Episode 6 – We Invite You to Lunch: The Morality of Atheism

The Morality of Atheism: Do Human Beings Have Value Without God?

The atheist physicist Stephen Hawking said: “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet.” The question is: was this a personal opinion or an exaggeration by Hawking, or is it atheism’s inevitable conclusion? Do human beings possess moral value without God? Does morality possess any value without God?

We will answer these questions in today’s episode and examine frightening examples of the moral degradation to which atheism leads. Praise be to God, and peace and blessings be upon God’s Messenger.

Morality in Faith and Atheism: An Illustrative Comparison

Imagine receiving a message from your brother on your phone saying, “We invite you to lunch.” Does this message have a meaning? Of course. Is it real or imaginary? It is real. Does it have value? Yes. Do you act upon it? Yes: you tell your wife and children that you have been invited to lunch at your brother’s home, and you do not prepare food, and so on.

Now imagine that you left your unlocked phone in your pocket with your house keys. As you walked, returned, stood, and sat, the keys struck the phone’s keyboard. Hours later, you took out the phone to make a call and saw thousands of random letters, among which appeared the sentence, “We invite you to lunch.” Does that sentence have an author who knows what he is doing? No. Does it have value? No. Do you act upon it? No, because even if something meaningful appears among the random marks, it acquires no value.

Atheism and the Negation of Moral Values

For the person who denies God’s existence, all the moral values a human being feels should in principle resemble these random marks: devoid of value and meaning and therefore no basis for action. According to his belief, they were produced by randomness, which knows nothing, promises nothing, and commits itself to nothing.

In an atheism that explains the universe and its existence in purely material terms, moral values have no place at all: neither truth nor falsehood, neither good nor evil. These are immaterial values that matter cannot explain. When the human being is merely a child of matter and nothing exists except matter, mercy, truthfulness, loyalty, and kindness to parents have no meaning. Feeling any of these things is merely the product of random genetic mutations, like the phone’s random keystrokes.

Islam and the Explanation of Moral Values

In Islam, a Creator perfect in His attributes commanded His servants to observe morals harmonious with those attributes. This Creator is just; He forbade injustice to Himself, so it is understandable that He should forbid it to His servants. He said: “My servants, I have forbidden injustice to Myself and made it forbidden among you, so do not wrong one another” (Sahih Muslim). He is merciful and commanded His servants to show mercy to one another.

The Creator endowed the human being with an innate love of these values and an aversion to their opposites, such as evil and injustice. Human passions, the pursuit of desires, and the love of domination may cover the fitrah, but this does not contradict the fact that the sound fitrah is the original state. Thus, in Islam, the existence of these values is explained, their value is explained, and the human being’s love of them and aversion to their opposites are explained. God’s existence explains all of it.

The Atheist Confusion in Explaining Morality

When a person denies God, Most High, he enters the miserable chain of atheist confusion we observed in the previous episode concerning rational intuitions according to the atheist. There is no Creator and no attributes of perfection, only nature that produced the human being. This nature is material and possesses no immaterial attributes of perfection, so it cannot be described as just or wise. Consequently, moral values have no place in a human being generated by this nature.

But what of the human feeling of love for good and hatred of evil? According to atheism, random genetic mutations caused the human being to imagine that good exists and to love that imaginary good, and to imagine that evil exists and hate that imaginary evil.

One of the leading atheists, Richard Dawkins, was asked: is your belief that rape is wrong entirely arbitrary, like the fact that we evolved with five fingers rather than six? Dawkins answered: yes, you could say that. In other words, the blind chance they posit could have followed a different path and produced in human beings the feeling that rape is not wrong. The matter is entirely arbitrary, so neither the feeling that rape is wrong nor the feeling that it is acceptable can be described as true or false; the feeling is merely a child of random chance.

For one who denies God’s existence, the source of the moral disposition is therefore unknown. It cannot be described as true or false, does not correspond to the attributes of any higher being, and entails no reckoning in the afterlife. It is therefore not absolute: no moral trait can be described as praiseworthy in an absolute sense or blameworthy in an absolute sense.

Examples of Atheist Moral Degradation

Where did atheists arrive as a result? Let us examine examples from the words of their prominent figures and theorists.

Incest

In a debate titled “Islam or Atheism: Which Makes More Sense?” Professor Lawrence Krauss was asked why incest was wrong for him as an atheist. In other words: Krauss, if you do not rely upon absolute values grounded in God’s existence, upon what basis do you declare incest wrong? What did he answer? Let us see. He tells you: it is not clear to me that it is wrong.

