CAN WE BE GOOD WITHOUT GOD? : SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND MORALITY
The greatest part of morality is of a fixed eternal nature, and will endure when faith shall fail.
—Bernard de Mandeville, An Inquiry Into
the Origin of Moral Virtue, 1723
On the morning of Tuesday, April 20, 1999, two students in black trench coats killed fourteen of their fellow classmates and a teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. The gunmen, Eric Harris, eighteen, and Dylan Klebold, seventeen, reportedly asked their victims, “Do you believe in God?” and allegedly snuffed out their young lives if they responded in the affirmative. The boys began their attack in the parking lot, picking off students with apparent indiscrimination, then proceeded to a ground-floor cafeteria, moved through school hallways, and ended up in a second-floor library before finally turning their weapons on themselves.
What was the cause of this murderous rampage? By the time I tuned in to CNN that afternoon, “experts” were already proffering theories that included television and movie violence, rock music, morbidly violent computer games, gangs and cults, parental neglect, teenage angst, and revenge for peer ridicule and rejection. Months later there was still no causal consensus. Perhaps if only parents paid more attention to their children, or if school administrators tried to decrease campus racism, or if school counselors could nip student bullying in the bud, or if teachers could check anti-Christian prejudice at the classroom door, or if everyone could learn to love instead of hate. As the documentary film producer Michael Moore wondered in his Academy Award-winning film Bowling for Columbine, since the last thing the boys were doing before they went on their shooting rampage was bowling, it is surprising that no one has placed the blame there.
Figure 20. The Massacre at Columbine High School
Eric Harris, age eighteen, and Dylan Klebold, age seventeen, are captured on a surveillance video moving through the Columbine High School cafeteria on the morning of Tuesday, April 20, 1999, on a mission to kill as many of their fellow students as possible before killing themselves. What would cause people to commit such acts of violence? (Courtesy of Associated Press)
When the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department released its report the following year, it contained more than 10,000 pieces of evidence that included over 4,000 leads and over 5,000 interviews. The attack, they concluded, was driven by indiscriminate hate, was intended to wipe out most of the student body of Columbine High, and was supposed to end in suicide. In Harris’s journal, which opened unequivocally with “I hate the fucking world,” he railed against everyone from the WB network and slow drivers to racists, minorities, and whites. In his rambling screed, on one page he praised Hitler’s efforts to eradicate European Jewry and on the next he obsessed about finding a date for the high school prom. His celebrated “hit list” included targets as risibly ridiculous as Tiger Woods.
The report was a monumental disappointment to those searching for the cause of the crime, the magic bullet, the single cause that could be directly addressed through legislation or social action. “I know a lot about both of them,” said Kate Battan, the lead investigator for the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department. “This was not about killing jocks or killing blacks or killing Christians … . It was about killing everybody.” But why did the boys kill, she was asked? “Everybody wants a quick answer. They want an easy answer so that they can sleep at night and know this is not going to happen tomorrow at their school. And there is no such thing in this case. There’s not an easy answer. I’ve been working on this nonstop daily since April 20th and I can’t tell you why it happened.”1
That opened the door for wannabe social commentators and ad hoc social scientists to speculate wildly and with no evidence about the deeper cause of Columbine. The violent computer game Doom, for example, was blamed, as when the New York Times reported that the boys played “popular computer games in which players stalk their opponents through dungeon-like environments and try to kill them with high-powered weapons.” The Washington Post described the online gaming world as a “dark, dangerous place.” CNN said that the boys “reportedly played computer games often, spending hours trying to kill each other with digital guns and explosive devices.” So-called Doom-sayers rallied to its defense, with such comments as this from a Web posting: “Doom has nothing to do with this. I enjoy making Doom more gruesome, I watch movies such as Evil Dead 2 and Terminator 2, and I listen to … [rocker] Rob Zombie, but I don’t even want to touch a real gun, bomb, chain saw, or anything.” Another fan correctly pointed out that if Doom were the cause of teenage violence, then “surely everyone who played Doom would be running around with guns and other instruments of violence and death.” Similarly, a gamer with the log-in name Theoddone33 skeptically observed, “Everyone is always quick to point out murderers that play violent video games, but no one ever thinks of the millions of people that play video games and aren’t murderers.”2
