On Morality and Religion

Dennis Prager, who is an American conservative political commentator, claims in this video* that you can't have morality without God.

I consider I am a moral person and most people who know me would agree. I am an atheist and I don't rely on the Bible or any other external source for my morality, so where does my morality come from? Is it merely a desire to conform to others' ideas of morality? I am not much of a conformist, as you can probably tell from the views expressed in my blog, so that doesn't seem likely.

I am moral because I think. Reason is the basis of my morality and in fact is the real source of all human morality, not religion. It is because we perceive the world through rational eyes that we have a morality at all.

Let us take the maxim, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Jesus said this, right? Well, actually it predates Jesus and is common to many early human cultures including ancient Egypt, China and India. Thales said it in ancient Greece and Seneca in Rome. In fact, it is so universal it is known as the Golden Rule. Do we need religion to derive this principle? No, of course not. All we need is a rational mind that can conceive of the potential consequences to oneself of doing something awful to another. A little experience of life teaches us that human relations are based on reciprocity - if I act decently towards you, then it is more likely that you'll be decent to me. On the other hand, if you believe that I am evil because I don't believe in your god, the chances are that you won't treat me fairly no matter how well I treat you.

Few would dispute that the moral standards to which mankind generally adheres have improved over time. Many things that human beings accepted in the past as perfectly moral - such as slavery, the torture and killing of so-called heretics, the stoning of adulterers, etc. - have become morally repugnant in modern societies precisely because we are in an age of greater reason. In fact, all of these practices were not only condoned in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Bible exhorts them.

Prager trots out the usual facile point that Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin were atheists and were evil, as if this is proof of his argument. Actually, Hitler was a Catholic all his life and Stalin was a Russian Orthodox seminarian before he became a Communist, so they hardly support his case. He then goes on to say that it is no coincidence that it was Judeo-Christian societies that first abolished slavery. I would have thought anyone who looked to the Bible for moral guidance would realise how hypocritical it is to claim its teachings led to the end of slavery. And anyone with a sense of history wouldn't engage in a moral pissing contest in defence of religion.

I think Prager has the facts exactly reversed. If your morality comes from an external source, such as belief in a divine being who tells you what is moral and what isn't, then you have no intrinsic morality. In other words, you are amoral, if not sociopathic. Of course, even religious people use rational judgement to determine which of their faith's moral precepts they apply in their own lives. But only those who derive their morality from their own reasoned judgement can be said to be truly moral.

* H/T: Craig Biddle from The Objective Standard, who brought Prager's video to my attention, has responded in greater detail and more philosophical terms here.

Yes, it is Islam (and all the Other Religions)

It is hard to conceive what motivates the minds of men who would take over a school and set out to systematically kill all the children and staff within it over a period of many hours, such as happened this week in Peshawar, Pakistan. The Peshawar massacre was like a monumental rebuttal of the likes of Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott who rushed to appease the Islamic community by claiming that the Sydney café attack by an Islamic cleric a day earlier was nothing to do with Islam. 

Abbott's absolution of Islam has been echoed again and again by the likes of Barack Obama, David Cameron and other Western leaders following similar attacks on their soil. But I'm afraid such disavowals are starting to wear a little thin, particularly when the perpetrators of these acts make it abundantly clear (as the Sydney attacker did with his use of an Islamic slogan flag) that they are acting in the name of Islam. I'm sure it will be revealed that the monsters who perpetrated the Peshawar massacre were making some sort of statement about the education of girls and the teaching of non-Islamic disciplines such as modern science, just like the Boko Haram (literally 'books forbidden') group in Nigeria and the man who shot Nobel Peace Prize-winner Malala Yousafzai in Pakistan.

Religion is at the heart of all these acts, as it is at the heart of much of the violence in the world today and throughout history. Fortunately for those of us who live in the originally-Christian West, Christianity has lost its potency as a motivator for violence, but Islam has certainly stepped into its shoes as one of the primary forces for evil-doing in the world.

The problem with religion is that it can justify any extreme of behaviour in the name of its gods. The scriptures of most religions include plenty of material to justify all manner of violent acts. Anyone who is seen as not being a sufficiently doctrinaire adherent to a particular faith can be struck down with little compunction on the part of the perpetrator. There is no compassion, empathy or guilt when you are acting in the name of the supreme being, for what is the worth of the life of child against the majesty of the creator?

