One
often hears atheists assert that the moral virtues are those virtues without
which we humans beings cannot, and do not, flourish because they are rooted in
human nature. One also sometimes hears
atheists assert that moral virtues are those virtues that enjoy a consensus
that spans culture, country, and century, something like the Tao described at
the end of C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man. That moral values described or derived in
either of these two ways are not truly moral
values, much less moral absolutes, is the burden of this brief essay.
First,
atheist values determined either by human flourishing or by human nature are
not truly right or wrong, not properly moral absolutes; they are pragmatism or
utilitarianism masquerading as good and coöpting the language of virtue and of
“oughtness,” to which they have no philosophical or (especially) theological
claim.
As
the following analysis will demonstrate, one must not contend that human nature
and human flourishing yield moral absolutes, properly so-called, because such a
theory fails to account for (1) the origin of human nature, (2) changes in
human nature, and (3) the selection of “flourishing” as a category of moral
discernment. I shall leave aside the
vexed philosophical question of whether or not human nature itself actually exists
as an entity in its own right and has objectively knowable and universal
characteristics, or if it is merely a philosopher’s fiction without any
extra-mental reality. I simply note in
passing that the atheistic theory of morality here under review assumes an
answer to this difficult philosophical question that, if mistaken, devastates
the atheist theory of morality by erasing its metaphysical basis.
(1)
If, as atheists insist, human nature arose as the chance result of a mindless
evolutionary process, a process behind which exists no divine mind and no
divine plan, then moral absolutes disappear.
That is, if human nature is the result of evolutionary accident (time,
plus matter, plus chance), and if right and wrong arise solely from human
nature, then right and wrong are accidents, not moral absolutes. Biological chance, evolutionary accident,
cannot serve as the philosophically proper foundation for right and wrong; it
is their undoing. If human nature and
human mind are the unintentional outcome of the chance collocation of atoms and
of the mindless and unpredictable meanderings of natural selection (in other
words, if the human mind is a mere epiphenomenon contorting and disporting
itself for a short while upon the face of physical matter), then we have no
convincing reason -- and no metaphysical justification -- for trusting them as
indicators of moral goodness; nor have we any real or enduring right and
wrong.
(2)
Had the evolutionary process been different, or had the primordial soup been
mixed from a different recipe, so to speak, or stirred at a different
temperature, human nature, if it existed at all, might have been noticeably
altered, along with the allegedly moral values atheist theory insists arise
from it. Evolution might well have
yielded a quite different array of species than it has, and humans might not be
the most intelligent species and they might flourish in ways radically
different from those that now obtain.
That is, one can easily imagine a set of markedly different biological
conditions, a set of conditions that demonstrated the physiological supremacy
of a non-human species, one that flourished after the fashion, say, of an
intelligent cockroach. Cockroach-style
flourishing would then become the measure of virtue, and not that means of
flourishing that we humans sometimes now employ. In other words, the moral absolutes yielded
by the atheist system of thought (biological might makes moral right) are
neither truly moral nor truly absolute.
They are simply that set of actions that the biological winners perceive
to tend most effectively toward the pleasure and prosperity of their own
species, which is, to put it bluntly, simply species bigotry parading as
morality.
To
make the point in a different direction, precisely why the actions that conduce
to the flourishing of the most intelligent and biologically innovative
survivors of natural selection, whatever those survivors happened to be like,
should be called morality is not
clear and has not been (indeed cannot be) metaphysically justified or properly established.
In other words, what is here propounded
by the atheists is not true morality. It
is an intellectual misfire that bases morality on the philosophically
injudicious assumption that somehow biological might makes moral right, or that
merely by succeeding biologically a species gets to use itself as the measure
of good and evil. This is not a system
of moral absolutes; it is a system of biological relativism. It is selfishness masquerading as the basis
for right and wrong.
That
those actions which conduce to the flourishing of the most biologically innovative
survivors of natural selection should be called "moral" merely
confuses with right and wrong those actions that seem to the atheists of that species
to permit that species to flourish at one
particular point in its evolution. If
in the atheistic worldview species evolve, then the species whose flourishing
they appoint as the arbiter of morality was sufficiently different in its
earlier stages of development from what it is now, and will be likely be sufficiently
different in its later stages of development, that those means by which it now
flourishes might be significantly different both from what they once were and might
eventually become. We simply do not
know. But whatever those unknown facts
were in the past and will be in the future, the atheist must endorse them as
moral, however grotesque and wicked they might actually be. If so, what are now called right and wrong in
the atheist view are not moral absolutes, but simply that set of actions
perceived to be most efficient at the moment.
What set of actions will be so perceived in the distant future is still
an open question, a question that might receive a starkly different answer then
than either it now does or previously did, but which the atheist system of
thought must nevertheless consider morally correct and universally binding if
it is to employ the language of moral absolutes. In short, to our previous charges of species
bigotry and biological relativism we now must add time relativism and moral
contradiction -- but not moral absolutes.
The new atheists cannot find metaphysical grounding for their claims to
morality. They cannot talk about how
religion ruins everything because the word "ruins" implies a morality
not metaphysically available in the atheist worldview. They can say they do not like what religion
does, and that they prefer something else.
But they can raise no truly moral
objection.
