Are Atheists Bad People?
Don't They Have Any Leg To Stand On? In 1990, Michael Martin produced an outstanding book, titled Atheism: A Philosophical Justification. Reviews of it appear in The Humanist, Mar/Apr 1991; The American Rationalist, Sep/Oct 1990; and Free Inquiry, Fall 1990. We hope to review it in Truth Seeker, but I have to finish reading it first, and it is a big job reading this great book. Meanwhile, I offer here a small sample. Before getting into his main topic, the question whether God exists or not, Martin takes care of criticisms of atheist morality, criticisms that are as widely believed as they are unfounded. All atheists are bad people. No. Martin offers the Jainists, David Hume, and Percy Shelley as counterexamples. There are many more. Well, most atheists are bad people. So? If you believe in original sin, most Christians are bad people. Even without o.s., it may just happen that most people are bad. This doesn't single out atheists as uniquely awful persons. Well, then, atheists are more likely to be bad people than believers are. Now we're getting to something we can talk about, maybe. Martin cites several studies that show little if any moral difference between believers and unbelievers. One even showed that mild believers were less moral than either strong believers or atheists, with the latter two being about the same. There is simply no evidence to support the claim. Martin, like a lawyer, goes on to say that, even if atheists are scumbags compared to believers, that doesn't show that their atheism causes or is caused by their depravity. I wouldn't mind if he had left that out, but he does insist that there is no good reason or evidence to accept the "if" clause. Dostoyevsky: Without God, all things are permitted! Martin's charming rephrase of this is: "It is morally permitted that p = It is not the case that God commands that ~p." Or, a little closer to English, "A performance p is morally permitted" is the same as saying "It is not the case that God commands that p not be done." Martin raises in his way the old question, does God command behavior because it is good, or is it good because he commands it? If the former, there is an objective morality that transcends God; if the latter, there is no objective morality of any sort. He also asks, how do we know what God commands? and provides the abundance of evidence that God allegedly has made many contradictory commands. He wonders about a transcendent entity with a voice, but believers don't have any trouble with that, do they? But under atheism, all morality is relative. If there are any nontheistic but absolute moral systems, this claim is false. Martin cites the utilitarian axiom, "the greatest good for the greatest number." Two more come from Kant: his "categorical imperative" and his "don't treat other persons as means to an end." Martin notes that there are yet others, and insists that the burden of proof, to show that none of these will work, is on the theist. He quotes William Frankena to the effect that most if not all of the alleged dependence of morality on culture stems from conceptual differences and differences of belief in matters of fact. Cultural differences are thus not a statement that "morality is relative." Martin reminds us that a "unique rational method" of settling questions of right and wrong is at least as hard to come by if you suppose a God as is the case if you do not.
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