Category Archives: Atheism

Atheism, Morality, Skeptics

If There Is No God, Why Be Good? Part 1

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, there is a section entitled “If there is no God, why be good?”  I eagerly devoured this section as I sincerely wanted to see what answer Dawkins would give.  After all, he is the most prominent intellectual atheist in the world today, right?  What did he say?

First, he addressed the alleged Christian claim that the only reason anyone acts morally is for fear of divine retribution.  If you take God’s punishments away, everyone goes bad.  Dawkins points out to Christians: “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.”

By Dawkins’s understanding of the Christian view of morality, we need God to scare us into behaving, and if belief in God were to disappear, every person would immediately cease doing good.  Dawkins thinks this view is obviously wrong.  He explains:

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.

According to Dawkins, Christians assert that without a person actively believing in God, they would do nothing good.  He then provides some brief statistical evidence to illustrate that religious people don’t always act very morally (it’s only a couple paragraphs that are meant to get this simple point across).

After “proving” God isn’t needed to motivate moral behavior, Dawkins quickly moves to another alleged Christian argument.  He imagines a Christian apologist saying the following:

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.

Dawkins is claiming that Christians believe that a person can only decide what is right or wrong by reading the Bible, a holy book which issues absolute moral commands.  Without a book like the Bible, there would be no way to decide between right and wrong.  Dawkins then wonders whether it is necessary for moral laws to be absolute.

To examine that question, Dawkins briefly introduces Immanuel Kant, a philosopher who tried to explain absolute moral duties without God.  Dawkins isn’t overly impressed with Kant’s attempt and admits that “it is tempting to agree with my hypothetical apologist that absolutist morals are usually driven by religion.”  Dawkins quickly adds, however, that “morals do not have to be absolute” and so ends the section of his book entitled “If There Is No God, Why Be Good?”

Here is where Dawkins has taken the argument so far.  He has demonstrated that religious people are often immoral, which defeats the Christian claim that believing in God motivates morality.  He then stated that Christians believe that the only way a person can decide between right and wrong is by following the absolute moral commands of the Bible.  Dawkins leaves the argument at this point and invites the reader to continue to the next book chapter where he will address the subject of whether the Bible can be successfully used as a source of absolute moral commands.

In part 2 of this post, we will examine the next chapter, entitled “The ‘Good’ Book and the Changing Moral Zeitgeist,” to see how Dawkins answers the question, “If There Is No God, Why Be Good?”

Atheism

Why Talk So Much About Atheism?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

If you’ve read this blog for any period of time, you’ve probably noticed that there are quite a few blog posts dedicated to discussions of atheism (there is no god or gods) and the philosophy of naturalism (all that exists is found in the material universe).  Atheism and naturalism generally go together, although not always.

Some of you may wonder why I (Bill) should spend so much time talking about atheistic naturalism when less than 5% of the population explicitly subscribes to this worldview.  Most of us don’t personally know practicing, outspoken atheists, so why bother addressing this worldview so often?  That’s a good question and one that I’ve asked myself.

The answer is that although the general populations of Europe and North America (the areas of the world that impact American culture the most) are not explicitly atheist, the percentages go way up for those who inhabit the highest levels in academia.  The academic world’s embrace of atheistic naturalism is unique among all the challengers to Christianity.

This may just confirm for some of you that academics are “not right in the head” or “out in left field” and that we should just ignore them.  While some of them may be like that, we ignore them at our peril.  I firmly believe that the ideas that are imbibed in the universities among academics eventually make their way to the general population.  History has proven this out time and again.

The battle of worldviews is being fought at our western universities and the major contenders are Christian theism and atheistic naturalism.  As a Christian apologist, I feel drawn to this battle as I consider it to be the heavyweight bout.

Now, I am not saying that we should ignore other worldviews that attack Christianity.  On the contrary, on this blog we have addressed many other worldviews, especially Mormonism, as my co-blogger Darrell is a former Mormon and understands that worldview extremely well.  I am merely saying that atheistic naturalism deserves a lot of ink because of the devotion of many western intellectuals.