Commenting in a tweet on what happened to Lawrence Krauss in that debate, Dawkins wrote: “An Islamist asked why incest is wrong. Lawrence Krauss tried to use reason in his answer. Reason? Pearls before swine.” Krauss’s reasoning thus became pearls in Dawkins’s eyes, while the problem was that the person who rejected it was a pig that failed to appreciate its value.

This is the same Dawkins who wrote in his book The God Delusion, in the chapter on the morality of the spirit of the age: “We do not cheat, kill, or commit incest.” He therefore sees incest as relative: his personal choice is not to practice it, while he defends his colleague Krauss’s position and calls it reason.

Let us examine further examples of atheist moral degradation collected by our brother Rashad Al-Qarni in the program Return to Your Origin. In a still bolder and more brazen step, Professor Greve demands that incest be decriminalized and that the provision punishing it be removed from the law. Do not be surprised to learn that one European country went even further by discussing the legalization of incest in parliament. What misguidance! How could a father be allowed to have a child with his daughter without being punished by law? Praise be to God for the blessing of Islam.

Rape and Bestiality

The atheists are truly pushing morality toward an abyss. The atheist Dr. Dan Barker says that rape may be moral if there is a need for it. As for the atheist Professor Peter Singer, that is another story and another farce. He sees no wrongdoing or genuine objection in bestiality, saying: “Human beings and animals can have mutually satisfying sexual relationships.”

This is in addition to Sam Harris’s defense of rape as part of an evolutionary strategy, and Dawkins’s defense of marital infidelity and refusal even to call it betrayal, on the grounds that neither spouse may claim private ownership of the other’s body.

Killing Newborns and Torturing Children

Professor Peter Singer also supports killing disabled newborns if doing so is in their interest and that of their parents. David Silverman, president of American Atheists, stated in a debate that all moral values are relative and that no absolute moral values exist. He was asked: on that basis, torturing and eating children, for example, is not absolutely wrong but wrong only for a particular person—is that correct? Silverman agreed. This means someone could torture a child, roast him alive, and eat him without thereby being wrong.

Silverman knows that if he calls this absolutely wrong, he must accept the existence of absolute meanings, which in turn entail God’s existence, as we explained.

Atheism’s Consequences for Human Morality

Atheism implies that random genetic mutations may produce genetically different people whose feelings toward the same act, such as rape or torture, differ greatly. The cause is purely material, and none of their positions can be described as true or false. Consequently, no person can be condemned or declared wrong, however immoral his action, because he can say: it is immoral for you but moral for me.

Some people in our Muslim societies use relativist expressions in moral matters and claim that there is no place for absolute truth. They imagine that even clear revealed texts concerning morals and values are all open to disagreement and contain nothing definitive. Some of them may be disgusted by the atheist statements we have mentioned but fail to notice that these are the natural result of the moral relativism they espouse. If values are not grounded in the light of revelation, only confusion remains. “And he to whom Allah has not granted light—for him there is no light.” [An-Nur 24:40].

The Atheist Fallacy in the Search for Morality

Atheists pose the following question: how can good, evil, and virtuous moral values be determined without belief in a God? This question is a logical fallacy, because without God there are no moral values—neither good nor evil, neither virtue nor vice. But they evade this fact, knowing that neither individuals nor societies can live without morality.

Nevertheless, they began writing books to answer their fundamentally mistaken question, including The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values and The Science of Good and Evil, among many others. All are desperate attempts because their pure materialism evades the fact that moral values have no place without God. It is as though they ask: what laboratory reaction can distinguish good from evil and justice from injustice?

Conclusion: Comparing the Atheist and Islamic Views of the Human Being

It should now be clear that when Stephen Hawking said, “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet,” he was consistent with his atheism and spared himself the search for morals for this scum. Compare that with these words of God, Most High: “And We have certainly honored the children of Adam.” [Al-Isra 17:70]. He honored them so that they might be worthy of the station of servitude to a God perfect in His attributes.

In this episode, we explained how the moral disposition points to the existence of God, Most High, and that morality has no foundation when His existence is denied. But that is not all. In the next episode, we will show that atheism does not leave its followers neutral toward morality; rather, it places them at a crossroads. Either they choose some good morals, contradict themselves, and betray their atheism and Darwinism, or they remain consistent with their atheism and Darwinism and adopt the worst and most criminal morals. These are important and shocking truths, so stay with us. Peace and God’s mercy be upon you.