Morality is like the river, in that there are some circumstances where it is fairly easy to make it become what we want it to be, as well as other circumstances where, do what we will, the “water” is going to follow its natural downhill flow. But if morality is like the river, then what is the landscape that shapes its natural course, and what force of “gravity” pulls it downhill? That one is a little more complicated to explain.

As you may recall from last week’s post, I differ from Thomist philosophy (or at least, from as much as I’ve seen of it so far) in that I believe there is precisely one ontological perfection, no more, and this perfection is reality/truth itself as a whole. All lesser “perfections” are, in fact, errors in perception: our minds are inadequate to contain and process more than a very small fraction of the whole truth about reality as a whole, so we are forced to isolate certain perceptible aspects of reality and treat them as distinct concepts, even though real truth is not isolated nor distinct from itself. Anything we have a concept for is necessarily imperfect, and is less than the whole truth.

In discussing things like “goodness,” therefore, the philosopher needs to be careful to remember that he is actually studying the characteristics of his own imperfect perception of goodness, and not something that is perfect and complete in and of itself. If he forgets the inherent imperfection of all philosophical entities, and believes that such things have an independent existence of their own (or worse yet, are the ontological sources for observable reality), then he makes the same mistake that led Aristotle to conclude that the celestial bodies are all perfect spheres moving in perfect circles. Such “perfections” are merely oversimplifications designed to make the philosopher’s life easier; they break down if you try to apply them to the more complicated reality they are drawn from.

In considering the actual basis for “good” and “evil,” then, the first thing we need to remember is the real-world context in which such patterns can be seen to emerge. That context is a context of materialism. We exist as material organisms; our lives, our actions, our very consciousness is built upon a physical foundation of energy exchanges, organized in patterns that have evolved over millions and even billions of years. “Good” and “evil” can thus be reduced to a question of energy exchanges, in much the same way as a symphony can be reduced to a series of rapidly varying air pressures—and with about the same loss of comprehensibility.  That’s zooming in too close, so that we can’t see the big picture. Too much detail overwhelms our limited minds.

There is useful information there, however. Knowing that a symphony exists, materially, as a series of variations in air pressure, we can understand why you can’t listen to symphonies in a vacuum. And likewise, knowing that good and evil are constructed out of a pattern of material energy exchanges, we can understand why good and evil do not exist in some abstract, ethereal dimension, but rather are rooted in, and bound to, our material life.

Let’s elaborate slightly (but not too much, since this is still just a blog post). As living organisms, we are what we are as a result of natural selection. Organisms that did not have the physical properties leading to extending their own existence are organisms that proved more likely to perish without reproducing; the organisms which were equipped to maintain and continue their existence were more likely to prolong the patterns that led to this kind of survival-seeking, in their own lives and in the lives of their offspring.

At the most fundamental level, then, we have a differentiating factor: natural selection has given rise to a behavioral pattern of pursuing actions that promote continuation of existence, and of avoiding actions that interrupt the energy exchanges (thus causing death). The actions that promote survival are thus “good” (on a primitive level), and the ones that promote premature death are “bad.”

Note, by the way, that there is no point in asking whether it matters whether the organism lives or dies. That’s a subjective question. We are not speaking of whether some third party observer has preferences one way or another about the organism’s life, because that’s irrelevant to understanding what “good” and “bad” really are, especially at such a foundational level. All we have, and all we need, is the evolved pattern of behavior that prefers survival over extinction.

This is a category of good and evil that exists all the way down to the microbial and even sub-cellular level. At this point, however, it’s still too basic, in a symphony=list-of-frequencies sort of way. To properly understand good and evil in our own context, we need to follow the organism as it evolves mechanisms that promote the “good” behaviors and avoid the “bad” ones. Again, though, we’re tracing the evolution of a material phenomenon, specifically the development of neural systems capable of registering sensations, emotions, and instincts.

The apex of this process (so far) is the evolution of intelligent, self-aware consciousness. We evolved into a material organism whose physical structure allows the types of energy exchanges we call “thinking.” And along the way, we learned a thing or two. For instance, we learned that there is strength in numbers, and we learned that the nail that sticks up gets hammered down. We learned, in other words, that banding together into societies is “good,” but that it has a price which can be “bad.” Societies can prolong your existence, but it can also cut it short, sometimes unexpectedly so.

This is the “landscape” across which the “rivers” of morality flow. In some places, there’s a clear, sloped channel down which the river flows: murdering someone, for example, makes you at least a potential threat to others, so that’s bad in two ways: not only is your victim dead, but you’ve put yourself in a situation where the “good” thing for everyone else to do is to prolong their existence by cutting yours short, so as to eliminate the threat. People benefit from being united in a society, PROVIDED that no one member ruins it for everyone else.

Morality thus arises spontaneously as set of conventions for balancing the potential rewards of social cooperation against the potential costs of social interaction. Because morality arises out of the nature of the material substances and energies that make up our lives, there is a certain degree of objective reality to large areas of morality. Dead is dead, and there’s no remedy for that, so the laws of morality in any society are almost certain to follow the same pattern of prohibition against murder.

On the other hand, there is also a strong subjective aspect to morality, in that the only reason we care about morality is because we are material organisms with a deeply ingrained behavior pattern that favors survival over extinction. If you give someone a definition of good and evil, and they ask you what difference your morality makes, you can tell them that they’re asking the wrong question. The question you have to ask first is, “To whom does it make a difference?” It makes a difference to us, because we are material organisms, whose patterns of makeup and behavior were formed by natural selection. And that’s the only difference it makes. That’s why we even discuss moral issues. Our interest in morality is the “gravity” that keeps the river flowing.

Of course, being organisms that are both intelligent and social, we have a lot more than just life and death to worry about. We understand that things can be bad even if they don’t threaten us with immediate annihilation. Loss of power, loss of goods, loss of shelter/clothing, loss of health and strength, loss of skills—any or all of these things cast doubts on how well we can survive in a hostile environment. This is another consequence of the material basis of good and evil: we have real, objective, material needs and there are sometimes hard physical constraints on who gets to keep the “good” stuff and who has to go without. It does not need to go all the way to literal physical death: any exchange that leaves you with fewer resources than you started with is a “bad” exchange (for you at least).

Ultimately, then, morality is both subjective and objective. It’s subjective in that it matters to somebody (and if it didn’t, then what difference would morality make?). People care about good and evil, subjectively, and this is what both defines morality and makes it important. But there’s an objective aspect of morality as well, and that is that our moral judgments take place in the context of a material “landscape” in which some directions are downhill and others aren’t. Societies have a way of imposing arbitrary moral standards (like the “right” of the rich to exploit the poor), but material actions have material consequences, and ill-advised moral standards are likely to be overthrown sooner or later (e.g. the French Revolution).

In answer to Nick’s question, then, my definition of goodness is that truth is good first and foremost. Your best shot at success depends on having what’s inside your head match what’s outside your head. Chasing illusory prey or fleeing illusory predators may give you strong feelings, but it’s not a survival benefit. This is the standard by which I judge C. S. Lewis’ arguments to be “not good.”

Beyond that, good and evil have to be defined in terms of finding the best balance between the interests of society and the interests of the individual. There’s no one correct moral balance, just like there’s no one correct river: we need to follow the path that best suits the circumstances and that achieves the best balance between making society strong at the expense of the individual, and making the individual strong at the expense of society.

Ultimately, you could reduce morality to a calculation of energy exchanges, albeit one that would be humanly impossible to compute. Each action has a certain cost to the individual, and a certain benefit to the individual, and a certain cost to society and a certain benefit to society. If we could add up all the costs, and all the benefits, and break it down so that neither party had disproportionately more nor less than the other, then we would achieve the mathematically optimal moral decision. Failing such a precise measure, though, we’ll have to do with our best estimate and with the imperfect process of consensus.

And that, barring a sudden burst of participation from Nick, is probably going to be as far as I go on this topic. I’ve answered his challenge, and his interest in engaging me has been conspicuous in its failure to manifest itself over the course of my past three posts, so there I think the matter will rest. It’s been fun, and moderately interesting (for me at least), and I, at least, am satisfied with the outcome.

By asserting the existence of a disobeyable Law, therefore, Lewis is implicitly assuming, in his premise, the existence of the intentional law-giver that is the goal of his conclusion… By incorporating the assumption of an independent Observer/Participant into his definition of “law,” he biases the fundamental vocabulary of the discussion, and makes it difficult or impossible to argue the case, using his terms, without being led inevitably to the predetermined conclusion.

This is a very serious logical fallacy which, if unaddressed, undermines the validity of all subsequent Thomistic argumentation regarding natural law. I then posed a fairly simple question for Nick:

My main question is about Mere Christianity, and about Lewis’ apparent failure to produce a logically valid introduction to Thomistic thought. A sound and correct philosophical foundation should have made it easier for Lewis to produce a coherent and non-fallacious summary, albeit a potentially incomplete one. How then do you account for this discrepancy…?

I was frankly looking forward to Nick’s reply, given his extensive readings (especially as compared to my own). How would he address this problem? Would he agree that Lewis was presenting an unsound argument, and try to excuse him on the grounds that he was summarizing something much more complex? Would he try and make a case for the existence of a disobeyable law independent of any Observer with opinions and preferences about our behavior? Would he admit that “disobeyable law” already assumes the existence of a Divine Law Giver, and plead that in this special case it’s ok to assume one’s conclusion?

I was very interested in seeing how he would reply, but I didn’t expect him to reply like this:

I believe the question, if I’m understanding it rightly, concerns if Lewis is contradicting himself about a law of nature that cannot be broken supposedly and a law of morality that can.

Also, it concerns why we should believe if it cannot be measured or is not tangible in some way.

As they say in lolspeak, I am disappoint.

First of all, with regards to the second point, I did not ask why we should believe in the intangible/unquantifiable, I asked how a layman can verify the validity of complex philosophical constructs, in the absence of tangible by-products. Most of us have no hope of understanding the math behind Einstein’s equations, but when we see the mushroom cloud we at least have some idea that e does equal mc^2. Is there any way, then, that we can verify the validity (or lack of validity) of Thomistic conclusions regarding goodness?

I would suggest that there are some standards even a layman can apply, such as the test of whether or not the whole structure is built on a simple logical fallacy. When we read Chapter One of Mere Christianity, we find Lewis committing the fallacy of incorporating the assumption of his conclusion into the specification for the terms he uses to define his premises. For the simple layman, that would seem to rule out any possibility that his argument is sound. That’s why it’s so important for us, as presumptively unread laymen, to get a straight answer to the question of whether or not Lewis’ first step is a logical misstep, and if so, is this implicit fallacy a fair depiction of the actual foundation of Thomist thought.

If the answer to both questions is yes, that would be extremely damaging to the argument for natural law, so hopefully Nick will address this issue in his next reply.

Meanwhile, I’ll take a stab at answering another one of his questions, since he has repeated it more than once. Nick is wondering whether any of us know know the three criteria for moral goodness: object, intention, and circumstance. It’s an interesting topic in and of itself, so let’s have a quick tour.

According to Thomas Aquinas, the primary criterion for assessing the moral goodness of a particular action is the object of the action. Note that’s “object,” not “objective.” When discussing the object of a moral act, we’re talking about describing what the act is, not what it is intended to accomplish. For example, murder, witch-burning, capital punishment and suicide all have human death as their object, even though many different intentions are involved (sometimes multiple intentions for the same act!). Thus, “object” has to do with “what,” not “why” or “how much” or so on.

Before an action can be morally good, it must first be good in its object. Thus, to judge the goodness of any action whose object is human death, we must first assess whether human death is good in and of itself. That’s a point that has interesting implications, as discussed below.

Next, we must look at intention. Is the action intended to accomplish a good result? The caveat here is that if the object is immoral then no amount of good intentions can make the act morally good. The end does not justify the means, at least according to the 3 criteria for moral goodness.

And lastly we must look at circumstance. This is kind of the loophole in Thomistic morality. In theory there can be no such thing as “extenuating circumstances” capable of making an action good when its object is not good (otherwise we don’t really have 3 criteria for moral goodness, because the real determining factor is circumstance). Thus, in theory the circumstance can tell you, e.g. that stealing someone’s parachute is a worse offense than stealing someone’s handkerchief, but both actions are still immoral because the object of the action is taking someone else’s property against their will, which is an immoral action.

The gotcha with the 3 criteria is that the actions of God Himself are, in many cases, immoral by this standard, and thus in practice theologians end up having to invoke the idea of extenuating circumstances, which means claiming that the last criterion overrules the first two. Without extenuating circumstances, no act of genocide can be good unless its object (wiping out an entire ethnic group of people, including children and babies) is also good; thus in commanding genocide, God is requiring His people to behave immorally. The only way to avoid this conclusion is either to decide moral goodness based on circumstance despite one or both of the other two criteria. Either that or decide that wiping out entire populations is morally “good,” or course.

And yet, even though you will find Catholics, for instance, who argue that the extermination of the Amalekites was not immoral, due to extenuating circumstances, they will still use the 3 criteria standard as an argument for why abortion can never be moral under any circumstances. As so often happens, the “absolute standard” isn’t always absolute. It’s what you might call a “flexible” standard—it allows us to determine what is and is not moral, except when it doesn’t, in which case we fall back on the argument from circumstance (which sometimes sounds suspiciously like my basis for morality ).

You could almost make the 3 Criteria standard work, if you said that you have to consider all three criteria as a whole. The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t really solve the problem: either all three criteria are in agreement, in which case the question is trivial, or else there is some conflict between the three criteria, in which case you need some kind of higher principle of morality to which you can refer in deciding how much of a “vote” to give to each of the 3 criteria in determining the outcome. But if you have to appeal to a higher standard of morality to referee between 3 conflicting criteria, then it is the higher standard that is the real criterion for moral goodness, and you’re just fooling yourself by claiming to base moral goodness on the 3 criteria.

So like I said, it’s an interesting topic, and one I’m sure Nick will have more to say about (and with my blessing). I wouldn’t call it a solid philosophical approach, though, unless Nick can convince me otherwise.

In the interests of focusing on the heart of the issue rather than on tangents, let me begin by conceding that Nick has read more books on the subject of the ontology of good, Thomist philosophy, and so on, than I have. He has recommended Budziszewski, so I will give him a go. (Nick, would Written on the Heart be a reasonable starting place? When you have kids in college, the $10 book has certain attractions over the $70 hard cover, which is what Amazon is charging for The Line Through the Heart.)

Meanwhile, I do have an on-topic question for Nick, which might open up some common ground for fruitful discussion.

My question concerns the validation of academic inquiry, with a special emphasis on the needs of the layman. Academia, the land of intellectuals and scholars, is a rather diverse landscape. It gives us cosmology and particle physics, and it also gives us postmodernism. It has its triumphs and its failures, its breakthroughs and its fads, its wisdom and its foolishness. For many people, it’s almost a cabal—we don’t know what they’re doing, and if we try to get involved, we find the discussion wrapped in an almost impenetrable layer of technical jargon, inside references, and non-obvious assumptions. Are they giving us the next big Answer, or is this just another postmodernism in the making?

That’s not my question for Nick, but I’m leading up to it. The point is that having a lot of publications and citations and academic popularity is no guarantee that your conclusions have meaning and value outside the ivory tower. If there were a major academic discipline dealing with, say, the philosophy of aerodynamics, then we could get some idea if the leading figures in the movement were correct by having them design a flying machine. If it just sits on the runway waggling “perfect” appendages until it finally tips over and bursts into flame, then it’s probably safe to conclude that the philosophers behind it had fallen into the uniquely academic trap of being brilliantly persuasive rather than brilliantly accurate.

That only works for disciplines that have a tangible output, however. Where a discipline is concerned entirely with intangibles and metaphysics, there’s a substantially increased risk of proceeding on the basis of conclusions that have been verified only by consensus rather than by objective measurement against a real-world standard of truth. The popularity of a given philosophy, and the eloquence with which it is defended and explained, are not in themselves any guarantee of real-world accuracy. Indeed, in the absence of an “experimental metaphysics” branch of philosophy, there is a substantially increased risk that one’s conclusions will owe more to rhetorical strengths than to actual fact—that the silver tongue will outweigh the gold standard.

Nevertheless, there are criteria that can be used to at least weed out those conclusions which are flawed by logical fallacies, self-contradictions, or substantial inconsistencies relative to real-world facts. And this, finally, is where I arrive at my point.

My question is this. If Thomistic philosophy is successfully representing real-world truth, I would expect it’s “tangible,” flying-machine-on-the-runway product to be a description of real-world morality that was coherent, consistent, and logically valid. In Mere Christianity, however, C. S. Lewis did not present a logically valid description. For example, in Chapter 1, he writes,

The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the laws of gravitation, and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law — with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Nature or to disobey it.

Wherever there is talk of disobedience, you are necessarily assuming the existence of two Observer/Participants, each of whom has intentions about how the principal Participant “ought” to behave. The disobedience consists of a difference between the behavior as practiced by the principal Participant, and the behavior as intended by the second Participant. This is in Chapter 1, mind you—the starting point of his argument for Moral Law.

In the absence of intention, there can be no “disobeyable” laws, because there is no intent that you should behave in any particular way. The only laws that exist apart from intention are laws that describe real constraints on what can and cannot occur. Such laws cannot be disobeyed, because they describe what can and cannot happen, and if anything happens contrary to such a law, it merely proves that the law is not an accurate description of what can and cannot happen, and thus is not a genuine law.

By asserting the existence of a disobeyable Law, therefore, Lewis is implicitly assuming, in his premise, the existence of the intentional law-giver that is the goal of his conclusion. In fact, we might even accuse him of naive animism—accounting for observed real-world phenomena by arbitrarily attributing them to invisible intelligent agents. By incorporating the assumption of an independent Observer/Participant into his definition of “law,” he biases the fundamental vocabulary of the discussion, and makes it difficult or impossible to argue the case, using his terms, without being led inevitably to the predetermined conclusion.

Granted, I don’t think that’s entirely Lewis’ fault. It’s easy to accidentally incorporate an assumed Observer into your basic terminology. Take the concept of “imperfection” for instance. Everything is a “perfect” instance of itself; things are “imperfect” only to the extent that they differ from what some Observer thinks they ought to be. To define “perfection” is to assume the existence of a Person with intentions regarding which characteristics and behaviors are “right” for some particular thing.

But I digress. My main question is about Mere Christianity, and about Lewis’ apparent failure to produce a logically valid introduction to Thomistic thought. A sound and correct philosophical foundation should have made it easier for Lewis to produce a coherent and non-fallacious summary, albeit a potentially incomplete one. How then do you account for this discrepancy, and given this problem why should we, as laymen, conclude that Lewis’ Thomistic philosophies are anything more than just another fad, like postmodernism?

Thanks.

DD: What I have is not so much a definition of goodness as an objective approach to discerning goodness. One of the major flaws I see in Lewis’ reasoning is a tendency to assume that “goodness” is defined by a list somewhere, and that’s not really realistic or workable, as I’ve discussed extensively in my discussion of the “Book 1″ portion of Mere Christianity.

Reply: So let me get this straight. You don’t have a definition of goodness, but yet you’re basing your argument on what goodness is. C.S. Lewis was a Thomist. Do you know how Thomism describes goodness? Do you know how Aristotle did? Do you know how that relates to the central doctrine of Thomistic thought, the doctrine of being?

If you do not believe goodness can be described (A more accurate word than defined) then there’s no point in you going on about it and the privation of it, evil.

Hello, Nick, and welcome once again. I’m afraid that you do not quite have things straight yet, but perhaps I can explain myself a bit better. What I’m saying is that Good (as in Good vs. Evil or Right vs Wrong) is not a singular standard with a singular definition. Moral standards are a cultural convention arrived at through a combination of factors including (a) accumulated experience of the consequences of certain things, (b) natural human empathy and (c) sentient self-interest, as they relate to the group in question. There may be other factors as well, but these are the big three.

The reason I did not give you the definition of goodness that you asked for is because your question was too vague. You did not specify any particular social/historical/cultural context, and that’s an important prerequisite for any such definition. Trying to define “Good” without reference to any particular social group is like trying to define marriage without any reference to either of the spouses: it’s not strictly impossible, but it leaves undefined a number of significant variables without which your definition is going to have problems. (More on that below.)

As for Thomistic thought and Aristotle and such, my critique of Lewis is based specifically on the job he does explaining his concept of Moral Law to the average layman, which is why I’m speaking in layman’s terms instead of invoking technical philosophical jargon. If you are suggesting that Lewis’ explanation is misleading, or that it fails to properly explain the topics he is discussing, such that the layman must first master Aquinas and Aristotle before he can properly understand Lewis (!), then perhaps we ought to warn people not to read Mere Christianity, as it will only confuse them.

And lastly, if all you want is a description of goodness, that’s a bit easier. I apologize for the brevity of my first reply, but I’ve got a bit more free time today, so perhaps I can go into more detail. In particular, I’d like to discuss how my understanding of the source of morality is different from (and better than) Lewis’.

The flaw I see in Lewis’ explanation, and in the concepts of natural law and eternal law which underlie it, is that it attempts to reduce the difficult question of Right vs. Wrong down to a relatively simple rule of fiat: somewhere “out there” is a list of things that are always Right/Good, and a list of things that are always Wrong/Evil, and thus morality is merely a matter of finding which list contains the thing you are trying to judge. (For purposes of this discussion it doesn’t matter as much whether this list springs from God’s mind or His will or His nature; the main problem is that it is there at all, by whatever means.)

There is a strong, naive appeal to such a notion. People are always hoping to find an easy, sure-fire way to lose weight, to get rich, to enhance their (*ahem*) “personal characteristics,” and they feel pretty much the same way about any system that offers an easy, sure-fire way to know what’s right and what’s wrong. Screw up morality, and you screw up your life, and people know it, so they’re eager to “buy.” The problem with the “rule of fiat” approach to morality, as it is with other such nostrums, is that it doesn’t actually work in real life.

For example, if there were, somewhere, an eternal law that enumerated all the things that are Good and all the things that are Sin, then that would be an absolute, eternal, and universal constraint. A thing is either right for all people, at all times, in all circumstances, or it is wrong for all people, at all times, in all circumstances. Its moral quality is defined, not by the circumstances attendant on it, but by an independent and extrinsic standard or ideal to which it must relate, and that standard must be arbitrary (i.e. not dependent on circumstances or consequences) or else it is reduced to merely relaying some other, more fundamental source of morality based on circumstances and consequences.

Thus, if genocide is a sin, then it’s a sin even when the Israelites do it; conversely, if it was ok then, it must also be ok now. If suicide is a sin, then it’s a sin for everyone, including those who commit suicide by provoking the Pharisees until they arrange a crucifixion. The rule of fiat is a fixed and absolute morality, not a kind of moral relativism, so it cannot and indeed must not modify its demands to suit some contemporary circumstance or other. But that causes theological problems, because sooner or later God Himself ends up doing something immoral like, say, getting another man’s fiancee pregnant.

The only way to “fix” this hypothetical law is by modifying it so that it becomes contingent upon circumstance: genocide is wrong IF you’re wiping out this group of people rather than that one; suicide is wrong UNLESS you are doing it to benefit someone else, it’s ok to impregnate an unmarried woman IF you are Almighty, etc. In other words, the “eternal law” approach fails unless it is reduced to merely relaying some higher moral standard based on real-world considerations—what we might call the “rule of consequences” as opposed to the rule of fiat. That’s an oversimplification, of course, but like I said, layman’s terms.

In other words, “absolute” goodness sounds good and is easy to sell, but it’s not the ultimate answer. There’s an even deeper and more fundamental source of morality, by which we can judge whether or not the Moral Law needs to be fixed to make it come out right. It’s the difference between theory and practice. In theory, Moral Law is natural law (in the Thomistic sense), but in practice, it is relativism, and we judge the rightness or wrongness of God’s actions by a more flexible standard so that things that would be sin for anyone else are fine for Him. Circumstances and contingencies, and not the inherent rightness or wrongness of the act itself, are the final measure believers use to get God’s conduct to come out “right.”

Lewis’ Moral Law argument suffers from many other, similar flaws, as I’ve discussed over the course of the past several weeks. And it’s not just that Lewis’ argument (and the philosophy behind it) fails to fit the facts, it’s that there exists an alternative that does describe human morality as we observe it in the real world, even among Thomists and other believers, without the caveats and twists and rationalizations that Lewis’ approach requires.