Even though our friends and neighbors are rarely hard core atheists, atheistic naturalism impacts our culture often in ways we don’t even realize.  There are more and more people who are practical atheists, even if they don’t call themselves atheists.  They live as if God does not exist, even though they would not say they don’t believe in God if they were asked.  Our friends and neighbors are taking in naturalistic ideas without even knowing it.

How are they taking in these ideas?  Through the pop culture.  How is pop culture picking up on these ideas?  From western intellectuals.  We cannot just ignore the academic world.  We owe it to our fellow man to counter atheistic naturalism.  C. S. Lewis, as always, is ready with a helpful bit of advice.  “Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.”

Atheism, Evolution, Philosophy

How Can We Trust Science in Richard Dawkins’ Middle World?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In the last chapter of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, he introduces the metaphor of Middle World.  The idea of Middle World is that the human sensory organs have only evolved in order to help humans survive in a world of medium-sized objects moving at relatively slow speeds (compared to the speed of light).  Dawkins observes that “our brains are themselves evolved organs: on-board computers, evolved to help us survive in a world — I shall use the name Middle World — where the objects that mattered to our survival were neither very large nor very small; a world where things either stood still or moved slowly compared with the speed of light.”

We are ill-equipped to deal with the vast distances to other galaxies or the sub-atomic world.  In fact, the way we perceive objects is misleading.

Science has taught us, against all evolved intuition, that apparently solid things like crystals and rocks are really composed almost entirely of empty space. The familiar illustration represents the nucleus of an atom as a fly in the middle of a sports stadium. The next atom is right outside the stadium. The hardest, solidest, densest rock, then, is ‘really’ almost entirely empty space, broken only by tiny particles so far apart that they shouldn’t count.

Our senses, then, do not give us an accurate picture of reality.  According to Dawkins, “Our brains are not equipped to imagine what it would be like to be a neutrino passing through a wall, in the vast interstices of which that wall ‘really’ consists. Nor can our understanding cope with what happens when things move at close to the speed of light.”

If Dawkins had stopped at this point, all would be well.  Nobody would argue that we are ill-equipped to see sub-atomic particles, that our sensory organs are limited.  Dawkins doesn’t stop here, though, because he wants to hammer home just how limited we are.  What we really perceive as reality, argues Dawkins, is only a mental model.

What we see of the real world is not the unvarnished real world but a model of the real world, regulated and adjusted by sense data—a model that is constructed so that it is useful for dealing with the real world. The nature of that model depends on the kind of animal we are.

Once the mental model concept is introduced, it is my contention that Dawkins ends up eviscerating our very ability to know anything about reality.  He is arguing that we really don’t know what reality is like because we only have the mental models that our species has evolved, and those mental models have proven to be incomplete and inaccurate time and again. In fact, humans are constantly surprised by just how wrong our models are.

But wait!  There is a savior that will rescue us from our ignorance.  Dawkins elates, “Science flings open the narrow window [of Middle World] through which we are accustomed to viewing the spectrum of possibilities. We are liberated by calculation and reason to visit regions of possibility that had once seemed out of bounds or inhabited by dragons.”

How can this be, though?  On the atheist worldview, do not science, calculation, and reason all depend completely on the severely limited human brain which has consistently given us inaccurate mental models of reality?  How is it that the very organ which has constantly misled us about reality will be our savior?  Isn’t this the classic case of the blind leading the blind?

Dawkins, like most atheists, just assumes that human reason magically works, that science marches inexorably to the Truth. But on the atheist view, reason and the ability to do science, all comes from the evolved human brain, an organ that, according to Dawkins, can’t be trusted to see the world as it really is, an organ that fools us.  There is no soul, no rational God that guarantees that our reason actually works.  So, I ask, how can we trust science in Richard Dawkins’ Middle World?

Atheism, Free Will, Philosophy

Is the Human Mind Like Computer Software?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

The question of the origin of human rationality plagues the atheistic naturalist worldview – the worldview that says that all that exists ultimately is matter governed by the laws of physics.  If every event that has ever occurred and ever will occur is determined by physical laws, then how are humans able to make decisions that are free from that determinism?

