[The lateness of this entry is entirely my (David's) fault; I apologize and I will try to do better in the future!]
Since the YouTube side of this debate has spawned a lot of unscheduled commentary—mostly initiated by me, I freely admit—let me address that before I properly answer David’s question.
Firstly, I do not think that your position is that Atheists behave less morally. I know that isn’t your position. What I asked is for you to justify the claim that Atheists have
diminished access to moral insights. Although that is my phrase, it is an inescapable assumption of your position. It is even contained within your question for me: You want me to justify the statement that a given behavior is wrong, presumably without reference to God. In other words, you are asking me to explain the “source” of my moral insights. If you did not think that atheism diminishes my access to such insights, it would make no sense to ask me this question. Presumably, you believe that human life is “sacred,” and that this belief underpins your morality, or some aspect of it. That idea then, is a moral insight, from your point of view.
Personally, I do not think the “sacredness of life” is a moral insight, but merely a superfluous fiction that obscures the true nature of our moral feelings in our popular culture.
However, I realize that from
your point of view it is a precept that fits neatly into your worldview but cannot be justified by mine. In other words, I cannot honestly justify my moral views by reference to the sacredness of life, but you can, in [your] theory. Again, I think that in terms of explaining morality as it really functions,
neither of us actually owe our fundamental morality to such ideas. I realize, though, that this is something we disagree about, and I don’t expect you to simply agree to that claim, but in order to understand what I am and am not saying, you need to understand that this is how I see things.
Secondly, let me respond to the issue about Atheists being underrepresented in criminality, or to be nearer the fact, as David correctly pointed out, prisons. According to data from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, as of 1997, 0.209% of prison inmates specifically identified as atheists, distinct from those who did not report a preference (19.74%).
However, upon closer examination, I have found that statistics measuring atheism in the general population of Americans are all over the place, some as low as 1%, and are variable in the extent to which they distinguish between atheism and religious apathy. So the problem is not with the prison statistics so much as with those of the general population. It does seem likely that atheists are, in fact, underrepresented in prison, but the case for that claim is not nearly as definitive as I had thought. Furthermore, I took this statistic to be common knowledge, even among Christians, and it really didn’t occur to me that you would dispute it. This is why I did not seek to provide more support for it in my question.
In retrospect, the point lacks the rhetorical force I thought it had. For what it’s worth, here is what I
suspect is the reason for the disparity, assuming a statistically significant one exists: Atheism
does correlate with higher levels of education and intelligence, both of which also correlate with lower criminality.
However, I would be quick to point out that this does not mean atheism is more likely to be correct: Because most people are religious to some extent, becoming an atheist requires, for most people, taking the question of God’s existence seriously in the first place. Because the category of “religious people” will include those who considered the same question, but decided in favor of theism,
and those who never questioned at all, a straight comparison in terms of education and intelligence between religious people and atheists is unfair, and distinguishing between “serious” believers and “unquestioning” believers is not feasible in a statistical format. (This should also be pointed out to people who make hay out of the fact that
vegetarians are more intelligent/educated than gen. pop.)
Thirdly, you say “Average people across the board tend to just ride the ‘cultural current;’ they tend to live the way everybody else lives; they tend to just imitate the way that everybody else is living…”
This is a totally unsupported assertion. It is, in fact, the kind of “observation” that can’t be persuasively demonstrated,
even in theory. Also, it contradicts what we know about human moral behavior. People are mostly driven by empathy and sociability. When I say “sociability,” I do
not mean that people behave morally because it’s the only way to socialize; I mean that the
innate desire to socialize with other members of our species (or even other species) is itself part of our evolved moral nature. We evolved to desire the esteem of others,
and we evolved to hold people in high or low esteem based on sets of traits that are surprisingly consistent across cultures. We don’t just anticipate the judgments of others, we also
make judgments of our own, and the basis of each judgment lies in a combination of our innate moral feelings and the mitigating factors which accumulate during our lives. For example, research (see especially James Mark Baldwin, Erick Erickson, and Jean Piaget) indicates that these innate moral senses are evolved specifically as a counterpart to the facts of human reproduction and family life. Moral sense evolved both to perpetuate and take advantage of “the family,” reaching the rough equilibrium we see today a long, long time ago, largely before we evolved our conspicuously intelligent brains. As a result, our moral sense can be deformed by destructive family situations, but because the positive outcome results from a more mutually sustaining cycle, most people come from essentially good families and have essentially healthy moral function. Additionally, children are born with a certain degree of resilience that, although variable from individual to individual, usually mitigate the damage done by bad parenting, and over time, populations will trend toward a morally healthy equilibrium.
The other influencing factor on morality deals with worldview, but not to the extent that moral philosophers would have us believe. I mean simply that how your innate moral feelings manifest results in part from what you believe about the world. If people believe, for example, that there are such things as heaven and hell, then this will influence not how their moral feelings are structured, but how they apply those feelings to situations.
