Are the Godless Immoral?

There are many reasons – besides God – we know what's wrong or right.

Posted Dec 28, 2014

Dennis Prager – leading American talk show host, conservative pundit, and supporter of the Salvation Army – doesn’t know if killing is wrong. He doesn’t know if it is OK to steal, lie, or kick a blind woman hobbling across a busy intersection. When it comes to any moral decision, he is completely clueless – utterly incapable of knowing how to treat others. And he admitted all of this to me, quite frankly and openly, when he had me on as a guest on his radio show on Dec. 17, 2014.

I’ve got a new book out, Living the Secular Life, and Prager was nice enough to invite me on to the “Ultimate Questions” hour of his nationally syndicated radio program. He plugged my book a lot, and for that I was most appreciative.

But he also did something else: he insisted that without a belief in God, a person (such as myself) can’t know wrong from right, good from bad, killing from caring. According to Prager, the only reason that he knows that killing is wrong is because he has a god who tells him so, along with a “3,000 year old book.” Without these things, he simply would not know that killing is wrong. I’m not making this up. He declared all of this on live radio: without a Bible and a deity to tell him what’s what, he is functionally amoral.

And furthermore, he wanted to know how I – a secular person who does not believe in God or the Bible – know that killing is wrong.

My answer – which was nearly impossible to articulate on the radio, because Prager kept interrupting me – was and is as follows:

I know that killing is wrong because:

1. The kind of brain I have, which has evolved the capacity for empathy, which is the underlying glue of social cohesion. Empathy is being able to imagine or understand what others are feeling or experiencing. It is what has allowed our species to flourish all these many tens of thousands of years. The simplest manifestation of empathy is the Golden Rule: treating others the way you wish to be treated. Because I don’t want someone else to end my life against my will, I don’t end other people’s lives against their will. Pretty basic. And no god is necessary for it to make sense. For more information on the evolutionary development of primate morality, you can start with Christopher Boehm’s Moral Origins or Frans deWaal’s The Bonobo and the Atheist.

2. The people who raised me. If children grow up in loving, peaceful homes and are raised by parental figures who are kind, supportive, and empathetic, then those children will grow up to care about the feelings of others. They generally don’t grow up to be killers. However, if children grow up in violent, abusive homes by parental figures who are cold, cruel, and hostile, then the moral development of those children will be decisively crippled, and they are far more likely to be violent and dangerous as adults. For more information on how violent homes factor in the childhoods of murderers, you can start with Jonathan Pincus’s Base Instincts: What Makes Killers Kill? or Simon Baron-Cohen’s The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty.

3. The culture within which I grew up. If you grow up in a culture rife with racism, the chances are high that you will internalize some of that racism, even if you aren’t aware of it. If you grow up in a culture that accepts homosexuality, then the chances are you will, too. Despite how much emphasis we like to place on individuality, the unavoidable truth – as anthropology has taught is – is that so many of our values come to use from the culture within which we are socialized. Think eating meat is OK? Think pigs are unclean? Think women should be able to go to university? Think Hutus are superior to Tutsis? Think the Beatles are great? While we all have personal answers to these questions, those personal answers have been strongly formed, shaped, and determined by the culture we grew up in. It is simply unavoidable. And thus, if you live in a culture that condemns murder (as nearly all cultures do), then you, too, will come to know that murder is wrong. For more information on the power of culture to shape so many aspects of our worldviews, just pick up any introductory textbook in cultural anthropology.

4. Personal experience. When people lie to us, we learn how it feels. When we lie to others, we learn how it feels. When we get punched in the face, we learn how it feels. When we punch someone in the face, we learn how it feels. Simply by being alive and interacting with others and having various experiences throughout the course of a lifetime, we develop a sense of morality. This helps us to know that killing is wrong.

* * *

But to Dennis Prager, none of the above counts for a hill of beans. Empathy? Parental influence? Enculturation? Personal experience? No, sir! Prager needs a magic, invisible god to tell him that killing is wrong. How truly strange. Or rather, terrifying. For what it means is that if Dennis Prager were to one day ever doubt the existence of his god, or were he to lose some pages in an ancient book, he just might kill you.

Of course, I jest.

I don’t honestly think that Dennis Prager might kill you. I actually think he would feel sickened at the possibility. And I am certain that his visceral feelings against killing come from the kind of brain he has which allows him to be empathetic, and from the people who raised him, and from the culture he grew up in, and from the experiences and interactions he has had during his lifetime – not because of some divine commandments from a deity that more and more people are no longer believing in.