One of the fundamental tenets of science is that a theory should be able to explain the exceptions to its generalizations. This is a problem for the computer-game theory of violence, as it is for the other theories. For example, physician and author Dr. Julian Whitaker blamed the use of prescription drugs: “When I first heard about the Columbine High School massacre, my initial thought was, ‘Lord help us, were they taking Prozac?’ Nine days later, it was reported that Eric Harris, one of the shooters, was taking Luvox, which, like Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil, belongs to the class of drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). In one out of every twenty-five children taking it, Luvox causes mania, ‘a psychosis characterized by exalted feelings, delusions of grandeur and overproduction of ideas.’”3 Whitaker’s theory, however, fails to explain why Columbine would be the only case of SSRI-induced mass murder. Another shortcoming can be found in an explanation offered by Dr. Ned Holstein, president of Fathers and Families in Boston, who claimed that fatherless homes cause teen violence: “The strongest predictor of youth violence is not poverty, not race, not inadequate gun laws, not the presence of gangs, not the wearing of camouflage clothing, not portrayals of violence in the media and not lack of midnight basketball. It is the lack of a father in the home.”4 Unfortunately for this theory, both Harris and Klebold were from intact two-parent families.
Initially, much was made of the fact that April 20 is Adolf Hitler’s birthday, that Harris had praised Hitler for the “final solution” to the Jewish question, and that both boys had occasionally been seen wearing swastikas. Cults and gangs in general, in fact, were also targeted, such as the “Goths,” who wear black and unusual clothing, and the “Trench Coat Mafia,” because the boys were known to wear long black dusters as seen in old West photographs. When further investigations failed to turn up any additional links to Nazis, neo-Nazis, or cults of any kind, a gang unit specialist for the Denver Police, Steve Rickard, blamed emotional problems at home: “A lot of times entertainment—music, movies—is the trigger. It’s not the cause, necessarily, it’s the little push that makes them do something.”5 If not music and movies perhaps, some wondered, the push came from homosexuality. Harris and Klebold had allegedly been called “faggots” by some of the Columbine High jocks, so the rumor mill churned out stories about gays gone mad.6 The girlfriends of the boys, however, disconfirmed this thesis. Another howler was suggested by the World Socialist Web master David Walsh: “Defenders of capitalism … long for a society where profit and loss are the only means of determining the value of any activity or human being … . What would such a society, guided only by selfishness and violence, look like? The events in Jonesboro [a shooting tragedy similar to Columbine] give some indication.”7 This theory also fails to account for disconfirmatory evidence, such as teen violence in noncapitalistic countries, or capitalistic countries like Japan where violence of any type is almost unheard of, among both teens and adults.
Ironically, some even identified insufficient violence as the cause, violence, that is, in the form of good old-fashioned parental discipline and adult authority. “I feel like the lack of discipline has led to what we are into now, total chaos and disrespect,” said Senator Frank Shurden of Henryetta, Oklahoma, who, after Columbine, proposed a bill in the Oklahoma state legislature that would encourage parents to use “ordinary force” such as spanking, paddling, or whipping to discipline their children. (The bill passed in the Senate 36—9, and in the House 96—4.) “Back when I grew up, we got our tails whipped at school, then got it again when we got home. We didn’t have shootings.” Sorry, Senator Shurden, single anecdotes do not make a science. As for adult authority, onetime presidential candidate Gary Bauer fingered teachers and administrators at Columbine High: “Why did adults in that school feel that they couldn’t grab Eric [Harris] and Dylan [Klebold] and say, ‘You know, if I see you give the Nazi salute again, if I don’t break your arm you’re going to be out of this school for the rest of this year.’”8 Of course, the parents of kids who get their arms broken by teachers and administrators are unlikely to feel that this is an appropriate form of discipline and authority.
