Our old fundamentalist friend Bill Lockwood claims that in my musings on truth I have fallen on my own sword. I trust, then, that he will accord me the courtesy of considering my final thoughts as I lie dying from my self-inflicted philosophical wound.
The thought uppermost in my mind at the moment concerns the apparent fragility of this thing that Lockwood and his fundamentalist cohorts call "objective morality." As long as they think it exists, they are able to lead exemplary moral lives, but if they should ever be without it, they see themselves succumbing to the enticements of just about every evil imaginable to the human mind. In his first article on the Amalekite massacre, Lindell Mitchell described all that he could do to me personally in the absence of a standard of absolute morality-- assault me, inflict multiple contusions and lacerations to my head, spoil my goods, kill my children, ravage my wife, and mercilessly torture me. Now comes Bill Lockwood to tell us that if there were no objective standard of morality, he might enjoy "inflicting pain to the bodies of others."
So what is it with these fundamentalist preachers who envision total moral chaos in a world that doesn't believe in absolute morality? I have established many friendships and associations with atheists and skeptics, most of whom do not believe in absolute morality, yet none of them has ever said, "Well, we don't believe in a standard of objective morality, so why don't we find a preacher and beat him up? It would be fun to inflict multiple contusions and lacerations to his head and then spoil his goods, kill his children, ravage his wife, and torture him mercilessly." I can assure all absolute moralists that a suggestion like this would not be favorably received in a gathering of skeptics and atheists. Anyone making such a suggestion would be urged to seek professional help.
There aren't many Church-of-Christ preachers in Central Illinois (how lucky can one get?), but I recall a conversation with one a few years ago in which he told me that he attributed his personal moral character entirely to God. Without his belief in God, he went on to explain, he was sure that he would be in prison because he would be unable to resist the temptation to steal. I told him that I found his statement hard to understand. At the time, we were sitting in his office, where several objects of value were in view, so I went on to explain that even though I don't believe in God, if I were left unsupervised in his office the entire day with every opportunity to pilfer, I would not steal anything. Even if a thousand dollars were left in the room, I said, and I knew that I could take it with impunity, I still wouldn't do it. I explained that my morality was based on logic. If a thousand dollars that he had worked for was not safe in his home, then a thousand dollars that I had worked for would not be safe in my home, so by respecting his personal property rights, I was acting in my own self-interest. Every person, then, who doesn't kill or steal or lie is acting in self-interest to help establish an orderly society in which one can live without fear of losing his life or property. The preacher seemed unable to understand--or perhaps didn't want to understand--the logical rationale that morality should be based on, so I assume that he still lives his life in fear that if he steals, God will get him. He may call that "happiness" if he wants to, but I call it just another example of the harm that religion inflicts on its believers.
As I lie dying from my self-inflicted wound, I also have to wonder if Lockwood is serious when he asks why we should bother if there is no God. "Why not sit back and watch the grass grow?" was the way that H. A. Dobbs put it in my debate with him in Portland, Texas, last May when we were supposed to be discussing the issue of prophecy fulfillment. I will gladly accommodate Lockwood and his cohorts with an answer, although I am sure that they will reject it. Once a fundamentalist has his mind made up on an issue, dynamite can't budge him from it. The more I talk to them and debate them, the more I wonder how I ever managed to find my way out of the maze of ignorance in which fundamentalists have imprisoned themselves.
So here is the answer, Mr. Lockwood. Please read it very carefully. Even though there is no God, we should "bother," in the sense of being concerned about the way we live our lives, because if we don't, we squander the only thing we have or will ever have. In the movie Unforgiven, there is a scene where Clint Eastwood's character said pensively, "It's a terrible thing to kill a man. You take away all that he has and all he'll ever have." Over 200 years ago, the American poet Philip Freneau gave a more than satisfactory answer to Lockwood's question in his poem "To the Honey Suckle":
If nothing once, you nothing lose,
For when you die, you are the same;
The space between is but an hour,
The frail duration of a flower.
Before one is born, he is nothing; he simply doesn't exist. When he dies, he returns to what he was before he was born--nothing. Dying, however, is not the terrible loss that theists make it out to be if atheism is true, because by being born we at least gained life (the space between). Viewed in this way, death becomes nothing to fear. I was not afraid before I was born, so what is there to fear after I am dead? I will become what I was before--nothing.
