Can atheist metaphysics justify a secular society? | Oliver Victorio

Britain is more secular now than it has been in any point in its past, according to the British Social Attitudes’ 2019 survey. Only 38% of the British public claim to be Christian, whilst more than half (52%) do not see themselves as belonging to any particular religion. As ‘one of the most important trends in post-war history’, this decline has been inevitably accompanied by seismic shifts in Britain’s moral landscape. Whilst a turn to atheism has informed this trend, what is hardly questioned is whether atheism can justify the values that a secular society aspires to uphold. In fact, it fundamentally undermines morality itself. As a result, far from creating a cohering society, in the climate of multiculturalism and the import and accommodation of contrasting moral systems, disbelief in God logically produces more crippling fragmentation than unity.

Metaphysical Beliefs and Civilisation 

Before addressing whether atheistic belief can sustain secular values, it is crucial to recognise the fundamental role that metaphysical beliefs – beliefs about the fundamental nature of being and reality – have had in shaping civilisation. The turn from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to an agricultural one in the earliest human societies, which subsequently brought about the rise of civilisation, is one such epochal event that is best explained by a change in metaphysical beliefs. Hunter-gatherer lifestyle, rather than being ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’ as Thomas Hobbes famously coined, was arguably a society of original affluence, given that material wants were easily attained due to low expectations. The turn to the laborious and time-consuming world of agriculture, therefore, would be unnecessary and unfavourable for the “affluent” hunter-gather. 

The explanation for the turn, offered by The Çatalhöyük Research Project – an interdisciplinary team of experts who have worked on a particular Neolithic archaeological site in Turkey – is a compelling one. Based on cave painting representations, they conclude that the change in depictions from a reciprocal relationship with nature to a more domineering one demonstrate a change from an egalitarian-animist belief system to an elitist-theistic one. The hierarchy of spiritual status that this would inevitably create would justify the enslavement of lower-status persons and the exploitation over nature needed for agriculture, and thus the gradual rise of “civilisation”.

Social Darwinism 

Given the fundamental role that metaphysical beliefs have played in the rise of civilisation, it stands to reason that metaphysical beliefs continue to play an indispensable role in the formation and maintenance of any given society. In the case of a secular society, where atheism is assumed to be the metaphysical justification for individual freedom and plurality, are such metaphysics able to justify its ethics? There are several paths available to the non-believer.

The first is that of social Darwinism. Charles Darwin, in his classic work, On the Origin of Species, argued that in the long process of gradual evolution through natural selection, the inherent drive toward survival would result in only the most successful or fittest organisms surviving. The obvious problem here is that this can hardly be a justification or an account for altruistic behaviour, particularly if such behaviour was aimed at the most vulnerable members in society, or even strangers, potentially coming at the cost of one’s own survival.  

Disingenuous Morality 

To salvage Darwinism as a metaethical theory, philosopher Michael Ruse proposes that survival also includes co-operation ‘as a good biological strategy’, and ethics would be instrumental in facilitating this. However, as Ruse himself recognises, this would only amount to an ethic of strategic co-operation for the purpose of self-interest, not genuine altruism.

To avoid this, he contends that our biology deceives us into believing in genuine co-operation (by what biological mechanism he fails to explain) for the purposes of biological self-interest and survival. Not only does this seem needlessly superfluous theoretically – it would be more efficient if we were deterministically programmed with no moral sense by which we could contravene – it also does not explain altruistic acts that are superfluous and even inimical to survival. 

Moral Delusions 

The more logical course for social Darwinism, as Ruse points out, is to believe ‘that there is no foundation to ethics at all!’: ‘Morality is no more than a collective illusion fobbed off on us by our genes for reproductive ends’. The problem is, as Ruse acknowledges, ‘if we recognised morality to be no more than an epiphenomenon of our biology, we would cease to believe in it and stop acting upon it’. Morality therefore collapses on Darwinian metaphysics. The only way to act morally on this basis and steer away from nihilism is, as Ruse suggests, to delude ourselves that there is such a thing as objective morality. 

Either way, this can hardly be the basis of a moral society. It would be impossible on this basis to argue against those who decided to act in the interest of their own biological advantage. What we term immoral criminal acts could only be classified as natural biological impulse.

