Arguing the Affirmative: RANDAL THE CHRISTIAN
Arguing the Negative: JOHN THE ATHEIST
Randal’s Opening Statement
The rain is falling steadily outside. As he steeps his cup of tea, he reflects aloud: “It has been a good career, but perhaps it is time to retire. After all, being a serial killer is hard work, especially when you’ve still got a day job.” With a sigh he then smiles, “At least I’ve got much to show for all my efforts.” Indeed, keepsakes from his various crimes litter his cramped home: panties in the bedroom closet with dark stains from blood spilled years ago, a collection of lipsticks buried in the bathroom medicine cabinet, and a few body parts stashed deep in a basement freezer. And he values all these trophies like the retiring company man values the Rolex watch given for thirty years of faithful service. There is no denying it. He has found this to be a fiercely satisfying life, one rich with untold pleasures as he has strived with singular purpose to fulfill every one of his endlessly dark, unspeakable desires.
He knows that others value more mundane pursuits like friendship, love, and charity. “And that’s fine for them,” he muses. “I certainly don’t begrudge them their suburban sentimentalities.” But he has always found pleasure and purpose in other things: being alone, preparing for the hunt, catching the victim, stuffing a wet cloth in the mouth, binding wrists . . . and everything that comes after. He looks out the window and a cruel smile spreads across his face as he recalls every desperate tear, every anguished plea.
He turns to the wall where a yellowed newspaper clipping hangs. “Police Commissioner Calls Cannibal Killer Pure Evil” the headline reads. “Evil?” he mutters to himself indignantly. “I guess it depends on who you ask.” With that he looks intently at the picture of a somber police commissioner staring back at him from the clipping, and suddenly his countenance darkens. “Who decided that I am evil?” he retorts angrily. “We all choose our values. You choose to help others,” he says to the visage accusingly, “and I choose to harm them.” He suddenly waves his hand dramatically. “Some people value the human species. Others value spotted owls or sea turtles. As for me, I happen to value my own personal fulfillment. My impulses are the engine in my car, the sails on my ship. They are my ethical set of values. Like a preference of one’s flavor of ice cream, we just disagree. You may like chocolate, but I happen to love vanilla.”
With that his expression softens as he turns back to the dripping windowpane. It surely is all about preference, isn’t it? Some people love warm sunny days, but as the rain tapers off slightly he reflects on how he always preferred the dark, moist chill of November evenings. He sits back in his favorite wing chair and opens his most cherished book of poetry. Though many find Frost to be overly sentimental, he loves those immortal lines for they tell his story. And so he reads aloud:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.[2]
“All the difference indeed,” he says wistfully. “We each choose our paths to live. And I lived well.” As he sips his tea, he grimaces from the pain in his aging, arthritic hands. “But even so,” he sighs, “I am getting older, and it probably is time to retire.”
Suddenly a faint groan escapes from the basement. In a moment his expression shifts from placid contentment to blackened rage. As he leaps out of the chair he growls, “Tomorrow. I’ll retire tomorrow.” With that he spins on his heel, walks out of the room, and disappears down the cellar stairs.
John’s Opening Statement
Christians love to quote Randal’s title to this chapter as a capsule description of atheist existentialists of the past like Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Paul-Sartre, and Albert Camus. But atheists are gaining a better understanding of morality. How long will Christians keep claiming this about us? Will they do so fifty years or one hundred years from now? What if I returned the favor and said Christians still think there is divine justification for the Crusades, the Inquisition, witch hunts, Manifest Destiny, and slavery? Is that fair?
Christians use this canard so often it’s nauseating. It seems self-evident to them, that is until they come to disbelieve. Then they will see things differently. The claim of Randal’s in this chapter presupposes that a supernatural being is doing the permitting. But which one? There are other conceptions of gods with their own moralities. And how does this being communicate to us what is permitted? Isn’t it evident that the Christian God has not effectively done so, given the biblical record and the history of the church?
There is no evidence that a Christian God is needed for morality since many non-Christian cultures have done very well for themselves in their own time periods with no Christian influence at all, such as Greece during the Golden Age, the Roman Empire, China, and Japan. This is nothing but a parochial, narrow-minded, and uninformed claim. I think all a believer has to do is travel the globe to see this.