Rationality is mere illusion under naturalism, as everything we say and think is the result of antecedent physical conditions and physical laws.  We can’t help what we say and think, because all our thoughts and words are the result of physical processes that we have no control over.  Judging a person’s beliefs would be like blaming a leaf for falling to the ground.

On a recent Unbelievable? podcast, atheist Norman Bacrac posited the following solution to the problem.  He claimed that the human brain represents the hardware that obeys the physical laws of nature.  But running on this hardware is the software of the rational mind, software which evolved out of the hardware of human anatomy.  According to Bacrac, even though the hardware is determined by natural laws, the software is not.  Software represents the thoughts and arguments made by humans when they are reasoning.

Does this software proposal really help?  I don’t think so.  Consider what hardware and software mean in the computer world.  Hardware consists in physical electronic circuits.  Software performs the function of the program it implements by directly providing instructions to the computer hardware.  Software is non-physical information.  It can be instantiated into a physical medium, but the medium is not the software – it merely contains the software.

If we are using the analogy of computer hardware and software to explain the difference between the human brain and human rationality, then we need to explain where the non-physical software came from.  Bacrac claimed that the hardware of the brain evolved through standard Darwinian processes, but what about the software?  Ultimately, for the naturalist, the software must come from physical matter.  So, we have physical hardware producing non-physical software, but this is certainly not the case in the world of computers.  Microprocessors don’t produce spreadsheet applications; human minds produce spreadsheet applications.

In order for Bacrac’s analogy to work, he needs to explain the incredible leap from the determined, physical hardware of the brain to the undetermined, non-physical software of human rationality.  On naturalism, I fail to see how this leap can occur, and thus the solution that Bacrac posits does not seem to work.

Atheism, Islam, Religion

Are You Muslim Because You Were Born in Morocco?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

A couple months ago I attended a debate between a Christian scholar and an atheist scholar at a local university.  At the conclusion of the debate there was a Q and A session and one of the atheist students stood up and asked something like the following to the Christian scholar: “How do you explain the fact that where a person is born is highly predictive of what religion they will believe?”

When I’ve heard this question before, the inquirer is usually making the point that religious belief is merely the result of cultural conditioning.  You don’t come to your beliefs through thought or reason; your religion is merely a reflection of where you were raised and what you were taught as a child.  Similar to your speaking accent, you “pick up” your religion through your parents and friends.

First, I must say that there are certainly people who merely inherit their religious beliefs from their culture.  There is no doubt about that, but what conclusion can we draw from this data?  Can we conclude that all religious believers are merely socially conditioned, that they don’t have any good reasons for what they believe?

Timothy Keller, in his book The Reason for God, quotes Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga as he answers those who claim religious beliefs are merely culturally conditioned.  Speaking of Plantinga, Keller says:

People often say to him, “If you were born in Morocco, you wouldn’t even be a Christian, but rather a Muslim.” [Plantinga] responds:  ‘Suppose we concede that if I had been born of Muslim parents in Morocco rather than Christian parents in Michigan, my beliefs would have been quite different.

Plantinga then points out that the same goes for the person making the charge.  For example, if the atheist student had been born in Morocco, then he probably would be a Muslim, not an atheist!   Does it follow that his atheist beliefs are merely conditioned by his parents or peers?  Keller concludes, “You can’t say, ‘All claims about religions are historically conditioned except the one I am making right now.'”

The atheist wants to claim that he is exempt from the cultural conditioning that everyone else is subject to, but this won’t fly because even he is influenced by his upbringing.  Even so, he would never want to say that his atheism is merely the result of cultural conditioning.   If the atheist can escape his culture, then so can everyone else.  Just look around.  There are people who hold minority religious views all over the world.

Once I go down the road of claiming that those who disagree with me only believe what they believe because of their culture or upbringing, I have ceased giving their position any respect.  I am simply patronizing them and fruitful discussion ends.

Atheism, Religion

Is Religion Temporary?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

For some secular, non-religious people, their hope is that religious people will some day be the minority, that mankind will finally grow out of this unfortunate phase of history.  Religion may have helped our distant ancestors to explain where we came from, why we are here, why we have moral feelings, why we are unhappy, and where we are headed after we die.  The answers that religion provided gave aid and comfort in the face of a hostile world.