That description, of course, is the one I’ve already alluded to above. Right and Wrong, Good and Evil are social conventions that arise within a certain group based on their perception/consensus regarding which set of consequences they want to encourage and which they want to avoid. It’s complex, changeable, and often results in conflicts between different groups with different moral standards (with one or both sides trying to promote their standard as Eternal and Immutable Law), as we see in action in real life every day.

That’s not a popular description (people like their diet pills and their Ten Commandments) but it’s the objectively accurate one. Like it or not, that’s the way the real world is. Moral standards evolve within particular groups at particular times, and are tied to those groups but not necessarily to others. That’s why, for example, slavery is evil today, and eating pork is not, whereas in Old Testament Israel it was the other way around. Circumstances change, social conventions change, and morality changes right along with them. So you see, I can describe how morality works, but I cannot give you a specific definition of what “good” is, because that definition can be different for different groups at different times. All I (or anyone else) can do is to describe how it works—and my description, unlike Lewis’, accurately matches the way we see real morality function in real life.

DD: As to your second question, I have a feeling you’re leading up to something by the reference to “goodness in relation to being,” but I’m not sure what exactly you have in mind.

Reply: Correct. If you are not sure what I have in mind, then it’s time to learn. If you do not know this concept, then it’s really difficult to take the account seriously. Of course, if you want to learn an accurate description, I’m ready to give it.

I’m sure I and my readers would be glad to hear it. Share, by all means, what you know.

DD: I do have a few decades of experience as an evangelical, Bible-believing conservative Christian, so I am fairly comfortable with my understanding of how Christians see “goodness.”

Reply: No you’re not. I’m not talking about how Christians see goodness. It’s irrelevant to me. Goodness is what it is regardless of if Christians see it and goodness had an ontology before Christianity came along. I’m talking about what it is and I don’t need the Bible for that or the revelation of God at all.

Good for you! I don’t need the Bible either, with the caveat that we are entitled to examine any book that claims to be inspired by the Author of that ontology, to see if its claims are consistent with itself and with the real world evidence. As I’m sure you would agree.

By the way, I apologize for misunderstanding which group you were thinking of when you said “Lewis and others,” but you’ll have to admit you were a bit vague there. I’m glad to see that you’ve been more specific in your response.

DD: No doubt you could find a point or two to quibble over, but I daresay you could do the same with any number of believers as well, so I’m not worried about falling outside the mainstream.

Reply: You bet I could because sadly, most Christians don’t even know this due to the dumbing down of the church that leads to the apostasy you’ve just described yourself as fulfilling. You didn’t know about goodness then and you still don’t now.

I’m afraid you have jumped to a false conclusion there; I hope that was unintentional. If you can address the points I’ve raised, then I would encourage you to do so. Anyone who merely wishes to indulge in innuendo and premature boasting, without demonstrating an awareness and understanding of opposing arguments, would risk coming across as ignorant and obstinate. That applies to me as much as to you, naturally.

I think the most productive approach would be for each of us to attempt to address the points under discussion as they are raised, and if there is any relevant argument or information that has not yet been raised, we should raise it, and actually see if the other party is familiar with it before drawing any conclusions about their level of knowledge. Fair enough? I have addressed the points raised by Lewis in his book, just as you are free and welcome to address the points I raise in my posts. And if you feel like there’s anything Lewis said in the first several chapters that I’ve overlooked, and/or that I’ve incorrectly omitted in order to make spurious claims of ignorance on Lewis’ part, feel free to point those out as well, and I will gladly correct any errors that warrant correction.

DD: If you think I’ve missed anything important, feel free to share.

Reply: Just the big picture and an education on what you’re talking about. You don’t have a working idea of what goodness is and you aren’t interacting with the metaphysics that C.S. Lewis held to, which would be a good Thomistic metaphysics.

You seem to have rather strong feelings on the subject. Are you by any chance letting these feelings bias your conclusions? That would explain why you seem to think you’ve plumbed the full extent of my knowledge even before we’ve started, as it were. And that would indeed be a shame. Still, I’m glad you showed up and gave me the opportunity to explore the topic a little further. The Lewis book was very disappointing, and you’ve made the discussion a lot more lively. Thanks much.

According to C. S. Lewis, we have a problem.

What is the problem? A universe that contains much that is obviously bad and apparently meaningless, but containing creatures like ourselves who know that it is bad and meaningless.

In the real world, this is hardly a problem: meaning is inherent in the law of cause and effect, because it creates predictable (and therefore meaningful) connections between causes and effects. Likewise, meaning is inherent in the fact that truth is consistent with itself: the self-consistency creates relationships between truths, and these relationships are what we call “meaning”. Lewis’ problem is simply that he has a superstitious answer to sell, and therefore he needs to manufacture some sort of question he can respond to.

Predictably, he recognizes only two possible explanations for this “problem.” One is the Christian view that the world is a good creation gone bad, and the other is Dualism, “the belief that there are two equal and independent powers at the back of everything, one of them good and the other bad,” each one believing itself to be the “good” god. No non-superstitious explanations need apply, apparently. Everything has to be “explained” in terms of magical, invisible beings. Oh well.

It might be interesting, given Christianity’s ancestry, to explore the conflict between Lewis’ beliefs and classical dualism. Unfortunately, Lewis makes a very serious strategic mistake: he attacks dualism from the perspective of asking what makes the good deity good and the bad deity bad. In a way, it’s a natural extension of his rhetoric in book 1, but it’s a fatal error nonetheless.

Lewis praises dualism for being, in his words, “the manliest and most sensible creed on the market,” though he doesn’t explain why he thinks so. I presume it has something to do with the fact that Christianity is also dualistic, except for the part about the good deity and the bad deity being co-equal and co-eternal. So what’s not to like, eh? Here’s Lewis explaining what he sees as being “the catch.”

[W]hat do we mean when we call one of them the Good Power and the other the Bad Power? Either we are merely saying that we happen to prefer one to the other—like preferring beer to cider—or else we are saying that, whatever the two powers think about it, and whichever we humans, at the moment, happen to like, one of them is actually wrong, actually mistaken, in regarding itself as good. Now if we mean merely that we happen to prefer the first, then we must give up talking about good and evil at all. For good means what you ought to prefer quite regardless of what you happen to like at any given moment. If ‘being good’ meant simply joining the side you happen to fancy, for no real reason, then good would not deserve to be called good. So we must mean that one of the two powers is actually wrong and the other actually right.

But the moment you say that, you are putting into the universe a third thing in addition to the two Powers: some law or standard or rule of good which one of the powers conforms to and the other fails to conform to. But since the two powers are judged by this standard, then this standard, or the Being who made this standard, is farther back and higher up than either of them, and He will be the real God.

If you just experienced a loud bang, a sudden flickering light, and a noisy crash, that was C. S. Lewis shooting down his own Moral Law argument in flames. The strategic error Lewis made here is in attacking one of the many areas that dualism has in common with Christianity. In book 1, Lewis made the claim that the universe was created by a “good” God; here in book 2, he points out the flaw in that reasoning. Dualism’s “evil god” is irrelevant, because with or without a dualistic alternative, the crucial question remains: what does it mean to call God “good”?

Lewis points out the two ways we could answer this question. We could say that God simply chose whatever He preferred, for no particular reason, and called it “good” (and arbitrarily imposed that definition on us as well). Alternatively, we could say that “good means what [He] ought to prefer,” and therefore God demonstrated His goodness by defining “good” according to that standard.

In the first case, it is meaningless to call God “good,” because He’s just doing whatever He happens to fancy, for no real reason. In this case, His self-professed “goodness” is only an arbitrary, selfish, tyrannical “good,” with no true moral merit. On the other hand, as soon as you say God was only doing what He ought to do, you are putting into the Universe a power greater than God, a Being who made a standard that even God has to measure up to. That being would have to be the true God, and for Lewis’ Moral Law argument to work, He would have to be a good God as well. But what does it mean to call this new God “good”?

Such is the trap that superstition lays for the naive and shallow-minded. God cannot both be “good” in any meritorious sense of the word, and also be the Author of the standard of what “good” is. Either “good” is entirely arbitrary and up to whatever God’s whim is at the moment (in which case it doesn’t deserve to be called good), or else there is some greater power than God, and that greater power is setting standards that even God has to obey. But if that greater power is to be called “good” in any meaningful sense, then there must be an even greater power above that, and so on ad infinitum.

Lewis has dug himself into a hole he cannot dig himself out of, but there are actually two ways a more rationally-minded person could escape this dilemma. One is by acknowledging that Alethea must be the Ultimate God: Reality itself is the supreme power that imposes standards which even gods (lesser gods) must live up to, or fail. Alethea alone is the God Who can define both good and evil without Herself being altogether good or altogether evil.

Or if you prefer to address the issue in less mystical/mythic terms, you could just say that good is defined by the shared experiences of countless individuals interacting with one another and seeking a common approach that benefits everyone. There’s a certain Darwinian dynamic at work, because a moral principle only spreads when people see some sort of benefit in it, and that’s more likely to happen if the principle has some real, tangible benefit. Principles that benefit more people will spread to more people, whereas if a principle tends to harm more people than it helps, fewer people will want to adopt it, and more people will want to actively discourage it.

Thus a moral consensus will emerge that is neither “whatever we humans happen to like at the moment” nor some divine list of do’s and don’ts. It may be good and wise, or it may be tainted with superstition and cultural biases, but it won’t be a matter of individual/arbitrary preference nor will it be some universal Moral Law that applies equally to all men at all times in every circumstance. It’s a consensus based on common, real-world experiences, relentless, undirected, and inescapable. Some of us can influence it, but no one, not even Jesus, can control it.

That’s why not even God can be good unless He (or She) conforms to our accumulated “moral” experience of what’s really beneficial and what isn’t. The ancient slave-owning Israelites could have a “good” God who had no problem with slavery, but that’s because of their narrow and self-centered concept of “good,” which only took the slave owner’s benefit into account. After the Enlightenment and the rise of humanism, with its views on the equality of all men, a pro-slavery God could no longer be “good,” and God had to change. Reality, including the reality of human experience, is a God that even Jehovah must submit to.

It’s sad, really. Not only is C. S. Lewis smart enough to have the potential to see the flaws in his Moral Law argument, but here in this chapter he explicitly details one of them for us. He not only should know better, he does know better. And yet, because of his Christian faith, he has compartmentalized this information out of the way, isolating it from the things he wants to believe, and using it only as a criticism of a very similiar religious belief.

There’s just no way around it. Christianity does not make you less intelligent, but as Prof. Lewis demonstrates, it can prevent you from enjoying the benefits of a good mind. Truth is knocking at the door, but Jesus has thrown the bolt.

At the beginning of Chapter 5, Prof. Lewis started to address those of us who might have “felt a certain annoyance” at his wild leap to the conclusion that there must be some supernatural What or Who behind morality. “You may even have thought that I had played a trick on you—that I had been carefully wrapping up to look like philosophy what turns out to be one more ‘religious jaw’.” In response, he said he had three things to say, the first two of which we’ve already seen.

The third point is, in some ways, a bit surprising. The real surprise, though, is that this third point isn’t just a brief aside on the way to a well-reasoned conclusion. It is the conclusion! He just got done telling us that his argument thus far hasn’t brought us “within a hundred miles of the God of Christian theology,” and yet now, apparently, he’s ready to conclude that the Someone “behind” the so-called Moral Law is the Christian God. And he sees nothing wrong with arriving at that conclusion via sloppy, subjective, and unfinished reasoning! Simply astonishing.

Lewis’ third point is, surprisingly, more or less a confession.

Now my third point. When I chose to get to my real subject in this roundabout way, I was not trying to play any kind of trick on you. I had a different reason. My reason was that Christianity simply does not make sense until you have faced the sort of facts I have been describing.

Except that he explicitly rejected real-world facts as a reliable means of discovering the truth about the origin of moral feelings. He called them mere “external observations,” as contrasted with the “inside information” we have about our feelings because we’re the ones feeling them. Despite his denial of trickery, he admits that his whole argument up to this point is, not an objective inquiry into the facts, but simply an attempt to manufacture a subjective mind-set within which Christianity might make sense.

The way he does that is by taking the standard “religious jaw” of Christian dogma and carefully wrapping it up to look like philosophy. It’s not that he’s providing us with an intellectual framework within which he defines the terms used to describe Christian concepts. He’s not trying to explain Christianity at all, he’s just trying to create a “felt need” for what Christianity is selling. (Rather an interesting use of the phrase “make sense,” in my opinion.)

Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know that they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness.

In other words, you can’t sell your snake oil to people unless they think they’re sick. Lewis may have paid lip service to at least the vocabulary of rational objectivity, but everything he said, every fact he pointed out, every fact he ignored, every spin he put on his interpretations, was all designed to make us feel like sinners rebelling against God’s will, and in need of a Savior, in the classic Christian tradition.

So in other words, the only way Christianity makes sense, Lewis proposes, is if you first condition your audience to reject scientific facts, to rely on subjective feelings, and to assume that the Gospel is true. Could there be a greater indictment against Christianity than C. S. Lewis’ defense of it?

Let’s do a quick review of some of the ways Lewis’ Moral Law argument falls short.

1. He fails to consider simpler, natural explanations like empathy, peer pressure, and anticipation of consequences, working together in a larger social context.
2. He fails to observe that feelings of guilt are unreliable as indicators of actual guilt (just as remorselessness is unreliable as an indicator of innocence).
3. He fails to identify any particular source for his claim that “philosophers” used to speak of a “Law of (Human) Nature,” nor does he offer any reasons why we ought to accept the ancient philosophers’ conclusions as true.
4. He acknowledges that different moralities exist, but fails to address the implications this fact has for his “Moral Law” conjecture. Instead, he merely dismisses all such differences by claiming that the moralities are not entirely different, and therefore the differences don’t matter. You know, like the way poisonous mushrooms are not entirely different from edible ones, and therefore the differences don’t matter.
5. He assumes that when we feel like we “ought” to do something that we’re unwilling or afraid to do, this feeling of “oughtness” is the Moral Law speaking directly to us. Unfortunately, he completely fails to explain how we can all be getting our Moral Law by direct, subjective intuition, and yet not all get the same definitions of right and wrong. Either this intuitive sense of morality is infallible, in which case there should never be any differences in our morality, or it’s unreliable, and we ought not feel guilty about letting our better judgment overrule it now and then.
6. He fails to explain how the same thing can be both right and wrong at the same time, for different groups of people (e.g. befriending people so that you can betray them to their enemies).
7. He fails to explain why some choices have no right/good answer (e.g. abortion).
8. He acknowledges that genuine laws of nature describe patterns that we consistently observe in the real world, and he even acknowledges that his proposed Moral Law does not describe any observable real-world patterns. Instead of acknowledging that his conjecture does not fit the facts, however, he invokes a completely gratuitous supernatural realm, and proposes that the discrepancies are due to this “Law” coming from “outside” the observable universe.
9. He fails to provide an objective way to determine what right and wrong and good and evil are (other than just taking some guy’s word for it), and yet consistently assumes that his definition of right and wrong is true and correct.
10. He consistently prefers superstitious attributions over natural/scientific explanations, even when the more mundane explanations are a better fit for the facts.
11. He bases at least part of his argument on the assumption that matter cannot think, even though the only known instances of thinking occur in biological brains made of matter.
12. He fails to acknowledge the existence of scientific analysis and the whole gamut of procedures, tests, and methodologies that allow us to look beyond the immediate observations to the underlying causes and forces at play. Worse, Lewis proposes a crippled version of “science,” limited to observations only, and makes that the basis for arguing that we should trust our subjective feelings more than we trust science, as the basis for understanding morality.

Well, I could go on, but 12′s a nice round number. C. S. Lewis set out to find a plausible, rational, objectively-factual basis upon which to present the skeptic (or at least the believer) with a valid reason to believe in the Christian Gospel. The fact that he made such a bloody hash of it—and became renowned as a defender of the Faith for it—just goes to show how far the Gospel is from having a rational, objective, and factual basis.

And that’s it. Bad as it was, incomplete as it was, this was Lewis’ whole argument for why we ought to think Christianity is really true. The next chapter starts “Book II – What Christians Believe.” We’ve finished the apologetics part, and now it’s on to the unvarnished dogma. That will probably come as a bit of a relief, for Lewis and for us, since he can stop pretending his arguments are rational and objective.

Ever since I was an evangelical Christian, I’ve always thought of Lewis as a champion defender of the Christian faith, and even after I left the faith, I still saw him as a leading Christian apologist. That’s a big part of why I picked Mere Christianity as my next book to work through. But now that I see what his apologetics are like, I can no longer call him an apologist. C. S. Lewis is a good writer (as in “easy to read”), but his true role is as a popularizer of Christian thought. He’s not deep, he’s broad, and that’s what makes him so famous. He tells people what they like to hear, says it smoothly, and doesn’t press any uncomfortable issues.

It’s a bit disappointing, but never fear, we’ll drive on. Next week, we’ll start Book II, What Christians Believe. Given his offhand remarks about how Christianity has nothing to say to anyone unless they’re damned souls in need of salvation, it should be interesting.

We come now to one of the more interesting things C. S. Lewis has said in the entire book so far. It’s an off-hand remark, a casual comment tossed in as a obvious truism, and one that you’ll hear echoed by an astonishingly large number of ordinary rank-and-file believers. And yet, despite all the people who take it for granted that things must be this way, it’s fairly trivial to show that it’s nonsense. Logically, rationally, it means something that can be called true in only the most trivial and even tautological sense. And yet people take it as one of the most fundamental Absolute Truths a person could base their life on. Why?

This is a very interesting question to me, and I’ve got a few ideas that I think are at least part of the answer. But still something about it mystifies me. I’d be interested to hear other people’s comments on this topic.

As you may recall from last time, Prof. Lewis has “not yet got as far as a personal God—only as far as a power, behind the Moral Law, and more like a mind than it is like anything else. But it may still be very unlike a Person.” Yet despite this, the next part of Lewis’ argument assumes that this “power” is indeed a person, with likes and dislikes, and a very strong preference for “Good.”

[Y]ou know at bottom that unless the power behind the world really and unalterably detests [evil] behaviour, then He cannot be good. On the other hand, we know that if there does exist an absolute goodness it must hate most of what we do. That is the terrible fix we are in.

Not half so terrible as the fix Lewis himself is in, rationally speaking. Not only has he failed to provide any reason why this “power” would be capable or interested in “loving” or “hating” anything, he’s trying to assess the “goodness” of this power by measuring it according its own definitions. It need not have “good” reasons for requiring us to be “good,” nor is it really even meaningful to use the term “good” to describe the fundamental definition of what “good” means. Ask anybody in marketing: arbitrarily designating something as “good” is no guarantee that it really is good!

There is a deeper, more fundamental definition of “good,” by which we instinctively judge whether things like the Moral Law or even God Himself—erm, excuse me I mean “the mysterious power behind the Law”—can rightly be called Good. And, in a bit of poetic justice, Lewis finds that he must rely on this real-world standard of Good and Evil/Right and Wrong, in order to spin his argument to favor Christian doctrine. If this real-world standard exists independently of the Law, however, then Lewis’ whole premise is mistaken and/or misleading, whereas if it does not exist, then he cannot correctly appeal to it here.

That’s pretty much where we left off last week, but now for the interesting bit.

If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless.

This may be the most fascinating statement in the whole book. Notice how Lewis (and millions of other believers) make two assumptions here which they assume to be absolutely and incontrovertibly true:

1. The universe is governed by an absolute goodness, and
2. This is necessary in order for us to have hope in the long run.

These two assumptions are why it is practically impossible for an atheist to win an argument with a believer over morality. The atheist must be wrong, because the universe must be governed by an “absolute goodness” (i.e. God), because without God, all our efforts are hopeless in the long run. Or in other words, “it must be true because I don’t want it to be false.”

Fascinating, isn’t it? Lewis tosses it off as though it were a common-sense observation, even though it’s fallacious nonsense in all but the most trivial of senses. Yet somehow this “observation” provides a powerful psychological motive that drives the moral reasonings of millions if not billions. What’s behind it? Is it simple denial? Some kind of psychological insulation to shut out the realization that “someday I will not be”?

That’s a big part of it, I think. Logically and rationally, it’s easy for the atheist to highlight just a small portion of the real-world evidence that’s inconsistent with the idea that the universe is governed by an absolute goodness. Trying to show that to a believer, however, is the psychological and emotional equivalent of saying “the universe is out to kill you, and someday it will succeed.” People tune that out, and tune out the atheist along with it. That makes C. S. Lewis’ job a walk in the park.

I think there may be another important dynamic here as well, a more tribal dynamic. Remember, moral laws are primarily social laws. “Good” behaviors and “evil” behaviors are defined relative to how they affect other people. Different groups within society, however, may have different standards of right and wrong. Especially among believers, the defense of Moral Law goes hand in hand with the assumption that our definition of goodness is the definition of goodness. To champion a particular moral code is to assert the supremacy of the cultural group that “owns” that standard. In that light, those who argue for “absolute goodness” as the supreme authority are merely taking the idea of a Christian Nation and applying it to the whole physical universe. “We are the rightful arbiters of morality, because the entire cosmos is subject to a Ruler whose opinions are the same as ours!”

This is a particularly vexing dynamic because it means that if you have a believer wise enough and self-aware enough not to let fear of death cloud their consideration of morality, they will still have a very powerful psychosocial motive for advocating the validity of Moral Law. Defending this kind of moral reasoning means going up in the esteem of your peers. Propagating it means raising the status of your group in society as a whole. Even if it’s a transparent rationalization and hopeless self-contradiction, you can gain politically and socially by selling it to the “unwashed masses,” who are not at all reluctant to swallow it. “We are the Good guys, led by the Hero, and we’re going to win.” Who wouldn’t want to jump on that bandwagon?

What can we, as unbelievers, do to counter this kind of diseased thinking? I’m open for suggestions. One thing I think we can do is to simply raise awareness of the issues. For example, it’s nonsense to claim that “all our efforts are hopeless in the long run” unless the universe is governed by “absolute goodness.” Hope, by its very nature, is an expectation of change for the better. If any state would rightly be called hopeless, it would have to be heaven, or some other variation on eternal bliss, since you could never hope for things to get better there. And that in turn shows us that it’s pointless to hope for things to be better than they can be.

Hope, and meaning, and purpose, and all the things that believers associate with having some kind of eternal objective, are all things that, in fact, lose their significance in the context of eternity. The purpose of eating is to satisfy the need of the moment, not to achieve some eternal satisfaction in which you never hunger. And likewise with other appetites, like the desire for beauty, or mental stimulation, or challenge, or achievement. The true meaning and purpose of things are rooted and nourished in the changeable, imperfect, ephemeral world in which we experience them, not in some eternal and unchanging perfection that’s effectively indistinguishable from death. We have hope, we have purpose, we have meaning, because we live in a world where there is room for improvement, and the possibility of achieving better things by our efforts.

Now, if you say, “But that still leaves us without a reason to hope that we will live forever in ceaseless bliss,” then I will reply that this is true, in the exact same sense that a detox clinic will try to leave a drug addict without a reason to hope he can stay high for the rest of his life. Ok, one difference: drug-induced euphorias do exist in the real world, whereas the evidence for heaven, not so much. But the point is, hope can be a bad thing if your hope is simply a form of denial and rejection of the real world. If you routinely write checks based only on the hope that your account will have enough to cover the draft, you’ll get to know your bank manager—if not your parole officer—on a first name basis. It is far better to embrace reality as it really is, and to find your meaning and purpose and hope in the real-world truth.

And that’s it for now. I don’t feel like it’s quite enough, and I’m sure there’s lots more that could be said (and probably should be). It’s a bit of a tangent from our main topic, though, so I’m going to keep it to just one post. Next week we’ll pick up back in Chapter 5 again.

It’s getting increasingly difficult for Prof. Lewis to pretend that he’s doing anything more than hiding traditional Christian dogma inside a secularized vocabulary. He still struggles gamely to maintain appearances, but in Chapter 5 he’s getting more and more careless about slipping openly Christian assumptions into his ostensibly objective “inquiry.”

[T]he being behind the universe is intensely interested in right conduct—in fair play, unselfishness, courage, good faith, honesty and truthfulness. In that sense we should agree with the account given by Christianity and some other religions, that God is ‘good’. But do not let us go to fast here. The Moral Law does not give us any grounds for thinking that God is ‘good’ in the sense of being indulgent, or soft, or sympathetic.

