The Moral Atheist: A response to Rabbi Adam Jacobs

Kenneth M. Montville DD

One of the most obsessive claims by theists is that without the delusional acceptance
of a personal creator god one can have no concept of morality. This is one of the most absurd
concepts out there but for some reason it is regurgitated ad nauseam. There is a willful
overlooking of ethicists who range from Immanuel Kant, whose categorical imperative and
the maxims upon which it rested required no divinities, to Ayn Rand, an atheist who
developed a field of philosophy called objectivism. In a nutshell it can be safely said that
more than one atheist philosopher—of whom there are many—would disagree with the
rabbi’s narrow view of morality as the sole property of the religious.
Beyond Rabbi Jacobs’ narrow view of morality as something to be expressed solely
though the personification of a deity, he seemed to miss the point of Sam Harris’ TED Talk
on the question of whether or not science can dictate ethics. He goes on to make baseless
claims such as that atheists don’t believe in free will, and that one is either absolutely
objective in their morality or completely amoral. The first claim is patently false, many
atheists believe in free will. In fact, free will is a much harder line to buy as soon as one
considers the logical ramifications of an all knowing god. If Yahweh knows everything then
humans have no free will. He knows if a person is going to be a sinner or not and the person
in question has no choice because God’s knowledge of his actions is predetermined long
before the action takes place. Conversely, if God doesn’t know what a person will do then he
is not omnipotent and the claim to who and what he is begins to fall apart. The error on
Rabbi Jacob’s part here is that he seems to conflate one’s admitting a lack of knowledge on
whether or not there truly is free will with denying its existence altogether.
As stated, the rabbi’s second fallacious point is that there is objective morality and
amorality. This is simply a false dichotomy created by his own cognitive dissonance and
nothing more. For the rabbi, there must be objective morality or his theological claims fall
apart; however, this claim fails to hold water no matter how hard the rabbi accepts it as
true. Ethics come with reason and logic. It is hard to classify traditional religious morality
as actual ethics because there is little reasoning involved. In Exodus God hands the
Decalogue to Moses as a matter of fact. Moses is never told why observing the Sabbath is
inherently good, let alone why murder is wrong. The claims made within many religions
follow more as paranesis; instruction to those who already buy into a set of moral claims as
how best to follow them rather than protepsis, arguments made to persuade why a set of
moral claims is correct. Real ethics takes into account action and reaction while objective
religious morality is more of a one sided game. One ought to do A because of B. However, in
ethics the operative word is “ought” while in religion the operative word is “must.” Ethics
comes from a desire to live an examined life, to paraphrase Socrates—a man who was
accused, according to Plato’s Apology, as being an atheist.
 It seems that from the get-go Rabbi Jacobs misunderstands the whole discussion—
this may explain the horribly irrelevant comment on his opinion of Sam Harris based on
Harris’s support of the State of Israel. However, it isn’t just ethics that Rabbi Harris
misunderstands. He takes a quick jab at science as well, commenting on a talk given by
Christopher Hitchens titled “The Moral Necessity of Atheism.” It should usually send up a
red flag as soon as a term like “Neo-Darwinianism” is used—a meaningless neologism
created by theists to sound scary to those with an even worse understanding of science.
Rabbi Jacob’s defines this “Neo-Darwinianism” as a “perpetual death struggle within all
species at all times.” Now, this must be a willful misunderstanding of one of the most basic
of biological principles as it is hard to believe that an educated person living in the global
west does not have at least a cursory knowledge of the mechanism of natural selection.
Using this false claim Rabbi Jacobs managed to turn a good point about how racism is
objectively wrong because all humans are related genetically and make the argument that
it would have been more apt to advocate for genocide—an interesting position for sure
considering the recent history of the Rabbi’s people.
With the last point he tries to derail a secular understanding of morality and state
that when atheists have good moral understandings it is only because it grew out of the
Judeo-Christian ethics using a quote by Jeffery Dahmer to supposedly prove his point that
atheists—especially those who are ardent supporters of evolution—are by nature immoral.
Again, this claim falls flat on its face. Without resorting to the blatant fact that using a
single sociopath to prove that a whole group of people are immoral is fallacious—e.g. Hitler
was in fact a Roman Catholic but making the claim that all Roman Catholics are genocidal
tyrants is wrong—there are myriad ethical theories which relate a genuine concept of how
one ought to live without the reliance on supernatural deities. From Mill’s Utilitarianism to
Rand’s Objectivism, from Kant’s categorical imperative to Hume’s is-ought problem,
philosophy has been no less shaped by free thinkers than it has by the religious.

Copyright © 2011 Kenneth M. Montville

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