Anderson_if god is dead is everything permitted_2007

without God, morality is impossible. In the famous words (mis)attributed to Dostoyevsky, ‘‘If God is dead, then everything is permitted.’’ Or, in the less- famous words of Senator Joe Lieberman, we must not suppose ‘‘that morality can be maintained without religion.’’ Why think that religion is necessary for morality? It might be thought that people wouldn’t know the difference between right and wrong if God did not reveal it to them. But that can’t be right. Every society, whether or not it was founded on theism, has acknowledged the basic principles of morality, excluding religious observance, which are laid down in the Ten Commandments. Every stable society punishes murder, theft, and bearing false witness; teaches children to honor their parents; and condemns envy of one’s neighbor’s possessions, at least when such envy leads one to treat one’s neighbors badly. 1 People figured out these rules long before they were exposed to any of the major monotheistic religions. This fact suggests that moral knowledge springs not from revelation but from people’s experiences in living together, in which they have learned that they must adjust their own conduct in light of others’ claims. Perhaps, then, the idea that religion is necessary for morality means that people wouldn’t care about the difference between right and wrong if God did not promise salvation for good behavior and threaten damnation for bad behavior. On this view, people must be goaded into behaving morally through divine sanction. But this can’t be right, either. People have many motives, such as love, a sense of honor, and respect for others, that motivate moral behavior. Pagan societies have not been noticeably more immoral than theistic ones. In any event, most theistic doctrines repudiate the divine sanction theory of the motive to be moral. Judaism places little emphasis on hell. Christianity today is dominated by two rival doctrines of sal- vation. One says that the belief that Jesus is one’s savior is the one thing necessary for salvation. The other says that salvation is a free gift from God that cannot be earned by anything a person may do or believe. Both doctrines are inconsistent with the use of heaven and hell as incentives to morality. A better interpretation of the claim that religion is necessary for morality is that there wouldn’t be a difference between right and wrong if God did not make it so. Nothing would really be morally required or prohibited, so everything would be permitted. William Lane Craig, one of the leading popular defenders of Christianity, advances this view. 2 Think of it in terms of the authority of moral rules. Suppose a person or group proposes a moral rule—say, against murder. What would give this rule authority over those who disagree with it? Craig argues that, in the absence of God, nothing would. Without God, moral disputes reduce to mere disputes over subjective preferences. There would be no right or wrong answer. Since no individual has any inherent authority over another, each would be free to act on his or her own taste. To get authoritative moral rules, we need an authoritative commander. Only God fills that role. So, the moral rules get their authority, their capacity to obligate us, from the fact that God commands them. 216 reflections Antony, L. M. (Ed.). (2007). Philosophers without gods : Meditations on atheism and the secular life. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. Created from stir on 2023-07-14 10:06:06. Copyright © 2007. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

sends two bears out of the woods to tear forty-two children to pieces, because they called the prophet Elisha a bald head ( 2 Kings 2 : 23 – 24 ). He condemns the Sa- marians, telling them that their children will be ‘‘dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open’’ (Hosea 13 : 16 ). 5 This is but a sample of the evils celebrated in the Bible. Can all this cruelty and injustice be excused on the ground that God may do what humans may not? Look, then, at what God commands humans to do. He commands us to put to death adulterers (Lev. 20 : 10 ), homosexuals (Lev. 20 : 13 ), and people who work on the Sabbath (Ex. 35 : 2 ). He commands us to cast into exile people who eat blood (Lev. 7 : 27 ), who have skin diseases (Lev. 13 : 46 ), and who have sex with their wives while they are menstruating (Lev. 20 : 18 ). Blas- phemers must be stoned (Lev. 24 : 16 ), and prostitutes whose fathers are priests must be burned to death (Lev. 21 : 9 ). That’s just the tip of the iceberg. God repeatedly directs the Israelites to commit ethnic cleansing (Ex. 34 : 11 – 14 , Lev. 26 : 7 - 9 ) and genocide against numerous cities and tribes: the city of Hormah (Num. 21 : 2 – 3 ), the land of Bashan (Num. 21 : 33 – 35 ), the land of Heshbon (Deut. 2 : 26 – 35 ), the Canaanites, Hittites, Hivites, Perizzites, Girgashites, Am- orites, and Jebusites ( Josh. 1 – 12 ). He commands them to show their victims ‘‘no mercy’’ (Deut. 7 : 2 ), to ‘‘not leave alive anything that breathes’’ (Deut. 20 : 16 ). In order to ensure their complete extermination, he thwarts the free will of the victims by hardening their hearts (Deut. 2 : 30 , Josh. 11 : 20 ) so that they do not sue for peace. These genocides are, of course, instrumental to the wholesale theft of their land ( Josh. 1 : 1 – 6 ) and the rest of their property (Deut. 20 : 14 , Josh. 11 : 14 ). He tells eleven tribes of Israel to nearly exterminate the twelfth tribe, the Ben- jamites, because a few of them raped and killed a Levite’s concubine. The re- sulting bloodbath takes the lives of 40 , 000 Israelites and 25 , 100 Benjamites ( Judg. 20 : 21 , 25 , 35 ). He helps Abijiah kill half a million Israelites ( 2 Chron. 13 : 15 – 20 ) and helps Asa kill a million Cushites, so his men can plunder all their property ( 2 Chron. 14 : 8 – 13 ). Consider also what the Bible permits. Slavery is allowed (Lev. 25 : 44 – 46 , Eph. 6 : 5 , Col. 3 : 22 ). Fathers may sell their daughters into slavery (Ex. 21 : 7 ). Slaves may be beaten, as long as they survive for two days after (Ex. 21 : 20 – 21 , Luke 12 : 45 – 48 ). Female captives from a foreign war may be raped or seized as wives (Deut. 21 : 10 – 14 ). Disobedient children should be beaten with rods (Prov. 13 : 24 , 23 : 13 ). In the Old Testament, men may take as many wives and concubines as they like because adultery for men consists only in having sex with a woman who is married (Lev. 18 : 20 ) or engaged to someone else (Deut. 22 : 23 ). Prisoners of war may be tossed off a cliff ( 2 Chron. 24 : 12 ). Children may be sacrificed to God in return for His aid in battle ( 2 Kings 3 : 26 – 27 , Judg. 11 ), or to persuade Him to end a famine ( 2 Sam. 21 ). Christian apologists would observe that most of these transgressions occur in the Old Testament. Isn’t the Old Testament God a stern and angry God, while Jesus of the New Testament is all-loving? We should examine, then, the quality if god is dead, is everything permitted? 219 Antony, L. M. (Ed.). (2007). Philosophers without gods : Meditations on atheism and the secular life. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. Created from stir on 2023-07-14 10:06:06. Copyright © 2007. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

