Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart: Rewriting the Ten Commandments for the Twenty-First Century

Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart

Individuals in the contemporary United States continue to disagree about many important things. This disagreement is becoming reflected in increasingly strongly-held and polarized theologies or theological philosophies. Even without modern disagreements, questions about God, reality, and ethics have long fascinated reflective people.

In their new short, eloquently written book, "Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart: Rewriting the Ten Commandments for the Twenty-first Century" Lex Baker and John Figdor explore these fundamental questions from an atheist perspective. Baker, an engineer and entrepreneur who is active in the humanist movement, was raised in South Africa as an Orthodox Jew before questioning and abandoning religion as a young man. Figdor was raised in New York State in a Protestant home and gradually came to question and abandon his religious beliefs.He currently serves as the humanist chaplain at Stanford University. The authors make good use of their backgrounds and experiences in writing this book.

The book is primarily directed to people who already are nonreligious, but it also is an attempt to present arguments and to persuade others. From the writing style and many references to contemporary culture in the book, the authors write largely for young people of college age or somewhat older. But the questions addressed in the book are not limited by the reader's age or cultural background. The aim of the book is not to debunk religion or God. Instead the book aims to show how atheism may lead to a happy, rewarding and ethical life.

The book proposes a "rewriting" of the Ten Commandments as "Ten Non-commandments" which are to be based on reason, to the extent possible, and subject to change with better evidence as opposed to being written in stone. This approach is gimicky, perhaps, but it includes an important teaching. It encourages readers to consider ethics and knowledge in their own terms and merits rather than as commands from on high. Plato taught this lesson in an early dialogue, the "Euthyphro" which is mentioned in the book but not discussed at length.

The book is divided into two parts. Part I, "A Framework for Facts" develops five non-commandments exploring the nature of belief, knowledge and reality, culminating in the non-commandment that "There is no God". Part II, "A Framework for Ethics" develops a value theory to accompany the factual theory of part I. The authors deny the universal, objective character of moral reality. They argue that people generally pursue their own happiness and interests as they, frequently erroneously, see them. They then develop a morality and an ethics based on enlightened self-interest that stresses the value and the joy of helping other people. They develop their theory on a personal level and then explain how it might apply to social questions.

Much in this book is fascinating, valuable, and challenging. As noted, I find it of critical importance in my own thinking to separate ethical, moral, and belief questions from a claimed source in, at the least, a personal God and in revelation, regardless of how interpreted. With that said, the book covers a great many complex questions that thinkers have wrestled with for a long time in a way that some readers will find too quick and fast. The first part of the book establishes the authors' naturalism. It is based on a sense-data theory of empiricism and a correspondence theory of truth that needs fleshed out much more if it is to be plausible. The first part also relies on a foundationalism which may be questioned. The foundation is softened by the authors' recognition of fallibilism -- that even basic assuptions may be subject to change.

The second part of the book introduces a reliance on introspection that may not be fully consistent with the theory of reality developed in the first part. The authors take science, as explained in part I, as setting the paradigm and only possibility for "objectivity" and they deny the possibility of "objective" ethics in the sense that science is objective. They develop a "subjective" ethics and claim it can account for and correct the ethical intuitions of individuals. Whether the authors' establish a subjective basis for morality can readily be questioned. In approaches such as that taken in this book, which are arguably based on a scientific reductionism, it may well be that "objective" moral considerations are tacitly smuggled into the analysis of the book. Such questions can be raised against other ethical systems such as that of Spinoza, which are much more fully developed and which try to combine a naturalistic outlook with a strong ethics.

The book has a liberating quality which is commendable even if it leaves many questions. Other writers have taken other, different approaches to nontheism. For example the late Ronald Dworkin (1931 --2013) was a legal philosopher who moved gradually to broader philosophical questions throughout his life. His last book, "Religion without God", explores many of the questions that Bayer and Figdor consider in their book. Dworkin rejects theism but he also rejects the naturalism of this book. He also strongly rejects this books empiricist, sense-based epistemology. He claims that values are real and objective, but different from science, that human life is purposeful and meaningful, and that the physical universe may exhibit a coherence and unity and can be seen to be of intrinsic value and wonder. Dworkin distinguishes between naturalism, theism, and nontheistic religion and argues eloquently but briefly in favor of the third alternative. Readers who are inclined to reject theism but who are not convinced by naturalism may want to read Dworkin's book for a start. The form of atheism and naturalism presented by Bayer and Figdor may not be the only alternative. To their credit, the authors invite readers to explore their own thoughts, to wrestle with principles and reasons, and to try to set out in succinct form the nature of their beliefs. This is a worthwhile but difficult exercise.

I enjoyed revisiting religious questions with Bayer and Figdor and learned from their book. These questions are important and difficult. The publicist for the book kindly sent me a review copy.

Robin Friedman