Conversations with Atheists

Alan Myatt, Ph.D.

The following is a series of correspondences I had with some atheists and others during 1998 in a discussion forum dedicated to religious issues. The discussion seemed to me to be fairly typical of conversations with atheists and I thought it might be of interest to post it here. My main concern in this conversation was to explore the rationality (or lack thereof) of atheistic presuppositions. My goal was not so much to offer a defense of theism, but rather a critique of non-theism. - AM

For those who would like to go straight to the heart of my argument without reading all of the details of the discussion, there is a summary on page 10. For the SUMMARY of the argument click here.

Note - aside from some light editing to correct typos, etc., the posts are pretty much as they first appeared. (I also removed the profanity that some of the atheists' used.) Additional comments that I wanted to add will be found in footnotes. I have changed the names of all participants to a set of initials, except for myself. Also note that the material found in between the arrows >> << indicates a quote from a previous post. I know that preserving this means you will read some stuff twice, but it helps to provide the exact context of each response, so I kept it in. There are occasional references to other discussions, but not all of those were saved. Some material had to be left out in order to prevent the reader from having to follow a lot of wandering around different subjects that were not relevant to the issue.

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Message from QB to All

Here is an interesting one I thought of while in the bath.

Many atheists will claim to be so because they can see no evidence or rational arguments for the Christian God.

The Christian will claim that no proof or reason is necessary, faith is all that is needed.

Then imagine a person who claims he is Jesus reborn and returned to earth. The Christian now has two choices, to believe or disbelieve the person. If he believes, then he must believe everyone who makes this claim, regardless of how much of a weirdo they are.

(I can pretty much guarantee that this will not be the case. Try it sometime)

If he does not believe, why not? Because maybe the person does not look like Jesus, or is disheveled, or for many other reasons, but all based on the Christians preconceived ideas of what Jesus will be like. In other words the Christian will be applying reason and standards of proof to the idea that the person is Jesus, i.e.. he is saying "This person cannot be Jesus, because..."

If the person then walked on water, or raised the dead, or called up God etc., the Christian would then have to believe, because it had been proved to him.

Hence the Christian must admit that proof and reason are necessary to examine the concept of his Jesus, who is also his God.

What do you think?

From IA to QB

You thought of this in the bath? Is this a Baptist story??

I think you are confusing two uses of reason. Most Christians would say that you cannot arrive at faith in God by reason alone, but that doesn't mean that faith is irrational. There is a school of philosophy called logical positivism; the leading book here in England was Language, Truth and Logic by Professor A. J. Ayer. It says that any statement which cannot, at least in theory, be proved by experiment to be true or false is meaningless. The trouble is, how do you prove by experiment the statement "any statement which cannot, at least in theory, be proved by experiment to be true or false is meaningless"? Oops! So another version says "any statement which cannot be falsified is meaningless". I can live with that.

My Christian faith is open to falsification. Irremedial evil would be evidence that the belief that the universe is the creation of a good God is false. So the Holocaust and the Killing Fields of Khmer and the Rwandan genocide are not only human tragedies; for the Christian, they are more pressing evidence that our faith is false than all the flak from the philosophers. On the other side, there are those individuals who show heroic sacrificial love in the face of extreme personal suffering. To the believer, they are the evidence of the presence and reality of God. This, BTW, is one reason why I am against capital punishment: to execute a person is to say that they are beyond correction, that their evil is irremedial.

So both Christians and atheists use reason to make sense of their experience of life. I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. If you can believe that such a vast, complex yet integrated, universe exists by pure chance ... Wow! You have more faith than me.

From Alan Myatt to QB

Hi Q,

An interesting question. There are various ways in which different kinds of Christians might try to answer it just as there are various ways in which non-believers, even atheists, justify their own brand of faith. I prefer to start by denying that there is any kind of dichotomy between faith and reason, as if one were rational and the other irrational. That is a peculiarly modern perspective on the question that is somewhat out of date I think, in light of more recent post-modern discussions of epistemology and hermeneutics. (1) In any case, the word faith in the Greek New Testament is simply the noun form of the word "to believe." The Bible never invites us to believe without good and sufficient reasons, although it does differ from the contemporary atheist as to what counts as a good and sufficient reason. Before we can discuss specific examples of evidence in favor of or against a world view it is necessary to decide what counts as evidence. However, part of the problem is that both the atheist and the Christian approach the subject with different sets of presuppositions that rule out and include certain kinds of evidence from the start. So while the atheist is unable to see any evidence, the Christian is able to see it everywhere. Hence, the discussion of faith vs. reason, in my opinion, needs to focus on more basic epistemological questions before haggling about the details of say, the evidence concerning the resurrection of Jesus, for example.

