I was watching a YouTube video of Richard Dawkins discussing an issue with a fellow atheist about moral matters when Dawkins made a defense of infanticide in certain circumstances. Needless to say, I was a bit floored, but I can’t say I was surprised. I don’t think Dawkins is pure evil or anything like that. But he clearly was struggling to come up with a set of moral values without an appeal to the divine or to natural law. The result of such endeavors leads to horror. The trouble with atheism is that nihilism is the logical outcome of a world without God.
I have been listening to Catholic apologists, and it was Father Robert Barron who pointed out that the New Atheism is childish and silly in comparison to the old atheism of people like Nietzsche, Sartre, and Camus. This is because those old atheists dealt squarely with this problem of nihilism. They knew nihilism was born out of atheism. The New Atheists hardly address these issues at all making moral judgments left and right without a second thought condemning the atrocities of Islamists, Christians, and the Old Testament God of Wrath. The problem with their position is obvious. What is the basis of right and wrong? They have none. An atheist making moral judgments is akin to a child who has outgrown Santa Claus but still expects goodies in his stocking.
Dawkins makes the case that there are many moral people who do the right thing without an appeal to religion. But St. Paul made much the same case in the book of Romans when he wrote, “For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another.” (Romans 2:14-15). Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and C.S. Lewis all made the same points. What they were talking about is natural law.
Natural law is that fundamental law that governs all human actions. It was the basis of this natural law that made the 13 colonies declare their independence from the English crown. It was natural law that was used to convict the war criminals at Nuremberg even though they had broken no German laws. Somehow, there was a law higher than German law and simply following orders does not excuse anyone from obeying this law.
The true atheist cannot appeal to this natural law. An inconsistent atheist may try and slip natural law in the back door, but he will simply be in error. The old atheists were consistent. Richard Dawkins is not. He wants it both ways. He says there is no God, but there is right and wrong. Nietzsche would laugh in his face. This is what happens when a biologist stumbles into the philosophical realm. Dawkins can easily make sport of some fundie Christian quoting Genesis, but I think Dawkins would sound similarly perplexed trying to explain to a Catholic apologist why a Nazi SS officer should have refrained from putting a bullet in the skull of a Jewish captive. This is why atheists can defend animal life in the same breath as making arguments for infanticide.
Christopher Hitchens is another inconsistent atheist. The man has a long history of inconsistency in that he could excoriate Henry Kissinger for war crimes while at the same time supporting the neoconservative foreign policy and subsequent war crimes of Bush/Cheney. Apparently, it is a war crime when communists die but not when Muslim fundamentalists die. As for religion, Hitchens makes the case that it poisons everything yet seems strangely silent when it comes to the many atrocities of atheists. Mao and Stalin give atheism a really bad name, and the best Hitchens can do is argue that these men were actually religious in some sort of way. This is stupid and disingenuous.
The case that Dawkins makes along with other atheists is that our morality is the product of natural selection and evolution. Apparently, compassion and altruism help us survive as a species. But so does cruelty and savagery. Why should we prefer compassion over cruelty? Why should the strong show deference to the weak? I am afraid biology does not help us here on any of these things. The flower and the honey bee may have a sweet arrangement of mutual benefit, but the lion and the gazelle do not. Likewise, Machiavelli makes the case that brutality is more reliable for the ruler than love. History demonstrates this to be true. Using game theory and biology only indicates to us that reciprocal altruism is one option among many, and that it doesn’t always work. Nothing compels us to be nice in any of these schemes. It merely explains why a Mafia don may whack one guy while showing love to another. It also explains why Dawkins can contemplate the slaughter of an infant as a morally acceptable option in the right circumstance. Ultimately, nothing is either right or wrong. There is merely that which is advantageous to the individual or the collective. Dawkins does a superb job of explaining why things are as they are, but he fails to make the case for why things should be any different. Ultimately, the Nazis were wrong because they lost the war. If they had won, they would be right. The end justifies the means.
We can come up with a hundred scenarios where the right thing would not be advantageous to either the species or the individual. Similarly, we can come up with a hundred scenarios where doing the wrong thing would be advantageous to both the species and the individual. The one that most comes readily to mind is eugenics. A neo-Nazi would make the argument that much social pathology would be eliminated if we exterminated the black race. I doubt Dawkins would agree with that, but he would have no basis to deny it. No matter how you slice it, the end result is nihilism.
The Christian has no such dilemma. Everything centers around the doctrine of the imago Dei. Humans are made in the image of God. Consequently, this champions the individual against the collective since even the least of us is worthy of human rights. Likewise, the strong must respect the weak as moral equals, and the weak must respect the strong to the extent that they are moral and just. In addition, the imago Dei commands respect for scumbags and criminals since they also share the image of God. The result is that the Christian ethic is the most humane one. No scientific, materialistic, or secular worldview is going to produce anything as humane.
