Introduction

Many of us are familiar with Bertrand Russell's bleak, despairing outlook of a world without God; he was convinced that such a stance was not only justified, but virtually guaranteed given an atheistic outlook. If we humans are simply ‘accidental collocations of atoms’ and our loves, beliefs, inspirations, labours and achievements are ‘destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system’ (Russell 1963, 41), then such a depressing scenario ineluctably follows. He adds, ‘All these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation, henceforth, be safely built’ (ibid.).

The equally cheery Richard Dawkins puts it this way:

In this chapter, I aim to show that however interesting non-theistic or secular efforts to ground human dignity and rights may be, these accounts are invariably tenuous as well as fragmentary or partial, and they exhibit far greater optimism than their metaphysic warrants, as Russell and Dawkins rightly conclude. By contrast, a traditional theistic perspective is considerably better equipped to provide a more robust, comprehensive accounting of human dignity. In this view, valuable humans are made in the image of a supremely valuable God. To support this thesis, I will defend the following three main points.

First, many atheist thinkers, on pain of inconsistency, feel forced to acknowledge that a Godless (i.e. atheistic) world leaves them without confident metaphysical grounding for intrinsic human dignity, moral duties and moral facts. No doubt, many of them would be happy to have naturalistic grounds for affirming human dignity and worth. But not having any obvious grounds available, they take the bleak view. Yet Godless normative moral realists such as Erik Wielenberg strangely seem unmoved by this disconnect.