It doesn’t? How would Lewis know that? Remember, his “rational” argument thus far has been based only on the observation that people sometimes have feelings that they ought to do certain things, and yet they don’t do them. Unfortunately, as Lewis himself has argued, we don’t find any basis for this “Moral Law” anywhere in the facts of the universe, which means these subjective feelings are our only connection with the Moral Law. And these subjective feelings shift and conflict in so many ways that it’s impossible to know what’s actually in this so-called Moral Law. So how can Lewis be so sure he knows what it does and does not give us grounds for?

Lewis knows (or thinks he knows) about the Moral Law because what he’s really talking about is the Christian ideal of an absolute and eternal Moral Law as typically summarized by the Ten Commandments. He’s proceeding, not from the evidence he has cited, but from ordinary dogma. Notice how his discussion of the Moral Law echoes Jesus’ teachings about the Law of Moses and the even stricter divine law behind it:

There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. It tells you to do the straight thing and it does not seem to care how painful, or dangerous, or difficult it is to do. If God is like the Moral Law, then He is not soft.

As you may remember from last week, the context of this argument is that Lewis is trying to “discover” something about the Someone or Something allegedly behind the Moral Law. The reason Lewis thinks the Moral Law is hard as nails is because he assumes that the God of the Old Testament is behind it. Were he to look at the evidence instead of at Christian dogma, he would have less reason for certainty: that same inner feeling that tells people they “ought” to be doing certain things is just as likely to also indulge them with a selection of reasons why its ok not to in this particular case. More often than not, feelings are a very self-indulgent guide.

Of course, you can interpret that indulgent voice in a Christian framework, and claim that it’s actually a different source, say a sin nature or a demon. But there’s nothing qualitatively different between one subjective moral feeling and another. You’re just interpreting them differently, based on Christian traditions. Which of course you are free to do, but at that point you ought to give up and admit that you’re not really following the evidence wherever it may lead, and that you’re simply assuming Christianity to be true, and adjusting the facts as needed to fit your desired conclusion. Which, by the way, pretty much sums up Lewis’ approach here.

He soldiers on anyway, and, without intending to be ironic, takes the tone of an unbiased observer cautioning the reader not to jump to any conclusions.

It is no use, at this stage, saying that what you mean by a ‘good’ God is a God who can forgive. You are going too quickly. Only a Person can forgive. And we have not yet got as far as a personal God—only as far as a power, behind the Moral Law, and more like a mind than it is like anything else. But it may still be very unlike a Person.

For example, it might be more like a committee, or a war. But you won’t find Prof. Lewis raising any polytheistic possibilities, except possibly trinitarian ones, because we’re not being nearly as objective as Lewis would like to pretend. His careful disclaimers notwithstanding, we are headed straight for the conclusion that God is a good, forgiving God. That’s why Lewis is already introducing the assumption that God is the Person behind the Moral Law, despite insisting that we have not yet got as far as a personal God. There are large gaping cracks in his logic that let his dogmatic agenda shine through—and that’s not the worst of his problems.

[I]t is no use either saying that if there is a God of that sort—an impersonal absolute good—then you do not like Him and are not going to bother about Him. For the trouble is that one part of you is on His side and really agrees with his disapproval of human greed and trickery and exploitation. You may want Him to make an exception in your own case, to let you off this one time; but you know at bottom that unless the power behind the world really and unalterably detests that sort of behaviour, then He cannot be good. On the other hand, we know that if there does exist an absolute goodness it must hate most of what we do. This is the terrible fix we are in.

Here is the problem: Lewis is setting up a conflict between “sinners” and the Moral Law, a “terrible fix” that (ta-da!) Jesus can ride in on a white horse and save us from. In order to pull that off, though, he needs to portray the Moral Law as unmerciful, inflexible and unforgiving. That means that the Moral Law, which supposedly defines Right vs. Wrong and Good vs. Evil, does not include mercy and forgiveness on its list of things that are Good and Right. If it did, then we wouldn’t need a Savior, because the Moral Law itself would already provide at least the possibility of a just and right forgiveness.

Forgiveness and mercy, in other words, are not technically “good” in this system. The Moral Law requires that you can’t be good unless you “really and unalterably detest [sinful] behavior,” which means that to be merciful and forgiving is to be “indulgent” and “soft” in the most negative possible connotations of those words. To exploit some loophole in this Law in order to help a sinner escape the Law’s demands does not merely violate this Law, but makes it irrelevant. If the Moral Law defines what is Good and Right and Just, then there’s no way God could be doing good by flouting what this Law requires.

In The Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis takes a stab at solving this problem by proposing that there is an older and deeper Law that takes precedence over the Moral Law, and allows for “ransoms” to be paid for sin. That way, it would still be “legal” for Aslan/Jesus to save us from the penalty of sin, even though it was not legal to let the offender escape the justice demanded by the Moral Law. (The moral issue of using human sacrifice to enable the sinner to escape the Law is a question we’ll leave for another time.)

This solution only compounds the problem, however,  because even if we did have some more powerful Law overruling the Moral Law, would that “deeper Law” be something we could legitimately call “good”? The definition of Good and Evil, remember, are supposed to rest within the Moral Law, so even if the other Law did manage to overthrow the Moral Law, this would not be a good thing according to the “official” definition of “good.” (Think about it: how could it possibly be “good” to overthrow the Law that defines what “good” is?)

What Lewis needs to do is to somehow reconcile these two Laws in a way that allows both Laws to be “good.” In order to do that, however, the two Laws need to refer to some external standard of Right and Wrong that they can both share in common. That means, however, that the Moral Law is not the true standard of right and wrong, good and evil. For all of Lewis’ carefully-crafted argument, his main thesis shipwrecks on the shoals of forgiveness. If you’re going to define righteousness in terms of some kind of supernatural, inflexible, and unforgiving Moral Law, then you have made it impossible for God to remain righteous while exploiting some devious loophole in order to thwart the requirements of the Law. Abort, retry, fail.

All C. S. Lewis is doing is manufacturing a contrived crisis in order to motivate us with a false fear that we’re in some kind of “terrible fix” so that we’ll be eager (and uncritical) when the time comes for him to offer us his genuine patented remedy for what ails us. In reality, the “fear” he’s feeding us is nothing to be afraid of at all: in the real world, good and evil are driven by consequences, and by a common consensus about which consequences are worth pursuing or avoiding.

In any group consensus, compromise is a useful and legitimate virtue, provided it’s not being used as an excuse for one party to force their will on the others. In such a realistic moral system, forgiveness and mercy, when appropriate, are entirely natural and beneficial. We need no Savior because there is no “absolute good” to take offense at our actions. There are only complicated consequences, and people trying to do the best they can with what they’ve got at the moment. Confusing the issue with unrealistic fears only makes a hard job harder.

Last week, we watched a rather sad spectacle, as Prof. C. S. Lewis, Oxford don, tried to convince us all that science can never answer any questions beyond certain basic, elementary observations (e.g. “at such-and-such a time, I saw so-and-so through my telescope,” or “when I heated this substance to such and such a temperature, it melted”). Why would an intelligent and educated man be so eager to blindfold science, and to deny the existence of the various analytical, theoretical, and experimental techniques that define what science is?

Rhetorical question, I know. Lewis wants to persuade us to believe in something that hasn’t got a chance of withstanding any sort of scientific scrutiny, so he’s anxious to get science out of the picture, and to propose an alternative “reality” beyond the reach of science. He wants to make sure we have no way of verifying the truth of what he claims, so that we have to just take his word for it, prompted and consoled by our own (carefully manipulated) subjective feelings and biases. That may not sound very intellectually honest, but you can’t deny that, in marketing terms, it has proven to be extremely effective.

There’s a certain natural pattern in the process of fleecing the gullible. First, you sow doubts and suspicions about the reliability of anyone or anything that might expose your hoax. Then, when you’ve got people wondering whether there’s really anything they can trust, you offer them your exciting new system, that they can trust 100%, and that they can verify by examining it in the light of their own feelings. (You might recognize this pattern, for instance, if you’ve ever spoken with Mormon missionaries for any length of time.)

Lewis follows the same pattern: he spends most of the beginning of Chapter 4 trying to make us doubt that science can answer any kind of “why” questions about the real world at all. That means we’re ready for step 2.

Now the position would be quite hopeless but for this. There is one thing, and only one, in the whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation. That one thing is Man. We do not merely observe men, we are men. In this case we have, so to speak, inside information; we are in the know. And because of that, we know that men find themselves under a moral law, which they did not make, and cannot quite forget even when they try, and which they know they ought to obey.

Slick, eh? Take that, psychologists and sociologists and anthropologists! Science doesn’t know anything about Man, because science can only make “external” observations, and report what it observed. But we know more than science does about Man because we are men. I notice that he doesn’t claim that because we are men, therefore we understand women! Funny, that. Perhaps he might have overstated his case here just a bit.

The problem, or one of the problems, is that, in fact, most of what we know about men does indeed come from external observation. I don’t really know what it is like to be you, and you don’t know what it is like to be me. I know what it is like to be me, but even then, it is a very rare individual who truly understands even himself. Lewis is mistaken: we don’t know Man, and we don’t know as much as we’d like about the one person we do know “from the inside.” And that’s not really a good basis to go on, at least not for this type of question. We might as well say, “Let’s just be superstitious and self-centered” and leave it at that.

Notice, too, the subtle psychological manipulation going on here. Lewis wants us to trust in his biased interpretation of our subjective feelings. He’s priming us with the notion that, whenever we’re unhappy with our choices, and feel some kind of nameless dread regarding present or future consequences, the name of this vague disquiet is “guilt.” All through the book thus far, he’s been planting the suggestion that we should be interpreting our ambiguous feelings within the framework of a supposed “moral law” that we have intentionally violated. And now he appeals to that suggestion, which he himself planted, as being our own personal, subjective, inner validation of the existence of such a moral law. We’re “in the know,” you see, and therefore we should trust this (manipulated) subjective impression as being more reliable than science in determining certain types of “truth.”

Let’s look, once again, at this idea that we know there is a moral law and that we’ve deliberately violated it. Consider, for example, the 98-pound weakling who says to himself (with a certain amount of dread), “Gosh, I should never have let the quarterback’s girlfriend kiss me.” I submit to you that the emotion the weakling feels is the very same feeling that Lewis is calling “guilt.” If we wanted to mess with the weakling’s head, we could tell him that there is a “moral law” that says wimps are not allowed to compete with jocks for girls, and that he is now feeling guilty for violating that moral law.

The truth, of course, is that he’s just worried about what kind of vengeance the 240-pound bully will exact. He did not actually do anything immoral, but he’s feeling the same feelings. And they’re fearful, anxious feelings that are not all that hard to manipulate. Give the poor kid a copy of Mere Christianity, and he’ll identify right away. This is easy stuff. And Lewis has no compunctions about using it.

Mind you, this isn’t to say that people never have any reason to feel truly guilty. Bad behavior does lead to bad consequences, and if the bad consequences haven’t happened yet just because you haven’t been caught yet, then guilty feelings are entirely appropriate and accurate. But the point is, the actual feelings themselves are an anticipation of the negative consequences, not a reflection of some kind of secret knowledge of some kind of moral law that we’ve knowingly and deliberately violated. This “law” is just a superstition that Lewis attributes guilty feelings to, instead of identifying actual, real-world causes.

Let’s move on.

The position of the question, then, is like this. We want to know whether the universe simply happens to be what it is for no reason, or whether there is a power behind it that makes it what it is. Since that power, if it exists, would not be one of the observed facts but a reality which makes them, no mere observation of the facts can find it. There is only one case in which we can know whether there is anything more, namely our own case. And in that one case we find there is. Or put it the other way round. If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe—no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way.

Isn’t it fascinating how coincidentally the only way we could detect Lewis’ alleged metaphysical reality just happens to be the specific case he is arguing right now? Funny old world.

One of the hazards of trying to reject science wholesale is that there’s no way to anticipate just how many babies are going to go out with the bathwater, and I think Lewis has missed a rather large preschool here. The goal he’s after is to propose that there’s an important body of knowledge that can only be detected by explicitly rejecting the scientific method and putting your trust exclusively in your own subjective (and possibly manipulated) feelings and emotions. In the process of pursuing this goal, however, he has declared that it is impossible for there to be any valid scientific approach that can tell us whether or not the universe is the product of an Intelligent Designer.

I’ve never heard Bill Dembski or Mike Behe or any of the other luminaries at the Discovery Institute try to address this argument, but it clearly pulls the rug out from under their whole enterprise. The whole point of ID, and indeed of creationism in general, is to try and claim that there exists scientific evidence that the universe was created by a Person. Lewis, in Chapter 4, is categorically denying that such a thing is even possible. It has to be impossible in order for his whole “moral law” argument to work.

After all, if it were possible for science to examine the evidence and draw verifiable conclusions about this moral law, and whether it comes from some other “reality,” then Lewis would be in trouble, because the evidence comes nowhere near supporting his claims. It doesn’t support his claims regarding what this “moral law” even is, let alone backing up his argument that it must come from a supernatural source.

Considering that two of the most popular arguments for Christianity right now are Intelligent Design and “moral law,” it’s a bit ironic that they contradict each other so strongly, don’t you think? But it goes even deeper than that. Notice that Lewis says that this supernatural power “could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe”—part of his argument against allowing science to get close enough to examine his evidence. That fine, but did you notice he just threw out the entire Bible? None of those supernatural powers can show up as facts of the universe, so miracles, prophets, incarnations, resurrections, and so on, are all frauds. God’s only possible interaction with the real world is via some kind of secret, inner knowledge that makes us feel guilty. The Bible stories thus can only be lies. Oops.

It says in the Bible that God is not mocked, and that’s true, except the God is Alethea, not Jehovah. When you take up arms (or arguments) against the truth, God will not be angry. She’s never angry. But She will get even, and the loser will be the one who challenged Her. So sorry, Prof. Lewis, but I think in this case God has had Her revenge.

Christian apologetics is a quest, a search for something in the real world that leads reasonably and logically to the conclusion that the Christian God exists. So far, no such Grail has turned up, which is why more modern apologists, like Lewis, keep trying different approaches. Lewis’ attempt is as doomed as the rest, though, because his preconceived conclusion keeps interfering with his ability to think reasonably and logically about the evidence he’s trying to use.

Today’s section is a good example. Lewis began his argument by trying to tell us that “just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation, and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law — with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.” Right away his thesis is in trouble, because he wants to suggest that there is some kind of Moral Law, on the same level as the law of gravity and other natural laws, and yet the very first and most obvious observation one makes about morality is precisely that it is not like the laws of nature at all.

In today’s reading, Lewis returns to this sore point, and tries to make sense of it in some way that does not involve admitting the fundamental error in his basic premise. It’s rather a jaw-dropping exercise in rationalization and self-befuddlement, despite Lewis’ clearly superior intellect.

Lewis begins by reviewing what we already know: that the true laws of nature are categorically different from what he wants to call the Law of Human Nature, the Moral Law, the Law of Right and Wrong, etc.

When you say that falling stones always obey the law of gravitation, is not this much the same as saying that the law only means ‘what stones always do’? You do not really think that when a stone is let go, it suddenly remembers that it is under orders to fall to the ground. You only mean that, in fact, it does fall… The laws of nature, as applied to stones or trees, may only mean ‘what Nature, in fact, does’. But if you turn to the Law of Human Nature, the Law of Decent Behaviour, it is a different matter.

Which is what we have been observing all along. He wants there to be a Law of Human Nature, i.e. some fundamental principle akin to the laws of physics and biology and all the other natural laws. Scientific laws, however, describe a universally consistent pattern in the way things behave in the real world. Our subjective and unreliable perceptions of “right” and “wrong” do not. At this point, it ought to be clear to Lewis that he’s barking up the wrong tree. There is no Law of Human Nature such as he imagines.

Sadly, though, he does not acknowledge this, and proceeds instead to try and find some rationalization that will reconcile the discrepancy between what he wants the truth to be, and what the truth actually is. He starts by looking at some of the difficulties we face in trying to use some simple principle to explain our perception of right and wrong.

For instance, we might try to make out that when you say a man ought not to act as he does, you only mean … that what he is doing happens to be inconvenient to you. But that is simply untrue. A man occupying the corner seat in the train because he got there first, and a man who slipped into it while my back was turned and removed my bag, are both equally inconvenient. But I blame the second man and do not blame the first.

He uses a similar example of a man who accidentally trips you versus one who intentionally tries to trip you and fails. You blame the second, even though he failed to hurt you, but not the first, even though he did hurt you, thus proving that we do not define right and wrong in terms of simply hurting someone. And that’s true, as far as it goes, but let’s add one more example just to follow this through a little further than Lewis did.

In the early part of the movie Gandhi, there’s a scene where Gandhi is thrown off a train in South Africa, because he was “guilty” of being in a first-class car despite not being white. How do we define “right” and “wrong” in this case? To the white conductor, Gandhi was wrong, because he was a “colored” man sitting in what was legally a whites-only carriage. To Gandhi, he was right to be there because the railroad had sold him the more expensive ticket without a qualm, and besides, he was a British citizen, not a native South African.

Is it wrong to break the law? Is it wrong to break an unjust law? Or to us another of Lewis’ examples, during a war, is the traitor a good guy or a bad guy? Can you even answer the question without knowing which side he betrayed?

These are complex issues, and not the least because there is no underlying Law of Nature that spells out for us what is right and wrong in every combination of circumstances. As I mentioned before, it’s not even possible for such a law to exist, because not every combination of circumstances has a “right” outcome. And even if it did, no law could enumerate all the Right choices, because there would either be innumerable exceptions to the law, or the law itself would consist of so many special cases that it would get lost in its own details, and thus be effectively useless.

But I digress. The point is, we can’t reduce “right and wrong” to some clear, universal principle precisely because there is no clear, universal Law behind it. Once again, Lewis is correctly observing the problem, and then totally failing to grasp the significance of what he has observed. He ought to have noticed by now that the data just does not fit the framework he’s trying to force it into. But he can’t, because he’s an apologist, and thus everything must somehow relate to his goal of making the Christian God sound like part of the real world.

Let’s move on. Lewis drives home his point by raising the ultimate ethical question.

If we ask: ‘Why ought I to be unselfish?’ and you reply ‘Because it is good for society,’ we may then ask, ‘Why should I care what’s good for society except when it happens to pay me personally?’ and then you will have to say, ‘Because you ought to be unselfish’ — which simply brings us back to where we started.

Sounds like a nice rebuttal, and the way he says it does expose a fallacious logical circle. But here again, Lewis misleads himself by making wrong assumptions. He assumes that (a) you ought indeed to be unselfish and (b) you ought to care what’s good for society even when it does not benefit you personally. I’m going to disagree on both points.

It is “selfish” to eat healthy foods, get some exercise, and practice good personal hygiene. That is, these are things we do to benefit ourselves. It doesn’t particularly help you when I avoid superfluous calories, it just makes life better for me, myself, personally. “Selfish” by itself is neither bad nor good, we simply call it wrong when we perceive that someone is profiting at someone else’s expense. (And even then we don’t always call it wrong—sometimes we call it “a free market,” for example.)

Likewise, we care what’s good for society because it benefits us personally. Indirectly, sometimes, but it still concerns us. The caveat is that there needs to be a balance between what society demands of the individual and what the individual demands of society. It’s too easy to enslave a nation by appealing to the idea that everyone must sacrifice their own individual benefit “for the good of society.” Without a certain rebellion against the idea of blind “unselfishness,” individual liberty will whither and perish.

And now we get to the part where Lewis really jumps the track. I promised you jaw-dropping, and here it is: Lewis has confronted again and again the fact that our perception of right and wrong doesn’t really fit the pattern of Things Governed By Universal Principles, and yet he still insists that Right and Wrong are governed by a Universal Principle. And how does he rationalize the conflict between his claims and the actual evidence?

[T]his Rule of Right and Wrong, or Law of Human Nature, or whatever you call it, must somehow or other be a real thing — a thing that is really there, not made up by ourselves… It begins to look as if we shall have to admit that there is more than one kind of reality; that, in this particular case, there is something above and beyond the ordinary facts of men’s behaviour, and yet quite definitely real — a real law, which none of us made, but which we find pressing on us.

Did you catch that? The real world clearly fails to fit the picture he’s trying to paint, and yet he’s not admitting that his idea of a Moral Law is actually incorrect. No, he’s insisting that it is a Law, and that the glaring discrepancies between the laws of nature and the Law of Human Nature are conclusive evidence that there is more than one kind of reality!

Wow. Lewis makes a claim. The facts are inconsistent with the claim he is making. Therefore there must be another reality above and beyond this one, so that this “Law” can be consistent with the other reality instead.

I’m just going to leave that where it is for now. Any comment I could make here seems pretty superfluous. I have to say, though, that I can’t wait to see where he takes this carefully-planted seed in Chapter Four.

Last time, we wrapped up Lewis’ attempts to address a few objections to his theory of Moral Law, and now he’s going to go back to developing his main thesis, which is that human morality stems from some kind of supernatural list of everything that’s Right and everything that’s Wrong. It’s a thesis dictated by the conclusion he wants to reach, so not surprisingly he has to work to make it all fit, even when he’s only using a carefully selected subset of the facts. Today he brings up another fact that would like very much to inform him about what’s wrong with his theory, but sadly he’s still not listening.

We’ll get to that point momentarily, but first here’s an interesting question: who controls the price of stocks on the stock exchange? On the one hand, it’s obvious that the answer is “people”—nobody else is there making offers or asking for bids. And yet, if people control the prices of stocks in the stock market, why would the market ever crash? A market crash does tremendous harm to the very people who are setting the stock prices, so if they control the prices, why would they ever create their own disaster?

Obviously, though stock brokers technically set the stock prices, they have only limited control over which prices they set. Other factors influence the price at which any given stock will actually sell, and these factors are complex enough to make market prices “volatile” and sometimes wildly unpredictable. Though stock brokers give the market its very existence, they cannot control it, and often must follow it and react to it as though obeying the dictates of some kind of Higher Being.

And yet, ultimately, the stock market is a purely human phenomenon. It responds to outside circumstances, it responds to primal human instincts (like greed and competition), but it there’s nothing magical or supernatural about it. In particular, it is not controlled by some outside, supernatural force. It’s just the complex behavior of a large number of humans trying to anticipate which of their choices will lead to the best results—human actions generating a force that humans themselves cannot control.

Morality is the same way. It’s the emergent property of a large number of humans trying to anticipate which of their choices is most likely to lead to the most desirable outcomes. We generate morality by our own activities and decisions, but, like the stock market, we can’t really control it.

This is a basic fact that Lewis has failed (or declined) to grasp, and that’s why he’s going off on these tangents, trying to rationalize the facts about human morality with his naive and superstitious desire for a magical list of Real Rights and Real Wrongs, written down by a divine Law giver to guarantee that in any circumstance there’s always a Right thing to do (i.e. a thing that will lead to the most desirable outcome).

I now go back to what I said at the end of the first chapter, that there were two odd things about the human race. First, that they were haunted by the idea of a sort of behaviour they ought to practise, what you might call fair play, or decency, or morality, or the Law of Nature. Second, that they did not in fact do so. Now some of you may wonder why I called this odd… In particular, you may have thought I was rather hard on the human race. After all, you may say, what I call breaking the Law of Right and Wrong… only means that people are not perfect. And why on earth should I expect them to be? That would be a good answer if what I was trying to do was to fix the exact amount of blame which is due to us for not behaving as we expect others to behave. But that is not my job at all. I am not concerned at present with blame; I am trying to find out the truth.

The key word here is “blame.” Lewis claims that he is trying to find out the truth (or at least making it look like a “discovery” when we reach his desired conclusion), but if that were his actual goal, then he might learn a lot by taking a closer look at what “blame” really means.

I compared morality to the stock market, and it’s a remarkably parallel comparison. And yet, there is a flavor of good and evil attached to the concept of morality that goes beyond the purely financial values of profit and loss, as we see them in the market. (We can make moral judgments about the stock market, of course, but I’m talking about comparing moral values to values of “good for the market” versus “bad for the market,” which is not the same thing.)

