WE NEED EVIL

 

 

Jeremy Blatchford has written that  atheists believe that morality and the sense that we have freewill are no more than electro-chemical reactions. For example, he cites the popular atheist Sam Harris:

·       He writes about the actions of two criminals, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky, and how they broke into the home of Dr. William and Jennifer Petit in 2007. After knocking William senseless, they tied the doctor’s wife and daughters to their beds. While one of the men forced the wife to withdraw money from their bank for him, the other sexually abused the youngest daughter. When the two returned from the bank, they raped Jennifer and strangled her. When they noticed that William had slipped his restraints and gotten away to seek help, they panicked. After dosing the house with gasoline, they lit it on fire, burning it down with the daughters still tied to their beds. Only William survived the incident. The two perpetrators of this ghastly crime were eventually captured and brought to justice; however, even after all this horror, Sam Harris can do nothing but conclude that these men were not responsible for their actions. “How can we make sense of our lives, and hold people accountable for their choices, given the unconscious origins of our conscious minds?” https://sciencereligion.science.blog/2020/04/16/the-shadow-proves-the-sunshine/?fbclid=IwAR2A-0pf-cHFI8FnlZ6kCAN5DcYXP0JhDuhOJfBNdlKqfWa5mOAceKmwOQs

Harris believes that these murderers are not responsible for their evil crimes because:

·       Evil is no more than an idea we dreamed up.

·       Since humans are only material objects, we can only do what the laws of science cause us to do.

·       Therefore, we do not have freewill and are not responsible for what we do. We could not have acted otherwise.

·       Since justice only pertains if we are able to freely choose how we behave, therefore, a justice system and punishment cannot be justified. Besides, justice is just another concept we invented.

What then happens in a world without belief in actual morality and justice? These concepts inevitably erode. Consequently, we are left with the savage world of might-makes-right—exactly what we are beginning to see today!