Secular Morality

The overwhelming majority of secular atheistic criticism against Islam and religion in general are moral claims (e.g., Islam is violent, homophobic, pedophilic, proponent of sex slavery, etc.), yet to an intelligent person, this does not make sense; how do people without possession of any moral foundations have the audacity to make moral arguments in the first place?

In short, there is something called "objective morality," and then there is "subjective morality":

• Subjectivity is opinion-based (e.g., "red is the best color").
• Objectivity is fact checked (e.g., "2+2=4").

Secular atheists do not have any objective morality. What secularism can only do is create subjective morality; to command its adherents to follow each one's whims and desires. Secularists are criticizing Islam based on their own subjective personal opinions. They might as well say: "I hate Islam because Muslims like the color green, yet my favorite color is blue," and this be no different than the garbage they say currently, honestly.

In Islam; morality and the concept of "good or bad," "right or wrong," or "just or unjust" are defined by Allah. What is good or bad is what Allah says it is, because He is our Creator Who has revealed guidance in moral standards and principles which we have to follow; a guidebook which humanity's own success both in this life and the afterlife anchors on. Obedience to Allah's commandments is what is defined as good and disobedience to His commands is defined as bad. Our objective morality is firmly established by Allah, and any other way to seek morality is false, for The Creator knows better than the created. The logic is that simple. The average atheist may object Islam's stance on morality's objectivity by bringing up Euthyphro's Dilemma, but this dilemma is wrong in itself according to the Islamic 'Aqīdah, as I've explained in the article dealing with this issue.

Nevertheless, the question of whether or not objective morality requires religion is both topical and ancient, and has long been hotly debated in politics, philosophy, etc. Fundamental to the concept of secular humanism is the strongly held viewpoint that morality doesn't require religious tenets, that is to say secular humanists posit that human beings are capable of being ethical and moral without religion, regardless of even its truthfulness.

Unsurprisingly, secular atheists explicitly disavow the connection between religion and the objectivity of morality. However, they oddly enough claim that people are not invoking ethical principles when they judge acts, but they make that moral distinction automatically because "the brain knows right from wrong and is responsible for moral judgment." However, if we degrade ethics to a merely materialistic viewpoint, then the brain is merely made up of neurons which communicate with one another through electrical and chemical signals, and the function of the nervous system consists of neurons exchanging signals thanks to the charged neural membranes which change in response to neurotransmitter molecules released from other neurons and environmental stimuli.

That is, moral principles are not the product of this brain activity (let alone consciousness actually coming from the brain as we discussed in a past article, Consciousness in the Heart). Moral principles are derived from the innate disposition which is consistent with the religious accountability, that is to say moral inclinations can't emerge independently of religious intuitions. Accordingly, religion is a precondition for morality, and it's therefore wrong to view the human being as a purely physical being and to explain his reality in exclusively materialistic terms, for if we analyze the human cerebral activity from a purely physical perspective, as we did earlier, it would be reduced to a mere exchange of ions and electrical charges on an atomic level; no moral code, no ethos, and no innate dictates of conscience.

Interestingly, such a materialistic perspective can provide a rationale for even the most appalling crimes against humanity such as total genocide of the so-called "lower races." For instance; Hitler admired America's rapid industrialization and growth which he attributed to the expulsion of indigenous people and the institution of slavery. So his plan was for Germany to emulate the U.S. by seizing large tracts of productive land by pushing the "Untermensch" out and then employing slave labor to produce the food necessary to support industrialization and militarization, just as the U.S. had done, because he ultimately considered mass eradication as the only "rational" solution according to natural selection.

Consequently, people with smaller or bigger skulls than that of the average "racially superior person" were thrown in animal cages for display and public humiliation, persecuted, put into concentration camps, and even further going, almost 300,000 people from different "inferior races" were killed in the infamous Aktion T4 operations. Assuredly, Hitler and his Nazi government used the evolutionist idea, that the civilized races of man will certainly exterminate and replace the savage races through the world, to justify ethnofascist militarism and to support the total eradication of those who can't stand to fit with the face of the "higher race." In other words, they believed that genocide was an inevitable result of the contact between people at different stages of cultural development, wherefore it's morally excusable because victims stood in the way of nature's decree (i.e., natural selection and the survival of the fittest).