Religious people believe they are moral, but really they are completely amoral. They substitute their interpretation of the words of an old book for the rational thoughts of their own mind. True morality is rationalism. True morality is about taking personal responsibility for, and thinking through the effects of, the actions you take. The rational person understands the horrible misery that killing a child brings to everyone who loved or cared for that child and thinks about how he or she would feel in the place of the victim. The religious person thinks only of whether their action will bring them distinction in the eyes of their god. I concede that evil is not confined to the devoutly religious, but religion enables its adherents to escape personal responsibility for their acts and in doing so makes it easier for them to commit evil.

On that rather depressing note, I would like to wish those who have read my blog posts this year a very happy holiday season. I intend to write more next year and hope that some of what I write interests and entertains you.

Thank you for reading and thank you most of all for your rationalism. It is a rare commodity.

Book Review - A Universe From Nothing by Lawrence Krauss

I have just finished reading the book A Universe From Nothing by Lawrence Krauss, in which he explains through the intersection of cosmology and particle physics how the universe could have come into existence without the need for divine intervention.  It is a brilliant book, a view that is shared in all the reviews I read on Amazon with the exception of those written by disgruntled adherents to the ancient mythologies that comprise the world's religions.  The motivation of the latter reviewers is perhaps understandable, given that Krauss does not shrink from challenging the need for the ancient mythologies when one is presented with such compelling scientific evidence to explain the origin of the universe we live in.  Krauss nailed his colours to the mast when he invited Richard Dawkins, the author of The God Delusion, to write the afterword.  Dawkins explains that those of religious faith are finding there are fewer and fewer epistemological places to hide when the light of scientific knowledge exposes the redundancy of their beliefs.

Religious dogma has always been exorcised by knowledge and logic.  The only difference today compared to, say, the Catholic Church's eventual accommodation of Copernicus's heliocentric view of the planets, is that religion is finding its ground getting smaller and smaller.  If religion is the preserve of that which cannot be explained by science, it is fair to say that the physical preserve of faith is approaching in size the Planck Length (a distance of approx 1.6 × 10∧-35 metres - the smallest conceivable measurable distance in physics).

I have heard Krauss debating cosmology with the religious faithful.  The latter usually resort to the argument that only God could truly create something from nothing.  In response to Krauss's argument that quantum physics allows precisely that, they simply retreat an order of abstraction by asking, who created the conditions or rules that allows quantum physics to do that?  Dawkins is perhaps better at Krauss at dealing with these specious arguments and his response is: if God created the conditions for quantum physics to create the universe, then who created God?  But God has existed forever, the theologians reply.

I have my own response to this theological question of First Cause, as it is known.  If God has existed forever, and if he is omniscient and omnipotent (not to mention omnipresent), why did he need to create the universe at all?  For his own amusement?  That hardly seems consistent with an omniscient and omnipotent being.  After all, if he is omniscient, he has perfect knowledge of everything that will ever exist and watching the universe unfold would contain all the amusement of watching an infinite number of reruns of a television soap opera.  And what was God doing before he created the universe?  If, as theologians assert, God has existed forever, he must have existed for an infinite amount of time before he created the universe.  Whether the universe was created 13.72 billion years ago (as Krauss and others have proven) or 6,000 years ago (as Creationists believe), it was an infinitely short time ago compared to the time God has supposedly existed.  So it appears he was sitting around for eternity doing absolutely nothing and suddenly decided to create the universe.  Was he bored?

Such theological arguments depart from the main argument of Krauss's book - that science can explain how the universe came into existence.  He does this more effectively that any other popular physics writer I have read (and I've read many) and does it in a way that makes you proud to be part of a race that can finally answer many of the big questions about its own existence.

There is one aspect to Krauss's conclusions that left me feeling dissatisfied, however.  In the final chapters, Krauss postulates a future where physicists will be unable to arrive at the same conclusions - about the Big Bang, Inflation and the existence of Dark Energy - as he does.  This is because the universe will have expanded to the point where only our local group of galaxies will be visible and even the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (which is part of the evidence of the Big Bang) will not be visible.  Future scientists will be literally in the dark regarding the origins of the universe.  Ultimately, the universe will die a cold death or collapse back into a singularity.  Krauss misses one important point, in my view - future scientists will know the history of the universe because they will be able to read about it in a book (of some form or other).  This is because human intelligence has reached a point where its survival is almost guaranteed, irrespective of what happens to human biology, the Earth or our galaxy.  Our descendants, who will certainly have transcended our biology to become something approaching pure knowledge or energy (and they are pretty much the same thing in physics), will endure for billions or even trillions of years.  They may even be able to save our universe from its eventual destruction or make the jump to another universe in the multiverse.  I am more optimistic than Krauss.