Because of the round-the-clock media coverage that Columbine captured, high-profile politicians could not resist tossing in their own extemporized explanations. Former House Speaker and noted conservative Newt Gingrich blamed (who else?) the liberal elite: “I want to say to the elite of this country—the elite news media, the liberal academic elite, the liberal political elite: I accuse you in Littleton, and I accuse you in Kosovo of being afraid to talk about the mess you have made, and being afraid to take responsibility for things you have done, and instead foisting upon the rest of us pathetic banalities because you don’t have the courage to look at the world you have created.”9 The chief elite liberal of the day, President Bill Clinton, understandably focused on a different causal vector—Hollywood: “We cannot pretend that there is no impact on our culture and our children that is adverse if there is too much violence coming out of what they see and experience.” Hollywood promptly fired back a defending salvo: “If you’re looking for violence, what about the evening news?” David Geffen asked rhetorically. “America is bombing Yugoslavia; it’s on every day. It’s not a movie, it’s real.”10
Guns, of course, were an easy target for Columbine commentators, with noted gun control advocates like Sarah Brady squawking for more legislation. (Brady is the chairperson of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, and the wife of James Brady, who was shot by John Hinckley in his attempt to assassinate Reagan.) The ledger was predictable, with liberals calling for more gun control and conservatives seeking a more sinister evil lurking behind those who wield the guns that kill people.
That evil, we are told, is the lack of morality and religion in public life, especially public schools. On Wednesday, June 16, 1999, barely two months after the Columbine shootings, for example, Congressman Tom DeLay, the Majority Whip, read a letter on the floor of the House of Representatives that reverberated throughout the country and became a flash point of political pundits and radio talk show hosts for months to come. It was written by Addison L. Dawson to the editor of the San Angelo Standard-Times (Texas). The letter was originally published in the paper on April 27, one week after the massacre, but DeLay’s reading of it led to the mistaken belief that it was written by DeLay, and he has been quoted as its author ever since. No matter, because by reading the letter, DeLay was endorsing Dawson’s thesis, which was that guns do not kill people; rather, something else kills people, that something else being broken homes, children’s lack of quality time with parents, day care, television sex and violence, computer games, contraception and planned parenthood, abortion, small family size (a direct result of the previous two), short prison sentences for hardened criminals, and, most notably for our discussion (the style of the letter is sarcastic):
It couldn’t have been because our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud by teaching evolution as fact and by handing out condoms as if they were candy.It couldn’t have been because we teach our children that there are no laws of morality that transcend us, that everything is relative and that actions don’t have consequences. What the heck, the president gets away with it.Nah, it must have been the guns.11
In my opinion, of all the theories and explanations offered for Columbine (as well as other social ills), there is none that touches people deeper than this one: a scientific and secular worldview, along with the theory of evolution, implies that there can be no outside objective basis for morality, no moral principles that transcend us, no ethical Archimedean point outside of us from which we can morally move the world. One minister succinctly summarized the problem this way: “If the Bible gets it wrong in biology, then why should I trust the Bible when it talks about morality and salvation.”12 We saw such arguments even before Columbine. The school shootings in Paducah, Kentucky, in December 1997, for example, were blamed on the “godlessness” of the perpetrator, fourteen-year-old Michael Carneal, who opened fire on a school prayer meeting, killing three fellow students and wounding five others. Christian commentators branded Carneal an atheist, and some Christian students at Paducah High claimed that gangs of atheists roamed the hallways targeting Christians for violence. (Subsequently, Carneal’s priest, Reverend Paul Donner of St. Paul Lutheran Church, corrected the mistake: “Michael Carneal is a Christian. He’s a sinner, yes, but not an atheist.”13 Thank God for that.)
