"I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity." - Tom Stoppard

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Do Atheists Pose a Threat to Morality?

"Without God, morality loses its foundation.

Is this concern really justified? Many philosophers will say it is not. It has been a common philosophical refrain since Plato wrote his dialogue the Euthyphro... Belief in a benevolent God is substantive only if one believes that God acts in accordance with some independent moral standard. On this view, even theists should accept that morality is independent of religion. But what standard could do the trick? There have been two thousand years of work by philosophers (mostly theists) trying to answer this question. The two most famous answers owe to John Stuart Mill and Immanual Kant. Very roughly, Mill says that happiness is intrinsically good, so we should try to maximize happiness, and Kant says that it is rational to recognize the common dignity of all people, and irrational to pursue actions that would undermine our own interests if others were to act similarly.

Research suggests that the independence of morality and religion is actually widely recognized outside of academic philosophy, even among staunch theists. For example, developmental psychologist Larry Nucci interviewed highly religious children from a wide range of backgrounds (including Catholics, Mennonites, and Orthodox Jews), and he found that they were overwhelmingly likely to judge that stealing would be wrong even if God were to say that stealing is permissible (see his Education in the Moral Domain). The aforementioned Pew study also reveals that fewer than a third of Americans cite religion as the major source of their moral values, and more than half claim that practical experience and common sense are the major source...

Let’s begin with relativism. The Pew study found atheists are much less likely than theists to believe that there are “absolute standards of right and wrong.”... It must be noted that the majority of atheists are not relativists, but these studies do suggest that atheists are more prone to relativism than those who attribute morality to God...

Atheists are much more likely to support government programs that give to the needy, and they are more likely to favor tax increases to pay for such programs, so the differences in charity may reflect a preference for centralized strategies rather than relying on what George Herbert Walker Bush called “a thousand points of light.”... A study by Gregory S. Paul, which documents an inverse correlation between religiosity and social health. For example, religious communities have higher homicide rates. Thus, it may not turn out to be the case that religious people are more moral across the board...

With respect to relativism, the atheist might say that false beliefs in moral absolutes are a recipe for trouble. Perhaps relativism could increase tolerance and international understanding. The challenge for the relativist is to identify constraints on tolerance. This is a place where some philosophy might come in handy, since philosophers have spent many centuries trying to identify secular foundations for morality."


Unfortunately, they didn't go into detail about the grounds for atheistic moral universalism, so there will still be the tired (and pointless) objection that without proper grounding, morality is useless (compare this to a claim that just because we do not have absolute certainty that we are not brains in vats, everything we do is pointless and useless).