The Antichristian Phenomenon

The most important reason for my atheism is the absence of both evidence and arguments (both sound and valid) for the existence of God. This can be extended for for my rejection of essential passages in the Bible which endeavour to establish the incidence of certain events in world history. These span the creation myth from the book of Genesis to Jesus’ miracles in the Gospel books. But parallel to the empirical criticism of such truth claims, there are also reasons why I reject Christianity as a collection of philosophical doctrines. Never minding whether the truth claims in the Bible actually stack up, I want to criticize some of the more abstract ideas tied into this religion. In this short essay, I want to criticise Christian ethics – or rather lack thereof, which I will explain in full.

It is a common argument by theists that without a god, there are no morals and everything is permitted. In the absence of a god who sets a standard of wrong and right, man is argued to be clueless as to whether, for example, murder is a good thing or not. I will not go very deep into alternative approaches of morality, but simply analyse the abovementioned position and draw conclusions from it. But first I should establish the specific ethical theory that is immanent in Christianity (but which is also true for Islam and Judaism). In these montheistic religions, the god is the giver of the moral law. Because God is said to be benevolent, all-knowing and all-wise, he is the giver of moral laws which are absolute and eternal. This idea of ethics is commonly referred to as Divine Command Theory (DCT). I will focus on two main problems with DCT.

The first one is in the form of a dilemma, originally found in Plato’s dialogues, posed by a philosopher called Euthyphro. It can be adapted to fit a core problem of DCT as found in philosophical theism in the following way:

“Is what is moral commanded by God because it is moral, or is it moral because it is commanded by God?”

This is Euthypro’s Dilemma^[I] . The question is fundamental and must be answered, but both answers pose serious problems for DCT. I will first discuss the second part of the dilemma.

If what is moral is so because it is commanded by God, then that means that anything that God commands is moral by definition. Whatever God commands to be moral is arbitrary, thereby reducing God’s benevolence to meaning absolutely nothing. Gottfried Leibniz wrote^[II] “So in saying that things are not good by any rule of goodness, but sheerly by the will of God, it seems to me that one destroys, without realizing it, all the love of God and all his glory. For why praise him for what he has done if he would be equally praiseworthy in doing exactly the contrary?” And that sums the problem up quite nicely – if we choose to answer the problem by saying whatever God commands is moral, we forfeit any rational consideration of morals and allow ourselves to be subjected to the whim of God. If God were to command that the rape of altar boys is an moral imperative, those who accept DCT would have to accept that in that scenario that action is indeed moral, and have to try their very best to make sure as many altar boys are raped as possible. The consequences of accepting DCT are clear: it replaces any moral predispositions one has by the perceived commands of God, without allowing the intellect to evaluate them. I reject this as I perceive it as nothing less than moral self-enslavement.

So what if we were to accept that what is good is commanded by God because it is good? Then we are left with the question: well what is God good for? In this possible response to the dilemma God is the messenger who tells us what is good in itself. However: morality itself is independent of God, as without God the moral laws that God otherwise would communicate to us in his commands would still exist and be in effect. However, there is still a problem with this approach, and the problem is epistemic in nature. The same problem arises for the other approach, but it is of less importance there because of other objections. Here, however, we must deal with how we can know what God commands. A theist might point to scriptures and claim we can find what God commands in there, but in practice this is a futile attempt. Thousands of years of interpreting scriptures has lead to various religious denominations that have decided upon mutually exclusive moral laws based on what is according to them the correct canonical collection.  Furthermore, there are moral problems in the modern world for which no guidance can be found in these scriptures, revealing a moral vacuity.

What is interesting about Christianity is that ethics based on DCT is mostly prevalent in the Old Testament. The New Testament, however, seems to also place importance on a different meta-ethical system which focuses on having certain virtues rather than following certain rules – virtue ethics. This is explicitly expressed in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount^[III]. Some virtues that are blessed by Jesus are “poorness in spirit” (“humility”), “meekness”, “righteousness”, “mercy” and  “purity of heart”. Jesus also blesses those who are persecuted, those who are peacemakers and those who mourn. In other passages, Jesus emphasizes on virtues like “love” and “service”. In virtue ethics the emphasis is on the person, who is good if he/she embodies these virtues, rather than the actions of the person. This could partly explain the reluctance of Christian denominations to require abiding the full Mosaic Law, and why these denominations place emphasis on “The Ten Commandments”, rather than all 613 of them^[IV]. Virtue ethics has its own problems, like internal consistency (should one embody benevolence and tell a white lie, or embody truthfulness and tell a hurtful truth?)  and a lack of basis and therefore external inconsistency, a foremost example of which is voiced by Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche rejected various Christian values (virtues can be understood as are moral values) such as pity and faith, calling these decadent values as they are antagonistic to Nietzsche’s Will to Power and the higher sort of man^[V]. There is no basis for deciding which set of values/virtues are better than another.

Any system of ethics which does not rely on rational analysis of its precepts, but rather on obedience and authority, is inherently prone to abuse, and should therefore be rejected. We are all moral people, and I am saddened when I see people defend the tyrannical actions of the Old Testament god. I not only believe that I am more moral than that god, I also believe that people who are defending this god are more moral than it. It is exactly as Steven Weinberg said^[VI]:

“With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion. “

Footnotes

1. Sometimes also called Euthypro’s Problem [↩]
2. Discourse on Metaphysics (1686) [↩]
3. Matthew 5:3-12 [↩]
4. The 613 Mitzvot [↩]
5. The Antichrist (1888) [↩]
6. Conference on Cosmic Design, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, D.C. in April 1999 [↩]