The Basis of Human Rights
What basis do today’s atheist intellectuals, often calling themselves ‘humanists’, have for suggesting that people should have high moral standards? They may follow the traditions of their ancestors but why should anyone else copy theirstandards? Indeed, if we have arrived from primordial soup by an accident of science without any divine involvement, then there is no way that morality can be anything other than personal opinion. Opinions may be enforced by those with power but a change in rule can then lead to a change in morality. Without God, it is hard to condemn Putin or Hitler because they espouse different values. The Nuremburg trials after WW2 did not accept that morality could be decided by those in authority within nations but that crimes against humanity are an individual’s responsibility, its judges concluding that individuals know right from wrong.
Yet there are many who advocate ‘Black lives Matter’, ‘Women’s Rights’ or other social values who claim to be atheists. They have failed to recognise that the very values they admire are adopted from the Christian message they have rejected.
The historian, Tom Holland, wrote in his book, ‘Dominion’, that our beliefs about human rights stem from a secularised version of Christianity. After the horrors of WW2, the American President’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, collected representatives from many nations to create a Declaration of Human Rights. Many of these delegates did not come from Christian countries so a secular declaration was devised. Tom Holland concluded that doctrines such as that of human rights, that many instinctively feel to be right, would only be accepted if its Christian origins were concealed. 1Today many atheists or agnostics have failed to recognise that there is no basis for their high ethic in their belief system. The belief that all people are of equal value comes directly from the teaching and authority of Jesus.
If there is not a God who created us all then the doctrine of human equality is make-believe. Science cannot give us a basis for these values that seem to be inherent in most people. I was recently given a copy of ‘Sapiens: A Brief history of Humankind’ written by the Israeli atheist historian, Yuval Noah Harar. In this he concludes,
“Homo Sapiens has no natural rights, just as spiders, hyenas, and chimpanzees have no natural rights.’2
The ‘American Declaration of Independence’ states,
“We hold these truths to be self evident, that all human beings are created equal.”
Yuval Noah Harar wrote,
“The Americans got the idea of equality from Christianity, which argues that every person has a divinely created soul, and that all souls are equal before God. However, if we do not believe in the Christian myths about God, creation and souls, what does it mean that all people are ‘equal’”3
Without God, anything goes and the strong will control even the morality of society. It is only because there is a supreme being who will judge us all that the atrocities of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and the genocides in Ruanda, Sudan and Bosnia are wrong.
Nietzsche derided people as “odious windbags of progressive optimism, who think it is possible to have Christian morality without Christian faith.” In “Twilight of the Idols” he wrote,
“They are rid of the Christian God, and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality . . . when one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality from under one’s feet.” 4
1 Tom Holland ‘Dominion, The Making of the Western World’ p. 521
2 Yuval Noah Harari, ‘Sapiens: A Brief history of Humankind’ Harper, New York, 2015 p. 111
3 Yuval Noah Harari, ‘Sapiens: A Brief history of Humankind’ Harper, New York, 2015 p. 109
4 https://genius.com/Friedrich-nietzsche-twilight-of-the-idols-chap-8-annotated
