Posted by
Norman on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 11:19:44 PM
More of my correspondence with a savvy atheist, "ModMark":
Mark,
Your post was interesting, too, in its discussion of "natural law." Unfortunately, as an atheist you have no basis on which to claim a belief in natural law. I'm not trying to be provocative, and I'll explain, of course.
All "law" has an author. I see only three possibilities, but feel free to enlighten me if I have missed something.
First, some believe that the ultimate source of law is God. This group includes serious adherents of all theistic faiths, as well as most Deists. As a Christian, this is what I believe.
Second, there is the “consensus” camp, which holds that law is simply a convention that emerges via a cultural consensus among reasonable people.
Third, law can be regarded as a kind of outgrowth of evolutionary psychology. That is, morality and law along with human beings.
Of these three, only the first is logically tenable. (That doesn’t mean it’s true, necessarily, but it does mean that the other two are false.)
The “consensus” argument fails miserably, because it assumes what it sets out to prove, a logical fallacy known as Petitio Principii (aka
“Begging the Question”).
In other words, law is consensual, because consensus is the nature of law. If that’s not clear enough, the best
way to illustrate this point is to walk up to a person and slap him. (Hegel, the 19th Century Idealist, suggested a good boxing of the ears.)
When the person inevitably responds in righteous indignation, ask him why it was wrong of you to slap him. The only answer an atheist can give is that there’s a “law” against it, enforced by police. In other words, it’s wrong because you will go to jail if you do it—which means that it isn’t “wrong” in any moral sense, it’s just a bad idea (because who wants to go to jail?).
If that’s still not clear enough, think about the moral basis on which a “consensus” person (which I’m guessing is where you fit in) would condemn the Holocaust. Why is it wrong to kill millions of people. Seriously. Why is it wrong? The Nazis thought they were doing good. The Allies killed millions of people in WWII. Are we the same as Nazis? After all, we were all killers. What’s the difference?
Before you start with “Well, the victims of the Holocaust were innocent,” what about the 12-year-old German “Pfadfinder” (Boy Scouts) who were forced to fight for the Nazis at the end of the war? Weren’t they “innocent,” too?
Still another example. I’m assuming that you condemn the Islamofascists who attacked us on 9/11. Why? Weren’t they just expressing their “voices” in protesting the decadence and evil of the American “Great Satan”? (What’s scary is that a lot of people actually believe this. Such moral idiocy is where the consensus argument ultimately leads.)
The “evolutionary” argument falls pray to much the same criticism. If different people evolve differently, then aren’t there different standards of morality. In fact, the Nazis used something very much like this to justify their superiority over the Jews, Christians, homosexuals, gypsies, mentally handicapped, physically handicapped, et al. whom they slaughtered during the Holocaust. So this approach also fails to explain rationally why murder is wrong.
The theist (especially the Christian) has an answer. These things are wrong because they violate the law that God gave to us. The theist has a first principle: God. The atheist will not be satisfied with that, naturally, but it’s more than the atheist has. The atheist must (ahem!) “borrow” from the theist, in order to justify his worldview. This is why every officially atheist society always devolves into barbarism: there are no enforceable, universally recognized standards of conducts, so atheism inevitably becomes Hobbes’ war of all against all in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
God provides the basis for your morality, whether you are willing to acknowledge it or not. That works fine as long as no one challenges you to justify what you believe, as I am doing. So, please give it some thought. You are blessed to have a Christian wife, a union I find quite interesting and indeed emblematic in a way. As atheists are always forced to rely on their oft-despised theist parents, friends, and neighbors for moral direction, so too does an atheist husband have an unappreciated “pipeline to divinity” in a Christian wife. You’re lucky in that, and I pray that one of these Sundays you’ll give your wife the chance to show you something of how she sees the world from a “God’s eye” view.
Blessings to you and yours.
Best,
Norman