Good without god

They’re not categorically immoral either.

In the past three days on my Facebook page, I’ve been called an antichrist¹, a Mormon basher², ignorant³, and unrighteous ⁴. I imagine that these commenters have replaced any semblance of what I’m actually like with a caricature of a scowling, hate-filled monster bent on abolishing the whole of Christianity. They assume that I’m immoral, and don’t see me as a real person anymore, playing with my kids, helping our neighbor’s 2-year-old get sand out his shoe, or taking a pair of lost sunglasses to the lost and found at the water park. They didn’t see me yesterday remind the clerk at Best Buy that he had failed to charge me for installing a car radio, or momentarily diverting my spray of water from our newly-planted grass to our neighbor’s strawberry patch that also needed a drink. They don’t see me visit pleasantly with the store clerk wearing a cross necklace or putting on my sons’ ties on Sunday mornings. These are not moral behaviors of which only theists are capable—these are simply little acts of human kindness that theists and atheists alike perform every day.

1.

2.

And I expected something like “20 unwanted pounds” or “self doubt!” She hasn’t defriended me yet. Anyway, I’ve never bashed a Mormon in my life! Good folks, Mormons. I just don’t share many of their beliefs anymore.

3.

4.

One of the reasons I started this blog was to promote civil equality for atheists by taking advantage of the “gay friend effect:” People who know someone who’s gay are less likely to be prejudiced against gays. Similarly, people who know an atheist are less likely to marginalize atheists. The more atheists come out, the greater is our progress toward a society where all people are treated with fairness and respect. To remain silent about one’s atheism is the easier route, to be sure, but silence is an implicit endorsement of the pervading Christian privilege.

Given this recent bout of name-calling directed at me, I see that I’ve overestimated some people’s ability to be thoughtful and reasonable, and I’ve underestimated how reactively they would engage their cognitive biases. The most troubling accusation is that people are by default unrighteous if they don’t have faith in Jesus. This is incredibly dismissive of the majority of the world’s population. I sometimes hear this as, “You can’t be good without God.”

I have no doubt that one can be good without believing in God, let alone having faith in Jesus. Let’s look at what research has found regarding the morality of nonbelievers.

In 1934, Abraham Franzblau found a negative correlation between acceptance of religious beliefs and three different measures of honesty. As religiosity increased, honesty decreased.

In 1950, Murray Ross conducted a survey among 2,000 associates of the YMCA and discovered that agnostics and atheists were more likely to express their willingness to aid the poor than those who rated themselves as deeply religious.

In 1975, a study found that college-aged students in religious schools were no less likely to cheat on a test than their atheist and agnostic counterparts in nonreligious schools.

In the most recent studies of religious belief among prestigious scientists, only 7 percent of members of the American National Academy of Sciences believed in God, while only 3.3 percent of the UK’s Royal Society said they believe in God. Are all these scientists unrighteous? Ignorant? Atheism is often the product of understanding the scientific process, not some secret cabal.

In his book, The Psychology of Religion: An empirical approach, David Wolf reviews dozens of studies of this nature that reveal a consistent and positive correlation between “religious affiliation, church attendance, doctrinal orthodoxy, rated importance of religion, and so on, with ethnocentrism, authoritarianism, dogmatism, social distance, rigidity, intolerance of ambiguity, and specific forms of prejudice, especially against Jews and Blacks.”

There have been several interesting studies in which ethical dilemmas are presented to people of various faiths, including to people of no religious faith at all. You can read about these experiments in some detail here. They’re quite fascinating, and I recommend you read them if you’re not already familiar with them.

In these ethical dilemma experiments, atheists consistently make the same moral decisions that believers do. Maybe they’re just absorbing the religious values from those around them, you may say. However, adapted versions of these ethical dilemmas were presented to a tribe of people who had almost no contact with the outside world, and they too made the same moral decisions. Additionally, consider how to explain people’s morality when they live in a society where almost no one believes in a supernatural God, most notably Buddhists.

One interesting study found differences between areas of the country with various concentrations of believers and nonbelievers. Believers tend to be more concentrated in ‘red’ (Republican) states as opposed to ‘blue’ (Democrat) states. Sam Harris noted that, “Of the twenty-five cities with the lowest rates of violent crime, 62 percent are in blue states, and 38 percent are in red states. Of the twenty-five most dangerous cities, 76 percent are in red states, and 24 percent are in blue states. In fact, three of the five most dangerous cities in the U.S. are in the pious state of Texas. The twelve states with the highest rates of burglary are red. Twenty-four of the twenty-nine states with the highest rates of theft are red. Of the twenty-two states with the highest rates of murder, seventeen are red.”

Similarly, Phil Zuckerman, sociologist and author of Society Without God: What the least religious societies can tell us about contentment, found that the Scandinavian countries, particularly Denmark and Sweden, have the lowest percentage of believers and the highest percentage of atheists, and yet they are incredibly moral countries. They have the lowest rates of violent crime in the world, the best elder care, the best childcare, strong education, and high literacy rates. But aren’t they sad people who find life meaningless? Not at all—they have one of the lowest rates of depression and the highest measures of happiness in the world. They find meaning in their work, families, causes that they are involved in, etc.

Another interesting bit of data comes from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, which found in a 1997 study that one in ten people in the U.S. were atheists or agnostics (in 2008, the figure had jumped to 16%), whereas only one in 200 prisoners are atheist or agnostic.

This doesn’t mean that atheism necessarily increases morality, although humanism, the ethical system that often goes with atheism, probably does. Another good possibility is that atheism is correlated with some third factor, such as higher education, intelligence, or reflectiveness, which might counteract criminal impulses. Neither do these data disprove the existence of God, but they are evidence that 1) people can be good without believing in God, and 2) that the morality of nonbelievers is not likely the product of being in a society steeped in religion.

Seriously?

So the only reason one tries to be good is to gain God’s approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That, of course, is not morality. That’s just sucking up. If people are good only because they fear punishment and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed. If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would commit robbery, rape, and murder, you reveal yourself as an immoral person and we would be well advised to steer a wide course around you. If, on the other hand, you admit that you would continue to be a good person even when not under divine surveillance, you have fatally undermined your claim that God is necessary for us to be good.

So research does not support the idea that those who don’t have faith in Jesus are unrighteous, or that people become immoral when they lose their faith in God. Indeed, the existence of altruism, compassion, generosity, kinship, and compassion can be explained very well by evolution by natural selection. Such behaviors are reported over and over in studies of animals, such as birds, bats, elephants, whales, rhesus monkeys, and others, and it is all well supported by the theory of evolution.

Skeptical? Read or listen to any or all of the six books below. They all present and summarize the peer-reviewed, published research that lays out the evolutionary origins of our moral instincts.

Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life by Dacher Keltner
Natural Selections: Selfish Altruists, Honest Liars, and Other Realities of Evolution by David P. Barash
Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are by Frans de Waal
The Moral Lives of Animals by Dale Peterson
The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Care, Share, and Follow the Golden Rule by Michael Shermer
The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement by David Brooks

Or you can just continue to call me names. Doesn’t bother me a bit. But you can’t get away with calling atheists immoral. Morality is about how you behave and how you treat others, not what theological opinions you hold.