JAMES TOEWS
Can we be good without God?

“Damn it all, what wouldn’t I do to the man who first invented God! Hanging on a bitter aspen tree would have been too good for him,” declares Fyodor Karamazov in Dostoyevsky’s classic novel, The Brothers Karamazov.

Those words could well have come from the pen of Dr. Robert Buckman, author of a new book entitled Can We Be Good Without God? Dr. Buckman is a cancer specialist, professor, author, broadcaster and passionate humanist. Religious convictions, especially the belief in God, are, in his opinion, the cause of untold human suffering. Because religious convictions have such “a wartorn history”, they must be exposed and rejected.

Dr. Buckman begins by asking an ancient question, “Can we be good without God?” It is a logical place to begin since virtually every religion in the world says that its moral code comes from God and the ultimate enforcement of that code will also come from God. If it is possible to be good without belief in God, argues Dr. Buckman, that means that God is unnecessary. And Buckman’s answer is quick – not only can we be good without God but belief in God is actually a hindrance to moral behaviour.

As attractive and progressive as Dr. Bruckman’s arguments seem to be, his case contains nothing new, and fails miserably even by the standards of logic that he proposes to use.

The first failure of his argument is the claim that belief in God is a primary cause of the human inclination to “kill and torture other humans”. While it is true that far too many wars have been and are being fought in religious contexts, this claim ignores the fact that the worst genocides of this century, and possibly all time, were not carried out by religious communities but rather by secular governments. In fact, the Stalinist purges, the killing fields of Cambodia and the Chinese Cultural Revolution were undertaken by governments which specifically drew their philosophies from “secular humanist” traditions. Even the Holocaust, while it took place in a nominally Christian nation, was not driven by Hitler’s belief in God but rather by the non-Christian philosophies of Nietzsche and Wagner. It would appear that, far from creating a better ethic, philosophies which try to get rid of God actually make things worse. Some years back, John Lennon wrote a song which sums up Dr. Buckman’s argument: “Imagine there’s no heaven . . . nothing to kill or die for and no religion too. Imagine all the people living life in peace.” The logical response to the Lennon/Buckman argument is, “Imagine you are wrong!”

The second failure of Dr. Buckman’s argument comes in another area. He spends some time on the claim, by some researchers, that the human brain is “set up to tell us that there is an external deity”. In fact, Dr. Buckman states that the need for a relationship with God is “hard-wired into” the human brain. Dr. Buckman obviously feels that this is a new discovery, but in fact, it was proposed by a Christian philospher called Augustine, in almost the same terms, nearly 1700 years ago. Regardless, it is still an interesting claim. But the conclusion Dr. Buckman draws from it is astonishing. Far from suggesting that this might indicate that God exists, as Augustine did, Dr. Buckman goes on to state that experiencing God is not proof of His existence. This is true, but only in a narrow sense. A delusional individual may see lights that do not exist because his brain is “hard-wired” to identify lights. However, this is no proof that light itself is a figment of the human imagination. The human mind has been “hard-wired” to see light precisely because light does exist. It would appear far more reasonable to conclude that the existence of a “hard wire” indicates the existence of the God the “hard wire” was designed to identify.

Writing 120 years apart, Dr. Buckman and Dostoyevsky, both explore the question, “Can we be good without God?” The conclusions they come to are vastly different. Dr. Buckman confidently answers, “Yes, of course!” Dostoyevsky’s answer is far more sobering: Humanity keeps trying to find morality without God, and the result is disastrous. He wrote The Brothers Karamazov nearly 40 years before the communist revolution under Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin launched his nation into a great experiment in humanist morality – an experiment that ended in untold misery and evil. As a new millennium begins, Dr. Buckman asks us to “imagine” what the world could be like without belief in God. Dostoyevsky would ask us to remember that this experiment has already been tried.