Following Columbine, Christian organizations went into overdrive to push for legislation to bring God back into the “Big House,” as Wendy Zoba referenced the spheres of public education and politics in her post-Columbine treatise on what’s wrong with America. “Columbine posed a question we weren’t prepared to answer and answered a question we did not ask,” Zoba reflected. “The question Columbine presents is not what the killers did or did not ask their victims about God but what their deeds ask us about God. If what happened on April 20,1999, is something we, as a people, cannot abide—as we seem to be concluding—we are forced to confront the follow-up question: Do we need to invite God back into the Big House?” Of course, Zoba is savvy enough to know that posting the Ten Commandments on the walls of Columbine would have done nothing to deter Harris and Klebold in their rampage. “But the sentiment is an expression of a larger truth: There is a God, and he has established a moral order, and we must find a way to make both part of the cultural conversation. How do we heal a nation whose moral fabric has come apart without introducing the language of faith in a higher law?” Zoba answers her own question this way: “Columbine has become the crucible for a larger cultural debate; not about whether Americans believe in God—numerous surveys reveal that they do—but about whether the God they believe in is relevant. That is the question Harris and Klebold put to their victims when they asked,”Do you believe in God?” while pointing a gun to their heads. It is the question their victims’ responses posed to us. It is the question that has made us all ‘Columbine.’”14
Without God are we all “Columbine”? Is a belief in God necessary to right the wrongs of immoral behavior? The 103rd archbishop of Canterbury (St. Augustine was the first, in 597) thinks so. On Friday, May 24, 1996, this spiritual leader of over 70 million Anglicans told 425 civic, business, and religious leaders at the Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel that “secularism” is the cause of much of the West’s moral woes. Paradoxically, this was followed by a litany of “unspeakable atrocities against innocent people” committed in the name of religion, as in Bosnia and against the Christian minority in Islamic Sudan. The archbishop—the Most Reverend George L. Carey—told his audience that only faith could stop these atrocities:
How else can momentum be found for combating the worst excesses of poverty and inequality around the world? How else can we find the self-restraint in the interest of future generations in order to save our environment? How else can we combat the malignant power of exclusive nationalism and racism? All this requires the dynamic power of commitment, faith and love. The privatized morality of “what works for me” will not do.15
Agreed, unalloyed self-interested morality will not suffice. But is our only choice between godly morality and godless immorality, as is so often presented by both theologians and the religious virtue peddlers of pop culture? Can we be good without God?
The “Grand Inquisitor” is the literary antagonist of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a Russian socialist who was arrested in 1848 following the political revolutions that threatened the Russian monarchy. He was found guilty of conspiring against the Orthodox Church and the Russian government as part of the Petrashevsky circle, followers of the French socialist Fourier. The sentence included a bizarre mock death sentence and execution, followed by a six-year stint in a penal colony where Dostoyevsky had not “one single being within reach with whom I could exchange a cordial word. I endured cold, hunger, sickness. I suffered from the hard labors and the hatred of my companions” but “the escape into myself … did bear its fruits.” Among the fruits was his profound religious crisis, which was triggered in Dostoyevsky after he read the Bible. As a result, he eschewed the social and political ideas of his youth and became deeply religious. Subsequent years of turmoil and poverty left him feeling like “a foreigner in a foreign land,” and while in exile he composed his greatest work, which was to explore “the problem that has consciously and unconsciously tormented me all my life.”
That problem was the existence of God, and the work became The Brothers Karamazov. Among the many deep issues addressed in his tome, Dostoyevsky considered the following question: if God does not exist, does anything go? “Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering.”16 As the Grand Inquisitor noted, if God granted us freedom to make moral choices, then what is the use of the ancient laws He gave us? “In place of the rigid ancient law, man must hereafter with free heart decide for himself what is good and what is evil, having only Thy image before him as his guide. But didst Thou not know that he would at last reject even Thy image and Thy truth, if he is weighed down with the fearful burden of free choice?”17
If God does not exist, then what is the origin of morality? The answer presented in part 1 of this book is that evolution generated the moral sentiments out of a need for a system to maximize the benefits of living in small bands and tribes. Evolution created and culture honed moral principles out of an additional need to curb the passions of the body and mind. And culture, primarily through organized religion, codified those principles into moral rules and precepts. The next logical question to ask, then, and one that is answered in part 2 of this book, is this: can we lead moral lives without recourse to a transcendent being that may or may not exist? Can we construct an ethical system without religion? Most believers and theists answer no. Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, for example, suggested that this need for a higher source for morality lies at the very foundation of religion: “So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship … . This craving for community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time.”18 In his Casti connubii of December 31, 1930, Pope Pius XI agreed that without God anything goes: “For the preservation of the moral order neither the laws and sanctions of the temporal power are sufficient nor the beauty of virtue and the expounding of its necessity. A religious authority must enter in to enlighten the mind, to direct the will, and to strengthen human frailty by the aid of divine grace.”19
Of course, we should not be surprised to find that the leader of the world’s largest religious denomination believes that religion is a fundamental necessity for sustained moral behavior. A more contemporary and pop-culture answer is provided by an individual who, you might say, in recent years has become America’s Grand Inquisitor. In the 1990s a self-appointed religious moral authority entered the American landscape to enlighten her listeners to the need of divine grace. She is Laura Schlessinger.
