Having recently been through a conversation with some atheists who insist that moral values are objective, but that God is not required to ground them, this article has been bumped to the top of the to-do list.
These atheists were convinced that objective moral values are just a fact of reality, and that the concepts of 'goodness' and 'sentient well-being' were identical. They seemed to think that either moral values are weaved into the fabric of space somehow, or that sentient beings just have the intrinsic value of being good, that is to say, sentient beings, i.e. humans, are valuable and good in themselves without any need for further explanation.
That to me is nonsense. The idea that humans are basically good, but get things wrong a lot of the time is common belief. History tells a different story. From gladiator games to the Stanford prison experiment, we've seen that apparently good people can be barbaric given the chance. That's not to say all people would devolve into savagery at any opportunity, but it very much undercuts the idea that humans at core are fundamentally good.
I tend to think it's more like the Native American parable: inside each of us there are two wolves fighting, one represents good, one represents evil. Which will win the battle? The one that we feed.
But atheists tend to go further. They will say that other things or behaviours are intrinsically good too. If you found a starving child, giving up your lunch and feeding it would be the good thing to do for its own sake. While I agree that in that case that would be the good thing to do, I don't think it can be claimed that the only details you need are a starving child and some food to offer. There are a number of questions that can be asked.
Why is a fed child better than a starving one? Why should you, who have been able to provide for yourself, worry about another who can not do that? Why are either of you bothering to survive?
These questions might seem to have the obvious answer: "because I care about other people and want to do what I can to stop suffering."
But the universe says to that: "So what?"
You may care, and you may want, but does what you want or care about matter? Your goals might seem to be noble, self sacrificing for the needs of someone else, but it comes back around to caring about the human species, of which you are a part.
So there's a broader question. Does the human race matter? Every time you help a child, or heal the sick, or give to charity, you're doing something to potentially benefit the human race. It might not specifically come back to you personally, but human well-being is the goal.
So why care about human well-being? We've already seen that we are not fundamentally good. We are definitely not intrinsically good.
How could anyone possibly claim that human beings are intrinsically good? When each of us has the capability to do wrong and evil things, and all of us have many times done wrong or evil things. Something intrinsically good, or something good for its own sake surely would not have that capability.
When we think of an atheistic universe, a universe without God, we have to figure out our place in it and what value we bring. Each one of us is a dot among seven billion other dots, on a planet which is a dot, in a solar system, in a galaxy which is a dot among countless other galaxies, in a universe bigger than we can comprehend. The idea that the human race, let alone one of us, has any value in that picture is absurd.
Then consider that one day the universe is going to die. The entire universe will no longer exist. The speck that was you lost to time. Nobody to remember you, no legacy left behind, nothing you or anyone else ever did made any difference to how we all end up.
A creature so insignificant, who makes no difference to anything, has no value - intrinsic or otherwise.
Could there be anything in that universe with intrinsic goodness? No. All of it has the same fate: doomed to die without making a lasting improvement to anything.
If you can't improve something, then you have no value to it. If the universe can not be improved, then anything inside it has no value.
This is the grim reality of atheism. Of course, grimness and bleakness does not mean it is not true. It could be the case that atheism is true, but the logical consequence of that is that there is no ultimate value for anything that exists.
Something that is objectively good, is good in and of itself. It would be good whether or not other things existed. It has no need for other things to justify its value. The opinions or attitudes of other beings towards it have no bearing on its value.
Something that is subjectively good, is only a good thing in relation to how other things interact with it. Opinion and attitudes towards a subjectively valued thing, can change the value of it.
God, is an example of someone objectively good. He is perfect, without equal, and fully self sufficient, able to exist without any other being beside him.
Money is an example of something subjectively good. People chase it and try to get as much as possible in order to improve their lives. However, if an economy has too much money in it, money loses its value and becomes worth a lot less. Something that is objectively good, would not become less good if there was more of it!
Alternatively, some people choose to try and live without money, and see it as an evil that has too many people under its power. While money is completely subjective, who is to say whether it is a good thing or not?
Could it be said that humans are objectively good on atheism? If they are, then any moral codes and behaviours that contribute to human well-being would be objectively good too.
But we have seen that humans are not objectively good. We all have a dark side, so we are not perfect. We all act on our dark side, so we can not even pretend to be perfect. We are not self sufficient, and we are limited, finite beings. There is so much wrong with us, that it's simply foolish to say we are intrinsically good.
We are capable of doing good things, and perhaps we might be able to do so much that we are about 90% good (long shot), but no one is purely good. And even those who do good most of the time, quite probably wish they might have done the selfish thing here or there instead.
On atheism, humans and acts like feeding a starving child, are just subjectively good. They are based in the value we as humans place on other humans. But we are not objectively good beings, and we can't decide other things are objectively good.
Deciding that something is good is precisely what makes a thing subjectively good.
The universe will not miss us when we go extinct. We bring nothing.
Even the fact that we as a species kill and destroy other beings and the environment is meaningless. It's all going to die eventually anyway.
Some will say that their deeds make a difference to the person that they help, and that is what make them good deeds. Well, that is subjectivity again. Your good deed was seen as helpful from the perspective of another person. That person is not intrinsically good either, so although your good deed made them feel happier, it has not actually made anything better.
This is an important distinction that many atheists fail to make. Happier, more comfortable, easier, etc, on atheism do not mean 'better'. On atheism there is no 'better'. To make something 'better' means to move something closer to an ideal. But atheism has no objective 'ideal'. So when atheists do what they call 'good deeds', they aren't making anything 'better', they are just making things preferable. They have not made anything better, they have just changed a situation from one objectively morally neutral state of things, to another objectively morally neutral state of things. The only sense that things are better, is subjectively - based on some chosen human ideal.
So can we really measure good or bad based on humanity? When we speak of objective goodness, we need some way to measure it. If we know that humans are bad to some extent, then they can't be the measure of perfection. We simply are not the objective ideal. To measure how something compares to pure goodness, there needs to be an example of pure goodness. Anything that falls short, e.g. humanity, is not going to be a good tool to make that measurement. Without an idea of what pure goodness looks like, we can't even judge just how wrong human beings even are. We know that death is a bad thing, so if the universe, and all things in it are doomed to die, then everything in that category is ruled out of being the measuring tool.
But in Christianity we have an objective system of morality and a measurement of pure goodness.
We have God who is objectively good. Good in and of himself, a living embodiment of perfect goodness. He made us to be with him, so we are given value by him. He put us on a tiny planet in a massive universe, but focused on us and said it is all for our benefit. This means that caring for one another, and trying to build the world that God wanted is an objectively good goal.
Can atheism compare with that? Is there anything in an atheistic universe that gives us the value that we need to justify caring objectively? Is there even anything in an atheistic world that is perfectly good? No.
There is only the subjective wishes of ourselves, and a drive to survive. But neither of those are objectively good, and neither come from objectively good sources.
This is why the likes of Friedrich Nietzsche realised that "Without God, everything is permitted", and why C.S. Lewis realised that atheism offered no way to explain our moral natures before abandoning it and coming to Christ. If all we have is subjective value, there is no overriding objective ideal that is the deciding factor over what values are true and right and good. Which means that everyone's opinion is valid, which means that the Amish are just as correct as the Nazis, because there is no such thing as correct. If there is no such thing as correct in relation to moral values, then it all becomes meaningless, and so atheism essentially leads to nihilism - life is meaningless, and purpose does not exist.