The difference between morality and the stock market is that we blame people for their immoral behavior, in a way that we do not blame the stock market for its ups and downs. And blame (aka guilt) is an interesting concept. It’s a stigma that we attach to people, and that affects the way we treat them. Blameless people are entrusted with greater responsibilities and greater authority (leading to greater reward). If you’re looking for a suitable spouse, you’d rather have a blameless mate than some scumball loser. People would rather do business with a blameless merchant, rent an apartment to a blameless tenant, and recruit blameless new members into their social clubs. And the list goes on and on.

Blame, thus, is rather a large factor in how we decide to invest in the moral stock market. We want to avoid acquiring any shares of blame, and we want to unload any shares we already have. The problem is, the moral stock market isn’t quite the same as the financial stock market. We can’t buy just any individual stock we want, we have to choose from the options we find within our reach, and some of those options come an unavoidable amount of blame attached. And if that weren’t bad enough, sometimes the blameless alternatives involve compromising ourselves in some way, e.g. by surrendering our independence or self-respect.

Of course, it’s also true that we sometimes just give in and grab what we want, heedless of the blame, because we’re weak-willed and greedy. It’s not as though morality is always wrong or unfair—far from it! But neither is it true that there’s always a Real Right thing to do. Sometimes, the choice is between two or more evils, because there is no one alternative that achieves a profitable goal with no blame.

Hence our persistent feeling of having failed to always find the Right thing to do. We haven’t always found it because it isn’t always there. If Lewis is indeed trying to find out the truth, then he needs to stop right here for a moment and realize that failing to do the morally right thing is as inevitable as failing to always make a profit in the stock market, and for much the same reasons. This is a perfectly normal and natural (i.e. non-supernatural) circumstance.

Lewis, sadly, does not seem to have any interest in making this sort of observation, so the rest of this chapter is going to be a somewhat embarrassing attempt to rationalize his way from the actual facts to the superstitious conclusion he’d like them to point to. Stay tuned.

This week we wrap up Chapter 2 of Mere Christianity with Lewis’ somewhat feeble attempt to address the morality of witch-burning. Until a few centuries ago, it was a rather popular practice among Christians, and—well, let’s let Lewis speak for himself.

I have met people who exaggerate the differences [between different moralities], because they have not distinguished between differences of morality and differences of belief about facts. For example, one man said to me, ‘Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death. Was that what you call the Rule of Human Nature or Right Conduct?’ But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather—surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did?

This is an amazing apologetic. Notice, he’s not quite arguing that Christians were doing the right thing by burning witches. He merely wishes to argue that we have made scientific progress, rather than moral progress, in ceasing to put witches to death. He ends Chapter 2 with the observation, “You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.” He’s neither justifying nor accusing the witch-burners; he’s merely arguing that we today are no better, because we would burn witches too, if we thought they were real.

Sadly, he got that part exactly right, at least as far as believers are concerned. There are Christian evangelists in Africa today who are spreading witch rumors and inciting people to violence against them, just like in the Old Days. Women and even children are dying, or being savagely tortured and/or driven from their villages, because Christians believe that “these filthy quislings” deserve it. Lewis is exactly right in saying that this morality shows no signs of being any better than that of the 17th century witch burners.

But let’s look at Lewis’ underlying assumption. He’s taking it for granted that everyone would agree that, if you believe in witches, the Right thing to do is to put them to death. He assumes that obviously real witchcraft would deserve the death penalty, and that this is true even today, even for believers like himself. Sure, there’s no such thing as a real witch, but if there were, why then fetch the rope and kindling boys! And be quick about it!

I’m going to disagree with Lewis on two counts. First of all, a civilized and just society should never penalize anyone for being the wrong thing. Justice, including the death penalty, must be limited to punishing people for doing the wrong thing. If a real witch used supernatural powers to murder someone, then society ought to accuse her of the murder, prove her guilty of the murder, and then punish her for the murder—not for being a witch. If she used magic to make it foggy so no one would see her flying around on her broomstick, you don’t burn her for being a witch, and you certainly don’t demand a death penalty for making it foggy at night, even if she really and truly did bring bad weather by magic.

The second and larger point centers around that crucial word “believe.” Lewis’ argument goes like this: We don’t kill witches because we don’t believe there are any. If we did believe they existed, then surely (or at least, Lewis is sure) we ought to agree with putting them to death. See anything missing in that line of thought?

What’s missing, obviously, is any consideration of the question of whether or not our beliefs were actually correct. The witch-burners of 17th century England believed they were putting real witches to death. According to Real Morality, was it Right for them to do so? That was the specific question that was asked of Prof. Lewis, and that is the specific question which he adroitly side-stepped and never answered. Yes, yes, it’s true that we now know there are no witches, but that means we also know that the people who got burned at the stake were, in fact, innocent. What does Real Morality say about murdering innocent victims on account of Christian beliefs, Professor Lewis? Professor Lewis?

Granted, this is an especially tricky question and it’s not surprising that Lewis would prefer to avoid it, because once you realize that Christian beliefs led to the murder of large numbers of innocent victims, the moral question becomes, “Who led the murderers to believe in killing witches?” Take a wild guess what the answer is.

Exodus 22:18 — Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

Yup. We could also add the Old Testament prophets who praised King Saul for putting to death all the witches in Israel (except the famous witch at Endor). Even the New Testament lists witchcraft among the acts of the sinful nature. Christians believed in witches, and in killing witches, because the Bible taught these things as though they were true. Now the moral question becomes, “If you believe God’s Word, and act on it, are you morally guilty, or does the guilt belong to God?” If we know that the Bible can be wrong about life-and-death issues, can Real Morality ever allow us to act as though Scripture must necessarily be true?

Remember, too, that the witch-burners typically were not relying on the Scriptures alone. They first “obtained” a confession from the accused witch, and then executed her. Perhaps we should ask Prof. Lewis about the morality of using torture to elicit confessions from the accused? Assuming he gave a similar answer, he might say something like “if we really thought they were Al Qaeda supporters witches, surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved torture, then these filthy quislings did?” Once again, though, the justification is based on our own (possibly erroneous) belief, rather than the wrongdoing (if any) of the accused.

This is the problem with faith-based moralities, with moralities that are based on some unseen and unverifiable list of Rights and Wrongs. It’s too easy to punish people because of certain wrong beliefs on our part rather than any wrong behavior on theirs. And it keeps coming back to haunt us. Christians tortured suspected witches in the 17th century, but oh yes, we know better than that now, because there are no witches. But did we really learn, or are we just using the same 17th century moral rationalizations today, now that we want to hurt those we suspect of being terrorists?

And of course, Christians today are literally killing “witches” once again, in Africa, with support from American churches. And it all comes back to their failure to make significant moral progress since the 17th century. To be fair, the Bible does make it hard to advance beyond that point. How can one Bible-believing Christian credibly tell another Bible-believing Christian not to believe the clear teaching of the Bible, and not to obey its clear commandments? There’s just not a lot of room to maneuver without exposing certain doubts about the believability of the Bible.

This puts Lewis in an even more insecure position, morally speaking, because not only does he fail to condemn witch-burning on moral grounds, but he does acknowledge that “God’s Word” is wrong about witches being real. That means the Scripture is factually wrong about at least some life-and-death moral issues. Lewis’ purported and invisible Real Morality thus becomes a standard that we cannot obtain even by divine revelation. Lewis claims that we all know we fail to keep this Moral Law, but how could we know whether we’re keeping it or not, if even the Bible itself cannot reliably tell us what it is?

All that Lewis has left, in the end, is some kind of subjective, mystical perception of Right and Wrong, an inner sense that boils down to “whatever seems right in my own eyes.” It’s dressed a little fancier, and it’s a bit pretentious, in that it presents itself as something engraved on our heart by God Himself, but bereft of both a real-world standard of morality and a reliable Scriptural standard, it’s the only standard he has left. The believer has no alternative but to accept his own personal opinions of right and wrong as the sole measure of Real Morality.

Maybe that’s why Lewis is so popular: he gives people a way to view their own personal morality as “coincidentally” being the same as Universal Moral Law, thus allowing them the pleasures of self-righteousness without the burden of having to live by someone else’s rules. Not a terribly high-quality ethic, but damn clever marketing, eh? No wonder so many modern apologists choose him as their patron saint.

According to C. S. Lewis, “the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in” lies in assuming the existence of a natural Law of Morality. This isn’t just some arbitrary, human legislated regulation either. It’s a real Law of Nature that defines a real standard of Right and Wrong—a standard, moreover, that we all fall short of.

This week, Lewis looks at one last objection to that premise.

Other people wrote to me saying, ‘Isn’t what you call the Moral Law just a social convention, something that is put into us by education?’ I think there is a misunderstanding here… We all learned the multiplication table at school. A child who grew up alone on a desert island would not know it. But surely it does not follow that the multiplication table is simply a human convention, something human beings have made up for themselves and might have made different if they had liked?

He also compares it to which side of the road we drive on, which (unlike math) is a convention. In America, we drive on the right-hand side of the road; in England, on the left. There’s no natural law that says things have to be that way, and we might just as easily have decided on different conventions. So the question is, when we learn morality, are we learning about a pre-existing law, as in mathematics, or about a mere convention, as in driving?

Lewis, not surprisingly, favors the former, and he gives us two reasons.

His first reason will probably sound familiar:

The first is, as I said in the first chapter, that though there are differences between the moral ideas of one time or country and those of another, the differences are not really very great—not nearly so great as most people imaging—and you can recognize the same law running through them all, whereas mere conventions, like the rule of the road or the kind of clothes people wear, may differ to any extent.

That’s a rather un-mathematical assessment. “Not very great”? In whose opinion? It seems to me that that the kind of morality that condones selling your daughters for sexual purposes, mutilating the genitals of babies, and committing acts of genocide, is very different from the kind of morality that finds these things abhorrent. But have I disproved Lewis’ point? We can’t really say, because he hasn’t really given us any objective guidelines for measuring the amount of difference between two moralities, let alone setting a specific point at which the difference would be great enough to falsify his claim. All Lewis is really saying is, “I know moral conventions are different in different times and cultures, and I hereby declare those differences irrelevant.” This is one avenue of investigation that he simply filters out.

What he ought to have noticed, had he been willing to look, is that our moral standards are not merely different today than they were in ancient times, they’re better. We’ve improved, to some extent, on the morality of our forefathers. We’ve even improved on God’s morality (which may explain some of Lewis’ reluctance to probe too deeply into this part of the evidence).

As I’ve said before, morality is rooted in our perception of the likely outcomes of different behaviors. As we live and learn, and as our society gradually acquires the collective experience of its members, we get better at understanding how some behaviors that originally seemed like a good idea (e.g. slavery) are actually more detrimental than beneficial. As a species, we’re a bit thick. It can take centuries of painful experience to convince us that we really don’t like the consequences of certain previously-sanctioned behaviors. But we do learn from those consequences, eventually. And that accumulated experience becomes our new and improved morality.

Thus, it’s not because we’re being guided by the timeless wisdom of the Ten Commandments or some other mystical list of simple rules. Experience itself is teaching us. And sometimes, what it teaches us is that certain situations don’t have a simple, clear-cut distinction between right and wrong. Sometimes you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Other times, the right solution requires making an exception to the so-called “Moral Law.” Not everyone is going to feel right about making such exceptions, especially if they buy what Lewis is selling here. Belief in a Moral Law can prevent you from doing the right thing, and can drive you to do the wrong thing. Thus, secular morality is better than the kind of superstitious morality Lewis wants us to believe in.

Oops, he overheard us, and now he’s going to use this argument against us.

The other reason is this. When you think about these differences between the morality of one people and another, do you think that the morality of one people is ever better or worse than that of another? Have any of the changes been improvements? If not, then of course there could never be any moral progress. Progress means not just changing, but changing for the better. If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilized morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality… The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people’s ideas get nearer to that real Right than others.

Rather fascinating, isn’t it? Lewis has very nearly declared that Christian morality is not Real Morality, and can thus be improved upon. A fairly obvious observation for anyone versed in real-world secular morality, but a fairly astonishing conclusion for Lewis to come to, given that Mere Christianity attempts to use this idea of Moral Law to prove the existence of a divine Law Giver. I can’t help but think that Lewis would object here, and would try to deny that Christian morality is different from Real Morality, but that’s the thrust of his argument. Otherwise, how could you ever compare Christian morality to any other morality (even Nazi morality!) and say that it was better? His whole point is that for one thing to be better, it must be different from the standard it’s being measured by.

The other possibility would be that he is merely playing devil’s advocate: “If you think that one morality is better than another, then you must think there is some Real standard of morality.” In 0ther words, he’s not agreeing that he thinks we’ve made moral progress, or that one morality can be better than another, he’s just saying if all y’all liberal types want to say that, then you have to agree that Moral Law really exists. Pretty clever, except that this argument implies that Christian morality cannot be any better than Nazi morality. Oops.

The problem here (besides the above) is that Lewis completely overlooks the fact that anyone who compares one morality to another is inevitably going to favor whichever morality is most like his own. Let’s take, for example, the question of gay marriage. Is it moral to allow it? Is it moral to forbid it? There are, within the Christian faith, within even the conservative, evangelical Christian faith, those whose morality would give an answer that was the exact opposite of what the rest of their fellow believers would say. Never mind secular versus pious; within Christian morality itself, there are questions for which you get opposite answers at the same time, depending on which Christian you ask.

This is how we know Lewis’ so-called Moral Law is not a natural law like the laws of mathematics. The question “What is 2 x 12?” does not give different real-world answers depending on who you ask: two dozen eggs is 24 eggs, just like two dozen homeopaths are 24 quacks. Count ‘em: the laws of multiplication are laws because they give the same answers to the same questions, no matter who does the asking or the answering. And, more importantly, you can check the answers, and determine whether or not the first person came up with the right number. There’s a consistent real-world referent for your answer, and that’s how we know Real Multiplication exists.

Lewis’ alleged Law of Human Nature doesn’t work that way. For instance, the obvious retort to gay Christian morality is to deny that gay Christian morality is Real True Christian Morality™—which is an easy claim to make, but how are we going to check your answers? Lewis believes in a “real Right,” meaning an invisible, mystical standard defining Right and Wrong for all circumstances, but we don’t have a written copy of that standard, nor can we determine it experimentally UNLESS we abandon Lewis’ superstitious and imaginary Law in favor of a secular morality based on a practical consideration of behaviors and consequences. The “Moral Law” approach, by itself, cannot tell you when your moral standards are wrong; it merely encourages you to look down on the morality of others.

Thus, there are (at least) two different moralities: a real-world, secular morality that needs no God, and a superstitious and subjective morality that tries to give God credit for moral answers that are secretly being borrowed from the secular kind. Because the superstitious morality often resorts to secular morality, the two moralities have a certain amount of overlap. Where they don’t overlap, as in the case of circumcision or gay marriage for instance, the superstitious morality is wrong, meaning it promotes as “good” things that have bad consequences, and forbids as “bad” things that have good consequences (or at least neutral ones).

The big difference between secular morality and superstitious morality is that the superstitious moralist has no consistent real-world referent for his moral answers (unless he resorts to secular morality). Thus, as I mentioned above, if you ask a superstitious moralist to compare two moralities, he has no choice but to favor whichever one is most like his own. We don’t have a copy of The Divine List of Do’s and Don’ts (if it were even possible for such a thing to exist), and without resorting to secular morality, he can only judge by whatever seems right in his own eyes. That’s why Lewis’ mathematical corollary fails, and why even Christian morality can give opposite answers to the same question depending on which Christian you ask.

Secular morality, by contrast, does not have this problem, because it’s based on a secular consideration of real-world consequences. Granted, the answers won’t always be easy, and some problems may not have any Right answers at all. The answers you do get, however, have the benefit of being based on real-world truth, rather than on subjective assumptions about what God’s preferences ought to be. That’s important, because when your morality is not based on real-world truth, moral issues boil down to “might makes right,” and you end up with the majority ganging up on minorities and oppressing them, as is being done right now to gays.

In summary then, and contrary to Lewis’ eloquent and misguided rhetoric, we can compare morality with mathematics and clearly see that morality (as Lewis envisions it) is not some kind of natural law that always gives the same answers to the same questions. There is more than one Morality, with the secular one being far better than the other. The alternative, advocated by Lewis, is to take the results of secular morality (e.g. “murder is wrong”), superstitiously ascribe them to an invisible magical Law Giver, and then sweep in a bunch of arbitrary, prejudiced, and self-serving “moral Rights” that end up harming people (especially minorities). This is detrimental to society as a whole, not just to the victims, and therefore it is, in secular terms, immoral.

Next week: Witches (see Servants of Satan, Burning). Stay tuned.

In Chapter 1, C. S. Lewis introduced two ideas that (he claims) “are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.” These two ideas are (a) that there is a universal Moral Law defining right and wrong, which we somehow inherently know, and (b) that we do not obey this law. Unfortunately, these two ideas are not themselves the product of clear thinking, and indeed are a rather biased and superstitious failure to understand human morals realistically. There is no singular universal Moral Law by which we all make moral judgments; rather, we judge right and wrong based on how we feel about the outcome. This fundamental disconnect between theory and reality has already bubbled to the surface in a number of inconsistencies between what Lewis claims and what we find through even a trivial examination of the real-world facts.

In Chapter 2, Lewis acknowledges some of these difficulties and attempts to either refute or discredit them. As we shall see, though, his attempts to reduce his troubles only adds to them. As the good fairy told Pinocchio, once you tell a lie, it grows and grows until it’s as plain as the nose on your face—even when you sincerely believe the lie because you first deceived yourself.

Lewis begins his response by suggesting that “a good many people find it difficult to understand just what this Law of Human Nature, or Moral Law, or Rule of Decent Behavior is.” Notice, he doesn’t credit them with having reasonable objections, or with having raised valid points about possible weaknesses in his hypothesis. He declares that they “find it difficult to understand” the concept he calls Moral Law. In other words, we’re starting from the assumption that these objections are not problems with his theory, they’re some kind of failure on the part of his critics.

For example, some people wrote to me saying, ‘Isn’t what you call the Moral Law simply our herd instinct and hasn’t it been developed just like all our other instincts?’ Now I do not deny that we may have a herd instinct: but that is not what I mean by the Moral Law. We all know what it feels like to be prompted by instinct… It means that you feel a strong want or desire to act in a certain way… But feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling that you ought to help whether you want to or not. Supposing you hear a cry for help from a man in danger. You will probably feel two desires—one a desire to give help (due to your herd instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to the instinct for self-preservation). But you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away. Now this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them. You might as well say that the sheet of music which tells you, at a given moment, to play one note on the piano and not another, is itself one of the notes on the keyboard. The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.

Let’s be clear about one thing from the outset: there is no Moral Rule that says that whenever you hear a cry for help, the Right Thing To Do is to suppress your instinctive desire for self-preservation, and to put yourself into danger. Sometimes that’s the right thing to do, and sometimes that exactly the wrong thing to do. Ask any fire fighter who has seen co-workers endangered by family members rushing into the flames to seek a missing child. Ask the child who safely escaped, only to lose the parent that ran into the flaming home not knowing where the child was. The rightness or wrongness of the behavior is determined by the consequences of that behavior, not by some arbitrary rule that declares “Thus always shalt thou do.” There is no one rule that applies to all circumstances, and each decision must be weighed in light of its probable outcomes.

I suspect that when Lewis first developed this argument, he had never had any personal experiences that involved hearing a cry for help and putting himself in danger in order to come to someone’s aid. There’s something of the armchair hero in his dispassionate description of a person hearing a cry, experiencing Impulse 1, followed by Impulse 2, followed by a consideration of which moral principles to apply to the conflicting impulses in order to decide a final course of action. Contrast this with any number of true-life stories in which real people responded instantly and instinctively, in the heat of the moment, without taking the slightest thought for their own safety and well-being (and sometimes with disastrous results, as in the parent rushing back into the burning home). Lewis’ version doesn’t sound terribly implausible in and of itself, but real life nevertheless frequently begs to differ.

Another flaw in this argument is that it falls short of actually proving his point. Even if we allow that some 3rd-party agency is helping to arbitrate between two conflicting instincts, this would not necessarily imply that the arbiter was some kind of universal Moral Law. A far better explanation would be to say that one instinct is simply stronger than the other, so no rational evaluation of moral principles is necessary. And should the erstwhile hero happen to be sufficiently self-possessed to consider the implications before acting, it makes more sense to say that he bases his decision on the expected outcomes, rather than on knowing that Moral Code Section 79 Article 132 A stroke 17 applies to this exact circumstance.

Lewis is telling a superficially plausible tale consistent with the point he’s trying to make, but it does not bear up under scrutiny. Even if we leave the hero himself out of the picture, and just ask ourselves how hindsight decides which decision ought to have been more morally correct, the Moral Law explanation falls short of the “expected outcomes” explanation. We don’t really have any way to know what such a Law ought to prescribe, other than to consider the consequences of the actions. Thus, by assuming the existence of a Moral Law, we have learned nothing that we can’t discover by considering the outcomes apart from any such Law. All we accomplish by appealing to a Moral Law is making a concession to superstition, and manufacturing an excuse for inserting God into a picture that doesn’t really contain Him.

But let’s take a step back. Lewis’ point is that instinct is not enough to explain human moral behavior. Despite his flawed example and superstitious “explanation,” that’s a partially correct observation. Instincts contribute to how we feel about certain types of outcome, and not uncommonly contribute quite strong feelings. The tiger that ate Golg yesterday is going to be hungry again tomorrow, and when he comes back to our tribe, Golg won’t be there to help us defend ourselves. The tribe that runs towards the tiger when Golg cries out for help, is the tribe that faces less danger in the long term. The tribe that laughs and says, “Sucks to be you, Golg!” is the tribe whose gene pool is going to run dry when the tiger picks them off one by one.

That’s why we see “defend the herd” instincts in non-human species—creatures not made in the image of God and not subject to any particular “Moral Law” written on their hearts and souls. Evolution is capable of producing some quite sophisticated and even altruistic behaviors, purely from the ongoing experience of a collection of genes distributed in a pool of social individuals, human or not. Thus, while social instincts are not sufficient to explain all human moral behavior, they’re more than adequate to produce a lot of the behaviors, priorities, and decisions that Lewis would like to ascribe to some sort of invisible, magical Moral Law.

The flaws in Lewis’ rebuttal are not fatal to his argument, but they do provide us with a good illustration of the ways in which his superstitions get in the way of clear thinking. Human instincts are not passive keys, to be played or not played according to some kind of celestial sheet music. They’re spontaneous and motivational, driving our decisions, not responding to them. Lewis realizes this, I’m sure, but his superstitions constrain him, and he ends up with a flawed and inaccurate analogy. Instead of defending his arguments, he ends up highlighting the discrepancies between the way things really are and the way he thinks things ought to be. It sticks out like Pinocchio’s nose, but unlike the wooden boy, Lewis seems completely unperturbed. It’s part of what makes him so popular, in certain circles anyway.

Chapter 1 of Mere Christianity sets out to establish what C. S. Lewis calls “two facts” that “are the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in.” We looked at the first of these “facts” last week: the notion that there is some kind of universal Moral Law, aka the Law of (Human) Nature, that dictates the definition of Right and Wrong. According to Lewis, we all know that this Moral Law exists, and we’ve even got some kind of inherent knowledge of what its commandments are. And yet (“fact” number two), we do not do what this Law tells us we should.

We’ll get to the rest of Chapter 1 in a moment, but first let’s note in passing just how far Lewis has already gone astray, due to the preconceived ideas he’s trying to impose on his interpretation of the evidence. Because he’s thinking in terms of divine commandments, he’s already introducing the notion that his so-called Moral Law is not just a description of common patterns of behavior, but is in fact some kind of obligation that each and every individual is somehow responsible to live up to. It’s a subtle little twist, but as he gets into the second part of Chapter 1, we’ll see that this extra little assumption is really a key factor intended to drive us to Lewis’ desired conclusion.

It’s kind of slick, in a way. He directs our attention to certain real-world facts (i.e. the way people judge actions in light of consequences), and then, while our attention is focused on the observations, he slips in a subtle, biased twist that colors our interpretation of these facts. Notice, the extra twist is not part of the observed facts: we don’t observe any Universal Moral Law with any objectively declared principle binding its precepts upon all mankind. This is purely Lewis’ ideology, injecting itself into the argument when it thinks no one is looking. Pretty sneaky, eh?

Before we get to Lewis’ second “fact,” let’s clean up a loose end from last week. Lewis is arguing that there is a universal, and universally-known, Moral Law.

Men have differed as regards what people you ought to be unselfish to—whether it was only your own family, or your fellow countrymen, or everyone. But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.

