The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

- Carl Sagan [HT to Space.com]

The above image is a photo of Earth seen from a distance of 4 billion miles. It was taken by the Voyager 1 space probe in 1991. I haven't read Pale Blue Dot, the book by Sagan from which the corresponding quote is taken, but if the passage above is a good representation of the ideas that Sagan presents in the book, then I think we can identify two philosophical assumptions on his part that are of dubious merit.

This post is the first entry in a series I will be doing this fall on the validity of atheistic ethics. This topic is very important to my own faith and philosophy, and I am writing a paper on the subject for one of my seminars in Christian apologetics. I will be using this series to help organize some of my thoughts on atheistic ethics and metaethics in general. - Brian

Christian philosophers and apologists often claim that the only worldview that can sufficiently account for the objectivity (and thus the ultimate significance) of moral values is theism. Atheistic naturalism, in particular, is singled out as being particularly unsuited for explaining the objective status of moral claims. This seems to me to be true, and yet the atheists aren't convinced (but really, are they ever?). Not only does this claim seem to be very strong, it is one of the bedrock principles on which I justify my belief in Christianity. Since they are not just byproducts of natural selection or expressions of preference, moral values are clearly objective, and it is Christian theism that best explains this objective ontological status of moral values.

Upon initial reflection, this claim makes sense. Consider a world without God, the naturalist's world, a world that is physical and physical only. Matter and energy are the only sure things that exist. Other non-physical properties like minds minds or morals may seem to be real, but most likely they are only curious byproducts of the interaction of atoms and energy, and it seems very difficult to rescue them from this tragic fate. Consider, for example, someone you love dearly. She is a material entity, like a rock or a tree. In fact, the material in her - every single atom - was once non-human. "She" is entirely made up of the food that she has consumed in her lifetime (or, in the case of a newborn, of the food her mother and father have consumed). Dust she once was and dust she again will be. Why then, would you value her as something more than material? Why would it be wrong to harm her but not the same dust of which she is made? She simply is the dust, and nothing more. Certainly she is valuable to you, but if she has no objective value then your belief that she has value and ought to be valued expresses only a personal preference, and a preference that no one else is under any obligation to share. It is akin to your preference for Captain Crunch over Golden Grahams, for example, or your affinity for the Packers over the Patriots. And I think this is a real problem for atheistic naturalism.

Theism, goes the claim, has no such problem and thus makes more sense of our common sense moral judgments. A theistic world is one that allows for a significant supernatural realm. Since the one you love is more than material in this world, she has ultimate worth and value. She has a non-material soul and appropriates non-material value by virtue of her status as a creature of God, the ultimate source of all value and goodness.

All of this can be set forward as either an argument for theism or, at the very least, an argument against atheism. I am concerned with the latter here. Let's make the argument against atheism a little clearer by setting it out formally:

1. Objective moral values exist.
2. Any worldview that has a non-existent or suspect basis for the existence of objective moral values ought to be rejected.
3. Atheistic naturalism has a non-existent or suspect basis for the existence of objective moral values.
4. Ergo atheistic naturalism should be rejected.

This argument is certainly valid, but are its premises true? The atheists say no. J. L. Mackie, for example, essentially rejected premise (1) by claiming that moral values are not objective. The properties of "moral goodness" or "moral wrongness" do not actually exist in a material world, and thus when we use these terms we are simply expressing subjective human desires that help us get along in life. This may not give you a reason for dancing in your underwear, but it is no argument against the truth of atheism. In other words, moral values aren't real and you are worthless. And that's that, so deal with it.

Now the theist will automatically say that Mackie's moral skepticism is consistent with his naturalism and atheism, and indeed his view seems to be the most logical one to take if you are an atheist. I know if I were an atheist, I would take this view. But many atheists aren't convinced that this is the way to go, and most of them go about arguing against the argument above by contesting the truth of premise (3).

But how do they go about this? What arguments do they make? This will be the subject of subsequent posts in this series. I will examine the counter-arguments of three prominent naturalists and provide a theistic response. It's go time.

Next time: the atheistic ethic of Kai Nielsen

I read the following quote in a book I was reading a few weeks back and I had planned on posting it here. But today I see that Tom Gilson has beaten me to it in this excellent post. The quote is from Bertrand Russell, perhaps the most influential atheist of the 20th century:

That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins -- all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.

If you want a summation of why I could never be an atheist, this is it. It is a worldview that - when honestly appraised - provides no meaning, no purpose, no morality, and no hope.

Tom Gilson over at Thinking Christian has a great post on why a religion-less worldview has no basis for objective human meaning:

Atheism, on the other hand, has a hard time explaining where meaning comes from. This is not to say that an atheist cannot experience meaningful feelings, values, reflections, and so on. It's that atheism cannot rationally explain how that sensation of meaningfulness can have real, non-illusory content.

Atheism is directly tied to philosophical naturalism, the view that nothing exists except for impersonal material entities and processes. In this impersonal cosmos, we who have interests, feelings, relationships, concern for self and others, rationality, a sense of free will and so on are clearly aberrations. Our sense of selfhood and personality demands explanation.

