. We no more get our sense that cruelty is wrong from the pages of the Bible than we get our sense that two plus two equals four from the pages of a textbook on mathematics. Anyone who does not harbor some rudimentary sense that cruelty is wrong is unlikely to learn that it is by reading–and, indeed, most scripture offers rather equivocal testimony to this fact in any case. Our ethical intuitions must have their precursors in the natural world, for while nature is indeed red in tooth and claw, it is not merely so. Even monkeys will undergo extraordinary privations to avoid causing harm to another member of their species. Concern for others was not the invention of any prophet.”
— Sam Harris, The End of Faith, W.W. Norton Company, New York, 2004 p171-172
“The fact that people of different times and cultures disagree about ethical questions should not trouble us. It suggests nothing at all about the status of moral truth. Imagine what it would be like to consult the finest thinkers of antiquity on questions of basic science...? We would surely encounter a bewildering lack of consensus on these matters... they simply lacked the physical and conceptual tools to answer questions of this sort. Their lack of consensus signified their ignorance of certain physical truths, not that no such truths exist.
“If there are right and wrong answers to ethical questions, these answers will be best sought in the living present: ‘What,’ we may ask, ‘is fire? And how do living systems reproduce themselves? And what are the various lights we see in the night sky?’ If ethics represents a genuine sphere of knowledge, it represents a sphere of potential progress (and regress). The relevance of tradition to this area of discourse, as to all others, will be as a support for present inquiry. Where our traditions are not supportive, they become mere vehicles of ignorance. The pervasive idea that religion is somehow the source of our deepest ethical intuitions is absurd. We no more get our sense that cruelty is wrong from the pages of the Bible than we get our sense that two plus two equals four from the pages of a textbook on mathematics. Anyone who does not harbor some rudimentary sense that cruelty is wrong is unlikely to learn that it is by reading–and, indeed, most scripture offers rather equivocal testimony to this fact in any case. Our ethical intuitions must have their precursors in the natural world, for while nature is indeed red in tooth and claw, it is not merely so. Even monkeys will undergo extraordinary privations to avoid causing harm to another member of their species. Concern for others was not the invention of any prophet.”
— Sam Harris, The End of Faith, W.W. Norton Company, New York, 2004 p171-172
Frederick Phillip Lenz, PhD, American philosopher & spiritual teacher, 1950-1998
“There is no evil, there’s no bad; there’s no good. These are human ideas. There’s no creator, there’s no creation; there’s no God, there’s no nirvana, there’s no perfection. These are ideas. Everything is transient. That's an idea. Everything is perfect. That's an idea. Everything is imperfect. That's an idea.
“Beyond ideas there's reality. That's not an idea–that's real. There's no way to talk about it, there's no way to describe it. But there's a way to get to it, a series of ways. The pathways to enlightenment are numerous and they're all in front of you. If we stand back with wide eyes and look, we'll see some of them.
“Our life is a pathway to enlightenment, every moment, every experience. Everything is a pathway to enlightenment. But if we think that there is good and evil, if we think that there is blackness and we don't see that it's black light, then we see ourselves that way. We see life that way.”
— Frederick Phillip Lenz, PhD, “Tantric Buddhism - Light,” Dharma Talks by Rama (podcast), Lenz Foundation for American Buddhism, 2009 (recorded 1990)
“There is no evil, there’s no bad; there’s no good. These are human ideas. There’s no creator, there’s no creation; there’s no God, there’s no nirvana, there’s no perfection. These are ideas. Everything is transient. That's an idea. Everything is perfect. That's an idea. Everything is imperfect. That's an idea.
“Beyond ideas there's reality. That's not an idea–that's real. There's no way to talk about it, there's no way to describe it. But there's a way to get to it, a series of ways. The pathways to enlightenment are numerous and they're all in front of you. If we stand back with wide eyes and look, we'll see some of them.
“Our life is a pathway to enlightenment, every moment, every experience. Everything is a pathway to enlightenment. But if we think that there is good and evil, if we think that there is blackness and we don't see that it's black light, then we see ourselves that way. We see life that way.”
— Frederick Phillip Lenz, PhD, “Tantric Buddhism - Light,” Dharma Talks by Rama (podcast), Lenz Foundation for American Buddhism, 2009 (recorded 1990)
Bertrand Russell, British philosopher & polymath, 1872-1970
“Dr. Barnes tells us that man ‘knows right and wrong.’ But, in fact, as anthropology shows, men’s views of right and wrong have varied to such an extent that no single item has been permanent. We cannot say, therefore, that man knows right and wrong, but only that some men do. Which men?... If knowledge of right and wrong is to be an argument for immortality, we must first settle whether to believe Christ or Nietzsche, and then argue that Christians are immortal, but Hitler and Mussolini are not, and vice versa. The decision will obviously be made on the battlefield, not in the study. Those who have the best poison gas will have the ethic of the future and will therefore be the immortal ones.
“Our feelings and beliefs on the subject of good and evil are, like everything else about us, natural facts, developed in the struggle for existence and not having any divine or supernatural origin. In one of Aesop’s fables, a lion is shown pictures of huntsmen catching lions and remarks that, if he had painted them, they would have shown lions catching huntsmen.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Do We Survive Death,” (1936) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p92
“I now want to say a few words upon a topic which I often think is not quite sufficiently dealt with by Rationalists, and that is the question of whether Christ was the best and the wisest of men. It is generally taken for granted that we should all agree that that was so. I do not myself. I think that there are a good many points upon which I agree with Christ a great deal more than the professing Christians do. I do not know that I could go with Him all the way, but I could go with Him much further than most professing Christians can. You will remember that He said, ‘Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on they right cheek, turn to him the other also.’ That is not a new precept or a new principle. It was used by Lao-tse and Buddha some 500 or 600 years before Christ, but it is not a principle which as a matter of fact Christians accept. I have no doubt that the present Prime Minister [of England, Stanley Baldwin], for instance, is a most sincere Christian, but I should not advise any of you to go and smite him on one cheek. I think you might find that he thought this text was intended in a figurative sense.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” (1927) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p14
“The Age of Reason [by Thomas Paine] ventured to doubt whether God really commanded that all males and married women among the Midianites should be slaughtered, while the maidens should be preserved. The Bishop indignantly retorted that the maidens were not preserved for immortal purposes, as Paine had wickedly suggested, but as slaves, to which there could be no ethical objection. The orthodox of our day have forgotten what orthodoxy was like a hundred and forty years ago. They have forgotten still more completely that it was men like Paine who, in face of persecution, caused the softening of dogma by which our age profits.”
— Bertrand Russell, “The Fate of Thomas Paine,” (1934) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p144
“Dr. Barnes tells us that man ‘knows right and wrong.’ But, in fact, as anthropology shows, men’s views of right and wrong have varied to such an extent that no single item has been permanent. We cannot say, therefore, that man knows right and wrong, but only that some men do. Which men?... If knowledge of right and wrong is to be an argument for immortality, we must first settle whether to believe Christ or Nietzsche, and then argue that Christians are immortal, but Hitler and Mussolini are not, and vice versa. The decision will obviously be made on the battlefield, not in the study. Those who have the best poison gas will have the ethic of the future and will therefore be the immortal ones.
“Our feelings and beliefs on the subject of good and evil are, like everything else about us, natural facts, developed in the struggle for existence and not having any divine or supernatural origin. In one of Aesop’s fables, a lion is shown pictures of huntsmen catching lions and remarks that, if he had painted them, they would have shown lions catching huntsmen.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Do We Survive Death,” (1936) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p92
“I now want to say a few words upon a topic which I often think is not quite sufficiently dealt with by Rationalists, and that is the question of whether Christ was the best and the wisest of men. It is generally taken for granted that we should all agree that that was so. I do not myself. I think that there are a good many points upon which I agree with Christ a great deal more than the professing Christians do. I do not know that I could go with Him all the way, but I could go with Him much further than most professing Christians can. You will remember that He said, ‘Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on they right cheek, turn to him the other also.’ That is not a new precept or a new principle. It was used by Lao-tse and Buddha some 500 or 600 years before Christ, but it is not a principle which as a matter of fact Christians accept. I have no doubt that the present Prime Minister [of England, Stanley Baldwin], for instance, is a most sincere Christian, but I should not advise any of you to go and smite him on one cheek. I think you might find that he thought this text was intended in a figurative sense.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” (1927) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p14
“The Age of Reason [by Thomas Paine] ventured to doubt whether God really commanded that all males and married women among the Midianites should be slaughtered, while the maidens should be preserved. The Bishop indignantly retorted that the maidens were not preserved for immortal purposes, as Paine had wickedly suggested, but as slaves, to which there could be no ethical objection. The orthodox of our day have forgotten what orthodoxy was like a hundred and forty years ago. They have forgotten still more completely that it was men like Paine who, in face of persecution, caused the softening of dogma by which our age profits.”
— Bertrand Russell, “The Fate of Thomas Paine,” (1934) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p144
Richard Dawkins, PhD, British evolutionary biologist, 1941-
“Moral philosophers are the professionals when it comes to thinking about right and wrong. As Robert Hinde succinctly put it, they agree that ‘moral precepts, while not necessarily constructed by reason, should be defensible by reason.’ They classify themselves in many ways, but in modern terminology the major divide is between ‘deontologists’ (such as Kant) and ‘consequentialists’ (including ‘utilitarians’ such as Jeremy Bentham, 1748-1832). Deontology is a fancy name for the belief that morality consists in the obeying of rules. It is literally the science of duty, from the Greek for ‘that which is binding.’ Deontology is not quite the same thing as moral absolutism, but for most purposes in a book about religion there is no need to dwell on the distinction. Absolutists believe there are absolutes of right and wrong, imperatives whose rightness makes no reference to their consequences. Consequentialists more pragmatically hold that the morality of an action should be judged by its consequences. One version of consequentialism is utilitarianism, the philosophy associated with Bentham, his friend James Mill (1773-1836) and Mill’s son John Stuart Mill (1806-73). Utilitarianism is often summed up in Bentham’s unfortunately imprecise catchphrase: ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.’
“Not all absolutism is derived from religion. Nevertheless, it is pretty hard to defend absolutist morals on grounds other than religious ones. The only competitor I can think of is patriotism...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p265-266
“Moral philosophers are the professionals when it comes to thinking about right and wrong. As Robert Hinde succinctly put it, they agree that ‘moral precepts, while not necessarily constructed by reason, should be defensible by reason.’ They classify themselves in many ways, but in modern terminology the major divide is between ‘deontologists’ (such as Kant) and ‘consequentialists’ (including ‘utilitarians’ such as Jeremy Bentham, 1748-1832). Deontology is a fancy name for the belief that morality consists in the obeying of rules. It is literally the science of duty, from the Greek for ‘that which is binding.’ Deontology is not quite the same thing as moral absolutism, but for most purposes in a book about religion there is no need to dwell on the distinction. Absolutists believe there are absolutes of right and wrong, imperatives whose rightness makes no reference to their consequences. Consequentialists more pragmatically hold that the morality of an action should be judged by its consequences. One version of consequentialism is utilitarianism, the philosophy associated with Bentham, his friend James Mill (1773-1836) and Mill’s son John Stuart Mill (1806-73). Utilitarianism is often summed up in Bentham’s unfortunately imprecise catchphrase: ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.’
“Not all absolutism is derived from religion. Nevertheless, it is pretty hard to defend absolutist morals on grounds other than religious ones. The only competitor I can think of is patriotism...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p265-266
“Even if it were true that we need God to be moral, it would of course not make God’s existence more likely, merely more desirable (many people cannot tell the difference). But that is not the issue here. My imaginary religious apologist has no need to admit that sucking up to God is the religious motive for doing good. Rather, his claim is that, wherever the motive to be good comes from, without God there would be no standard for deciding what is good. We could each make up our own definition of good, and behave accordingly. Moral principles that are based only upon religion (as opposed to, say, the ‘golden rule,’ which is often associated with religions but can be derived from elsewhere) may be called absolutist. Good is good and bad is bad, and we don’t mess around deciding particular cases by whether, for example, somebody suffers. My religious apologist would claim that only religion can provide a basis for deciding what is good.
