In Letter to a Christian Nation (Knopf, 2006), in the section Are Atheists Evil?, Sam Harris writes:
If you are right to believe that religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than believers. In fact, they should be utterly immoral. (pp. 38-39)
Harris then goes on to point out something that I don't doubt is true, namely, that atheists ". . . are at least as well behaved as the general population." (Ibid.) Harris' enthymeme can be spelled out as an instance of modus tollendo tollens, if you will forgive the pedantry:
1. If religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than believers.
2. Atheists are not less moral than believers.
Therefore
3. Religious faith does not offer the only real basis for morality.
The problem with this argument lies in its first premise. It simply doesn't follow that if religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than theists. This blatant non sequitur trades on a confusion of two questions which it is essential to distinguish.
Q1. Given some agreed-upon moral code, are people who profess some version of theism more 'moral,' i.e., more likely to live in accordance with the agreed-upon code, than those who profess some version of atheism?
The answer to this question is No. But even if the answer is not in the negative, I am willing to concede arguendo to Harris that it is. In any case (Q1) is not philosophically interesting, except as apart of the run-up to a genuine philosophical question, though it is of interest sociologically.
Q2. Given some agreed-upon moral code, are atheists justified in adhering to the code?
The agreed-upon code is one that most or many atheists and theists would accept. Thus don't we all object to child molestation, killing of human beings, rape, theft, and lying? And in objecting to these actions, we mean our objections to be more than merely subjectively valid. When our property is stolen or a neighbor murdered, we consider than an objective wrong has been done. And when the murderer is apprehended, tried, and convicted we judge that something objectively right has been done. Let's not worry about the details or the special cases: killing in self-defense, abortion, etc. Just imagine some minimal objectively binding code that all or most of us, theists and atheists alike, accept. What (Q2) asks about is the foundation or basis of the agreed-upon objectively binding moral code. This is not a sociological or any kind of empirical question. Nor is it a question in normative ethics. The question is not what we ought to do and leave undone, for we are assuming that we already have a rough answer to that. The question is meta-ethical: what does morality rest on, if on anything?
There are different theories. Some will say that morality requires a supernatural foundation, others that a natural foundation suffices. Here you can read the transcript of a debate between Richard Taylor and William Lane Craig on this topic. I incline toward the side ably defended by Craig. Although I respect Taylor very much as a philosopher and have learned from his work, he seems to me to come across in this debate as something of a sophist and a smart-ass.
But the point of this post is not to take sides on the question of the basis of morality, but simply to point out that Sam Harris has confused two quite obviously distinct questions. For if he had kept them distinct, he would have seen that the question whether morality requires a basis in religion is logically independent of the question whether theists are more moral than atheists. He would have seen that invoking the platitude that atheists can be as morally decent as theists has no tendency to show that morality does not require a supernatural foundation.
See Is Religion the Problem? for further criticism of Sam Harris.
"The Athenians, who were at war with Sparta, wanted to force the inhabitants of the little island of Melos, allied to Sparta from all antiquity and so far remaining neutral, to join with them. It was in vain that the men of Melos, faced with the ultimatum of the Athenians, invoked justice, imploring pity for the antiquity of their town. As they would not give in, the Athenians razed their city to the ground, put all their men to death, and sold their all their women and children as slaves.
Thucydides has put the lines in question into the mouth of these Athenians. They begin by saying that they will not try to prove that their ultimatum is just.
Let us treat rather of what is possible... You know it as well as we do; the human spirit is so constituted that what is just is only examined if there is equal necessity on both sides. But if one is strong and the other weak, that which is possible is imposed by the first and accepted by the second.
The men of Melos said that in the case of a battle they would have the gods with them on account of the justice of their cause. The Athenians replied that they saw no reason to supposes so.