So, I would reply that every world view, and this most certainly includes philosophical naturalism, or the empiricist materialism of the atheist, rests upon one or more assumed axioms. Such axioms are necessary for any system to get off the ground and by their very nature they are unproven and incapable of rational proof (that is they are not the conclusion of other arguments) otherwise they would not be axioms. This means that no system can derive its own axioms because axioms are not derived. They are the starting point. Think back to your high school geometry course and you can see how it works. The axioms are the assumptions that are necessary for all the other proofs in the system. The axioms are simply believed, that's all. They are taken on faith, whether one is an atheist, Christian, Hindu, etc. They are believed because they are the necessary conditions for the supposed rationality of the whole. If they turn out to be wrong, then the whole system collapses.

At this point, then, my question for the empiricist/philosophical materialist/atheist would be: What are your fundamental axioms and on what basis should I be compelled to accept them? Why should I begin with your set of faith assumptions rather than those of Christianity?

Looking forward to your reply.

Alan Myatt

From J to Alan Myatt

>>At this point, then, my question for the empiricist/philosophical materialist/atheist would be: What are your fundamental axioms and on what basis should I be compelled to accept them? Why should I begin with your set of faith assumptions rather than those of Christianity?

Looking forward to your reply<<

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I think you have a false and narrow notion of what atheism entails. In its most elementary form, atheism makes no assertions. Speaking generally, atheism is simply the negation of theism. If theism is "belief in God" then atheism is "no belief in God". It doesn't of necessity entail a denial. To be sure, there are a great variety of individual atheistic viewpoints which deny the assertion "gods exist", but when speaking generically of atheism there really are no fundamental axioms requiring acceptance and likewise "no faith assumptions". (2)

From Alan Myatt to J

Message text written by J

>I think you have a false and narrow notion of what atheism entails. In its most elementary form, atheism makes no assertions. Speaking generally, atheism is simply the negation of theism. If theism is "belief in God" then atheism is "no belief in God". It doesn't of necessity entail a denial. To be sure, there are a great variety of individual atheistic viewpoints which deny the assertion "gods exist", but when speaking generically of atheism there really are no fundamental axioms requiring acceptance and likewise "no faith assumptions". <

Well, you could be right in saying that I am not up an all forms of atheism, but I have read some on this subject and I see your point. It is basically the position that George Smith defends in his book, Atheism The Case Against God, that atheism is simply the lack of belief in a God. However, as I read the book it became quite clear that Smith has a world view and since he does, then he also believes in something. That is he has not fallen into either absolute skepticism or solipsism (if there is indeed a difference). So since he believes that he knows something, and since he defends an epistemology ( in his case Ayn Rand's objectivism if I remember right) then he quite clearly has presuppositions or axioms on which his system rests. And here I would suggest that perhaps you have missed the point of my previous post. My point is that, in general, all atheists have a world view in which God is either explicitly denied or held to be irrelevant. In any case, it is a world view that does not require the existence of God or gods. My experience has been that this usually turns out to be philosophical materialism of some sort. And while there are various ways of constructing such a world view, it still requires, as all world views do, an epistemology that allows the corresponding ontology of the system to be knowable. Now, my interest is in understanding what the basic underlying assumptions of such an epistemology are in any given case. To deny that one has such assumptions is simply to assert that one believes one has knowledge for no reason at all. This is an option that some take in our age of irrationalism, but to my mind it simply ends the discussion, because if the atheist can give no reasons for holding his or her (positive) beliefs, then I can't see how this position is any different from the fundamentalist who the atheist accuses of believing based on "blind" faith.

So, I would be interested in knowing what your basic world view is, how you justify knowledge, what are your basic presuppositions concerning epistemology... for starters. After all, if you atheists want us to give up belief in God, or at least to consider your viewpoint intellectually viable, then you will need to offer us a rational alternative.

Cordially,

Alan

From J to Alan Myatt

Message text written by J

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Alan writes:

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J writes:

Tis here you stray from the gist of my remarks. Obviously, everyone has a world view but the crux of my post was to point out that atheists are a varied lot. Smith assuredly has a world view but to infer that Smiths world view is shared by other atheists is misguided. For all I know, Smith may lack belief in gods do (sic) to an adverse reaction to being raped by a priest as a young boy. Or, Smith may be completely unfamiliar with the notion of "gods". Or, Smith may think that the definition of "gods" unintelligible and therefore the proposition "gods exist" is essentially meaningless. None of the aforementioned types of atheism suggest any particular "world view" other than a lack of belief in gods. Therefore, as I implied previously, atheism is as individual as the individual. Atheists have world views, but in order to determine what they are, it is necessary to inquire of the individual.