Realization of this truth is as old as the Bible itself, whose editors somehow managed to let some very skeptical sentiments sneak by them. So if Lockwood won't believe me, maybe he will believe his inspired word of God:
Everything that confronts them [both the righteous and the wicked] is vanity, since the same fate comes to all, to the righteous and the wicked, to the good and the evil, to the clean and the unclean, to those who sacrifice and those who do not sacrifice. As are the good, so are the sinners; those who swear are like those who shun an oath. This is an evil in all that happens under the sun, that the same fate comes to everyone. Moreover, the hearts of all are full of evil; madness is in their hearts while they live, and after that they go to the dead. But whoever is joined with all the living has hope, for a living dog is better than a dead lion. The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no more reward, and even the memory of them is lost. Their love and their hate and their envy have already perished; never again will they have any share in all that happens under the sun (Ecc. 9:2-6, NRSV).
These thoughts are in full agreement with a belief that Job expressed in his fourth speech. Preachers frequently lift out of context a question that Job asked in this speech: "If a man dies, shall he live again?" (14:14). They quote it and then try to make it mean that Job was expressing faith in an afterlife, but actually he was doing the opposite. Prior to this question, he clearly expressed a belief that death was the end of man:
For there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its tender shoots will not cease. Though its root may grow old in the earth, and its stump may die in the ground, yet at the scent of water it will bud and bring forth branches like a plant. But man dies and is laid away; indeed he breathes his last and where is he? As water disappears from the sea, and a river becomes parched and dries up, so man lies down and does not rise. Till the heavens are no more, they will not awake nor be roused from their sleep (vv:7-12, NKJV).
So that was the answer to Job's question, "If a man dies, shall he live again?" His answer was, "No, never again!" Yet fundamentalist preachers accuse skeptics of being everything but human for having the same doubts that some of their own inspired writers expressed.
Life, the "space between" that Freneau spoke of, is valuable; it is the only thing that we can be absolutely sure of. It is because of the value of life, then, that we should "bother" and do more with our lives than sit back and "watch the grass grow." It is because of the value of life that I don't plan to take a gang of commandos to Livingston, Texas, and do all the things to Lindell Mitchell that he claims he would have the right to do to me in the absence of absolute morality. My "twitching gray matter" that Lockwood wrote about twitches more than enough for me to understand that inflicting contusions and lacerations to his head and body would cause Mitchell pain and suffering. I don't want anybody to do that to me, so I don't want to do it to him. My head also "twitches" enough to tell me that spoiling one's goods, killing his children, ravaging his wife, and torturing him mercilessly would cause him severe grief. I don't want anybody doing this to me, so I won't do it to anyone else. Just what is the big mystery here? What is so hard to understand about intelligence reaching a degree high enough to formulate noble thoughts that become moral principles?
As a matter of fact, indications of morality in lower animals has even been observed and documented. In Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan related the results of an experiment with macaques (primates native to Japan) that had been reported earlier in Psychonomic Science (1964, pp. 47-48):
In a laboratory setting, macaques were fed if they were willing to pull a chain and electrically shock an unrelated macaque whose agony was in plain view through a one-way mirror. Otherwise, they starved. After learning the ropes, the monkeys frequently refused to pull the chain; in one experiment only 13% would do so--87% preferred to go hungry. One macaque went without food for nearly two weeks rather than hurt its fellow. Macaques who had themselves been shocked in previous experiments were even less willing to pull the chain. The relative social status or gender of the macaques had little bearing on their reluctance to hurt others (Shadows..., p. 117).
What could possibly account for the conduct of these macaques except a level of intelligence that had enabled them to understand that their personal actions were causing their fellow primates to suffer? The understanding had created in them a desire to avoid causing suffering to others that they would not want to experience themselves. Now if monkeys are capable of moral abstraction on this level, why should it surprise anyone that humans, the highest order of primates, can moralize on an even loftier plane?
Absolutists will argue that humans are able to moralize in the absence of direct divine revelation of moral commands only because they were created in the image of God, but not even the Bible will support this view. Adam and Eve were allegedly created in the image of God (Gen. 1:26-27 ), yet they did not understand the difference in good and evil till after their experience with the forbidden fruit (Gen. 3:1-5 , 22-23 ). For the sake of argument, however, let's just grant the fundamentalists their argument: humans can moralize in the absence of divine revelation because they were created in the image of God. So does this mean that macaques were also created in the image of God? If not, then it must not be true that the ability to moralize results from having been created in the image of God.