“Some philosophers, notably Kant, have tried to derive absolute morals from non-religious sources. Though a religious man himself, as was almost inevitable in his time, Kant tried to base a morality on duty for duty’s sake, rather than for God’s. His famous categorical imperative enjoins us to ‘act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’ This works tidily for the example of telling lies. Imagine a world in which people told lies as a matter of principle, where lying was regarded as a good and moral thing to do. In such a world, lying itself would cease to have any meaning. Lying needs a presumption of truth for its very definition. If a moral principle is something we should wish everybody to follow, lying cannot be a moral principle because the principle itself would break down in meaninglessness. Lying, as a rule for life, is inherently unstable. More generally, selfishness, or free-riding parasitism on the goodwill of others, may work for me as a lone selfish individual and give me personal satisfaction. But I cannot wish that everybody would adopt selfish parasitism as a moral principle, if only because then I would have nobody to parasitize.
“The Kantian imperative seems to work for truth-telling and some other cases. It is not so easy to see how to broaden it to morality generally. Kant notwithstanding, it is tempting to agree with my hypothetical apologist that absolutist morals are usually driven by religion. Is it always wrong to put a terminally ill patient out of her misery at her own request? Is it always wrong to make love to a member of your own sex? Is it always wrong to kill an embryo? There are those who believe so, and their grounds are absolute. They brook no argument or debate...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p263-265
“Some philosophers, notably Kant, have tried to derive absolute morals from non-religious sources. Though a religious man himself, as was almost inevitable in his time, Kant tried to base a morality on duty for duty’s sake, rather than for God’s. His famous categorical imperative enjoins us to ‘act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’ This works tidily for the example of telling lies. Imagine a world in which people told lies as a matter of principle, where lying was regarded as a good and moral thing to do. In such a world, lying itself would cease to have any meaning. Lying needs a presumption of truth for its very definition. If a moral principle is something we should wish everybody to follow, lying cannot be a moral principle because the principle itself would break down in meaninglessness. Lying, as a rule for life, is inherently unstable. More generally, selfishness, or free-riding parasitism on the goodwill of others, may work for me as a lone selfish individual and give me personal satisfaction. But I cannot wish that everybody would adopt selfish parasitism as a moral principle, if only because then I would have nobody to parasitize.
“The Kantian imperative seems to work for truth-telling and some other cases. It is not so easy to see how to broaden it to morality generally. Kant notwithstanding, it is tempting to agree with my hypothetical apologist that absolutist morals are usually driven by religion. Is it always wrong to put a terminally ill patient out of her misery at her own request? Is it always wrong to make love to a member of your own sex? Is it always wrong to kill an embryo? There are those who believe so, and their grounds are absolute. They brook no argument or debate...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p263-265
Morality appears to have evolutionary roots.
Carl Sagan, PhD, American astronomer, astrophysicist, & astrobiologist, 1934-1996
“So societies that teach contentment with our present station in life, in expectation of a post-mortem reward, tend to inoculate themselves against revolution. Further, fear of death, which in some respects is adaptive in the evolutionary struggle for existence, is maladaptive in warfare. Those cultures that teach an afterlife of bliss for heroes–or even for those who just did what those in authority told them–might gain a competitive advantage.
“Thus, the idea of a spiritual part of our nature that survives death, the notion of an afterlife, ought to be easy for religions and nations to sell. This is not an issue on which we might anticipate widespread skepticism. People will want to believe it, even if the evidence is meager to nil.”
— Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World, Ballantine Books, New York, 1996 p269
“So societies that teach contentment with our present station in life, in expectation of a post-mortem reward, tend to inoculate themselves against revolution. Further, fear of death, which in some respects is adaptive in the evolutionary struggle for existence, is maladaptive in warfare. Those cultures that teach an afterlife of bliss for heroes–or even for those who just did what those in authority told them–might gain a competitive advantage.
“Thus, the idea of a spiritual part of our nature that survives death, the notion of an afterlife, ought to be easy for religions and nations to sell. This is not an issue on which we might anticipate widespread skepticism. People will want to believe it, even if the evidence is meager to nil.”
— Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World, Ballantine Books, New York, 1996 p269
Sam Harris, PhD, American philosopher & neuroscientist, 1967-
“Given this situation, we can see that one could desire to become more loving and compassionate for purely selfish reasons. This is a paradox, of sorts, because these attitudes undermine selfishness, by definition. They also inspire behavior that tends to contribute to the happiness of other human beings. These states of mind not only feel good; they ramify social relationships that lead one to feel good with others, leading others to feel good with oneself. Hate, envy, spite, disgust, shame–these are not sources of happiness, personally or socially. Love and compassion are. Like so much that we know about ourselves, claims of this sort need not be validated by a controlled study. We can easily imagine evolutionary reasons for why positive social emotions make us feel good, while negative ones do not, but they would be beside the point. The point is that the disposition to take the happiness of others into account–to be ethical–seems to be a rational way to augment one’s own happiness... The connection between spirituality–the cultivation of happiness directly, through precise refinements of attention–and ethics is well attested... This is not a proposition merely to be believed. It is, rather, a hypothesis to be tested in the laboratory of one’s life.”
— Sam Harris, The End of Faith, W.W. Norton Company, New York, 2004 p191-92
“Given this situation, we can see that one could desire to become more loving and compassionate for purely selfish reasons. This is a paradox, of sorts, because these attitudes undermine selfishness, by definition. They also inspire behavior that tends to contribute to the happiness of other human beings. These states of mind not only feel good; they ramify social relationships that lead one to feel good with others, leading others to feel good with oneself. Hate, envy, spite, disgust, shame–these are not sources of happiness, personally or socially. Love and compassion are. Like so much that we know about ourselves, claims of this sort need not be validated by a controlled study. We can easily imagine evolutionary reasons for why positive social emotions make us feel good, while negative ones do not, but they would be beside the point. The point is that the disposition to take the happiness of others into account–to be ethical–seems to be a rational way to augment one’s own happiness... The connection between spirituality–the cultivation of happiness directly, through precise refinements of attention–and ethics is well attested... This is not a proposition merely to be believed. It is, rather, a hypothesis to be tested in the laboratory of one’s life.”
— Sam Harris, The End of Faith, W.W. Norton Company, New York, 2004 p191-92
Richard Dawkins, PhD, British evolutionary biologist, 1941-
“...Natural selection can easily explain hunger, fear and sexual lust, all of which straightforwardly contribute to our survival or the preservation of our genes. But what about the wrenching compassion we feel when we see an orphaned child weeping, an old widow in despair from loneliness, or an animal whimpering in pain? What gives us the powerful urge to send an anonymous gift of money or clothes to tsunami victims on the other side of the world whom we shall never meet, and who are highly unlikely to return the favour? Where does the Good Samaritan in us come from? Isn’t goodness incompatible with the theory of the ‘selfish gene’? No. This is a common misunderstanding of the theory – a distressing (and, with hindsight, foreseeable) misunderstanding. It is necessary to put the stress on the right word. The selfish gene is the correct emphasis, for it makes the contrast with the selfish organism, say, or the selfish species...
“The logic of Darwinism concludes that the unit in the hierarchy of life which survives and passes through the filter of natural selection will tend to be selfish. The units that survive in the world will be the ones that succeeded in surviving at the expense of their rivals at their own level in the hierarchy. That, precisely, is what selfish means in this context. The question is, what is the level of the action? The whole idea of the selfish gene, with the stress properly applied to the last word, is that the unit of natural selection (i.e. the unit of self-interest) is not the selfish organism, nor the selfish group or selfish species or selfish ecosystem, but the selfish gene. It is the gene that, in the form of information, either survives for many generations or does not...
“The most obvious way in which genes ensure their own ‘selfish’ survival relative to other genes is by programming individual organisms to be selfish. There are indeed many circumstances in which survival of the individual organism will favour the survival of the genes that ride inside it. But different circumstances favour different tactics. There are circumstances – not particularly rare – in which genes ensure their own selfish survival by influencing organisms to behave altruistically. Those circumstances are now fairly well understood and they fall into two main categories. A gene that programs individual organisms to favour their genetic kin is statistically likely to benefit copies of itself. Such a gene’s frequency can increase in the gene pool to the point where kin altruism becomes the norm. Being good to one’s own children is the obvious example. but it is not the only one. Bees, wasps, ants, termites, and, to a lesser extent, certain vertebrates such as naked mole rats, meerkats and acorn woodpeckers, have evolved societies in which elder siblings care for younger siblings (with whom they are likely to share the genes for doing the caring). In general, as my late colleague W.D. Hamilton showed, animals tend to care for, defend, share resources with, warn of danger, or otherwise show altruism towards close kin because of the statistical likelihood that kin will share copies of the same genes.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p246-247
“The other main type of altruism for which we have well-worked-out Darwinian rationale is reciprocal altruism (‘You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’). This theory, first introduced to evolutionary biology by Robert Thrivers and often expressed in the mathematical language of game theory, does not depend upon shared genes. Indeed, it works just as well, probably even better, between members of widely different species, when it is often called symbiosis. The principle is the basis of all trade and barter in humans too. The hunter needs a spear and the smith wants meat. The asymmetry brokers a deal. The bee needs nectar and the flower needs pollinating. Flowers can’t fly so they pay bees, in the currency of nectar, for the hire of their wings... Reciprocal altruism works because of asymmetries in the needs and in capacities to meet them...
“...Natural selection favours genes that predispose individuals, in relationships of asymmetric need and opportunity, to give when they can, and to solicit giving when they can’t. It also favours tendencies to remember obligations, bear grudges, police exchange relationships and punish cheats who take, but don’t given when their turn comes.“For there will always be cheats, and stable solutions to the game-theoretic conundrums of reciprocal altruism always involve an element of punishment of cheats...
“I have mentioned kinship and reciprocation as the twin pillars of altruism in a Darwinian world, but there are secondary structures which rest atop those main pillars. Especially in human society, with language and gossip, reputation is important...
“...[Israeli zoologist Amotz] Zahavi studies Arabian babblers, little brown birds who live in social groups and breed cooperatively. Like many small birds, babblers give warning cries, and they also donate food to each other. A standard Darwinian investigation of such altruistic acts would look, first, for reciprocation and kinship relationships among the birds. When a babbler feeds a companion, is it in the expectation of being fed at a later date? Or is the recipient of the favour a close genetic relative? Zahavi’s interpretation is radically unexpected. Dominant babblers assert their dominance by feeding subordinates. To use the sort of anthropomorphic language Zahavi delights in, the dominant bird is saying the equivalent of, ‘Look how superior I am to you, I can afford to make myself vulnerable to hawks by sitting on a high branch, acting as a sentinel to warn the rest of the flock feeding on the ground.’... Individuals buy success, for example in attracting mates, through costly demonstrations of superiority, including ostentatious generosity and public-spirited risk-taking.
“We now have four good Darwinian reasons for individuals to be altruistic, generous or ‘moral’ towards each other. First, there is the special case of genetic kinship. Second, there is reciprocation: the repayment of favours given, and the giving of favours in ‘anticipation’ of payback. Following on from this there is, third, the Darwinian benefit of acquiring a reputation for generosity and kindness. And fourth, if Zahavi is right, there is the particular additional benefit of conspicuous generosity as a way of buying unfakeably authentic advertising.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p247-251
“...Natural selection can easily explain hunger, fear and sexual lust, all of which straightforwardly contribute to our survival or the preservation of our genes. But what about the wrenching compassion we feel when we see an orphaned child weeping, an old widow in despair from loneliness, or an animal whimpering in pain? What gives us the powerful urge to send an anonymous gift of money or clothes to tsunami victims on the other side of the world whom we shall never meet, and who are highly unlikely to return the favour? Where does the Good Samaritan in us come from? Isn’t goodness incompatible with the theory of the ‘selfish gene’? No. This is a common misunderstanding of the theory – a distressing (and, with hindsight, foreseeable) misunderstanding. It is necessary to put the stress on the right word. The selfish gene is the correct emphasis, for it makes the contrast with the selfish organism, say, or the selfish species...
