Superstitious Selfishness

by Benny Mattis

Religious apologists often think themselves clever paraphrasing Dostoevsky:  "If God does not exist, then everything is permitted."  They claim that, without God, there must not be any ethical standards higher than one's own held preferences.  In this view, the only theories of morality available to the atheist can collectively be referred to here as "egoism," because in practice they all look the same:  "I do what I want, when I want to."  The altruistic New Atheists (Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Dennett, and friends) are often presented as philosophically naïve, because they never got the memo that "Altruistic morality depends on God's existence, gosh darn it!"  They are often contrasted to the "Real Atheist" (TM), who becomes their own god, unconstrained by petty morality.

The aforementioned religious apologists often subscribe to something called Divine Command Theory, which says that an action is moral just because it is commanded by God or immoral just because God forbids it.  This theory is self-defeating, as Russ Shafer-Landau explains in The Fundamentals of Ethics with the "Euthyphro Argument":

1. Either God has reasons for his commands, or God lacks reasons for His commands.
2. If God lacks reasons for His commands, then God's commands are arbitrary--and that renders God imperfect, undermining His moral authority.
3. If God has reasons that support His commands, then these reasons, rather than the divine commands, are what make actions right or wrong--thereby refuting Divine Command Theory.
4. Therefore, either God is imperfect, or the Divine Command Theory is false.
5. God is not imperfect.
6. Therefore, Divine Command Theory is false. (63-64)

The arbitrariness of divine laws under Divine Command Theory reveals that it is, in fact, just as amoral as Real Atheism.  As Shafer-Landau notes, "If there is nothing intrinsically wrong [i.e., wrong independent of divine condemnation] with rape or theft, then God could just as well have required that we do such things.  He could have forbidden that we be generous or thoughtful.  But this makes a mockery of morality, and of our view of God as morally perfect" (64).  Of course, there are stories of God actually commanding such things, and the New Atheists don't hesitate to mock, but that's a different issue.  The point is that Divine Command Theory is at its heart as nihilistic as the egoism of Max Stirner.

In fact, I think it's also appropriate to say that the Real Atheist's egoism is as religious as the faith of a Divine Command Theorist.  The Real Atheist, in fact, is not an atheist at all, but a polytheist: each ego in their view is a moral law-maker, as opposed to a law-taker, and so each individual is their own god.  Moreover, the Real Atheist's extolled "self" is an undefinable and undetectable point of subjectivity, much like the god worshipped by Divine Command theorists.  The Real Atheist is not godless; he is his own god.  It is, in fact, the New Atheists who go all the way, claiming that nothing--not even their own egos--is above the laws of nature and morality.

Source

Shafer-Landau, Russ.  The Fundamentals of Ethics.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.  Print.