But, the secularist may argue, we don’t need religion any more.  The scientific method has served to successfully explain many aspects of the world that our ancestors did not understand.  Religion is on the way out.

Are the secularists right?  Will mankind move beyond religious answers?  Will the deepest desires of man be fulfilled without religion?

I do not see this happening any time soon, if ever.  The worship of God seems like a permanent need built in mankind, not something temporary that will disappear in the near future.  Pastor and author Timothy Keller has the following to say about man and religion in his book The Reason for God:

Religion is not just a temporary thing that helped us adapt to our environment.  Rather it is a permanent and central aspect of the human condition.  This is a bitter pill for secular, nonreligious people to swallow.  Everyone wants to think that they are in the mainstream, that they are not extremists.  But robust religious beliefs dominate the world.  There is no reason to expect that to change.

For the foreseeable future, those who deny the existence of the supernatural will remain in the small minority, as they always have.  It is always possible that they are right and the religious are wrong, but the entire history of man is the history of belief in the supernatural, not just by a few, but by the many.  Humans seek the supernatural – that’s who we are.

Atheism

Are Atheism and Socialism a Package Deal?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

I am not a political science expert, so I can’t say for sure how strong the link between socialism and atheism is.  I’m sure some of you can think of examples of people you know who are atheist and not socialist or socialist and not atheist.

For Fyodor Dostoyevsky, writing in the late 1800’s, the linkage was clear.  In his book The Brothers Karamazov, considered to be a literary classic, Dostoyevsky’s narrator has the following to say about the main character, Alyosha, a strong Christian:

In the same way, if he had decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would at once have become an atheist and a socialist. For socialism is not merely the labor question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth.

Any ideology which has as its goal to set up a completely human-constructed utopia on earth is certainly not derived from Christian theology or from any other religious theology that I can think of.  Most religions envision a heavenly paradise, but not one created by man alone.

If socialism is truly characterized by this aim, to create heaven on earth by man pulling himself up by his own bootstraps, then Dostoyevsky’s point holds – atheism and socialism are bedfellows.  There may be socialists who disavow this aim and would declare allegiance with theists.  Any socialists out there who want to speak up?

Atheism, Philosophy

Atheist Physicist Roger Penrose on Reality

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts this morning, Unbelievable?, where the two guests were atheist physicist Roger Penrose and Christian theologian Alister McGrath.  In a fascinating exchange, the host, Justin Brierley, asked Penrose if reality could be reduced to matter.

I expected Penrose to say “yes” and was shocked when he said “no.”  In fact, Penrose said that he tends to divide reality up into three realms: consciousness, the material world, and mathematics.  Penrose, if I understood him correctly, said that these three slices of reality are all intertwined but also distinct from each other.  Penrose seemed to be saying that a reduction of all reality to matter was mistaken.

In fact, Penrose went on to explain that as a physicist, the more he discovers about matter, the more it looks like mathematics!

What is so interesting about Penrose’s comments is that he recognizes that consciousness and mathematics are not explained by the material world, which runs very much counter to the standard atheist dogma.  Mathematics, according to Penrose, seems to exist as an objective reality outside the material world.  He didn’t venture to offer a theory as to where mathematics has come from, but he is clearly disdainful of the materialist reduction program.   How refreshing.

Atheism, Evolution, Morality

What Kind of Morality Could Evolution Have Given Us?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Most atheists appeal to the process of Darwinian evolution as the source of our moral instincts, but this idea poses some intriguing questions.  What if humankind had evolved in different circumstances, in different environments?  One could imagine a different set of moral instincts having developed in humans.  What about other animals?  We see different behaviors in them based on their evolutionary history.  Let’s look at some examples.