What then is the origin of moral principles? There is only one logical answer. Concepts of right and wrong, are intellectual abstractions. The human mind has abstracted concepts of beauty, loyalty, and fairness, yet there are no gods of beauty, loyalty, and fairness who have decreed objective standards of beauty, loyalty, and fairness. If Lockwood or Mitchell should say that it is impossible to have a beautiful sunset in the absence of an objective standard of beauty against which to measure light, hue, and perspective, they would be soundly ridiculed by everyone who recognizes that the mind is fully capable of formulating concepts of beauty. Would they argue that in the absence of an objective standard of loyalty, it is impossible for anyone to determine if a spouse or friend or employee is loyal? If not, then by what logic do they argue that morality cannot be conceptualized without a god to issue a standard of objective (absolute) morality?
Moral absolutists like Lockwood and Mitchell are actually saying that no one can determine right from wrong unless God speaks from heaven or inspires someone to write in a book that X is right and Y is wrong, but all reasonable evidence on the subject disputes this premise. I hate to sound like a broken record, but their own inerrant "word of God" clearly recognizes that man is capable of making correct moral decisions without divine enlightenment. In Romans 2:14 , the Apostle Paul referred to Gentiles who "have not the law" [special revelation] but who nevertheless "do by nature the things of the law" and are therefore "the law unto themselves." If this doesn't mean that the chief architect of Lockwood's and Mitchell's religion thought that correct moral decisions could be made without receiving moral revelations from God, then they should tell us what Paul did mean. Maybe if I urge them enough, they will eventually get around to dealing with this fly in their absolute-morality ointment.
Another fly in their ointment is a dilemma as old as Plato. For the absolutist who believes in a morality that emanates from a god or gods, this dilemma is the problem of why moral principles are moral. Let's take the proscription against killing. Lockwood would say that it is morally wrong to kill because God has said, "Thou shalt not kill." Very well, why did God tell us not to kill? Did he prohibit killing because killing is inherently bad or is killing bad because God said that it is? If Lockwood says that God prohibited killing because killing is inherently bad, then he is saying that there is an objective morality that transcends even God himself. In other words, God had no choice; he had to prohibit killing because the inherent badness of killing had already been predetermined by some "standard" separate and apart from God, which God could not contravene without compromising his much touted attribute of "infinite" goodness. If Lockwood chooses this horn of the dilemma, he will have to concede that God is not supreme, because there is at least one thing superior to him--objective morality.
Lockwood will find the other horn even less attractive. If he says that killing is bad because God says that it is, then he completely destroys his precious concept of objective morality. If things are good or bad only because God says that they are good or bad, then it isn't possible for anything to be inherently (objectively) good or bad. They are good or bad... well, because God says that they are. So the same god that declared X good and Y bad could change his mind and decree X bad and Y good.
Lockwood thought that he was having a lot of fun at my expense when he envisioned people who think it is fun to inflict pain on others or to burn themselves alive, but turn about is fair play. Now it's my turn to hypothesize. If Lockwood chooses the second horn of the dilemma, I ask him to consider the possibility of what the next universe will be like. (He surely doesn't think that God is through playing around; after the heavens have dissolved in fervent heat [2 Pet. 3:12 ], he will probably want to make himself another toy.) Maybe in that universe, Lockwood's god will decide to make lying, killing, and stealing good. If so, then there will probably be absolute moralists like Lockwood and Mitchell somewhere in that universe arguing that if there is no objective morality, then anything goes. One can tell the truth, save lives, give money to the needy, and do all other kinds of "evil" deeds.
Perhaps, then, Lockwood will enlighten us in this matter. Why is a given moral principle moral? Is it because it is just intrinsically moral, or is it because God said that it was moral? Fundamentalists have pat answers for everything, so he should be able to tell us.
Lockwood accused me of thinking that people have an obligation to accept atheism "even if it makes [them] extremely unhappy," but I have never said that. I have said that religion makes people unhappy, often very unhappy, and I think I have in my letter files--not to mention my own personal experience-- ample testimony that this is so. In those cases, I unhesitatingly advise people to find the courage to face the disapproval of relatives, friends, and associates and remove religion from their lives.