One option is to bite the bullet. This is the only option open to hard-core fundamentalists, who accept the inerrancy of the Bible. In this view, the fact that God performed, commanded, or permitted these actions demonstrates that they are morally right. This view concedes my objection to theism, that it promotes terrible acts of genocide, slavery, and so forth. But it denies the moral force of this objection. We know where this option has led: to holy war, the systematic ex- tirpation of heretics, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Thirty Years War, the English Civil War, witch-hunts, the cultural genocide of Mayan civilization, the brutal conquest of the Aztecs and the Inca, religious support for ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, slavery of Africans in the Americas, colonialist tyranny across the globe, confinement of the Jews to ghettos, and periodic pogroms against them, ultimately preparing the way for the Holocaust. 6 In other words, it has led to centuries steeped in bloodshed, cruelty, and hatred without limit across continents. Since this is clearly reprehensible, one might try a stopgap measure. One could deny that the dangerous principles in the Bible have any application after biblical times. For example, one might hold that, while it is in principle perfectly all right to slaughter whoever God tells us to, in fact, God has stopped speaking to us. This argument runs into the difficulty that many people even today claim that God has spoken to them. It is hard to identify any reason to be compre- hensively skeptical about current claims to have heard divine revelation that does not apply equally to the past. But to apply such skepticism to the past is to toss out revelation and hence the core evidence for God. Another option is to try to soften the moral implications of embarrassing biblical episodes by filling in unmentioned details that make them seem less bad. There is a tradition of thinking about ‘‘hard sayings’’ that tries to do this. 7 It imagines some elaborate context in which, for instance, it would be all right for God to command Abraham to sacrifice his son, or for God to inflict un- speakable suffering on His blameless servant Job, and then insists that that was the context in which God actually acted. I have found such excuses for God’s depravity to be invariably lame. To take a typical example, it is said of David’s seemingly innocent census of his army that he sinned by counting what was not his, but God’s. Even if we were to grant this, it still does not excuse God for slaughtering seventy thousand of David’s men, rather than focusing His wrath on David alone. I also find such casuistic exercises to be morally dangerous. To devote one’s moral reflections to constructing elaborate rationales for past genocides, human sacrifices, and the like is to invite applications of similar reasoning to future actions. I conclude that there is no way to cabin off or soft-pedal the reprehensible moral implications of these biblical passages. They must be categorically rejected as false and depraved moral teachings. Morally decent theists have always done so in practice. Nevertheless, they insist that there is much worthy moral teaching that can be salvaged from the Bible. They would complain that the sample of biblical moral lessons I cited above is biased. I hasten to agree. There are many 222 reflections Antony, L. M. (Ed.). (2007). Philosophers without gods : Meditations on atheism and the secular life. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. Created from stir on 2023-07-14 10:06:06. Copyright © 2007. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