Lastly, you state that someone who properly interprets Christianity won’t rape or murder, and you also state that atheists are overrepresented among serial killers and school shooters. To me, these are two different issues which must be explained separately. For the first, I think you greatly overestimate the extent to which Christianity is easily “decoded.” People who identify as Christians have committed both rape and murder. Who are you—who am I, for that matter—to say who is the “true” Christian? Speaking as a former believer, such judgments don’t seem like the purview Christ is supposed to have left for his followers. Christian churches in parts of Africa often sanction the abuse and even killing of children who are accused of witchcraft, and young women have been similarly terrorized by Western churches at several times and places throughout History. Then there are the crusades, the various inquisitions, and the day-to-day torment of heretics which occurred throughout the church’s history.
I realize, David, that as an Orthodox Christian, your denomination does not owe patronage to most of that precedent, (although your co-religionists have committed atrocities, for example in the Balkans) but that doesn’t change the fact that, as an atheist, I have no intellectual reason to prefer your interpretation over, say, a Catholic one, or even the current Christian “zeitgeist” over that of the more openly barbaric past. If you are right and a 13th century Dominican is wrong, how am I to prove this?
To your other point, I would say that white males are also overrepresented among serial killers and school shooters. Remember what I said earlier about epigenetic theory, and also keep in mind that at the end of the day, atheism is a state of nonbelief in god or gods, not a philosophy, church or movement. (Interest group, yes, in that atheists living in the West have common difficulties stemming from their atheism and the theism of society at large.) That state of being may be arrived at in a number of ways. Consider, for example, that Asperger’s patients are much more likely to be atheists than the general population. This is because for many of them, their condition makes some of the cognitive biases which underlie religion impossible, or at least less influential. One of the cognitive functions that has arisen as a result of our powerful brains is
Agency Detection or “theory of mind.” That is, our tendency to assume intention. This “cognitive shortcut” makes it easier to understand one another. You don’t have to start from scratch every time you meet a new person just to realize that they have a mind which is mostly similar to yours. However, that cognitive shortcut becomes a cognitive bias when we see people imputing motive to things like storms, diseases, climate, earthquakes, economic trends, etc. This penchant for agency detection, according to anthropologists such as Pascal Boyer, is one of the major causes for the persistence of religion into modern society. Since Asperger’s patients have diminished agency detection, it makes sense for them to be less frequently religious. Serial killers have, almost to the one, some level of antisocial personality disorder, previously known as sociopathy. School shooters, in particular, tend to come from troubled homes and
overwhelmingly have trouble socializing in schools. It is entirely possible that Aspergers may play a role, not in contributing to the violence, but in contributing to the patient being bullied, which in turn causes violence. As for serial killers, I have not been able to find any support for the claim that they tend to be atheists, and a number of high-profile cases made references to receiving commands from some sort of deity or another, so my instinct is to be skeptical of that claim. However, even if it were true, it would likely be that some aspect of antisocial personality disorder tends to favor atheism in a fashion similar to that of Asperger’s syndrome. Keep in mind that sufferers of antisocial personality disorder are much less—and often not at all—able to feel concern about long-term consequences, and so the threat of eternal punishment cannot be as persuasive to them as it is to most people who believe it. (In other words, they might believe in God, but still act in ways that seem irrational to a mentally healthy theist.)
I don’t know if you intended to include murderers like Stalin, Polpot, etc. in your reference, but since it comes up a lot, let me briefly address those. The problem here was not their atheism, but their ideology (and paranoia). As I have argued elsewhere in this debate (and likely will again) atheism itself is not an ideology, but some version of it can—and often does—become a tenet of an ideology. To take the most frequently used example of Communism, this ideology was demonstrably wrong about a lot of things. The idea of private property, although something of a fiction as it is portrayed by Capitalist ideologues, is absolutely necessary in any human society that is 1: post agricultural (not hunter-gatherer) and 2:
not post scarcity (resources are perceptibly finite). Contemporary religion is
also ideological, but
much, much older. While religions are riddled with as many counter-factual beliefs these younger ideologies, the most destructive of those were weeded out long ago in favor of more sustainable ones.
I do not subscribe to anything that I, at least, would recognize as an ideology. Rational self interest, empathy, a sense of fairness, a sense of duty, and my capacity for self-control, all modified by genetic disposition (unique to individuals, but falling on spectra) and upbringing, conspire with my beliefs about reality to inform my decisions. Moral behavior will be affected by more temporary brain states, as well, such as drug influence, fatigue, confusion, etc. This is also why I am not like Mother Theresa, and is generally the explanation for there being “no” atheists quite like her (neither of us can say for certainty that there haven’t been, but I’m willing to accept it as provisionally true). It seems likely that there have been numerous atheists (and theists, deists, etc.) that have, through individual effort, done as much meaningfully quantifiable good as she did, but since we do not believe the claims of the Church, we have no motivation to actually subject ourselves to the same poverty we might choose to fight against. Mother Theresa’s beliefs about personal sacrifice and solidarity included the idea that suffering is a good in itself. (Some have argued that she was more a friend to poverty than to the poor, but I will make no effort to defend such claims, today.) Since I do not believe that suffering will benefit me beyond a certain amount of character building, and I do not believe that my living in poverty would in any perceivable way contribute to the well-being of others, I have no reason to behave in
quite the same way as Mother Theresa. That (in and of itself) does not make me less moral than her. As for leprosariums, in particular: Leprosy does not appear to be contagious, and so there is no good reason to quarantine patients, other than tradition, which is A: not a good enough reason, and B: not the sort of tradition an atheist would recognize, at any rate. In light of modern medicine, quarantining lepers into colonies seems barbaric, rather than empathic, any alleged “curmudgeon’s” opinion notwithstanding.