Personally, my "lack of belief" in gods entails a denial. Although I lack belief in gods, I "believe" the proposition "gods exist" to be false. As of yet, there is no indication of "why" I believe the proposition false and therefore any inference as to what particular "philosophical camp" I belong remains a mystery. There is no singular "atheistic philosophy". There are no singular "fundamental axioms" and there are no singular "faith assumptions".

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<snip> Alan writes:

Cordially,

Alan

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Why a rational alternative? A leprechaun believers demand to produce a rational alternative to "leprechaun belief" by no means upholds the rationality of arguments supportive of that belief.

Assuming you lack belief in leprechauns and believe the proposition "leprechauns exist" to be false, perchance you could give your basic presuppositions of why you lack such a belief.

Regards,

From Alan Myatt to J

Hi J,

>>Why a rational alternative? A leprechaun believers demand to produce a rational alternative to "leprechaun belief" by no means upholds the rationality of arguments supportive of that belief. <<

No, not about leprechauns anyway, although if a non leprechaun believer could not construct a coherent theory of a leprechaunless world I would be inclined to at least consider the possibility that they might exist. But seriously, one can hardly put the Triune Creator God of the Bible on the same level as leprechauns. The existence of leprechauns might be an interesting curiosity if it turned out to be true, but I think the modifications it would require in your world view could probably be accommodated without radically altering it. On the other hand, if there is a God, then the structure of ultimate reality as you understand it is fundamentally in error. It would call for a reconstruction of your world view of the most radical kind imaginable. The stakes are much, much higher. Atheists are constantly accusing Christians of buying into an irrational belief. Well, I think if they reject belief in God because they are committed to rationality, then they should be able to show how the notion of a universe where there is no God can be rationally defended. Otherwise they need not imagine that they are somehow holding to a more intellectually defensible position than the Christian.

Back to the issue of presuppositions, I agree and disagree with you. I agree that atheists are a varied lot and I have spent some time taking to atheists of various types. Atheists have different world views in some respects, however, I think that the postulation of atheism necessarily involves certain common presuppositions. So one may be an existentialist, a pragmatist, a logical positivist, etc., each with a different world view, yet operating on common assumptions that follow necessarily from atheism. I would like to see the atheist examine the implications of those presuppositions. That's all.

Alan

From R to Alan Myatt

Message text written by Alan Myatt

> After all, if you atheists want us to give up belief in God, or at least to consider your viewpoint intellectually viable, then you will need to offer us a rational alternative.<

I didn't know any atheists want others to give up belief in God. All that is desired is for you to keep your god based laws and morals to yourself.

From Alan Myatt to R

OK I will keep my God based laws to myself. I will not allow them to cause me to interfere with anyone who might have an impulse to kill you, rape your wife, steal your bank accounts, burn your home, etc.

It reminds me of a story Chuck Colson told about how he heard a high school principal brag at a conference about how he had removed the ten commandments from the walls of the school. Then he went on to complain about the drugs, violence, theft, guns, etc. in the public school system and suggested that we ought to teach some kind of moral code to the kids. So when it came time for Chuck to speak, he said, "Maybe we should post some rules of moral conduct on the wall of the school, something like, You shall not steal, you shall not kill, etc.?"

OK, so let's throw out God, let's say that the universe is ultimately impersonal. From whence do we derive universal moral principles for any kind of rational ethic then? And don't carry on about the need for the human race to survive, etc. If there is no personal absolute distinct from the universe, then there is no reason, aside from an irrational emotional prejudice, why cockroaches should not eventually inherit the earth (after the nuclear holocaust). Nobody has succeeded in deriving a rational ethic from philosophical naturalism (that rises above the level of relativism). The fact that you think it would be wrong to murder someone can have no basis in anything other than finite opinion if the universe is ultimately impersonal. And there is absolutely no compelling rational reason you can give anyone as to why such an act is immoral and why they should not carry it out.

So we will keep our God-based ethic to ourselves and then when anarchy comes....

Please allow me to include here a lengthy quote from an interesting article by Philip Johnson .

