Objective morality is not a required tenet of atheism (also, it is NOT TRUE that atheists have no objection to child rape)

The title of this post was not unprovoked. It’s a direct response to statements made at a small public gathering by pastor and student of theology Andrew Pitts, of Antioch Church LA. I’m a bit late getting around to this, but the message is too important to let it fall through the cracks. I (evolutionary biologist) co-wrote this with my girlfriend (science historian – @deetronic), who is posting it on her own blog as well.

A couple of weeks ago we were invited to attend what was called a “debate” at a church near the UCLA campus. This debate, which was actually a presentation of two stand-alone 20-minute talks, was called “The Conflict,” and described as “[t]wo opposing views on God and Science meet up to debate whether there is a conflict.” Pastor of Antioch LA, Andrew Pitts (organizer) represented the view that there was no opposition between God and Science. Colleague and friend of ours, Anthony Friscia, a UCLA faculty member in the Department of Integrative Biology and Physiology, represented the view that Science cannot support the existence of God.

Perhaps we were naïve to think this would be a lively, rational conversation. Even before walking inside, we were greeted on the sidewalk by two friendly college students who asked, “Are you here for the debate? It’s against the biologists!” It was amusing to see them stare awkwardly when one of us answered, “We’re biologists!” But in retrospect this was an obvious indication that we were not walking into an honest discussion of conflicting worldviews. When Pitts started his talk, it was immediately clear that the event was intended to bring a scientist into a church meeting to somehow lend credibility to what amounted to pseudoscience, insisting that there is more scientific support for theism than for atheism and then attacking atheists for lack of morality.

Dr. Friscia began the event with a 20-min presentation on what science is, how messy the scientific method can be in practice, and summarized the overwhelming evidence for the evolution of life. He acknowledged missing pieces in evolutionary theory, but gave compelling reasons for why the existence of a divine creator doesn’t provide a satisfying replacement for those gaps in knowledge. Dr. Friscia noted that the “God of the gaps” argument, which many theists use to reconcile their belief in God with Science, is actually, if we can paraphrase, lazy. If science has yet to answer a particular question about the nature of something in our universe, that does not equate to evidence for that something being divinely created. It only means science does not currently have information. That isn’t to say scientists don’t make educated guesses. For every gap, there are many hypotheses to be sure. Pitts, however, despite explicitly denying that he was referring to a God of the gaps, argued for exactly that. And when he did make statements about scientific evidence for a creator, he misrepresented the science in the process.

Mr. Pitts’ own 20-min talk began by defining scientism, “[the belief that] we can only know those things that can be known through the hard sciences or scientific method,” and by stating that science gives only “one description of the world.” He then went on to claim that theism provides a better interpretation of science’s description of the world than does atheism, based on what Science knows about the Big Bang and evolution by natural selection. His warped reasoning proceeded as follows:

We know that there has been time and space after the Big Bang. So prior to the Big Bang, there was no time and no space: t = 0 / s = 0. Therefore: “Cause of the Big Bang = Timeless / Spaceless.” Since God is timeless and spaceless, he must therefore have created the Big Bang.

When his talk was finished and one of us stated that this sounded exactly like God of the gaps, Pitts emphatically disagreed. He insisted that this is what science tells us! You can view his whole presentation here:

We didn’t really expect Pitts to get the science right, and he certainly fulfilled those expectations. Using twists of logic, he weaved a convoluted train of thought regarding the origin of the universe that focused on what came before the Big Bang. His insistence that science tells us absolutely nothing existed before the Big Bang is just not true. Science simply does not know what did or did not exist before the Big Bang. It does know that all the matter in the universe was compressed into an infinitesimally small point just prior to the Big Bang; we have just been unable to make any observational measurements about what happened before that. Based on this already-flawed premise, for something to originate in the absence of time and space Pitts claimed that there must have been a “personal” origin. We were quite confused about this statement and he never clarified what he meant by it.

Pitts even tried to use the theory of natural selection to back his claims, ironically suggesting that it may have produced a false “belief” in science among atheists, even though theists’ belief in God would have been a much more appropriate example. We could go on for pages about the scientific fallacies he presented, but the point of this post is to respond (albeit it late) to one of the most offensive and disturbing things we’ve heard from the divine creation camp. If one relatively young and progressive preacher espouses the following idea, it seems likely that he’s not alone. And that’s a problem.

While discussing the merits of theism versus the problems of atheism, Pitts claims that to be an atheist equates to believing that science will eventually lead us to a perfect morality, unbiased from the conflicting interests of different groups of people whether religious, political, cultural or otherwise. But, Pitts said, “science cannot tell us why we can’t interfere when a lion rapes another lion.”

And then, almost in passing but still loud and clear, Pitts said that by extension atheists have no moral objection to raping children.