To
take it a step further, not only does the doctrine of evolution entail the
notion that the human species and human nature are essentially mutable, but
this natural mutability is amplified by the very startling, and very real,
prospect of the species itself orchestrating and accelerating its own evolution
and alteration by means of its scientific experimentation and acumen. Like the natural mutability that precedes it,
this self-orchestrated mutability is the death knell of any and all moral
absolutes supposedly rooted in human nature.
When we do acquire the power to modify the nature of the race -- and
some speculate that our ability to do so is soon to be gotten -- will what we
produce still be truly and fully human?
Will right and wrong then be rooted in human nature as it was or in
human nature as it is in whatever it is we shall have made of it? Assuming that the alteration in human nature
is accomplished only one person at a time rather than in the entire race all at
once, and assuming therefore that two (or
more) sorts of persons with a defendable claim to human nature exist
simultaneously, which version of human nature supersedes the other and is to be
considered the fountain from which all right and wrong arise? Will those who possess the older human nature
be subject to a system of right and wrong that arises from a newer nature not
entirely their own? What if our
experiments do not always succeed? That
is, what if the treatment does not always "take;" what if it yields
occasionally idiosyncratic results that produce far more than merely two
varieties of human nature? Which variety
is normative? Shall we fall into the
logical contradiction of having a number of competing sets of moral absolutes,
each with different content? The answer to
these and other questions are still unknown to us. In the wake of their ignorance, the atheists
are flying by faith. Though the answer
to such puzzling questions might be difficult, or even impossible, to identify,
and though the answers to such questions might raise insurmountable
difficulties for those who advocate this inadequate atheistic system of moral
absolutes, the answers given to those questions make no difference at all to my
purpose because any answer given them exposes the metaphysical foundation of
the atheistic ethical system as shifting sand, not moral bedrock. Nothing transitory can yield moral absolutes.
Furthermore,
if humans did not exist at all (and under the direction of a mindless
evolutionary process they easily might not), and if right and wrong arise from
human nature, then right and wrong would not exist (regardless of whether we
considered right and wrong as either moral absolutes or as the biological
relativism that emerges from biological success). In other words, because the atheist theory of
ethics ties morality to human nature, the fate of human nature is the fate of
morality. That fate, if the second law
of thermodynamics is correct, is oblivion.
The material world is winding down to something like an amorphous,
motionless mass of dead matter at a low temperature, incapable of sustaining
life. Along with the demise of the
physical universe go all the atheist's alleged moral absolutes, the true name
of which we now see is “nihilism.” In
this system, morality, like everything else, comes precisely to nothing. When human beings cease to exist sometime in
the future, as any worldview that leaves out God must assert, right and wrong
cease to exist at that same moment. In
short, what is intended by the atheists to be the foundation of morality is
really its death warrant.
(3)
Why flourishing (and not something else) should be the measure of morality
cannot be proven, cannot be metaphysically rooted or justified. To select flourishing as the measure of moral
discernment, or to define flourishing as one thing and not another, is merely
to elevate both one's own personal preference for flourishing and one's own
definition of flourishing (whatever it happened to be) to the level of a moral absolute,
which they neither are nor ever could be.
One might just as easily have selected private pleasure at the expense
of another's pain as the measure of moral conduct, as might someone like the
Marquis de Sade. One might even prefer
death to life, as do virtually all suicides.
That happiness or prosperity, and not death, is the proper content of
flourishing cannot be established upon a merely evolutionary basis, except that
an atheist simply assert a preference (pragmatic or otherwise) for the one and
not the other. Again, whatever else such
private preferences might be, they are not moral absolutes.
The
un-Godded worldview does not, and cannot, yield moral oughtness. It yields only
competing sets of preferences to which some atheists unjustifiably try to attach
the language of oughtness. Other more astute atheists refuse to make that mistake.
On that point those more astute and consistent atheists deserve full credit
because they understand that no atheistic explanation of morality has the
metaphysical rootedness necessary for moral absolutes. Their worldview
precludes it. They know that when other more inconsistent atheists want to hold
onto atheism and to avail themselves
of the language of oughtness, they fall afoul of what atheist Ayn Rand called
the error of stolen concepts: They employ ideas and categories to which their
system has no metaphysical access.
Atheists who invoke morality are idea thieves.
Put differently, it makes all the difference in the world
whether we say mind came from matter or matter came from mind. Because ideas
have consequences, if you choose the former, you cut yourself off from the
consequences that attach solely to the latter. One of those lost consequences
is the metaphysical rootedness necessary for moral absolutes, that is, for a
morality that rises above the level of mere preference.
Finally,
as much as I value the work of C. S. Lewis, in general, and his The
Abolition of Man, in particular, I would be misusing his book were I to
argue from it that, because there appears to be substantial agreement among the
peoples of the world about the rules of right and wrong, therefore these rules
of right and wrong are moral absolutes.
Consensus, regardless of how extensive or how enduring it might be, is
no sure measure of morality. All too
often the majority has consented, either explicitly or implicitly, to colossal
evil. Atheist governments have made it
happen time and again. Morality is not
determined by nose count (or by power).
"Majority" is no synonym for "morality."
In
a word, if there is no God, there is no good.
