A repost from the old blog, first pub­lished in July, and light­ly edit­ed. This is in part a response to crit­ics of my crit­i­cism of Richard Dawkins, but also a chance to break the first rule of Fight Club.

Blog Merid­i­an brings us a dis­cus­sion of Fight Club. John quotes some­one quot­ing a review which says:

Quite hon­est­ly, if I did­n’t believe in God, I would join Tyler Dur­den in his phi­los­o­phy. If God did­n’t exist—if Christ did­n’t offer salvation—then Tyler would be right [to reject moral­i­ty and con­se­quences]… and to live oth­er­wise in this mad world would be hyp­o­crit­i­cal, and a waste of air.

These are the peo­ple that scare me. These are the peo­ple that think that if they evolved from a pri­mate ances­tor, then they might as well tear open peo­ple’s chests and feed on their still warm organs. At the first hear­ing for the new sci­ence stan­dards in Kansas City, a per­son claimed that if his chil­dren were taught that their ances­tors evolved, they’d grow up to be doc­tors who would “feel no inhi­bi­tion to abort life.”

I’m sur­round­ed, walk­ing down the street, at the super­mar­ket, on the high­way, by peo­ple who think that the only rea­son not to join Han­ni­bal Lecter and Tyler Dur­den in a spree of vig­i­lante-ish hooli­gan­ism is the implic­it threat of death and pun­ish­ment. These peo­ple are lit­er­al­ly tee­ter­ing on the edge, and they seem to gen­uine­ly believe that the only thing hold­ing them back is the threat of eter­nal damnation.

I don’t know if heav­en exists, or if hell exists, and I don’t behave any more or less moral­ly than I would oth­er­wise. I don’t know if God will pun­ish me for sins or reward good works or if I’m jus­ti­fied by faith alone, and I don’t wor­ry too much about whether or not there is or isn’t an eter­nal judge. I don’t real­ly think it mat­ters much.

I think that a moral­i­ty that exists only because you’re afraid of pun­ish­ment here or in eter­ni­ty is an inau­then­tic moral­i­ty. I think that peo­ple who care more about what a deity thinks about right and wrong than they care about actu­al right and wrong are very, very scary. Because if they woke up one morn­ing and heard a lit­tle voice telling them to kill, they might just do it.

The review­er is basi­cal­ly build­ing a syl­lo­gism and claim­ing that it proves athe­ists are real­ly amoral. It goes some­thing like this:

• We do things because they are good
• God tells us what’s good
• With­out God, we would not do good things

The impli­ca­tion is then that athe­ists are only kept from mass slaugh­ter by rigid­ly enforced laws and what the review­er refers to as “soft, archa­ic, reli­gion-inspired morals.” 

No, I don’t quite see how he makes that leap, either.

The flaw in the syl­lo­gism is with the sec­ond point. Even if we grant that point, it need not be exclu­sive. An athe­ist ought to have no trou­ble agree­ing that if a god did exist, then it might well be able to help us sep­a­rate good and evil. I don’t know. I do know that con­clu­sion of the syl­lo­gism ought to be “With­out God, we’d have to rely on oth­er means of dis­tin­guish­ing right from wrong.” And those exist in spades.

Peo­ple are good. Help­ing oth­er peo­ple is good. Hurt­ing them is bad. Doing some­thing to some­one else that you would­n’t want them to do is wrong. I don’t need com­mand­ments to tell me that. Moses, Jesus, Bud­dha, Con­fu­cius, Pla­to, Kant, Rawls and most oth­er major reli­gious or philo­soph­i­cal groups all man­aged to fig­ure out essen­tial­ly the same for­mu­la. Maybe that’s God’s will man­i­fest­ing itself, or maybe it’s some­thing about the nature of the world. The Gold­en Rule can be shown to be an evo­lu­tion­ar­i­ly sta­ble strat­e­gy, giv­en the right social set­ting. And maybe that express­es some divine desire, an unrecord­ed “let there be…”. Maybe it doesn’t.

I think this gets to John’s first question:

The Mis­fit’s dilem­ma, of course, is that which every believ­er dai­ly lives/wrestles with: that belief by its very nature is not ulti­mate­ly con­firmed by empir­i­cal knowl­edge. For him–and for Tyler Dur­den, for that matter–authenticity is defined by that ulti­mate con­fir­ma­tion. But might there also be anoth­er sort of authen­tic­i­ty, one that sees the embrac­ing of the not-empir­i­cal as not only pos­si­ble but as actu­al­ly (and for­give the oxy­moron here) more authen­tic as a way of liv­ing? Sure­ly, implic­it some­where in the believ­er’s deci­sion to believe is pre­cise­ly that oth­er notion of authenticity.

I think that belief in a deity can­not be con­signed to the uni­verse of testable claims, and that its authen­tic­i­ty must be sought beyond the realm of empir­i­cal knowl­edge. The nature of a super­nat­ur­al being is to exceed the phys­i­cal, to be beyond the testable nat­ur­al world. If it weren’t, it would be nei­ther super­nat­ur­al nor meta­phys­i­cal. In this sense, “the name that can be named is not the eter­nal Name,” and con­tin­u­ing with the Tao Te Ching, “Noth­ing, and Heav­en share the same root.… There are too many laws, when all you have to do is to hold on to the centre.”

Maybe there’s heav­en, maybe there’s noth­ing, but truth and good­ness, like fal­si­ty and evil, exist either way. Athe­ists and the­ists all know that.

Dur­den, like Flan­nery O’Con­nor’s Mis­fit, find them­selves in trou­ble not because they lack God, but because they lost God after hav­ing relied on an exter­nal deci­sion-mak­er as a sub­sti­tute for their own moral com­pass. And that’s problematic.

The Dis­cov­ery Insti­tute’s war on evo­lu­tion is dri­ven by their fear of “mate­ri­al­ism.” The fear is that mate­ri­al­ism “por­trayed humans not as moral and spir­i­tu­al beings, but as ani­mals or machines who inhab­it­ed a uni­verse ruled by pure­ly imper­son­al forces,” that it “under­mined per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty.” The solu­tion – their stat­ed goal – was “To replace mate­ri­al­is­tic expla­na­tions with the the­is­tic under­stand­ing that nature and hur­nan beings are cre­at­ed by God.”

This all rests on the same shaky assump­tion that only the­is­tic expla­na­tions can pos­si­bly offer any moral guid­ance. And I, like many athe­ists and many the­ists, firm­ly reject that hypothesis.