A response to PragerU's "If There is No God, Murder Isn't Wrong"

With a little under two weeks to go before Best American Short Stories 2019 drops, I thought I'd use my blog to indulge in a non-literary but still-important-to-me topic. If you follow this blog for literary reasons and aren't really into God and moral philosophy, I'll see you on October 1st. This is a response to a video that some friends of mine were talking about the other day, and I thought I'd collect all my thoughts in one place to aid our conversation. You, the reader, are welcome to join in.

Prager "U" and the video in question

If you're not familiar with PragerU, the quick version is that they're more of a conservative media company than a university, whatever their name might imply. They create videos with relatively simplistic versions of Christian or politically conservative arguments, done in such a way to get millions of people who agree with those ideas to re-post the videos on social media. A friend of mine posted one the other day, mostly to say how stupid he thought it was. This was the video:

Another friend, who is deeply trained in classical philosophy, saw that post and asked what the external basis was for morality without a god. He wasn't so much agreeing with the video as asking what, if my other friend found it objectionable, we might substitute for God-given morality. It's a reasonable question, and one I've been chewing on for 25 years since I left Christianity behind me. I think I've got three responses, and not just because three is always the number people pick when they want to support a thesis.

Synopsis of Prager's arguments

Denis Prager, the "dean" of PragerU, basically argues that without God to dictate what morality is, all views about morality, even when it comes to nearly universally accepted premises like "it's wrong to murder," are just opinions. You can say that nearly everyone agrees with the idea, but that's not the same as being able to point to empirical data for why you believe in something like gravity or that the Earth is round. There's no firm foundation. Morals are relative, and if society began to reject the notion that murder is wrong, we'd be unable to make a grounded argument for why that was evil.

When I raised this with Mrs. Heretic, she had the same reaction I'd guess a lot of people do. She thought it was a stupid thing to say and that plain, old "common sense" ought to tell us it's wrong to murder even if we don't believe in God. I'm not entirely sure she didn't suspect I was concocting some kind of sophistry to convince her there is no such thing as morality, since she knows I don't believe in God. It took me a while to get across that the argument is simply that without reference to an objective criteria we all agree on, you can't say "murder is wrong" like you can say 2+2=4. You'd lose the "self-evident" nature of moral arguments the founders were so fond of. You couldn't argue about more advanced moral issues either, like abortion or immigration or welfare, because you'd have no postulates to build a proof from.

I'm sympathetic to Prager's argument, because it has a lot of intuitive appeal. C.S. Lewis and Christian apologists after him have used an offshoot of this argument to argue for the converse. Rather than arguing that we need God to have morality, they have argued that the near universal existence in human society of morality is proof of God as the giver of that moral code within our consciences. I used to really buy into that belief, and it took me a long time, even after I no longer accepted it, to be able to explain why. So here I go.

Argument #1: Christians are in the same shaky boat

If Christians want to argue that without God, we have no moral absolutes, that's fine, but this overlooks that they're in a very similar logical quandary themselves. They have to face a question about the nature of good and evil and its relationship to God that has plagued Christian theologians for centuries. The video sort of glossed over it by saying that murder is evil because God says it is (and then showing a cartoon depiction of the Ten Commandments).

But here's the conundrum: is murder wrong because God says it's wrong, or is it wrong because it's objectively and independently wrong, and God merely happens to have the right moral beliefs, beliefs He chooses to share with us? Some hard-core Calvinists have held that morality is whatever God says it is, and that if God had chosen to say murder and rape were good, they would be good. Most theologians balk at that, because that would seem to mean that God didn't choose moral precepts out of his own character. But if we say that God commands us to do what is good because it is objectively good, then that means there is a good and an evil that predates and "outranks," if I may use that term, even God. It means murder is wrong because it's wrong, not because God says it is.