In a large church filled with impressionable college students, most of them wanting to hear about evidence for the existence of God, this rockstar preacher with hip clothes and a techno-beat intro, said atheists are okay with raping children.

Now, it should first be understood that there is a small but loud contingent of atheists (often called “the new atheists”) who do believe that science can lead us to moral objectivity. (You can read an extensive and thoughtful critique here of the writings of Sam Harris, a vocal atheist who espouses the idea of objective morality. But this group does not speak for all atheists.) Many atheists contend that morality is historically and culturally contingent, and there’s evidence that natural selection has played a role in its evolution, but this is all beside the point.

Mr. Pitts took advantage of a highly obscure, intellectual, esoteric argument for a scientific objective morality to accuse all atheists of having no morality. For students of Pitts, atheism is now associated with child rape. Without God, we are monsters.

Mr. Pitts’s misrepresentation of science throughout his presentation was frustrating. But his assertion that atheists are immoral and by extension condone child rape was no less than infuriating. Not only is it a lie, it is utterly irresponsible for someone of authority – and he indeed has authority in his Christian circles – to teach these sorts of damaging and offensive assumptions. It does nothing but create fear among his followers, and feed the notion that humans are somehow incapable of treating each other with dignity and respect unless they possess a fear of eternal damnation from an almighty judge. This notion is flat out absurd, and it should be insulting to every human being, religious or not. This is awful, deplorable, ignorant judgment. And it really doesn’t seem like something Jesus would be down with.

Unfortunately, Mr. Pitts’s method of attack on science and atheists is not unique. Some Christians like to claim values such as love and compassion and generosity as being uniquely theirs. As if people are incapable of caring for others unless they believe God will punish them for not doing so. We hear way too much of this rhetoric in US right-wing politics (i.e. we need God in our schools, society is in decline due to Godlessness and teachings of evolution, etc.). It labels as immoral anyone who doesn’t subscribe to a higher power. A less damning but equally ignorant sentiment was expressed by Oprah Winfrey this past Sunday when she accused Diana Nyad, a self-proclaimed atheist, of not being an atheist because she finds awe and wonder in nature. According to Oprah, the awe and wonder that anyone experiences in nature IS God, and if you experience it then you must believe in God whether you know it or not. Thanks for clarifying O’ Mighty O! It takes some hard-core narcissistic elitism to define someone else’s identity, declaring that God is producing someone else’s sense of awe and wonder despite what they’ve just said explicitly to the contrary.

So let us be very clear about these facts: There is absolutely NO evidence that atheists are measurably more immoral than theists. There is absolutely NO evidence that a lack of belief in God is followed by the belief that raping anyone is okay. There is absolutely NO evidence that atheists lack morals.

Not only is there no evidence to support Mr. Pitts’s claims of atheist immorality, there actually is evidence to suggest that, as a group, atheists may have better morals than religious believers. For example, it has been shown that compassion is a more powerful motivator for atheists and agnostics than for the faithful. There was also some recent clarification of an oft-cited statistic regarding the percentage of the U.S. prison population that is atheist. It turns out that while self-proclaimed atheists make up 0.7-1.6% of the U.S. population, only 0.07% of prisoners identify as being atheist. Not sure whether this is a statistically significant difference, but it certainly doesn’t support the idea that atheism is immoral. And there is a fairly large body of scientific literature dedicated to the evolution of morality, with some evidence that empathy and morality evolved in our ancestors, which means it‘s not uniquely human as many would like to believe.

Maybe being better grounded with reality causes atheists to focus more on living in the moment, allowing them to better empathize with others. If you need a 2000-year-old text that you believe is the Word of God to tell you it’s not cool to cheat or murder or steal or rape, then uncertainties about the origin of the universe should probably not be at the top of your list of concerns. (Just to be clear, this is not a condemnation of all religious people, it’s about pointing out that the ridiculous notion that morality is dependent upon a belief in God is complete bullshit.) And to accuse a group of people of condoning child rape because they don’t share your theistic beliefs is one of the most illogical, offensive, and irresponsible straw-man arguments an influential preacher could possibly make.

Perhaps, as opposed to atheists’ morality being eroded by their lack of fear for eternal damnation, they are instead motivated by compassion and empathy because they want to make the best out of their limited time on this beautiful planet with all of its beautiful people. It’s possible that atheists feel a profoundly deeper sense of awe and wonder for the natural world than those who believe in creation by an almighty being. As Diana Nyad said, atheists can stand next to Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims, and others, and weep just as many tears at the beauty of nature around them. And maybe if Christian believers (in the US anyway) knew more about the teachings of Jesus, they’d understand that having compassion toward others, as opposed to bigotry and judgment, was one of the most important lessons he was trying to teach.