In his book "The God Delusion," Dr. Richard Dawkins said this:"As Einstein said, 'If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed. ' Michael Shermer, In The Science of Good and Evil, calls it a debate stopper. If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would 'commit robbery, rape, and murder', you reveal yourself as an immoral person, 'and we would be well advised to steer a wide course around you'. If, on the other hand, you admit that you would continue to be a good person even when not under divine surveillance, you have fatally undermined your claim that God is necessary for us to be good. I suspect that quite a lot of religious people do think religion is what motivates them to be good, especially if they belong to one of those faiths that systematically exploits personal guilt.
It seems to me to require quite a low self-regard to think that, should belief in God suddenly vanish from the world, we would all become callous and selfish hedonists, with no kindness, no charity, no generosity, nothing that would deserve the name of goodness."
The primary fallacy, as I see it, is this: Without God there is no good or evil. That is to say, if man is the final arbiter of what is good, then what is good for you may not be good for me.
Suppose we speak of a little thing like lying; I hold that it is best to be truthful, but you see nothing wrong with telling a small lie, perhaps to avoid hurting a person's feelings.... Yes, honey, that dress looks great on you. We have already diverged in our morality.
But the divergences don't have to be tiny.
Suppose I believe that the highest aim of humanity is reproduction, not only because the act feels good but because it propagates the species. It could then be quite easy for me to justify not only rampant philandering, but polygamy and perhaps even rape. And if I should come to the conclusion that rape is an excellent way to propagate my genes, who could tell me I'm wrong? Man is the final arbiter of morality... what is right for you is not necessarily right for me.
Thus, without the existence of an objective, moral law giver... that is, someone outside of humanity to tell us what is objectively right and what is objectively wrong,
there
would
BE
NO
GOOD
OR
EVIL,
just as Dr. Dawkins himself realizes in his later book "A River out of Eden," when he says
"In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference."
Please note: This is NOT to say that atheists cannot be moral people, but only to say that they cannot justify the existence of morality satisfactorily. They offer a wide array of explanations for it. My favorite one is that morality evolved along with genetics, but this gives us an ever shifting morality. What is the problem with that? It suggests the possibility of a period in history where things like rape and slavery were not only accepted, but acceptable, and further suggests that at some point yet future, those things might once again be acceptable. Thus, the atheist who takes this approach cannot say that anything is objectively wrong, for all peoples and at all places and at all times, but only that such a thing is wrong here and now. So the American atheist cannot decry the evils of slavery in a place like Africa, where it still exists, but can only say that the African morality has followed a divergent evolutionary track.In the end, then, we find this: Dawkins, in his appeal to people being moral, appeals to the existence of God in an attempt to make his argument that God does not exist. As Dr. Frank Turek says, Dawkins must sit on God's lap to slap Him in His face.