And:

Christianity is true on many grounds. One of those grounds is that it works. It works because it is true. We who follow Christ know that there is a personal Center to all of reality, so we're not grasping futilely at strange theories, trying to turn electrons and chemicals in our brains into intimations of immortality. We're not trying to squeeze free will out of indeterminate quantum dynamics. We're not trying to believe there is something meaningful to say, when we believe that belief itself is no different than a cancer on our brain. We don't have to turn mental gymnastics over whether love is merely a chemical reaction, a genetically determined quid pro quo, or any other reductionist version that doesn't square with what we all know inside is true! All of these come from a perfectly adequate source: our very personal Creator.

I call this the "poverty of the meaningful" that characterizes worldviews without a speaking God. Materialistic worldviews - i. e. worldviews in which physical entities and processes (be they chimps, or quarks, or heat, or whatever) are all that ultimately exists. This makes concepts such as "love" or "meaning" or even "good" reducible to physical properties or states. This is extremely problematic, simply from a practical standpoint of living life. If life isn't meaningful and one day all of us will pass into oblivion, it will be as if we never existed. Why bother with being moral? Showing love? Seeking truth? Promoting justice? In other words, materialist and/or naturalist worldviews can answer a lot of questions about ourselves and our world, but the most important ones are left unanswered. Christian apologists and philosophers have been making this claim for a long time, especially since Francis Schaeffer popularized this kind of thinking, primarily in his books The God Who is There and He is There and He is Not Silent.

For non-material concepts such as love, significance, purpose, morality, etc. to have some real, objective ontological status, and for humans to be able to know and understand that status, I believe two criteria must be satisfied:

1. A personal God in whose nature and character those concepts have their grounding must exist.
2. That God must deliberately reveal Himself as the source of those concepts.

For right or wrong, this is the claim of theistic religions. God has spoken, and it is only through this revelation that we can have any real knowledge of who we are or why we exist. Christianity says that not only has God revealed Himself, He has done so in the most practical way possible: in the form of a person, Jesus Christ, as well as in the Scriptures that testify to Him. Not only have the proponents of non-theistic worldviews not been able to define any objective, non-physical reality to concepts such as meaning or goodness, I believe it is impossible for them to do so.

Spoiler warning: If you don't want to know the ending of Collateral, don't read this post.

Last year on my personal site I wrote this review of the 2004 movie Collateral:

I have a very general system of rating movies in my head. These are great, extremely good, very good, and good. I try not to watch movies that would fall into any lower categories. Collateral pushes the "great" category. At any rate it is "extremely good," and one of the best movies I saw in 2004. I have not seen all of Michael Mann's movies (like Ali), but his Last of the Mohicans is one of my all-time favorites. Mann is a true professional filmmaker; he makes most directors in Hollywood look like amateurs. Here is an intelligent action-drama with even more intelligent dialogue. Add in characters that are well-developed by the actors playing them being shot by a man who knows what actually comprises a good movie and you have, for lack of a less-cliched term a "cinematic tour de force." The philosopher in me was intrigued by the level of cosmic soul-searching in the movie by Cruise's character, a hit-man who is also a nihilist. Thus he justifies his killing because he sees all people - including himself - as being ultimately insignificant and meaningless. In true modern fashion, there is no antidote to this terrible diagnosis of meaninglessness, no breaking-in of some revelation wherein the assassin suddenly realizes that he has been wrong all along about his own nature and that of humanity. Strangely, Mann presents this pessimistic outlook without depressing the audience. At least I was not depressed, but that is perhaps because this kind of movie can actually encourage me by contrasting its implications with those of my own worldview. The Christian has hope that ultimately all his life and his acts will be eternally significant and that one day he will pass into the next world. It also reminds me that one's worldview must ultimately determine his or her actions. Since Cruise's character does not see humans as meaningful he sees no reason not to kill them for money. But, as Maximus tells us in Gladiator, "What we do in life echoes in eternity."

I was reminded of this movie today as I read this story about a man who died on a New York subway and wasn't discovered for six hours. The two main characters in Collateral, a nihilist hit-man and his taxi driver hostage, have a conversation about this very scenario. Vincent (the assassin played by Tom Cruise) tells Jamie Foxx's character about a man who died on the L. A. subway. No one even paid enough attention to the man long enough to to realize he was dead. I thought this story was only a fiction made up for the movie, but the above news story proves that such a thing can happen.

The interesting thing is the context in which Vincent tells this story. Vincent is a nihilist. He sees humans as simply insignificant material specks, with no inherent dignity or worth to be respected. Thus he justifies his occupation. Here's one of his quotes to this end:

Vincent: Get with it [Max]. Millions of galaxies of hundreds of millions of stars, in a speck on one in a blink. That's us, lost in space. The cop, you, me... Who notices?

His use of the story about the man on the train comes in a moment of philosophical reflection. His point is that we as a race are all insignificant, and we don't make matters any better by how alienated we are from one another. We're so alienated that we don't even notice when one of our human compatriots dies right in front of us.

