Climate, technology and chaos Blog

Right wing intellectual, Ben Shapiro, appears to try and avoid the challenges of social chaos and complexity by implicitly arguing that morals require the uniformity and imposition brought by religion.

[This style of text is Shapiro, as I understand him]

• [This style of text is a comment]

Shapiro’s argument seems to go:

Atheists accuse religious people of being immoral and argue that if religion inculcated goodness then religious people would be good. They argue “if religion is good, why are religious believers often so bad?”

• That is a common argument made by atheists. They say that religious belief does not guarantee morality in believers. Therefore there is nothing particularly wonderful about religious morals, or religion in inculcating morals. If we are discussing morals, this is a point to be considered.

However, Shapiro responds to this point by writing, “Of course, one could ask this about any philosophy – most people are in fact sinful and wicked, and have the capacity for good.” 

• So he appears to dismiss the question of whether religion is a good source of morals, by saying nothing is. He will forget this as he goes on, but let’s agree and make the proposition: ‘There may be no philosophy, the holding of which will guarantee that the holders will be good.’ If this is true then it applies to religion (as Shapiro is doing here) as well as to non-religion. It does not justify religion as a sources of morals, it excuses it.

He continues by arguing that atheism cannot establish a moral framework, and hence that atheism cannot guarantee people will be good.

• We have already agreed with him that no philosophy will guarantee those who hold it will be good. It is as true of atheists as of religious people.

• However, I have never heard an atheist claim, in the way that religious people can make claims, that only atheists can be good or that religious people are all morally dead, or that all religious people should be killed. It is not a general part of atheist philosophy. So his argument is completely irrelevant to the initial point that religion does not guarantee morality, and does not display any indications that there is anything supernaturally beneficial about religious morals.

• His argument does not claim that religious people are generally more moral than atheists, or that religions give an infallible basis for morals, or even that religions provide a moral moral framework which is good, and which works. He does not try to. Indeed he asks:

“how we are supposed to judge whether the religion is promoting something morally good or bad without another frame of moral reference.”

• This is another extremely important question, which he ignores, and he asserts:

“atheism itself can make no self-sustaining moral claims on human beings.“ 

• I agree again to an extent. But that is not the point of atheism. Atheism is not about establishing moral claims. His argument also ignores atheist philosophers who have made coherent moral systems with claims on people. David Hume for example.

• Even if it is correct that atheism makes no self-sustaining moral claims on human beings, that does not mean that all, or even any, religion is promoting something necessarily good. That some set of ideas cannot do something well, does not mean that another set of ideas it attacks, will necessarily do that something well. We can return to the principle that ‘There may be no philosophy, the holding of which will guarantee that the holders will be good.’

• However, atheists do make an implicit argument that ‘if you do not embrace truth and reality, you cannot be moral’. I think this is a valid argument about morals, and not to be ignored as Shapiro does.

• The atheist position implies that if you accept the absolute morality of beings who torture people forever, commit genocide, or demand people’s deaths for eating shellfish or being gay, or whatever, then you will have a dangerously warped moral sense. And indeed we can see this throughout history. People driven by their religious beliefs can do things, which I, and often other religious people, judge to be immoral and not to be praised, but which are covered up or celebrated by the religion. Rape of children by godly men, is the obvious example, and appears to occur in most organised large scale religions.

• Atheists may also argue that different religious systems have different moral systems and promote different laws. Hence there is nothing obvious about religious morals, other than the authority being claimed for them and the punishments threatened for disobeying them. How do we know those particular morals are moral? This is another important question when we consider the morals of religion. To requote Shapiro: “”how we are supposed to judge whether the religion is promoting something morally good or bad without another frame of moral reference?”

He then appears to avoid these issues about morality, by claiming that atheism is bad because atheist governments have been murderous: they “have been far more murderous and tyrannical than any religious theocracy in history.”

