Arguing the powers of atheism and religion

August 19, 2009|Rich Barlow, Globe Correspondent

‘How can you be a Christian when you are such an [expletive]?’’ someone supposedly asked Evelyn Waugh after the British writer converted to Roman Catholicism in 1930. According to legend, Waugh answered, “Just think how much worse an [expletive] I would be if I were not a Christian.’’

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, a professor of philosophy at Dartmouth, quotes the above exchange in “Morality Without God’’ to argue that religion can be a force for good, even for flawed believers, and to make the same case about the positive power of atheism. If we lived in a rational world, a reviewer could pan this book as a needless waste of ink. That atheists can be moral without resorting to belief in God, and that such belief is hardly insurance against sinfulness, is supported not only by many people’s everyday experience but by longstanding intellectual tradition. The American thinker and humanist Robert Ingersoll became one of the top orators of the Gilded Age with his reasoned defense of agnosticism.

Sadly, however, Sinnott-Armstrong’s book is necessary. Thankfully, it is well done.

Why necessary? “Atheism is the opiate of the morally corrupt,’’ conservative thinker Dinesh D’Souza wrote in a line Sinnott-Armstrong quotes. D’Souza could be written off as another cranky intellectual. But Sinnott-Armstrong also cites a 2007 USA Today/Gallup poll in which most respondents, 53 percent, said they would not vote for a well-qualified presidential candidate who was atheist. By contrast, fewer people objected to a gay, Mormon, female, or thrice-married candidate. No wonder Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins are grouchy.

Sinnott-Armstrong is a big improvement on those two atheist authors: Though he variously calls himself agnostic and atheist, he’s no grouch, and he’s actually versed in the thinking of religious believers, both as a philosopher and former evangelical Christian. “Morality Without God’’ is a short, clear, and occasionally witty refutation of the atheism-is-bad brief, and evangelical Christianity, with its emphasis on the Bible, is its main target. (Religions such as Roman Catholicism and liberal Protestantism, by contrast, stress not just the Bible but also church tradition and scholarship in constructing their theology and moral teachings.)