An Accidental Virtue: Why Atheist Ethics are Necessarily Arbitrary and Accidental

A common claim of atheists is that they “don't need ‘a book’ to tell them how to be a good person.” The purport of this claim is that the distinction between good and evil, right and wrong, and virtue and vice, are in some sense self-evident and readily accessible to reason. If, however, this claim is examined more closely, then its emptiness will become clear.

In order to make this problem more clear, the concept of canon will prove illuminating. It is not a word which is often heard in day to day speech, and so deserves a brief explanation. One standard definition of the term canon is “a general law, rule, principle, or criterion by which something is judged.” It comes from the Greek, kanon, and calls to mind a measuring stick like a ruler or “any straight rod or bar; rule; standard of excellence.”

The notion of canon is important, especially in things requiring measurement, for without an objective standard of measure, a canon, there is no way to have any certainty regarding the true dimensions of any object of inquiry. An additional consequence of having no accurate measurement means that one will also be unable to squarely fit any additional pieces together. Thus if one wants, say, to lay the foundation for a house, fit a pipe, or build a bridge, one must have an objective canon, a fixed measure or criterion by which to ensure that the construction does not fall apart.

A similar situation obtains in ethics. For example, if there is an ethical prescription, say, against theft, meaning the forbidding of a claim to ownership of any property that is not rightfully one’s own, i.e. to not steal, then this prescription serves as a canon, a criterion, a measure by which to evaluate whether or not an act can be regarded as theft. Without this objective canon, however, nothing is objectively ethical, and therefore it would be impossible to measure whether or not an action was ethically forbidden and thus wrong. It is the criterion which makes this evaluation possible. In other words, a canon is the organizing principle that makes ethics possible.

An additional factor impacting the concept of canon is that of authority. This is made obvious in the differences between the US standard and the metric systems. For example, when people design parts for a machine, they will measure according to one or the other system. When a system is chosen and put in place, the various manufacturers can produce size-matching products. Although in this example the systems of measure are each equally valid, it is clear that uniformity of measure is what makes complex integration of many machine parts feasible, and that the imposition of this measure by an authority that makes its feasibility actual. In other words, the canon becomes effectual because it is established by an authority (whether this be initiated by an academic institution, scientific academy, or governmental organization, etc.).

Without an authority there is no foundation upon which to establish the consistent criterion requisite for effectual compatibility. No authority means no canon; no canon means no organizing principle. The problem, therefore, for the atheist, is that there is neither an objective criterion nor authority, and therefore no possibility for establishing any stable, non-arbitrary ethical system.

Atheism can equally produce anything from a principle of hedonism to total permissiveness to one of eugenics-inspired genocide to one of killing all humans in order to preserve the environment, and anything inbetween. But within atheism there is absolutely no authority that can be appealed to which states one is objectively right and the other objectively wrong. The appeal will be to reason, desire, force (alas), precedent, survival, democratic processes, various philosophers, studies, aesthetics, psychology, or any number of other things, but canonically none of them will agree with each other or be able to establish a certain foundation or principle of integration for ethics.

Christianity, however, as regards ethics, has an explicit, unquestioned authority in the Lord Jesus Christ, and as such He establishes both the canon and the authority for determining what is right and wrong. For example, if a man hates his enemy, one can immediately point to Christ who stated unequivocally to love one’s enemy (Matthew 5:44; Romans 13:9; 1 Corinthians 13; Galatians 5:4; 1 John 2:9, 2:11, 4:20). The atheist, however, has no fixed reference to point to. He may point to this or that atheist philosopher, idea, or ruling authority, either individual or collective, perhaps a Hegel, a Rand, or a Stalin, a survival of the fittest, but ultimately they all will prove arbitrary starting points for ethical thinking, each unable to escape the ethical subjectivism which ultimately destroys all ethics. He can compel conformity, certainly, but virtue remains unknown.

