The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [48]
Consider the first alternative: what makes the norm correct is that God chose it. If he had chosen the opposite one (a pro-choice or anti-gay norm), then the opposite one would be the morally right one.
Now consider the second alternative: God chose the pro-life or pro-gay norm, or whatever your favorite moral norm is, because it is the right one, and he was smart enough to discern that fact about it.
Pretty much everybody, including the dyed-in-the-wool theists among us, prefers the second alternative. No one wants to admit that our most cherished moral norms are the right, correct, true morality solely because they were dictated to us by God, even a benevolent, omniscient God. After all, he is omniscient, so he knows which norm is right; and he is benevolent, so he will choose the norm he knows to be morally best for us. If it’s just a matter of whatever he says goes, then he could have made the opposite norm the right one just by choosing it. That can’t be right.
It must be that the norms God imposes on us were ones he chose because they are the right ones. Whatever it is that makes them right, it’s some fact about the norms, not some fact about God. But what is that fact about the right moral norms that makes them right? All we can tell so far is that it was some fact about them that God in his omniscient wisdom was able to see.
Atheists and agnostics, too, will make common cause with the theists in seeking this right-making property of any moral norm that we all share in common (and there are many such norms). Plato’s argument should convince us all that finding this right-making property of the moral norms we accept is an urgent task.
There is one way for the theist to avoid this task, but it’s not one people will have much intellectual respect for. The theist can always say that identifying the right-making property of the morally right norms is a task beyond our powers. They could claim that it is beyond the powers of any being less omniscient than God. So, we had better just take his word for what’s morally right. We ought neither question it nor try to figure out what the right-making fact about the right morality is, the one that God can see but we can’t. This is a blatant dodge that all but the least inquisitive theists will reject. After all, morality isn’t rocket science. Why are its grounds beyond the ken of mortal humans?
What does Plato’s problem for sermonizing about morality have to do with scientism, or nihilism for that matter? Two things. First, Plato’s argument shows that our moral norms need to be justified and that religion is not up to the job. Second, it turns out that scientism faces a coincidence problem just like the one troubling the theists. No theist can accept that it’s just a coincidence that a moral norm is the right one and that God just happened to choose it for us. One of these two things must explain the other. Similarly, scientism is going to be faced with its own intolerable coincidence. But unlike theism, it’s going to have a solution: nihilism.
Nihilism maintains that there isn’t anything that makes our moral norms the right ones or anyone else’s norms the right ones either. It avoids the challenge Plato set for anyone who wants to reveal morality’s rightness. Nihilism instead recognizes that Plato’s challenge can’t be met. But the nihilist doesn’t need to deny that almost all people share the same core moral norms, theists and nihilists included. Ironically, almost everyone’s sharing a core morality is just what nihilism needs to show that no morality can be justified. What’s more, the reasons that make nihilism scientifically and scientistically unavoidable also reveal that it doesn’t have the disturbing features scientistic people worry about. Public relations problem solved.
TWO EASY STEPS TO NIHILISM
We can establish the truth of nihilism by substantiating a couple of premises:
• First premise: All cultures, and almost