There's really no good way out of this dichotomy for Christians. If we go through door number one, then morality isn't really "moral," it's still relative or "opinion" as PragerU puts it. The only thing different about this opinion is that the supreme ruler of the universe holds this opinion. It's an extreme example of "might makes right," the kind of thing we see at the end of the Book of Job when God's answer to Job's question of why bad things happen to good people is essentially, "Shut up and be glad I didn't make it worse, because I am strong and wise and you are not."

Door number two feels right to most people, I believe, but it also makes God's rightness on moral matters contingent. God did not create good and evil. God did not tell us to murder because he happens not to like it, but because murder is wrong. It was wrong before God said anything about it. It was wrong for all 60,000 years when homo sapiens was developing the ability to record its moral precepts. If that's the case, then doesn't it really make no difference whether we believe in God or not? Shouldn't our proper interest be in the good and evil that existed before the Ten Commandments? Are we not capable of being our own priests, communicating in some sense with moral rights and wrongs that are independent of God?

You could argue that even though right and wrong are what they are without God saying anything, He is, by his completely good nature, the only being capable of revealing their nature to us. That kind of ruins Lewis's argument for morality proving the existence of God, then, because that is essentially saying we don't understand right and wrong without God, when Lewis would like to say that God plants and understanding of morality in all of us and uses that to help us find our way to Him. If Lewis's argument is true, then we will maintain a conscience whether we believe in God or not.

And lo and behold, we find cultures all over the Earth who have developed morality independently of Judeo-Christian values. Those moral codes do what moral codes are supposed to do--regulate the behavior of individuals in such a way that society becomes possible. If only God's edicts can create reliable morality, whence all these other long-standing societies?

Argument #2: So what if morality is just opinion?

I agree that murder isn't "Evil" with a capital "E." There is no Platonic perfect morality, of which our Earthly morality is just a shadow, and on which all our best moral ideas are modeled. Murder is only "evil," which is to say that society regards it as such. It's an opinion, even if it's one held by nearly everyone. For me, it's evil because it does not lead to the kind of world I want to live in, which is my main rule for deciding whether I find something moral. But others may have different reasons for thinking it wrong, and a few stragglers out there might not find it immoral at all. So why don't I find this a threat to the good of mankind, if I can't prove those who think murder isn't evil are wrong?

Consider for a moment the 1988 movie "Mac and Me." (If life has been good to you, this will be the first and only time you will ever consider it.) I cannot "prove" that it is a bad movie. There is no formula that proves it, no empirical data. But 100% of critics on Rotten Tomatoes agree that it is bad. How did we arrive at such a unanimous consensus if there is no ultimate, unshakable basis for stating what is good and bad in a movie?

I guarantee this is the only time this movie has been cited in a moral argument. 

I would contend that moral reasoning works something like aesthetic reasoning. In aesthetics, we may not be able to come to scientific statements about what is good or bad or beautiful or ugly, but we still have some hazy understanding of  what we mean, and this hazy understanding actually helps produce consensus a lot more than you'd think. Yes, 38% of the audience said they liked the movie (I would be willing to bet at least half of those are trolls pretending they loved it). We won't get total unanimity. But we can get close. Murder is the Mac and Me of the moral world. Nearly everyone who isn't just trying to troll others happens to have the same opinion. If the goal of morality is to help people know what they should and should not do, then isn't the "right ballpark" of morality good enough, even if we don't have a map to show us exactly where we are?

Prager argued that utilitarian ideas of morality fail, that they are "wishful thinking." We can't argue that people will do what is moral because they either fear punishment or wish to live in a pleasant world. Mao, Hitler, and Stalin killed, and no utilitarian argument stopped them. Here, I don't think Prager is being entirely honest. He just admitted that plenty of Christians have done evil things, even done them in God's name. But then he talked right past that and spoke of how there is a reason that the rejection of Judeo-Christian beliefs has coincided with an increase in murder. He claimed that Judeo-Chrisitan societies were the first to accomplish a host of social goods, implying that without Judeo-Christian beliefs, we can't really hope to advance the social good.

