I'm looking forward to holding a debate with Oxford’s Professor John Lennox this Thursday. We’re engaging the framing question: Morality and God – is there a connection?
John is a great thinker and popular international speaker, and an academic who specialises in, and teaches, mathematics, philosophy of science and Christian Apologetics at Oxford University.
Being agnostic, I obviously think he’s wrong. He believes morality doesn’t make sense without God.
My view is that we can justify moral principles and moral values without reference to a god – any god or gods or deities.
Not only do I think God is not needed in moral reasoning, I think outsourcing justification for why you should or should not do something to an authority like God is cowardly and pathetic. In this column I want to reflect on the general status of religious beliefs in public debate. I heard Professor Lennox got a good grilling from a talk show host in Cape Town last week which resulted in many callers being rather upset.
Why do many people who believe in some sort of higher power think that religious convictions are beyond lampooning, ridiculing, criticism or close intellectual scrutiny?
I’ll be damned – yes, yes, pardon my ungodly pun – if I’m to treat God with kid gloves. All convictions can and should be up for grabs in the marketplace of ideas.
If you’re genuinely interested in debate, then you should have a commitment to concepts such as ‘truth’ and ‘justified’.
Without needing to go into complex academic philosophy on epistemology, there is an intuitive point here worth unpacking. While many false beliefs or unjustified beliefs could be useful to you practically, that is the exception rather than the rule.
But over the course of a life you mostly want to believe that which is true or justified. Making millions of decisions based on falsehoods or unjustified beliefs will very likely lead to a rather miserable life.
This brings us back to the value of examining all the beliefs you have. A critical life is practically good for you. And I’d argue, on another day, that a critical life is an important part of a worthwhile life.
So if you’re a believer with an appreciation for critical self-examination then questions like the following shouldn’t offend you.
Does God exist? What is the evidence for this belief if you answered yes? What justifies such a belief?
On morality: Is something right because God says so or does God command you to do something because it is morally right independent of God?
On meaning: Can you make sense of a life having meaning without God in it? Why or why not? Why is God necessary to confer meaning on my life?
These are just a small number of questions that all believers who value truth must engage
, both publicly and privately. Just because your belief that God exists matters to you as an important part of your sense of self, doesn’t mean it can’t be critically engaged. So quit getting upset when religion is debated.
This doesn’t mean giving great offence is acceptable. Many atheists are embarrassed by Richard Dawkins, for example, who often exhibits a condescending attitude towards religious communities. They share his conclusions, many of his arguments even, but sometimes bemoan his tone and arrogance.
I personally think Dawkins gets excessive flak. Some examples of his condescension are compelling. But frankly some of the criticism rests on the assumption that one mustn’t play rough with religious communities.
We lampoon Aids denialists, for example, with a mix of evidence-based reasoning and ridicule. Some views are so ridiculous and dangerous for society that ridicule is surely permitted.
I’m not implying religious beliefs are dangerous. But if Dawkins holds such a view sincerely and wants to make the argument from his perspective such views must be engaged with a mix of reasoning and ridicule.
His motivation is precisely to role-model what it means to not treat religion with kid gloves. And he’s right. The way to respond to Dawkins is to obsess less about his arrogance and instead show where his views are false or unjustified. Even so I concede that many opponents of religious views can be unhelpfully offensive.
Two final caveats: First, atheists do not have a monopoly on being offensive or arrogant. Many religious believers are, too.
Secondly, too many religious believers think debating their beliefs is intrinsically offensive. This category of believers do not even care for polite debate. Like a first-year student who walked out of my first lecture at Wits a few years ago when I taught introduction to philosophy of religion.
I explained the course content and said the first question we’ll explore is, ‘Does God exist?’ The student deregistered after confessing to the philosophy administrator she could not believe I could think it acceptable to ask whether God exists.
Sadly she missed the point of university.
More importantly she’s an example of the absurd belief of some that religion is special and beyond debate.
God is not special.