The argument that atheists will make is that history is replete with Christians behaving badly. This cannot be denied. People claiming to be Christians have done atrocious things, but it is only Christians who have any ground to condemn these actions. Atheists have no moral case at all. This is because they have to use the Christian standard to judge those bad Christians. Plus, you can always throw Mao, Stalin, and the Marquis de Sade in their faces. It isn’t a good argument for an atheist to make.
A better argument would be a contest between the greatest atheist and the greatest Christian. In the Christian corner, we have Jesus of Nazareth. In the atheist corner, we have no one. I am straining my brain to find one exemplary atheist to go head-to-head with Jesus, but I can’t. Maybe if I picked someone less divine like St. Francis of Assisi. Still, it is no contest. I don’t see atheists helping people on anything like a saintly level. I am sure some atheists labor to help the sick, cure cancer, or defend civil rights. But there are no atheist saints. There are heroes but no saints among freethinkers.
The reason this issue matters to me is because of Albert Camus. Camus is the closest thing to what I would consider to be an atheist saint. This is because despite his unbelief he still had the desire to live in a Christian way and opposed Sartre over Stalin. Camus was no angel, and there is a report that he wished to convert to Christianity before his death. But I always appreciated Camus for asking a simple question. Can an atheist be a saint? His novel The Plague is an excellent examination of this question. In fiction, atheists can be saints. In reality, they aren’t.
What makes a saint? The answer to that is mysterious but simple. Saints are measured not by their impact but by their compassion. Atheists can labor to solve world problems, but they lack compassion beyond just a few people. This is because it is impossible to love more than a few people. We can only love our familiars. Yet, saints love everyone. How is this possible? Their secret is obvious. They love God, and they see God in every human being. Atheists do not love God since they do not believe in Him. As such, their compassion for others is limited and deficient. An atheist can believe in a principle or be clever at solving problems. But an atheist can never be on any level that is the same as a saint.
Jesus makes this principle clear in his parable of the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25 when He says,
'Lord, when did we see you hungry, and feed you; or thirsty, and give you a drink?When did we see you as a stranger, and take you in; or naked, and clothe you? When did we see you sick, or in prison, and come to you?'
The King will answer them, 'Most certainly I tell you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.'
This is nothing more than the imago Dei principle at work. Conversely, great hatred and evil comes when we see people as sub-human. This is how the Nazis could exterminate the Jews with a clean conscience. They were sub-human. This is why all evil is preceded by a belief that our victims are not the same as ourselves. They are our inferiors. This is how Richard Dawkins can contemplate infanticide. It is not quite human.
If there is a man that I can consider the antichrist, it would be the Marquis de Sade. Sade’s evil was limited only by his impotence. Being without power, his crimes were limited to his imagination, but he gloried and desired all that was despicable and evil. His delight was in sadism, depravity, perversion, and cruelty. Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom is the book that best exemplifies this man’s evil. Sade was an atheist, but he seemed to take special delight in the blasphemous. One scene involves taking a consecrated host and using it in sexual perversion. Why does Sade do this? Why would an atheist care? But it goes back to the imago Dei principle. All of Sade’s perversions and sadism and blasphemy are directed at the same end. Because Sade hates God, he consequently hates humanity. His wish is to obliterate the imago Dei in all he sees.
Sade is the godfather of nihilism. Atheists naturally want to distance themselves from this guy. Sade is bad PR for freethinkers. But make no mistake about this. Sade was a freethinker. He was perhaps the freest thinker that ever was. Nothing was beyond his imagination. Sade would be an influence on later existential thinkers like Nietzsche and Sartre. Unlike those later thinkers, Sade had the courage to live in and embrace the depraved world of his nihilism. He was consistent.
If you are an atheist, you must admit that nothing is really right or wrong. There is merely the strong and the weak. There is the mutually advantageous. There is whatever you can get away with. But you can’t sneak natural law in the backdoor. Logic will not allow this. As C.S. Lewis pointed out, there are two things we know. We have a sense that there is a natural law that decides our morals, and we have broken that law. Even the Marquis de Sade knew that law because he delighted so much in breaking it.
I see atheists in a crisis. I watch guys like Sam Harris attempt to solve this moral dilemma, but they can’t. The best Harris can do is postulate how science may one day be able to bring clarity to the issue of moral relativism, but I think he is deluding himself. Alain de Botton thinks religion can inform our thinking on many issues and even encourages a religion for atheists. But this is like fake meat for vegetarians. The only conclusion that I can draw is that atheists demonstrate empirically a need for religion. I even know a few atheists that still attend church of their own free will. They just can’t let it go when so many nominal Christians have no qualms about sleeping in on Sunday. Why?
Nihilism is death. Camus knew this. Atheists are nihilists. If they deny it, they lie to themselves. If they embrace it, they become monsters. The result is a middle path of schizophrenia where the atheist attempts to have his cake and eat it, too.
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