Can atheists be moral?

This is part 2 of my reactions to "Letter to a Christian Nation," by Sam Harris.
You will sometimes hear people argue against atheism by saying something like, "If you don't believe in God, why be a good person? What keeps you from killing someone." Of course, this is insulting to atheists. Besides the obvious fact that atheists don't want to go to jail (or simply may not have any desire to kill), atheists will claim that they can believe in morals and be good people apart from God- even when they know they can get away with doing something. This is essentially what Sam Harris argues. And to a certain extent, you have to agree. My own personal experience is that atheists can be very good human beings. Just because you don't believe in God doesn't mean you're going to suddenly go on some kind of rampage of evil.

However, there is going to be a difference between the moralities of atheists and theists, and I have never seen it more clearly illustrated than by Harris' book. Without God, there can be no objective standard of right and wrong. What one person believes is right- another may argue is really wrong, and how do you know who is right? Harris uses this principle when he declares that theists are really the ones who lack morality. He claims that “religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral (p.25)." His illustration? Mother Teresa, who he claims had “deranged" moral intuitions because of her religious faith (p. 35)! His reason is that Mother Teresa decried abortion, something that causes relatively little pain compared to something else like genocide. His ethics can largely be reduced to discovering what causes the most pain or pleasure. I wouldn't even know where to begin to explain the problems with this kind of ethic. It's the same kind of thinking that drove so many of the murderous tyrants of the 20th century (many of whom were atheists). I have to say that Harris has opened my eyes a bit on this subject. While atheists may on the surface appear to live by a decent moral code, when you begin getting into the specifics of their ethical beliefs, the differences get clearer.

Atheists may be able to live relatively moral lives without believing in God. But could they if God really didn't exist? There is a huge difference between the two questions. I believe all of us have a sense of what is really "right" and what is really "wrong." But where does this come from? If God doesn't exist, there really can't be such a thing. We'd really all be just a bunch of molecules. But if there is a God who has established what is right and wrong, we can understand how even people who don't believe in God can believe in morals. As C.S. Lewis once said, the reason we believe in God is similar to the way we believe in the sun. We can believe in the sun without directly looking at it, because through it we can see everything else.