Morality, Faith and Atheism
By: Francisco Mejia Uribe
Tags: Atheism, Religion, Morality, Metaphysics, Pragmatism

MANY people of faith believe that atheism is inconsistent with morality. As I will argue in what follows, this apprehension is justified — but only from within an impractical view of what morality is supposed to accomplish.

In very broad terms, most believers understand morality as a universally valid set of rules that govern our behavior. These rules, the faithful believe, were handed down by God and are either codified in the scriptures, or embedded in our nature, or imprinted in our reason. It is fairly obvious why such an understanding of morality is wary of atheism: from the faithful’s perspective no God means no rules, and more importantly perhaps, no God means no guaranteed punishment for deviating from the rules. In the faithful’s mind, God acts as a “lender of last resort” that prevents a run on the bank of morals, to use a financial metaphor. God is the backstop that lends credibility to the whole moral system. If to be good is to follow a set of universally valid rules endorsed by the Almighty, then atheism is indeed problematic. Without recourse to an ultimate authority that dictated and enforces the moral rules how can we distinguish between legitimate rules and counterfeits and how can we make sure it pays to follow them? Morality requires God; as such, believers’ mistrust of atheism seems warranted.

Atheists typically reject these accusations by arguing that the faithful have gotten morality completely wrong. Morality, atheists contend, is not a divine product but a human affair. There is indeed a long list of moral theories that aim at grounding morality in mortal soil. The problem with these alternatives is that no matter how you slice and dice the arguments, the wariness of the faithful remains intact — if morality is indeed all too human, how would we ever know for sure which are the rules we ought to follow and even if we knew them who would enforce them? Once morality is devoid of God, the attempts to save it from arbitrariness and impunity seem futile from the faithful’s perspective.

The deeper problem that surfaces here is that the dispute regarding who has gotten morality right (the faithful or the atheists) cannot be decisively settled; and it cannot be so because establishing “what morality really is” is a typical metaphysical problem. By “metaphysical problem” I simply mean a problem that cannot be settled by observable facts or whose premises cannot be falsified by experience. One can certainly study how an actual set of observable moral rules came to be, but that is not what believers and non-believers usually debate about. What is at stake from their perspective is how morality really is in normative terms, independent of how it manifests here and there in reality. In other words, they are arguing about how we ought to judge, not about how our judgement is in this or that society. Inquiring about how something ought to be (independent of any practical goals) is a typical metaphysical task.

Fortunately for us pragmatists, unresolvable metaphysical disputes are our bread and butter. Instead of trying to look for a normative definition of what morality ought to be — as metaphysicians do — we pragmatists survey the practical effects that each one of the contending theories would have in reality and side with the one that gets us closer to a specific and predefined goal. As I have stressed in previous posts, as pragmatists, what we should care about is which approach to morality allows us to better cope with our current environment, not which approach to morality is the true one, because such a thing cannot — by definition — be settled. Therefore, the question both atheists and believers alike should be asking is not “what morality really is?” but “What are the practical consequences of believing that our moral values were handed down by God and do these consequences fit our current goals?” This — I insist — is not a metaphysical question; this is a pragmatic inquiry: given the type of society we live in today, is it a good idea to go on believing that our morality is divine? As I will argue in the remaining paragraphs, putting the question this way highlights the perils of grounding our morals in religious beliefs and dissipates earlier fears about a Godless morality dissolving into arbitrariness and impunity.

Before we can begin to answer the pragmatic question I just proposed, we need to be explicit about what we hope to accomplish with morality, i.e., we need to specify its goal. We might not be able to truly grasp what morality ought to be, but we can certainly debate about which moral theory gets us closer to a predefined goal. As I have argued before, the goal of morality should be to regulate human interaction in a way that fosters a peaceful, plural and sustainable world that maximizes the well-being of its inhabitants. This is the goal we pragmatists use to evaluate which concept of morality is best suited for us. It does not have to be our goal, but living in an increasingly interwoven and plural world has made this a rational priority for a large portion of humanity. We live in an interconnected, plural and global society; as such, the project of making it work in the best possible way for the greatest number seems to be a reasonable practical choice for morality.

One should notice that, while we lived in relatively homogenous and closed societies, believing in a set of unique and objective rules handed down by God was probably the most effective way to sustain a cohesive and peaceful social organization. There is no denying that a ‘religiously grounded’ morality has had great pragmatic advantages in certain historical contexts. But, of course, the world has changed. The type of morality needed today is not one that breeds the God-fearing-rule-followers of the past. Moral obstinacy and a staunch belief that what is good is unique is at odds with the type of environment in which we live in today. In a remarkable turn of events, people who faithfully adhere to a God-given moral code and that not so long ago would have been regarded as examples of moral purity, are now subject to the very same suspicious looks they used to give to the atheists. Instead of being ranked amongst the good — as they used to — people of sturdy moral faith are now being ranked alongside the fundamentalists and the conservative bigots. How did this happen? Well, although the faithful might sincerely think they are being good because they are sticking to their clear and tightly enforced moral commandments, the reality is that this commandments might interfere with other people’s idea of the good, and this clash of principles is being pushed from the private to the public arena in this interconnected times. It is fascinating how dramatically the tables have turned; we are only beginning to grasp how the old triumphant idea of grounding morality in incontrovertible mandates (religious or else) is utterly inadequate for a world of interlinked plurality.

Instead, in the world that we live in today, the kind of morality that we urgently need is one that breeds individuals with an ever expanding sensitivity towards completely unfamiliar ways of life and structures of beliefs. The good individuals of the interlinked digital era are those with the capacity to put their own beliefs in parenthesis when it comes to sympathizing with increasingly diverse world-views. In this sense, the new exigencies of morality require us to be progressively flexible towards our own beliefs and cultural milieu and to be more and more open to converse with alien outlooks. To be good in a truly interlinked world is to be able to relate with an increasingly diverse environment and to include this diversity as a parameter when determining our conduct.

So returning to the initial question, is atheism inconsistent with morality? Of course it’s not; what is inconsistent is the view that morality needs indisputable credentials for it to work. From a pragmatic perspective, the best moral theory is the one that is most attuned with its own time — and by now it should be clear that an inflexible view of morality is an anachronistic and perilous candidate. As I have remarked elsewhere, the pendulum of goodness has swung in favor of a secular take on morality. The force pushing the pendulum in this new direction is the plural and interconnected world in which we now find ourselves, not any metaphysical breakthrough finally grasping how morality really is.

I will end by noting that the fact that pragmatism favors a secular morality does not imply that one needs to be an atheist to be good, nor that all atheists are good. Theism is not contradictory with a pragmatic take on morality yet the limits between faith and morality should be accepted by the faithful if they wish to remain valuable counterparts in the now ‘globally open’ conversation about how we should live.