“The logic of Darwinism concludes that the unit in the hierarchy of life which survives and passes through the filter of natural selection will tend to be selfish. The units that survive in the world will be the ones that succeeded in surviving at the expense of their rivals at their own level in the hierarchy. That, precisely, is what selfish means in this context. The question is, what is the level of the action? The whole idea of the selfish gene, with the stress properly applied to the last word, is that the unit of natural selection (i.e. the unit of self-interest) is not the selfish organism, nor the selfish group or selfish species or selfish ecosystem, but the selfish gene. It is the gene that, in the form of information, either survives for many generations or does not...
“The most obvious way in which genes ensure their own ‘selfish’ survival relative to other genes is by programming individual organisms to be selfish. There are indeed many circumstances in which survival of the individual organism will favour the survival of the genes that ride inside it. But different circumstances favour different tactics. There are circumstances – not particularly rare – in which genes ensure their own selfish survival by influencing organisms to behave altruistically. Those circumstances are now fairly well understood and they fall into two main categories. A gene that programs individual organisms to favour their genetic kin is statistically likely to benefit copies of itself. Such a gene’s frequency can increase in the gene pool to the point where kin altruism becomes the norm. Being good to one’s own children is the obvious example. but it is not the only one. Bees, wasps, ants, termites, and, to a lesser extent, certain vertebrates such as naked mole rats, meerkats and acorn woodpeckers, have evolved societies in which elder siblings care for younger siblings (with whom they are likely to share the genes for doing the caring). In general, as my late colleague W.D. Hamilton showed, animals tend to care for, defend, share resources with, warn of danger, or otherwise show altruism towards close kin because of the statistical likelihood that kin will share copies of the same genes.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p246-247
“The other main type of altruism for which we have well-worked-out Darwinian rationale is reciprocal altruism (‘You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’). This theory, first introduced to evolutionary biology by Robert Thrivers and often expressed in the mathematical language of game theory, does not depend upon shared genes. Indeed, it works just as well, probably even better, between members of widely different species, when it is often called symbiosis. The principle is the basis of all trade and barter in humans too. The hunter needs a spear and the smith wants meat. The asymmetry brokers a deal. The bee needs nectar and the flower needs pollinating. Flowers can’t fly so they pay bees, in the currency of nectar, for the hire of their wings... Reciprocal altruism works because of asymmetries in the needs and in capacities to meet them...
“...Natural selection favours genes that predispose individuals, in relationships of asymmetric need and opportunity, to give when they can, and to solicit giving when they can’t. It also favours tendencies to remember obligations, bear grudges, police exchange relationships and punish cheats who take, but don’t given when their turn comes.“For there will always be cheats, and stable solutions to the game-theoretic conundrums of reciprocal altruism always involve an element of punishment of cheats...
“I have mentioned kinship and reciprocation as the twin pillars of altruism in a Darwinian world, but there are secondary structures which rest atop those main pillars. Especially in human society, with language and gossip, reputation is important...
“...[Israeli zoologist Amotz] Zahavi studies Arabian babblers, little brown birds who live in social groups and breed cooperatively. Like many small birds, babblers give warning cries, and they also donate food to each other. A standard Darwinian investigation of such altruistic acts would look, first, for reciprocation and kinship relationships among the birds. When a babbler feeds a companion, is it in the expectation of being fed at a later date? Or is the recipient of the favour a close genetic relative? Zahavi’s interpretation is radically unexpected. Dominant babblers assert their dominance by feeding subordinates. To use the sort of anthropomorphic language Zahavi delights in, the dominant bird is saying the equivalent of, ‘Look how superior I am to you, I can afford to make myself vulnerable to hawks by sitting on a high branch, acting as a sentinel to warn the rest of the flock feeding on the ground.’... Individuals buy success, for example in attracting mates, through costly demonstrations of superiority, including ostentatious generosity and public-spirited risk-taking.
“We now have four good Darwinian reasons for individuals to be altruistic, generous or ‘moral’ towards each other. First, there is the special case of genetic kinship. Second, there is reciprocation: the repayment of favours given, and the giving of favours in ‘anticipation’ of payback. Following on from this there is, third, the Darwinian benefit of acquiring a reputation for generosity and kindness. And fourth, if Zahavi is right, there is the particular additional benefit of conspicuous generosity as a way of buying unfakeably authentic advertising.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p247-251
God’s behavior (Christian), as recorded in the Bible, contradicts God’s own laws, and thus, counters the assertion that morality is universal and is valued by God.
Richard Dawkins, PhD, British evolutionary biologist, 1941-
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Bantam Books, 2006
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Bantam Books, 2006
Sam Keen, American author, philosopher, & professor, 1931-
“The minimum requirement for any belief system is that it be internally consistent. An inconsistent system is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. Self-contradiction, like the sound of metal grinding against metal in an engine, is a symptom of an impending breakdown. It is, for instance, inconsistent to claim that (1) God is love; (2); we, being created in the image of God, must love our neighbors as ourselves; and (3) God orders his chosen people to slaughter the inhabitants of the Holy Land. (Blessed shall you be when you dash their little ones’ heads against stones.) Only by betraying intellectual responsibility can anyone believe all three of these statements, even if all of them are contained within the ‘revealed’ text of the Bible. When we insist on believing contradictory assertions, we settle into a condition of spiritual schizophrenia in which faith and reason live in exile from each other.”
— Sam Keen, Hymns to an Unknown God, Bantam, New York, 1994 p103
“The minimum requirement for any belief system is that it be internally consistent. An inconsistent system is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. Self-contradiction, like the sound of metal grinding against metal in an engine, is a symptom of an impending breakdown. It is, for instance, inconsistent to claim that (1) God is love; (2); we, being created in the image of God, must love our neighbors as ourselves; and (3) God orders his chosen people to slaughter the inhabitants of the Holy Land. (Blessed shall you be when you dash their little ones’ heads against stones.) Only by betraying intellectual responsibility can anyone believe all three of these statements, even if all of them are contained within the ‘revealed’ text of the Bible. When we insist on believing contradictory assertions, we settle into a condition of spiritual schizophrenia in which faith and reason live in exile from each other.”
— Sam Keen, Hymns to an Unknown God, Bantam, New York, 1994 p103
Thomas Paine, English philosopher, political theorist, & revolutionary, 1737-1809
“To charge the commission of things upon the Almighty, which in their own nature, and by every rule of moral justice, are crimes, as all assassination is, and more especially the assassination of infants, is matter of serious concern. The Bible tells us, that those assassinations were done by the express command of God. To believe therefore the Bible to be true, we must unbelieve all our belief in the moral justice of God; for wherein could crying or smiling infants offend? And to read the Bible without horror, we must undo every thing that is tender, sympathising, and benevolent in the heart of man. Speaking for myself, if I had no other evidence that the Bible is fabulous, than the sacrifice I must make to believe it to be true, that alone would be sufficient to determine my choice.”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, 1988 p104-5
“To charge the commission of things upon the Almighty, which in their own nature, and by every rule of moral justice, are crimes, as all assassination is, and more especially the assassination of infants, is matter of serious concern. The Bible tells us, that those assassinations were done by the express command of God. To believe therefore the Bible to be true, we must unbelieve all our belief in the moral justice of God; for wherein could crying or smiling infants offend? And to read the Bible without horror, we must undo every thing that is tender, sympathising, and benevolent in the heart of man. Speaking for myself, if I had no other evidence that the Bible is fabulous, than the sacrifice I must make to believe it to be true, that alone would be sufficient to determine my choice.”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, 1988 p104-5
Sam Harris, PhD, American philosopher & neuroscientist, 1967-
“In the face of God’s obvious inadequacies, the pious have generally held that one cannot apply earthly norms to the Creator of the universe. This argument loses its force the moment we notice that the Creator who purports to be beyond human judgment is consistently ruled by human passions–jealousy, wrath, suspicion, and the lust to dominate. A close study of our holy books reveals that the God of Abraham is a ridiculous fellow–capricious, petulant, and cruel–and one with whom a covenant is little guarantee of health or happiness. If these are the characteristics of God, then the worst among us have been created far more in his image than we ever could have hoped.”
— Sam Harris, The End of Faith, W.W. Norton Company, New York, 2004 p173
“In the face of God’s obvious inadequacies, the pious have generally held that one cannot apply earthly norms to the Creator of the universe. This argument loses its force the moment we notice that the Creator who purports to be beyond human judgment is consistently ruled by human passions–jealousy, wrath, suspicion, and the lust to dominate. A close study of our holy books reveals that the God of Abraham is a ridiculous fellow–capricious, petulant, and cruel–and one with whom a covenant is little guarantee of health or happiness. If these are the characteristics of God, then the worst among us have been created far more in his image than we ever could have hoped.”
— Sam Harris, The End of Faith, W.W. Norton Company, New York, 2004 p173
Unquestioning belief requires suspension of moral values, including honesty and integrity, and therefore, is inherently immoral in and of itself.
Bertrand Russell, British philosopher & polymath, 1872-1970
“It is the question whether societies can practice a sufficient modicum of morality if they are not helped by dogmatic religion. I do not myself think that the dependence of morals upon religion is nearly as close as religious people believe it to be. I even think that some very important virtues are more likely to be found among those who reject religious dogmas than among those who accept them. I think this applies especially to the virtue of truthfulness or intellectual integrity. I mean by intellectual integrity the habit of deciding vexed questions in accordance with the evidence, or of leaving them undecided where the evidence is inconclusive. This virtue, though it is underestimated by almost all adherents of any system of dogma, is to my mind of the very greatest social importance and far more likely to benefit the world than Christianity or any other system of organized beliefs.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Can Religion Cure Our Troubles?” (1954) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p194
DIRECT ARGUMENTS
“It is the question whether societies can practice a sufficient modicum of morality if they are not helped by dogmatic religion. I do not myself think that the dependence of morals upon religion is nearly as close as religious people believe it to be. I even think that some very important virtues are more likely to be found among those who reject religious dogmas than among those who accept them. I think this applies especially to the virtue of truthfulness or intellectual integrity. I mean by intellectual integrity the habit of deciding vexed questions in accordance with the evidence, or of leaving them undecided where the evidence is inconclusive. This virtue, though it is underestimated by almost all adherents of any system of dogma, is to my mind of the very greatest social importance and far more likely to benefit the world than Christianity or any other system of organized beliefs.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Can Religion Cure Our Troubles?” (1954) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p194
2. Rebuttal:
Argument from Conscience
Argument from Conscience
Summary:
God’s eternal nature is morally consistent, and the source of human conscience & moral obligation. Even if different people’s conscience tells them to do different things, everyone agrees that following one’s conscience is a good idea.
Charles Darwin, English naturalist & creator of the theory of Natural Selection, 1809-1882
“When two tribes of primeval man, living in the same country, came into competition, if the one tribe included (other circumstances being equal) a greater number of courageous, sympathetic, and faithful members, who were always ready to warn each other of danger, to aid and defend each other, this tribe would without doubt succeed best and conquer the other ... Selfish and contentious people will not cohere, and without coherence nothing can be effected. A tribe possessing the above qualities in a high degree would spread and be victorious over other tribes; but in the course of time it would, judging from all past history, be in turn overcome by some other and still more highly-endowed tribe.”
— Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, D. Appleton & Company, 1872 p156 (quoted by Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p199-200)
“When two tribes of primeval man, living in the same country, came into competition, if the one tribe included (other circumstances being equal) a greater number of courageous, sympathetic, and faithful members, who were always ready to warn each other of danger, to aid and defend each other, this tribe would without doubt succeed best and conquer the other ... Selfish and contentious people will not cohere, and without coherence nothing can be effected. A tribe possessing the above qualities in a high degree would spread and be victorious over other tribes; but in the course of time it would, judging from all past history, be in turn overcome by some other and still more highly-endowed tribe.”
— Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, D. Appleton & Company, 1872 p156 (quoted by Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p199-200)
Robin Le Poidevin, British professor of metaphysics, 1962-
“...There is an alternative explanation of the source of conscience, and that is that it is the result of both positive and negative conditioning, in which good actions are rewarded and bad ones punished, making us anxious or fearful at the mere thought of performing or avoiding certain actions. We experience approbation and disapprobation when we are at a very young and impressionable age and we internalized these judgements. When we act, it is as if we are being watched by a parent or by someone who has authority over us, because those were exactly the conditions under which we took our first steps towards understanding right and wrong. There is an ineradicable association between act and judgement, so that the performance or contemplation of the former leads inexorably to the expectation of the latter. God, it might be argued, needn’t come into it.”
— Robin Le Poidevin, Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2020 p64
“...There is an alternative explanation of the source of conscience, and that is that it is the result of both positive and negative conditioning, in which good actions are rewarded and bad ones punished, making us anxious or fearful at the mere thought of performing or avoiding certain actions. We experience approbation and disapprobation when we are at a very young and impressionable age and we internalized these judgements. When we act, it is as if we are being watched by a parent or by someone who has authority over us, because those were exactly the conditions under which we took our first steps towards understanding right and wrong. There is an ineradicable association between act and judgement, so that the performance or contemplation of the former leads inexorably to the expectation of the latter. God, it might be argued, needn’t come into it.”
— Robin Le Poidevin, Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2020 p64
Richard Dawkins, PhD, British evolutionary biologist, 1941-
“Through most of our prehistory, humans lived under conditions that would have strongly favoured the evolution of all four kinds of altruism. We lived in villages, or earlier in discrete roving bands like baboons, partially isolated from neighbouring bands or villages. Most of your fellow band members would have been kin, more closely related to you than members of other bands – plenty of opportunities for kin altruism to evolve. And, whether kin or not, you would tend to meet the same individuals again and again throughout your life – ideal conditions for the evolution of reciprocal altruism. Those are also the ideal conditions for building a reputation for altruism, and the very same ideal conditions for adverising conspicuous generosity. By any or all of the four routes genetic tendencies towards altruism would have been favoured in early humans. It is easy to see why our prehistoric ancestors would have been good to their own in-group but bad – to the point of xenophobia – towards other groups. But why – now that most of us live in big cities where we are no longer surrounded by kin, and where every day we meet individuals whom we are never going to meet again – why are we still so good to each other, even sometimes to others who might be thought to belong to an out-group?
“It is important not to mis-state the reach of natural selection. Selection does not favour the evolution of a cognitive awareness of what is good for your genes. That awareness had to wait for the twentieth century to reach a cognitive level, and even now full understanding is confined to a minority of scientific specialists. What natural selection favours is rules of thumb, which work in practice to promote the genes that built them. Rules of thumb, by their nature, sometimes misfire. In a bird’s brain, the rule ‘Look after small squawking things in your nest, and drop food into their red gapes’ typically has the effect of preserving the genes that built the rule, because the squawking gaping objects in an adult bird’s nest are normally its own offspring. The rule misfires if another baby bird somehow gets into the nest, a circumstance that is positively engineered by cuckoos. Could it be that our Good Samaritan urges are misfirings, analogous to the misfiring of a reed warbler’s parental instincts when it works itself to the bone for a young cuckoo?... I must rush to add that ‘misfiring’ is intended only in a strictly Darwinian sense. It carries no suggestion of the pejorative...
“I am suggesting that the same is true of the urge to kindness – to altruism, to generosity, to empathy, to pity. In ancestral times, we had the opportunity to be altruistic only towards close kin and potential reciprocators. Nowadays that restriction is no longer there, but the rule of thumb persists. Why would it not? It is just like sexual desire. We can no more help ourselves feeling pity when we see a weeping unfortunate (who is unrelated and unable to reciprocate) than we can help ourselves feeling lust for another member of the opposite sex (who may be infertile or otherwise unable to reproduce). Both are misfirings, Darwinian mistakes: blessed, precious mistakes.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p251-253
“If our moral sense, like our sexual desire, is indeed rooted deep in our Darwinian past, predating religion, we should expect that research on the human mind would reveal some moral universals, crossing geographical and cultural barriers, and also, crucially, religious barriers. The Harvard biologist Marc Hauser, in his book Moral Minds: How Nature Designed our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, has enlarged upon a fruitful line of thought experiments originally suggested by moral philosophers. Hauser’s study will serve the additional purpose of introducing the way moral philosophers think. A hypothetical moral dilemma is posed, and the difficulty we experience in answering it tells us something about our sense of right and wrong. Where Hauser goes beyond the philosophers is that he actually does statistical surveys and psychological experiments, using questionnaires on the Internet, for example, to investigate the moral sense of real people. From the present point of view, the interesting thing is that most people come to the same decisions when faced with these dilemmas, and their agreement over the decisions themselves is stronger than their ability to articulate their reasons. This is what we should expect if we have moral sense which is built into our brains, like our sexual instinct or our fear of heights or, as Hauser himself prefers to say, like our capacity for language (the details vary from culture to culture, but the underlying deep structure of grammar is universal). As we shall see, the way people respond to these moral tests, and their inability to articulate their reasons, seems largely independent of their religious beliefs or lack of them. The message of Hauser’s book, to anticipate it in his own words, is this: ‘Driving our moral judgments is a universal moral grammar, a faculty of the mind that evolved over millions of years to include a set of principles for building a range of possible moral systems. As with language, the principles that make up our moral grammar fly beneath the radar of our awareness.’”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p254-255
“Through most of our prehistory, humans lived under conditions that would have strongly favoured the evolution of all four kinds of altruism. We lived in villages, or earlier in discrete roving bands like baboons, partially isolated from neighbouring bands or villages. Most of your fellow band members would have been kin, more closely related to you than members of other bands – plenty of opportunities for kin altruism to evolve. And, whether kin or not, you would tend to meet the same individuals again and again throughout your life – ideal conditions for the evolution of reciprocal altruism. Those are also the ideal conditions for building a reputation for altruism, and the very same ideal conditions for adverising conspicuous generosity. By any or all of the four routes genetic tendencies towards altruism would have been favoured in early humans. It is easy to see why our prehistoric ancestors would have been good to their own in-group but bad – to the point of xenophobia – towards other groups. But why – now that most of us live in big cities where we are no longer surrounded by kin, and where every day we meet individuals whom we are never going to meet again – why are we still so good to each other, even sometimes to others who might be thought to belong to an out-group?
“It is important not to mis-state the reach of natural selection. Selection does not favour the evolution of a cognitive awareness of what is good for your genes. That awareness had to wait for the twentieth century to reach a cognitive level, and even now full understanding is confined to a minority of scientific specialists. What natural selection favours is rules of thumb, which work in practice to promote the genes that built them. Rules of thumb, by their nature, sometimes misfire. In a bird’s brain, the rule ‘Look after small squawking things in your nest, and drop food into their red gapes’ typically has the effect of preserving the genes that built the rule, because the squawking gaping objects in an adult bird’s nest are normally its own offspring. The rule misfires if another baby bird somehow gets into the nest, a circumstance that is positively engineered by cuckoos. Could it be that our Good Samaritan urges are misfirings, analogous to the misfiring of a reed warbler’s parental instincts when it works itself to the bone for a young cuckoo?... I must rush to add that ‘misfiring’ is intended only in a strictly Darwinian sense. It carries no suggestion of the pejorative...
“I am suggesting that the same is true of the urge to kindness – to altruism, to generosity, to empathy, to pity. In ancestral times, we had the opportunity to be altruistic only towards close kin and potential reciprocators. Nowadays that restriction is no longer there, but the rule of thumb persists. Why would it not? It is just like sexual desire. We can no more help ourselves feeling pity when we see a weeping unfortunate (who is unrelated and unable to reciprocate) than we can help ourselves feeling lust for another member of the opposite sex (who may be infertile or otherwise unable to reproduce). Both are misfirings, Darwinian mistakes: blessed, precious mistakes.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p251-253
“If our moral sense, like our sexual desire, is indeed rooted deep in our Darwinian past, predating religion, we should expect that research on the human mind would reveal some moral universals, crossing geographical and cultural barriers, and also, crucially, religious barriers. The Harvard biologist Marc Hauser, in his book Moral Minds: How Nature Designed our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, has enlarged upon a fruitful line of thought experiments originally suggested by moral philosophers. Hauser’s study will serve the additional purpose of introducing the way moral philosophers think. A hypothetical moral dilemma is posed, and the difficulty we experience in answering it tells us something about our sense of right and wrong. Where Hauser goes beyond the philosophers is that he actually does statistical surveys and psychological experiments, using questionnaires on the Internet, for example, to investigate the moral sense of real people. From the present point of view, the interesting thing is that most people come to the same decisions when faced with these dilemmas, and their agreement over the decisions themselves is stronger than their ability to articulate their reasons. This is what we should expect if we have moral sense which is built into our brains, like our sexual instinct or our fear of heights or, as Hauser himself prefers to say, like our capacity for language (the details vary from culture to culture, but the underlying deep structure of grammar is universal). As we shall see, the way people respond to these moral tests, and their inability to articulate their reasons, seems largely independent of their religious beliefs or lack of them. The message of Hauser’s book, to anticipate it in his own words, is this: ‘Driving our moral judgments is a universal moral grammar, a faculty of the mind that evolved over millions of years to include a set of principles for building a range of possible moral systems. As with language, the principles that make up our moral grammar fly beneath the radar of our awareness.’”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p254-255
3. Rebuttal:
Divine Command Theory
Divine Command Theory
Summary:
Anything God commands is good, and anything that is good is because God commanded it.
The Euthyphro Dilemma
Socrates, Greek philosopher, 470-399BCE
SOCRATES: To the nature of omnibenevolence. God’s acts are good. Acts are good because they are commanded by God. So which came first?
EUTHYPHRO: Yes, I should say that what all the gods love is pious and holy, and the opposite which they all hate, impious.
SOCRATES: Ought we to enquire into the truth of this, Euthyphro, or simply to accept the mere statement on our own authority and that of others? What do you say?
EUTHYPHRO: We should enquire; and I believe that the statement will stand the test of enquiry.
SOCRATES: We shall know better, my good friend, in a little while. The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods.
— Socrates & Euthyphro, The Dialogues of Plato Vol. II, translated by B. Jowett, Oxford University Press, Third Ed., 1892
SOCRATES: To the nature of omnibenevolence. God’s acts are good. Acts are good because they are commanded by God. So which came first?
EUTHYPHRO: Yes, I should say that what all the gods love is pious and holy, and the opposite which they all hate, impious.
SOCRATES: Ought we to enquire into the truth of this, Euthyphro, or simply to accept the mere statement on our own authority and that of others? What do you say?
EUTHYPHRO: We should enquire; and I believe that the statement will stand the test of enquiry.
SOCRATES: We shall know better, my good friend, in a little while. The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods.
— Socrates & Euthyphro, The Dialogues of Plato Vol. II, translated by B. Jowett, Oxford University Press, Third Ed., 1892
Bertrand Russell, British philosopher & polymath, 1872-1970
“Kant, as I say, invented a new moral argument for the existence of God, and that in varying forms was extremely popular during the nineteenth century. It has all sorts of forms. One form is to say that there would be no right or wrong unless God existed. I am not for the moment concerned with whether there is a difference between right and wrong, or whether there is not: that is another question. The point I am concerned with is that, if you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, you are then in this situation: Is that difference due to God’s fiat or is it not? If it is due to God’s fiat, then for God himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good. If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent of God’s fiat, because God’s fiats are good and not bad independently of the mere fact that he made them. If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong came into being, but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God. You could, of course, if you liked, say that there was a superior deity who gave orders to the God who made this world, or could take up the line that some of the gnostics took up–a line which I often thought was a very plausible one–that as a matter of fact this world that we know was made by the devil at a moment when God was not looking. There is a good deal to be said for that, and I am not concerned to refute it.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” (1927) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p12
“...The whole contention that Christianity has had an elevating moral influence can only be maintained by wholesale ignoring or falsification of the historical evidence.
