Borrowed Morality

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Welcome, atheist readers!

Wow.

You know, most of the time, my little blog averages about sixteen hits a day. Recently, it spiked to about thirty-five readers a day for a few days, principally as a result of a couple of links from a blogospheric friend of mine.

But you people--you people take the cake, I must admit. At time of writing, I was up to 49 hits today, far and away the most this blog has ever had. And I have you to thank for it.

Well, like I say, welcome. Even to the people that think I'm a "loathsome person." I don't take offense.

'Cause, as I've noted elsewhere already today, who cares what an accidentally-animated bag of protoplasm thinks?

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I was googling on a tangentially-related subject, and almost accidentally came up with the post from which this material comes. Emphasis is mine:

When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands. Christianity presupposes that man does not know, cannot know, what is good for him, what evil: he believes in God, who alone knows it. Christian morality is a command; its origin is transcendent; it is beyond all criticism, all right to criticism; it has truth only if God has truth—it stands or falls with faith in God.

In this quotation, many of my readers will immediately detect the echo of Van Til, or Bahnsen, or some other related apologist infused with “worldview,” or presuppositional thinking. Such a guess comes close in content, but misses widely. The surprise: this quotation flows candidly—and insightfully!—from arch-atheist Friedrich Nietzsche. This is not, of course, to say that Van Til derived his ideas from reading Nietzsche—highly unlikely. The point—completely lost on modern atheists—is that when you strike down Christianity, Christian morality necessarily goes with it. Nietzsche candidly professed this, as did his earlier French counterpart Marquis de Sade: no God, no moral imperatives; no “thou shalt,” and no “thou shalt not.” Only, “I will.”

But modern atheists have not only ignored this logical conclusion, they have actually attempted to attack Christianity in the name of Christian morality, calling the Christian God cruel, bloodthirsty, racist, sadomasochistic, etc. Richard Dawkins’ now famous book begins an early chapter with such accusations and much more. Whence the moral outrage?

Time and again, I have pointed out that atheism has no morality, not unless you want to call the law of the jungle "morality," only to have people say that they know atheists who are very moral people.

They miss the point. It is not that atheists necessarily act immorally. Many don't. The point is that an atheistic worldview simply cannot intellectually justify any sort of morality. In an atheistic universe, you arrived here completely by accident, via an unthinking, uncaring process that results in a progressively more complex arrangement of biological matter (said process utterly violating the second law of thermodynamics in the process, by the way, but that is a mere side-issue as far as this post is concerned) that has no purpose whatsoever. You do not matter to the cold, uncaring universe that accidentally produced you. You winked into existence and in less than a hundred years, you will wink out of existence. What happens to your progeny will be of no concern to you, for you will not exist to care about them. What you do to yourself and to others matters to no one that has ever existed and will not matter to you after you have vanished from this earth. The only thing with which you can possibly have any concern is your own life, and, there being utterly no eternal purpose for your life, your concern has to be limited, in the rawest terms, to what you can get out of this life.

In short: a logical application of "atheist morality" dictates that you do whatever you can to make your own life more enjoyable to you, provided only that you can get away with it. All pretensions to the contrary are logical nonsense, as Nietzsche pointed out. Atheists with "morals" have borrowed them from a theistic worldview, and they either lack the integrity to admit it, or they don't have the intellectual candlepower to understand it, or they have simply not cared to consider the logical implications of their worldview.