The problem with these two examples is that neither one is true. There have been and still are cultures and subcultures that admire those who put themselves first (and in fact some of our own celebrities are famous for it). They may not call it “selfishness,” since that’s the term used by people on the receiving end of this kind of behavior, assuming they don’t like it. But the cult of ego has always been a significant part of human society, and forms a large part of the “divine right of kings” mythology that has been popular for so much of human history.

Likewise, the people who “all agree” that you shouldn’t simply take any woman you like are the people who, despite the casual and callous sexism of Lewis’ era, were willing to admit that there is a certain merit to be had in respecting women’s rights. This has not always been a universal condition, and in fact in times of war the idea of “take any woman you like” has been rather popular, to the point that it even became part of the Law of Moses.

What Lewis is referring to is the common assumption that all “right-minded” men have agreed with the things he’s proposing, i.e. everybody whose moral perceptions must be correct because they match Lewis’ standards. He’s not reasoning based on things as they are, he’s simply exercising his own preconceived ideas about the way things ought to be. But like I said, that’s last week’s topic. Let’s move on to this week’s.

It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong; but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table. Now if we are agreed about that, I go on to my next point, which is this. None of us are really keeping the Law of Nature. If there are any exceptions among you, I apologize to them. They had much better read some other book, for nothing I am going to say concerns them. And now, turning to the ordinary human beings who are left:

I hope you will not misunderstand what I am going to say. I am not preaching, and Heaven knows I do not pretend to be better than anyone else. I am only trying to call attention to a fact: the fact that this year, or this month, or more likely, this very day, we have failed to practice ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.

Notice how Lewis’ preconceived ideas about morality inject themselves into his interpretation of the facts. Not only does he believe there is a real Right and Wrong, his argument implicitly assumes that this Moral Law is right about what’s Right and Wrong for everyone, all at the same time. He is assuming, in other words, that there’s always a Right thing we could have done, and that by failing to do it, we have done Wrong.

Sadly, we live in a world where this is not always the case. There are many situations where life gives us, not a choice between Right and Wrong, but a choice between Wrong and Wrong. Two shoppers each have handicapped granddaughters whose heart is set on getting a Groompy doll for Christmas, and there’s only one left. To be generous to the stranger is to add one more heartache to a small child’s life of misery. What’s the “right” thing to do? Or on a more serious note, take certain hot social issues, like abortion. To intentionally kill a healthy human fetus seems Wrong, but to violate a woman’s body via an unwanted pregnancy is also Wrong. What’s the Right answer? There isn’t one, which is why it’s so controversial.

In fact, if we go back to our original understanding of morality, we can see why this situation is more or less inevitable: we all judge Right and Wrong in terms of how we feel about the consequences of our choices. Some choices are easy: if you threaten enough people, they’ll gang up on you and eliminate you as a threat, which you probably won’t like. That’s easy, because there’s a clear difference between the good outcome and the unpleasant one.

But what about situations where all the outcomes are undesirable, albeit in different ways? There is no clear path to the right answer, because there is no right answer. This happens often enough in real life that we can say with reasonable certainty that Lewis’ mythical Moral Law is just that: mythical. We all wish there were always a way out, a right answer that resolves every situation, but there isn’t. Some of us, like Lewis, retreat from this harsh reality by imagining an invisible, universal, and eternal Law that knows all the right answers, even if we don’t. But this kind of fantasy is just wishful thinking, and it’s mere superstition to try and attribute our own moral behavior to this kind of imaginary Law of Nature.

This gives Lewis a significant handicap when it comes to trying to develop an impartial and reasonable system of morality and ethics. Had he begun with an accurate understanding of how we make moral judgments, he would have seen right away that there is no Moral Law that provides consistently Right answers to all human individuals at the same time. It can’t, because our moral judgments are based on consequences, and it’s frequently difficult, if not downright impossible, to find a course of action that produces outcomes that everyone regards as optimal. There’s just too much conflict and competition, and not enough material and social capital to go around.

Lewis has missed this point, which is a real shame because now he’s going to lay what he calls “the foundation of all clear thinking about ourselves and the universe we live in” without taking this vital element into account. Instead, he’s going to assume that there is always a Right answer, a course of action that we know we ought to do, and yet some mysterious force within each of us magically drives us to choose Wrong instead. Superstition piles up on superstition, and “clear thinking” gets buried at the bottom, unmissed and unlamented.

We’re ready to start the main body of Mere Christianity, but before we delve into what Lewis calls the “law of human nature,” let’s take a moment to do some forward thinking. Let’s start with a species that is intelligent enough to have some understanding of cause and effect, so that they can anticipate the probable consequences of their actions, and choose the ones which will have the most favorable outcomes. Let’s further suppose that these beings possess enough empathy to communicate with each other, to recognize each other’s feelings, and to anticipate what sort of feelings others are likely to feel in any particular set of circumstances.

Given this as a premise, plus the assumption that each individual wants to achieve the most favorable possible outcomes, what consequences would we expect as the members of this species interact with each other and with an environment that contains both dangers and opportunities? If we look at a few specific scenarios, I think a clear general trend will emerge.

Let’s start with Ogg, Glog, and Berk, three members of a clan of these beings. In the first scenario, each one is fending for himself, looking for food. Ogg manages to catch a squirrel—not really a satisfying meal, but better than nothing. Glog, however, decides it would be easier to steal Ogg’s squirrel (or demand a part of it) than to catch one of his own, and the two begin to fight, allowing Berk to sneak in and steal the whole thing while the first two are distracted. Berk gets a meal, but now Ogg and Glog are both mad at him.

Second scenario: a moose wanders into the clan’s hunting grounds. It’s too big for any two or three hunters, so the clan gathers all of its hunters into a full scale hunting party. Ogg and Glog join in the hunt, but they deliberately don’t let Berk in on it because they’re still mad about the squirrel. The hunt is successful, and all the hunters, including Ogg and Glog, get a good, satisfying meal. Berk gets some too, as part of the clan, but by the time the hunters have finished, all the choice bits are gone and he has to make do with leftovers.

We could spend quite a lot of time exploring this particular set of scenarios, but these two give us a good starting point. Notice first of all the consequences of competition versus cooperation. The competing hunters had to settle for smaller prey since each was operating on his own, and the results were poor. Also, as Berk found out, certain behaviors had social consequences: by putting his own selfish interests ahead of those of the rest of the clan, Berk lost social esteem, and found that he received less benefit from intra-clan cooperation than the other hunters did.

The cooperative consequences were much better: the group could work together to bring down much bigger prey, thus providing much more food for each individual in the tribe. It wasn’t a matter of “I’ll give you some of my squirrel and then we’ll both have an inadequate meal,” it was “wow, that was some moose, I couldn’t eat another bite.” Competition is inevitable, and not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but the potential rewards of cooperation are frequently far better.

What we have here, then, is the evolution of a rudimentary moral system, i.e. a set of guidelines that help us categorize behaviors into those which promote conflict and competition versus those which promote cooperation and mutual benefit. We can call these guidelines “evil” versus “good,” but that’s just a label. The main significance is that we recognize and encourage the behaviors that we anticipate will bring the most desirable outcomes.

And speaking of labels, notice we’re not necessarily talking double-entry bookkeeping here. Ogg and Glog didn’t write down “Debit: one stolen squirrel; Credit: one missed moose hunt.” They got mad at Berk, and regarded him as a “Them” in the age-old categories of Us versus Them. It’s much simpler and more commonplace to categorize people according to how you feel about them. Can you imagine if we had to make all our decisions about how to treat people on the basis of adding up every interaction we’ve ever had with them, assigning a positive or negative score to each, and then adding up the total to see if it ended up on the plus side or the minus side?

It’s much easier, and more instinctive, to simply put labels on people, and then base your judgments on how you feel about the label: liberal vs. conservative, believer vs unbeliever, freshman vs. senior, dude vs. babe, black vs. white, homo vs. hetero, etc. And here’s the trick: if we’re talking about people that know about feelings like this, and who can anticipate that certain behaviors will put them in certain social categories, then that in itself becomes a “moral” guideline. We want to do things that will benefit us; we don’t want to do things that will cause us to end up in an unfavorable category (like Berk did).

We can make several predictions based on the above evolutionary scenario. First of all, we can predict that different groups will evolve different moral standards, though with a lot of common ground based on our common experience (i.e. we tend to have fairly predictable feelings about being robbed, assaulted, threatened, and so on). This is a perfectly natural outcome resulting from the immediate material consequences of certain types of competitive actions, regardless of the culture in which they occur.

Next, we can also predict that there will be certain individuals who will find competition more personally advantageous than cooperation is: the schoolyard bullies, or the bloody tyrants. Their moral system won’t restrain them from harming others, because they’re big enough and bad enough to get away with it. By the same token, however, very few people will adopt such narrowly selfish moral codes because such codes benefit the bully/tyrant at the expense of others, leaving others with little reason to admire the code. The others will stick to seeing that sort of conduct as wrong.

We can also predict that evolved moral codes will tend to have different guidelines for those outside our own social group than they do for those inside our group. For example, the code may say that it is wrong to tell a lie, meaning that it’s wrong to tell a lie to another member of the same group. At the same time, it can be perfectly ok to tell a lie to someone outside the “Us” group (“Do you know where the Jews are hiding?” demanded the Gestapo leader…), and sometimes it might even be wrong not to tell a lie.

Finally, we can predict that moral codes will continue to evolve, as we continue to acquire experience and (hopefully) wisdom regarding which behaviors do or do not contribute to the most desirable outcomes. There may be a period when the bully/tyrant can build a society by imposing his own strength and will on a troubled and chaotic world, and his servants might very well see his tyranny in terms of “the divine right of kings,” assuming they’re better off with a strong bully on the throne than they are with dog-eat-dog anarchy and disorder. But such periods can end, as stability opens up new experiences in the benefits of cooperation, equality, and liberty. Despotism’s Golden Age can fade and tarnish, morally speaking. And likewise with slavery, sexism, and homophobia.

Thus, what we have in the real world are a number of moral codes, with common core principles that evolve naturally out of our common, human reactions to behaviors that are materially harmful to us or beneficial to us. These natural, real-world codes are further augmented by the anticipatory social awareness that helps us recognize which behaviors are going to promote cooperation (and consequent benefits) within our society, versus those which are going to put us into undesirable social categories and to provoke undesirable conflicts with those around us. And these codes evolve and adapt to the particular social and environmental circumstances of the groups that hold them, leading to regional and temporal variations from one another.

This is an extremely important concept for us to grasp, because not only does it spare us the superstitious mistake of ascribing “right” and “wrong” to some invisible legislator in the sky, but it also explains what “right” and “wrong” really mean, and how they are grounded in objective reality itself. When we say that murder is wrong, this is not an arbitrary and whimsical designation. It’s not that some celestial tablet-scratcher flipped a coin that came up tails. Murder is wrong because it produces undesirable outcomes in the real world: undesirable for the victim’s friends and family because they are grieved and hurt by their loss, and undesirable for the murderer because he has just put himself in the category of Dangerous Threats, and society will, if it can, work to eliminate him somehow.

C. S. Lewis, I daresay, isn’t going to see this. That’s going to seriously handicap his argument, because the alternative is actually a pretty sad little system. The alternative is to say that there is no real-world basis for right and wrong, that it’s just an arbitrary system made up by some celestial bully/tyrant, and the only reason we need to care about it is that He is strong enough and brutal enough to hurt us if we fail to play along. That’s not an ethical system, it’s autocratic mind games. It’s like saying blue is good and green is evil—neither color has any intrinsic moral qualities, good or bad, they’ve just arbitrarily been designated as one or the other. Is murder really no more intrinsically immoral that some randomly chosen color?

No. Real-world morality is not arbitrary. It arises naturally and inevitably from the consequences (including the social consequences) of our behavior. And God Himself cannot change that.

We’ve been listening to a fictional Christian, whom we’ve dubbed “Dr. Geistur,” as he tries all sorts of excuses for why God does not oppose evil in the kind of tangible and productive ways that would be consistent with the existence of a good and all-powerful deity. We’ve heard him excuse God on the grounds that God really has no choice, that somehow He lacks the power to prevent evil from happening one way or another. We’ve heard him criticize a Jewish apologist for making basically the same argument, on the grounds that all things are possible for God. We’ve heard him propose analogies like the Super Bowl, as illustrating how struggle can make victory sweeter (though he apparently fails to realize that it also illustrates the existence of alternatives that do not require resorting to sin and evil). And we’ve heard him try to sell the idea that evil isn’t really all that bad, and that it’s actually good for us, in the long run.

As if that hasn’t sufficiently made a general hash of his own religious beliefs, he next turns to this tidy morsel of misanthropy:

STRAW [the Atheist]: If God is infinitely powerful as you say, then why does he allow bad things to happen to good people?

GEISTUR: We’ve already pointed out that there are good outcomes for pain and suffering. But we also need to point out that the question makes an assumption that isn’t true.

STRAW: What’s that?

GEISTUR: There are no good people!

Charming, isn’t it?

Now in all fairness to Dr. Geistur, he’s not indulging in any personal antipathy towards his fellow mortals. He’s merely upholding an anti-human bias that’s inherent within his religion itself. As I mentioned before, one of the techniques that con men use to deceive their victims is the “Blame the Pigeon” strategy. People are more gullible when they’re afraid that they’re guilty of something, so to keep your pigeons from seeing through your scam, you just need to make them feel guilty.

Christianity takes this a step further by asserting that we are all guilty, by definition. There are no good people, according to the Gospel—just like there’s no naturally luxuriant and vibrant hair according to the marketing department of your favorite shampoo and conditioner. Even before you start, you’re inherently inferior and inadequate, and you need our product to make you socially acceptable. Even if we don’t have any actual product to deliver.

Dr. Geistur then gets the strawman atheist character to confess to having told lies and having stolen things. Mr. Straw protests that he’s not all bad, but Geistur retorts that he’s not all good either, and then broadens that to include all people, including babies who, in his view, are sinfully guilty of being selfish. Mr. Straw is judging himself to be more or less good relative to other people, but (Geistur argues) he’s failing to consider where he stands on an absolute standard of goodness.

The point of this whole little diversion is just to get to a point where Geistur can go back to Rabbi Kushner’s book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, and claim that Kushner is making incorrect assumptions about both God and man. As far as Geistur is concerned, evil in the world is not a problem for an omnipotent God because the victims all deserve to suffer. The only real question, according to Geistur, is “Why do good things happen to bad people?” In other words, he’s invoking the Rapist’s Defense (“She was asking for it!”) as yet another excuse for God’s failure to oppose evil in any tangible, real-world way.

Like I said: charming.

Let’s take a moment here to indulge in some of the thinking that’s sadly failing to happen in this little dialog between the Christian and the straw man. Is it really true that there are no good people? And is there an absolute standard of goodness for us to measure people against?

Obviously, the answer to the first question is no, it’s not true at all. But to explain why, we need to understand the answer to the second question, which is also “no.”

When Dr. Geistur accuses Mr. Straw of judging people by comparing them with other people, he’s making an astute observation. We do judge how good people are by comparing them with others. What Dr. Geistur fails to realize is that this is the correct way to judge goodness in a person’s life, because “goodness” is a social relationship whose existence is defined by the person’s interactions with others. If you don’t consider the person’s behavior in light of the other people they are interacting with, then you’re taking things out of context, and are not making a fair judgment.

When a person is part of a group, there’s a certain tension between the best interests of the individual and the best interests of the group. “Goodness,” in a social context, consists of finding a workable balance between behaviors that benefit the individual and behaviors that benefit the group. Ideally, we want to maximize the behaviors that are beneficial to both, and minimize the behaviors that are detrimental to one or the other. It’s “good” to be a positive example and a reliable contributor to the well-being of the group, but it’s “bad” to be too much of a taker/exploiter, or too much of a doormat. “Goodness” is that which maximizes the benefit to all involved.

Now, that’s a fairly abstract description because different groups actually have different characters, objectives, and priorities. “Good” as defined by a fellowship of stay-home, full-time, home-schooling evangelical moms, and “good” as defined by an association of activists working to promote First Amendment liberties, might not be entirely the same list of behaviors. Is it “good” to depend on a wealthier relative to meet your own financial needs? Again, in a third world culture, it might very well be good (and even inescapable), whereas in an affluent society like America it might be seen as a sign of moral weakness, or worse.

How about mandatory celibacy? Good or bad? Even within Christianity, you’ll get a different answer depending on which group is considering the question (and who’s being proposed as being subject to the restriction). Is gay marriage better or worse than promiscuous gay sex? Hmm, might be hard to get a consistent answer to that one too, and might lead the Christian to reconsider his or her answer to the question about mandatory celibacy.

I think you see my point. There is no absolute standard of goodness, because goodness exists relative to a particular person, in a particular set of circumstances, in the context of a particular group with a particular set of standards, expectations, constraints, and so on. If you were to write a book containing an enumerated listing of which actions were “good” for a particular person in a particular social/cultural/economic context, the table of contents alone would probably consume all of the world’s paper and ink!

But by and large, no such reference guide is even necessary. We know that there are good people, and bad people, and we judge them according to our own contexts, as we should and must. But more to the point—and to get back to the topic Geistur is failing to address—none of that has anything at all to do with deserving to be born with crippling birth defects, or deserving lifelong poverty and starvation, or deserving premature death due to natural or man-made catastrophe.

Rabbi Kushner originally asked (and tried to answer) a perfectly good question about why a supposedly good God fails to intervene in cases where the victims suffer evils that they have not provoked by any correspondingly evil deeds. Geistur’s diversion into abstract hamartiology is just that: a diversion, a hand-waving attempt to distract us from the fact that he has no good answers. Go ahead: argue about whether or not it’s inhumanly barbaric to seriously claim that babies deserve to be born with horrendous, life-shattering birth defects. At least if you’re debating hamartiology, you’re not asking why God allowed an innocent child to suffer, and the real question of evil has been successfully dodged.

I wish I could say that this was just a momentary lapse on Geistur’s part, but skimming ahead… no, sorry, there’s lots more where that came from. Stay tuned (if you can stand it).

Based on the Old and New Testaments, the answer is an unmistakable “NO!” God may be a lot of things, but “pro-life” isn’t one of them, by a long shot.

Before we start our survey of the actual texts, there’s one thing we need to be clear about. Which kind of life are pro-lifers supposed to be “pro” about? In Christian theology, a person actually has two lives: their physical, mortal life which ends when the body dies, and the everlasting life of their immortal soul (which by definition never ends). What pro-lifers will tell you is that abortion is wrong because it ends a life, so we’re clearly concerned with life in the materialistic sense here (thus betraying once again the materialistic roots and biases of the pro-life political movement).

How much value, then, does the God of the Bible place on physical, materialistic life? In a conflict between life and free will, to which does He give priority? The first chapter of Genesis does not address the topic, but the second begins to, and the third gives us quite the clearest demonstration possible of God’s preference for free will over pro-life principles.

Here’s Genesis 2:15-17:

The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the LORD God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.”

God already knew good and evil, being omniscient. He clearly did not want His children to know, since He explicitly forbade them to eat the fruit. Why, then, did He think there was any need to create a tree of  knowledge of good and evil? This tree does not appear again anywhere else in Christian lore or scripture; it has no other use. Its sole purpose is to create the opportunity for God’s children to make fatal choices.

Not a perfectly clear-cut case of God giving priority to free will over respect for life, I’ll grant you, but it definitely has pronounced inclinations in that direction. Can you imagine a sincere pro-lifer going up to a troubled, unwed pregnant teen, handing her the business card to the local abortion clinic, and saying, “Now you must not go to this clinic between the hours of 8 and 4 on weekdays and 8 to noon on Saturdays, parking in the rear, phone 727-555-1212 for an appointment, bring a photo ID and your insurance card if any, all interactions guaranteed strictly confidential.”? It’s just not pro-life to create the opportunity for fatal choices and then put it right in front of the chooser’s face. But that’s what God did in Genesis 2.

Genesis 3 is even clearer.

Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’ “

“You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

What’s missing from this picture? How about God? Where’s God in all this? Here is Eve, mother of all women, about to exercise her freedom of choice in a way that will be fatal for her offspring. Allow Eve to exercise her freedom of choice, and it’s certain death, not just for one baby, but for all her offspring, and all their offspring, generation to generation. And it’s not just physical death either: according to Jesus, most of Eve’s offspring will lose their salvation as well. Eve is about to make the ultimate anti-pro-life choice.

The pro-life thing to do at this point, assuming you know what Eve is contemplating, would be for you to intervene, deprive Eve of her freedom to choose, and thus prevent the consequent loss of life—and soul! That’s especially true in this particular case, since there aren’t any issues here about Eve being forced to endure an unwanted pregnancy—this is strictly eat or don’t eat.

And God, being divine, most definitely does know what Eve is thinking, and what the serpent is saying. He’s even known about it in advance, just as He knows everything in advance. He’s had more than enough time to slap some gory pictures on a piece of cardboard and a stick, and to situate Himself at the location where Eve and the snake are going to meet to arrange the termination of her immortal innocence.

If God were pro-life, He would have to be there. Anything less is a betrayal of everything “pro-life” stands for. Eve and the snake are about to commit the Ultimate Abortion, not just of one baby’s life, but of the lives of each and every member of the human species (at least eventually). Preventable deaths, every one. If only there were one pro-lifer around to talk Eve out of it! But there wasn’t, because God is pro-choice. He values the woman’s freedom of choice above the lives of her offspring, above even their immortal souls, and therefore He stayed out of it until after the decision was made.

Let’s look at a few more examples, like Genesis 6-10. Here’s an excerpt:

The LORD saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. So the LORD said, “I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth—men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air—for I am grieved that I have made them.”

This time God isn’t just pro-choice, He’s the abortionist: taking the life of virtually everyone and everything, on account of the choices of man. (Yes, I know Noah and the Ark, but that’s a vanishingly small percentage of those God killed by the Flood, according to the story.) The pro-life thing to do would be to simply prevent man from having the freedom to choose to do all those evil things. Taking away the freedom to choose is what the pro-life movement is all about. But God values freedom of choice too highly to deprive man of it, even though the cost of that freedom is the sudden, violent death of every man, woman, child, baby, beast, and insect on the face of the earth! God is not pro-life.

So God, in the Bible, has a pronounced bias in favor of freedom of choice over respect for life. But does that apply to His followers too? Could this be a case of “Do as I say, not as I do,” a case of God having different moral values than He expects us to? Does God want us to have more respect for life (i.e. fleshly, materialistic life) than He does?

Well, no, not really. There are many cases in the Bible where God calls on His people to impose death penalties for a variety of offenses, from verbal things like cursing the name of God (Lev. 24:16), to things like disobeying your parents (Deut. 21), to picking up sticks on a Saturday (Num. 15). In some cases, God commanded His people to impose the death penalty for things the accused had no control over, like being born (or even just conceived!) as a descendant of the Amalekites (I Sam. 15).

Nor is this absence of respect for life limited to the Old Testament. In Acts 5, for instance, it’s not clear whether God or the Apostle Peter is to be credited (if that’s the word) with immediately slaying an elderly couple who sold some land and donated the proceeds to the church, claiming to have donated the entire sale price when in fact they had kept some for themselves. Granted, Ananias and Saphira were deceptively trying to win some credit they hadn’t earned, but is that sort of thing really a capital offense?  “Respect life” indeed!

Some will say at this point that these examples don’t count. God is wise above all the imaginations of men, and if He did demonstrate a callous disregard for the value of a human life, it’s because it was ultimately destined to bring about the greater good (for values of “good” that are not incompatible with suffering, disease, death, sin, and the eternal damnation of most of God’s children).

But that’s not the point. The point is, what is the real value of fleshly life? Pro-lifers place a much higher value on physical life than God does, if the Bible is correct. Is God wrong about how much a human life should be worth, or are the pro-lifers? Is the pro-life obsession with fleshly life merely a reflection of the materialism at the foundation of their movement?

I’m going to side (roughly) with the pro-lifers on this one. The life of a person should have a much higher value than God gives it in the Bible. That’s not to say that (as materialistic extremists would argue) the person exists from the moment of conception onwards. Far from it: the process of gestation is a process that slowly assembles a person from a large number of component parts, of which the fertilized egg is merely the first and simplest. But once all the pieces are in place, we should value human life too highly to casually toss around death penalties.

