There is a harmful confusion perpetuated by some theists about the moral integrity of atheists and non-believers. It suggests they have no foundation for morality, or worse, they are personally immoral because they lack religious beliefs.
These stereotypes and prejudices are a type of religious discrimination. Like most discrimination, it’s caused by ignorance and is morally offensive.
This ignorance happens when people don’t question their intuition that morality requires God. Studies show people have this intuition and it causes the perception atheists themselves are immoral. Like all instances of garbage in garbage out, the inference is unsound because it’s based on a false assumption.
Does morality require belief in God?
The moral argument says God is the best explanation for the existence of moral facts. But this is irrelevant to our religious beliefs and gives us no reason to judge the moral qualities of any individual.
This is a simplified version of the argument:
Objective moral values exist
God is the best or only explanation of objective moral values
Therefore, God exists
The first thing to clear up is what we mean by objective moral values. Objective means there is some fact of the matter which doesn’t vary with opinion.
If I say chocolate is the best flavor of ice cream and you disagree and think strawberry is best, there’s no fact about who is right. We don’t even expect to resolve the dispute, because we don’t think one of us is right and the other wrong. We understand we’re only giving our personal opinion and preference.
But if I say the Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun, I’m making a factual statement about the world itself. The distance between the Earth and the Sun is an objective fact which is independent of opinion.
Our claims about ice cream flavors are subjective, which contrasts with the objective claim about the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Once we understand this subjective vs objective distinction we can ask, what type of claims are moral claims?
Are moral claims objective or subjective?
Moral claims are an unusual type of claim. They’re claims about how we should behave, and how we should treat others.
If I say torturing babies is immoral, it seems like I’m making an objective claim. I’m not telling you my personal preference that I don’t like to do it, I’m saying it’s wrong for everyone, no one should torture babies. Moral claims don’t appear to be subjective because we’re not just sharing our personal preferences.
But they’re also not exactly like the claim about the distance between the Earth and the Sun. We can go and measure the world to resolve any dispute about distance.
But how can we do that for moral claims? Where is the property of moral or immoral located? What objective source can we refer to if we want to settle a moral dispute?
It’s important to understand this question isn’t about which actions are moral or immoral. This is meta-ethics. It’s about how to understand the properties we assign to some actions.
Why do we think actions like, torturing babies, have the property immoral, while actions like, giving in charity, have the property moral? These properties aren’t like mass or length which we can measure.
And more specifically we can ask, what grounds these properties of morality in the world? If they’re facts and true independent of opinion, by virtue of what other thing are they true or false? What objective feature in the world is the standard that makes it true to call them moral or immoral?
It’s tempting to give the easy answer and point to God. This gives us an objective feature in the world which is our moral standard. It’s moral or immoral because God says it is. This does make the moral claim objective, but it creates a lot more problems than it solves.
The theist dilemma
The most famous and succinct version of the problem is Plato’s Euthyphro dilemma :
Is something good because the gods will it, or do the gods will it because it is good?
As with all dilemmas, whichever answer you choose lands you in trouble. If something is good because God wills it, then murder could be good if God says so.
If we choose the option God wills something because it is good, we don’t have an objective basis for morality. Even God is beholden to some other standard. And we still don’t know what that standard is, we only know it isn’t God.
We can avoid the dilemma by saying God is the good and so he would never recommend anything immoral. But we still need to say what quality of God corresponds to the property of good and why.
For our purposes we don’t need to find out which of these answers, if any, are right. For now, let’s assume they’re right and see what this means for the morality of the non-theist.
Imagine there was a moral law book where those moral facts are written down. This gives us something in the world which is an objective source of our moral facts.
Either God wrote the book, or God looks up what is moral in the book and then gives his commands, or God is the personification of the moral properties in the book, so he knows them off by heart.
And we find that it doesn’t matter which of these three options we choose. It makes not one whit of difference what your religious beliefs are. If the book says X is wrong, then it is wrong for everyone, even God.
Does theism tell us what those objective moral properties are?
This idea of a moral law book is the source of the misunderstanding. Many people think the objective moral law is found in their preferred scriptural texts. But even if this is true, it doesn’t matter what you believe about God’s existence, or the truth of any particular religious scripture, it’s your actions that are moral or immoral.
Another problem for the theist is that all scriptural texts need interpretation to understand their meaning. We have a variety of opinions on the meaning of the same scriptural text and parts of those texts once thought to be moral are now rejected. Any dispute about interpretation of the text needs to appeal to logic and other philosophical principles.
This method is the same as the secular practice of using ethical philosophical texts for guidance and adapting their principles over time. The method the theist uses to understand the meaning of religious texts is the same method the non-believer uses when they grapple with a moral problem and come to a conclusion based on logic.
Even if we assume for sake of argument what the theist claims about their scripture is true, it still doesn’t show any connection between morality and atheists.
The secular grounding of moral facts
There are many non-religious ways to ground moral facts. None of the main normative ethical theories, virtue ethics, deontology or consequentialism need any reference to God.
Virtue ethics is grounded in character virtues like honesty, courage and compassion. If someone has those traits, we can say they act morally.
Deontology is grounded in rational duties, the dictates of our rational human nature. If something is a categorical imperative, a universal maxim, that is the objective standard to judge if an action is moral or immoral.
Consequentialism is grounded in the consequences or outcome of the actions. Whatever action has the outcome of minimizing suffering is moral.
All these secular theories give us an objective standard which is independent of opinion, without mentioning God.
It’s irrelevant which of these different explanations is the best. There is nothing in any of them which suggests atheists are immoral, or that atheism can provide no grounding for moral facts. The idea it does is based on a misunderstanding.
The moral argument is about which gives us the best explanation for moral facts. It doesn’t argue without God there is no possible explanation of those facts. And it certainly isn’t an argument that a persons religious beliefs are a guarantee of moral behavior.
When we consider the kind of properties moral and immoral are, they fit uncomfortably in a world of insentient matter. We can ground them in the properties of humans like rationality or virtues, but theists argue that isn’t objective enough. Since God is a sentient, rational being, he gives us a standard independent of humans who embodies those facts.
There are of course other explanatory options available. We can revise our conception of matter as insentient and mindless. We can reject the existence of moral facts and explain moral claims as non-factual, something like practical guidelines for human society.
Every explanatory option for meta-ethics has it’s strengths and weaknesses. But one thing they all have in common is none of them have any relevance to someones beliefs about God. There is no logical connection between the two.
Morality transcends religious beliefs and is a universal quality of human beings. It’s time we ditched the immoral atheist stereotype, it’s discriminatory and has no basis in fact.
