Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

The Euthyphro argument puts the lie to the common claim that atheism consigns us to a moral relativism in which everyone can do his own thing. The claim gets it backwards. A humanistic morality rests on the universal bedrock of reason and human interests: it’s an inescapable feature of the human condition that we’re all better off if we help each other and refrain from hurting each other. For this reason many contemporary philosophers, including Nagel, Goldstein, Peter Singer, Peter Railton, Richard Boyd, David Brink, and Derek Parfit, are moral realists (the opposite of relativists), arguing that moral statements may be objectively true or false.⁴⁵ It’s religion that is inherently relativistic. Given the absence of evidence, any belief in how many deities there are, who are their earthly prophets and messiahs, and what they demand of us can depend only on the parochial dogmas of one’s tribe.

Not only does this make theistic morality relativistic; it can make it immoral. Invisible gods can command people to slay heretics, infidels, and apostates. And an immaterial soul is unmoved by the earthly incentives that impel us to get along. Contestants over a material resource are usually better off if they split it than fight over it, particularly if they value their own lives on earth. But contestants over a sacred value (like holy land or affirmation of a belief) may not compromise, and if they think their souls are immortal, the loss of their body is no big deal—indeed, it may be a small price to pay for an eternal reward in paradise.

Many historians have pointed out that religious wars are long and bloody, and bloody wars are often prolonged by religious conviction.⁴⁶ Matthew White, the necrometrician we met in chapter 14, lists thirty religious conflicts among the worst things that people have ever done to one another, resulting in around 55 million killings.⁴⁷ (In seventeen conflicts, the monotheistic religions fought each other; in another eight, monotheists fought heathens.) And the common assertion that the two world wars were set off by the decline of religious morality (as in the former Trump strategist Stephen Bannon’s recent claim that World War II pitted “the Judeo-Christian West versus atheists”) is dunce-cap history.⁴⁸ The belligerents on both sides of World War I were devoutly Christian, except for the Ottoman Empire, a Muslim theocracy. The only avowedly atheist power that fought in World War II was the Soviet Union, and for most of the war it fought on our side against the Nazi regime—which (contrary to another myth) was sympathetic to German Christianity and vice versa, the two factions united in their loathing of secular modernity.⁴⁹ (Hitler himself was a deist who said, “I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord’s work.”)⁵⁰ Defenders of theism retort that irreligious wars and atrocities, motivated by the secular ideology of communism and by ordinary conquest, have killed even more people. Talk about relativism! It is peculiar to grade religion on this curve: if religion were a source of morality, the number of religious wars and atrocities ought to be zero. And obviously atheism is not a moral system in the first place. It’s just the absence of supernatural belief, like an unwillingness to believe in Zeus or Vishnu. The moral alternative to theism is humanism.

Few sophisticated people today profess a belief in heaven and hell, the literal truth of the Bible, or a God who flouts the laws of physics. But many intellectuals have reacted with fury to the “New Atheism” popularized in a quartet of bestsellers published between 2004 and 2007 by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens.⁵¹ Their reaction has been called “I’m-an-atheist-but,” “belief-in-belief,” “accommodationism,” and (in Coyne’s coinage) “faitheism.” It overlaps with the hostility to science within the Second Culture, presumably because of a shared sympathy to hermeneutic over analytical and empirical methodologies, and a reluctance to acknowledge that dweeby scientists and secular philosophers might be right about the fundamental questions of existence. Though atheism—the absence of a belief in God—is compatible with a wide range of humanistic and antihumanistic beliefs, the New Atheists are avowedly humanistic, so any flaws in their worldview might carry over to humanism more generally.