Can a Consistent Atheist Condemn the Savagery of Hamas?

As you’ll see, the answer is going to be a straightforward “No.”

The truth is that atheists cannot remain consistent within their godless worldview and still condemn the barbarism that Hamas embodies, or any terrorism for that matter.

In fact, as you’ll also see, in order for an atheist to condemn the abhorrent attacks of October 7 he must first disavow his atheism (intellectually speaking) and adopt a theistic paradigm that would allow him to make moral distinctions in the first place.

A baseline for morality is critical to establish because, with Hamas, we are literally dealing with a group that seeks the extermination of the Jewish people and will inflict all types of atrocities to get to that heinous goal.

There are plenty of graphic accounts regarding what took place in southern Israel, but this one report captures how terribly gruesome the sneak attack was on defenseless civilians:

“Perhaps the most disturbing image in the [forensic] slideshow was a completely charred mass of flesh, which at first glance could not be seen as ever having belonged to a human. It was only after a CT scan was done that experts could see the inhumanity of the image. Two spinal cords — one belonging to an adult, one to someone young — a parent and child bound together by metal wires in a final embrace before being set alight.”

These descriptions create mental images that are hard to stomach, as they should be.

It shocks the conscience to see such unrestrained evil on display.

And with the usual suspects in academia publicly taking the side of Hamas, perhaps the person laying out the most forceful distinction between Israel and “her enemies” has been Sam Harris.

For those unfamiliar with Harris’s work, he’s a formidable atheist and outspoken critic of Islam.

He, along with Richard Dawkins, has been named as one of the “Four Horsemen” of
“modern atheism.”  

I will quote Harris at length on the Israeli-Hamas war because, despite being a man of the left, he’s spot-on as it pertains to this issue.

But there is another reason I’m excerpting him liberally.

As you read his commentary, keep asking yourself how someone committed to a materialistic explanation of the universe (no divine lawgiver or creator) can lay down transcendent markers for humanity to follow.

Shortly after the Hamas invasion, Sam Harris released a podcast episode called “The Sin of Moral Equivalence.” In it he says:

“Whatever you think about the origins of this conflict, whatever you believe about the role that religion plays here or doesn’t play, whatever you think about colonialism or globalism or any other ism, whether you’re a fan of Noam Chomsky or Samuel Huntington, you should be able to acknowledge the following claims to be both descriptively true and ethically important: At this moment in history there are people and cultures that harbor very different attitudes toward violence and the value of human life. There are people and cultures that rejoice, positively rejoice, dancing in the streets rejoicing, over the massacre of innocent civilians.

Conversely, there are people and cultures that seek to avoid killing innocent civilians and deeply regret it when they do. And they occasionally prosecute and imprison their own soldiers when they violate this modern norm of combat. There are people and cultures who revel in the anguish of hostages and prisoners of war, who will parade them before cheering mobs, and often allow them to be assaulted, or raped, or even murdered. They will desecrate their bodies in public. And all of this carnage is a cause for jubilation.

Conversely, there are people and cultures who find such barbarism revolting…In short, there are people and cultures who revel in war crimes, and who do not hide these crimes or their celebration of them…Conversely, there are people and cultures who have given us the very concept of a war crime as a sacred prohibition, and as a safeguard in the ongoing project of maintaining the moral progress of civilization…

There is no moral equivalence now between Israel and her enemies.”

All of what Harris said — every single word of it — is, of course, true.

No doubt there are nuanced debates and trade-offs to weigh in any geopolitical clash, but that still doesn’t obscure the fundamental contrast between Israel and Hamas: Only one side is hog-tying terrified families together before lighting them on fire.

Yet this obvious difference leaves atheists like Harris in a quandary because there is no basis in their worldview to render these actions as either evil or good.

To them, we’re merely a cluster of atoms bouncing around — the byproduct of random mutations and natural selection in a vast, purposeless universe.

What difference does it make, in the end, if one evolved animal abuses another evolved animal — whereby some animals will survive while others will not?

It’s called survival of the fittest, after all.

A guy named Charles Darwin promoted the idea.

You may have heard of him.

Therefore, any talk about “The Sin of Moral Equivalence,” at least from an atheist’s perspective, is just that — talk.

There remains no fixed, absolute standard of truth to appeal to in making sense of sin or morality when denouncing the bloodlust of Hamas.

In his new book, Why It Might Be Ok to Eat Your Neighbor, prolific author Gary DeMar drills home the point that given the “operating assumptions” of atheism, it is impossible for them to make “moral judgments” on any type of behavior, including rape, murder, theft, cannibalism, and yes, pouring kerosene on a father and son before lighting the match.

Consider these remarks by Richard Dawkins, who, as noted earlier, has been hailed along with Sam Harris as one of today’s foremost atheists.

Dawkins writes in his book River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life,

“In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice…there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”

To ensure readers aren’t confused by what he means, Dawkins adds that “DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.”

Was Hamas simply dancing to its genetic music when it slaughtered babies, executed the elderly, and burned screaming families alive?

Without a supreme judge of the world, who is to say otherwise?

Jerry Coyne, a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago in the Department of Ecology and Evolution, argued in a USA Today op-ed that human brains are akin to “meat computers that, like real computers, are programmed by our genes and experiences to convert an array of inputs into a predetermined output.”

The title of the opinion piece is “Why you don’t really have free will,” a position that Harris himself shares.

Could it be that the Hamas gene was “programmed” to set people on fire?

If so, what’s all the fuss about?

Their meat computer of a brain predetermined the action beforehand, just as our outrage to that action was likewise predetermined.

Impulses, impulses!

The cold reality is that Sam Harris and his fellow travelers cannot live logically within their own “evolutionary presuppositions” and show anger over what Hamas perpetuated.

It is at the very moment they do show righteous anger that atheists start to “hijack” a biblical framework for ethical living.

This is what Gary DeMar calls “borrowed capital.”

As he put it, atheists must appropriate “intellectual and moral capital from the Christian worldview so [they] can avoid the absurdity and hopelessness of a consistent atheistic worldview.”

Every decent person should denounce Hamas.

And when we do, we’re subtlety acknowledging that there’s a cosmic yardstick to measure their depravity against.

In effect, we’re all living off of “borrowed capital,” and thank God for that.

It is He who has shown us through His Word “what is good” and, as Micah 6:8 outlines, what is required of us — which is to “do justice,” “love kindness,” and “walk humbly” before the Lord our Maker. 

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