“There is nothing immoral if there is nothing in charge.”
Said Al Sharpton in his debate with Christopher Hitchens, repeating a common argument against atheism.
What I find so weird about this argument is that it attempts to reject moral relativism, yet it is, itself, a moral relativist argument. It says that morality does not exist independently and is relative to the whim of God.
Murder is wrong, for example, because God says thou shalt not kill. But if, next Tuesday, God decides you should disembowel your neighbor and drink blood from his skull, then it is righteous and justified to do so, according to this argument. One can hope God would not demand such a thing of you, but even the religious admit they cannot fully know God’s plan.
And even if you believe God is too benevolent to do such a thing, or that God is unlikely to communicate such a wish, if you adhere to this argument you must admit it would be rightful to disembowel your neighbor and drink blood from his skull if God did unequivocally demand it of you. He is the only source of morality, after all.
Yet, incredibly, even within the very argument from which I quoted, Sharpton claims:
“When you raise the issue of morality, if there is no supervisory being, what do we base morality on? Is it based on who has the might at a given time, who is in power? [.. ]There is nothing immoral if there is nothing in charge.”
It is his own argument, not the atheists’, that is an appeal to power, to say the only possible source of morality is from someone “in charge.” Of course, it is well known logical error to believe rightness necessarily inheres in power or authority.
Sharpton’s faulty belief springs from another logical error, the argument from ignorance. He doesn’t know or care how morality might arise without God, seems to refuse to consider the possibility, and uses that ignorance as the basis for his belief that morality comes from God. (I’ve previously discussed ways to think about morality without relying on religion.)
Reading about this debate reminded me of Glen Whitman’s instructive post on the subject. Whitman notes the vague idea that morality comes from God can be considered more precisely, viewing God as either the “knower” or the “decider” of morality. If you view God as the decider of morality, then, as elaborated above, you have an essentially an amoral, relativistic view of morality that simply hinges on doing whatever the guy who shoots lightning bolts out of his fingers tells you to do. If, however, you view God as the knower of morality, you have conceded morality exists independently of God.
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