Michael Gerson - What Atheists Can't Answer - washingtonpost.com So the dilemma is this: How do we choose between good and bad instincts? Theism, for several millennia, has given one answer: We should cultivate the better angels of our nature because the God we love and respect requires it. While many of us fall tragically short, the ideal remains.

Atheism provides no answer to this dilemma. It cannot reply: “Obey your evolutionary instincts” because those instincts are conflicted. “Respect your brain chemistry” or “follow your mental wiring” don’t seem very compelling either. It would be perfectly rational for someone to respond: “To hell with my wiring and your socialization, I’m going to do whatever I please.” … Atheists can be good people; they just have no objective way to judge the conduct of those who are not.

In a way, this is a very good way of limiting the sense in which atheism is like religion. It needs to deal with the essentially amoral stance that the moral good is simply epiphenomenal to the material existence. That is the only rational description of the human condition: because of whatever configurational properties of our body/mind, we tend to agree on certain principles of good (with enough variation to confound assumptions of grand design). An amoral or immoral actor in a system of moral actor is equivalent to the ‘freeloader’ individuals against whom evolutionary forces tend ward off the ‘moral majority’ across most species. They exist as individuals but are not evolutionarily successful enough to take over (the species where they did presumably did not breed to tell the tale). How can an atheist call a thief or even a murderer immoral, if all this person has transgressed is a temporally agreed consensus against such action? The answer, of course, is correctly that he or she cannot. But instead of arguing that morality and good do should be a deliberate act of the individual most atheists refer to a version of secular humanism which refers to the authority of common humanity (and all the values associated with it; cf. e.g. Arendt invoking the concept of animal pity in connection with the Eichman trial). There is nothing wrong with that only it is no different than referring to God as the authority (particularly since while theists rely on interpretation of the good word by human rather than divine mediators). With secular humanism, God is not necessary. There are many religious cultures where the moral good is not exclusively sanctioned by a deity. But there is no good reason to assume that secular humanism is common to all humanity any more than religious belief is. It is simply an easy substitute for divine sanction. Morality as choice and non-judgmental attitude to ‘freeloader-behavior are simply too scary (although they in no way preclude an allegiance to legal order sanctioning against freeloader-behavior). Giving a human actor freedom to choose badly (even at the expense of others) is not something that’s easy to advocate. But, at least, as the atheists argue, we do not need fear as the basis of moral behavior. And how else can we describe rationalistic religious conviction as described in the concluding paragraph of the column?

None of this amounts to proof of God's existence. But it clarifies a point of agreement -- which reveals an even deeper division. Atheists and theists seem to agree that human beings have an innate desire for morality and purpose. For the theist, this is perfectly understandable: We long for love, harmony and sympathy because we are intended by a Creator to find them. In a world without God, however, this desire for love and purpose is a cruel joke of nature -- imprinted by evolution, but destined for disappointment, just as we are destined for oblivion, on a planet that will be consumed by fire before the sun grows dim and cold.

This form of “liberation” is like liberating a plant from the soil or a whale from the ocean. In this kind of freedom, something dies.

The concluding analogy is noteworthy in the context with the current preoccupation with the ‘culture of life’ where death and suffering are to be avoided at all cost (a conviction shared by secularists and theists alike).

An parallel (and much more passionate) argument was made by  Scarecrow that:

it strikes me as odd to claim as a moral advantage the inability to see that what his President has done (and Gerson has justified) in his God’s name is, on moral grounds, only barely distinguishable from the acts of the crazed religious zealots who, in Allah’s name, flew airplanes into the Twin Towers, except for the fact that the Christian had enough firepower to kill 100 times more people than the Islamists.