>>>Yale Law Professor, Arthur Leff, expressed the bewilderment of an agnostic culture that yearns for enduring values in a brilliant lecture delivered at Duke University in 1979, a few years before his untimely death from cancer. The published lecture - titled, "Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law" - is frequently quoted in law review articles, but it is little known outside the world of legal scholarship. It happens to be one of the best statements of the modernist impasse that I know. As Leff put it,

I want to believe - and so do you - in a complete, transcendent, and immanent set of propositions about right and wrong, findable rules that authoritatively and unambiguously direct us how to live righteously. I also want to believe - and so do you - in no such thing, but rather that we are wholly free, not only to choose for ourselves, individually and as a species, what we ought to be. What we want, Heaven help us, is simultaneously to be perfectly ruled and perfectly free, that is, at the same time to discover the right and the good and to create it.

The heart of the problem, according to Leff, is that any normative statement implies the existence of an authoritative evaluator. But with God out of the picture, every human becomes a godlet - with as much authority to set standards as any other godlet or combination of godlets. For example, if a human moralist says "Thou shalt not commit adultery", he invites the formal intellectual equivalent of what is known in barrooms and schoolyards as 'the grand sez who?' Persons who want to commit adultery, or who sympathise with those who do, can offer the crushing rejoinder: What gives you the authority to prescribe what is good for me? As Leff explained:

Putting it that way makes clear that if we are looking for an evaluation, we must actually be looking for an evaluator, some machine for the generation of the judgements on states of affairs. If the evaluation is to be beyond question, then the evaluator and its evaluative processes must be similarly insulated. If it is to fulfill its role, the evaluator must be the unjudged judge, the unruled legislator, the premise maker who resets on no premises, the uncreated creator of values ... we are never going to get anywhere (assuming for the moment there is somewhere to go) in ethical or legal theory unless we finally face the fact that, in the Psalmist's words, there is no one like unto the Lord ... The so called death of God turns out not to have been just His funeral; it also seems to have effected the total elimination of any coherent or even more-than-momentarily convincing, ethical or legal system dependent upon finally authoritative, extrasystematic premises.

Leff pointed out that is it not we who define God's utterances as unquestionably true, in the manner that we define a triangle as a three-sided plane figure. In a God-based system, God is not the idea in the human mind but a separate and controlling reality. If human reason aspires to be the judge of God's statements, it makes itself the unevaluated evaluator, which is to say it takes God's place. In Leff's words , "Our relation to God's moral order is the triangle's relationship to the order of Euclidean plane geometry, not the mathematicians. We are defined, constituted as beings whose adultery is wrong, bad, and awful. Thus, committing adultery in such a system is 'naturally' bad only because the system is supernaturally constructed."

...Most of Leff's lecture consisted of a review of all the unsuccessful attempts to establish an objective moral order on a foundation of human construction, i.e., to put something else in God's place as the unevaluated evaluator. The asserted non-supernatural sources of moral authority are many and varied, and each is only temporarily convincing. They include: the command of the sovereign; the majority of the voters; the principle of utility; the Supreme Court's varying interpretations of the Constitutions' great but ambiguous phrases; the subtle implications of platitudinous shared values like "equality" or "autonomy"; and even a hypothetical social contract that abstract persons might adopt in the imagery "original position" described by John Rawls. Every alternative rests ultimately on human authority, because that is what remains when God is removed from the picture. But human authority always becomes inadequate as soon as people learn to challenge its pretensions. Every system fails the test of "The grand sez who".

....Arthur Leff had a deeper understanding of what the death of God ultimately means for man. He saw modern intellectual history as a long, losing war against the nihilism implicit in modernism's rejection of the unevaluated evaluator who is the only conceivable source for ultimate premises. Leff rejected the nihilism implicit in modernism, but he also rejected the supernaturalism that he had identified as the only escape from nihilism. Here is how he concluded his 1979 lecture:

All I can say is this: it looks as if we are all we have. Given what we know about ourselves, and each other, this is an extraordinary, unappetising prospect; looking around the world, it appears that if all men are brothers, the ruling model is Cain and Abel. Neither reason, nor love, nor even terror, seems to have worked and made us "good", and, worse than that, there is no reason why anything should. Only if ethics were something unspeakable by us could law be unnatural, and therefore unchallengeable. As things stand now, everything is up for grabs.
Nevertheless:

Napalming babies is bad.

Starving the poor is wicked.

Buying and selling each other is depraved.

Those who stood up and died resisting Hitler, Stalin, Amin and Pol Pot - and General Custer too - have earned salvation.

Those who acquiesced deserve to be damned.

