A day after Thanksgiving, with the turkey and stuffing settled in our stomachs, it's a good time to reflect on one aspect of the holiday often ignored: historically, this was a day in which Americans were encouraged to call upon God both in gratitude for His blessings, and to ask mercy for our sins.

We see seeds of this in Lincoln's 1863 Thanksgiving proclamation, the source of the modern holiday, in which he reminded Americans of “the gracious gifts of the most high God, who while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.” It's clearer in prior Thanksgiving proclamations (for example, James Madison's 1814 proclamation of a day intended for “a devout thankfulness for all which ought to be mingled with their supplications to the Beneficent Parent of the Human Race that He would be graciously pleased to pardon all their offenses against Him”).

In 1865, President Andrew Johnson proclaimed the third modern Thanksgiving by setting apart

"a day of national thanksgiving to the Creator of the Universe for these great deliverances and blessings. And I do further recommend that on that occasion the whole people make confession of our national sins against His infinite goodness, and with one heart and one mind implore the divine guidance in the ways of national virtue and holiness."

So let's talk about one of “our national sins,” racism. Whether you're recounting to your kids the story of the first Thanksgiving, and have to explain what happened to the Wampanoag Indians; or explaining how President Lincoln made Thanksgiving a national holiday while fighting to save a nation and liberate a race of people from chattel slavery (which then-Senator Obama referred to as “this nation's original sin”); or simply taking a break from Thanksgiving festivities to watch the news, only to see a nation in flames over the shooting death of Michael Brown, racism is an unavoidable reality.

I'm not going to write an essay explaining that racism is evil. I'm confident that you know this already, even if you struggle with racism personally. And in describing racism as “evil,” I use the term advisedly. We recognize—virtually all of us, anyways—that racism isn't just mistaken, or factually incorrect, but actually a moral ill. This is why the Washington Post's Alyssa Rosenberg can casually refer to the racist as “a wholly bad person.” She doesn't need to explain or defend this association, because she can count on her readership sharing her sentiment.

Instead, what I want to explore is what we can learn from our moral intuition. If we're right that the racist (or, in any case, racism itself) is evil, what does this tell us about human rights, metaphysics, and God?

I. Why Racism is Evil: The Universal Equality of Man

If you were asked why racism is evil, I suspect your answer would involve something about the idea of the universal equality of man. America was famously founded on the proposition that all men are created equal. At the time those words were penned, one race of Americans was being used as slaves, one race was being exterminated, and women and non-landowners had very little political voice. We weren't, as a nation, actually living as if our Declaration of Independence was true, nor have we always done so in the years since. But we really do believe those five words, and they've served as a veritable engine of social justice.

This notion of fundamental human equality is also the basis for international human rights law. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reads: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” And it is precisely this “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family [that] is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world.”

This is why we rightly view racism as an evil. It strikes at the very root of our belief in the universal equality of man. For example, consider the white supremacist who believes that members of his race are superior because they're more intelligent than other races. That's not primarily a question about the latest social sciences on how well different racial groups perform on IQ tests, or how legitimate IQ tests are, or anything else. Underlying all this, we're confronted with a question about the foundations of human dignity. Is the worth of human beings something that can be determined by skin color, or by any sort of test, or by any of the countless other markers by which we can separate ourselves from one another? Because if all men truly are created equal, it's because our inherent dignity is rooted in something deeper, in our common humanity.

When we take seriously this idea of basic human rights, owed to us simply due to our humanity, we repudiate all manner of injustice, from racism to sexism to abortion. But these rights also point to a bigger reality, namely the existence of God.

II. Universal Human Rights, the Equality of Man, and the Need for God

So most of us share these foundational beliefs about human rights and dignity. But atheistic materialism can't get you to universal human rights or the equality of man. As Ross Douthat asked Bill Maher, “Where are human rights? What is the idea of human rights, if not a metaphysical principle? Can you find universal human rights under a microscope?”

