In Dostoevsky’s famous novel The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov famously insisted that without God, everything is permitted.  This, of course, is simply untrue.  Morality is not dependent on the existence of God, and centuries of nontheistic ethical philosophy, from deontology to utilitarianism, has demonstrated this fact.  Indeed, contrary to Ivan Karamazov, it is instead true that with God, everything is permitted.  Because human beings do not have access to the thoughts of their deities, their religious moral systems frequently conflict with and contradict each other.  This has been demonstrated empirically over and over again, as people have at once justified slavery and the abolishment of slavery on religious grounds; they’ve justified indiscriminant killing and the turning of the other cheek on religious grounds; and they’ve justified terrorism and nonviolence for religious reasons.  Even worse, the nature of religious faith, or what amounts to beliefs held to be absolutely certain in the absence of any evidence, allows for the justification of any belief whatsoever.  With faith, everything is permitted.

If a belief is grounded in faith—that is, if the belief has no basis in evidence or reasoning—then there is no means for adequately and objectively determining whether a belief is true or false.  Removed from the irritating responsibility of being shackled to and corresponding to reality, truth becomes whatever one wants it to be.  This, in essence, is the meat of the New Atheist’s criticism of moderate religion.  Clearly, religious fundamentalism and extremism is directly more harmful than more liberal religious interpretations or a vague spirituality, but both the extremists and moderates nevertheless engage in a style of thinking that makes extremism possible.  With faith, everything is permitted, and the religious moderate’s faith-based thinking legitimizes the faith-based thinking that is more extreme, whether it be the religious justifications for terrorism to religious oppression of homosexuals and women.

As WK Clifford once argued in his famous essay The Ethics of Belief: “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”  I do not go as far as Clifford in that I do not think it is always wrong to believe something with insufficient evidence, but I do believe it is wrong to legitimize faith-based thinking and even worse to praise it as a virtue.  To believe without evidence can lead to a number of unintended and harmful consequences.  In that sense, the benign religious moderates of the world are not direct dangers, but they harbor a terrifying potential for danger, and they stoke the flames of unreason present in extremists and fundamentalists, unable to criticize their evil deeds adequately with their faith-based criticisms, unmoored from reality, and engaging in exactly the same type of thought that causes and encourages religious extremism.  And not only that, but the moderate’s religious beliefs are also false, which is no small charge.

Of course, I have been generous in assuming religious moderates are not themselves harmful, but this assumption is not correct, and denying it only further bolsters my case.  To use only one example, consider the role liberalized moderate religion and spirituality play in the complementary and alternative medicine movement.  Despite its good intentions, the alternative medicine movement is dangerous and harmful, fostering unwarranted skepticism toward medicine that actually works (as in the antivaccination movement) and promoting medical modalities that do not actually work.  Many of these alternative medical modalities are justified on the basis of appeals to vague spirituality and westernized bastardizations of Eastern religions, as well as on criticisms of scientific study and research in order to emphasize intuition and faith as “other ways of knowing”.  In this way, faith-based thinking can be dangerous, and even the most well-meaning and charitable beliefs can pave the way to destruction if they are not adequately based on evidence and legitimate reasoning.

There is also much to be said for criticizing religious believers, even the moderates, simply because they are wrong.  It is not necessary to demonstrate that a belief is harmful to nevertheless show that it is incorrect.  There is certainly less harm in beliefs concerning big foot and extraterrestial aliens than there is in fundamentalist religion, but I criticize these beliefs, too, on the basis of the lacking evidence and the silly credulity of those who jump to unwarranted to conclusions.  Like religion, though, these beliefs can also become something dangerous in many ways, like when a naive believer in psychics empties her bank account to pay a psychic to cleanse her negative aura, or when believers in extraterrestial life commit mass suicide to join the UFO trailing behind the Hale-Bopp comet.

Truth should ultimately matter more than appeals to negative consequences.  This is because truth itself can lead to negative consequences.  Some people cannot cope with the realization that there is no God, and may kill themselves.  Some people may be crippled by existential fears of death when realizing that there is no afterlife or no soul.  The truth need not always benefit people.  Similarly, false beliefs can cause amazing acts of goodness and kindness, as in the charitable contributions of churches.  Only by seeking the truth through evidence-based reasoning, however, can we adequately protect against the needless harms of faith-based thinking.  It is often said that there are more ways to be wrong than to be right.  For example, if the length of a ruler is twelve inches, then there is only one correct answer (12 inches), but an infinite number of incorrect answers (-13 inches, 2 inches, pi inches … and so on).  In that sense, one can also say that there are more ways to do wrong through falsehood than to do wrong with reality.  Thus, to guard against the almost-infinite possibilities for faith-based wrongdoings, I value truth.  Of course, it can also be said that there is an infinite possibility to do good with faith-based reasoning.  This is true, but faith-based reasoning does not guarantee this possibility, and in such a world where evidence does not matter, there is no way to guard against or prevent the innumerable potential evils that could crop up.  It is best, then, to simply accept the truth, the good with the bitter.  As such, we should criticize religious moderates and extremists, because both have the potential to do untold harm, and because both can do untold harm for imaginary and false reasons.

Beyond that, I also believe that truth  is an intrinsic value.  Like many atheists, I would prefer to live in a universe in which there is an eternal afterlife, and I often suffer a vague dread and angst at the thought of my inevitable demise.  But I also value this bitter truth, not because it is good or bad, but because it simply is—because it is true.  With that said, I shall close with a poem by Stephen Crane, “In the Desert”, the sentiments of which reflect my personal values concerning truth better than I could ever convey:

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said: “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”