Why I’m not a believer – the ‘But without God we wouldn’t have any morals!’ argument

This is the third in a short series of posts I’m writing about the subject of why, after investigating reasons for theism, I ultimately became a non-believer.

For background: These investigations were in my childhood/teenage years. I grew up in a non-religious household, but was intensely interested in the whole subject from an early age. I regarded the whole question of whether or not there was a God, and, if so, what religion he wanted us to follow, as being an extremely important one; so I put a lot of time into reading and thinking seriously about the subject. These are, as best as I can remember after a thirty-year gap, my reactions at the time to the arguments I found in my reading.

This one is probably self-explanatory, but can be briefly summarised thus: ‘Without God to tell us what to do, we’d all be scratching our heads trying to figure out what right and wrong are, since there is obviously no way anybody could work this out for him/herself without some sort of Supreme Arbiter defining it for us. And you obviously don’t want that to be the case, do you? So better believe in God.’ *

I have to say that this argument, when I read it as a teenager, did send me to particular levels of facepalming “Are they serious?!” In the first place, as you’ve probably noticed, this argument is subject to exactly the same flaws as the ‘But your life is meaningless without God!’ argument that I discussed in my last post; it falls apart logically (to be technical, it has the form of logic flaw known as an argument/appeal from consequences), and it isn’t even factually correct, since, despite not being a believer, I found myself perfectly well able to make the sort of basic distinctions between right and wrong that the authors using this argument were insisting I couldn’t possibly make. But this argument also has an extra flaw over and above the ‘But your life is meaningless without God!’ argument; namely, that the very fact that someone is using it indicates that they don’t actually believe it.

After all, apologists surely use only arguments that they at least think have a chance of being effective? The ‘But your life is meaningless without God!’ argument, despite its flaws, at least has a chance of convincing someone; a person who does feel their life is meaningless is going to want it to be meaningful, so that argument has a potential audience. But a person who doesn’t care about morals… doesn’t care that they don’t care about morals. If we unbelievers genuinely were all indifferent to right and wrong, then we wouldn’t care when someone pointed that deficiency out to us. It would be as meaningless to us as the fact that we don’t keep to kosher dietary laws. The very fact that apologists use the no-morals-without-God argument as an attempt to convert non-believers shows that – at least on some level – they know perfectly well that morals matter to non-believers.

I was quite intrigued by the twisting of logic that must be required to use an argument that could only be used if you didn’t believe it was true. Surely there has to be a name for that particular logic flaw? Maybe not; I can’t think of any other examples of it that I’ve heard. If anyone knows what that logic flaw would be called, do please tell me!

*Note that CS Lewis, in Mere Christianity, used a different type of pro-theism moral argument which effectively contradicts this one; the argument that precisely because we all have innate knowledge of right and wrong, we can conclude that God must exist, on the basis that the only way such innate knowledge could exist within us would be if a deity had caused us all to be born with this type of instinctive knowledge. While I don’t agree with that form of the argument either, I do find it rather better than this form. However, I’m writing this as the story of what arguments I looked at when originally deciding whether I should believe in God or not, and this particular argument was one I didn’t run across until some years later; therefore, in the interest of vaguely chronological accuracy, I’ll leave it to a later post.

Why I’m not a believer – the ‘But your life is meaningless without God!’ argument

This is the second in a short series of posts I’m writing about the subject of why, after investigating reasons for theism, I ultimately became a non-believer.

For background: These investigations were in my childhood/teenage years. I grew up in a non-religious household, but was intensely interested in the whole subject from an early age. I regarded the whole question of whether or not there was a God, and, if so, what religion he wanted us to follow, as being an extremely important one; so I put a lot of time into reading and thinking seriously about the subject. These are, as best as I can remember after a thirty-year gap, my reactions at the time to the arguments I found in my reading.

The ‘But your life is meaningless without God!’ argument almost got left out of this list, as it was such a poor argument I’d actually forgotten about it; however, I was reading John Blanchard’s ‘Does God Believe In Atheists?’, which spends a lot of time on it, and I thought ‘Oh, yes… now I come to think of it, I do recall coming across this when I was researching the whole God subject’. So here it is.

This argument consists of telling the reader or hearer, in impassioned terms, about… well, obviously, about how meaningless lives are without God, with the implication that we should therefore believe in God. Or, to put it another way, ‘We should believe in God because we really want [our version of] Him to exist’.

This is what is technically known as an argument from consequences (or, if you want to get fancy about it, an argumentum ad consequentiam) – the claim that a particular viewpoint is true because the consequences of it being false would be bad. (Or, conversely, that a particular viewpoint is false because the consequences of it being true would be bad.) It’s the logic flaw that’s the downfall of the cancer sufferer who ignored that lump or worrying symptom for too long because they didn’t want it to turn out to be cancerous, the gamblers who convinced themselves that that long shot just had to pay off because they so much wanted it to.

It can work if used as an appeal to emotion, but it’s an argument too flawed to stand up in the light of day. Which is why you will probably never see anyone spell it out quite as blatantly as I did a couple of paragraphs above – if anyone attempting this argument ever did explicitly state ‘And because it feels so awful not to believe in God, God must therefore exist’ then the crashing failure of logic would (hopefully) be far too obvious to take seriously.

(Ironically, if this type of argument actually had worked well in converting me, it would have backfired on any Christian apologist who tried it, since I always found the idea behind Christianity quite horrifying. The idea of God existing – a wise, kind, all-knowing being in charge of the universe and steering its ultimate destiny – sounded lovely to me, and I always hoped my studies would lead me to theism as a conclusion. But the idea that this being had set things up so that people would burn in hell forever simply for having the wrong beliefs? It appalled me. If I hadn’t recognised the fallacy behind this sort of believe-what-you-want-to-believe argument, I’d have rejected Christianity in a heartbeat without further thought, simply because I so much didn’t want it to be true.*)

A more important problem I had with this argument as a teenager, however, was that the premise was so obviously false. Plain and simple, my life did have meaning without God. Plenty of meaning. I loved being alive, I loved enjoying life’s pleasures, I loved looking forward to everything life had to bring. Sure, I liked the idea of a God existing (as long as it was a nice one, not the horrible variety of god that I was hearing about from Christian sources), but I was in no way dependent on God’s existence for finding meaning in my life.

So all of these arguments about how meaningless life was without God got a rather blank look from me. I was sorry for the people who felt that way, who obviously needed very much to hold on to their beliefs and who seemed to struggle inexplicably with enjoying life for its own sake; but their attempts to persuade me that I felt the same way simply fell flat.

 

*Obviously, I ended up rejecting Christianity anyway. But I did so only after spending a lot of time, over many years, reading and thinking about the various arguments and holding myself to strict standards in terms of whether I felt any particular argument actually disproved the belief system or not. It was not just a case of ‘I don’t want to believe it so I’ll assume it’s not true.’ (All of which will make for another post series which I do hope eventually to get round to writing.)