Robertson on Dawkins part two

David Robertson’s second youtube installment on The Dawkins Letters. 

He presents a very reasonable, fair argument.  I like how he pushes atheism to its logical conclusions; this is something that very few atheists do. 

The idea that we can be atheists and believe in morality really was dealt a death blow after World War Two.  Up until this point, legal jurists (who study theories of legal philosophy, morality etc) were making apparently great strides in a legal theory called positivsm.  This is essentially a secular, atheistic take on law.  It was the belief that law is only law because a group of humans have decided it is a law.  Thus, working on atheism’s presuppositions that there is no absolute morality, positivism claimed that law is amoral and any law passed by a particular legislature cannot be externally condemned on moral grounds.

So this is where atheistic thinking was prior to WW2.  Then came the Nazis.  In the Nazi state, the Holocaust was perfectly legal.  Everything they did to the Jews was permitted by their own legal code.

This was the point at which positivism (in its thoroughly atheistic ‘there is no God so there is no absolute morality’ sense) crumbled and died.  For its atheistic proponents to act consistently, they would have had to say the Nazis were justified as, (a) their legal code allowed the Holocaust, and (b) no-one can judge the Nazis because there is no God so there is no absolute morality with which to condemn them.

Needless to say, the jurists in question realised this and quickly abandoned their fundamentally flawed theory.  At this point, jurisprudence developed the concept of ‘the minimum content of natural law’ (that all human law must be based on some kind of minimal level moral absolutes).  Thus, it was recognised that moral absolutes do exist; obviously, this is at total loggerheads with atheism. 

On such a premise, the rest of the world has moved on in its moral theory.  In this light, it’s hard not to see Richard Dawkins as an intellectual dinosaur.  To use an evolutionary metaphor, his species (the inconsistent atheistic moralist) has long since died out.  In the survival of the fittest ideas, his idea wasn’t fit enough to survive.

When you study the history of ideas, it is clear that atheism’s intellectual claims are totally untenable, particularly when it comes to morality.  It’s not really surprising that a guy like Dawkins uses an outmoded idea as the basis of his debate.  He does not attack Christian theism intellectually, he attacks it pragmatically, polemically and emotionally.

All the best to David Robertson for engaging with him in a kind of Jurassic Park battle against the (reconstructed) T-Rex of the ideas world!