moral truths or some morally neutral proposition (for example, claims about historical events and prophecies of the future), as well as testimonies of miracles and experiences of divine presence, which should be accepted as having come from God and do provide evidence for the existence and nature of God. I think this fallback position should be rejected for two reasons. First, it does not explain why these extraordinary types of evidence should be thought to fall into two radically distinct groups. Why should they ever have generated grave moral errors? Second, it does not explain why all religions, whether monotheistic, polytheistic, or non-theistic, appear to have access to the same sources of evidence. Believers in any one religion can offer no independent criteria for accepting their own revelations, miracles, and religious experiences while rejecting the revelations, miracles, and religious experiences that appear to support contradictory religious claims. I believe that the best explanation for both of these phenomena–that the extraordinary sources of evidence generate grave moral error as well as moral truth and that they offer equal support for contradictory religious claims–undermines the credibility of these extraordinary sources of evidence altogether. So first, why were the ancient biblical peoples as ready to ascribe evil as good deeds to God? Why did they think God was so angry that He chronically unleashed tides of brutal destruction on humanity? The answer is that they took it for granted that all events bearing on human well-being are willed by some agent for the purpose of affecting humans for good or ill. If no human was observed to have caused the event, or if the event was of a kind (e.g., a plague, drought, or good weather) that no human would have the power to cause, then they assumed that some unseen, more-powerful agent had to have willed it, precisely for its good or bad effects on humans. So, if the event was good for people, they assumed that God willed it out of love for them; if it was bad, they assumed that God willed it out of anger at them. This mode of explanation is universally observed among people who lack scientific understanding of natural events. It appears to be a deeply rooted cognitive bias of humans to reject the thought of meaningless suffering. If we are suffering, someone must be responsible for it! Why did these representations of God as cruel and unjust not make God repugnant to the authors of Scripture and their followers? They were too busy trembling in their sandals to question what they took to be God’s will. The seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes observed that people honor raw power irrespective of its moral justification: Nor does it alter the case of honour, whether an action (so it be great and difficult, and consequently a sign of much power) be just or unjust: for honour consisteth only in the opinion of power. Therefore the ancient heathen did not think they dishonoured, but greatly honoured the Gods, when they introduced them in their poems, committing rapes, thefts, and other great, but unjust, or unclean acts: insomuch as nothing is so much celebrated in Jupiter, as his adulteries; nor in Mercury, as his frauds, and if god is dead, is everything permitted? 225 Antony, L. M. (Ed.). (2007). Philosophers without gods : Meditations on atheism and the secular life. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. Created from stir on 2023-07-14 10:06:06. Copyright © 2007. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

don’t believe that other religion’s testimonies of miracles or revelations, since they come from those who teach a false religion (Deut. 13 : 1 – 5 ). It is equally useless to appeal to the certainty in one’s heart of some experience of divine presence. For exactly the same certainty has been felt by those who think they’ve seen ghosts, been kidnapped by aliens, or been possessed by Dionysus or Apollo. Furthermore, where independent tests exist, they either disconfirm or fail to confirm the ex- traordinary evidence. There is no geological evidence of a worldwide flood, no archaeological evidence that Pharaoh’s army drowned in the Red Sea after Moses parted it to enable the Israelites to escape. Jesus’ central prophecy, that oppressive regimes would be destroyed in an apocalypse, and the Kingdom of God estab- lished on Earth, within the lifetime of those witnessing his preaching (Mark 8 : 38 – 9 : 1 , 13 : 24 – 27 , 30 ), did not come to pass. 11 If any instance of these extraordinary sources of evidence is what it purports to be, it is like the proverbial needle in the haystack—except that there is no way to tell the difference between it and the hay. I conclude that none of the evidence for theism–that is, for the God of Scripture—is credible. Since exactly the same types of evidence are the basis for belief in pagan Gods, I reject pagan religions too. It follows that we cannot appeal to God to underwrite the authority of morality. How, then, can I answer the moralistic challenge to atheism, that without God moral rules lack any authority? I say: the authority of moral rules lies not with God, but with each of us. We each have moral authority with respect to one another. This authority is, of course, not absolute. No one has the authority to order anyone else to blind obedience. Rather, each of us has the authority to make claims on others, to call upon people to heed our interests and concerns. 12 When- ever we lodge a complaint, or otherwise lay a claim on others’ attention and conduct, we presuppose our own authority to give others reasons for action that are not dependent on appealing to the desires and preferences they already have. But whatever grounds we have for assuming our own authority to make claims is equally well possessed by anyone who we expect to heed our own claims. For, in addressing others as people to whom our claims are justified, we acknowledge them as judges of claims, and hence as moral authorities. Moral rules spring from our practices of reciprocal claim making, in which we work out together the kinds of considerations that count as reasons that all of us must heed, and thereby devise rules for living together peacefully and cooperatively, on a basis of mutual accountability. What of someone who refuses to accept such accountability? Doesn’t this possibility vindicate Craig’s worry, that without some kind of higher authority external to humans, moral claims amount to nothing more than assertions of personal preference, backed up by power? No. We deal with people who refuse accountability by restraining and deterring their objectionable behavior. Such people have no proper complaint against this treatment. For, in the very act of lodging a complaint, they address others as judges of their claims, and thereby step into the very system of moral adjudication that demands their accountability. 228 reflections Antony, L. M. (Ed.). (2007). Philosophers without gods : Meditations on atheism and the secular life. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. Created from stir on 2023-07-14 10:06:06. Copyright © 2007. Oxford University Press, Incorporated. All rights reserved.