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     Does Atheism offer an objective standard of morality?  Interestingly, atheist utopias were attempted in the US, but they failed.  Examples are Robert Owen’s New Harmony, Indiana (1825) and George Walser’s Liberal, Missouri (1880).  Owen, an atheist, who believed in communal living, believed marriage, church, and private property ownership were detriments to society.  His New Harmony experiment failed in a few years.  Walser, also an atheist and a lawyer, founded Liberal on the principle of freethinking, thus its name.  He wanted a town with no God, no churches, no saloons, and no hell.  Although, supposedly a freethinker, he respected marriage and forbade free love.  Shortly though, the town divided among atheists, freelovers, and spiritualists (communication with the dead).  By 1885, even atheists were leaving because of the violence and disorder.  Like Owen’s atheist utopia, Walser’s never materialized either.  Indeed the atheist foundation of both towns attracted people who reveled in following their ungodly desires.  Atheism can not establish a workable moral foundation.  Why?

     In 1976, Dr. Thomas Warren (Christian) and Dr. A.G.N. Flew (world renown Atheist philosopher) met in public debate in Denton Texas with Flew asserting that “I know that God does not exist.”*  Preliminaries to the debate included giving each other a list of 10 questions to answer.  Warren gave the following questions to Flew.

     Question #1:  “Value did not exist before the first human being.”  Flew answered True, thereby being consistent with atheism, implying that value of any sort is merely a function of the human mind.  Thus, value is merely a matter of likes or dislikes, approval or disapproval.  Ultimately, the Nazi’s genocide of millions of Jews was merely a matter of approval or disapproval and nothing more.  If Flew had answered False, he would have implicitly admitted that a higher power (God) had established value before the first human existed.

     Question #2:  “In torturing and/or murdering six million men, women and children, the Nazis were guilty of real objective moral wrong.”  Flew answered True, implicitly acknowledging a moral power (God) higher than man.  Certainly, the murder of six million people is unthinkable, as is the millions of the murdered unborn, but what objective standard establishes it as wrong?  Flew was now inconsistent with atheism, because objective moral wrong requires an absolute objective moral standard by a power higher than humankind.  Atheism has no standard other than what the human mind establishes, so morality is not absolute.  It changes by the whims of an individual or group.

     Question #3:  “In torturing and/or murdering six million Jews, the Nazis were guilty of violating (a) law of Germany, (b) law of England, (c) law of USA, (d) law of God, (e) some other law?”  Flew answered (e) and annotated “international law.”  International law is manmade, subject to men’s whims, and does not necessarily appeal to an absolute standard.  (In the debate with Warren, Flew never stated a logical proposition to show how he knew God did not exist.)

     Professor Flew’s inconsistency and the failures of so-called atheist utopias tell us that atheism’s “no absolute moral standard” can not bring order to a person’s life, to society, or to the world.  So to what standard do we appeal?  (Note: In August of 2004, Dr. Flew finally acknowledged the existence of God.)
* (Warren-Flew Debate available at http://www.warrenapologeticscenter.org/ and can be viewed on http://www.thebible.net/video/ )

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