The Declaration of Independence recognized this. Remember that the Declaration didn't suddenly make all men equal. Rather, it simply recognized that we already were equal, prior to the law. That's why the Declaration describes these realities in theistic and natural law terms: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

These aren't rights that are invented by the state or by the crowds; these are rights that we have inherently, rights which the state and the mob must recognize. If they came from the state, then they wouldn't be human rights at all, but civil rights. And what the state giveth, the state can taketh away. Obviously, corrupt states and corrupt men can violate human rights; the point here is that they can't repeal them. They're unalienable.

Indeed, the whole point of saying something is a human rights violation is that the victim had rights that the state or the masses ought to have respected. It's why slavery was wrong even when the government and the majority of people condoned it. And it's also why, when corrupt southern states imposed Jim Crow laws, and lynch mobs threatened the basic rights of African-Americans, there was a higher law to which African-Americans could appeal, above the level of the mob or the state.

The Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, one of the principal drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, recognized this, explaining that the “philosophical foundation of the Rights of man is Natural Law.” For human rights to exist in any meaningful way, they must be rooted in natural law, in something coming from before and above the level of the nation-state or the masses.

III. The Unsavory Alternatives

Having said all of this, where does this leave atheists? Not in a good place. On atheism, fellow man is nothing more than a mere collection of material parts, none of which are inherently dignified. And he, like you and I, is ultimately nothing more than a cosmic accident. In such a world, how can he or we have any rights to begin with, except for the rights that the state or the masses decides to give us?

Human rights, as we've seen, can't be meaningfully grounded in the masses or in the state; after all, these rights are often needed precisely to protect us from the masses and the state. We need the existence of something like natural law, and law based on much more than instinct or the like. If natural law is just instinct, why ought we listen to it or obey it?

Likewise for the equality of all men. What exactly is the basis for this equality, if not our shared endowments from our Creator? Theists hold that our equality is ontological, related to the sort of beings that we are. We're each made in the image of God, and we're each endowed with certain rights and dignity, which we share in common. But ontology is blatantly metaphysical, and this particular belief appeals quite directly to God. Without that theistic appeal, the whole thing seems to fall apart.

The most you can say without God would appear to be that all men are of equal social utility. But of course, that's untrue, and obviously so. Some people are born with serious handicaps; others are born into extreme privilege. By any purely-material criteria, some people are born better or worse off than their peers. So, without any connection to the Creator, “all men are created equal” reduces to a meaningless bromide. It sounds nice, but deep down, we don't believe it.

Let's return once more to our port of departure, racism. If your view is that human dignity and human worth is rooted in our intelligence, our physical ability, our life expectancy, our freedom from pain (or conversely, our ability to feel pain), and the rest, the most that you can say is that you're only conditionally not a white supremacist. Tomorrow, some double-blind gold-standard study could come along showing that whites (or some other racial or ethnic group) outperformed their peers in these categories, and you'd be forced to that they have more dignity and worth than members of other racial and ethnic groups.

Such an absurd result reveals the poverty of atheistic materialism; it fails to account for our most basic moral intuitions, and it fails to explain how we can know that racism is a moral evil. Since we do know that racism is evil, we can know with equal certainty that our brother is more than a collection of purely-material parts. During this time of thanksgiving, we should rejoice and be thankful to God for our shared human dignity, and we should take this chance to entreat His forgiveness for our individual and national sins, not least of which is racism.
 
 
(Image credit: Nation of Change)

Andrew Sullivan linked to my conversion story recently, and there’s been some interesting discussion in response. It was this particular part of my essay that generated the most controversy, and I can’t say I’m surprised:

"If everything that we call heroism and glory, and all the significance of all great human achievements, can be reduced to some neurons firing in the human brain, then it’s all destined to be extinguished at death. And considering that the entire span of homo sapiens’ existence on earth wouldn’t even amount to a blip on the radar screen of a 5-billion-year-old universe, it seemed silly to pretend like the 60-odd-year life of some random organism on one of trillions of planets was something special. (I was a blast at parties.) By simply living my life, I felt like I was living a lie. I acknowledged the truth that life was meaningless, and yet I kept acting as if my own life had meaning, as if all the hope and love and joy I’d experienced was something real, something more than a mirage produced by the chemicals in my brain."