In fact, atheists openly support abortion of embryos without the slightest twinge of conscience on the grounds of a purely materialistic analysis. As it happens, their rationale behind allowing the killing of those innocent babies is founded on the claim that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," which was for many decades accepted as a natural law. In its strict sense it means that an organism, in the course of its development, goes through all the stages of those forms of life from which it has evolved (i.e., embryos pass through stages of their evolutionary history). According to the theory of recapitulation, the fetus is the common general embryonic form and the early stage of development that corresponds precisely to those of animals (fish and reptiles), therefore, atheists argue that there is no harm in aborting fetuses. Analogously, it is possible, both materialistically and atheistically, to rationalize the annihilation of the entire human race, for it would be no different from the destruction of bacterial colonies.

In a final word, humans need religion to curb nature's vices and it is simply impossible for them to be moral without religious guidance. Despite the claim of the proponents of atheism, and that the "brain" knows right from wrong and is responsible for moral judgment, it's impossible, without a valid religious foundation, to justify moral behavior on metaphysical grounds and thus to make a coherent case for abiding by moral standards. That's what Richard Dawkins himself claimed:

To sum up, human knowledge, gained through science and logic, is deficient despite its ability to provide solutions to simple problems as regards food, travel, medication, and comfort, because it can't resolve any existential crisis or answer the foundation of all questions. On the other hand, the true religion (i.e., Islam), through its legitimate divine revelation, answers all the questions pertaining the human values and the teleological meanings as well as the unseen. Hence, those who find themselves dazzled by secular philosophy and empirical science, taking it as the real knowledge whilst regarding the knowledge brought by the prophets of Allah as worthless, are doomed to failure and eternal damnation.

As we can see, morality, just like angels, is a religious concept; seeing an atheist trying to prove objective morality is as absurd as seeing an atheist trying to prove that angels or demons or flying spaghetti monsters exist. More psychologically developed atheists like Nietzsche realized this once, and his rejection of theism is what led him into rejecting the objectivity of morality as a whole in most of his writings:

Even learned atheist scholars, like Russ Shafer-Landau, admit that the role of creating objective morality is unattainable for actual human beings, unless by attaining some sort of a "divine god-like status," where no biases or personally cherished beliefs of any kind should be held, all while keeping a totally neutral standpoint, and let alone the need for an absolute authority to impose such morals on humanity as a whole and throughout all cultures through innate disposition and sending prophets and messengers in every tribe and society:

Most atheists actually reject the concept of objective morality, because objective moral truths transcend human subjectivity. If we are able to establish morality as being objective, then we assert the existence of an external standard (i.e., Allah). In other words, we can conclude that secular atheism has no objective morality, because no human being can hold absolute neutrality while dealing with such matters. The best thing atheism can only do is to create subjective morality since they detached morality from Allah altogether, and to logically determine what is good and what is bad subjectively. The possible grounding on which it stands on goes something like these:

1. The Harm Principle (i.e., removing or minimizing harm)
2. Hedonism (i.e., maximizing pleasure and happiness)
3. Consent
4. Evolution (i.e., imitating animals to survive)
5. Empathy and Humanity

From this point on, we will show how absurdly inconsistent such choices can be if they're used to differentiate between good and bad. Before reading, please understand that due to the nature of this topic, there may be certain unavoidable uses of language and sexual details that some may find disgustingly unbefitting, repulsive, and offensive.

1. The Harm Principle ~

This is John Stewart Mill's famous principle; an improvement to Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism. It can be summarized as: "Do whatever you want so long as you don't harm anyone."

This logic is highly contradictory to atheism itself, however; mountains of scientific studies have shown atheism is harmful to human health and society. For example, there's a large meta-analysis on ScienceDirect that shows how atheism harms people's mental well-being, degrades their self-esteem, increases their depression and suicidality, and results in higher crime rates and substance use. Atheists can't consistently use this logic without also abandoning atheism itself; they cannot claim an action is morally wrong using the Harm Principle, since atheism itself is something that harms people. Therefore, the idea of the Harm Principle doesn't conform with atheism in the first place.

But let's stop and ask ourselves this; why is not harming anyone required for something to be morally permissible? What's so bad about harming others? Sure, if we think about harming others, that might make us feel bad or even disgusted. It might cause us anger, but that doesn't mean that it's immoral. In moral philosophy, there is a theory of morality called emotivism. Emotivism says that our moral judgments are nothing but expressions of emotion. When we say: "X is wrong," what such a statement amounts to and, hence, what it really just means is just: "X makes me feel bad!"

Of course, feelings are subjective; diferent people feel different things about X. As such, anyone who attempts to make a factual claim like: "X is wrong as a matter of fact," as if that is universally or objectively the case is simply making a category error. As an analogy, just because someone doesn't like pineapple on pizza, that doesn't mean that eating Hawaiian pizza is immoral (cry about it).