“...But in any case, what modern apologists call ‘true’ Christianity is something depending upon a very selective process. It ignores much that is to be found in the Gospels: for example, the parable of the sheep and the goats, and the doctrine that the wicked will suffer eternal torment in hell-fire. It picks out certain parts of the Sermon on the Mount, though even these it often rejects in practice. It leaves the doctrine of nonresistance, for example, to be practiced only by non-Christians such as Gandhi. The precepts that it particularly favors are held to embody such a lofty morality that they must have had a divine origin. And yet Professor Butterfield [Modern History, Cambridge, Christianity and History] must know that these precepts were all uttered by Jews before the time of Christ. They are to be found, for example, in the teaching of Hillel and in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, concerning which the Rev. Dr. R. H. Charles, a leading authority in this matter, says, ‘The Sermon on the Mount reflects in several instances the spirit and even reproduces the very phrases of our text: many passages in the Gospels exhibit traces of the same, and St. Paul seems to have used the book as a vade mecum.’ Dr. Charles is of the opinion that Christ must have been acquainted with this work. If, as we are sometimes told, the loftiness of the ethical teaching proves the divinity of its author, it is the unknown writer of these Testaments who must have been divine.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Can Religion Cure Our Troubles?” (1954) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p202-203
“Kant, as I say, invented a new moral argument for the existence of God, and that in varying forms was extremely popular during the nineteenth century. It has all sorts of forms. One form is to say that there would be no right or wrong unless God existed. I am not for the moment concerned with whether there is a difference between right and wrong, or whether there is not: that is another question. The point I am concerned with is that, if you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, you are then in this situation: Is that difference due to God’s fiat or is it not? If it is due to God’s fiat, then for God himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good. If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent of God’s fiat, because God’s fiats are good and not bad independently of the mere fact that he made them. If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong came into being, but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God. You could, of course, if you liked, say that there was a superior deity who gave orders to the God who made this world, or could take up the line that some of the gnostics took up–a line which I often thought was a very plausible one–that as a matter of fact this world that we know was made by the devil at a moment when God was not looking. There is a good deal to be said for that, and I am not concerned to refute it.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” (1927) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p12
“...The whole contention that Christianity has had an elevating moral influence can only be maintained by wholesale ignoring or falsification of the historical evidence.
“...But in any case, what modern apologists call ‘true’ Christianity is something depending upon a very selective process. It ignores much that is to be found in the Gospels: for example, the parable of the sheep and the goats, and the doctrine that the wicked will suffer eternal torment in hell-fire. It picks out certain parts of the Sermon on the Mount, though even these it often rejects in practice. It leaves the doctrine of nonresistance, for example, to be practiced only by non-Christians such as Gandhi. The precepts that it particularly favors are held to embody such a lofty morality that they must have had a divine origin. And yet Professor Butterfield [Modern History, Cambridge, Christianity and History] must know that these precepts were all uttered by Jews before the time of Christ. They are to be found, for example, in the teaching of Hillel and in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, concerning which the Rev. Dr. R. H. Charles, a leading authority in this matter, says, ‘The Sermon on the Mount reflects in several instances the spirit and even reproduces the very phrases of our text: many passages in the Gospels exhibit traces of the same, and St. Paul seems to have used the book as a vade mecum.’ Dr. Charles is of the opinion that Christ must have been acquainted with this work. If, as we are sometimes told, the loftiness of the ethical teaching proves the divinity of its author, it is the unknown writer of these Testaments who must have been divine.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Can Religion Cure Our Troubles?” (1954) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p202-203
Kai Nielsen, American Professor of Philosophy, 1926-2021
“About the first view first, namely, the belief that to have any kind of coherent moral belief at all, you must believe in God–believe, that is, in God in the sense or roughly the sense I defined–I think that just the reverse is true. I think, that is, that you cannot even have a coherent sense, if indeed it is a coherent sense, of God that the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions wish to have, at least as that has been developed without at least some prior moral understanding. That, in short, to oversimplify, instead of morality requiring religion, the very possibility of even understanding the concept of God and in making a religious response presupposes some minimal moral understanding...
“...I suppose you have read about theories of divine command morality. That is, moral theories which say that to know what is right, to know what is obligatory, even to know what is good, you have to know what God commands, God wills, God ordains. And whatever God wills and whatever God ordains, that establishes what is right and what is wrong. This is the divine command theory...
“...[Divine Command Theory] is, in its unmodified strong form, as you see in Emil Brunner, where you simply determine what is right by knowing what God wills, that you get a deep challenge to secularism. These accounts just assume that there is a God–it is just background assumption. That, they claim, settles what is right, no matter what it seems to human beings, no matter what our frail moral sense suggests. You must do it even if God orders to you kill your only son. If God orders you to do it, then it is right, no matter what He orders you to do. You would, no doubt, say He wouldn’t give you such orders, but if He did, you would still conclude that it is the right thing to do because whatever is right and whatever is wrong is determined by what God wills. We don’t have even to look at the content of His commands. You just have to know that they are His commands.
“I want to say, to understate it, that sort of ethic is clearly inadequate. It’s wrong, God or no God, to torture little children just for the fun of it. What basis we have for making that confident moral claim is another thing, but we know, if we know anything, if we have any moral understanding at all, that that is wrong. And moreover, to understand what you’re talking about, to understand that God, among other things, is a being worthy of worship and that God is said to be perfect, the perfect good, we need some logically prior understanding of those normative concepts. In order to understand that something is the perfect good, you have to understand what is good, and in order to understand that something is worthy of worship, you have to have at least some elementary criteria or understanding of what worthiness is, and that is not itself derived from God... Our understanding of these concepts is quite logically prior to any religious response.”
— Kai Nielsen, Does God Exist?, Prometheus Books, 1988 p98-100
“About the first view first, namely, the belief that to have any kind of coherent moral belief at all, you must believe in God–believe, that is, in God in the sense or roughly the sense I defined–I think that just the reverse is true. I think, that is, that you cannot even have a coherent sense, if indeed it is a coherent sense, of God that the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions wish to have, at least as that has been developed without at least some prior moral understanding. That, in short, to oversimplify, instead of morality requiring religion, the very possibility of even understanding the concept of God and in making a religious response presupposes some minimal moral understanding...
“...I suppose you have read about theories of divine command morality. That is, moral theories which say that to know what is right, to know what is obligatory, even to know what is good, you have to know what God commands, God wills, God ordains. And whatever God wills and whatever God ordains, that establishes what is right and what is wrong. This is the divine command theory...
“...[Divine Command Theory] is, in its unmodified strong form, as you see in Emil Brunner, where you simply determine what is right by knowing what God wills, that you get a deep challenge to secularism. These accounts just assume that there is a God–it is just background assumption. That, they claim, settles what is right, no matter what it seems to human beings, no matter what our frail moral sense suggests. You must do it even if God orders to you kill your only son. If God orders you to do it, then it is right, no matter what He orders you to do. You would, no doubt, say He wouldn’t give you such orders, but if He did, you would still conclude that it is the right thing to do because whatever is right and whatever is wrong is determined by what God wills. We don’t have even to look at the content of His commands. You just have to know that they are His commands.
“I want to say, to understate it, that sort of ethic is clearly inadequate. It’s wrong, God or no God, to torture little children just for the fun of it. What basis we have for making that confident moral claim is another thing, but we know, if we know anything, if we have any moral understanding at all, that that is wrong. And moreover, to understand what you’re talking about, to understand that God, among other things, is a being worthy of worship and that God is said to be perfect, the perfect good, we need some logically prior understanding of those normative concepts. In order to understand that something is the perfect good, you have to understand what is good, and in order to understand that something is worthy of worship, you have to have at least some elementary criteria or understanding of what worthiness is, and that is not itself derived from God... Our understanding of these concepts is quite logically prior to any religious response.”
— Kai Nielsen, Does God Exist?, Prometheus Books, 1988 p98-100
Elmer Leon Towns, American professor of theology & pastor, 1932-
“...Conceived within the mind of the scholastic teachings of Spinoza and Professor Bauer of Tubingen, is the view that sin is a necessary cause that stems from our finite being. God, as the absolute substance, is good. However, man, not an absolute substance, is finite. His limitation of being is evil, or sinful. The lack of total virtue and being implies a limitation of being or inherent weakness, thus sin...
“According to this view, sin does not assume a quality role. Rather, sin stems directly from a quantity of being. Absolute being is absolute good. Anything less than absolute is evil...
“Objections to this view are as follows: (a) The salient indictment to this view centers on the One who is ultimately responsible for man’s sin. God... (b) Taken to its logical extreme, this view would condemn Christ as a sinner... (c) This view also ignores the difference between moral and physical existence. Men commit sins with their physical bodies, but the desire to sin may stem from the intellect, emotions, or will, residing in the heart. Determining the difference between right and wrong deeds is not a metaphysical issue, it is a moral issue. The barometer for recognizing sin is not human ability, but the revealed moral law of God. Permitting the notion that ability is good to expand to its logical end, then mere strength and power are morally right. [Charles] Hodge correctly traces the obvious weakness with this thinking.
“‘It not only teaches that all that is, is right; that everything that exists or happens has a right to be, but that the only standard of virtue is power. The strongest is the best. As Cousin says, the victor is always right; the victim is always wrong. The conqueror is always more moral than the vanquished. Virtue and prosperity, misfortune and vice, he says, are in necessary harmony. Feebleness is a vice (i.e., sin), and therefore is always punished and beaten. This principle is adopted by all such writers as Carlyle, who in their hero worship, make the strong always the good; and represent the murderer, the pirate, and the persecutor, as always more moral and more worthy of admiration than their victims. Satan is far more worthy of homage than the best of men, as in him there is more of being and power, and he is the seducer of angels and the destroyer of men. A more thoroughly demoniacal system than this, the mind of man has never conceived. Yet this system has not only its philosophical advocates, and its practical disciples, but it percolates through much of the popular literature both of Europe and America.’”
— Elmer L. Towns, Theology for Today, Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2002 p513-514 (enclosed quote by Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Eerdmans, 1975 p134)
“...Conceived within the mind of the scholastic teachings of Spinoza and Professor Bauer of Tubingen, is the view that sin is a necessary cause that stems from our finite being. God, as the absolute substance, is good. However, man, not an absolute substance, is finite. His limitation of being is evil, or sinful. The lack of total virtue and being implies a limitation of being or inherent weakness, thus sin...
“According to this view, sin does not assume a quality role. Rather, sin stems directly from a quantity of being. Absolute being is absolute good. Anything less than absolute is evil...
“Objections to this view are as follows: (a) The salient indictment to this view centers on the One who is ultimately responsible for man’s sin. God... (b) Taken to its logical extreme, this view would condemn Christ as a sinner... (c) This view also ignores the difference between moral and physical existence. Men commit sins with their physical bodies, but the desire to sin may stem from the intellect, emotions, or will, residing in the heart. Determining the difference between right and wrong deeds is not a metaphysical issue, it is a moral issue. The barometer for recognizing sin is not human ability, but the revealed moral law of God. Permitting the notion that ability is good to expand to its logical end, then mere strength and power are morally right. [Charles] Hodge correctly traces the obvious weakness with this thinking.
“‘It not only teaches that all that is, is right; that everything that exists or happens has a right to be, but that the only standard of virtue is power. The strongest is the best. As Cousin says, the victor is always right; the victim is always wrong. The conqueror is always more moral than the vanquished. Virtue and prosperity, misfortune and vice, he says, are in necessary harmony. Feebleness is a vice (i.e., sin), and therefore is always punished and beaten. This principle is adopted by all such writers as Carlyle, who in their hero worship, make the strong always the good; and represent the murderer, the pirate, and the persecutor, as always more moral and more worthy of admiration than their victims. Satan is far more worthy of homage than the best of men, as in him there is more of being and power, and he is the seducer of angels and the destroyer of men. A more thoroughly demoniacal system than this, the mind of man has never conceived. Yet this system has not only its philosophical advocates, and its practical disciples, but it percolates through much of the popular literature both of Europe and America.’”
