Atheism is Bad Morality

The last several months have seen repeated instances of individuals murdering as many people as they could before taking their own lives. These horrific occurrences are universally denounced as evil. Yet, though atheists join in that condemnation, their belief system provides no moral foundation for considering such acts to be wrong.

The problem is what the logic of atheism inherently says about the nature of human beings.

Atheism says humans are just biological machines

If there is no Creator, humans are nothing more than accidents of evolution. They are in essence bio-chemical machines, no different, except in level of complexity, from a computer. As famed atheist Richard Dawkins puts it, “We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”

Like a computer, these human “machines” have been programmed, through millions of years of evolution and natural selection, to react to their environment in certain very complex ways. That complexity does not, however, change the essence of what they are.

A computer applies rules of logic on a very sophisticated level, and may appear to “think.” In reality it does no such thing. It only reacts, on the basis of its programming, to the inputs it receives. From an atheistic perspective, human beings are no different. Actions that may appear to result from “thought” on their part are, in reality, the result of nothing more than the interaction of their evolutionary programming with the inputs they receive from their environment.

In other words, by the logic of atheism humans, like computers, cannot possess anything that goes beyond the physical structures of the body, nothing that could be called a “soul.” They are complex mechanisms, and nothing more.

There is no moral dimension to shutting down a machine

The moral consequences of this way of thinking are immense. If human beings are indeed nothing more than bio-chemical machines, then a person has no more real purpose or significance than a housefly. And we swat houseflies unmercifully, with no thought of any moral restriction on doing so.

An experiment carried out by researcher Christoph Bartneck of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand illustrates the moral abyss into which the logic of atheism would pitch the human race.

An experiment that shows people will “kill” a machine

Dr. Bartneck set up a scenario to test, as NPR reporter Robert Seigel put it, “What would happen if a machine explicitly addressed us as if it were a social being, a being with a soul? What would happen, for instance, if a machine begged for its life?”

In Dr. Bartneck’s experiment, a human subject was paired with a robot cat that talked like a person. The two verbally interacted, as would two people, as they teamed up to play a game against a computer. At the end of the game, the humans were told it was their responsibility to turn their robot partner off.

Dr. Bartneck says, “It was made clear to them what the consequences of this would be; namely, that they would essentially eliminate everything that the robot was. All of its memories, all of its behavior, all of its personality would be gone forever.”

When it came time for the human to shut off — to “kill” — the cat robot, it was programmed to beg for its life, pleading with the person to not shut it off. It was apparent that the human subjects were very disturbed by the prospect of doing so. The experiment was set up to encourage the human to interact with the robot as if it were a person, and all the individuals in the test group struggled for some time with the decision to turn it off.

But here is the key: in the end they all did it.

As Spiegel put it, “There they sit, in front of a machine that is no more soulful than a hair dryer; a machine they know, intellectually, is just a collection of electrical pulses and metal. And yet they pause, waiting, until finally, they turn the knob that kills it.”

Because they understood that the robot was only a soulless machine, all the people involved in the experiment eventually brought themselves to “kill” it, simply because they had been instructed to do so.

Atheism destroys all morality

That’s exactly what the logic of atheism would dictate regarding human beings as well as robots. If a human is, as atheism necessarily declares, nothing more than a biological machine, there is no moral consideration in shutting it off. There is no moral dimension to anything one might choose to do to a machine. There is, then, from an atheistic perspective, no such thing as morality.

That’s why atheism isn’t just bad morality; it is the abandonment of the very concept of morality.

Other articles in this series:

Atheism is Bad News

Atheism is Bad Science

Atheism is Bad Philosophy