As I read Lockwood's claim that atheism will make people "extremely unhappy," I wondered, "How does he know that this is what will happen if people accept atheism?" Certainly, he can't be speaking from experience, because he has never been an atheist. On the other hand, I am an atheist who was once a Bible-believing theist, and I say that there is no comparison between the two philosophies. Atheism makes one happier, and this has been attested to by numerous atheists. I have yet to meet an atheist who says, "I am miserable; I was so much happier when I was a Bible believer." Obviously, then, Lockwood has no qualifications to claim that atheism causes extreme unhappiness.
The same can be said of James Bales, whom Lockwood quoted on the subject of happiness: "Happiness is the goal of life, but if one thinks of the futility of life when viewed in the framework of evolution, he will become unhappy" (Bales, p. 44). Bales was a Bible professor at the college I graduated from. He was a Bible believer then, and when I last had contact with him by correspondence three years ago, he was still a Bible believer. I don't recall ever hearing Bales claim that he has personally experienced atheism. How then can he know that "if one thinks of the futility of life when viewed in the framework of evolution, he will become unhappy"? How many atheists has he interviewed to determine that this is true? In other words, what qualifies Bales to make an assertion like this?
I often think of life "in the framework of evolution," and it by no means makes me unhappy. Of course, I don't think of the "futility" of life in the framework of evolution, and that is because I don't think that the "framework of evolution" in any sense makes life "futile." To the contrary, consideration of life in the framework of evolution should produce a sense of awe when one considers that we are the result of eons of struggle successfully endured by distant ancestors who brought us from what they were then to what we are now. The suffering and endurance of the famous heroes of faith in Hebrews 11:32-38 fades to nothing in comparison to the obstacles that those primitive ancestors overcame.
Lockwood doesn't like to think of thought in terms of "twitching gray matter," and I don't blame him. The expression suggests a chaotic act, and thought is far from chaotic. The impulses in the brain that generate thought behave in a very orderly fashion that could hardly be described as "twitching." This order is the result of eons of organization through natural selection.
Lockwood ridiculed Woolsey Teller for saying that "(t)hought is matter in motion," but he should have read the statement in context rather than depending on what "Brother Bales" had said. After discussing the discoveries that established thinking as a function of the brain, Teller said this:
As functions cannot exist apart from their organs, it is the height of absurdity to imagine a function like thinking existing by itself or wandering about the heavens without a material substratum. A "pure spirit" hovering over matter is pure nonsense. Thought is "immaterial" only as respiration and digestion are immaterial--we cannot see, weigh, or handle functions apart from their organs--but thinking is as material as matter itself when we consider it mechanically, that is to say, as a form of vibration and sensation in the nerve fibers of the brain and of the nervous system. Matter thinks quite as well as it walks, and talks, and dresses for the opera; and without matter thinking is impossible (The Atheism of Astronomy, pp. 10-11).
Teller then went on to say that "thought is matter in motion," and so a "cosmic intelligent being would have to be made of matter."
Whether this is an accurate way to describe thought may be debatable. Personally, I prefer to think of thought as the result of matter in motion, just as walking and talking are the result of matter in motion. However, the basic premise is sound. If Lockwood thinks otherwise, then perhaps he will accept the challenge to prove to us that thought can exist apart from matter. Let him establish the existence of a disembodied thought just floating around in space unattached to any brain, and I will concede the debate to him.
I have repeatedly urged Lockwood and Mitchell, along with several other absolute moralists, to tell us just how we can determine what absolute morality is, but they have consistently evaded the issue. They say that absolute morality is revealed in the Bible, so why won't they explain to us just how we can determine, without question, what is moral and what is immoral?
Is it morally right, for example, for a woman to allow herself to be artificially inseminated by the semen of a man she is not married to? Is it morally right to transplant organs? Is in vitro fertilization morally right? Embryo transplants? Gene-splicing? And more recently we have learned that human embryos can be cloned. Will it be morally right to clone humans? Was the right moral decision made last summer when Siamese twins were separated in an operation that surgeons knew would result in the death of one of the twins? What does Lockwood's guide to absolute morality tell us about this and the other issues mentioned above? He owes us an answer.
If he will send us a book-chapter-and-verse resolution of these
moral problems, we will publish it in The Skeptical Review. If
morality is as simple as he would have us believe,
he shouldn't have any trouble providing us with a document that
will satisfactorily resolve all these problems and set us all
on the road to moral happiness.