Of course, very many atheists have claimed that they have a system for distinguishing right from wrong, and for identifying virtue, but without a canon these are by nature arbitrary and accidental virtue. Atheism, when it comes down to it, cannot determine whether it has produced virtuous or vicious acts, and, what is worse, there is no mechanism that in principle can inform them. It could be moral to kill inferior races, to lie to further a political cause, to destroy humanity in order to save the planet, to sterilize those deemed undesirable, or the opposite, they cannot really know. They will borrow ethical momentum from Christian civilization, of course, and arbitrarily claim it as self-evident, but without Christ these borrowed virtues will lose their center and become increasingly distorted, grotesque caricatures.

And so atheists are incorrect when they state they don’t need an authoritative source for being a good person. Without an authoritative source there is no objective canon, and with no canon there is no ability to truly distinguish right from wrong. They philosophically cannot know what a good person is or does, and so any virtue they practice is necessarily arbitrary and accidental. Virtue is not self-evident, and therefore the atheist’s claim to have it while having no means to certainly identify it and distinguish it from vice is empty.

See the following article for continued analysis.

A Female Priesthood: How We Know it is Wrong

Many can be heard to say, “I don’t need anyone to tell me murder is wrong!” And yet, as anyone knowledgeable in history will know, this ethical principle has not been universally held or recognized.

Now, what does this have to do with why women are not permitted to be priests? A lot, and the answer shall be made clear.

Returning to the groundwork of the argument, it is known that approximately eleven million non-combatants did not spontaneously die in Germany during World War II. They were murdered. Likewise, tens of millions of people in Russia, China, and elsewhere, were also murdered in the early and mid 20th Century. Going further back in history, the Mongol hordes are thought to have murdered tens of millions of people as they swept like a furious storm through the steppes of Eurasia. What is more, there have been numerous cultures who had "practices" such as cannibalism and human sacrifice.

Instances of the consistent practice of murder throughout history and across the entire planet are innumerable. It is a sad tale, but why mention it? Well, clearly these people did not heed what some appear to claim to be the nigh universal intuition that murder is wrong, that harming others is unethical, that chattel slavery, rape, and genocide are wicked evils. These wicked people lived (and still live) in the same world as those who state that they do not need to be told that murder is wrong, and yet still they murdered and saw no problem with it. It is therefore fair to say that the intuition maintaining that murder is wrong is not universally held, is not self-evident, and is not entirely obvious. In fact, it is possible that few people really know why murder is wrong, and likely attribute it to some innate ethical knowing, a moral instinct that all people share (which clearly all people do not).

The statement that people do not need to be taught that murder is wrong is, frankly, a lie. Too many people treat it as self-evident, but this is a confusion based on the fact that in our current society most people typically agree that it is wrong. But this only underscores the fact that people do need to be taught that murder is wrong, and moreover there need to be laws that announce it, and that prevent and punish for it. Those who state that they do not need to be taught that murder is wrong, that it is self-evident, are self-deceived by their conditioning, because they have been taught that murder is wrong, and having been taught that it is wrong they got the idea that it is wrong.

The philosophy of natural law certainly can, of course, inform us that murder is wrong, for God does write this on our hearts, and many cultures have come to agree with this truth, but with seared consciences not everyone is sensitive to this or receptive to the reasoning, and always evil geniuses are ready to spin reasons why the murder of certain people is okay, whether they be of a certain faith, race, territory, group, or age. For example, today millions are murdered in abortion clinics, and yet so-called civil society promotes this form of murder in the mainstream media and even frames it as a practice born of enlightened thinking. Apparently these people also need to be taught that it is wrong to murder unborn human beings.

Quite simply, it is God who, through His divine and revealed command against it, teaches us that murder is wrong. We are informed that it is wrong. It did not magically or spontaneously appear as an intuition that murder is wrong; it was not a long chain of syllogistic reasoning that convinced humanity; it was not the result of pragmatism that caused us to agree that murder is wrong. Some might think that it is more pragmatic to kill undesirables. In fact, apes kill other apes and they don’t get in any trouble, and apparently do not feel remorse. Nature kills all the time. Time itself kills all. Only the fittest survive. Many people reason similarly that lying and stealing are justified, and thus pragmatist arguments built of autonomous human reasoning might make these all together sound acceptable. Communist countries killed millions on this very basis.