Moral Relativism 

Moral delusion is not the only natural implication of Darwinian metaphysics. Given that, on this basis, there is no such thing as objective morality, one is justified in believing in normative moral relativism, where, as philosopher David Wong explains, ‘it is wrong to pass judgement on others who have substantially different values’, since ‘we have no more of an objective case for our moral outlook than the others have for theirs’. We might be reminded of the current socio-political dilemma facing Western multicultural secular societies today, where intercultural moral conflict is a very live issue – such societies are inhibited from pronouncing moral judgments on other moral systems due to the relativist implications inherent in disbelief in God.

In a climate where contrasting comprehensive value systems are irreconcilable, the only logical outcome for moral relativism is societal fragmentation. Secularism is therefore unable to assert itself on this basis since the very act of assertion contradicts its metaphysical belief of there being no objective morality. It is utterly self-defeating.

Atheism Self-Refuted 

Another self-refuting implication of atheism is materialism. The crux of the problem with materialism is that it implies determinism, and determinism is self-refuting. A view is self-refuting when it is included in its field of reference and fails to satisfy its own criteria of acceptability. For instance, the statement “there are no truths” must include itself as not being true, and hence is self-refuting and necessarily false. In the case of materialism, it operates on the presumption that everything is derived from matter, which behaves deterministically.

Therefore, one’s alleged rational basis for believing that “there is no God” is itself determined by a physical non-rational process. It is necessarily false even if it were true. Moreover, it removes the recognition of the reality of free will. Since morality fundamentally depends on responsibility for one’s freely chosen actions, atheism’s justification for a moral secular society is logically dead on arrival.

Christian Metaphysics and the Birth of the Individual

The death of God, famously proclaimed by the atheist nineteenth century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, was not to be without consequence. What Nietzsche was able to perceive, which his contemporaries could not, was that the values that secular society held are inextricably bound to Christian faith. Therefore, when ‘you abandon the Christian faith, you are pulling the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet’. ‘This morality’, Nietzsche poignantly observes, ‘is by no means self-evident’. Indeed, what is self-evident in nature is inequality, and it is this that formed the moral basis of ancient Greek and Roman societies.

As political philosopher, Sir Larry Siedentop points out, ‘different levels of social status reflected inherent differences of being’. Siedentop argues that it was the idea of the fusion of the divine will with each person’s faith in the immortality offered by Jesus’ remission of sins, immortalised through his resurrection, that gave birth to the individual and ‘the assumption of the moral equality of humans’.

The Christian Cultivation of Individual Liberty

It might be argued that as the Catholic Church came into prominence during the Middle Ages, obedience to dogma and canonical law would directly oppose freedom. However, this is an oversimplification. Canonist lawyers in the twelfth century first brought about the notion of natural individual rights, arguing that ‘all human beings as such have subjective natural rights, an inherent freedom and power, the violation of which is unjust’. This ideal would find further expression in the demand for freedom of individual conscience opined by pioneers of later Protestantism. Even the Enlightenment, a period beloved of secularists, was not wholly eviscerated of faith. As Enlightenment scholar, Jonathan Israel, points out, Enlightenment movements could ‘take specifically Christian, Deist, or atheistic forms’. 

One branch of the Enlightenment grounded its morality in a ‘supernaturally ordered and divinely guided progress’. It is this group that formed the basis of the American enlightenment where secular institutions have always ‘been identified with moral institutions generated by Christianity’. It is no wonder why Nietzsche insisted that ‘we godless and anti-metaphysical people, we still take our fire from that blaze kindled by a thousand years of old belief, that faith in Christianity’. The It is not just that the value system inherited by Western secular societies has its roots in the Christian religion. It is also that a morality that is presumed to be in some way objectively true, ‘stands and falls with the belief in God’.

Conclusion

None of this is to gloss over any of the immoral acts that have occurred in the name of Christianity. Rather it is to trace the source and continuing justification for the moral values that secularists hold dear. The National Secular Society president, Terry Anderson, has argued that religions, including Christianity, would benefit from embracing secularism. However, as we have seen, attempting to justify secular values on the metaphysics of disbelief in God is self-refuting. Therefore, Anderson has it the wrong way around: the only way to justify a secular society is to embrace Christian metaphysics.

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