On March 19, 1998, I attended a prayer breakfast sponsored by the Glendale, California, Chamber of Commerce, with Dr. Laura as the featured speaker, and, considering the hour (6:00 A.M.), there was a remarkable turnout of approximately 850 people. When she was introduced, it was announced that the week before she had surpassed Rush Limbaugh in number of listeners to become the most popular radio talk show host in America. The syndication of her program set an all-time record for growth (now in excess of 450 stations). Her books are national best-sellers. Her lectures are typically standing room only. During her daily three-hour program, over 65,000 people jam the phone lines, hoping to be one of the lucky few to be able to speak to her. At the breakfast I attended, the title of her lecture was “Can You Be Good Without God?” Her short: answer was: “Here and there, but not consistently through all the things that humans have to suffer.”
Schlessinger’s long answer included an exposition on her personal history, in which she recapped her youth in the “anything goes” 1960s when she was relatively freewheeling and “grew up with no God.” Her mother was a “nice Catholic girl from Italy,” and her father “a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn,” neither of whom believed in God. So for Schlessinger, and for so many others that decade, anything went morally. (Well, not quite for Schlessinger, who admitted that her parents did instill some moral principles in her. Something like this argument is often used by believers to explain how and why nonbelievers are moral—even if raised in a nonbelieving household the culture in which they reside is a Judeo-Christian one in which moral precepts and beliefs are inculcated tacitly as part of the general zeitgeist and prevailing milieu.) What is “good” in this system, she explained, is “what I really want to do, what is really turning me on, what is titillating, what is available, what is seductive, what is exciting, what is fun. Without God that is pretty much how we define ‘good’—it is a matter of opinion. Your opinion of what is good is probably going to be based on what you were taught, some opportunities that are available, and this magnificent brain that can rationalize anything.” Schlessinger explained that over the long haul, however, this morally carefree philosophy was unsatisfying to her—not miserable, mind you, but nothing like a feeling of moral closure or satisfaction. Like most religious converts who describe their conversion in terms of a fulfillment process, Schlessinger explained, “something was missing” from her life. Finally she found God, converted to Judaism, and now has a moral compass that she points at Americans daily from noon to three. “I’m a prophet,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “This is a very serious show.”20
Schlessinger’s argument was similar to the one she made to me privately several months prior when she resigned from the editorial board of Skeptic magazine, a science publication I edit. In 1994 we invited Schlessinger to be on our board because of the public position she bravely took on the recovered memory movement (in which therapists alleged they could extract repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse through suggestive talk therapies, hypnosis, fantasy role playing, and the like). Schlessinger even spoke for us as part of our public science lecture series at Caltech, and she delivered a brilliant exposition on self-reliance, critical thinking, independence of thought, and other attributes admired by freethinkers, humanists, and skeptics. Even after her conversion to orthodox Judaism and a surfeit of critical letters from readers that subsequently came pouring into Skeptic’s office, we left her on our board because we do not believe in excluding people based on their religious beliefs. Her later resignation, then, surprised me: “Please remove my name from your Editorial Board list published in each of your Skeptic Magazine issues immediately. Science can only describe what; guess at why; but cannot offer ultimate meaning. When man’s limited intellect has the arrogance to pretend an ability to analyze God, it’s time for me to get off that train.” Our follow-up conversation clarified to me that, for Schlessinger, the subject of God’s existence was off-limits to science. There is a God. Period. And morality follows.
