Just How “Good without God” are Atheists Justified in Being? By Christian Smith, Ph.D. Suppose that tomorrow everyone on earth woke up and decided that no God, gods, or superhuman powers or forces existed. Everyone became an atheist. What kind of moral commitments would humanity then rationally be justified affirming, promoting, and living? 1 In this lecture I examine the question—much debated of late—of whether humans can be “good without God.” I focus on arguments advanced by activist atheists who answer this question in the affirmative, claiming that a robust, universal, humanistic ethic of care and respect for the rights and wellbeing of all other human beings can be derived rationally from atheism. I evaluate these arguments by conducting a close reading of a body of texts addressing the matter. To preview, I will argue the following: First, of course atheists can be “good” despite not believing in God. I witness this empirical fact around me and suspect that most of you do too. When asked if he believed in infant baptism, Mark Twain once replied, “Believe in it? Hell, I’ve seen it!” On the simple empirical question of whether atheists can be good, my answer is the same. 2 However, we need to distinguish between the practical fact of many atheists’ evident capacity for “being good” and the philosophical question of what kinds of goodness atheism actually rationally warrants. Just because someone can and does act “good” does not mean they necessarily have good reasons to do so. 3 And if they do not have compelling reasons, perhaps they or their children will eventually wise up and stop acting so good. Third, I will say that we need to disaggregate monolithic and ill-defined notions of what “good” is—that is, what we mean when using the adjective “good”—by identifying and describing distinct versions of what “being good” might entail. Most arguments in this debate proceed by assuming an implicit good-bad binary, as if people’s lives are either simply “good” or “bad,” which is crude and obfuscating. We need to work out more helpful distinctions to make better sense of the issues. I will distinguish what I will call “modest” or “moderate” expectations of goodness that are fairly demanding from “high” or “strong” expectations that are universalistic and very demanding. I will conclude that atheists are rationally justified in living according to a certain conception of moral standards that we can rightly call “good,” but that this standard ought to be ethically modest, setting no more than a moderately high bar of moral expectations on human behavior. And this modest standard of morality falls far short of the kind of robust, universal, humanistic morality that most atheist activists have in mind today when they insist that we can be “good without God.” I went into this inquiry with a genuinely open mind, interested to see if atheists really could make a solid case for the rational justification for a strong morality. I read nearly all the relevant recent works directed at (mostly) popular audiences that I could get my hands on, written both by scholars and atheist activists (my intention is to engage more accessible works designed to influence mainstream culture, rather than to drill down into the technical literature on the topic in academic philosophy journals). My analysis here focuses on a close reading of four particular works. They are Philip Kitcher’s Life after Faith (along with his more in-depth, companion book, The Ethical Project), Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape, Greg Epstein’s Good without God, and Lex Bayer and John Figdor’s Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart. 4 Two of these are written by academic scholars (Kitcher a philosopher and Harris a neuroscientist) and two by humanist chaplains at Ivy League universities (Epstein and Figdor) and a leader of an atheist nonprofit (Bayer). In addition, I read and will sometimes reference related works, such as Frans de Waal’s The Bonobo and the Atheist, Phil Zuckerman’s Living the Secular Life, Katherine Ozment’s Grace without God, Walter Sinnott-
17