— Elmer L. Towns, Theology for Today, Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2002 p513-514 (enclosed quote by Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Eerdmans, 1975 p134)
4. Rebuttal:
Moral Argument from the Consequences of Atheism
Moral Argument from the Consequences of Atheism
Summary:
God is the source of objective morality. Without God, people will be driven by their most base instincts.
Sam Harris, PhD, American philosopher & neuroscientist, 1967-
“To treat others ethically is to act out of concern for their happiness and suffering. It is, as Kant observed, to treat them as ends in themselves rather than as a means to some further end. Many ethical injunctions converge here–Kant’s categorical imperative, Jesus’ golden rule–but the basic facts are these: we experience happiness and suffering ourselves; we encounter others in the world and recognize that they experience happiness and suffering as well; we soon discover that ‘love’ is largely a matter of wishing that others experience happiness rather than suffering; and most of us come to feel that love is more conducive to happiness, both our own and that of others, than hate. There is a circle here that links us to one another: we each want to be happy; the social feeling of love is one of our greatest sources of happiness; and love entails that we be concerned for the happiness of others. We discover that we can be selfish together.”
— Sam Harris, The End of Faith, W.W. Norton Company, New York, 2004 p186-87
“To treat others ethically is to act out of concern for their happiness and suffering. It is, as Kant observed, to treat them as ends in themselves rather than as a means to some further end. Many ethical injunctions converge here–Kant’s categorical imperative, Jesus’ golden rule–but the basic facts are these: we experience happiness and suffering ourselves; we encounter others in the world and recognize that they experience happiness and suffering as well; we soon discover that ‘love’ is largely a matter of wishing that others experience happiness rather than suffering; and most of us come to feel that love is more conducive to happiness, both our own and that of others, than hate. There is a circle here that links us to one another: we each want to be happy; the social feeling of love is one of our greatest sources of happiness; and love entails that we be concerned for the happiness of others. We discover that we can be selfish together.”
— Sam Harris, The End of Faith, W.W. Norton Company, New York, 2004 p186-87
Thomas Paine, English philosopher, political theorist, & revolutionary, 1737-1809
“Moral principle speaks universally for itself. Miracle could be but a thing of the moment, and seen but by a few; after this it requires a transfer of faith from God to man to believe a miracle upon man’s report. Instead, therefore, of admitting the recitals of miracles as evidence of any system of religion being true, they ought to be considered as symptoms of its being fabulous. It is necessary to the full and upright character of truth that it rejects the crutch; and it is consistent with the character of fable to seek the aid that truth rejects.”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, 1988 p96
“Moral principle speaks universally for itself. Miracle could be but a thing of the moment, and seen but by a few; after this it requires a transfer of faith from God to man to believe a miracle upon man’s report. Instead, therefore, of admitting the recitals of miracles as evidence of any system of religion being true, they ought to be considered as symptoms of its being fabulous. It is necessary to the full and upright character of truth that it rejects the crutch; and it is consistent with the character of fable to seek the aid that truth rejects.”
— Thomas Paine, Age of Reason, Citadel Press, 1988 p96
Richard Dawkins, PhD, British evolutionary biologist, 1941-
“Of particular interest for this book, [Marc] Hauser also wondered whether religious people differ from atheists in their moral intuitions. Surely, if we get our morality from religion, they should differ. But it seems that they don’t. Hauser, working with the moral philosopher Peter Singer, focused [his study] on three hypothetical dilemmas and compared the verdicts of atheists with those of religious people. In each case, the subjects were asked to choose whether a hypothetical action is morally ‘obligatory,’ ‘permissible’ or ‘forbidden.’ The three dilemmas were:
“1. Denise’s dilemma. Ninety per cent of people said it as permissible to divert the trolley, killing the one to save the five.
“2. You see a child drowning in a pond and there is no other help in sight. You can save the child, but your trousers will be ruined in the process. Ninety-seven per cent agreed that you should save the child (amazingly, 2 per cent apparently would prefer to save their trousers).
“3. The organ transplant dilemma described above. Ninety-seven per cent of subjects agreed that it is morally forbidden to seize the healthy person in the waiting-room and kill him for his organs, thereby saving five other people.
“The main conclusion of Hauser and Singer’s study was that there is no statistically significant difference between atheists and religious believers in making these judgements. This seems compatible with the view, which I and many others hold, that we do not need God in order to be good – or evil.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p258
“...Gregory S. Paul, in the Journal of Religion and Society (2005), systematically compared seventeen economically developed nations, and reached the devastating conclusion that ‘higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.’...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p262-263
“Of particular interest for this book, [Marc] Hauser also wondered whether religious people differ from atheists in their moral intuitions. Surely, if we get our morality from religion, they should differ. But it seems that they don’t. Hauser, working with the moral philosopher Peter Singer, focused [his study] on three hypothetical dilemmas and compared the verdicts of atheists with those of religious people. In each case, the subjects were asked to choose whether a hypothetical action is morally ‘obligatory,’ ‘permissible’ or ‘forbidden.’ The three dilemmas were:
“1. Denise’s dilemma. Ninety per cent of people said it as permissible to divert the trolley, killing the one to save the five.
“2. You see a child drowning in a pond and there is no other help in sight. You can save the child, but your trousers will be ruined in the process. Ninety-seven per cent agreed that you should save the child (amazingly, 2 per cent apparently would prefer to save their trousers).
“3. The organ transplant dilemma described above. Ninety-seven per cent of subjects agreed that it is morally forbidden to seize the healthy person in the waiting-room and kill him for his organs, thereby saving five other people.
“The main conclusion of Hauser and Singer’s study was that there is no statistically significant difference between atheists and religious believers in making these judgements. This seems compatible with the view, which I and many others hold, that we do not need God in order to be good – or evil.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p258
“...Gregory S. Paul, in the Journal of Religion and Society (2005), systematically compared seventeen economically developed nations, and reached the devastating conclusion that ‘higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.’...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p262-263
5. Rebuttal:
Belief in God makes people behave better.
Belief in God makes people behave better.
Summary:
People are inspired by a belief in God to improve the lives of themselves and others.
Bertrand Russell, British philosopher & polymath, 1872-1970
“No reason can be assigned as to why certain acts should be thus displeasing; it would be very difficult to say, for instance, why it was displeasing that the kid should be seethed in its mother’s milk. But it was known by Revelation that this was the case. Sometimes the Divine commands have been curiously interpreted. For example, we are told not to work on Saturdays, and Protestants take this to mean that we are not to play on Sundays. But the same sublime authority is attributed to the new prohibition as to the old.
“It is evident that a man with a scientific outlook on life cannot let himself be intimidated by texts of Scripture or by the teaching of the church. He will not be content to say ‘such-and-such an act is sinful, and that ends the matter.’ He will inquire whether it does any harm or whether, on the contrary, the belief that it is sinful does harm. And he will find that, especially in what concerns sex, our current morality contains a very great deal of which the origin is purely superstitious. He will find also that this superstition, like that of the Aztecs, involves needless cruelty, and would be swept away if people were actuated by kindly feelings toward their neighbors. But the defenders of traditional morality are seldom people with warm hearts, as may be seen from the love of the militarism displayed by church dignitaries. One is tempted to think that they value morals as affording a legitimate outlet for their desire to inflict pain; the sinner is fair game, and therefore away with tolerance!”
— Bertrand Russell, “What I Believe,” (1925) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p65-66
“It would be a good thing if people loved their neighbors, but they do not show much inclination to do so; Christ said they ought to, and if they believe that Christ was God, they are more likely to pay attention to his teachings on this point than if they do not; therefore, men who wish people to love their neighbors will try to persuade them that Christ was God.
“The objections to this kind of argumentation are so many that it is difficult to know where to begin. In the first place, [Herbert Butterfield, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, who argued in favor of Christianity in Christianity and History,] and all who think as he does are persuaded that it is a good thing to love your neighbor, and their reasons for holding this view are not derived from Christ’s teaching. On the contrary, it is because they already hold this view that they regard Christ’s teaching as evidence of his divinity. They have, that is to say, not an ethic based on theology but a theology based on their ethic. They apparently hold, however, that the non-theological grounds which make them think it a good thing to love your neighbor are not likely to make a wide appeal, and they therefore proceed to invent other arguments which they hope will be more effective. This is a very dangerous procedure. Many Protestants used to think it as wicked to break the Sabbath as to commit murder. If you persuaded them it was not wicked to break the Sabbath, they might infer that it was not wicked to commit murder. Every theological ethic is in part such as can be defended rationally, and in part a mere embodiment of superstitious taboos. The part which can be defended rationally should be so defended, since otherwise those who discover the irrationality of the other part may rashly reject the whole.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Can Religion Cure Our Troubles?” (1954) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p201
“No reason can be assigned as to why certain acts should be thus displeasing; it would be very difficult to say, for instance, why it was displeasing that the kid should be seethed in its mother’s milk. But it was known by Revelation that this was the case. Sometimes the Divine commands have been curiously interpreted. For example, we are told not to work on Saturdays, and Protestants take this to mean that we are not to play on Sundays. But the same sublime authority is attributed to the new prohibition as to the old.
“It is evident that a man with a scientific outlook on life cannot let himself be intimidated by texts of Scripture or by the teaching of the church. He will not be content to say ‘such-and-such an act is sinful, and that ends the matter.’ He will inquire whether it does any harm or whether, on the contrary, the belief that it is sinful does harm. And he will find that, especially in what concerns sex, our current morality contains a very great deal of which the origin is purely superstitious. He will find also that this superstition, like that of the Aztecs, involves needless cruelty, and would be swept away if people were actuated by kindly feelings toward their neighbors. But the defenders of traditional morality are seldom people with warm hearts, as may be seen from the love of the militarism displayed by church dignitaries. One is tempted to think that they value morals as affording a legitimate outlet for their desire to inflict pain; the sinner is fair game, and therefore away with tolerance!”
— Bertrand Russell, “What I Believe,” (1925) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p65-66
“It would be a good thing if people loved their neighbors, but they do not show much inclination to do so; Christ said they ought to, and if they believe that Christ was God, they are more likely to pay attention to his teachings on this point than if they do not; therefore, men who wish people to love their neighbors will try to persuade them that Christ was God.
“The objections to this kind of argumentation are so many that it is difficult to know where to begin. In the first place, [Herbert Butterfield, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, who argued in favor of Christianity in Christianity and History,] and all who think as he does are persuaded that it is a good thing to love your neighbor, and their reasons for holding this view are not derived from Christ’s teaching. On the contrary, it is because they already hold this view that they regard Christ’s teaching as evidence of his divinity. They have, that is to say, not an ethic based on theology but a theology based on their ethic. They apparently hold, however, that the non-theological grounds which make them think it a good thing to love your neighbor are not likely to make a wide appeal, and they therefore proceed to invent other arguments which they hope will be more effective. This is a very dangerous procedure. Many Protestants used to think it as wicked to break the Sabbath as to commit murder. If you persuaded them it was not wicked to break the Sabbath, they might infer that it was not wicked to commit murder. Every theological ethic is in part such as can be defended rationally, and in part a mere embodiment of superstitious taboos. The part which can be defended rationally should be so defended, since otherwise those who discover the irrationality of the other part may rashly reject the whole.”
