Good Without God?

Of the more absurd modern atheistic claims, the one that has caused me the most head-scratching has been the notion that morality exists because it benefits the survival of our species. Richard Dawkins has famously argued that our genes are "selfish" and propel us to survive. Somehow, this "selfish" impulse extends even to the point of doing seemingly stupid things (in terms of pure survival value) like rescuing other people not of our genetic background from burning buildings, swerving to avoid hitting a dog in traffic, or the more mundane charitable gift to OXFAM. None of those actions can in any way be adequately or satisfactorily explained by claiming genes are "selfish," an anthropomorphic and value-laden claim if ever one existed.* Yet the idea persists among atheists. And it persists, it must be maintained, because it has to persist. The moral impulse is undeniable and in a mechanistic scheme must be explained away rather than addressed directly. However, even the explanation offered by atheists is quite obviously a metaphysical position held by a philosophy that, ironically enough, denies metaphysics.

David Bentley Hart, in his book The Experience of God, draws out this inconsistency quite well. He sets up the mechanistic, atheistic dilemma here:

The most common strategy for 'naturalizing' ethics is a sort of evolutionary utilitarianism, with two distinct moments: first, the attempt to reduce the human ethical sense to a variety of traits that, by virtue of the evolutionary advantages they confer, have been implanted in us by natural selection; and then, second, a vague but earnest assertion that, for this very reason, ethical imperatives ought to be accorded real authority. 

Hart's follow up comment argues, essentially, that the logical jump between the first and second points is ludicrous. If morality is merely a useful tool, or was a useful tool for earlier generations, there is no reason at all to think that such a morality is binding on us today. These imperatives can have no real authority for any individual. Every moral act is, rather, implicitly acknowledging the existence of a transcendent moral authority-giver, whether it pretends otherwise or not. People might invent/cling to outlandish notions of selfish genes overriding the wills of robotic human beings, in Dawkins's textbook example of crappy use of metaphor, but the central issue is not evaded by spectacular fabrications. Goodness, as a concept, is contingent on the existence of God.

This line of argument usually prompts the impetuous response from atheists: so, are you saying you need to believe in God to be a good person? I've always felt this question went wide of the mark. There is a natural law tradition in virtually every faith system that makes such a claim unnecessary. Of course we can be good without God. We can be good without God because we have been given a moral sense that is inextricably bound up in our vision of the world. 

Hart dismisses this atheist canard. 

Simply said, if there were no God, neither would there be such a thing as moral truth, nor such a thing as good or evil, nor such a thing as a moral imperative of any kind. This is so obviously true that the need to argue the point is itself evidence of how inextricable our hunger for a transcendent moral truth even is, even when all our metaphysical convictions militate against the existence of that truth. So, yes, it certainly is not the case that one needs to believe in God in any explicit way in order to be good; but it certainly is the case, as classical theism asserts, that to seek the good is already to believe in God, whether one wishes to do so or not.

I think this accounts for the bluster of contemporary atheism. They know this is true. This is not a new idea. Dostoevsky was on the case here 150 years ago. The atheist response has been to invent metaphysical systems of transcendent value and deny that they are metaphysical or transcendent. They act as if saying such-and-such an impulse emanated from the brain over time explains it away. It does not, even if it could be proved. 

One of the ineluctable truths of modern atheism is that it is built upon a foundation of Christian ethics. Even the claim--good without God--presupposes the existence of "good." And why ought "good" to exist in a world without "God." What sort of chemical reaction created it? What unseeing mechanistic cause hardwired it into our vision of the world? The only reason we have a vocabulary for goodness is because, as Hart contends, "our minds may have really glimpsed the form of the good, and so we can recognize goodness when we see it because it has left its impress and its fragrance and its sparks in our souls." We know what is good, in other words, because we all know God. Some of us are simply more honest about this fact.

* If this were true, it would also prompt merely an infinite regress of causality. If our genes are selfish and therefore somehow sentient, what gave our genes this power? If we find that cause, what gave that it's power? And on and on. You cannot bridge the gap from pure mechanistic landscape to intelligent consciousness through the simple addition of layers of sapience.