{"id":12312,"date":"2011-03-20T20:49:20","date_gmt":"2011-03-21T00:49:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/?p=12312"},"modified":"2011-03-20T20:49:20","modified_gmt":"2011-03-21T00:49:20","slug":"an-atheist-tries-to-come-to-terms-with-morality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/an-atheist-tries-to-come-to-terms-with-morality\/","title":{"rendered":"An atheist tries to come to terms with morality"},"content":{"rendered":"

From here<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Recently an atheist, philosophy professor has recounted his repentance in the magazine \u201cPhilosophy Now\u201d.<\/p>\n

He is Professor Emeritus Joel Marks of the University of New Haven, Connecticut.\u00a0\u00a0 A moralist and ethicist, he regularly writes a column: \u201cMoral Moments\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0 He is a vegan by ethical persuasion, quite passionately opposed to vivisection and other common uses of animals.\u00a0 His basic position in ethical debate has been to oppose utilitarianism in favour of Kantian ethics.\u00a0 He describes his life prior to his conversion as: \u201cmorality has been the essence of my existence, both personally and professionally.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, Prof. Marks has come to understand the error of his years of atheistic, philosophical, moral arguments.\u00a0\u00a0 Turning his philosophic eye on his \u201cown largely unexamined assumption\u201d, he goes so far as to call himself \u201ca moral fool\u201d.\u00a0 His long standing religious prejudice shows when he describes his conversion as \u201cmy shocking epiphany that the religious fundamentalists are correct: without God, there is no morality.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Professor Marks illustrates some common traits of atheists:<\/p>\n

An atheist’s assumptions go unexamined. The usual one is that atheism is entirely rational; in actual fact, atheism is based on assumptions that are no more rational than those of Christianity.<\/p>\n

Atheists are fond of laying claim to a morality that they say is not inferior to that of Christianity. The truth is, as professor Marks has noticed, atheism has no objective morality; an atheist\u2019s morality is a concoction of subjectivity that is the result of Darwinian selection \u2013 or a piece of less than fresh cheese consumed the previous evening. Jean-Paul Sartre was a rare breed of atheist: he admitted that, without God, we make up our own morality. The so-called new atheists are less honest and maintain that their subjective morality is in some way universally valid, and so, wish to foist it on the rest of us<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The article goes on to note that, rather than believe in God, Professor Marks decided to disbelieve in morality. Now all he has to worry about \u2013 well, other than the final destination of his immortal soul \u2013 is the inconsistency of his non-belief in morality and living his life as if morality were real. I\u2019m assuming he isn\u2019t planning to become a serial killer.<\/p>\n

Sadly Prof. Marks\u2019 conversion was not from atheism to Christianity but rather from morality to amorality.\u00a0\u00a0 As he puts it \u201cI became convinced that atheism implies amorality, and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 This is a poor piece of logic for a professional philosopher.\u00a0 He could just as easily conclude that \u201catheism implies amorality and since I am a moralist I must therefore embrace theism.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 But presumably he felt his reasoning about God was more secure than his reasoning about morality \u2013 even though his commitment to amorality raised the question of whether such a life was even viable.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From here: Recently an atheist, philosophy professor has recounted his repentance in the magazine \u201cPhilosophy Now\u201d. He is Professor Emeritus Joel Marks of the University of New Haven, Connecticut.\u00a0\u00a0 A moralist and ethicist, he regularly writes a column: \u201cMoral Moments\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":7,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[2049,1258],"class_list":["post-12312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-atheism","tag-atheism","tag-professor-joel-marks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12312\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.anglicansamizdat.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}