— Bertrand Russell, “Can Religion Cure Our Troubles?” (1954) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p201
Richard Dawkins, PhD, British evolutionary biologist, 1941-
“This chapter began by showing that we do not – even the religious among us – ground our morality in holy books, no matter what we may fondly imagine. How, then, do we decide what is right and what is wrong? No matter how we answer that question, there is a consensus about what we do as a matter of fact consider right and wrong: a consensus that prevails surprisingly widely. The consensus has no obvious connection with religion. It extends, however, to most religious people, whether or not they think their morals come from scripture. With notable exceptions such as the Afghan Taliban and the American Christian equivalent, most people pay lip service to the same broad liberal consensus of ethical principles. The majority of us don’t cause needless suffering; we believe in free speech and protect it even if we disagree with what is being said; we pay our taxes; we don’t cheat, don’t kill, don’t commit incest, don’t do things to others that we would not wish done to us. Some of these good principles can be found in holy books, but buried alongside much else that no decent person would wish to follow: and the holy books do not supply any rules for distinguishing the good principles from the bad.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p298
“...When a religious person puts it to me in this way (and many of them do), my immediate temptation is to issue the following challenge: ‘Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God’s approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That’s not morality, that’s just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base thought.’ As Einstein said, ‘If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.’ Michael Shermer, in The Science of Good and Evil, calls it a debate stopper. If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would ‘commit robbery, rape, and murder,’ you reveal yourself as an immoral person, ‘and we would be well advised to steer a wide course around you.’ If, on the other hand, you admit that you would continue to be a good person even when not under divine surveillance, you have fatally undermined your claim that God is necessary for us to be good. I suspect that quite a lot of religious people do think religion is what motivates them to be good, especially if they belong to one of those faiths that systematically exploits personal guilt.“It seems to me to require quite a low self-regard to think that, should belief in God suddenly vanish from the world, we would all become callous and selfish hedonists, with no kindness, no charity, no generosity, nothing that would deserve the name of goodness...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p259
“To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and ‘improved’ by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries. This may explain some of the sheer strangeness of the Bible. But unfortunately it is this same weird volume that religious zealots hold up to us as the inerrant source of our morals and rules for living. Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it, as Bishop John Shelby Spong, in The Sins of Scripture, rightly observed...
“Begin in Genesis with the well-loved story of Noah, derived from the Babylonian myth of Uta-Napisthim and known from the older mythologies of several cultures. The legend of the animals going into the ark two by two is charming, but the moral of the story of Noah is appalling. God took a dim view of humans, so he (with the exception of one family) drowned the lot of them including children and also, for good measure, the rest of the (presumably blameless) animals as well.
“Of course, irritated theologians will protest that we don’t take the book of Genesis literally any more. But that is my whole point! We pick and choose which bits of scripture to believe, which bits to write off as symbols or allegories. Such picking and choosing is a matter of personal decision, just as much, or as little, as the atheist’s decision to follow this moral precept or that was a personal decision, without an absolute foundation. If one of these is ‘morality flying by the seat of its pants,’ so is the other.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p268-269
“Well, there’s no denying that, from a moral point of view, Jesus is a huge improvement over the cruel ogre of the Old Testament. Indeed Jesus, if he existed (or whoever wrote his script if he didn’t) was surely one of the great ethical innovators of history. The Sermon on the Mount is way ahead of its time. His ‘turn the other cheek’ anticipated Gandhi and Martin Luther King by two thousand years. It was not for nothing that I wrote an article called ‘Atheists for Jesus’ (and was later delighted to be presented with a T-shirt bearing the legend).
“But the moral superiority of Jesus precisely bears out my point. Jesus was not content to derive his ethics from the scriptures of his upbringing. He explicitly departed from them, for example, when he deflated the dire warnings about breaking the sabbath. ‘The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath’ has been generalized into a wise proverb. Since a principle thesis of this chapter is that we do not, and should not, derive our morals from scripture, Jesus has to be honoured as a model for that very thesis.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p283-284
“But does [Stephen Jay] Gould really want to cede to religion the right to tell us what is good and what is bad? The fact that it has nothing else to contribute to human wisdom is no reason to hand religion a free license to tell us what to do. Which religion, anyway? The one in which we happen to have been brought up? To which chapter, then, of which book of the Bible should we turn – for they are far from unanimous and some of them are odious by any reasonable standards. How many literalists have read enough of the Bible to know that the death penalty is prescribed for adultery, for gathering sticks on the sabbath and for checking your parents? If we reject Deuteronomy and Leviticus (as all enlightened moderns do), by what criteria do we then decide which of religion’s moral values to accept? Or should we pick and choose among all the world’s religions until we find one whose moral teaching suits us? If so, again we must ask, by what criterion do we choose? And if we have independent criteria for choosing among religious moralities, why not cut out the middle man and go straight for the moral choice without the religion?...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p80-81
“My main purpose here has not been to show that we shouldn’t get our morals from scripture (although that is my opinion). My purpose has been to demonstrate that we (and that includes most religious people) as a matter of fact don’t get our morals from scripture. If we did, we would strictly observe the sabbath and think it just and proper to execute anybody who chose not to. We would stone to death any new bride who couldn’t prove she was a virgin, if her husband pronounced himself unsatisfied with her. We would execute disobedient children...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p283
“This chapter began by showing that we do not – even the religious among us – ground our morality in holy books, no matter what we may fondly imagine. How, then, do we decide what is right and what is wrong? No matter how we answer that question, there is a consensus about what we do as a matter of fact consider right and wrong: a consensus that prevails surprisingly widely. The consensus has no obvious connection with religion. It extends, however, to most religious people, whether or not they think their morals come from scripture. With notable exceptions such as the Afghan Taliban and the American Christian equivalent, most people pay lip service to the same broad liberal consensus of ethical principles. The majority of us don’t cause needless suffering; we believe in free speech and protect it even if we disagree with what is being said; we pay our taxes; we don’t cheat, don’t kill, don’t commit incest, don’t do things to others that we would not wish done to us. Some of these good principles can be found in holy books, but buried alongside much else that no decent person would wish to follow: and the holy books do not supply any rules for distinguishing the good principles from the bad.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p298
“...When a religious person puts it to me in this way (and many of them do), my immediate temptation is to issue the following challenge: ‘Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God’s approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That’s not morality, that’s just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base thought.’ As Einstein said, ‘If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.’ Michael Shermer, in The Science of Good and Evil, calls it a debate stopper. If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would ‘commit robbery, rape, and murder,’ you reveal yourself as an immoral person, ‘and we would be well advised to steer a wide course around you.’ If, on the other hand, you admit that you would continue to be a good person even when not under divine surveillance, you have fatally undermined your claim that God is necessary for us to be good. I suspect that quite a lot of religious people do think religion is what motivates them to be good, especially if they belong to one of those faiths that systematically exploits personal guilt.“It seems to me to require quite a low self-regard to think that, should belief in God suddenly vanish from the world, we would all become callous and selfish hedonists, with no kindness, no charity, no generosity, nothing that would deserve the name of goodness...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p259
“To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and ‘improved’ by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries. This may explain some of the sheer strangeness of the Bible. But unfortunately it is this same weird volume that religious zealots hold up to us as the inerrant source of our morals and rules for living. Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it, as Bishop John Shelby Spong, in The Sins of Scripture, rightly observed...
“Begin in Genesis with the well-loved story of Noah, derived from the Babylonian myth of Uta-Napisthim and known from the older mythologies of several cultures. The legend of the animals going into the ark two by two is charming, but the moral of the story of Noah is appalling. God took a dim view of humans, so he (with the exception of one family) drowned the lot of them including children and also, for good measure, the rest of the (presumably blameless) animals as well.
“Of course, irritated theologians will protest that we don’t take the book of Genesis literally any more. But that is my whole point! We pick and choose which bits of scripture to believe, which bits to write off as symbols or allegories. Such picking and choosing is a matter of personal decision, just as much, or as little, as the atheist’s decision to follow this moral precept or that was a personal decision, without an absolute foundation. If one of these is ‘morality flying by the seat of its pants,’ so is the other.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p268-269
“Well, there’s no denying that, from a moral point of view, Jesus is a huge improvement over the cruel ogre of the Old Testament. Indeed Jesus, if he existed (or whoever wrote his script if he didn’t) was surely one of the great ethical innovators of history. The Sermon on the Mount is way ahead of its time. His ‘turn the other cheek’ anticipated Gandhi and Martin Luther King by two thousand years. It was not for nothing that I wrote an article called ‘Atheists for Jesus’ (and was later delighted to be presented with a T-shirt bearing the legend).
“But the moral superiority of Jesus precisely bears out my point. Jesus was not content to derive his ethics from the scriptures of his upbringing. He explicitly departed from them, for example, when he deflated the dire warnings about breaking the sabbath. ‘The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath’ has been generalized into a wise proverb. Since a principle thesis of this chapter is that we do not, and should not, derive our morals from scripture, Jesus has to be honoured as a model for that very thesis.”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p283-284
“But does [Stephen Jay] Gould really want to cede to religion the right to tell us what is good and what is bad? The fact that it has nothing else to contribute to human wisdom is no reason to hand religion a free license to tell us what to do. Which religion, anyway? The one in which we happen to have been brought up? To which chapter, then, of which book of the Bible should we turn – for they are far from unanimous and some of them are odious by any reasonable standards. How many literalists have read enough of the Bible to know that the death penalty is prescribed for adultery, for gathering sticks on the sabbath and for checking your parents? If we reject Deuteronomy and Leviticus (as all enlightened moderns do), by what criteria do we then decide which of religion’s moral values to accept? Or should we pick and choose among all the world’s religions until we find one whose moral teaching suits us? If so, again we must ask, by what criterion do we choose? And if we have independent criteria for choosing among religious moralities, why not cut out the middle man and go straight for the moral choice without the religion?...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p80-81
“My main purpose here has not been to show that we shouldn’t get our morals from scripture (although that is my opinion). My purpose has been to demonstrate that we (and that includes most religious people) as a matter of fact don’t get our morals from scripture. If we did, we would strictly observe the sabbath and think it just and proper to execute anybody who chose not to. We would stone to death any new bride who couldn’t prove she was a virgin, if her husband pronounced himself unsatisfied with her. We would execute disobedient children...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p283
Kai Nielsen, American Professor of Philosophy, 1926-2021
“I want to take up the claim that argues, and sometimes with considerable force, that the best of religious moralities, though not all religious moralities, are far more worthy of acceptance that even the best of secular moralities...
“First, what grounds lead religious moralists to make such assertions? Why do they believe that a fully adequate religious morality would be a more adequate morality than any humanistic secular morality? Well, one of the claims, and an important one, is that religious moralities answer more deeply to our deepest human needs. This, of course, goes with a background assumption–an assumption I am perfectly comfortable with–that an adequate morality is a morality that will meet human needs. It will not be a morality so concerned with rights and duties that it will ignore the importance of meeting human needs...
“So you start with these considered judgments. You get [the judgments] into a coherent packet with themselves and everything else we know; that’s as much–indeed it’s the only kind–of objectivity I think you can get in ethics. But I want to point out that the religious moralist is exactly in the same boat. He doesn’t have any better or any worse objectivity. Because suppose he says, ‘We should love God,’ and then further suppose we ask the religious moralist, ’Why love God? Why do, or try to do, the will of God? Why obey God’s commands?’ He basically would have to say, ‘Because God is the perfect good, and God with His perfect goodness reveals to us the great value of self-respect for people. He shows that people are of infinite precious worth.’ But even if you accept all this, you could go on to ask, ‘Why should you care? What difference does it make anyway whether people are of infinite precious worth?’ Faced with such questioning, you will finally be pushed into a corner, where you say that ‘It is important to me that people be regarded as being of infinite worth because I just happen to care about people. It means something to me that people should be treated with respect.’
“So the religious moralist as well has to rely finally on his considered convictions. So if that is too subjective a ground–that is, grounding things in considered judgments in wide reflective equilibrium–then both the religious person and the secular person are in the same boat, though he [the religious person] has all these cosmological claims he might appeal to in backing his moral judgments. Nonetheless, you can ask, ‘Why pay attention to these cosmological claims?’ ‘It simply,’ you might respond, ‘rests on a judgment about the importance of truth.’ ‘Why should you,’ Nietzsche asks, ‘pay attention to the truth?’ You might say, ‘It is what you ought to do–you must simply pay attention to the truth.’ So there are these deep considered judgments that underlie our moral response, and which we justify by getting them into coherent patterns with everything else we know.”
— Kai Nielsen, Does God Exist?, Prometheus Books, 1988 p100-101, 107-108
“I want to take up the claim that argues, and sometimes with considerable force, that the best of religious moralities, though not all religious moralities, are far more worthy of acceptance that even the best of secular moralities...