It is clear that moral knowledge was not the result of the sustained brilliance and authority of human reasoning. We had to be told by God in order for it to become clear. God revealed His will that murder, lying, and stealing are wrong, and therefore it is clear. It is His will that we are obeying when we agree that these are wrong, and the fact of their wrongness has no other ontological foundation than the divine, revealed will.

Coming to the point of whether or not women should be ordained to the priesthood, the principle is the same: It is God’s will that only men be priests. It is thus not an issue of pragmatism or human reasoning. It is not an issue of women’s ability or inability. It is not a matter of culture (as this has been maintained since the Temple period and throughout the entire history of the Church and throughout all cultures). It is also not a matter of dragons who will fly in to eat any women that are found in the altar such that, in order to protect them, we must not ordain them. These are all red herrings. God wills that men be priests, and so the Church obeys, just as she obeys His will not to murder, lie, or steal.

It must be noted that famous and public Orthodox Christians are currently promoting the issue of why women might be ordained. One well-known nun has publicly stated:

“Women can be priests. We don't want them to be priests.' Because you see, God can do anything, and the Church, by divine authority, can do anything, but, the Church doesn't want to - and that's a legitimate reason.”

As if the Church’s wish is arbitrary, this nun frames the issue as the Church basing its decision on what it wants, not what God wants. God, according to her reasoning, grants divine authority to the Church, and so the Church with divine authority can say no, but the Church’s no, according to this reasoning, is disjointed from God’s will, and so the Church simply enforces its own wish, albeit authoritatively. She states it is the Church that doesn’t want to ordain women, which presupposes that the Church’s desire is somehow autonomous, not rooted essentially in God’s will, and that its autonomy being given divine sanction and authority can make what it wants binding.

The problem is, she has changed who said what. A more accurate thing to say is that God almighty wills that women not be ordained, and that the Church is simply obeying what He has revealed in, to, and through the Church, and that with divine authority the Church is simply preserving what He has willed to reveal through the Church’s unchanging praxis of male ordination, which itself can be traced back to the founding of the Levitical priesthood. The Church, in other words, is not a merely human institution, but the very Body of Christ, and as such her will is not her own, but reflects His divine will.

She concluded:

“Nowadays some people who are at pains to argue against females in priesthood- whereas I don't think there's a big problem, we should just say honestly, ‘We don't want women to be priests. As Church, we don't want that.’ That's fine, you know, that's fine, but we shouldn't say that we couldn’t have women as priests.”

Actually, the Church cannot have women priests, quite simply because God forbids it, and we can know He forbids based on His unchanging will regarding this matter, from the founding of the male Levitical priesthood through to the Apostles, through the post-Apostolic Fathers, through ante-Nicene Fathers, through the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, through the Middle Ages, through the Fall of Byzantium, through to this very day. The Church, in fact, never made the decision not to ordain women, because it was never up to her. The decision was made by God and she simply perseveres in it.

To conclude, it may not be evident to many people why ordaining women is wrong, but when the foundations of morality are examined, we find that God is the only real foundation for any moral claim. Even the wrongness of such things as lying, stealing, and murder, as history has shown time and again, are not self-evident. Many cultures have made a living on doing those very things. It is made evident by God, however, that lying, stealing, and murder are wrong, because He reveals His will. In the case of lying, stealing, and murdering, these were condemned in the Ten Commandments. In the case of the male priesthood, this is revealed in the Old Testament Levitical priesthood, in the Apostolic continuation of this in the Church, and in the Church’s two thousand year liturgical Tradition. In continuity with Scripture, this liturgical Tradition is a mode of God’s self-disclosure, a self-disclosure which also bespeaks of His will. Since, in obedience to this revealed will of God, the Temple and the Church have always had an only-male priesthood, therefore it is simply the divine obligation of the Church to continue in this.