New Atheism: A Bridge to Nowhere

David Hume: The Dragon that Atheists Cannot Slay

By Douglas Wilson
Minister, Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho
First published in the Washington Post.

A billboard in my small town has informed us that it is possible to be good without God. And I recently had a radio discussion with Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard, on the very same question. And this problem is also posed at the climax of the film Collision, in which Christopher Hitchens and I are . . . um . . . colliding.

When I was a boy, we used to get corrected on a point of grammar that may have been abandoned these days. I don't know, for these are dissolute times. But it used to be that if we asked something like, "Can I go play ball with the guys?" the maternal eyebrows would go up, and we so corrected it to, "May I go play ball with the guys?"

Can I be good without God? Sure. Knock yourself out. May I be good without God? Again, sure, but here is where the question starts to cut both ways. The question is double-bladed because it is here that we realize that we are alone by ourselves, and we are not really asking anybody for anything. I may be good without God for the same reason that I may be evil without Him or, as it suits me, indifferent without Him. There is no one here to get permission from. For anything. Mom doesn't care if I go play ball, and she doesn't care if I shoot my sister. She doesn't care because she doesn't exist. Turns out I have been asking questions of a deaf and indifferent universe.

Near the end of our film, Christopher admirably acknowledges that you can be a fascist and an atheist, a communist and an atheist, a sado-masochist and an atheist, and so on, and you can do it all without contradicting anything within the tenets of atheism. Christopher does not think of this as a concession to my central point, but I do want to press it. He wants to go on to insist that atheism does not commit you to the "absurd belief" that if you are an atheist then you "have no morality."

If we piece all this together, the only thing he can possibly mean is that every atheist has the authority to generate his own code of morals, and that these morals do not need to conform to the tenets promulgated by the International Society of Nice Atheists, and that they further do not need to conform to the code of morals being generated in the fevered brain of the fellow next to me. But notice what this does. It makes all morality a matter of radical personal choice.

But once we do this, how can we come back in later to restrict or limit the choices? Once the individual generates his code, he certainly may seek out other like-minded people in order to form what sociologists call a plausibility structure. But there is no such thing as an overarching moral code, independent of the individual, one that is authoritative over him. There is no ultimate reason why he cannot decide to defy his societal norms (his plausibility structure), or move to northwest Pakistan to join up with another plausibility structure--one with more excitement and explosions.

Once we have gotten to this point, we may certainly fight with those who have made different choices. But we may not appeal to a standard that overarches both of us, which they are disobeying and which we are not. They have as much right to generate their code as we do ours. We may fight with them, but we have lost the ability to reason with them.

Centuries ago, David Hume pointed out how deep and broad the chasm was between is and ought. The new atheists, for all their vaunted skill in engineering, have not been able to build a bridge.

Douglas Wilson is the minister of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, and a senior fellow of theology at New St. Andrews College. He has written numerous books, including "Five Cities That Ruled the World, Heaven Misplaced, and Reforming Marriage."