Why do theists think atheists have no morality?

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This is a really good question and I’d love to be able to do it justice, but I’ll probably fall way short.

Theists and atheists are divided by more than ‘mere’ belief. The mindset that produces atheism demands that the world fit a peculiar set of principles, those of rationalism. When theists claim that atheists believe in their position, this is what they’re referring to.

Theists subordinate rationalism to their beliefs, while atheists want only rationalism. I’ll dive a little deeper before considering morality as I think it’s really a really important distinction to grasp. When I say that theists subordinate rationalism to their beliefs what I’m pointing at is trust. A theist trusts God first, the principles of rationalism second. If they are in conflict, God always wins. But if God is pleased, then we can listen to your reasons.

God is not pleased by atheism, so no theist is going to listen to your arguments impugning His existence. Bother me not with your silly logics, heathen. Believers with a severe bone to pick with atheists love stories about people who think they’re being rational running astray because their minds painted them into a really tight corner.

So now what about morality? I think it bears saying that atheism is still, even to this day, somewhat rare, and because the mindset differences are rather severe, believers and nonbelievers self-segregate into social groupings that can have very very little interaction with each other on these sorts of philosophical issues. There are a lot of types of believers that you’ll never find at a church, let alone a rationalist! So it’s easy to see how some believers are simply completely ignorant about rationalism.

But mere ignorance doesn’t explain the commonly-held refrain that atheists have no morality at all. Ignorance in a racial context leads to prejudice, hate requires something more, and stating that someone lacks morality is something more than mere prejudice.

No, what we’re looking for is deeply embedded in Abrahamic theology itself. The idea that it’s God that makes man moral. The Old Testament is filled with stories of people getting lost and only finding their way back through God. These are beautiful, compelling stories. The overarching theme and narrative of the Bible explores the myriad ways in which humans manage to mess things up when they don’t involve God in their decision-making.

The concept is called ethical monotheism. That there’s a single source of truth for the whole concept of ‘goodness’. If it’s good, it must be coming from God.

It should be stated that this concept is thousands of years old. It’s much older than Christianity and survived the Jewish-Christian split, being adopted by both sides. When the US split from Britain we started driving on the right side of the roads just to spite them, but we kept their common law legal system. When things survive deep splits, you know that you’re dealing with something truly transcendent. So ethical monotheism has a lot of weight behind it.

It provided a political counterweight to the ugly national politics of Dark, Middle Age, and Renaissance Europe up until the Reformation. War was the sport of kings, and Christian-derived chivalry ensured that this sport didn’t devolve into the kind of wars we started seeing after the French decided they’d had enough of royalism.

I can dive into this and it’s a very fascinating facet of history and human nature but it’s not really germane to the point, which is to explain why some theists really believe that atheists have no morals. In these people’s minds, morality only comes from God, and while these people are 100% wrong, this concept was enough to totally remake the Western world when society was based off of it.

Just being wrong doesn’t mean it’s ineffective. The sheer massive scale of human societies means it can take a long long time for rationalism to overtake a lot of things. There’s a saying for this in finance, the market can remain irrational for longer than you can remain solvent. Rationalists can have the last laugh, but if they want to bet against the market while it’s being irrational, then they’re going to have that last laugh broke.

Rationalism is in many ways less efficient than a pretty belief that allows you to move forward with trust. While the rationalist waits for proof and evidence, the believer charges forth and gets there first.