No More Mr. Nice Guy!

Atheism considered harmful?

Several months ago, I started reading Sam Norton's blog because he promised he would show that, contrary to what most freethinkers would expect, Christianity is rational while atheism is not only irrational but harmful. A great deal of verbiage later, I finally managed to find what Rev. Sam thinks atheism "misses in its worldview":

• What is acceptable to the humourless atheist?
• On wisdom
• Is wisdom necessary?
• Emotions and decisions
• Atheism and choosing the good

According to Sam, there are two types of atheist: humorless and "reasonable" or "sophisticated". A humorless atheist (I've changed the British spelling to shut my spell checker up) denies that wisdom exists. Of course we should define our terms, and call bullshit if a theist tries to equate wisdom with god-belief, but I have no problem saying that there is something called wisdom to which we should aspire, and that science can't answer all the questions in life. Indeed there is a long, honorable and secular tradition of seeking wisdom, both as a personal endeavor and in the context of how a society should function.

Since we essentially agree on these points, I don't have much to say on the first three links listed above. Also, it seems to me that "societal wisdom" is the more important question. I sometimes have theists trying to drag me into a discussion of their personal notions of spirituality, a prospect that holds no interest for me. People are free to believe whatever they wish, as long as they neither break my leg nor pick my pocket. The interesting question is how a society, especially a religiously diverse one, should be governed if the goal is harmony and justice. More on that below.

The fourth link talks about how human decision-making is not purely logical, with emotions playing in fact a key role, even in a game like chess. This is an interesting point, but I don't think any deep theological significance can be read into it. Rather, it illustrates the point that the human brain is a kluge which evolved in a haphazard fashion, like many other features in biology.

So what is atheism "missing in its worldview"? Whoa, stop right there! Atheism is not a worldview. It is a component of many different worldviews, from the far left of communism to the far right of Ayn Rand's objectivism. That fact in itself should be a hint that atheism itself is not a worldview.

Of course there are probably as many forms of atheism as there are atheists, but to me, atheism is not a destination but a starting point. It is a clearing away of magical thinking and egocentrism, and a recognition that nature is governed by impersonal forces rather than being suffused with some infinite and invisible but anthropomorphic spirit(s) with which it is possible to have a personal relationship, albeit as a helpless and unworthy supplicant.

Where the atheist goes from this starting point is up to him or her. Many choose not to go any further. Others choose to go off in various different directions. Since I want to explore some of the big questions I will press on to the fifth link, where we finally get some meat, though it turns out to be unfilling and unsatisfying.

Sam writes:

The more interesting questions are: 1. does the social acceptance of an agreed framework of values tend to enable people to be good or otherwise? And: 2. does atheism undermine the social acceptance of an agreed framework?

(I think this was Peter Hitchens' essential point - that it is the breakdown of common belief that has undermined social virtue. It happens to have been Christianity in the British context, but it doesn't need to be.)

Peter Hitchens is the younger brother of Christopher, but he is a conservative and a critic of atheism. He equates it, and Sam apparently concurs, with British yob culture and the old saw that "without God, all is permitted." This is a very tiresome and superficial criticism. Just as atheism is not a worldview in itself, it is not a moral or ethical system in itself, but can form the basis for various different systems. And I would argue that it is a better basis, since faith-based morality is arbitrary, imposed by fiat, and tends to obsess with ancient and rigid taboos rather than how our actions affect real people here on Earth in the here and now. Back to Sam:

As I understand it, atheism doesn't (cannot) recognise anything outside of the individual conscience to which appeal can be made. From a (humourless) atheist point of view, for a common social order to be established, each individual member of the community needs to be intellectually persuaded of the merits of that order. The individual conscience is the lynchpin of the system, around which everything else pivots.

What this misses out is the panoply of ways in which human beings operate non-rationally (note, NOT irrationally) on which their rationality depends. You could say that atheism has a hopelessly inadequate anthropology. In particular, choosing of the good depends upon evaluation, which is a form of emotional intelligence. Why shouldn't I have that extra portion of chocolate dessert? Why shouldn't I lie and cheat and steal and so on?

The reason is very simple. People don't exist in a vacuum in isolation from one another. What we do has consequences for other people. We would like to persuade everyone of the rightness of the social norms, but there will always be some who don't get it or are just anti-social, and they have to be restrained from harming others. So we have to come up with a system that as many people as possible agree on, and then enforce it, but it is not true that we are paralyzed until we have unanimity.

In my post Ding Dong The Wicked God is Dead, I argued that ethical systems evolve along with the societies in which they are found. In previous centuries, most societies would be dominated by one religion or another, but there was broad agreement among different societies on the need to discourage theft, murder and so on - for the simple reason that any societies where murder and theft were no big deal would have died out.

In the last few centuries, the limitations of faith-based morality monocultures have become all too clear with the advent of large-scale war, as such societies come into conflict. Today the old order is breaking down, with religiously diverse societies increasingly becoming the norm. The idea that we can have a commonly agreed-on social order that has a sectarian basis is getting more and more unrealistic, as is the notion that we can juggle different religions and not offend anyone. Conflicts between native-born Europeans and Muslim immigrants, with the latter becoming ever more aggressive in seeking to impose their religious strictures on the host society, are a good illustration of this problem.

New types of societies need to evolve new ethical systems. The old religious models are breaking down, and we need to move to a more humanist approach rather than making a last-gasp and rather cynical effort to impose religious shibboleths on a diverse population. We need to focus on the good or harm our actions do to our fellow citizens, rather than the offense allegedly given to some old man with a beard who sits on a cloud.

Coming up with such a system is of course a highly non-trivial undertaking, but to claim that atheism means the abandonment of all ethical systems is shallow and insulting. And I still haven't seen how atheism is supposed to be irrational...