Atheism and Goodness

Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God...promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all. - John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration

But can a person who does not acknowledge that he is accountable to a truth higher than the self, external to the self, really be trusted? - Richard John Neuhaus, Can Atheists Be Good Citizens?

The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky is often quoted as saying, “If there is no God, everything is permitted.” Similarly, the French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre has allegedly opined that "If there is no God, the only honest response is despair." We will allow those continental notables a bit of slack, as the exact sources of those quotes are difficult to pin down. Still, despite anything else they certainly convey ideas about atheism which an honest atheist should find hard to dispute.

If there is no God, everything is permitted. Sartre taught that with no God then each individual is god. With that as a philosophic basis then everything certainly is permissible. The individual would have no need to consider other persons' rights. There would be nothing to measure them against if life, the universe, and everything were his domain.

Atheists will argue that this isn't true. An atheist can care, indeed most do care, about others, about right and wrong, about being responsible for themselves. Yet if what Sartre and Dostoevsky say is true, and we must insist that in terms of philosophic reason it is (they are after all statements which assert that if A is true then B is true as well almost axiomatically) then the responsible atheist is being good only because he either isn't a real atheist or is, at the least, simply choosing to live better than his ideals require.

Why should it be any other way? An atheist after all believes (he must believe this as, again, a logical extension of his nonbelief) that we are accidents of the universe who came into being quite out of our control and will leave existence behind in a like manner. Where can you infer responsibility from that? You surely can't find dignity in it either.

We should point out that we aren't talking about what many if not most atheists say atheism is but about where atheism, if true, must lead whether those folks accept such conclusions or not. The undisputed fact that most atheists lead relatively good lives doesn't prove that atheism is true any more than a cold blooded murder by an avowed Christian would disprove Christianity. While it is generally good advice to question practitioners of given creeds when you want to find out what they believe, this cannot mean that they are automatically right about it. Who sees best the entire play developing: the pulling guard or the fan at the 50 yard line?

If atheism is true then the atheists who pay their bills on time, respect others, and plan for the future do so either because they're better than their premise allows or are just selfish about their comfort. There really are no other explanations for the 'good' atheist.