One of the biggest challenges for atheism is the origin of good, that is, if we all got here by the strong eating the weak in evolution, then why do we cry out when we see the strong eating the weak in society? If we accept Dawkins’ self gene theory, then when we see injustice and the oppression of those who aren’t in our family, a consistent atheist should just shrug their shoulders and recognise it as the survival of fittest. But we don’t. People have an inherent sense of right and wrong and we cry out against injustice and oppression, why? Atheism has no basis or explanation for the origin of a good conscience.
This is because science deliberately restricts itself to the objective. Science doesn’t talk about opinion or speculation, only cold hard facts. Ethics on the other hand, is subjective and open to debate. You can’t put right and wrong in a test tube and produce a scientific proof about what someone should do, scientific proofs are limited to what someone can do. This was famously observed by Hume’s Naturalistic fallacy which states that you cannot get an ought from an is, that is, scientific facts can never give you a basis for what people should or shouldn’t do. You can never get an imperative from an indicative.
Sam Harris has challenged this in his book The Moral Landscape. Harris claims that science can give you a basis for ethics because “well being” (his goal for ethics) is something that can be observed and improved by science. However this fails at a crucial point – the subjectivity of well being – what happens when people disagree about someone’s or some group’s best interests? How does science solve a disagreement about one’s well being? Harris writes off the naturalistic fallacy as a trick of language without actually dealing with it as an argument, he simply claims that “well being” is obvious and objective and then steamrolls his western idea of well being over eastern values about women and children.
After Harris promotes utilitarianism based on “common sense” while pretending it’s based on science, he hides this double standard in a medical analogy. If “good health” is hard to define but can be improved by science, then so can “well being”. Unfortunately for Harris, what you should do for “good health” is just as subjective and what you should do for “well being”. Scientific advances in medicine can tell you what you can do to save or to kill, but not whether you should save or kill. Science is completely silent on the issue of euthanasia, it can tell you how to kill someone, but not whether you should.
Hume’s naturalistic fallacy and Harris’ challenge of it is actually historically verifiable. If you can think of a single instance in history where science has changed human morality then Harris is right, if not, Hume is right. This doesn’t include areas of morality that science has opened up e.g. bioethics, but situations where people used to believe that A was right or B was wrong, and then a scientific discovery has proved that A was wrong or B was right. It has to be a scientific discovery that settles an ethical debate. I can’t think of a single one but Harris claims that science should be able to settle them all.
If there is no God and therefore no outside third party to dictate right and wrong, then our idea’s of right and wrong are nothing more than our ideas. Who am I to tell a con artist that what they are doing is wrong? If a group of pedophiles could somehow convinced the majority of a country’s population that pedophilia was ok then they would have no choice but to legalise it. Our rationality can function as a justification for our ethics, but it can never be an objective basis for ethics. We can rationalise our ethical decisions, but our rationality will never rebuke our morality, and neither will science.
This is more than just an argument for the attractiveness of faith, it’s an argument for its truthfulness because of our inherent sense of right and wrong. Why do we cry out against injustice? Why do we care when the weak are oppressed? Atheism has no basis or explanation for our morality, Dawkins’ selfish gene theory contradicts the evidence of our selfless concern for the marginalised. Atheism simply cannot account for the origin of the good in our morality.