As she wrote in an opinion editorial in the Calgary Sun on September 9, 1997: “There are those who say it is feasible to be moral without God or religion. I think they are all wrong.”21 The bottom line, Schlessinger believes, is that humans are naturally deceitful, innately evil, and inherently bad. “Being good is not natural. Being good requires you to overcome your own self-interest.” In short, if we think we can get away with something, we will. Of course, we cannot get away with just anything since we have laws and customs, so we try to get away with what we can, hoping we will not get caught. “Getting caught,” says Schlessinger, is the level of morality most people attain, but a belief in God elevates morality to a higher level. If you think you can get away with something, this is when anything goes, and she hears tales of this every day on the radio. But, says Schlessinger, you never get away with anything because God is always watching. He can even see through concrete she explained (in an offhanded one-liner about God knowing you are stealing from a store even if no one can see you). “The notion of God is really, fundamentally, all we have to truly lead us to be good or else we make our own decisions and we become, individually, our own Gods.”22
That’s it. That is the core of Schlessinger’s argument. There was nothing about these moral principles being worthy of following in their own right. There was nothing about treating other people as you would like to be treated. There was nothing about human rights or human dignity. For Schlessinger, it comes down to this: you’ll be busted by Mr. Big if you sin, so don’t.
On the simplest of levels, of course, any of us can be good without God. Most sincere and honest religious folks admit that anyone—even atheists—can occasionally be good. Their deeper argument lies in the sustainability of right moral actions across varied circumstances and extended periods of time. Without a religious foundation, they argue, the flesh is weak and the mind is a willing coconspirator in the justification of doing the wrong thing. It is often difficult to do the right thing and, they argue, without that extra transcendental boost from above we fail too often.
Events of an evil and primeval nature force us to confront the deepest questions about our moral nature, beginning with the nature of morality if there is no God and the fate of ethics in a secular and scientific society. Are we doomed to destruction if we do not accept the objective value of moral absolutes offered by religion? Do we need religion-based morality as an antidote to the alleged nihilism of a secular and scientific society? Many theologians and religious believers think that we do, and they are often responding to their perception of what it means to embrace science and secularism. Among both social commentators and moral philosophers the consummate example of the result of secular morality is the Holocaust. The Nazi regime, we are told, was a godless atheistic one that led directly and ineluctably to a relativistic morality that justified the brutal murder of millions of people.
The problem with this particular case is that Hitler and the Nazis were not atheists. In Mein Kampf Hitler observed that “faith is often the sole foundation of a moral attitude” and that “the various substitutes have not proved so successful from the standpoint of results that they could be regarded as a useful replacement for previous religious creeds.” In fact, Hitler argues that an attack against religion “strongly resembles the struggle against the general legal foundations of a state” and “would end in a worthless religious nihilism.”23 Hitler’s most famous statement on the subject was made in his Reichstag speech of 1938, when he proclaimed: “I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator. By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord’s work.”24 As for the Third Reich itself, number twenty-four of the original twenty-five points of the German Workers’ party proclaimed liberty for all religious denominations “so far as they are not a danger to it and do not militate against the moral feelings of the German race.” The party, it was stated, “stands for Positive Christianity.”25 In 1934, Professor Ernst Bergmann penned a twenty-five-point catechism for the core of this new “Positive Christianity” that included, in point number six, this denunciation of atheism and nonbelief: “The German religion is a religion of the people. It has nothing in common with free thought, atheist propaganda, and the breakdown of current religions.”26
Although it is certainly true that the Lenin-Stalin regime of the Soviet Union was atheistic in principle, sociologists of religion are now discovering that throughout the seventy-five-year-long social experiment of Communism, religious faith remained steadfast, albeit underground and practiced with considerable stealth.27 As for the rest of the twentieth century, at its beginning the Great War featured God-fearing, Ten Commandment-swearing men who killed other God-fearing, Ten Commandment-swearing men, all in the name of God. By the end of the century, wars, revolutions, and acts of terrorism committed in the name of God were almost nightly news affairs. The fact that the twentieth century was the bloodiest century in human history (by raw numbers only, not by percentage of population casualties) has nothing whatsoever to do with a lack of religious or moral values (which, clearly, were not lacking). Given the killing technologies of modern states (and their correspondingly larger populations) there is little doubt that the crusades, inquisitions, and religious wars of the medieval and early modern periods would have easily produced the vast killing fields of our time. The problem is not a lack of God, religion, or morals. It is the wedding of extremism, fundamentalism, and absolute morality, coupled with the means of murder and access to masses of humanity that results in the wanton destruction we have witnessed in modern times. And it is only fair to ask, what if religion is not the solution but is actually part of the problem? This is not an argument that I am particularly disposed to make, but one can make the observation that if more (and a greater percentage of) Americans believe in God than ever before in history, and if America is going to hell in an immoral handbasket as never before, then at the very least the argument that we cannot be good without God would seem to be gainsaid.