As touching the gods we have the belief, and as touching men the certainty, that always, by a necessity of nature, each one commands wherever he has the power. We did not establish this law, we are not the first to apply it; we found it already established, we abide by it as something likey to endure forever; and that is why we apply it. We know quite well that you also, like all the others, once you reached the same degree of power, would act the same way.
Such lucity of mind in the conception of injustice is the light that comes below that of charity. It is the clarity that sometimes remains where charity once existed but has become extinguised. Below comes the darkness in which the strong sincerely believe that their cause is more just than that of the weak."
Simone Weil in Waiting For God, speaking of Thucydides in the chapter "Forms of the Implicit Love of God," pagers 140-142.
The question for the religious and the anti-theists then is why morality (justice) at all? What is the cause of thinking that it is a virtue to behave as though there were equality when one is the stronger in an unequal relationship?
The following quote from Shermer is pretty representative also:
<i>“What would you do if there were no God? Would you commit robbery, rape, and murder, or would you continue being a good and moral person? Either way the question is a debate stopper. If the answer is that you would soon turn to robbery, rape, or murder, then this is a moral indictment of your character, indicating you are not to be trusted because if, for any reason, you were to turn away from your belief in God, your true immoral nature would emerge…If the answer is that you would continue being good and moral, then apparently you can be good without God. QED.” [Michael Shermer, The Science of Good and Evil, pp. 154-155].</i>
I have seen this "proof" use to argue that atheists don't have a special problem of moral justification! (*) As psychology, perhaps he is right, but it does nothing to address the epistemic status of moral claims. I dont' think they are being sneaky and slippery, but are simply ignorant of these important distinctions.
(*)A conclusion I agree with, just not based on such arguments.
Eric Thomson
Thanks for alerting me to the Shermer quotation. He seems to making the same mistake that Harris makes.
James,
Glad to see you are reading Simone Weil. Imagine a situation in which A is in a position to impose his will on B (by raping and murdering her, say) and that A will 'get away with it.' (No one cares about B, they are far off in the wild, etc. We may imagine that A will die in a month from cancer. ) In this situation, does A have a reason not to rape and murder B, a reason to not gratify himself? If there is no God, and no surivival of physical death, what reason could A have? Because it is wrong in the abstract for A to rape and murder? That will strike A as a joke. "You are going to oppose to my real and furious lust an abstract moral demand that hangs in the air with no way of being enforced??"
This is one way to focus the question that people like Harris and Shermer apparaently don't grasp.
My favorite Simone Weil quote from the same book:
“The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread [God], but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry.”
That is an outstanding formulation. A reason why many atheists think that theism is just a load of childish rubbish is that they are not "hungry" in Weil's sense. Compleltely satisfied by this world (if not in its present state then in an imagined future one), they make no inquiry into whehter or not it is ultimate.
Furthermore, I am quite sure Weil would say that genuine existential doubting of the existence of God is a higher spiritual state than a Falwell-type smug conviction of his existence. (Though I should not pretend to know what went on in Falwell's soul.)
Thanks for that excellent quotation on the positive uses of doubt. But doubt also has a negative side which is perhaps betrayed by its etymology. I speculate that there might be a connection between the German Zweifel (doubt) and Teufel (devil). Zweifel contains zwei (two) just as duplicitas points us back to duplex. What's the Latin for devil? Diabolus? which may be related to dubitare, to doubt.
These are just my speculations. Further, Goethe in Faust describes Mephistopheles as Der Geist der stets verneint, the spirit that always negates. The power to negate, grounded in our free will, is a power that spiritual beings have. It makes us God-like and so tempts us to egotism, rebellion, and the Fall. In a man like Hitchens we find practically the apotheosis of the spirit of contrariety, though 'apotheosis' might not be the right word.
Now why does that remind me of Monty Python's Argument Clinic ...?
I'll bet there is a strong negative correlation between having religion as an important part of your life and being a criminal. And I wouldn't be surprised if there were a positive correlation between religious devotion and being a generally kind and charitable person.
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