Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin joins Cy Kellett to tackle a provocative question about morality and belief in God. Addressing a common atheist objection, Jimmy clarifies the distinction between the existence of God and the meaning of life, arguing that the latter plays a crucial role in guiding moral behavior. Tune in as he unpacks this complex issue and offers insights into the relationship between faith and ethics.
Transcript:
Cy: Are Christians who do good because they believe in God like psychopaths on a leash? One common atheist objection goes like this: if you were ever to become certain that God does not exist and there’s no ultimate purpose, would that change your behavior? Would you be more inclined to do evil? If the answer is yes, and if God is basically the only thing keeping you from doing evil or simply more evil, then you sound like a pretty dangerous person. Would it be fair for a Christian to say, perhaps if my life or even the whole universe truly turned out to be meaningless, then I suppose I would just follow my various desires, even if they were things I currently consider sinful?
Jimmy: Okay, so it seems to me that this objection from the atheist is confusing two separate issues. One is the existence of God, and the second is the meaning, the purposefulness or meaningfulness of life. Because you’ll notice the way the objection is phrased: if you were ever to become certain that God does not exist and that there is no ultimate purpose, would that change your behavior? Well, and specifically, would you be more inclined to do evil?
Well, there are a number of ways one can approach that. But notice we’re not just talking about one issue here. It’s not just that you become convinced there is no God. It’s that you then become convinced that there is no meaning to life, there’s no purpose to it. And it seems to me that in terms of acting good or bad, it’s the latter that is the more decisive. You know, even if you thought there is no God, but you still think there’s meaning and purposefulness and good and evil in life, you could still be a good person even if you didn’t believe in God. It’s not just the existence of God that is leading you to do good. It’s your belief that there is such a thing as moral goodness in the world that’s leading you to do that.
Now that may be something that would please the atheist and say, “Yeah, and see, I’m an atheist and I think that moral goodness is real. That’s why I’m good. So I don’t need God to convince me to be good.” And okay, well, I would say that’s good for the atheist. It’s good that they are trying to be a good person. I would say that if they look closer at the grounding of their belief in moral goodness in the world, without the existence of God, it’s harder to ground.
And so I would say it’s good that you want to be a good person, even though you don’t believe in God, but you do want to look at the foundation of your belief in moral goodness in the world. And if you do that, I think you need to be open to God as an explanation for why good and evil exist in the world, why that’s a meaningful distinction. So I think that the situation is still going to play to the advantage of the person who believes in God. It’s just going to require a little more work to get there.
On the other hand, let’s pose the other challenge. Let’s suppose, okay, let’s talk to the atheist again and say, okay, you’re halfway there to the challenge you’ve just posed. You said you don’t believe in God. What if you then became convinced that there’s no purpose in life, that there’s no good and evil, that there’s no meaning? Would that lead you to do something bad compared to what you do now? And the answer presumably would be yes. If you, just like for a Christian, if you become convinced of the meaninglessness of life, that there is no ultimate good and evil, it’s all just meaningless, well, that likely could change your behavior in some way.
Would that mean you’re a psychopath though? Well, no, not necessarily. What psychopathy is, is a condition where a person fundamentally lacks empathy with others and they treat others in a non-empathic way where they just don’t care about the feelings of others except insofar as it helps the psychopath get what they want. If you have pain in your life and stuff like that, then you just don’t care about that person’s pain. I mean, it’s irrelevant to you unless it has an impact on your own goals.
So psychopathy and sociopathy, which is a related condition, involve a fundamental lack of empathy with others. But the thing is, empathy is built into us. And so even if most people, whether Christian or atheist, became convinced that there is no objective good or evil, they still would have this empathic call in their heart to care about other people and their feelings.
And so it would be inaccurate for most people to say, well, if you’re a Christian and you become convinced the world is meaningless, you’re just going to become a sociopath and not care about anyone’s feelings. Well, okay, no. That wouldn’t happen to most people. And the way we know that wouldn’t happen to most people is that’s the situation atheists are in; they don’t become sociopaths. Many atheists are of the opinion that the world does not contain good or evil—not all of them, but many of them. And they don’t suddenly lose all empathy for other human beings.
And so this objection on the part of the atheist doesn’t grapple with that reality. The reality is that most humans, at least the way they’re raised today, do have a fundamental empathy for others. And that keeps reasserting itself even in situations where a person doesn’t believe in an objective existence for good and evil. And so consequently, it wouldn’t stop an atheist from not being a sociopath if they believe good and evil don’t exist. And it wouldn’t stop a Christian from being a sociopath. It wouldn’t cause a Christian to become a sociopath just because they lose their faith and become convinced there is no good and evil in the world. That fundamental empathy is still going to be there in the majority of people.
Now, that’s not to say that it wouldn’t have any impact on a person’s behavior. It might. Well, you know, if a Christian or an atheist becomes convinced there’s no such thing as good and evil, objectively speaking, well, then that would affect how they act on some things. They might cut themselves slack on adultery, for example, or fornication or pornography or things like that. But that doesn’t mean that they would just become homicidal murderers if they thought they could get away with it.
So I think it would damage the person to come to the conclusion that good and evil don’t really exist, but it wouldn’t mean that they would just go whole hog and become completely amoral. But I also think it’s going to apply equally to atheists as Christians. So I don’t think that I need to see how an atheist applies this in a particular situation. But if it’s presented the way Wojtek has presented it here, I would say it’s going to apply to atheists just as much as it’s going to apply to Christians.
Cy: Wojtek, I mean, thank you very much for the question. I hope that answer was helpful to you. We’ll take a very quick break. We’ll be right back with lots more questions for Jimmy Akin on Catholic Answers Live.