Some evil is so shocking that it defies belief. A Nazi guard asking a mother to choose which of her two children will be taken to the gas chamber; the rape and mutilation of women in war; tossing babies in the air and catching them on bayonets…
How do you respond to this?
This sort of raw evil cause a visceral outrage in most of us. Only the depraved and those who are evilly deluded could think otherwise. We know instinctively that these things are wrong.
This prompts the question: How do people become evil, and what worldviews encourage it?
Hitler adapted Nietzsche’s atheistic philosophy and used it to underpin his Nazi ideology. Without the constraints of God, it became perfectly okay for Hitler to dominate, enslave and kill the weak. His abiding ambition was for the Arian race to take over Europe through savage warfare, and establish itself as the crowning power of Europe, indeed: of history.
In doing this, Hitler was simply imitating the brutal reality of the animal and plant world. It was therefore ‘natural.’ But whilst there is some sort of perverse logic to this thinking, most of us would recoil at the evil it sanctioned… and we would do so at a deep, visceral level. The same is true for Communism. It too has stripped humanity of its sacredness and subsumed everything to the wellbeing of ‘The Party.’ This philosophy explained the evils committed by Pol Pot and his army. (They did the bayonet thing with the babies.)
But here’s the question: If there is no God to guarantee what is morally good or morally evil, how can we know what ‘good’ actually is? At best, all we can say is that evolution has taught us that things are more ‘efficient’ for our species if we co-operate and are nice. But that doesn’t really satisfy. After all, evolution has taught most other animals to kill off rivals from other species, and even from within their own species.
So, the big question then is: Where do atheists get their ‘visceral’ moral code from? If they hold true to their atheistic tenets, atheists can’t have moral outrage. They can only talk in terms of what is efficient for the wellbeing of their DNA.
From this, I can only conclude that most atheists actually make very bad atheists. Put simply: Their worldview is not consistent with what they experience in reality.
Some atheists speak of ‘good’ as something that is self evident, and therefore we don’t need God to be moral. There are two responses that can be made to this claim.
The first is that for many atheists, morality is self-evident only because they have a folk-memory of the Christian culture that instilled it in the lives of their grandparents.[1] The sad reality is that many atheists are leaning on the Christian heritage of their forbears… whilst simultaneously whittling these values away. Quite how long these values will last in their hands, who knows.
The other thing worth mentioning is that Christian morality is not self-evident in many cultures that have no knowledge of Jesus. In some cultures, trickery and deceit are lauded (e.g, by the Sawi tribe in Irian Jaya, pre 1960). In others, strength and dominance over others was lauded above all else (e.g. the early Roman Empire).
What we can say, however, is that most humans are instinctively moral beings. The Bible suggests this is so because we are made in the image of God, who is the preeminent moral being.
So, what can we conclude?
Simply this: If you want to be authentically and consistently moral, you need to acknowledge God. Otherwise, there is no reason, value or purpose in the ‘good’ you define for yourself. And what happens when the ‘good’ of my happiness is threatened by your ‘good?’ Whose ‘good’ wins?
Without God, morality falls into a heap.
This reality has even percolated through to Richard Dawkins, the Oxford biologist who has made a career from being a strident atheist. He admitted that if God were eliminated from society, people would behave poorly. Dawkins cited an experiment carried out by Professor Melissa Bateson of the University of Newcastle. It entailed setting up a coffee station with an ‘honesty box’ system of payment. Evidently, when a picture of a large pair of eyes was displayed near the honesty box, customers were three times more likely to pay. It instilled the idea that someone was watching.
So, if morality is important to you, seek out the God who guarantees it.
[1] Even non-atheistic philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Søren Kierkegaard have fallen into this trap. Both tried to think of rational reasons for morality that didn’t require God. Although Kant and Kierkegaard believed in God, they tried to find a philosophy for morality that didn’t require people to believe in a higher being.
