Editor's Note: Spokane Faith & Values has a new feature called “Ask An Atheist” where readers are invited to submit question to our atheist writers. Here's the second set of question that came in, and a response from one of our atheist writer.
Q. Okay, let's cover a few things. Freewill: does it exist and what is your rational behind believing either way? Ethical grounding: why do good things? Or, taken from a different approach, what is good? How, then, do you approach suffering (in general, like what are your thoughts about your own suffering, where it comes from, and what you do about it) and what do you believe your responsibility is for the suffering that happens around you? What if you had the Ring of Gyges and you could get away with anything even if it was at the expense of others? What if someone else had the Ring of Gyges and wanted to do horrible things to people? What would you say to them? I ask these questions coming from a Christian perspective. But I believe that I have to answer them in just about the same manner as you do because I don't believe that something is good simply because a deity commands it. I ask myself the ring of Gyges question all the time, even in the scenario of being able to get things past God.
A. There is a thicket of issues here, so I shall be all too brief in tackling what are actually very deep topics that warrant much longer exploration.
1) Free will: while much of our actions are ultimately driven by motivations we do not always recognize or understand, as sentient beings once we come to understand them we objectively can make informed choices to alter our behavior. To take a trivial case as illustration, we like or don't like broccoli because of a specific gene mutation in the bitter taste receptor inherited through our primate ancestry. If in the “not like” category, though, yet knowing that green vegetables are good for you despite tasting icky to you, that biology wouldn't stop a person from deciding to eat them anyway because its good for them.
2) The Good: philosophers (religious and otherwise) have been tying themselves in knots over this one since time immemorial, so don't expect this to be reducible to bumper sticker size any time soon, though much of popular fiction and film addresses these things rather better than abstract philosophers. One can tell a lot about what someone believes by how they act on it (or not). So I would agree with the High Lama in Frank Capra's “Lost Horizon” (1937) to try always to “be kind.” I think the classic Golden Rule, ubiquitous in human cultures, reflects a big truth in this area also, which in turn rests on the idea of equality and fairness, neatly expressed in Rogers & Hammerstein's “Oklahoma!,” I don't think I'm any better than anyone else, but I think I'm just as good.
3) Suffering: here an obvious distinction is between suffering occasioned by natural processes (some of which, such as disease, may be capable of amelioration) and that inflicted wilfully manno i manno. I may be annoyed at the virus that attacks me, but I feel no malice for what is an unthinking string of RNA doing what comes naturally for it, and I happened to get in the way (tough luck). However, if the virus was a designed object (by a terrorist or even a god) then it slams into a moral wall that may be legitimately contemptible. As for alleviating the suffering of others, few people have the means to accomplish the big ones like disease or social injustice, which is why we have come up with representative democracy and international treaties to enable collective responses here.
4) Magic Rings: As (per above) no moral sentient being should treat others differently as they would like to be treated, having the Ring of Gyges means it should only be used for good. If it can only do that at the expense of others though, then it shouldn't be used at all. Find another way. The same would apply to magic cloaks, or time machines or any instrumentality. The nature of the moral issue isn't changed in the slightest by that. To take an historical example: had I had the ability to intervene magically and been living at the time of the Holocaust, it would have been a moral failure on my part not to have used such means to have interfered with all that evil. This is a tragic theodicy question for putative omnipotent deities held to have existed at that time, such that atheists may have less sleep to lose at night over this than many of a religious persuasion.
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