Will Wilkinson disagreed with my methodology for deducing meaningfulness, saying that “the best reason to think ‘life is meaningful’ is because one’s life seems meaningful. If you can’t stop ‘acting as if my own life had meaning,’ it’s probably because it does have meaning.” Over at the New York Times, Ross Douthat responded to Wilkinson by saying that we need to look at that idea a little more closely. Douthat offered a thought experiment in which he described soldiers in the trenches who feel like the overall war is meaningless, yet find purpose in their bonds with one another. Ultimately, he concluded:

"This is a very natural way to approach warfare…and it’s a very natural way to approach everyday life as well. But the part of the point of religion and philosophy is address questions that lurk beneath these natural rhythms, instead of just taking our feelings of meaningfulness as the alpha and omega of human existence. In the context of the war, of course the battle feels meaningful. In the context of daily life as we experience it, of course our joys and sorrows feel intensely meaningful. But just as it surely makes a (if you will) meaningful difference why the war itself is being waged, it surely makes a rather large difference whether our joys and sorrows take place in, say, C.S. Lewis’s Christian universe or Richard Dawkins’s godless cosmos. Saying that “we know life is meaningful because it feels meaningful” is true for the first level of context, but non-responsive for the second."

Exactly. That’s smart-person speak for the point I was fumbling around to make: All of the atheistic arguments I’ve heard in favor of the meaningfulness of human life assume that our experiences are valuable. “I volunteered at a soup kitchen this weekend, and that brought others happiness and gave me a sense of fulfillment,” the thinking goes. “That gives my life meaning right here, right now, whether or not there’s a soul or an afterlife.” It sounds lovely. But I don’t think it works.

Let’s say we have the following equation, and I have the freedom to make X whatever I want it to be:

X * 0 = _____

I could do something cool like make X = (21 + 2 + 10 + 28 + 22 + 14 + 7), adding up the days of the month for family and friends’ birthdays so that their total is a number that represents the month and day my husband and I were married. Or I could carefully craft some other combination of numbers that was deeply significant to me. But the equation would still look like this:

(21 + 2 + 10 + 28 + 22 + 14 + 7) * 0 = _____

No matter how many or how few numbers I use, it would still yield the same result: Zero.

If consciousness is just a mirage produced by chemical reactions in our brains, and if the mirage permanently flickers out on the day those reactions cease, then do any of our conscious thoughts really matter? Sure, you can have an impact on others who will live on after you die, but one day they will disappear into thin air too. To my mind, all this talk of valuable life experiences adding up to something meaningful is like talking about how to make X add up to something meaningful in the above equation. In the end, it’s all for naught.

This, of course, does not necessarily mean that the atheist materialist worldview is false. Whether or not life has any meaning if atheism is true is a separate question from whether or not it is true in the first place. My intent here is simply to point out that you can’t have it both ways: Modern atheism denies that human consciousness is rooted in anything other than the chemicals in our brains, thus rejecting the idea that any of our experiences will last outside of time; yet it also tries to say that our consciousness and experiences are meaningful. I don’t see how both of those assertions can be true.

Interestingly, this is a debate I’ve had with atheists when I was an atheist, and with Christians now that I’m a Christian. It’s not only nonbelievers who argue that you can find meaning within the atheist worldview: I’ve talked to quite a few Christians who say that if there were no eternal life for the soul, they would still find life to be meaningful. Maybe there’s some gene that allows you to sense meaning even if you believe that you’re faced with complete annihilation? If so, I don’t have it, because that mindset is not one I’ve ever understood.
 
 
Originally posted at National Catholic Register. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Psychologies)