Philosopher William Lane Craig draws our attention to John Hick.  He “invites us to imagine an ant suddenly endowed with the insights of socio-biology and the freedom to make personal decisions.”  Hick writes:

Suppose him to be called upon to immolate himself for the sake of the ant-hill. He feels the powerful pressure of instinct pushing him towards this self-destruction. But he asks himself why he should voluntarily . . . carry out the suicidal programme to which instinct prompts him? Why should he regard the future existence of a million million other ants as more important to him than his own continued existence? . . . Since all that he is and has or ever can have is his own present existence, surely in so far as he is free from the domination of the blind force of instinct he will opt for life–his own life.

Why should the ant go against his evolutionary instincts?  His instinct for suicide is for the good of the ant-hill and has been placed into him by evolutionary processes.  If humans had likewise evolved with an intense instinct to immolate ourselves, would atheists tell us we ought to immolate ourselves or would they say we ought not?  If we ought not, then why not, given our evolutionary instincts?

Darwin himself recognized this problem.  He said, “If men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering.”

If morality is derived from evolution, and evolution gave our females moral instincts to kill their brothers, would the atheist say that this is behavior is right?

Philosopher Mark Linville notes that “wolves in a pack know their place in the social hierarchy.  A lower ranked male feels compelled to give way to the alpha male.”  If we imagine that there were wolf moral philosophers, would they not draw the inference that justice is inequality, that wolves ought to give way to those higher in the social hierarchy?  After all, this is what evolution gave them.  Would atheists agree with the wolf philosophers?

In the rest of the animal world, we see animals eating their young, we see males aggressively forcing themselves on females sexually, and we see animals violently taking things from each other.  If evolution has caused all of these behaviors, then how would the atheist call any of these behaviors wrong if humans had evolved these same instincts?

Here is the problem in a nutshell.  Atheists must say that evolution has given us moral instincts as they cannot invoke any kind of moral standard that comes from outside the natural world.  But evolution has given the animal kingdom all sorts of instincts that atheists would want to say are wrong.  In order for them to say these instincts are wrong, however, they must invoke a moral standard that transcends evolution, but they don’t believe that a transcendent standard exists.

Either atheists must admit that a moral standard exists outside and above evolution, or they must accept the fact that they cannot rationally call any behavior wrong that evolution has produced.  Which way to go?

Atheism, Morality

Where Is Ultimate Justice on Atheism? Part 2

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

On atheism, there is no guarantee that evil will ever be punished or that good will ever be rewarded.  Philosopher William Lane Craig quotes Richard Wurmbrand’s comments on the state torturers in Soviet prisons who understood this all too well:

The cruelty of atheism is hard to believe when man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil. There is no reason to be human. There is no restraint from the depths of evil which is in man. The Communist torturers often said, ‘There is no God, no hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish.’ I have heard one torturer even say, ‘I thank God, in whom I don’t believe, that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart.’ He expressed it in unbelievable brutality and torture inflected on prisoners.

Since death is the end, there is no reason to not live a purely self-centered life focused on fulfilling your desires, whatever they may be.  Atheist philosopher Kai Nielsen laments:

We have not been able to show that reason requires the moral point of view, or that all really rational persons should not be individual egoists or classical amoralists. Reason doesn’t decide here. The picture I have painted for you is not a pleasant one. Reflection on it depresses me . . . . Pure practical reason, even with a good knowledge of the facts, will not take you to morality.

Craig answers the atheist who might say that we should be moral because it is in our self-interest:

Somebody might say that it is in our best self-interest to adopt a moral life-style. But clearly, that is not always true: we all know situations in which self-interest runs smack in the face of morality. Moreover, if one is sufficiently powerful, like a Ferdinand Marcos or a Papa Doc Duvalier or even a Donald Trump, then one can pretty much ignore the dictates of conscience and safely live in self-indulgence.

On atheism, sacrificing for others seems utterly irrational.  Craig concludes, “Acts of self-sacrifice become particularly inept on a naturalistic world view. Why should you sacrifice your self-interest and especially your life for the sake of someone else? There can be no good reason for adopting such a self-negating course of action on the naturalistic world view.”

Why not be self-indulgent and live for yourself?  Under atheism, there is no rational answer to that question.  All you can appeal to is your moral emotions and instincts, which means the moral life nowhere intersects with reason.  Just do it if you feel like it.  Otherwise, don’t.