The subtitle of Reasonable Atheism [*] is “a moral case for respectful disbelief.” There's a lot in there to unpack. We want to say something about the sense in which the book makes a moral case for atheism. Roughly, we hold that there’s something intrinsically morally wrong about holding religious beliefs. This perhaps is a startling claim. We elaborate at length in the book. Here, we will have to be brief.
Atheists frequently see their position as in some way required by morality. Even when atheists are singularly focused on demonstrating the falsity of religious claims, their arguments are often motivated by a background commitment to a certain ethics of belief. Usually the atheist’s ethics of belief is roughly the view articulated by W.K. Clifford in his famous essay “The Ethics of Belief”: “it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” Call Clifford’s view evidentialism. Importantly, most of the more sophisticated defenses of religious belief are driven by the attempt to undermine evidentialism. The immediate issue, then, is not whether religious beliefs are true or false, but rather whether religious belief is warranted (or justified). The evidentialist sees religious belief as wrong because the content of such beliefs is lacking in evidential support. The wrongfulness of religious belief, then, consists in an abdication of one’s epistemic duties. Religious belief is morally wrong, then, in that it involves the violation of an epistemic duty, and it's wrong to violate a duty, epistemic or otherwise. In this way, religious belief is morally wrong, but in a way that involves the mediation of a theory of epistemic responsibility.
Another moral dimension of atheism is focused on how religious belief is often found to be the motivating force behind exceedingly immoral action. The examples here are familiar and well documented; we need not rehearse them here. Steven Weinberg captured the general thrust of this line of critique: “With or without [religion] you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”
In Reasonable Atheism, we do not resist either of these moral objections to religious belief. In fact, we explicitly endorse the argument from evidentialism. But we add another kind of moral objection, one that fixes neither on the violation of epistemic duty nor the bad consequences for action that religious belief involves. As we said above, we think that there’s an intrinsic moral wrong in religious belief.
The thought is frequently associated with Bertrand Russell: The worship of anything is beneath the dignity of a rational creature. That is, we argue that worship is immoral. Consequently, for any type of religious belief, if it requires one to worship anything, then it is intrinsically immoral. The argument turns on the claim that any conception of worship that’s worth its salt will involve the voluntary and irrevocable submission of one’s rational faculties to those of another. Invoking a few low-grade and noncontroversial (even among anti-deontologists) insights associated with Kant, we argue that this kind of submission is intrinsically morally wrong.
The argument of course requires us to get clear on precisely what worship is. And, as it turns out, it has proven difficult to formulate a conception of worship that religious believers will endorse. The challenge we pose to religious believers is to formulate a conception of worship that at once makes worship distinguishable from lesser attitudes and actions (such as praising, thanking, appreciating, admiring) and yet non-submissive. We think that there is no such conception. That is, any conception of worship that does not involve morally objectionable submission will be indistinguishable from, say, thanking, praising, and admiring. But the religious believer holds not only that God is entitled to thanks, praise, and admiration; the religious believer holds that God (uniquely) is entitled to worship. Yet worship is morally wrong. Hence so is any mode of religious belief which requires it.
By means of a further argument which piggybacks on this one, we argue that the fact that it is morally wrong to worship entails that there is no God. But that further move deserves a post of its own.
By means of a further argument which piggybacks on this one, we argue that the fact that it is morally wrong to worship entails that there is no God. But that further move deserves a post of its own.
