"Funny thing. I have a feeling that if I were atheist I would have killed somebody by now. So therefore... I won't even consider it. Christianity helps me keep my morals in check."
--Killerdragon, in the comment thread for the guild opening post.

(Killerdragon has since refined his position - I'd suggest reading the linked thread before commenting on the quote)

I've seen opinions similar to this in a lot of places - basically, this general idea that there is no sense of morality under atheism, or that there can be no morality under atheism.

I've always been mildly puzzled by this particular claim. It just doesn't make sense to me. I'll go into why soon.

As I understand it, the basic argument goes something like this:

- God gives us morality (or, alternately, god is morality. More later)
- Atheists don't believe in god.
- Therefore, atheists have no morality.

Of course, this is probably a gross oversimplification. I'm sure you can probably find more in-depth explanations elsewhere, and I'd suggest you look into it.

Anyway, the basic idea is that you can't have morality without some sort of supernatural being giving it to you (in stone tablets, or whatnot).

Obviously, I would disagree.

This particular argument/idea fails on several fronts. I'll just go through a few:

- Divine command ethics (God/s tell you what's good or bad) is not exactly a great ethical system. Firstly, it has to deal with the problem of the Euthyphro dilemma - does god/s command things because they are good, or are things good because they are commanded by god/s? If the former, there is morality external to god/s. If the latter, what is moral is arbitrary, which goes against the whole spirit of the idea to me.

To make matters worse, you then have to deal with the issue of deciding which particular divine command ethics you're going to follow - Catholic? Hindu? Sikh? It fails as an absolute ethical system because it isn't evident, in any form - the arguments for any of the divine command ethics systems clearly aren't extremely forceful, because people don't necessarily accept them.

- These arguments seem to be based on the idea that under atheism, morality must be relative - as someone who likes to think he has an absolute sense of morality, this is quite annoying.

Consider a few well-known ethical systems suggested by philosophers - utilitarianism and Kantian ethics. Utilitarianism holds that an action is 'good' if it causes more happiness than sorrow - basically, you tally up all the 'good stuff' your action will cause, and all the 'bad stuff', and then decide based on what the tallies come to. Kantian ethics hold that an action can only be good if you could reasonably foresee everyone doing the same thing. Lying, for example, is bad under Kantian ethics - because if everybody lied, society would not last long.

Neither of those ethical systems even come close to mentioning God, god, or gods.

They're also both absolute.

Of course, they're hardly perfect - pretty much everybody sort of subscribes to a mix of those two with a healthy dose of intuition. But the point is that these are two well-developed, long-standing ethical systems that do not require a deity.

- Finally, the claim just doesn't match up with observed reality - atheists aren't less moral than other people, as measured by any reasonable standard. They don't murder more often, or steal more often, they don't donate less to charity, or lie more. At least, I've never seen any reliable statistics demonstrating this.

Basically, morality and atheism are entirely compatible - the idea that religions have a monopoly on moral thought is just wrong.