THE CITY

The City
I agree with Nielsen. Apart from God, there is no good reason for
me to do the morally good thing in cases where I can benefit from
doing the wrong thing and can do it with impunity. If morality is just
a function of where the human race has evolved thus far, this seems
a flimsy basis for the affirmation of such values as the worth and
dignity of all people, their equality before the law, the need to treat
people as ends in themselves and not just means to other ends, and
the duty to do the moral thing even in situations where you can get
away with doing what is immoral.
If I am right that objective moral values and obligations only exist
if God exists, then there are two choices. You can opt for atheism
and some kind of evolutionary and relativistic meta-ethical theory
or you can opt for theism and for objective moral values. If you are
someone who thinks, for example, that torturing babies just for the
fun of it is objectively morally wrong, even if there are perverted
sadists who think it is okay, and even if (God forbid!) such perverted
sadists became the majority, then that, I say, is a good reason for you
to believe in God.
III
Let me close with some thoughts about why I am not an atheist, i.e.,
why I believe in God. I will mention three reasons. First, I believe in
God for the historical reason that my parents believed in God and
taught me to do the same. But since many people grow up to reject
opinions held by their parents, I should add the important phrase,
“and I have never encountered any convincing reason to reject belief
in God.”
Like everybody else, I have listened over the years to very many
reasons that atheists give against God, but I have never found any
of them to be convincing. There are of course serious anti-theistic
arguments that theists must think about and treat carefully, but I
think many of them I amount to sheer ranting or even hand waving.
They are often of the form, “After all, everybody knows that
_______” or “Of course every intelligent person today realizes that
________.” Richard Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion (2006), for
example, is full of more bluster than argumentation, and when he
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