There is in the world such a thing as evil.

[All together now:] Sez who?

God help us.

(Philip Johnson, Nihilism and the End of Law, in First Things, March 1993, No.31)<<<

Sez who indeed!

The complete article can be found at http://id-www.ucsb.edu/fscf/LIBRARY/JOHNSON/nihilism.html

Alan

Message from IO to Alan Myatt

Hi, Alan.

I said I'd check out this thread.

I've come into this late in the day, but in this last message you are discussing the origin of morality - among other things. (3)

Let me, initially, make an observation. By the point in the Bible where Cain kills Abel, morality has been established, yet God has not explicitly stated that murder is wrong. He doesn't actually do that until the writing of the Ten Commandments.

Now, I don't believe that every event in the Bible took place. Even in my Christian youth I thought of the Creation story, indeed the whole of Genesis, as a metaphor if you will. So, taken as such, it seems to me that morality arose separate from God.

Indeed, regardless of whatever mythology might say, it is apparent that morality is a natural evolution derived from human experience. It doesn't need God to tell us that something is wrong.

Take murder for example. Hands up everyone who actually wants to be killed. Apart from the odd nut, the majority of people do not. So, humanity develops the concept that needless killing is wrong.

Theft. Do you want to have your Lexus or whatever taken from you? No, of course not. You worked hard for it. It has some value to you. So, humanity adds taking anothers belongings without consent to the list of "do nots".

You get the picture. Its a case of "treat your neighbor as yourself". Given man's natural tendency to collect in groups, this would likely develop rather quickly. If you consider morality as a form of order, you would think that other examples might be found in nature.

Now I realize this is a stretch, but consider. A pack of wolves has order to it. Each animal knows its place and rarely strays outside it. Likewise Chimps and Gorillas and many other collective animals. Without knowledge of God, these creatures have a stable society with their own rules and regulations. By our standards, their societies might sometimes be considered to be pretty horrifying, nature red in tooth a claw and all that, but it works for them.

So, if animals can develop a form of "morality", or order if you prefer, why shouldn't human beings. We label it differently, we call it, morals, ethics, laws, but they all contribute towards an ordered society. God is not needed.

Now, if my theory is correct, you might think that different groups of humans might develop different morals. Well, you are correct. Many people know that until comparatively recently, the Inuit use to rid themselves of their elderly by abandoning them. This, to them, was a moral act. How different can you get?

These are just musings on my part. I haven't done any research or anything. If this proves a profitable contribution, I probably will check a few things out.

From Alan Myatt to IO

Hi I,

Welcome to the thread. I think you have given a good account of how morality can develop in a social or psychological setting. That all people have some moral code or other is beyond dispute. But the fact that people have a moral code and believe in it and that it may be necessary for sociological reasons, etc. does not really address the issue I raised. That is simply, what philosophical justification exists for saying that any moral assertion is in fact moral. Usually when we say that an act is immoral we are saying something stronger than, "I don't like it when you do x." We usually mean that the act is intrinsically wrong, in the nature of things, such as in the assertion, Thou shalt not kill, which you have so often quoted. My point is, in a materialist universe there can be no such thing as an act that is intrinsically wrong, and no amount of theorizing about social contracts, evolution of societies, etc. can change that. Whatever is, is, that's all. You are left with relativism, pure and simple, and if all morality is ultimately relative, then nothing is absolute. Then morality is reduced to the level of opinion, and it matters not that it may be the opinion of societies who disagree (over what to do with the Jews for instance) or if it is with individuals. The ultimate justification of one's position becomes, "My stick is bigger than yours."

None of the basis for morality you mentioned is sufficient to show why it is immoral to murder. They may show why it is inconvenient to society, but then why should any one care about that? Maybe I am a masochistic serial killer and so my carrying out my actions is exactly what I fantasize someone doing to me. What of the Golden Rule then?

If reality is ultimately impersonal, then there is no morality resident in it. Where would we find it? In the structure of the atom? The intestines of a beaver? Morality is conceptual and must therefore reside in minds. If all there are are finite minds, then morality is nothing but opinion. And one opinion is as good as another in a universe where the word "good" really means "I like it and approve of it" and "bad" means "I don't like it and I disapprove of it."

So there may be all kinds of behaviors that we could admit have some functional utility for the survival of society (the ancient Aztecs found that human sacrifice was quite functional for them). But making the leap from that to objective morality is a leap over a bottomless chasm of an infinite distance across. It can't be done.

