The Writer and the Christian

A good friend of mine who happens to be an atheist has started a series of notes on Facebook entitled “My Atheism”. He just posted this picture with one of his notes, and I thought it deserved a counterpart.

So I made one myself in response (it’s pretty gruesome, but that’s the point):

This, of course, is the main thrust here. I am not accusing my friend of being a holocaust supporter. That would be silly. He does much good, but the classic problem with atheism still stands. It is not a question of whether atheists do good, but how they cannot account for it in the first place. Words like ought, should, need indicate there is some kind of morality being appealed to here that we need to live up to.

If there were a second grader school bus accident, many atheists would be horrified and saddened at the deaths, but - and here’s the kicker - they cannot explain in principle why it is any worse for the electrical synapses in the heads of these kids to stop than for the wiring of the bus engine to stop. Using only material forces (taste, touch, smell, sight) and Darwinian evolution, explain why the one is bad and the other is okay. Moreover, using only material forces and Darwinian evolution, explain bad and good. Is there an overarching, objective standard or isnt there? Physically, bus engines are electricity running through metalic and rubber wiring, and brains are run by electricity running through organic wiring. One is squishy and one is not - beyond this what is the difference?

So then, an atheist can be legitimately horrified at the holocaust, but what could he say to a Nazi soldier shoveling bodies into a mass grave to dissuade him? All atheists want people to stop doing undesirable things. They’re very good at getting that message across. If somebody stole their shirt, they’d believe that to be a bad action and call the cops. This nobody doubts. The real question comes in justifying their moral indignation to others. What, exactly, is the difference between desirable and undesirable? And, ultimately, how can that difference stand up against the concept that - if the Nazi gets away with it - there is no final judgment. Nobody gets to sit around for 30 minutes after they die to contemplate their wrongs. People who are deeply wrong - child molesters, Nazis, Hilary Clinton (for example) - will go to the grave and that will be that. They will never know they were wrong (or, really, what wrong is). If they evade punishment in this life, they will have cheated justice.

In the atheist worldview, Ronald Regan, Ronald McDonald, three year olds, Mother Teresa, Pol Pot, puppies, and Jeffrey Dahlmer are no different. They are organic machines synapsing their way through a meaningless cosmic accident and acting in different ways - and then they return to dust, and this cycle will continue until the sun goes out and this small hunk of rock freezes over and spins silently through space for eternity - nothing matters and nobody cares what they did for their blink under the sun.