replaced Jeff Sessions with in the position of attorney general, Matt Whitaker, has declared that he takes a “Biblical view of justice” and that any judges who take a secular view are inherently problematic.36 The late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia made such a view explicit, stating that atheists favor the “devil’s desires.”37 And Newt Gingrich said—oh, hell, you get the idea. Claims made by pundits, politicians, and pastors about atheists having no morals and religion being the only thing capable of providing values are a dime a dozen.
And sadly, most people buy it.38 As stated earlier, millions of people are convinced that without belief in God, one cannot be a moral person, one cannot know right from wrong, one cannot be ethical. In fact, an international Pew study from 2014 found that most people around the world subscribe to a decidedly theistic morality in which it is accepted that one must believe in God in order to be a good person. For example: 53 percent of Americans, 56 percent of Mexicans, 70 percent of Indians, 74 percent of Tunisians, 79 percent of Kenyans, 80 percent of Venezuelans, 86 percent of Brazilians, 87 percent of Turks, 91 percent of Nigerians, 93 percent of Filipinos, 95 percent of Egyptians, 98 percent of Pakistanis, and 99 percent of Indonesians believe that it is necessary to believe in God in order to be moral.39
Fortunately, ample social scientific evidence soundly refutes this mistaken belief.
Good Societies Without God
Societies in the world today with the lowest rates of belief in God and church attendance—such as Sweden, Japan, and the Netherlands—are among the best-functioning and most humane societies on Earth. As has been amply documented by contemporary economists, criminologists, and sociologists,40 the nations with the lowest murder rates, violent crime rates, infant mortality rates, child abuse fatality rates, incarceration rates, etc. are among the most secular, while those nations with the highest rates of corruption, murder, violent crime, inequality, political repression, and violence—such as Colombia, El Salvador, and Jamaica—are among the most God-worshipping and church-attending. Granted, this is merely a correlation, but it is a powerful correlation that handily knocks out the knees of the claim that only God can provide morals and values for humanity.
It’s pretty fascinating, actually: in the Pew study cited above, you can see that 93 percent of Filipinos think that it is necessary to believe in God in order to be moral, but that same study found that only 19 percent of those in the Czech Republic think as much—and yet, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the Philippines’ murder rate is nearly ten times higher than the Czech Republic’s.41 If belief in God kept people moral—and given that the Philippines is one of the most God-believing countries in the world, while the Czech Republic is one of the most atheistic—then theses nations’ murder rates should be reversed. But they aren’t. Granted, the dramatically differing rates of murder in the Czech Republic and the Philippines is not solely a result of the former’s atheism and the latter’s theism. There are numerous other factors at play. But that’s the point: these other factors are all secular in nature—economic, cultural, historical, political. What they are not is divine, spiritual, or supernatural.
And the same correlation between secularity and societal well-being is also found when comparing states within the United States. States with the highest levels of belief in God, like Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama, have much higher rates of violent crime and other social pathologies than those states with the lowest levels of belief in God, such as Vermont, Massachusetts, and Oregon.42 If widespread belief in God kept people moral and a widespread lack of belief in God led to immorality, then we should expect to see an opposite correlation; we should find that those states (and nations) wherein God-belief is strong and popular have the lowest levels of violent crime, while those states (and nations) wherein God-belief is weak and marginal have the highest. But we find just the opposite.
So, we can compare nations to one another and see that where God-belief is lower and religiosity is weaker, so too are violent crime and other societal pathologies. And we can also compare states within our country and observe the exact same correlations. And yet still a third way to debunk the “God-belief is necessary in order to have a moral society” canard is simply to look at a single society over the centuries and note that, in many instances, a precipitous drop in religiosity does not result in an increase of day-to-day violent crime—but just the opposite occurs. Consider the Netherlands: the homicide rate in the capital city of Amsterdam has dropped from forty-seven per one hundred thousand people back in the mid–fifteenth century43—when religiosity was strong and pervasive—down to around two per one hundred thousand today,44 a time when there are more atheists than ever before in Dutch history and church attendance has been plummeting for decades to all-time lows.45 And the homicide rate in medieval England—a deeply pious time—was on average ten times that of twentieth-century England,46 a time of rapid secularization. That is, contemporary England—now one of most irreligious societies in the history of the world—is 95 percent less violent than it was back in the Middle Ages,47 when faith in God and religious devotion were deep and wide. And while all societies have experienced a notable decrease in daily violence over the course of the last several centuries, that decrease has been most acute in those societies that have experienced the greatest degrees of secularization.
Good Individuals Without God
All of this information—correlational as it is—does not prove that secularism or atheism, in and of themselves, automatically result in markedly moral societies. But the fact that highly secular nations and states fare so well compared to religious nations and states, and the fact that many nations have seen violent crime and other social pathologies decrease over time as secularity has simultaneously increased, does prove that morality clearly doesn’t hinge upon the existence of God, or require belief in God. Which is why atheists such as myself, and my wife, and my kids, and hundreds of millions of others all over the world, are not the immoral monsters that the likes of Saint Thomas Aquinas—or Ted Cruz—make us out to be.
As American professor of psychology Ralph Hood has concluded—based on an extensive survey of relevant research—there exists no empirical support for the myth that religious people are more ethical than their secular peers.48 Claremont Graduate University researcher Justin Didyoung and his colleagues concur, finding that “the longstanding stereotype that non-theists are less moral than theists is not empirically supported.”49 In addition to their own study comparing atheists with theists—which revealed that the former are no less moral than the latter—there is also the work of various other social scientists, such as Catherine Caldwell-Harris, professor of psychology at Boston University, who has found that atheists exhibit robust levels of compassion or empathy.50 Or the research of American political scientist Matthew Loveland, who found that secular people are actually more trusting of others than religious people.51
And then there’s the matter of violent crime—perhaps the most overt manifestation of immorality. Not only have various studies found that secular people are, in fact, less likely to commit violent crimes than religious people,52 but researchers from both the United States and the United Kingdom have reported that atheists are underrepresented in prisons.53 Indeed, atheists currently make up an infinitesimal 0.1 percent of federal prison inmates in the United States.54 As University of Haifa psychology professor Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi has observed, “ever since the field of criminology got started and data were collected of the religious affiliation of criminal offenders, the fact that the unaffiliated and the nonreligious had the lowest crime rates has been noted.”55
Additional studies have shown that atheists and agnostics, on average, exhibit lower levels of racism