I have to go back to the other thread and read your discussion with SD. How do you guys get the time to do this so much? :-) I need to stay out of here until the weekend so I can get some work done.

Peace,

Alan

From IO to Alan Myatt

Alan,

Basically, there is no philosophical justification for saying that any moral assertion is, in fact, moral. Absolute right and wrong don't exist except in a religious setting. When we say "x is wrong", this is the result of our indoctrination by society, and it is subject to change. An examination of history demonstrates this.

The ultimate justification really is the medieval concept of "might is right". This has always been the case, and always will. Expression of might has changed emphasis somewhat, but the fact remains, and the basis is, as ever, money and power. Those with the most of both dictate to those without. Much of our history and behavior has been dictated to in this way. Superb examples from Medieval Europe are the aristocracy, and the Church both of whom wielded almost god-like influence over the masses.

Personally, I wish this was not the case. I would like to believe in absolutes, but they don't exist. You mention that I have not given any reason why it is immoral to commit murder, beyond the inconvenience to society. I am saying that what is inconvenient to society becomes its morals.

Individuals then choose either to adhere to society's morals, or not. How they choose is a remarkably complex issue. (4)

From Alan Myatt to I

I appreciate your honesty, but this is a rather devastating admission of the inadequacy of non-theism. Rather than take such an unfortunate conclusion as all we have, why not consider it as an indication that its underlying presuppositions are false? I mean, you are basically saying that Hitler was wrong because the Allies won the war. Are you sure that's where you want to end up?

Alan

FOOTNOTES*******************************

(1) Epistemology is that branch of philosophy that deals with the theory of knowledge. It responds to the question of how we justify our belief that a thing is true or not. There have been many methods suggested. Many have said that human reason is the final authority for deciding the truth. These are divided into two camps: empiricists and rationalists. Empiricists believe that knowledge comes through the 5 senses, i.e.; seeing is believing. They usually think that the scientific method is the best way to prove something. Most contemporary atheists are in this camp. Rationalists think that fundamental ideas and principles of reason in the mind are the basis for knowledge. They think that logic is the best way to determine the truth. Others think that knowledge comes to us through mystical experience. Mystics think that rational thought is a hinderance to finding the truth because the truth is intutive. It is not a matter of ideas. They think that meditation and altered states of consciousness (even drug induced) can lead us to truth. They tend to look to Eastern Religions and New Age groups for truth. Christians, Jews and Muslims believe that truth comes to us from our senses, through logical reasoning and also by being revealed by God. For them, revelation from God is the comunication of rational ideas. This is the basis for truth.

Hermenuetics is the study and application of methods for interpreting texts. Principally it has to do with correct methods for interpreting the Bible and other literature. In recent years the post-modernist philosophers had said that no one can know what the author of a text intended to communicate. They say that a text means what it means to the reader.

(2) This is a rather common delusion suffered by many atheists that I have encountered or read, namely, the notion that they have no presuppositions, they only look at the "facts". It is astounding, but true, that this degree of philosophical naivety is so common. For the record: all positions start with unproven axioms and back behind all forms of atheism are some common presuppositions, but often getting an atheist to recognize this is one of the most difficult tasks.

(3) At this point he makes a category mistake that seems to recur commonly in discussions with atheists. When a Christian points out that there is no objective basis for morality in a materialist universe, the atheist responds by rehearsing naturalistic theories about how morality supposedly evolved. Many times he seems unable to comprehend that such answers are irrelevant to the question. The question is not to explain how people in various societies might have come to develop their particular moral codes. The question is, rather, is there any rational basis for believing that some things or actions are inherently good and others are not? They confuse the sociology and psychology of belief in morals with the larger question as to whether or not it is really rational to defend as inherently right or wrong certain moral precepts. Those who make this error offer explanations of why certain moral behaviors exists as if that explained the question of morality. However, they fail to notice that the discussion is not about what people do and why they do it. The question is about what people ought to do or not do and why they ought to do or not do it. The theistic contention is that on the basis of atheism there is no rational reason discernible to establish the oughtness of anything. And if there is no rational basis for oughtness, then there is no rational basis for justice either. The notion of justice reduces to what I happen to approve, period.

(4) Here we have an unbeliever who admits that he has no basis for morality. This is rare indeed and one has to appreciate the honesty here. However, it is fascinating to note that those who hold such a view still cannot live on the basis of this. They still know, deep in their hearts, that there is such a thing as justice and morality and they feel outrage when justice is violated.

Alan Myatt, Ph.D.
www.pobox.com/~myatt