The thing that bothered me the most was the emphasis on Christianity. Not that I objected to the faith, of course. I joined in the prayers and the hymns as enthusiastically as anyone else. But I couldn’t help but notice the atmosphere of possessiveness and exclusivity with which the pro-life position was being linked to the religion. It was as if there were a sub-text hiding in the signs and banners people were carrying: “Pro-life is for CHRISTIANS ONLY.”

It bothered me at the time, because the pro-life movement was unlikely to win without the support of a large number of other groups, and yet there was a tangible attitude of not wanting those other groups to join in. There was a certain amount of tolerance for Christian-like religions (Rabbis For Life could be openly accepted for instance), but I didn’t see too many Mormons for Life or (God forbid!) Gays for Life. I even had one pro-lifer tell me frankly and honestly that the only terms on which he would be willing to see America outlaw abortion again would be if the nation first turned to Jesus, so that Jesus could take the credit. Dead babies were something to shout about, but they came in a firm and distant second to the goal of using the pro-life movement to establish the political clout of believers.

Nowadays I see that as a rather more positive aspect of the pro-life movement: their self-righteous exclusivism makes them naturally self-limiting and self-defeating. Considering that they are crusading to dehumanize women, that’s a good thing. And not just women, because if you look at the philosophical basis of the pro-life movement, they’re really dehumanizing us all.

Before I get into that, though, let me just point out in passing that one of the big problems with trying to worship and serve a non-existent God is that you leave yourself open to the political influence of anyone who can do a convincing imitation of what you think the voice of God would sound like if He could talk. And there are any number of people who want your labor, your money, your vote, your military service, and on and on, who are more than willing to tell you what God is urging you to do.

The pro-life movement is a classic example. Back in the early 70′s, Republican strategists hit on the idea of using abortion as a political wedge to drive conservative Christians into the ranks (and coffers) of the party. It was not a particularly Christian issue, but it was a popular superstition, and Christian leaders like Pat Robertson and James Dobson were only to happy to enlist in the Republican crusade and make it a religious issue. In effect, they sold the American Christian church to the Republican party in exchange for some political influence, not realizing that most of the influence was actually flowing the wrong way. (As usual.)

The result is that we have a major Judeo-Christian political movement that manipulates believers into obeying the directives of Republican strategists, and that incidentally dehumanizes humankind in general and women in particular. It’s an unbiblical position, and flows contrary to a lot of what we might call the “spirit” of Christianity, but because God does not show up in real life and the Republicans are willing to take the lead in “relaying” God’s voice in His absence, Christians willingly embrace it as a part of their faith.

Ok, let’s get into the details. The root of the problem here, as in so many other cases, is that we all know that murder is wrong and surgery is ok, but it’s not clear at what point abortion switches from being the latter to being the former. That kind of ambiguity is not the sort of banner the average Joe can rally around. If you’re going to draw a line in the sand, it needs to be a clear, definite line, not a bunch of people sitting around wondering who, if anyone, might have crossed it. So how do you turn this into a black-and-white issue to use as a political tool?

Well, that’s easy, we’ll just say that “life begins at conception.” Sperm + egg = human life and therefore it’s murder if you take that life. The Bible never says anything about life beginning at conception (and in fact declares in Genesis 2 that Man first became “a living soul” when God breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, so there’s reason to believe that breathing marks the point at which God regards us as human souls). But modern Republican leaders of the pro-life movement have declared that conception is what makes us people, and that’s good enough for the rank-and-file pro-lifer.

Notice what we’re saying, though. The nucleic acids of the sperm penetrate the cell wall of the egg, migrate to the nucleus, and recombine in an mundane biochemical reaction just like in every other organism from bacteria on up. There are as yet none of the attributes we normally associate with “soul,” like mind or emotion or will or perception. Nature has just begun construction of the physical, material housing into which these human (and dare I say “spiritual”) characteristics will later take root. But they’re not present yet, at conception.

What we have here, in other words, is an extremely materialistic reduction of what it means to be a person. We’re not beings of soul or spirit, let alone any image of God. We’re fundamentally a mere collection of proteins and amino acids and other materialistic chemicals. Kudos to pro-lifers for acknowledging the materialistic nature of man, and the fact that our true essence and worth is rooted in the physical and material substances of which we are composed. But this takes materialism too far.

The material universe is not just a universe of substances, it is a universe of substances and processes—nouns and verbs. And the verbs are no less important than the nouns. The reason human beings have value and dignity is not just because of the bare physical substances that interact biochemically at conception, as they do in all species. What makes us truly human, in the personal and spiritual sense, are the unique material processes that develop within our bodies once development advances beyond a certain point, the thoughts and emotions and goals and, yes, even the temptations.

These post-conception attributes are what make us human, not the mere substances of the single-celled organism. Philosophically, the pro-life movement is based on a heartless materialism that ignores the verbs and reduces people in general and women in particular to mere nouns. The fertilized egg lacks the processes and capacities that make us uniquely human persons—no mind, no thought, no feeling, no will, no perception, no desire, nothing more than a lowly bacterium would have. And that, pro-lifers tell us, is what it means to be a real, true human being.

This New Materialism flies in the face of the spirituality that pro-lifers allegedly believe in. Ok, not allegedly, they really do believe in it. It’s just that they’re following political leaders who don’t believe, and who could care less about the contradictions you produce in a believer’s testimony when you force him to reduce humanity to a mere chemical formula, and to call that “the whole person.”

But that’s what happen when you try to obey the voice of a God Who isn’t there, and is easily imitated. You become a pawn, a tool, to be deployed and used at will by whoever has the ambition and lack of scruples to pull it off.

But wait. Didn’t Jesus voluntarily lay down his life, in a heroic self-sacrifice to save the souls of sinners? Didn’t he freely give all to save all, and doesn’t the moral virtue of that humble service outweigh the moral liabilities of the negotiable guilt system?

Well, no, though I can understand the powerful emotional appeal that makes people think the answer ought to be “yes.” We admire the drama, the heroics, the self-sacrifice (and of course the ultimate vindication and happy ending when, the story says, Jesus triumphed over death). But having warm feelings about an idea is not the same as “examining everything carefully” so that we can “hold fast to what is good.” So let’s consider this aspect of the Christian moral system.

First of all, let’s notice that even if Jesus did voluntarily lay down his life for the benefit of the wicked, we’re still making the assumption that the suffering of the innocent does indeed have some kind of magic mojo to make the sinner’s guilt disappear. In other words, we’re still basing our moral values on the kind of bizarre voodoo in which the suffering of the innocent creates some kind of force or power that can be applied to the benefit of the wicked.

This is a rather nasty, black-magic sort of concept, but it’s absolutely essential to make the Gospel work. If the sufferings of the innocent are merely an injustice or an evil turn of events, with no magical benefits for the wicked, then when Jesus goads the Sanhedrin into a lethal fury, all he’s really accomplishing is a rather exotic and elaborate form of suicide.

Technically, of course, suicide is itself a sin, so had Jesus deliberately and intentionally created the circumstances of his own death, he would be sinning, and thus would lose the innocence that is supposed to make the mojo happen. The Gospels, however, portray Jesus as submitting—reluctantly—to the will of the Father. “Not my will but Thine be done” means it was not Jesus’ will to die, but someone else put him in a situation where he could not refuse. As Hebrews tells us, he “learned obedience” through what he suffered. His Dad made him do it.

This kind of coerced submission puts Jesus into rather a grey area, under any moral system. Did he really seek his own death, or was he just obeying with a gun, as it were, pointed at his head? It’s an interesting question, but it’s a moot point. The benefit his death supposedly creates for sinners is not drawn in any sense from his willingness to die, but merely from the fact that he suffered and shed his blood, as the New Testament emphasizes over and over again. For example, in Hebrews 9 we read:

In fact, the law requires that nearly everything be cleansed with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness. It was necessary, then, for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified with these sacrifices, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. For Christ did not enter a man-made sanctuary that was only a copy of the true one; he entered heaven itself, now to appear for us in God’s presence. Nor did he enter heaven to offer himself again and again, the way the high priest enters the Most Holy Place every year with blood that is not his own. Then Christ would have had to suffer many times since the creation of the world. But now he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself.

Notice, it’s the blood—the emblem of the suffering and death of the innocent victim—that produces the magical benefits for the wicked. Much as we might admire Jesus for being willing to go to his death for the benefit of sinners, the whole premise of such a “benefit” is that guilt can be transferred from the wicked to the innocent, such that the subsequent abuse of the innocent somehow rewards the wicked. Voluntary or not, what Jesus was pursuing was not noble. Though our feelings may say otherwise after the relentless indoctrination of countless hymns and sermons, there’s a nasty bit of blood magic at the core of the Cross.

I’m not saying, of course, that mercy is immoral, or that it’s never right to forgive sin. If you’re going to forgive sin, though, then just forgive it. Making innocent people suffer for things they never did is injustice, not forgiveness. If it’s your intention for the truly guilty to escape the consequences of their offenses, then just don’t punish anyone at all, duh! That would be a moral form of forgiveness.

Notice that the “negotiable guilt” system of morality actually makes mercy impossible. Under the classical Christian system of transactional morals, it’s not that sin was ever forgiven, or ever could be forgiven. Over and over the New Testament writers inform us that all sin was punished. The punishment was diverted onto Jesus instead of onto those who were actually guilty, but the full punishment was meted out. No sin was ever actually forgiven. Our “merciful” heavenly Father has never actually shown any real mercy. Under the Christian moral system, He can’t.

You see what I mean when I say the Christian moral system is hopelessly corrupt. Christians sing God’s praises for His alleged grace and mercy, yet the Gospel itself is founded on the premise that God never has and never could show any real mercy. A truly forgiven sin is a sin for which no punishment is ever meted out, which means no innocent sacrificial victim is needed to endure the suffering and death that the punishment requires. If God is capable of that kind of forgiveness, then the whole Gospel falls apart.

Unfortunately, that leaves us with a moral system in which God cannot ever actually forgive sin. He must necessarily pour out retribution on someone, even if (or rather, especially if) they never actually committed the sin He’s punishing. That’s what it means to be “forgiven” in the New Testament. But a system in which you say, “I forgive you,” and then dish out the punishment anyway, is a very perverse and immoral system!

Imagine for a moment if real people actually practiced such a system. Let’s say we show up at a party, and the host greets us at the door, holding a small, cute, adorable puppy. “Oh how cute,” we say, “you’ve adopted a new pet?”

“Oh no,” says the host, “I’m just borrowing this puppy so that if any guest says or does anything that offends me, I can just torture this puppy until I’m satisfied that the guest is forgiven.”

Superior moral system or batshit crazy?

It’s the same principle of negotiable guilt that the Judeo-Christian sacrificial system is built on, and it’s no more moral or admirable there than it is at the party of our puppy-punishing host. That Jesus would volunteer to perpetuate such a system is hardly a demonstration of virtue, and is evidence of a seriously flawed sense of moral judgment.

My first point, that Christians do not actually get their morality from the ancient moral codes of the Jews and early Christians, can be easily demonstrated by comparing the moral standards of today to the moral standards that were normal and normative in the major Biblical periods. Despite denouncing moral relativism, and claiming to have an eternal and absolute standard of morality in the Bible, we can see from Scripture itself that believers’ moral standards have changed quite a bit over the years.

In the days of Moses, for instance, not only was it morally acceptable to own slaves and beat them, God’s Law even provided for the sale of one’s daughters as sexual slaves that the buyer could keep for himself and/or pass on to his son. Though God’s Law speaks of the girl’s “conjugal rights” being protected, this is not a marriage: if the man tires of the slave, he needs no writ of divorce, he needs only to emancipate her free of charge.

And speaking of divorce, the Law of Moses not only permitted divorce, but actually called for the death of the wife if she could not prove she was a virgin on her wedding night. Similarly lethal punishments were stipulated for sins like blasphemy, working on Saturday (even if it’s just gathering firewood), hitting your parents, and worshiping other gods. Christians don’t live according to those standards of right and wrong any more, and few of them would even call such standards morally acceptable in any enduring and absolute sense.

Judeo-Christian morality is not an eternal moral absolute. It has changed over the years. Even in the Bible itself, the morality of divorce changed from being acceptable in Moses’ day to being questionable and even unacceptable in New Testament times. Jesus went so far as to make divorce the moral equivalent of adultery (thus inadvertently putting the Law of Moses, aka “God’s Perfect Law,” in the position of legalizing the equivalent of adultery!). And the changes in moral standards didn’t stop there, as can be seen by comparing today’s attitudes towards slavery and polygamy with the corresponding attitudes of Biblical patriarchs, prophets, and kings.

That’s a good thing, because Biblical morality, at its heart, is built on a moral framework that is both flawed and barbaric.

” ‘If a member of the community sins unintentionally and does what is forbidden in any of the LORD’s commands, he is guilty. When he is made aware of the sin he committed, he must bring as his offering for the sin he committed a female goat without defect. He is to lay his hand on the head of the sin offering and slaughter it at the place of the burnt offering. Then the priest is to take some of the blood with his finger and put it on the horns of the altar of burnt offering and pour out the rest of the blood at the base of the altar. He shall remove all the fat, just as the fat is removed from the fellowship offering, and the priest shall burn it on the altar as an aroma pleasing to the LORD. In this way the priest will make atonement for him, and he will be forgiven. (Lev. 4:27-31)

There’s no one single place where this moral flaw resides, but the above passage is a fair sample of the kind of corruption that permeates the Old Testament Law and the Gospel that springs from it. The problem lies in the concept of sin as something that exists as an independent entity, almost a commodity, that can be materially transferred from one being to another.

If you’ve been raised in a Christian culture, as I was, you may be so accustomed to this principle that it seems natural and unremarkable. Habit, however, is no justification for moral turpitude, and this idea of sin as negotiable commodity is an appallingly bad principle on which to base a moral system. Think about it: if you have done something wrong, if you’ve committed some crime that demands retribution or at least accountability, the doctrine of negotiable guilt says that you can morally get off scott free by transferring your guilt to some other party. And then they have to suffer the consequences for what you did!

In other words, it is moral, under this system, for the innocent to be punished for sins they did not commit, so that the guilty can sin with impunity. Not only is this doubly unjust (for punishing the innocent and for leaving the guilty unpunished), it’s an open invitation to abuse. It’s bad enough that the rich and powerful exploit and neglect the poor and weak, but under this kind of moral system, it’s even possible for the wicked to add to the trials of the saints by transferring to them the guilt for sins they did not commit.

If that seems a bit extreme, just re-read the quote from Leviticus 4 above. If the goat were somehow guilty of a sin deserving of death, that goat would not be an acceptable sin offering to the Lord. The innocence (and helplessness) of the animal are what make it a suitable recipient onto which the guilt of the sinner can be transferred. The suffering and death of the innocent is what magically puts the sinner back into a state in which he needs never again fear any retribution for his misdeeds.

And that, my friends, is the heart of the Christian Gospel: that Jesus Christ, the innocent lamb of God, received all the guilt for all of our sins past, present and future, that we committed and that he did not; he was punished for those sins so that we would not be. Negotiable guilt, freely transferable from the wicked to any weak and/or innocent victim who can be cajoled, coerced or otherwise induced to assume it.

This. Is. Not. Moral.

If someone wants to debate whether morality demands punishment and retribution for evil deeds, then we can have that discussion another time. What cannot be disputed is that if punishment is to be meted out for evil deeds, then genuine, valid, uncorrupted morality demands that the punishment fall on the person who committed the deed. The question of guilt is not a question of transactions or of the power of the wicked over the innocent, it’s a question of historical fact. “Guilty” means “at such and such a point in time, when the evil deed was done, this is the person that did it.” No subsequent “transaction” will alter the true historical facts of what happened in the past.

The doctrine of negotiable guilt lies at the heart of the Old Testament sacrifices and the New Testament Gospel, and it’s a poisonously immoral doctrine that explicitly provides for the punishment of the innocent and the impunity of the wicked. It is the very opposite of what a sound moral system ought to be based on. It is not, and cannot be, the source of any modern morals worthy of our respect and endorsement. We do not obtain our modern moral values from such a corrupt source, and nobody with a conscience should ever want to.

There are three variants of atheism that can be considered at least partly rational: these can be described as Somerset atheism, Nietzschean atheism, and Post-Nietzschean atheism.

Somerset atheism is the common practice of moral parasitism described in the previous section. It is a partially rational atheism that functions perfectly well on an individual level but cannot function on a societal level because it depends entirely on the existence of an external morality to support it.

Christianity, of course, borrows its morals (such as they are) from the surrounding cultures, which is why the only real moral innovation in Christianity is the impractical and rarely-practiced notion of loving your enemies and doing good to those who hate you. In his haste to do evil to his enemies, Vox accuses them of a flaw that is actually a Christian failing, thus fulfilling the Curse and repeating the stumble that has brought him down so often in TIA. But we still have two more atheisms to go…

Now, it might be worth mentioning, just for the sake of completeness, that atheism is a lack of belief in the existence of genuine deities. It is not a philosophy. It is not a moral code of ethics. It isn’t even naturalism or skepticism or any other “ism” but a simple lack of belief in the existence of gods. Even Christians are atheists with respect to the vast majority of pantheons that have ever populated the temples and imaginations of men. Vox has never quite understood what “atheism” is, and that’s why he makes the mistake of proposing that there are different schools (or “churches” as he snidely calls them—as though “church” were a less honorable term!).

Anyway, as we were saying, Vox turns next to the second philosophy, which he mistakes for atheism, namely the philosophy of Nietzsche (and Crowley). According to Vox, this moral system “takes no account of society’s mores in stating that “do what thou wilt” based on the individual’s will to power is the whole of the law. This is entirely rational from the individual’s perspective and it is the variant to which history’s great killers have subscribed.”

Having tried to tag atheism with whatever discredit comes from being associated with Nietzsche, it’s perfectly understandable why Vox’s next step would be to try and link Nietzsche with “history’s great killers.” But I can’t help but notice how similar Nietzsche’s philosophy seems to be to the philosophy that the Christian God is described as practicing. “Do what Thou wilt based on Thy own will to power” is indeed the whole of God’s law for His own conduct, and He does indeed care little for society’s mores, commanding genocide whenever He feels like it, executing “sinners” for trivial offenses like gathering wood on a Saturday, demanding ritual mutilation of babies, and condoning slavery (including the beating of slaves to the point of death)—God does what He has the power to do, regardless of what society regards as good.

So Nietzsche, and by extension the other “great killers” mentioned by Vox, are really only practicing godliness, imitating the example and moral system of God Himself. In that light, it’s rather amusing that Vox shares with us his personal assessment of God’s manifest philosophy.

This philosophy is rational, but it is literally psychopathic in the sense described by Dr. Robert Hare, developer of the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised, a clinical scale used to diagnose psychopathy.

I can certainly agree with the “psychopathic” bit, given God’s past history. But remember, Vox himself lends this philosophy the endorsement of identifying it as one of only three “rational” atheisms in existence. It might seem strange that Vox would use the term “rational” to describe psychopathy, but then again Vox isn’t striving for coherence and objectivity, he’s just out to twist everything into some kind of anti-atheist slander, whether it makes sense or not.

Two swings and two misses. The last pitch is what Vox calls “post-Nietzschean atheism,” typified by Michel Onfray. Once again, Vox mistakes a philosophical moral system for a simple lack of belief in God, and repeats his habitual error of ignoring the secular roots of morality.

Onfray recognizes that if one rejects the source of a moral system, one has no logical basis for retaining that which derives from it. For example, if all men are created equal, removing the Creator from the equation therefore requires abandoning the idea that men are equal unless another basis for that equality can be provided.

The idea that all men are created equal is a product of the Enlightenment, which Vox claims is the result of atheism. Christianity, meanwhile, springs from a tradition in which all men are not created equal. Kings rule by divine appointment, slaves are to serve as though serving the Lord (another rank of non-equality), the Jews are “God’s Chosen People,” and even the larger group of humanity as a whole is divided into “the elect” and “the lost.”

So it might be nice, actually, to find some other basis for asserting the equality of all men (such as, for example, considering the consequences of doing so, versus the consequences of practicing bigotry). Christian-sponsored anti-gay laws and amendments make it quite clear that basing equal rights on religious superstitions is an iffy proposition at best.

But Vox isn’t interested in finding a genuine, universal, non-superstitious source for human rights, because he does not want such a thing to exist. If we can find a real-world basis for rights, then he loses an opportunity to blackmail unbelievers into converting (“submit to God, or you can NEVER be a good person, vile infidel!”). He does not want all men to be created equal, because if atheists are as good as believers, then what’s the point in being believers? Oh, I suppose you could still believe, but from reading TIA, it’s clear that Vox wouldn’t enjoy it as much if he couldn’t presume the moral superiority Christians supposedly hold over atheists.

But I digress. This “post-Nietzschean atheism” is supposed to be the last of the three “rational” atheisms, so it might be interesting to see what Vox thinks is so rational about it.

It is social psychopathy that is an order of magnitude beyond that envisioned by the most rabidly psychopathic intellectual. Not even Leon Trotsky’s vision of an international communism is as ambitious in its ghastly grandeur as Onfray’s sociopathic philosophy of desire. Nietzsche only wished to slay God and rule over His Creation, the post-Nietzschean dreams of total destruction so that he might build a new creation from the ashes.

Goodness, if that’s what Vox considers “rational,” I think I can see why his arguments so frequently appear to be a bit out of touch with reality.

And with that last spray of spittle, the Chainsaw sputters to a long-anticipated halt. Strangely, most of the casualties that litter the field seem to have been Vox’s allies, plus the remnants of his own credibility. But whatever, we’re past this particular bit of logical carnage. Next week, we get to climb up the gang plank for the first leg of our voyage on the Omnidirigible, Hindenberg II. Stay tuned.

Vox begins with an attempt to twist the facts to make atheists sound both conceited and overly obsessed with reason.

[F]orty-three commenters at the militantly atheist science blog Pharyngula reported the results of an online personality test they had taken. Similar to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator survey, the test was hopelessly transparent and subjective, but provided a useful means of examining how these predominantly atheist individuals view themselves. They reported an average Rational rating of 94 out of 100, compared to an Extroverted rating of 32 and an Arrogance rating of 49. They do not see themselves so much as champions of reason, but paragons!

Sarah Palin be proud, Vox Day is jumping on the anti-elite band-wagon right beside you. At the risk of making a “paragon” of myself, I’m going to try something Vox apparently disdains: I’m going to think logically and reasonably about what the test actually said (as opposed to the fanciful and slanderous interpretation Vox chooses to give to it).

First of all, if you’ve taken an MBTI-style personality inventory like the ones Vox mentions, you’ll know that seeing yourself “as a paragon of reason” is neither a question on the test nor an indicator reported by the test. The test instead measures your personal “style” across four axes: Introvert versus Extrovert, Sensing (i.e. 5 senses) vs. Intuition, Thinking (using analysis to arrive at conclusions) vs Feeling (drawing conclusions based on how you feel about the people/circumstances), and Judging (getting answers now) vs Perceiving (wait and see what develops).

Notice that this has nothing whatsoever to do with atheists holding exaggerated and egotistical views about their rationality being supposedly superior to everyone else’s. What the MBTI tells you is that if a person scores closer to the Thinking end of the axis than the Feeling end, you’re going to have better luck convincing them with verifiable facts and non-fallacious reasoning than you are with appeals to emotional bonds like “if you disagree, you’re only helping the terrorists.” It’s just their personality type. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re better at reasoning and logic than others, it just means that they trust facts and logic more than they trust appeals to emotion and social connections.

Vox’s goal, of course, is not to try and understand what the MBTI really means. He just wants to set up a straw man atheist who is a goddamn-elitist-convinced-of-his-own-intellectual-superiority-and-wouldn’t-you-just-love-to-see-Vox-take-him-down-a-notch. But stand clear folks, Vox has Occam’s Chainsaw fully revved up at this point, and he don’t care where it swings.

His first swipe is to confuse being rational with being analytical, so that he can try and chop an arm or two off of science. The beauty of science, of course, is that it draws its answers from reality itself, which is the truth, so no matter how complicated science gets, or how much increasing specialization tends to create new and more difficult niches of scientific knowledge, it’s all consistent with itself and with the real world. There’s nothing unreasonable or irrational about having confidence in an approach that yields coherent, practical, and beneficial results on such a consistent basis. But Vox, in his crusade to blemish the atheists, tries to make it sound insane.

