Morality from the Bottom Up
Adrienne J. Davis

It has become a shibboleth in Christian circles to state that atheists should have no morals and that atheists are inherently immoral. The logic, such as it is—and I propose to demonstrate that the logic is inherently sloppy—goes like the following. All morality comes from God, atheists believe that there is no god and therefore atheists believe that they are their own gods. Since only god can dictate morality, atheists have no other compass than their own to know what is right or wrong and therefore, atheists should happily indulge every base impulse. Now, anyone who actually knows non-theists (and in this group, I include Buddhists, like myself, who pray to no god, pagans who take the idea of the Goddess as a metaphor, agnostics and atheists) will, on a moment's reflection, admit that chances are their friends and family members who are non-theistic are probably no more or less moral than those who are loud and showy about proclaiming Christ the King. However, there are more serious weaknesses to the argument, which I will demonstrate below. The first is a logical failing and the second is a failure of imagination, emotion and intellect.

The logical failing is this. If God is the font of all morality and something is moral only because God has declared it so then anything he commands must be moral, right? Well, that brings up an interesting thought experiment. Now, before I give you the assignment you need to promise to yourself that you won't get cheeky and say “God would never command that” because, if one knows the Old Testament you know that god commands exactly what follows: “Kill all unbelievers”. Let us assume that this is unambiguously stated in the Bible and that the words came from Jesus (just to make it impossible to be clever and get out of it by claiming, in one breath that Christians are under the law of grace while in the next claiming that the whole Bible should be taken literally). What would be the moral thing to do? Would it be to kill every Hindu, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist and atheist you met? If one assumes that the only reason why murder is wrong is because God has said that it is then the answer must be yes, it is simply inescapable from the initial framing. If, on the other hand, one would say (as I would hope one would) that regardless of that command the moral thing to do would be to refrain from murder than one must admit that there is a transcendence to the morality of not killing that trumps even the idea of a celestial Lawgiver. But the moment you say that the whole edifice of the argument that atheists, not subscribing to belief in some god or another collapses under its own weight.

The second problem is quite a bit more complex and will take a bit of space to develop. The idea that there's no reason to be moral if there isn't a top-down morality is wrong because it ignores a number of things, some obvious and some arcane, that when one really sits down and thinks about the problem it becomes clear why one behaves morally. Let's take the stranded motorist as our parable. It's a cold night, it's raining and your car breaks down, your cell phone is out of juice so you can't call. Cars are wizzing by and you have your hazard lights on. What would you want as you stood there cold and wet? Would you want everyone to ignore you or would you want someone to pick you up? As you approach you think about how many people might have passed by and if you have an ounce of compassion in you, you'll pull over because it's what you would want for yourself. Now, how hard is that? Not very difficult,put like that is it?

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