The Myth of Secular Peace

A common rhetorical trope of atheism is the claim that religion is the primary cause of war and that a secular world would naturally give rise to peace and rational cooperation. This claim is historically illiterate.

While religious conflicts have certainly occurred, the twentieth century provided a decisive counterexample. The most explicitly atheistic regimes in history, the Soviet Union, Maoist China, the Khmer Rouge, and Revolutionary France, produced the highest death tolls ever recorded, exceeding one hundred million deaths.

The explanation is not merely historical coincidence but philosophical structure. When transcendent moral authority is denied, the state necessarily becomes the highest authority. In a theistic worldview, even rulers stand under divine judgment; there are acts the state is forbidden to perform regardless of utility or majority approval.

In an atheistic framework, the state has no such constraint. Law, morality, and human worth are determined internally by power structures. Individuals cease to possess inviolable dignity and instead become resources to be managed, reshaped, or eliminated for the sake of an ideological future.

History consistently demonstrates that attempts to construct heaven on earth without God do not end in peace, but in total domination. When no authority stands above power, power inevitably becomes absolute.

Formal Argument

P1. If transcendent moral authority is denied, then the ultimate moral boundary on the state is either the state itself or shifting human consensus.

P2. If the state or consensus is ultimate, then there is no inviolable moral constraint on power, only contingent constraints that can be revised.

P3. The absence of inviolable moral constraints renders systemic atrocities internally permissible when framed as “necessary” for collective ends.

C1. Therefore, rejecting transcendent moral authority removes any principled and inviolable moral barrier against totalizing state power.

P4. Any worldview that supplies inviolable moral limits on the state must locate moral authority above the state and above popular consensus.

P5. Theism locates moral authority above the state and grounds moral limits that remain binding even against majorities.

C2. Therefore, theism provides a principled and non-revisable moral constraint on the state.

Analogy

Imagine a game with no rulebook and no referee. The strongest player decides what counts as a foul, when the game ends, and who wins.

Appeals to fairness are meaningless because no authority stands above the players. When a society removes transcendent moral authority, power fills the vacuum.

History shows that when the state becomes the highest authority, individuals inevitably become expendable.