There are, obviously, many problems with emotivism, but it's interesting how the atheists use emotivism for their purposes and use it selectively. For those moral proscriptions they disagree with, they jump straight to emotivism. They might as well say: "Doing the deed with your sister is not wrong just because it makes you feel disgusted" (actual comment I found on Reddit).

But for those moral proscriptions that they believe in, emotivism goes out the window, as they may say: "Harming others is the very essence of immorality and something that we have to use the force of law to prevent." Why the selectivity? Why draw the line at this notion of "harm," which is in itself loosely defined and selectively applied? If you press such people to explain why harming others is immoral, this forces them to get into the meta-ethical and metaphysical issues that they attack theists for. Either they have to dig in their heels and say it's immoral because "it just is, ok?," or they would just bite the bullet, reject the notion of morality in its entirety, and embrace what amounts to some form of nihilism (and of course, this can be responded to on its own terms but even absent that, to simply get an atheist to admit he's essentially a nihilist is itself a huge win that can be leveraged in further arguing against him).

One might disagree with and say that: "Harms were always known and easily distinguished but powerful, evil, self-serving people prevented moral sentiments from changing in order to address those harms." However, there's absolutely no proof whatsoever that certain harms were always known throughout human history. If we survey the world's cultures throughout history, much of what is considered seriously "harmful" by present standards was unheard of historically, and most of the Western categorizations of harm are unheard of in the East even nowadays; homophobia is one example, transphobia is another, cultural appropriation, oppression through pronoun selection, etc. Everything that is known nowadays by the atheistic liberal society as oppression, disenfranchisement, sexism, etc., was historically unheard of, and the very concepts upon which these "evils" are based were not coined prior to one or two generations ago. How plausible is this view that many of the serious "harms" recognized by the atheists today were known historically?

In fact, this exact response undermines the whole idea of a central tenet held by the liberal society; "moral progress," the thought that there's nothing wrong with morality changing over time, dismissing it as a natural, inevitable process that we should all embrace. If the Harm Principle is an un-evolving absolute and people's knowledge of what's harmful or not is an un-evolving absolute, then where exactly is all the moral progress we keep hearing so much about?

One might say that: "The progress happens when the bad guys get beat and true justice triumphs," but that is a very weak idea of moral progress, because it's general knowledge accepted by every sane human being. What if Hitler's ideology was too militarily equipped? What if they won and took over Europe (and I kinda wish they did)? The fight between good and evil is perpetual, and sometimes, the good guys win, other times they lose; everyone believes this. This is hardly the notion of continuous moral progress over the course of human history that the atheists like to appeal to.

2. Hedonism ~

A more outdated version of Mill's Harm Principle is heavily based on utilitarianism (i.e., maximizing net happiness in society); hedonism, or pleasure seeking, is the basis for many liberal, feminist, and homosexual ethics. One of the strongest criticism of it is that it would allow gangrape, on the basis that a group of rapists would gain more total happiness than the victim gained any unhappiness such that the net happiness in the world has increased.

This atheist logic of promoting hedonism also permits things like rape, bestiality, child molestation, and other sexual deviances. David Benatar, a known atheist philosopher, explains that those who promote "sexual liberation" open the doors to rape as a "human right":

In fact, many well-known academic atheist pseudo-philosophers (like Benetar, Singer, Gule, etc.) would state that this is what subjective attempts at a secular liberal atheist moral framework logically lead to. Funnily enough, a huge study on the topic of atheism and morality on PLOS One has found that people (and even atheist participants) judge immoral acts like incest, necrobestiality, serial murder, cannibalism, and "having sex with, then eating, a dead chicken" as representatives of atheists out of all religious and ethnic groups:

3. Consent ~

This also contradicts atheism, for the logical end conclusion of basing morality on consent is anti-natalism, summarized as: "Life is the ultimate evil since nobody consents to exist" (at least not from an Islamic perspective, because in Islam every human did actually consent to be born prior to existence). With the spread and acceptance of the anti-natalist ideology, atheism will surely cause the extinction of the human race, as David Benatar explains:

If I recall correctly during my stay on the worst website ever made (Reddit), there's even a whole popular subreddit supporting anti-natalism. In point of fact, consent shouldn't the central tenet the of morality, as some entities can't consent; if we take animals' consent into account, then slaughtering them for food is murderous cannibalism and keeping them as pets is slavery, and if we take children's consent into account, then changing their diapers is sexual molestation and an invasion of their privacy, and giving birth to them is an infringement on their consent from an apparent sense. Some people actually believe this, scary.

