“…if we are random collections of atoms impersonally coughed up by nature, as the atheist believes, do we have any rational basis for believing in intrinsic worth, dignity, and equality of all persons?”
As an atheist (agnostic leaning closely toward atheism), I believe in evolution. Although Darwin gets all the credit, to be fair, Alfred Wallace also arrived independently at the same conclusion at almost the same time.
Firstly, just about the only thing that atheists all agree on is that they don’t believe in a God or Gods. That being said, I do not believe that atheists believe we are entirely random at all, and neither did Darwin or his contemporaries. While we maybe, at a particle level, made up of atoms, this is not untrue for theists either as it is an accepted scientific principle. Nor do I believe that we were “coughed up”. If anything, this would be more aligned as to what creationists might believe – that we were formed one day and left here as we are. What IS commonly accepted as evolution is nothing more than descent with modification, or the change of species over time. In our case a very long time, about three billion years, and while that might be a huge number to grasp, it’s long enough for us to start out as prokaryotes and evolve into Homo sapiens that dominate the planet today.
Secondly, I do not follow how evolution denies an atheist the rational basis to treat other humans humanely. His logic does not follow, or provide any argument for why this is so other than we can assume this is his own opinion. Having a creator does not itself imbue humanity with worth, dignity or equality, and if it did why would this creator have destroyed 95%+ of life on this planet over the eons? If anything I would argue the creator is the one who lacks the qualities above as It seems to enjoy using Its creations as pawns in Its megalomaniacal schemes.
On the other hand, if we are willing to look at the evidence of how humanity evolved, it is easy to see from anthropology that we weren’t plopped into huge cities with millions of people overnight. We started out in very small groups and had to learn to live together. I doubt very much that any of these traits that we like to credit a creator with are inherent in anyway. We learned them over millions of years (about 4.5 million in humanities case). That’s a long time to learn to value other people and to pass it on. This is why an atheist can look at humanity and find value, because our societies have evolved to work together. This is a fragile truce and I think we all know that in times of great upheaval it doesn’t take much form humanity to revert back. But for the pious who think we need a creator, how do we answer the following chaos that ensues? What happens to our worth, dignity, and equality when we are strained to simply survive?
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