Now, to answer your question:
The question is answered simply enough. The behavior described (I want to avoid the question of whether—or to what extent—Casey Anthony, in particular, is factually guilty of the crimes of which she’s accused, but I suspect you’d agree that that’s beside the point, anyhow. I am not a juror.) is absolutely immoral, or bad, or “evil,” or whatever word you want to use. Just scratching the surface, taking a human life offends empathy, because of the finite experience of life, of which the victim is deprived. It offends fairness (and empathy again, for that matter) to kill such an innocent child who could have held no responsibility for the situation that lead to her death. It offends duty that this crime was (presumably) committed by the child’s mother, who held paramount responsibility for keeping the child safe. I could go on.
What is important to understand, here, is that I believe that you are not any different from me in this regard. If you want to discuss why you think Casey will (or won’t) go to Hell, that would be the purview of theology and, while I’d consider it inane, something about which I can admit I have nothing intelligible to say from my worldview. However, I truly believe that the visceral reaction that both you and I feel at this story, as fathers and as human beings, is rooted in our innate moral perspectives, which I insist are not the purview of theology, philosophy, or anyone else who wants to make statements without regard to evidence, when evidence does exist. You may choose, if you wish, to justify your condemnation of this crime by referring to scripture, but you cannot use scripture to sensibly explain why you (and I) find the crime revolting. It is becoming abundantly clear that this is a consistent and predictable (within reasonable margins) matter of our earthly constitution.
You may wish to respond that a sociopath (as Casey most likely is) would disagree with me, or that I have appealed to emotions or preferences. No moreso than you, I submit. What moral insight do you have as a Christian that I don’t as an atheist? That “life is sacred?” What does sacred mean, if not “loved by God,” and why should I care what anyone’s god loves, anymore than what you, or your third cousin, or Mikhail Gorbachev love? Because he’s powerful? Because he made me? If you say it is because God is synonymous in some sense with objective morality, that’s a tautology: it is immoral because it offends morality. As for the idea that a sociopath’s opinion is just as valid as mine, that is as much as to say that any one’s opinion is equally valid with everyone else’s, regardless of circumstance. You have said, David, that you were an atheist, once, and it led, inexorably, to morality-denying philosophies. I’m here to tell you that I, as a representative to this debate of contemporary atheism, have no idea why it did that to you. Maybe you got a hold of a bad batch, or your dealer laced it with something. Or maybe you had already swallowed a bunch of bullshit about morality being subject to whimsy; equivalent to one person’s taste in ice cream flavor.
In response to your introductory statement, I both agree and disagree. In my opinion, the failure of any moral philosophy to give satisfactory answers to all “concrete examples” demonstrates yet again that even to attempt codifying a moral philosophy is to bark up the wrong tree. (The fact that there is such a thing as an “unsatisfactory” answer belies the fact that we must reconcile our philosophies to our moral senses, and not the other way around.) But since I believe moral philosophy is bankrupt anyway, I disagree that there is any use in such an exercise.
I need to explain the difference between
morality and moral
philosophy. I do not
have a moral philosophy. I
do have morality, and my morality is consistent (even when my behavior isn’t), but it is not rooted in navel-gazing that is speculative at best, and demonstrably counterfactual at worst. (Here I refer to moral philosophy as a realm, not to your beliefs in particular.)
Jeffrey Dahmer rather famously said “if a person doesn’t think that there is a God to be accountable to, then what’s the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges?” Because I cannot speak for his victims or for their families, I cannot forgive Dahmer for his crimes. (It is worth noting that your alleged God has no problem doing this. You could argue, I admit, that His omnipotence allows Him to see the experience of the victims in its entirety, but since God apparently bases the decision to forgive only on contrition and salvation, he hardly seems to be giving the victim’s opinion much regard.) But because he suffered from a severe form of antisocial personality disorder, I
can forgive him his ignorance in making this statement. He is, in this regard, like a blind person expressing skepticism in the existence of colors, or Horatio Hornblower (whose fictitious mind could not make sense of music) suspecting that musical appreciation is an affectation. When a mentally healthy person, such as yourself (as far as I know) agrees with such a statement though, it strikes me as a bit disappointing, all the more because I am obliged to call it “philosophy.”
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