The director, Michael Mann, is one of my favorite working directors, but I have to disagree with the statement he's making in this movie. The statement is this: even though we may not be meaningful beings, we can make life better by valuing our relationships, by pursuing our dreams, etc. The point is pressed home by the film's ending. Foxx's cab driver character is convinced by his ordeal that he should work harder at starting his own business. He also gains confidence in pursuing the woman of his dreams, and the final shot is of the couple walking into the dawn together. Contrast this with Cruise's assassin. He is killed by Foxx on a subway. He slumps onto the subway bench and dies, and the empty train moves on with the solitary corpse inside. The message is clear: Vincent's life is meaningless because he embraced it as such. But Foxx's character at least has some hope because he's trying to make his life meaningful. But this is no more than a Hollywood version of existentialism. And in the end, existentialism still leaves man as a hopeless, absurd being, because all it says is, "Well, we may not have any inherent value, but we can at least pretend that we do."

But I don't buy it, and such a worldview makes life unlivable, even if it makes for good filmmaking. I understand my own worth as being grounded in a living, infinite Creator-God. In Him I "live and move and have my being."

A post over at the Christian CADRE blog touches on something that's been on my mind for the last few weeks. I've been reading through some of Plato's major works, and a short but interesting one is Euthyphro, in which Socrates grills a worshipper of the Greek gods on what it actually means to be pious or moral. In the dialogue, neither Socrates nor Euthyphro are able to come to a workable definition of the proper grounding of morality, and all of Euthyphro's ideas are shown by Socrates to be worthless.

I mention this because of a traditional problem in philosophy of religion known as the "Euthyphro dilemma," which you can read more about here. This dilemma stems from the following exchange found in the dialogue, with the most relevant text in italics:

Euthyphro: Yes, I should say that what all the gods love is pious and holy, and the opposite which they all hate, impious.

Socrates: Ought we to enquire into the truth of this, Euthyphro, or simply to accept the mere statement on our own authority and that of others? What do you say?

Euthyphro: We should enquire; and I believe that the statement will stand the test of enquiry.

Socrates: We shall know better, my good friend, in a little while. The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods?

This creates an alleged dilemma because (1) if God issues moral commands because they are moral, then the moral law exists above God, and this goes against traditional theism and the very concept of God and (2) if morals are moral simply because God commands them, then He could change His command tomorrow (from "don't rob banks" to "rob banks and kill all the people inside wearing pink") and abhorrent acts would then become moral. In other words, morals would be based on the arbitrary will of God.

This "Euthyphro dilemma" is supposedly the death knell for any ethical system that grounds moral imperatives in the command of God (i. e. a divine command theory of ethics). Even today, in many contemporary discussions of the subject, on atheistic blogs or whatever, non-theists act as if the issue is settled. Ethics just can't be rooted in the command of God, they say, because Socrates has already dealt with that issue definitively. (They do this quite often, by the way. We can't have any real knowledge of God anyway, for example, because Kant has already settled that! The teleological argument for God's existence doesn't work either! We know that because Hume showed it was impossible! This kind of thing wouldn't be so annoying if the arguments they were referring to were better.)

But I call poppycock on that. If we're looking solely at Socrates' argument, it doesn't even apply to theistic beliefs, and that's because the Greek gods are not analogous to the omnipotent, omniscient, perfect God of theism. The Greek gods - Zeus, Ares, Athena and the like - are more like glorified superheroes than God. That is, they may be very strong or beautiful or smart and have magnificent powers, but they are still finite. They are part of the created order, not the ontological ground of that order. Thus of course it's impossible for objective morals to be rooted in their command, and Socrates points out that the gods often disagree or change their mind anyway.

Now, for the sake of argument, let's suppose that Socrates was not talking to Euthyphro. We'll say he was transported seven hundred years into the future and was talking to Saint Augustine (who would have given a much better answer, by the way, than poor Euthyphro). There he poses the same question to Augustine: are moral actions good because God has commanded them? Or has God commanded them because they are good? Most sophisticated formulations of the Euthyphro dilemma simply twist the question and pose it to theists in this way. What is the proper Christian response?

Truth be told, I like this formulation of the dilemma better, because the solution is so much more illustrative of good Christian theology. Before answering, I have to admit that if one subscribes to divine command theory, and places the emphasis on the command, then the question posed carries much more force. But I see a fatal flaw here: whoever said the command of God is the ground of morality? If we're only focusing on the command itself, then we aren't actually going deep enough into the question of what grounds morality. In other words, we're not at the ground of moral grounding yet. We're still hovering over the surface.

The obvious question to ask is: well, why does God command what He commands, exactly? Answer: He commands what is in accord with His character. Thus objective morals are grounded in the nature of God: loving, relational, life-giving, sacrificial, merciful, gracious, etc. The commands that He issues only flow out of His character. So the truth is that God actually can't issue moral commands that are ultimately contradictory. So he can't one day tell someone to feed the hungry, and the next day to throw them off a bridge. God is the ground of all being and reality itself. The "good" is whatever is in accord with that ground of being - the personal God Himself - and evil is whatever opposes the personal God, not His commands but His character. In my mind this solves the problem. There is no Euthyphro dilemma.