I don't deny the many good things Christians have accomplished. But they sure took their sweet time getting there for many of them. Before some Christians began opposing slavery, people arguing from the same Judeo-Christian beliefs also expanded it on a scale that had never been dreamed of before. Prior to expanding the vote to women, Christians excluded them from the vote. Why did it take so long? Maybe because for all his belief in how clear God makes morality, there aren't that many things that are really terribly clear from the Bible. Should we outlaw slavery? Christians made arguments both ways, both quoting from the same book. Should women be allowed to vote? Same thing. If God is the source of all morality, He's done a lousy job of making it clear what we ought to do and not do. Even today in America, there are liberal Christians arguing for more state welfare and conservative ones quoting Saint Paul's "if a man will not work, he will not eat," arguing for far fewer.

God doesn't make morality any clearer. Morality is inherently difficult, and more of a general grid on a map than a specific dot. It's a region of a graph, not one coordinate. But the map isn't really any foggier without God than with Him. Instead, we have to try to figure out what a person we cannot know and certainly cannot create proofs for wants, rather than trying to figure out what we want ourselves.

Reason #3: We already made morality without God once

Like all agnostics, I believe humanity evolved without supernatural intervention. Therefore, as unlikely as it sounds, that means human beings evolved as moral creatures. There was likely an evolutionary reason for this. Most mammals seem to show some signs of empathy, and I think empathy may help explain some of our success over the last 65 million years. If you're looking for a bedrock on which to build your moral principles, empathy might be as close to one as you've got. (Of course, this still doesn't make anything simple. If you try to go through life operating on the "do unto others as you'd have them do unto you" heuristic, you'll soon find yourself in a morally difficult position of having to decide which "other" you should be doing unto when there are competing camps of "others" who want things.)

Evolved morality is not the same as God-given. This is more along the lines of behaviors that have worked in the past to help us propagate as a species than it is an unassailable principle upon which arguments can be built. We don't understand exactly how it evolved or why, but it's not too great a stretch to see how it can be evolutionarily useful as a species for one person to risk his or her life for another. Within bodies, it happens all the time, with some cells sacrificing for others. In insects, it happens at the organism level. It would not require supernatural interference for humanity to evolve selfless behavior, even to desire to behave selflessly. And nearly all mammals almost HAVE to have empathy at some point, because as milk-eaters in our infancy, we all rely on a mother who is willing, for a time, to put her interests aside for those of her children. Without this selflessness, nearly all mammals would die before having a chance to pass on genes.

Even non-mammals evolve behaviors of how to behave. Insects have incredibly sophisticated social lives. They know what is expected of them and how to act without God. And although some theists insist that "instinct" is just a word for what we don't understand and that God may have been the one to put the moral instinct there, I would respond that while I accept and enjoy the existence of beautiful mysteries, that is not the same as accepting God as an explanation for them.

It's really not very hard to imagine an evolutionary basis for morality. There are much more difficult questions for a non-theist than this one, actually. Humanity saw what was good (little "g"), did it, and when it evolved to a point where it could codify its already-existing practices, thought it important enough to put moral codes in the mouth of God. We invented right and wrong, not God.

Summary

Prager claimed that every non-theist he has ever debated admitted that without God, morality is "just an opinion." I don't know that all philosophers would agree to his dismissive characterization, but I certainly don't object to the claim that morality isn't certain. At least, it's not certain if your aim is to construct philosophical dialogues that proceed by getting someone to accept one point and then building from there, one abstract brick at a time. But maybe that's not really how moral philosophy ought to work. People are living beings. Moral philosophy ought to be about how to live as a human among humans, not how to turn morality into a geometry problem. I think it's actually a good thing that we can't always reduce moral problems to math. As C.S. Lewis once put it when explaining that the complexity of the Bible was a good thing, because it kept believers from reducing its truths too much, "No net less wide than a man's whole heart, nor less fine of mesh than love, will hold the sacred Fish."