[The atheist] is not without faith, because he puts his trust in the scientific method and those who use it whether he understands their conclusions with regards to any given application or not. But because there are very few minds capable of grasping higher-level physics, for example, let alone understanding their implications, and because specialization means that it is nearly impossible to keep up with the latest developments in any of the more esoteric fields, the atheist stands with utter confidence on an intellectual foundation comprised of things of which he himself neither knows nor understands.

What Vox overlooks is the fact that the atheist, in many cases, does understand how science works and why it is reliable. There may be increasingly specialized subdomains to which the scientific method is applied, but it remains fundamentally the same scientific method, and its answers are reliable for the same reasons. Vox is confusing the detailed researches to which science is applied, with the rationality and reliability of the method itself. It’s a blatant appeal to ignorance: “Everyone must be ignorant about a lot of the knowledge that’s available, therefore no one has any reason to believe the answers.” Please, O Mighty Ignorance, protect us from science! But we do have a reason to trust the answers: we know that they were obtained using reliable scientific technique.

Vox argues that the atheist can “be legitimately criticized when he fails to admit that he is not actually operating on reason in most circumstances, but is instead exercising a faith that is every bit as blind and childlike as that of the most thoughtless, Bible-thumping fundamentalist.” But in fact, Vox is not being what you would call truthful here. It is reasonable to trust that a reliable scientific method, repeatedly demonstrated to be both useful and accurate, would return valid answers when deployed on real-world evidence and facts. The thoughtless, Bible-thumping fundamentalist, by contrast, bases his faith on the fact that somebody told him what to believe, and he believed it, even though (in contrast to science) his approach consistently yields answers that contradict themselves, other fundamentalists, and the real world.

By the way, if there are any “thoughtless fundamentalists” out there with chainsaw wounds, don’t feel too bad. You are by no means Vox’s only intended victims here. Morality is next on the hit-list.

The fundamental irrationality of the atheist can primarily be seen in his actions, and it is here that his general lack of intellectual conviction is also exposed. Whereas Christians and the faithful of other religions have rational reasons for attempting to live by their various moral systems, the atheist does not. Both ethics and morals based on religion are nothing more than man-made myth to the atheist, he is therefore required to reject them on rational materialist grounds.

As we’ve pointed out before, Vox’s worldview apparently interferes with his ability to understand where morality really comes from. It comes from the consequences of the behaviors that people learn to categorize as “good” or “bad.” If a religious man decides to refrain from saying “hell” because he believes that God will punish him for it, he is deriving his morals from a consideration of the consequences of his actions, just like the atheist does. The only difference is that the believer has a superstitious and gullible expectation of what those consequences will be. But real-world morality, where actions have real-world consequences, work for both believer and unbeliever, and in fact work better for the unbeliever, since the gullible and superstitious notions don’t garble the unbeliever’s ability to correctly distinguish between real consequences and imaginary/paranoid ones.

Believers, watch out, here comes that chainsaw again!

So the atheist seeks to live by the dominant morality whenever it is convenient for him, and there are even those who, despite their faithlessness, do a better job of living by the tenets of religion than those who actually subscribe to them. But even the most admirable of atheists is nothing more than a moral parasite, living his life based on borrowed ethics.

Ooo, nasty cut there. Vox was aiming at the atheists, but unfortunately he missed. Morality comes from one of two places: either it comes from secular consequences (valid morality) or it comes from superstitions (invalid morality). When believers excuse genocide on the grounds that God wants certain ethnic groups wiped out, that’s superstition, invalid morality. When believers want to mutilate their babies’ genitals because they think God will like their babies better after they’ve lost certain parts of their body, that’s superstition, invalid morality. The valid morality happens when believers borrow the atheists’ secular consequences as the basis for judging right and wrong. I wouldn’t use the term “moral parasite” myself, but if Vox wants to chuck that chainsaw at the people who are borrowing someone else’s basis of morality, believers ought to be the ones to duck. Especially since, as Vox admits, unbelievers can and do live morally better lives than believers in some cases.

It’s really a very poorly-thought-out argument, and a rather silly attempt to make atheists look bad, but Vox can sink lower, and does so by citing two atheists, Dawkins and Hitchens, as proof that atheism is “childish” because the two became atheists when they were nine years old. I kid you not, he really tries to argue that:

Hitchens and Dawkins became atheists after long and exhaustive rational inquiries into the existence of God, both at the age of nine. The idea that there is any rational basis for atheism is further damaged due to the way in which so many atheists become atheists during adolescence, an age which combines a tendency towards mindless rebellion as well as the onset of sexual desires which collide with religious strictures on their satisfaction.

With this in mind, it’s interesting to note that intelligent men of intellectual repute such as Francis Collins and Anthony Flew should have rejected atheism at the tender ages of twenty-seven and eighty-one, respectively. Atheism is not only irrational, it is quite literally childish in many instances.

So based on the ages of a sample population of four individuals who were specifically chosen to serve as examples of atheists being young and believers being older, Vox uses his own unique brand of statistical analysis to conclude that atheism is both irrational and childish. And just in case there was even a shred of credibility left in his little screed, he tops it off with a footnote which reads, “Is there any doubt that most college-age atheists would have no problem believing in a God who permitted them to get laid at will? This is why even the most idiotic forms of paganism compete so favorably with atheism.” Yes, he’s really suggesting that college-age atheists are all secret worshipers of Aphrodite, Venus, and their sisters.

I dunno, clearly atheism is the intended target here, but it looks to me like most of the blood on that chainsaw is Vox’s own, this time. Fear not, though, the chainsaws reign of errorterror is not over yet. Next on the hit list: all mankind.

But the ultimate atheist irrationality is the idea that Man himself is rational. Despite the fact that many of our behavioral sciences are founded on this principle, including the dismal science so dear to me, almost all of the observable evidence, scientific and casual, forces one to conclude otherwise. Consider how the way in which the educated Western voting class manages to combine total ignorance with fundamental misconceptions to achieve a higher state of irrational consciousness that is breathtaking in its delusionary confidence, the miracle of aggregation notwithstanding.

Vox, being human himself, would no doubt cheerfully agree that his own writings give us a fair sample of “a higher state of irrational consciousness that is breathtaking in its delusionary confidence,” given his misconceptions and ignorance about such topics as the secular basis for morality, etc. Nevertheless, he’s committing a fallacy here by arguing that, because people sometimes behave irrationally, therefore Man is never capable of being rational. It’s the old false dichotomy: either Man is 100% rational 100% of the time, or Man is not capable of rationality, and therefore atheists are irrational when they think that it’s even possible for anyone (e.g. themselves) to be rational.

Predicated on an unreliable human attribute that may not even exist, rejecting the foundation of Man’s most successful civilization, trusting a notoriously quixotic institution for a miracle as a means of replacing that foundation and refusing to learn from its past disasters, atheism is not so much the basis for an irrational philosophy as for an insane one. Attempting to build a society on reason is like waging a war on terror; the effort is doomed to failure because it’s a category error.

So let’s all just reject reason, and build our society on a solid foundation of irrationality! Hooray! Thinking was hard anyway.

Let’s see, so far the chainsaw has chopped down fundamentalists, believers with morals, Vox himself, all mankind, and Western civilization. What else can he hack? Maybe take another whack at himself? He prides himself on his expertise in history, so it’s kind of fun to watch him take a swipe at the alleged hypocrisy of ancient unbelievers, especially after having identified some obscure 18th century author as “History’s first confirmed atheist.”

This irrational, if pragmatic, compromise between a public nod to morality and its private dismissal is an ancient one. When Socrates taught his students that knowledge is the only good and ignorance the only evil more than 2,000 years ago, he was fully aware of the potentially dangerous repercussions of this teaching and argued in The Republic that it was necessary to keep such virtuous knowledge to the ruling elite. The knowledge of the nonexistence of morality was the great secret to which only the rulers were to be privy and the justification for keeping their subjects in ignorance for their own good, lest the herd break out into rebellion.

The ever-practical Romans understood this too. Seneca the Younger described religion as being regarded as true by the common folk, false by the wise, and useful by the rulers. But as an aristocrat in a cruel and brutal culture, he may have understated religion’s importance to social stability, because it is more than useful for the peaceful maintenance of a civilized society, it is a downright necessity.

I dunno, saying that “religion is…false to the wise” sounds pretty atheistic to me. Not sure what Jean Meslier could have said in the 1700′s to “confirm” his atheism any more clearly, especially since Vox seems to want to accuse Seneca and Socrates of having that same lack of moral foundation that he attributes to atheism.

Anyway, we’re done. As I said, a longish section, and yet for all the sound and fury, still no substance. It was a waste of Vox’s time to have written it, and a waste of any else’s time to read it.

There are many atheists who live lives that are morally exemplary according to religious standards. This causes some atheists to claim that this exemplary behavior is evidence of atheist moral superiority, because the atheist is behaving in a moral manner of his own volition, not due to any fear of being eternally damned or zapped by a lightning bolt hurled by an offended sky deity. However, this is a logical error, because while motivation plays a role in how we judge immoral actions, there are no similar gradations of that which is morally correct. There are many evils, there is only one Good.

Only one Good? Is this perhaps a reflection of Jesus’ remarks that only God is good? No, it’s not even that sophisticated. There is only one Good because Vox needs an excuse to deny the existence of the Better, and thus make it impossible, by definition, for atheists to be better than believers.

We see this in the shallowness of Vox’s defense of his “only one Good” claim.

For example, the act of stealing a loaf of bread is considered more immoral if the theft was committed by a rich thief who simply didn’t feel like paying for it than if the bread was stolen by a poor man who needed to feed his two hungry children. But the act of driving an injured person to the hospital is no more right when performed by a good Samaritan who just happened to be passing by than by a paramedic team who will be financially compensated for their actions. We may find the one more admirable, being less expected, but it cannot be more morally correct because that would imply that there was some degree of moral incorrectness to a correct action.

A couple seconds’ worth of reflection would suffice to show that, if one action cannot be morally superior to another, then neither can it be inferior, otherwise whatever it was inferior to would be superior. Thus, according to Vox’s argument, Jesus was mistaken when He said that the “widow’s mite,” given out of poverty, was better than the rich donations the Pharisees gave out of their wealth.

What Vox is trying to do here is to pull a fast bait-and-switch. Though he claims to be addressing an “argument from moral superiority,” his rebuttal hinges on substituting “moral correctness” in place of “moral superiority.” This would seem to be an ingenious, if deceptive strategy. After all, if you get the correct answer, you can’t have some other answer that is more correct, can you?

Alas, this is simply not the case. There are many situations where more than one “correct” answer is possible, some answers being better than others. If you see a hungry, homeless man, for example, and he asks you for money, is it correct to give him some cash, or to take him to McDonalds for a free meal, or to secure some training and/or medical help that will equip him to provide for his own needs, or to launch a program that will provide food, housing, rehabilitation, and job placement services for a large number of homeless people?

Contrary to what Vox claims, there’s nothing really incorrect about giving food to a hungry man, even though it’s better if you can take steps that will provide a long term solution to his hunger and homelessness. The person who grudgingly gives to the poor because he doesn’t want people to call him stingy is doing the morally correct thing, but it’s better if he gives willingly, out of genuine compassion for his fellow man. One action can be more morally correct than another, by encompassing a greater context, both in terms of the motivations for the action, and in terms of the scope of the “blessings” that result.

In other words, there are lots of things that we can do to make life better for ourselves and those around us, and there’s no harm or moral stigma if it turns out that not all of those things are the Ultimate Best Perfect Morally Correct Solution. One good deed can be inferior to another simply by undertaking less, without necessarily being an evil deed. Even just minding our own business is a morally correct choice in a lot of situations, though there is usually a morally superior alternative to mere passive non-harm.

Vox, however, makes it clear in the closing lines of his argument that all he’s really after is some way to deny, in the face of incontrovertible evidence, the validity and cogency of the argument from moral superiority.

An atheist can certainly behave better than a theist by the theist’s own moral reckoning. But it is logically incorrect to insist that identical moral behavior on the part of an atheist and a theist is proof of the atheist’s moral superiority.

That’s what Vox would like to accomplish by his pseudo-syllogistic legerdemain, but in fact he’s contradicting both common sense and the teachings of Jesus. A person who behaves in a superficially moral manner just because he fears punishment is morally inferior to the person who voluntarily embraces and advances moral behavior because good is intrinsically better than evil. In the latter case, morality is a reflection of the atheist’s own good nature; in the former case, the virtue does not spring from the heart of the person, but is forcibly imposed from without. There may be goodness in the heart of the person doing the compelling, but the one under compulsion has no right to claim that virtue to his own credit.

And Vox can’t deny it. For all the fluff and bluster about how godliness is supposed to be the source of virtue, study after study finds that non-Christians are not the moral reprobates that Christian haranguing would have us believe. They’re not just good, they’re good without having to be coerced by some superstitious fear of endless torment. Only people who deny the existence of Hell can make a comparable claim to loving goodness entirely untainted by some fear of ultimate punishment. (But without Hell, what need is there for a Savior to save us from it?)

Backed into a corner, Vox cannot think up a better rebuttal than to try and deny the possibility of one thing being better than another. It’s a silly argument, and all the more so in that it “proves” just as easily that God cannot be morally superior to an atheist. But we already knew that atheists were superior, because you can actually see atheists showing up and helping in tangible and meaningful ways. And that’s more good than the Christian God is willing and able to do.

For example, in referring to last Tuesday’s TIA post, “Mike T” writes:

It is a very weak argument, that fails to even understand the point that Vox was making that the Golden Rule is simply not a moral statement at all because it provides no inherent, objective guidance on what we should do. If a psychopath or a sociopath were to follow the golden rule as the foundation of their moral code, it could lead to some extremely *ahem* “interesting” situations. Hence why Vox said that the Golden Rule only makes sense as a means of applying a pre-existing, objective moral system to your actions.

Mind you, Vox didn’t actually say that the Golden Rule makes sense as a means of applying a pre-existing, objective moral system (at least not in Chapter 14 of TIA), but he did say that it was not a perfect basis for determining morality, and I did agree that “Yes, the Golden Rule is not a perfect and infallible guide to morality.” But if agreeing with Vox makes my argument weaker, then perhaps I ought to revisit the topic.

There’s a lot more I could say about the Golden Rule, of course. In my original post, I wanted to focus more on the fact that Vox was using a shallow, 1-dimensional strawman to distract attention from the argument atheists actually use, which is that Biblical morality often falls short of what one would expect from a divinely inspired and supremely good revelation. But if we just want to look at the Golden Rule, there’s lots more we could say.

For instance, while it’s true that you can think up fringe cases (e.g. psychopaths) where the Golden Rule could be abused, it’s still a good moral guide in the vast majority of cases. Jesus did, after all, preach it as a guiding principle, so you’d think Christians would acknowledge that it has some utility in that particular domain. Even in the cases where it can be abused, it’s not as though any other moral system would do better—a psychopath is going to remain psychopathic no matter how many times you read Exodus 20 at him.

Mike T is wrong, of course, about the Golden Rule not providing any kind of practical guidance on what we should do. If you’re considering whether or not to punch someone in the face, ask yourself, “Would I want to BE punched in the face?” If you can answer that question, then you can receive moral guidance from the Golden Rule. Even if all the Golden Rule does is to restrain you from inflicting suffering on others (because you would not want suffering inflicted on yourself), it has served a tremendously practical and specific moral purpose.

In fact, it is revelation-based morality, and not the Golden Rule, that fails to give us reliable guidance as to right and wrong behavior. If right and wrong are determined solely by divine decree, if a thing is good solely because God permits or demands it, and if we assume that God is sometimes willing and able to speak to human hearts, then there is no behavior that is not potentially good so long as it is arguably the will of God. If someone murders someone else, and God spoke to his heart and told him to do it, revelation-based morality gives us no basis for calling his behavior “evil.” We have no way to disprove the claim that God revealed, to that one person, that murder was His will.

Nor can we claim that we know God would never reveal that murder was His will. Even without all the Biblical examples of cases where God did command people to kill each other, if right and wrong are defined solely by what God has revealed, then we can’t assume that murder (or torture or stealing or lying) would be so wrong in and of themselves that God would be wrong to want them. If you assume that there’s a higher standard to which even God’s behavior and desires are accountable, you are making moral judgments about God’s revelations based on a secular, objective moral standard. That means that God’s revelations are not the source of moral standards, since God’s ability to dictate moral decrees is itself subject to a higher, secular standard of morality. But if that’s the case, then it’s the secular standard of morality, and not divine revelation, that is really determining what is right and what is wrong.

There are also some very practical reasons why revelation-based morality actually makes it more difficult to tell right from wrong. An ethicist who defined morality in terms of what God allegedly revealed in the Old and New Testaments would have a harder time explaining why it is wrong to practice genocide, to deny a man his own wife and children, to sell your daughter into sexual slavery, to mutilate babies’ genitals, to put someone to death for the “crime” of working on Saturday, and so on.

By condoning and even commanding such actions, the Bible leaves the revelation-based moralist without any means of declaring that such things are intrinsically wrong, and forces him (or her) to declare that they are only wrong relatively and situationally. There is no objective standard of right or wrong behavior, because the behaviors themselves are neither right nor wrong. They only become right or wrong relative to God’s inscrutable and unpredictable will for a particular time, place, and situation. And since “God works in mysterious ways,” and “His thoughts are not our thoughts,” we can’t really predict what will or will not be God’s perfect will for any given situation. Unless, of course, we’ve got an objective, secular moral standard which rules over the moral decrees God Himself is allowed to make.

So I hope it’s more clear by now that I do not agree with Vox Day’s attempt to portray revelation-based morality as being somehow superior to the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule does not need the Bible to guide people into correct moral behavior (much of which consists of minding one’s own business and not inflicting suffering on others). And, sadly, the Bible does not show much evidence of relying too heavily on the Golden Rule (despite Jesus’ endorsement of it). The Israelites, for example, probably would not want to be wiped out by the Amalekites, so that fact alone ought to have guided them in considering whether or not the prophet Samuel was really telling them to do things that a genuinely moral deity would have endorsed.

There, I’ve contradicted Vox. Is my argument stronger now?

It is often asserted that Christian morality is no different than other ethical systems that are based on the Golden Rule. And it is true that one can find pre-Christian examples of the same concept in the Analects of Confucius, in the Mahabharata, the Dhammapada, the Udanavarga, and even the histories of Herodotus. Still, there are two errors in this argument because Christian morality is not based on the Golden Rule, and because the Golden Rule, which states that a man should not do to others what he would not have them do to him, cannot provide a basis for a functional moral system.

Vox is partly right: Jesus didn’t base his religion on the Golden Rule, and more’s the pity because it would have produced a better moral system if he had. But the standard atheistic argument is more an observation that the best parts of Christianity, the parts worth keeping, are not original with Jesus, but were absorbed into Judaism and Christianity from the moral systems of the surrounding cultures. Vox, once again, is merely fencing with a straw man.

Vox pursues his point that Christianity is not based on the Golden Rule by making an argument that badly confuses ethics with theology.

Jesus Christ’s version of the Golden Rule… is practical advice given in the context of a general admonishment and it cannot possibly be the essence of Christian morality, for in the very same chapter, Jesus informs his listeners that “only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven” will enter that kingdom.

Vox is confused here on two counts. First of all, he confuses the moral question (“How do I know what is right and what is wrong?”) with the soteriological question (“How do I get into heaven?”). He also seems to be confused about God’s will, which he apparently regards as being something incompatible with the Golden Rule. But why would Jesus want us to obey the Golden Rule if it were not going to get us into heaven? A more thoughtful theologian would be less likely to perceive Vox’s alleged conflict between obeying God and obeying the Golden Rule.

Vox goes on to give us what he calls “the true foundation of Christian morality, …in Matthew 22:37:

“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

This time Vox is on more solid ground. Yes, the reference to “Love your neighbor as yourself” is a fair rewording of the Golden Rule, but that’s not Rule One. Rule One is to devote yourself completely to God, which in practice means unquestioning obedience to whatever the priests and prophets tell you God’s will is, whether it’s selling your daughter into sexual slavery or beating your slaves or taking genocide to the point of killing every man, woman, child, babe, and beast. This takes precedence over the Golden Rule in Jesus’ eyes, and it’s a shame he had to tarnish an otherwise good moral system with such primitive and barbaric superstitions.

Vox objects to the Golden Rule on the grounds that it’s not perfect. “Obviously, a moral system based on loving the Lord your God and obediently submitting your will to His is a very different moral system and a far more objective one than the Golden Rule, which is not only entirely subjective, but incapable of accounting for either rational calculation or human psychopathy,” he says, apparently oblivious to the ease with which “the will of God” has been construed to mean “Gott mit Uns,” which is German for “we’re right no matter what we do.” Or words to that effect.

In fact, obeying God’s will is not merely difficult, but impossible, since God does not show up in real life to tell us what that will might be. Instead, we are forced to rely on what men say God’s will is—and no, it does not help that some other men have gotten together and voted to declare certain of their brethren to be infallible and inspired prophets and apostles. The leadership and teaching of an infallible and perfect deity might indeed provide us with a superior moral system, if we had real-world access to such a deity. But we don’t, and in His absence men have found it far too easy to their own desires into the words of Holy Writ.

Going back to the original atheistic argument (the actual argument, not Vox’s peculiar straw man), there is very little in Jesus’ personal moral system that is unique to Christianity, as opposed to being a continuation of moral principles that previously existed in various pagan and/or pre-Christian cultures. In fact, Jesus’ only true innovation might be the idea that we should love our enemies and do good to those that hate us. But seriously, is that really such a good idea?

Let’s suppose our Christian president decided to follow Jesus’ only original precept, and respond to 9/11 not by invading other countries, but by sending gifts and financial aid to Osama bin Ladin. Do you suppose Jesus’ moral principles would make the world a better place, if consistently put into actual practice? When you think about it, Jesus’ unique moral innovation isn’t really such a good idea in real life. Yet most of his other admirable moral teachings concern practices that were already old when Abraham was a kindergartner.

The moral history argument is still valid, despite Vox’s attempt to distract attention from it with a bogus straw man about the Golden Rule. Yes, the Golden Rule is not a perfect and infallible guide to morality (but then again, neither is the Bible and its questionable endorsements of slavery, genocide, and having sex with your brother’s widow). But the real point, the point Vox avoids mentioning let alone addressing, is that the Judeo-Christian tradition appears after most of the moral principles it seeks credit for inventing. And if it strikes you as ironic that someone would lie in order to defend morality, then you’ve probably got a pretty good handle on why atheists shake their heads at the moral bluster of Christians like Vox.

This is another superficial argument popular with Low Church atheists, although it pops up from time to time among the more militant High Church breed. It states that even if God exists, the morality He dictates is so abhorrent to the atheist and inferior to the atheist’s own moral sensibilities that the atheist cannot believe in Him. And in the unlikely event that the atheist is ever confronted by God, he will refuse to acknowledge His divine status let alone His right to rule over Mankind.

One is tempted to think that Vox expects most thoughtful and rational readers to have abandoned his book before now, leaving him free to say whatever he likes without worrying too much about whether or not he can get away with it. Surely by this point only his fans are still tuned in, and they’re not going to worry too much about whether he’s really addressing substantial arguments against God or merely breaking rhetorical wind, so long as he talks like he’s refuting the Bad Guys.

But we’re still here, Vox.

Vox’s “argument from God’s character” sounds vaguely like a combination of the argument from the inconsistencies in what men say about God’s character, coupled with a non-propositional reaction to the absurdity and incoherence of the pictures men paint of their God(s). The latter isn’t even an argument at all, of course, since it’s merely an expression of how one might react to the conclusions Vox is drawing. Yet it is the latter notion that is the focus of Vox’s “rebuttal.”

I find it very difficult to take this argument seriously, given how the first words out of every angel’s mouth seems to be “Fear not!” I am as arrogant as anyone (and more than most, I’m told), but on the day when I meet my Maker, the Creator Lord of the Universe, I fully intend to set new speed records in performing a full proskynesis complete with averted eyes. It’s not so much the Biblical confidence that “every knee shall bow” that makes me skeptical about this theoretical atheist machismo in the face of the Almighty, it’s the part about how even the demons believe . . . and tremble. I don’t know what it takes to make a powerful fallen angel shake with terror just thinking about it, but I have a feeling that neither Richard Dawkins nor Bertrand Russell will be wagging their fingers at God and criticizing Him for insufficient evidence on the day their disbelief is conclusively destroyed.