There is no supernatural being out there. Therefore, the ones doing the permitting are those of us on earth in our respective cultures. We do not permit just anything either. In every society we come up with moral rules just as we do when it comes to speed limits on our highways, regulations for food preparation, protocols for approaching different people, or criminal acts we consider harmful to the common good. What kind of society could we possibly have where everything is permitted anyway? Even in a purely atheist society, rules would exist in order to have a sane, decent, productive civilization that allows people to live healthy, happy, and fruitful lives. It’s that simple. Otherwise societies would collapse under their own weight. And given the fact that societies have collapsed in the past, we do learn to some degree from our mistakes because morality evolves. Our own societies have done the permitting, and each individual in every society has had some say in what it permitted—even in totalitarian ones. (Otherwise why have these regimes failed from within?)
A great many of our moral rules are the same ones around the globe simply because we are all of the same human species. That’s the only objective morality we’ll ever know, and it is an objective morality even if it isn’t an ultimate, absolute, or unchanging one. Since we’re rapidly becoming a world community, we’re growing closer to one global ethic. A world culture, if that happens, will have a world ethic. This is what we’d expect from a global community.
Morality evolves. It has done so from the very beginning. Morality is not even unique to human beings. We find precursors of it in the nonhuman species.
But maybe I’ve missed the point?
If this is supposed to be an argument for the existence of God, not even Richard Swinburne, one of the greatest living Christian apologists, thinks it works: “I cannot see any force in an argument to the existence of God from the existence of morality.”[3] If it doesn’t convince him, why should it convince me, or anyone else for that matter?
The bottom line is that when it comes to morality there are problems knowing what it is (eating habits? dress codes?), how it is justified (which ethical theories?), and what motivates us to be moral (long-term rational self-interest can work just fine).
Christians have these same problems. The Euthyphro dilemma in Plato’s dialogues shows us that positing a God as the source of morality is no answer. Does God create morality? If so, he can create any kind of morality at all. Then any acts—even horrific ones—could be morally obligatory simply because God commands them. Or must God instead derive morality from a higher source? If so, even God must obey it. Christian philosophers have all but abandoned the divine command theory, or at least modified it. All they can say is that God is what he is and that he does what he does. That’s it.
Randal’s Rebuttal
John observes that “there is no evidence that a Christian God is needed for morality.” But the argument is not that one needs a Christian conception of God to have morality. Rather, the argument is that we need a transcendent ground of meaning and purpose, or we are awash in a bracing moral relativism in which no view of the moral life is objectively right or wrong, good or evil.
Interestingly, John’s own comments confirm this worry for he writes, “In every society we come up with the moral rules just as we do when it comes to speed limits on our highways [or] regulations for food preparation.” So our moral principles are selected with the same arbitrariness as highway speed limits or modes of food preparation? “Sixty miles per hour on this stretch, oh, and no gang rape or murder for the next hundred miles please.” Really? That’s it? John may not like divine command theory (though given his criticisms, I have to wonder how well he understands it), but he surely needs some transcendent source of moral valuation to avoid the moral relativism that even now is wrapping its tentacles around his oblivious appendages.
John’s Rebuttal
“Here I am Lord, your servant Andrea Yates. Speak to me. What would you have me do today? Let’s see what’s in your Holy Book. Hmmm, you say, ‘Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.’ Really? What do you mean? You want me to kill my children? Why them? Yes, I know they are unrighteous, lacking a care for godly things. That’s my fault as a mother. Why me? You want to test me just like you tested Abraham with Isaac? Are you sure? I just can’t do that. You want me to drown them in the bathtub? If you insist, Lord.”
This story about Yates is true. Religious examples like these are numerous. What do they prove? That there are some sick people in our world we need to catch and incarcerate and that most of them are religious nuts doing these evil deeds.
Contrary to Randal, if there is a God, everything can be permitted, for faith-based reasoning can justify any evil deed. In fact, religion is what turns otherwise good people into evil monsters because they think God told them what to do, either “audibly” or from something they read in the Bible.
Randal’s Closing Statement
I believe moral values are objective and rooted in the necessity of the divine nature. John believes they are rooted in our subjective whims—whatever gets you through the night, it’s all right. On that point John and our retiring serial killer are in hearty agreement. Spot of tea anyone?
John’s Closing Statement
It does no good to assert there is a transcendent ground of meaning unless Randal can state what it is or what morals can be derived from it. Leaving his mischaracterizations aside, morality evolves. That’s what we know. That’s what we see in the Bible and the church too.