Anyway, if we base morality on consensual agreements, then incest, necrophilia, pedophilia, and zoophilia would be moral; if a sibling, a corpse, a child, or a dog and a creep genuinely loved each other, this reasoning would permit their sexual relationship. One might object by saying that incest is harmful to offspring, but what if, as Lawrence Krauss said above, the siblings use contraception, or both parties are homosexual? Another objection is that dead people, children, and animals can't consent, and hence it becomes rape; this is wrong in all ways. For necrophilia, a dead man could consent to it prior to death, so there's nothing wrong from a liberal paradigm, add to that the fact that some bodies are given out for research purposes with the consent of the family as well; a dead body is more comparable to an inanimate object than a human being, so there's absolutely nothing stopping an atheist from opening the zipper and having a little fun, now is there? As for zoophilia and pedophilia, atheist philosophers like Peter Singer and David Benatar have shown that animals and children, from an atheistic perspective, can actually consent to sexual intercourse:

Of course, it doesn't end here; atheism also contradicts informed consent. After all, no atheist informs religious people that atheism causes health problems, depression, and pushes its adherents to bump up suicide rates. Here's a study from Springer:

Suicide rates (per 100,000) according to religion (PDF).

I sure do love how the atheists base their morality on consensual agreements when they literally have a problem with the majority of people consenting to religion.

4. Evolution ~

Evolution, which is a pillar and a foundation of an atheistic worldview, is actually contradictory to atheism as well. Ironic, isn't it?

Liberal secularism, the socio-political philosophy of atheism, results in population decline and a civilization's eventual extinction, which is pretty common knowledge since liberal secularism promotes population control, abortions, and the (indirect) destruction of family relationships to a point where the adherents of this ideology can't even uphold a nuclear family structure. Atheist societies are evolutionarily inferior, they don't and can't and will never, ever, survive longer than religious societies. That's according to this, this, and this:

In addition, evolution stands by the claim that any deeper meaning to morality beyond survival, such as ethics, is illusory. But hypothetically, if evolution took us to a point where rape is added our survival, then it becomes moral according to the atheistic mindset; that's why Dawkins admitted that rape being wrong is as arbitrary as us evolving to have five fingers instead of six.

And, of course, we shouldn't even need to explain why the behaviors and habits of animals shouldn't be the basis for morality, otherwise, we'd have a basis for murder, rape, cannibalism, sacrifice, coprophagia, incest, necrophilia, pedophilia, sodomy, nudity, theft, and infanticide, just to name a few. There are no "animal civilizations." Allah separated man from animals by moral values and the ability to rationalize:

5. Empathy and Humanity ~

The last and most appealing resort for atheists is suggesting "humanity," or more precisely "empathy," as a fifth grounding by claiming that the "humanity within us is enough to guide us on what is right and what is wrong, without the intervention of Allah or religious institutions." The "empathy" they refer to isn't the innate disposition of human beings (i.e., the Fitrah), since that would contradict the irreligious stance of secularism; rather, it involves cognition, emotion and compassion as means to build up a moral basis with thought, research, and logical thinking.

This doesn't make any sense because empathy is subjective in of itself, and it depends heavily on societal norms which majoritarily rely on the environment, ideology, religion, culture, and historical contexts of different societies; homosexuality, for example, is fine in one region, whilst in the other it isn't. This is why many atheists ideologically resort to what the majority believes in, which is an ad populum logical fallacy.

The real problem here is that being "empathetic" or "humane" is just another wording for being "moral" by all appearances, and in this case, that would be circular reasoning. Surely, it's undeniable that an atheist can be cognitively, emotionally, and compassionately empathetic and humane in the eyes of others, but this is one thing, and justifying moral acts by providing an objective moral basis for them is another; one which the atheists have failed to do.

The question here has never been about the great possibility of a good atheist or a bad theist in a moral sense, but the logical question is about whether atheism as an ideology could lead to moral conduct or not. There are moral atheists, but there is no moral atheism; their "morality" is essentially derived from factors and sources external to atheism itself, such as parental upbringings, social environments, or what little is left out of their undistorted Fitrah. A moral atheist is not a true representative of atheism in its true form since atheism revolves around the idea of our existence without an end goal, without an overseer to our actions, and without a punishment or a reward to them; I don't think this mindset encourages good moral conduct.