How One Atheist (or Agnostic) Sees The World

A Christian asked me the following questions in a discussion over religion and atheism, and I wrote the answer below, and I liked it enough to want to save it in a more easily accessible location than Facebook.

The questions:

Just how do you determine what is right or wrong without God? And what do you do about guilt and what is the purpose of guilt? Do you think there is a difference between people and animals? Do people have souls?

And my answers:

OK, in order... to me, good and evil is based largely on empathy and unwilling harm done to others. So to me, it is evil to murder someone (you're taking away their life without their approval), but it is not evil to assist someone in suicide (for instance, if they're a terminal patient, assuming the person is making a fully informed decision and hasn't been coerced or misled into the decision).

I do not find "victimless" crimes to be particularly bad, except when they're "victimless" only in that you happened to not hurt someone. (For instance, I don't have any problem with consensual sodomy in any form, but I think drunk driving is evil, because drunk driving MAY be victimless, most of the time, but it puts other people at serious risk due to YOUR risky behavior, and the times that it ISN'T victimless can be pretty extreme). I'd be open to discussing whether drunk driving should be treated as never victimless and punished whenever it's found, or whether we should say "No, if you don't hit anyone, you're fine, but if you kill someone and you're found to be drunk, you face the death penalty", aka make it only a crime if you ACTUALLY hurt someone, but make the punishment so extreme that no one wants to risk it.



And it isn't the HARM that's the problem, it's the harm done to someone against their will. And by that I mean that I think it's STUPID to play Russian Roulette, but if a group of people wants, of their own accord and with no coercion, to play the game, I don't think that's EVIL, even though some of the participants will almost certainly die. No one there dies who didn't know it was a possibility and who didn't willingly join into the game.

So that's a very simplified view of my take on right and wrong.  But honestly, it's a "do unto others" situation. If I wouldn't want it done to me, or if a reasonable person wouldn't want it done to them even if it's not something I mind, then in general, doing it to someone against their will is bad. It doesn't require the threat of a God to recognize that, nor the teaching of a religion to make clear what should be obvious to every normal human being.

Question two I don't understand. What do I do about guilt? I feel guilt the same way anyone else feels guilt. Some more so, some less so, but guilt does not, IMO, come from religion (although some religious people convince themselves that the source of their guilt is "shame before God"). But I don't know what you mean by "what do you do about it and what is the purpose of it". What is the purpose of any emotion? What is the purpose of happiness? Sadness? Excitement? Envy? I'm sure they all have biological purposes, at some point each of those emotions in some way enhanced the chances of survival of those people who had it over those who did not. Beyond that, I'm not sure there's some grand universal "purpose".

Do I think there's a difference between people and animals? I struggle with this one all the time. Clearly we sort of have to dismiss that to some extent, or we'd never be able to eat meat, but that might be an intentional and necessary blindness rather than a reality. Certainly families that have dogs don't like to see their animal mistreated or harmed, or get sick. We know some animals can learn, which means there's intelligence there. But I am leery of getting into the "relative intelligence" debate, because that's a slippery slope to the "Ok, if it's intelligence, then are mentally challenged people less human than average humans? Are Mensa members MORE human than average?"

So... I can't really answer that. I try not to inflict any unnecessary pain or mistreatment upon animals, because there's no reason to be cruel, but I am not a vegetarian, so clearly I've convinced myself it's OK to eat them, or at least some of them, and I'm not above squashing a beetle or spider in my house or swatting a fly or a mosquito, and I wouldn't be at all happy doing any of those things to a fellow human being, even one in a persistent vegetative state (aka no more aware or intelligent than animals may be).

Do people have souls? Define souls. To my way of thinking, we don't yet completely understand the nature of awareness. What exactly is going on in the brain to make us aware? I don't mean WHAT we're aware OF, but THAT we're aware at all. I know you can make people have hallucinations by stimulating various portions of the brain, so certainly the brain is involved, but what aspect of the brain makes awareness happen? I don't believe we know, scientifically. And so that old "any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic" argument kicks in, and lacking any better answer, I suppose you can call that "a soul" until we discover a better answer for it.

Remember, I'm agnostic, not atheist, which means I'm honestly not sure if there's anything after death. I don't think it likely involves God in any way that human beings currently conceive of the concept, but we have ZERO experience of people coming back who have gone FULLY through that door for more than a few seconds.

Let's analogize to one of those one-way, full-height turnstiles in subways. You are in a building and you see one of those that leads into another part of the building, and you have NO idea what's over there. You do know that you've seen people go through it, and the only people who have come back didn't really go FULLY through it, and they report having seen things on the other side, but clearly their view wasn't much better than just standing next to the turnstile.

What's on the other side? You can't see. You have no reliable testimony from anyone who has been there. So all you can do is speculate. It could be a wild party, so much fun no one even considers leaving. It could be filled with poison gas and the moment you're out of sight down the hallway, you die. It could be that you're just trapped there and no one comes back because no one can get out. It could be that there's another exit out of the building on that side, and no one comes out because they leave the building and go home and you just don't see them.

Death is, to me, the same way. The number of possibilities I can think of is myriad and of course includes the very real possibility that this is it, when we die our consciousness is extinguished along with our body, and that's just the end of it. My ego doesn't like this answer, because ultimately I think it's human nature to reject the idea that we are not the center of the universe or somehow essential to it... but just because we don't like something isn't reason to believe the contrary. I don't like that I'm going to die one day, but that doesn't mean I get to believe that I'm immortal.