Not only is God something we made up, but so are good and evil. That’s right: Good and evil aren’t real. They are not forces. They are not at war with each other.
They are constructs, born of our desire to objectify and standardize our preferences–basically, our likes and dislikes, loves and hates. In our raw, unsocialized form, we humans are all about what we like and dislike. What we want and what we want to avoid. Our gut reaction is to call the things we like “good” and the things we don’t like “bad.” If someone actively opposes what we want, they become a very special form of bad.
But we have a problem, and an opportunity. We live together as social creatures. Some of the things I like and dislike are just my quirks (I hate red-leaved trees, don’t ask me why, I just do). Other things are more universal–who doesn’t like watermelon? Watermelon is good. Some things promote the general welfare (functioning sewers are good!), some things harm the general welfare (earthquakes are bad) and some things actively oppose the general welfare (terrorism is evil!).
So to accommodate this mishmash of subjectivity and shared interest, we elevate and attempt to objectify “like” and “dislike,” “promote our welfare” and “harm/oppose our welfare” into the concepts of good, bad, and evil. When we can agree on what’s good, bad and evil, it gives us a common currency with which to exchange ideas and proposals. In the process, we are likely to forget that we made up these notions.
To make matters worse, we may have an interest in reifying our own opinions of what’s good and evil. What better way to do that than to ascribe them to God and the Devil? Then we can claim that those who disagree with us aren’t just different, they are wrong. What a useful bit of alchemy! Or, if we aren’t guilty of performing that trick ourselves, we may have swallowed the trick as handed down to us through the generations, or simply by the local preacher.
Three more things about all this nonsense:
First: Many of my fellow atheists claim you shouldn’t believe something without evidence. I take a softer view of that; I have no objection to people believing in God with or without evidence. I mention this here because I want to acknowledge up front that while I believe what I’ve written above is true, I offer you no evidence that it’s true. It is simply my opinion, formed over 50+ years of observing and thinking about human behavior.
Second: I anticipate the objection that what I’ve written above is nihilist. In a sense, it is. But I don’t begrudge any of us our values, even if I don’t find any ultimate validation for them. And whether it is nihilist or not has little bearing on whether it is an accurate description of the phenomena it attempts to describe. The argument succeeds or fails on how accurate or inaccurate it is, not on whether it fits into a box called “nihilism.”
Third: I anticipate an objection from consequences: If people accept what I’ve written, that spells the end of morality and the collapse of Western Culture (as was claimed in a recent OP). To which I reply: This is an unfounded fear. People will not behave any more or less morally based on whether they agree or disagree with what I’ve written. Acting morally comes naturally to us because we are social creatures and have empathy; acting morally is nurtured through good parenting, which is independent of the parents’ philosophical or religious beliefs; and acting morally is cultivated through self-discipline, which again is independent of your philosophical or religious beliefs. In short: We don’t need good and evil to be real in order to live moral lives; nor do we need to deceive ourselves into believing they are real in order to live moral lives.
Questions:
- I have claimed my argument succeeds or fails based on its accuracy or inaccuracy; but then have failed to provide a shred of evidence for it. Is this the kind of thing that can be decided by evidence? What kinds of evidence would be germane?
- I have claimed you don’t need to fear the consequences of the argument–that it doesn’t threaten morality or social order. But would there be any consequences if everyone were to go, “Oh yeah, that Dan T, he’s right about that, good and evil aren’t real”?
- What else do you want to say?