Turning from the level of collective politics to that of individual people, 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 (and most people do, at some point in their lives), your true immoral nature would emerge and we would be well advised to steer a wide course around you. If the answer is that you would continue being good and moral, then apparently you can be good without God. QED.
As anyone with any life experience or a sense of history knows, religious people are more than capable of committing sins and crimes, and nonreligious people are more than capable of being moral and trustworthy citizens and friends. (I am not arguing that religious people are more immoral, just that they are not any more moral than nonreligious people.) Think of child-molesting priests, money-scamming televangelists, or flimflam faith healers. At the same time, think of all the people you know who are not religious, yet who daily perform acts of kindness and generosity. Many of your friends are probably either nonbelievers or give little to no thought to religion. Are they robbers, rapists, or murders? Probably not. How then did they come to be moral? Why do they continue to be moral? Personally, it would frighten me to believe that the people I deal with on a day-to-day basis treat me tolerably well only because they are afraid of God and divine retribution. What happens when their belief in God diminishes or departs altogether? Where do their moral principles go then? To me it is a higher level of morality to be good for its own sake than for the consequences it may bring.
An argument could be made that since America is still primarily a Judeo-Christian society even nonbelievers have imbibed these values, regardless of their personal upbringing—that is, atheists are good because of all the good theists around them. Maybe, but as I argued in part 1, religion codified these moral principles for sound reasons that have nothing to do with divine inspiration. The moral sentiments and principles came first, evolving over the course of a hundred thousand years of humans living in a Paleolithic environment. Religion came second, co-opting morality and codifying it to its own end, all of which happened in just the past couple of thousand years. What would happen if we jettisoned religion altogether? Would society collapse into immoral chaos?
No, it would not. And we have a two-centuries-long experiment in the separation of church and state to prove it. When the United States of America was founded, the original framers of the Constitution, heavily influenced by the secular Enlightenment philosophers whose writings over the previous century had laid the philosophical groundwork for a secular ethical and political system, made it clear that regardless of which religion (or even no religion) one professes belief in, certain moral principles hold. These include the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as well as the other rights protected in the Bill of Rights. What the Enlightenment philosophers were arguing, and the U.S. Constitution framers adopted, was the belief that humans have certain rights and values in and of themselves. These rights and values are grounded not in religion, or any other transcendental state or supernatural force, but in themselves. They stand alone. Humans deserve life, liberty, and happiness, not because God said so but because we are human. Period. These rights and values exist because we say they exist, and that is good enough. They are inalienable because we say they are, and that suffices.
Does this secular system work? To answer the question, we have only to compare the levels of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of the citizens of the United States to those of the citizens of other countries, particularly those still ruled by theocracies. The system is not perfect, plenty of people fall through the cracks, rights are abused, lives are unjustly lost, liberties are unfairly trammeled, and too many are not achieving the levels of happiness that they could. But these are relative judgments, relative to what came before and to what exists elsewhere. Like science, secular ethics may be primitive and flawed, yet it is the most precious thing we have.