“First, what grounds lead religious moralists to make such assertions? Why do they believe that a fully adequate religious morality would be a more adequate morality than any humanistic secular morality? Well, one of the claims, and an important one, is that religious moralities answer more deeply to our deepest human needs. This, of course, goes with a background assumption–an assumption I am perfectly comfortable with–that an adequate morality is a morality that will meet human needs. It will not be a morality so concerned with rights and duties that it will ignore the importance of meeting human needs...
“So you start with these considered judgments. You get [the judgments] into a coherent packet with themselves and everything else we know; that’s as much–indeed it’s the only kind–of objectivity I think you can get in ethics. But I want to point out that the religious moralist is exactly in the same boat. He doesn’t have any better or any worse objectivity. Because suppose he says, ‘We should love God,’ and then further suppose we ask the religious moralist, ’Why love God? Why do, or try to do, the will of God? Why obey God’s commands?’ He basically would have to say, ‘Because God is the perfect good, and God with His perfect goodness reveals to us the great value of self-respect for people. He shows that people are of infinite precious worth.’ But even if you accept all this, you could go on to ask, ‘Why should you care? What difference does it make anyway whether people are of infinite precious worth?’ Faced with such questioning, you will finally be pushed into a corner, where you say that ‘It is important to me that people be regarded as being of infinite worth because I just happen to care about people. It means something to me that people should be treated with respect.’
“So the religious moralist as well has to rely finally on his considered convictions. So if that is too subjective a ground–that is, grounding things in considered judgments in wide reflective equilibrium–then both the religious person and the secular person are in the same boat, though he [the religious person] has all these cosmological claims he might appeal to in backing his moral judgments. Nonetheless, you can ask, ‘Why pay attention to these cosmological claims?’ ‘It simply,’ you might respond, ‘rests on a judgment about the importance of truth.’ ‘Why should you,’ Nietzsche asks, ‘pay attention to the truth?’ You might say, ‘It is what you ought to do–you must simply pay attention to the truth.’ So there are these deep considered judgments that underlie our moral response, and which we justify by getting them into coherent patterns with everything else we know.”
— Kai Nielsen, Does God Exist?, Prometheus Books, 1988 p100-101, 107-108
John Hartung, American professor of anesthesiology, 1947-
“The Bible is a blueprint of in-group morality, complete with instructions for genocide, enslavement of out-groups, and world domination. But the Bible is not evil by virtue of its objectives or even its glorification of murder, cruelty, and rape. Many ancient works do that – The Iliad, the Icelandic Sagas, the tales of the ancient Syrians and the inscriptions of the ancient Mayans, for example. But no one is selling the Iliad as a foundation for morality. Therein lies the problem. The Bible is sold, and bought, as a guide to how people should live their lives. And it is, by far, the world’s all-time best seller.”
— John Hartung (quoted by Richard Dawkins), The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p293
“The Bible is a blueprint of in-group morality, complete with instructions for genocide, enslavement of out-groups, and world domination. But the Bible is not evil by virtue of its objectives or even its glorification of murder, cruelty, and rape. Many ancient works do that – The Iliad, the Icelandic Sagas, the tales of the ancient Syrians and the inscriptions of the ancient Mayans, for example. But no one is selling the Iliad as a foundation for morality. Therein lies the problem. The Bible is sold, and bought, as a guide to how people should live their lives. And it is, by far, the world’s all-time best seller.”
— John Hartung (quoted by Richard Dawkins), The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p293
6. Rebuttal:
Pascal’s Wager
Pascal’s Wager
Summary:
A. God either exists or does not exist.
B. God punishes those who do not do God’s will.
C. If God does not exist, death is the end, and one can live freely for a few years. If God does exist, then not following God’s laws means eternal suffering.
D. It is better to wager on God’s existence, and live accordingly.
B. God punishes those who do not do God’s will.
C. If God does not exist, death is the end, and one can live freely for a few years. If God does exist, then not following God’s laws means eternal suffering.
D. It is better to wager on God’s existence, and live accordingly.
Richard Dawkins, PhD, British evolutionary biologist, 1941-
“The great French mathematician Blaise Pascal reckoned that however long the odds against God’s existence might be, there is an even larger asymmetry in the penalty for guessing wrong. You’d better believe in God, because if you are right you stand to gain eternal bliss and if you are wrong it won’t make any difference anyway. On the other hand, if you don’t believe in God and you turn out to be wrong you get eternal damnation, whereas if you are right it makes no difference. On the face of it the decision is a no-brainer. Believe in God.
“There is something distinctly odd about the argument, however. Believing is not something you can decide to do as a matter of policy. At least, it is not something I can decide to do as an act of will. I can decide to go to church and I can decide to recite the Nicene Creed, and I can decide to swear on a stack of bibles that I believe every word inside them. But none of that can make me actually believe it if I don’t. Pascal’s Wager could only ever be an argument for feigning belief in God. And the God that you claim to believe in had better not be of the omniscient kind or he’d see through the deception...
“But why, in any case, do we so readily accept the idea that the one thing you must do if you want to please God is believe in him? What’s so special about believing? Isn’t it just as likely that God would reward kindness, or generosity, or humility? Or sincerity? What if God is a scientist who regards honest seeking after truth as the supreme virtue? Indeed, wouldn’t the designer of the universe have to be a scientist? Bertrand Russell was asked what he would say if he died and found himself confronted by God, demanding to know why Russell had not believed in him. ‘Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence,’ was Russell’s (I almost said immortal) reply. Mightn’t God respect Russell for his courageous scepticism (let alone for the courageous pacifism that landed him in prison in the First World War) far more than he would respect Pascal for his cowardly bet-hedging? And, while we cannot know which way God would jump, we don’t need to know in order to refute Pascal’s Wager. We are talking about a bet, remember, and Pascal wasn’t claiming that his wager enjoyed anything but very long odds. Would you bet on God’s valuing dishonestly faked belief (or even honest belief) over honest scepticism?
“Then again, suppose the god who confronts you when you die turns out to be Baal, and suppose Baal is just as jealous as his old rival Yahweh was said to be. Mightn’t Pascal have been better off wagering on no god at all rather than on the wrong god? Indeed, doesn’t the sheer number of potential gods and goddesses on whom one might bet vitiate Pascal’s whole logic?...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p130-131
“Is it possible, finally to argue for a sort of anti-Pascal wager? Suppose we grant that there is indeed some small chance that God exists. Nevertheless, it could be said that you will lead a better, fuller life if you bet on his not existing, than if you bet on his existing and therefore squander your precious time on worshipping him, sacrificing to him, fighting and dying for him, etc...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p131-132
“The great French mathematician Blaise Pascal reckoned that however long the odds against God’s existence might be, there is an even larger asymmetry in the penalty for guessing wrong. You’d better believe in God, because if you are right you stand to gain eternal bliss and if you are wrong it won’t make any difference anyway. On the other hand, if you don’t believe in God and you turn out to be wrong you get eternal damnation, whereas if you are right it makes no difference. On the face of it the decision is a no-brainer. Believe in God.
“There is something distinctly odd about the argument, however. Believing is not something you can decide to do as a matter of policy. At least, it is not something I can decide to do as an act of will. I can decide to go to church and I can decide to recite the Nicene Creed, and I can decide to swear on a stack of bibles that I believe every word inside them. But none of that can make me actually believe it if I don’t. Pascal’s Wager could only ever be an argument for feigning belief in God. And the God that you claim to believe in had better not be of the omniscient kind or he’d see through the deception...
“But why, in any case, do we so readily accept the idea that the one thing you must do if you want to please God is believe in him? What’s so special about believing? Isn’t it just as likely that God would reward kindness, or generosity, or humility? Or sincerity? What if God is a scientist who regards honest seeking after truth as the supreme virtue? Indeed, wouldn’t the designer of the universe have to be a scientist? Bertrand Russell was asked what he would say if he died and found himself confronted by God, demanding to know why Russell had not believed in him. ‘Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence,’ was Russell’s (I almost said immortal) reply. Mightn’t God respect Russell for his courageous scepticism (let alone for the courageous pacifism that landed him in prison in the First World War) far more than he would respect Pascal for his cowardly bet-hedging? And, while we cannot know which way God would jump, we don’t need to know in order to refute Pascal’s Wager. We are talking about a bet, remember, and Pascal wasn’t claiming that his wager enjoyed anything but very long odds. Would you bet on God’s valuing dishonestly faked belief (or even honest belief) over honest scepticism?
“Then again, suppose the god who confronts you when you die turns out to be Baal, and suppose Baal is just as jealous as his old rival Yahweh was said to be. Mightn’t Pascal have been better off wagering on no god at all rather than on the wrong god? Indeed, doesn’t the sheer number of potential gods and goddesses on whom one might bet vitiate Pascal’s whole logic?...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p130-131
“Is it possible, finally to argue for a sort of anti-Pascal wager? Suppose we grant that there is indeed some small chance that God exists. Nevertheless, it could be said that you will lead a better, fuller life if you bet on his not existing, than if you bet on his existing and therefore squander your precious time on worshipping him, sacrificing to him, fighting and dying for him, etc...”
— Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, Mariner Books, 2008 p131-132
Edmund Way Teale, American naturalist & writer, 1899-1980
“It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it.”
— Edmund Way Teale, Circle of the Seasons, 1950 (Quoted by Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World, Ballantine Books, New York, 1996 p12)
“It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it.”
— Edmund Way Teale, Circle of the Seasons, 1950 (Quoted by Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World, Ballantine Books, New York, 1996 p12)
7. Rebuttal:
Argument for the Remedying of Injustice
Argument for the Remedying of Injustice
Summary:
A supreme being is required to bring eternal justice to an unjust temporal existence. The scales will be balanced in the end.
Bertrand Russell, British philosopher & polymath, 1872-1970
“Then there is another very curious form of moral argument, which is this: they say that the existence of God is required in order to bring justice into the world. In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying; but if you are going to have justice in the universe as a whole you have to suppose a future life to redress the balance of life here an earth. So they say that there must be a God, and there must be heaven and hell in order that in the long run there may be justice. That is a very curious argument. If you looked at the matter from a scientific point of view, you would say, ‘After all, I know only this world. I do not know about the rest of the universe, but so far as one can argue at all on probabilities one would say that probably this world is a fair sample, and if there is injustice here the odds are that there is injustice elsewhere also.’ Supposing you got a crate of oranges that you opened, and you found all the top layer of oranges bad, you would not argue, ‘The underneath ones must be good, so as to redress the balance.’ You would say, ‘Probably the whole lot is a bad consignment’; and that is really what a scientific person would argue about the universe. He would say, ‘Here we find in this world a great deal of injustice, and so far as that goes that is a reason for supposing that justice does not rule in the world; and therefore so far as it goes it affords a moral argument against deity and not in favor of one.’”
— Bertrand Russell, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” (1927) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p13
“Then there is another very curious form of moral argument, which is this: they say that the existence of God is required in order to bring justice into the world. In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying; but if you are going to have justice in the universe as a whole you have to suppose a future life to redress the balance of life here an earth. So they say that there must be a God, and there must be heaven and hell in order that in the long run there may be justice. That is a very curious argument. If you looked at the matter from a scientific point of view, you would say, ‘After all, I know only this world. I do not know about the rest of the universe, but so far as one can argue at all on probabilities one would say that probably this world is a fair sample, and if there is injustice here the odds are that there is injustice elsewhere also.’ Supposing you got a crate of oranges that you opened, and you found all the top layer of oranges bad, you would not argue, ‘The underneath ones must be good, so as to redress the balance.’ You would say, ‘Probably the whole lot is a bad consignment’; and that is really what a scientific person would argue about the universe. He would say, ‘Here we find in this world a great deal of injustice, and so far as that goes that is a reason for supposing that justice does not rule in the world; and therefore so far as it goes it affords a moral argument against deity and not in favor of one.’”
— Bertrand Russell, “Why I Am Not a Christian,” (1927) Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects, Touchstone Books, 1957, p13