• I’m not sure Nazism was atheist. Hitler definitely talks about his guidance by metaphysical concepts. Jewish people had been condemned and murdered by Christians for a long time so the Holocaust may exist because of religion, and the Nazis approved ‘Aryan Christianity’. Mussolini generally had a good relationship with the Catholic Church. However, religious governments are also murderous: inquisitions, pogroms, brutal punishments for sinners, and religious wars do happen. All European wars and conquests have been backed and justified by churches. So far the religious haven’t had the technology of mass murder down to the art it reached in the 20th Century under Nazism, but if they ever get into total power again, it is not unreasonable to expect that the full technology of death and suffering will be used to purge the world of sin and disagreement.

He asserts: “Atheism promotes a vision of mankind entirely at odds with the building of a productive society: it suggests materialism, which means lack of free will; it undermines the unique value of human beings, which undermines liberty and rights; it dismisses the value of tradition in favor of a reason it cannot defend on its own terms.” In another place he argues:

“a Godless world is a soulless world…. Transcending biology and our environment requires a higher power — a spark of the supernatural” (2). 

• It is amazing that he is apparently unaware of the idea that God being all-powerful and all-knowing has determined or determines everything that happens or will happen. This also gives a lack of effective freewill.

• Materialism does not have to back determinism, any more than religion does. Materialism nowadays should embody complexity, and challenge the fuzzy boundaries between mind and matter. Materialism is not necessarily in opposition to consciousness. While materialism may undermine traditions based on religion, so does capitalism, and he is not attacking that for some reason.

• He presents no evidence for the idea that we can only make moral choices because of ideas like soul, or that morality involves transcending biology – perhaps the ability to learn a morality is part of out biology, like the ability to learn language, or the need to socialise and form social groups.

• This is an undemonstrable assertion not an absolute truth, and quite possibly asserts that non monotheisms, and that religions which don’t promise an afterlife are immoral as well.

His major implied point here seems to be that many major religions demand behaviour they call ‘morals’. They tell us what to do, and threaten punishments for those who don’t do it, and therefore form a good basis for the State (or at least an authoritarian state).

• It seems to me (but I won’t insist on it) that Shapiro is implying that if the population is ‘brainwashed’ by a religion, then they will all have the same morals and think the same way, and this will bring about social harmony and agreement. In this way religion builds order out of chaos and protects against chaos. This may be correct (although I suspect it leads to a lot of murder of deviant thinkers and a lot of blowback), but if so, it might seem he is in favor of authoritarianism, and of people who are violent arbiters of morals. This may not require religion, as he has argued above with respect to atheist governments, it just requires a passionate and thorough intolerance of dissent or questioning – which may equally lead to social breakdown, social distrust and fracture as people struggle to assert their innocence, and show how good they are by accusing others.

He also implies that as atheism does not tell us what to do, (apart from asking us not to believe in falsity, undemonstrable propositions, or in incoherent gods, theologies and religious morals) it, perhaps, asks us to think and question, and is BAD. “As a system of thought, atheism cannot be the basis for any functional state” (2).

• Even if atheism could never be a basis for a functional state, that does not prove that religious morals can deal with the complexity of modern life, do not have unintended consequences, are a real basis for a functional state, or are moral.

• It apparently does not matter if the morals taught by a religion are ethical, coherent, beneficial, cruel or even if they do always provide the basis for a ‘productive society’, as long as we are all told what to do, and can stop thinking or questioning those morals, and we agree on what is moral on fear of death or God’s displeasure. That is all.

• Religion just functions to declare morals and produce order by enforcing those morals. It makes things simple and generally agreed. This makes it good. Whether this order and uniformity allows us to deal with complexity, or not make mistakes, or be moral is irrelevant.

• To make this argument, he needs to ignore the questions of ‘what is morality,’ ‘do religions all have good morals’ ‘how do we decide whether a system of morals is good’. He raises these issues to ignore them immediately. He implies that it is enforced order which is good and justifies morals being enforced.

• This implicit praise of any order as long as it can be called ‘religious,’ seems, to me, to be an immoral basis for morals.

• It could be suggested that he is not really a friend to religion and that his position is morally bankrupt.

References:

Unless specified the arguments come from

https://www.facebook.com/officialbenshapiro/posts/776862607128379/

(2) indicates they come from:

https://townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/2008/12/18/why-atheism-is-morally-bankrupt-n734917

https://www.dailywire.com/news/shapiro-debunking-atheism