Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (73 page)

If someone does endorse the violence and hatred that made these monsters infamous — now
that’s
something worth objecting to. But as I argue in “Framing the question right” later in this chapter, the rest of the people in a given worldview should get credit for showing a lot more human decency.

Being good without God — a quick history

Most atheists will readily admit that a lot of religious believers are good people. From Martin Luther King, Jr. to the Dalai Lama to Mr. Rogers to my dear, sweet mother-in-law, I have no trouble coming up with countless examples of people who do their religion proud.

But many religious people to think that nonbelievers simply can’t be moral people. This idea found its way into a good number of the sermons I heard in 25 years as a churchgoing nonbeliever. Not all religious people think it, of course, but many have, and many do, and that misconception has caused a good deal of personal pain among atheists and other nonbelievers.

When the philosopher Pierre Bayle said in 1681 that an atheist could be just as virtuous as a Christian, and that there’s no reason atheists couldn’t form a moral society of their own, Christian Europe fell off its chair. He eventually lost his teaching job in the Netherlands for saying such things.

Funny thing, though: Three centuries later, the Netherlands is majority nontheistic. And Bayle was right — it’s one of the most peaceful, orderly, nonviolent societies on Earth. (More on that shortly in “
The Scandinavians
” section.)

But the misconception that atheists can’t be good is a persistent one. So before I turn to how morality works without supernatural religion, I want to offer a few cameos from the history of goodness without God. (See
Chapter 4
for a deeper discussion of these three.)

The Confucians

Confucianism is a philosophy that’s all about ethics, self-improvement, virtue, altruism, and compassionate action — and all without appealing to gods for help or clarification. Confucius articulated the earliest known version of the Golden Rule: “What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others.” Check out
Chapter 4
for more on Confucianism.

Epicureans

The philosopher Epicurus and his followers in ancient Greece, most of whom were atheist, agnostic, or deistic, were among the first to talk about justice as a social contract between people — an agreement not to do harm to each other.

The Jains

Jainism is a nontheistic religion centered on peace and nonviolence. Jains have been at the forefront of social and moral issues in India for centuries, all without reference to gods. Refer to
Chapter 4
for additional insight into the Jains.

The Reformers

Atheists and agnostics have done courageous work on major moral issues of their times, such as

Pioneers of women’s rights including Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Simone de Beauvoir, and Gloria Steinem

Slavery abolitionists including Frances Wright, Ernestine Rose, Frederick Douglass, and Lydia Maria Child

Advocates of social equality, prison reform, and fair labor practices including Jeremy Bentham, Robert Owen, J.S. Mill, Felix Adler, Emma Goldman, Gora, and Jane Addams

Advocates of reproductive rights including Margaret Sanger and Katha Pollitt

Protestors against war and militarism including Bertrand Russell, Kate Hudson, Jane Addams, Noam Chomsky, and Aldous Huxley

(See Chapters
7
and
8
for more on these reformers.)

Moral society without God — the Scandinavians

One of the clearest arguments that people can be deeply good without believing in God is happening right now in the Scandinavian countries — Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. By nearly every measure, these societies are some of the least religious in human history. Between 65 and 78 percent of the population expresses no belief in God, and regular church attendance hovers around 3 to 5 percent.

But instead of teeming with depravity and violence, sociologist Phil Zuckerman notes that these countries are “moral, stable, humane, and deeply good.” They top the world in nearly every marker of a civilized society, including low crime rates, high literacy, low unemployment, and some of the highest GDPs per capita on Earth.

And when it comes to generosity, the Scandinavians make up three of the top four countries in aid per capita given to poor countries. The (highly religious) United States does all right, giving $97 per person to developing countries in 2010. But secular Sweden gave $483 per person, doubting Denmark gave $517, and nonreligious Norway gave an incredible $936 for every man, woman, and child in their country to struggling nations — nearly ten times the level of the United States. A pretty moving and impressive commitment to moral values, I’d say, all from countries with very little religious belief.

The compassionate humanists

Nontheists have always been generous people. But in recent years an effort has evolved to specifically organize giving and volunteering around the values of that worldview, including mutual care and responsibility. If humanity wants a better world with less suffering and more justice, and there’s no supernatural power to make it happen — well, then it’s up to humans.

Several major nontheistic groups launched disaster relief efforts after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, including SHARE (by the Council for Secular Humanism) Non-Believers Giving Aid (by the Richard Dawkins Foundation), and Humanist Charities (by the American Humanist Association).

In 2010, a humanist membership organization called Foundation Beyond Belief was created to focus and encourage generosity in the nontheistic community. (Full disclosure: I’m the executive director.) As of late 2012, the atheist and humanist members of the Foundation have raised more than $750,000 for charities around the world and created a network of humanist volunteer teams in 23 cities across the United States.

Digging Up the Natural Roots of Morality

For as long as people have been thinking about the difference between good and bad, two ideas have competed for attention:

The human understanding of the good comes from outside of humanity — God being the usual suspect.

The human understanding of the good is woven into the human mind, a natural part of being human.

For a long time this was considered a toss-up, and a tie generally goes to the Big Guy. But the last century or so has seen a huge amount of new understanding of how humans are put together. Fields like neuroscience, genetics, and biochemistry have shed much more light on how people know right from wrong — and why they tend more often than not to choose the right.

As with so many other discoveries, the resulting picture leaves little for God to do. Behaving well turns out to be highly adaptive. It aids survival. So evolution has naturally selected a tendency to be good, which puts moral understanding and behavior deep in the fabric of who and what human beings are.

That’s a shocking claim to many people, even those who accept evolution. Sure, evolution can explain sex and aggression and hunger and fear — but isn’t evolution about “survival of the fittest,” and “nature, red in tooth and claw”? How can that ever lead to morality?

As it turns out, evolution not only
can
select for moral behavior, it really
must.
Even so, morality isn’t foolproof. Some evolved tendencies that were helpful a million years back aren’t the least bit helpful in the modern world. In those cases, humans have developed social norms, rules, and laws to protect each other from each other. The biologist David Lehti gives an arresting example: If you think of the way other social species on Earth behave, it’s frankly amazing that dozens of unrelated adult males can be confined together on a plane for hours with dozens of fertile females, yet everybody arrives at the gate in Cleveland alive and unharmed. Left to its own devices, evolution would tend to work against that happy outcome. Yet it happens ten thousand times a day because people have developed a social morality that thankfully trumps evolved human tendencies when it needs to.