Bang, Bang. You're Dead.

False Allegiances and Irrelevance

We have often observed that the materialistic atheists amongst us are often the most strident moralisers in the market place.  They are always telling us what they deem to be right and wrong, moral and immoral, evil and good.  Islam, insists Richard Dawkins, is a perverse, wicked thing.  Christianity is so morally bankrupt that any parent who attempts to teach its basic doctrines to her or her child, should suffer their children to be removed from their care.  Morally bankrupt?

Christopher Hitchens, whilst alive, thundered like a Titan against totalitarianism, communism, and any authoritarian standard within his line of sight. He thought abortion was OK, but grabbing someone off the street and torturing them was very bad form.  All of which was and is entertaining but hardly relevant to materialism or atheism, let alone their conjoint.

There is an instructive video entitled Collision in which Christopher Hitchens debates Douglas Wilson.
 Hitchens in normal mode gravely tells us of all the evils religion has perpetrated in the history of mankind. Wilson responds by quoting John Lennon's classic Imagine as an apt presentation of Hitchen's atheism.  To speak of good and evil in the imaginary world to which Lennon, Hitchens and his co-labourers cling is nonsensical.  It has no meaning.  To thunder about the evils of religion is to bloviate about nonsense, as every atheist knows--to be full of sound and fury, yet signify nothing.  Evil is a meaningless concept to the atheist, or ought to be, if reason and logic have any sway.

Few actually challenge the secular atheists about their moralising.  The explanation for this generous free pass is the universal moral sense inscribed into human beings.  All men instinctively think in categories of right and wrong, evil and good, so when Dawkins speaks about evil, the existence of evil is self-evident.  It needs no justification, no proof.  Or so it seems, unless you are an atheist.

Dawkins and other atheists are freeloaders.  They assume illogically and illegitimately that the categories of good and evil not only have meaning in their religious world-view, but that good and evil exist, and that there is a standard somewhere by which right and wrong are definitively laid down.  But such assumptions, although having the appearance of truth because human beings think instinctively in ethical categories, are illegitimate in a materialist and atheist world.

In yet another famous exchange, Dr Greg Bahnsen was debating an evolutionist and atheist.  His opponent was true to form--railing against all kinds of evils both genuine and imagined--and Bahnsen won the debate by cutting to the chase.  "Imagine", he said, channelling John Lennon, "I have a gun in my pocket.  Imagine I take it out and lift it to your head and squeeze the trigger.  Bang, bang.  You are dead.  I have won this debate."  He won the debate because his evolutionist opponent had no ground upon which to argue against the actions of his opponent.  The atheistic materialist has no ground for objection, and not just because he would be dead.  Philosophically and ethically he has no principled basis for objection.

As the sceptic, David Hume so eloquently put it, there is no logical warrant to move from what is to what ought to be.  As David Berlinski has put it:

These are familiar questions in philosophy, and if they have long been asked, they have long remained unanswered.  David Hume asked in the eighteenth century whether ought could be derived from is, and concluded it could not: There is a gap between what is and what ought to be.  The world of fact and the world of value are disjoint. They have nothing to say to one another.  The ensuing chilliness between what is and what ought to be has in the twentieth century grown glacial.  The more science reveals what is, the less it reveals what ought to be.  The traditional biblical view--that what ought to be is a matter chiefly of what God demands--thus stands on his existence, the very point challenged by scientific atheism.  [David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009) p. 35f.]

So, before the materialistic, atheistic world can enter the lists to argue for what it believes ought to be--in any aspect or sphere of human or demonic, or angelic, or Divine activity--they first must overcome the irrationality of such a move, given their cosmology.  They have to explain why they have an entrance-pass to witness the debate, let alone participate in it.

Hume's argument was so compelling and so devastating to Unbelief that it provoked Immanuel Kant to cast about for a solution.  His solution was no solution, but a reiteration of trying to hold a contradictory position.  “I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith,” he wrote.  That compulsion to "deny knowledge" in order to have ground for ethics and morality acknowledged Unbelief's conundrum.  But it did not solve the unsolvable.  It merely served to make the world of materialism and atheism and Western Unbelief feel more comfortable in its own skin.  It was a "just so" story the increasingly secular West could tell itself.

Then, every so often, an enfant terrible like Friedrich Nietzsche would emerge with a scathing denunciation of the West for its cowardice.  The West claimed God was dead, but clung to the accoutrements of a Deity. Or a tyrant emerges to kill and torture millions and the watching room grows eerily silent, knowing it is all wrong, but with no principled ground upon which to stand to mount a battle.

Berlinski summarises the ethical and epistemological quandaries of modern Unbelief:

If moral statements are about something, then the universe is not quite as as science suggests it is, since physical theories, having said nothing about God, say nothing about right and wrong, good or bad.  To admit this would force philosophers  to confront the possibility that the physical sciences offer a grossly inadequate view of reality  And since philosophers very much wish to think of themselves as scientists, this would offer them an unattractive choice between changing their allegiances or accepting their irrelevance.  [Ibid.]

Indeed.