Catholic and Enjoying It!
One of the great rhetorical maelstroms to come in the wake of the shallow crackpots who have given us the New Atheism is the perennial question, “How can atheists possibly be moral without God?” Fundamentalist Christians love this one since they think they really got the New Atheists on the run. Fundamentalist Atheists (aka “New Atheists”) think the charge so self-evidently silly that they love it too, since they imagine that “being moral” is a piece of cake and in no way raises theistic issues. Neither side has the slightest idea what they are talking about.
So along comes Mike Flynn to bring a boatload of paradoxical light and clarity to the discussion by creating a Thomistic defense of Moral Atheists, with St. Paul as their great champion! In the course of it, we discover a) that Fundamentalist Christians who imagine that morality is impossible for an atheist simple do not know what they are talking about. However, we also discover that atheist moralists (aka “New Atheists”) have not thought deeply at all about the untenableness of their own position. Real atheists are actually the ones who argue the most strenuously that morality is a subjective illusion, that there is no answer to the question “Why not be cruel?” without smuggling in a transcendent code of ethics reflecting the Will of You Know Who, and so forth. So the problem is not that atheists are immoral. The problem is that atheists are theives who constantly borrow Greatest Hits from a transcendent worldview rooted in Theism, while lying to everybody (including themselves) that their favorite “self-evident” truths are just artifacts of evolution or “practical” or some other lame naturalist piece of bafflegab while ignoring the fact that they are privileging their own favorite moral precepts as Transcendent.
Flynn cuts through the BS and demonstrates that what’s really happening is that atheists, being human, have the law of God written on their hearts and just don’t want to admit it.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In