Yeah, I don’t expect Dawkins or Russell or anyone else to be wagging their fingers at anyone on some future Final Judgment Day either, though not for the same reasons as Vox. Vox apparently wants to make the belligerent version of Pascal’s Wager—the threat that “God’s gonna gitcha because you dared to disagree with what I believe about Him!” Only it’s a hollow threat, because Vox is only sharing the things that people have told him and that he gullibly believes just on their say-so. There’s no real-world basis for concluding that God is too darn scary to be opposed, there’s only the stories that Vox heard from the Christians, who heard it from the Pharisees, who heard it from the Persians, who heard it from Zoroaster, who made it up so that people would be afraid to doubt him.

Vox does almost seem to recognize that he’s beating up a non-argument, though of course he tries to make it look like he’s actually accomplished something significant with this little charade.

The argument is totally specious from the logical perspective, of course, because the fact of God’s existence no more depends on the quality of His character than does Charles Manson’s. Things exist or don’t exist regardless of whether we wish them to be or not.

And that, in a nutshell, is Vox’s big problem. Regardless of whether or not he wishes God were true, God does not actually show up in real life, which means Vox has no real-world source for his information. He has only the stories men tell about God, and the superstitions and subjective feelings of believers, and the speculative sophistries of theologians, as the foundation for his faith—and those stories, superstitions, subjective feelings and speculations all say inconsistent and mutually-contradictory things about God and about His character.

We can’t tell what’s real and what’s not just on the basis of what we do and do not wish to be real, yet that’s all Vox has to go on: he wishes God were real, he thinks God ought to be real, therefore God is real. But the infallible and objective standard of truth is that truth is consistent with itself. The Gospel stories about God fail to meet that standard, and therefore, no matter what anyone may wish or not wish, the Gospel is not true and God does not exist, at least as Christians envision Him.

We’ve got room for another blunted link on the Chainsaw, so let’s look at the “Argument from Moral Evolution.”

The idea that morals are not defined by sacred texts but have instead evolved naturally is the subject of much pseudo-scientific speculation and a few books, such as Marc Hauser’s Moral Minds, have been written about it. Christopher Hitchens is the foremost advocate of this idea among the New Atheists. While they admit that morality exists, they argue that it has evolved naturally through a material process, therefore it cannot have been acquired through divine revelation.

Apparently, Vox believes that morality is younger than writing, since illiterate people can’t derive their morality from sacred books they are unable to read. Pity those poor savages, having their food stolen, being beaten, sometimes having family killed, and sitting around wondering, “Hmm, I wonder if that was a good thing or a bad thing? I don’t have any Bible to tell me right from wrong, so there’s no way I can tell whether pain and loss and suffering are better or worse than strength and health and satisfaction. Gosh, I sure hope we learn to read and write soon!”

Vox’s rebuttal to the idea of moral evolution is to play stupid, and pretend to believe that the only way morals could “evolve” is biochemically.

There are a number of problems with the idea of moral evolution if we pretend that it is not a metaphor but literal evolution. First, if the mechanism of evolution takes place at the gene level, it is very difficult to understand how one moral would mutate and replicate itself genetically. Second, it is easy to observe that the pace of moral transformation is rapidly accelerating. Less than forty years ago, homosexuality was universally considered an immoral action. Today, there is a substantial minority in the West that insists that belief in either the immorality or the psychological abnormality of homosexuality is itself immoral, a rapid notional transformation that is consistent with neither past moral transformations nor biological evolution. Furthermore, moral evolution depends upon the group selection aspect of evolutionary theory that has largely fallen into disfavor among modern evolutionary biologists.

Either mankind should expect to start sprouting wings within the next century, or the process of human moral development cannot be reasonably described as evolution.

As California’s Proposition 8 sadly showed, morals are not evolving quite as fast as Vox would suggest. In fact, taken in the light of gay history as a whole, it would seem that Californian morals were rather regressing more than advancing. It’s true we’ve at least progressed beyond the point of outright stoning gays, as was the “morality” advanced by the Old Testament. But we’ve still got quite a ways to go before people can relax their homophobic prejudices enough to refrain from punishing people for simply being what they are.

Be that as it may, Vox either does not understand what moral evolution is, or he’s just playing dumb so as to have an excuse to give a flippant dismissal to a very serious problem: The Bible, as a source for “divinely-inspired” morality, has some pretty immoral things in it—things that were supposedly revealed to man by God Himself.

Take ritual mutilation of the genitals of baby boys, for instance. Or animal sacrifice. Or stoning people for working on Saturday, blaspheming, or disobeying their parents. Ok, we still practice the genital mutilation, but a lot of those things we’ve more or less outgrown, culturally. How is it that our morals are better than some of the morals in the Bible, if the Bible is supposed to be the authoritative source for morality?

The answer is that the Biblical writers (and more importantly, the Biblical writings) were the products of their times. That’s a big problem for the inspiration of the Scripture, because if we can discover that the Bible has outdated and inferior moral information, why should we assume that any other information is necessarily true and up-to-date, especially in the face of verifiable evidence to the contrary? Why should we take the Bible’s word for it that God created the world in six days when we manifestly cannot take the Bible’s word for it that slavery and genocide are A-ok with God?

It’s no wonder Vox would rather play dumb than confront this problem squarely. Moral authority is supposed to be the Bible’s strong point, and if we admit that Biblical morality is unexpectedly obsolete, it casts doubt on all the rest as well. And it does no good to say that the bad stuff is all in the Old Testament, because Jesus stated quite clearly that he regarded the OT Scriptures as being genuinely inspired, authoritative, and perfect. That means Jesus was no more morally advanced than the OT writers were, and didn’t point out any moral flaws in the Law of Moses because he couldn’t discern any. We, today, are morally more advanced than Jesus, and how can that be if Jesus were God the Son?

Maybe that’s why believers today feel a twinge of nostalgia for the “good old days” when you could really punish people for disagreeing with your religion. Maybe Proposition 8 was an expression of dissatisfaction with modern moral advances, and a desire to go back to a more primitive system based on “might makes right” and “different is evil.”

Let’s hope it was just a temporary setback, but let’s also work twice as hard to improve our culture’s morals. Unlike biological evolution, moral evolution takes hard work by men and women of conscience. But it benefits everybody in the long run. Even nostalgic people with rusty chainsaws.

A popular Christian claim is that God is the source of all morality. In other words, things like shooting rampages are not wrong in and of themselves, they’re only wrong because God forbids them. Or, as Vox Day puts it, “God’s game, God’s rules.” There’s no power greater than God that can force some external moral standard on the Almighty, therefore God is free to define morality however He sees fit. Who is to say, then, that God cannot make a special set of rules, for this one deranged shooter, that commands him to go on a shooting spree and kill people? Sure, he’s insane, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s not telling the truth about God. So how do we know?

Someone might say, “Of course he’s lying; God would never order anyone to commit wholesale murder.” But how do we know that? If murder is not wrong in and of itself, what’s to prevent God from defining mass murder as morally good in this specific case? It wouldn’t be the first time, right?

“But,” someone will object, “we know that murder is wrong because it says so in the Ten Commandments.” That’s true as far as it goes, but there’s all kinds of loopholes. Obviously so, otherwise all divinely-ordained killings would be morally wrong, and there’s plenty of them in the Bible. Besides, if it’s “God’s game, God’s rules,” then He’s obviously free to define whatever exceptions and special cases He likes. So long as murder is not wrong in and of itself, so long as God is the sole source for moral authority, then we have no guarantee that He could not and did not order the Washington shooting spree just like He allegedly ordered killings in the Old Testament.

“But,” someone might say, “you’re making a false assumption. Murder is wrong, in and of itself, because it kills innocent people.” I think we can agree that it’s a false assumption, but it’s not our assumption. Christians, and particularly Christian supremacists like James Dobson and Roy Moore, are the ones pushing the idea that all morality comes from God. If there’s a secular basis for morality, if we can examine murder itself and determine that it is wrong because of the consequences it produces, then those Christians are wrong, and we can discover a valid, objective, universal moral code without needing some divine Lawgiver to define it for us.

There’s a compromise position: I once heard an apologist on Christian talk radio who argued that, yes, God is the source of moral authority, but it’s not arbitrary because it springs from God’s nature. That way God does not have the freedom to arbitrarily define murder as “good,” but at the same time He’s still the source for universal morality. Whatever is consistent with God’s nature is “good” and whatever is contrary to God’s nature is “bad.”

There are a number of problems with this approach, however. When God allegedly ordered the slaughter of the Amalekites, was He being consistent with His own nature, or was He sinning? The OT killings make it difficult to maintain that God’s unchanging nature is the source for eternal moral standards, especially regarding killing, slavery, and a multitude of lesser sins that somehow don’t seem to apply today. And if “good” is defined relative to God’s inherent nature, over which He has no control, it becomes essentially meaningless to call God “good,” since all you’re really saying is that God behaves in a certain way because that’s how God behaves. It’s not good or bad per se, it’s just how God is.

And why should our morality be judged by whether or not our behavior is consistent with God’s nature? God’s “good” behavior is automatic, not a matter of willful choice, so why should we be guilty of immorality if our behavior springs just as spontaneously from our own nature?

There are more problems with this position, but the above is a fair sample. It’s a clever answer, but even this approach can’t quite pull off the kind of self-consistency we ought to be finding in a real-world truth. And even if it could, it clearly has to be consistent with God’s will (and thus God’s nature) for people to die, sometimes violently and senselessly. If, by hastening their deaths, God ushers them into a new and endless life of bliss and blessing, free from the toils and suffering of mortal existence, is that really so contrary to His benevolent and loving nature?

We come back, thus, to the original question: how do we know the insane shooter is not telling the truth when he claims to kill for God? God does not show up in real life to give us an objective standard against which to compare the shooter’s testimony, nor does the Bible support the contention that God never orders His servants to kill. And if believers claim to have some sort of immaterial, inner witness, some kind of direct, spiritual connection with God, such that they alone can hear what God is telling them, then how can we know the shooter didn’t have the same connection, and that God didn’t use that channel to send out a command to kill?

There’s only one answer: we know God would not murder because we would not murder, and God’s morality is just a projection of our own. We declare that our own moral standards come from God just because we want to lend God’s authority to our own moral opinions, not only for obvious cases like murder, but for more controversial cases as well, like equal rights for gays. But in practice, using God as the source of moral authority doesn’t work, because He does not show up in real life to exercise that authority, and because His own track record, as recorded in the OT, is somewhat murky. We start with what morality is (at least in our own eyes), and then ascribe that morality to God. And not the other way around.

Theists have a perfectly logical and objective basis for the application of their god-based moralities that even the most die-hard rational atheist cannot reject, given the theistic postulate that God actually exists and created the universe. In short, God’s game, God’s rules. If you’re in the game, then the rules apply to you regardless of what you think of the game designer, your opinion about certain aspects of the rulebook, or the state of your relationship with the zebras.

Vox’s goal is to show that his idea of morality has a solid foundation, and Daniel Dennett’s doesn’t. But not only is Dennett’s system far stronger than Vox seems to realize, the “God’s Game, God’s Rules” morality he espouses has so many flaws that it’s hard to know where to start.

But start we shall. To begin with, “God’s Game, God’s Rules” (or GGGR, from now on) is a system that makes morality entirely arbitrary. What is morally good? Whatever the rules say is morally good. If the rules say, “Mutilate your baby’s genitals,” then genital mutilation is a good thing. If the rules say you lose points for wearing green on St. Patrick’s Day, then wearing green is a bad thing. If you get chilled on a Saturday, and light a fire to warm up a little, and the rules say you deserve to die for breaking the Sabbath, then you deserve to die. Nothing—not genocide, not torture, not rape, not terrorism—is wrong in and of itself. It’s only wrong if the rules say it’s wrong. Which they don’t have to do, because morality is arbitrary–God’s game, God’s rules. If the rules tell you to rape puppies, then that’s what you gotta do. Our own intuitive sense of morality has nothing to do with it.

Second, GGGR is virtually useless in a world where God does not show up in real life to tell us what the rules are. If it’s God’s game and God’s rules, then none of us have any basis for saying that it would be wrong for God to publish one set of rules for the general public, while privately applying a different set of rules on a case-by-case basis. If a pregnant girl knows in her heart that God is ok with her having an abortion, who are we to forbid it? You can quote bible verses to her if you like, but if God has given His blessing to the abortion, who are you to tell Him He can’t do that? If God wants to publicly forbid homosexuality, but privately assure homosexuals that they’re an exception because He made them that way, who are you to say it’s wrong for God to make exceptions to His own rules, and to convey them privately to the homosexuals?

Third, GGGR tells us nothing about what those rules are. Since they’re arbitrary to begin with, we cannot deduce them, and even if someone stands up and claims that God told him what they were, we have no way to evaluate what he says, to see if he got the rules right or not. Even if he did get them right, nothing says God can’t make exceptions, or make changes, or have different sets of rules for different people and/or circumstances. And even if God gives us a list of rules, it’s not always clear how the rules are to be applied in various situations (hence Jesus’ frequent accusation that the Pharisees were obeying the Law of Moses in a way that was spiritually wrong despite being technically correct).

GGGR is not a valid moral system or even a valid foundation for a moral system. GGGR is simply a ploy for claiming that one’s own moral system is “God’s Rules,” and therefore must be applied to non-believers whether they want to accept it or not. It’s a justification for Christian supremacy, as well as being an excuse for why so many of God’s “moral” rules turn out to be actually immoral (like mutilating genitals, or selling daughters into slavery, or wiping out entire ethnic groups like the Amalekites). It might sound good to Vox, but real life is not a video game, and real-world morality is more than just a pre-programmed set of rules.

In the real world, morality is an imperfect system based on our fallible (but usually reliable) ability to anticipate the consequences of our actions. Even in a theology-soaked morality like GGGR, the ultimate standard of right and wrong is based on our expectation of consequences: if you play the game by God’s rules, you win, and if you break the rules, or oppose them, you lose. So the moral is, if you want the good consequences (i.e. winning), you will play by the rules. The morality of your actions is defined relative to the consequences your actions will return to you.

Vox does not seem to grasp this point, insisting instead that there is no secular basis for moral authority.

Atheists, on the other hand, enjoy no similar logical basis, no objective foundation or universal warrant, which leaves every individual playing his own game and making up his own rules as he goes along. So Dennett finds himself caught in the seemingly senseless act of lauding atheists for behaving in a moral manner according to a morality that he considers groundless and in need of democratic modification.

Dennett’s morality, however, is not groundless—it has the same foundation as every other moral system. It’s perfectly legitimate to praise atheists for behavior that has positive consequences for themselves and those around them; no omnipotent deity is needed to decree that the desirable consequences are more desirable than the undesirable ones. Whether or not you write everything out in terms of a formal list of Shalt’s and Shall Not’s, the connection between morality and consequence is always there, and provides the foundation for all moral judgments.

Vox has a tendency to fall into the All or Nothing Fallacy: you don’t have any answers unless and until you have all the answers.

And yet, not only do we know these reason-based moralities don’t exist, we are informed by an unimpeachable source that it is ‘‘quite obvious’’ that they do not exist and have never existed:

“I do not intend this to be a shocking indictment, just a reminder of something quite obvious: no remotely compelling system of ethics has ever been made computationally tractable, even indirectly, for real world moral problems. So, even though there has been no dearth of utilitarian (and Kantian, and contrarian, etc.) arguments in favor of particular policies, institutions, practices, and acts, these have all been heavily hedged with ceteris paribus clauses and plausibility claims about their idealizing assumptions.”

The latter quote is from Dennett himself, and Vox uses it to try and say that Dennett is denying the possibility that anyone could derive a moral system based on reason. That’s not at all what Dennett is saying, however. Dennett is saying that you can’t reduce morality to a programmable set of rules that can be mechanistically applied to arbitrary real-world situations (which is why GGGR can’t work, by the way). There are exceptions to every rule, including moral rules–circumstances in which the the consequences of rigidly and legalistically applying the “moral” rule would actually be more detrimental than the consequences of breaking the rule. Hence, no system—not even “divinely ordained” systems—have proven to be foolproof guides to morality, in practice.

Just because it’s not possible to draw up a list of rules that covers all situations, however, doesn’t mean we don’t have secular moral principles to guide us in many situations. Dennett is far from “fall[ing] into the very trap he previously had described so eloquently.” On the contrary, Dennett’s observation, which Vox found no problems with, is an observation that blows away the “God’s game, God’s rules” idea, because what Dennett is showing is that no system of rules (i.e. of Shalt’s and Shalt Not’s) is going to be workable in real life ethical problems. You can’t reduce real-world morality to a list of IF/THEN/ELSE statements, which means the rule set that God would supposedly have defined is a non-existent set.

The closest we can come to a workable system is to realize that all of our moral principles are based on how we feel about the consequences that are likely to result. This works well in cases where one alternative leads to consequences that are noticeably better or worse than another, but it becomes problematic when the expected consequences are all bad, or are unknown. And yet, any system that is not based on the consequences is bound to be an arbitrary system, like GGGR. You can arbitrarily pick one undesireable outcome over another, and say that one is “good” and the other is “bad,” but really they’re both bad, and you’re just making choices for which there is no solid basis for moral certainty.

And that’s the end of Vox’s discussion of Dennett. Dennett seems to have done remarkably well, especially at the end, where Vox’s moral argument falls flat due to his failure to understand Dennett’s point in anything more than a video game sense. No moral system can be perfect, because morality is a choice between outcomes, and there’s no guarantee that every choice is necessarily going to offer us an option that is unambiguously “correct.” We do the best we can with what we’ve got. But ultimately, Reality itself dictates what’s right and what’s wrong, by the consequences our decisions entail. The sooner we abandon our superstitious and arbitrary lists of “God’s rules,” and deal directly with the true source of morality, the better off we’ll be.

Recommended Reading.

It has been established that Christians give three times more to charity and are less criminal than the broad spectrum of atheists; experiments at the Economic Science Laboratory suggest that this might be because they believe that their actions are known to God. In variations on an envelope experiment designed to test random charity on the part of a subject who was given ten dollars as well as the opportunity to share it anonymously, the knowledge that the experimenter was watching increased the subject’s likelihood of giving by 142 percent and the amount given by 146 percent.

We’ve looked at Vox’s statistics before, and it’s no surprise that he brings up the same spurious interpretations he’s been using all along. “Correlation is not causation,” as they warn you in Statistics 101 in your freshman year. Even if we take Vox’s reported studies at face value, we don’t know whether religious people are more generous, or whether generous people, being more socially oriented, are more likely to attach themselves to peer groups like the Rotary Club, the Lions, or the local church. But we can see that his preferred interpretation—that people give more when they think they are being watched by God—is not really supported by the evidence. People give more when they’re being watched by someone they can see watching them. And that ain’t God, brother!

I’m not going to look too hard at these statistics, though, because regardless of whether the Christian God exists, Christian people do exist, and are indeed responsible for doing a number of good works, at least when they know they’re being watched by someone real. So let’s move on and see how Vox tries to wrestle with Dawkins’s views on morality.

Dawkins erroneously states that behaving in a traditionally moral manner in the absence of policing is somehow “more moral” than the very same behavior when it is witnessed. This confuses action with intent and reveals a basic misunderstanding of the nature of Christian morality.

Hmm, so Christian morality means you’re only refrain from sin when you think you’re going to get caught? That would certainly explain a number of newspaper headlines in the Religion section, but I don’t think that’s really what Christians have historically taught. In fact, when I was a Christian I was routinely taught that your true character was shown, not by how you behaved when people were watching, but by how you behaved when you believed yourself to be unobserved. This was particularly likely to be a theme when the sermon text was based on any verses containing the word “Pharisee.”

Seems to me that Dawkins is closer to traditional Christian morality than Vox is here, but let’s move on. Wait, what? Vox is done with this section already? Either he really is in a hurry to get this over with, or else Dawkins didn’t leave him much room to argue. Let’s go ahead and see how Vox reacts to Dawkins’s claim that America would become a “fascist” state if it were rebuilt to embody “God’s Law and the Ten Commandments.”

Dawkins claims that the goal to have a Christian nation built on God’s Law and the Ten Commandments “can only be called a Christian fascist state” and claims that it is “an almost exact mirror image” of an Islamic fascist state. This is preposterous on several levels….

Fascism is not merely a word that means “scary,” it is a specific historical ideology no less readily identifiable than Marxism or Communism. While there were avowedly fascist governments in the Christian nations of Italy and Austria, there is no such thing as Islamic fascism. Islamic fascism does not exist and it has never existed, either as a political ideology or a practical system of government. The concept is a meaningless term of propaganda used primarily by American neocons and third-rate political pundits seeking to stir up public support for the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism during the lead-up to the Iraqi invasion; it is already falling out of the political discourse.

Notice how Vox subtly shifts from “fascist,” an adjective meaning “of or like fascism,” to the noun “fascism,” which in one of its definitions does indeed have the specific technical meaning Vox ascribes to it. Dawkins compares a theocratic state to a fascist state based on common factors such as defining national identity in terms of some authoritarian standard like religion or ethnicity, and in order to make Dawkins work out to be wrong, Vox has to pull a word switch, substituting a technical term (noun) for Dawkins’s original comparison, and then claiming that Dawkins misapplied the noun.

Then again, even if Dawkins had used the noun, the experienced reader will recognize that Dawkins is making a comparison highlighting the objectionable characteristics of such a state. He’s not, as Vox would have it, claiming to have given it an expert classification based on its political and sociological taxonomy. But Vox needs to make his accusation and then quickly change the subject, because the last thing he needs at this point is to get into a discussion of how individual liberties in America would have to be curtailed or revoked in order to bring us all under someone’s interpretation of what God’s Law is. I’m not sure what church Vox goes to, but somehow I suspect he might feel differently about Dawkins’s assessment if it turned out that God’s Law meant America tithing to the Pope.

Naturally, Vox is outraged, in the following section, by Dawkins’s suggestion that being raised in a Catholic church is more damaging, psychologically, than being abused by the priest. I’ve got some sympathy for Vox here: in terms of the classical concept of psychological damage, sexual abuse is of course more damaging. I believe, though, that Dawkins is chiefly alluding to psychological harm of a sort that is not generally recognized as being real damage, namely, the crippling of the ability to distinguish between what actually is true, and what you only wish were true. To Dawkins, the fact that you believe in God, despite all the evidence, is a very serious and horrible form of damage in and of itself.

Vox, of course, wades off into more statistics and does his usual number waving, and indulges himself in a few tasteless jeers at what he sees as Dawkins’s presumably inferior parenting skills. (This is, after all, a book frankly and enthusiastically dedicated to ad hominem.) I won’t belabor the point, because it’s really all an exercise in semantics: Vox is going to use his definition of “psychological harm” as though it is the only possible definition, and a consideration of what Dawkins actually meant isn’t even going to enter into the picture.

My own personal assessment of Dawkins’s point is that it is not likely to sell well, because when someone suffers, and knows they are suffering, the harm is readily apparent. When someone is harmed, and the nature of the damage is such that it renders the victim insensitive to the suffering, then our dismay is less visceral. It’s not unlike drunkenness: the one who is very drunk does not feel as drunk as the one who is only slightly “buzzed.” We may be offended and repulsed that anyone would stun their own brains like that, but we don’t necessarily feel the same kind of empathetic suffering as when we see an abuse victim suffering bouts of suicidal depression. On a purely cerebral and moral basis, one might judge the harm to be nearly equal in both cases, but we feel more sympathy for the one whose suffering is obvious. So I can see where Dawkins is coming from, but I don’t expect much popular support for his opinions in this particular area.

And that about does it for this week. We’ll pick up in Chapter 8 again next Tuesday. See you there.

I was going to move on to Chapter 8 this week, but I noticed a couple interesting things going on the the chapter summary that make it worth a little extra attention. In particular, Geisler and Turek use the summary to introduce new material, not previously discussed. As we shall see however, the new material fares no better than the bankrupt and superstitious morality that G&T did discuss in Chapter 7.

The new material shows up in point #4 of the summary.

4. This Moral Law is God’s standard of rightness, and it helps us adjudicate between the different moral opinions people may have.

(Note: just as an aside, this statement contradicts the claim in point number 1 about there being an absolute standard of right and wrong “written on the hearts of every human being.” If the same “Moral Law” were already written on every person’s heart, we wouldn’t need to adjudicate between the different moral standards we find in different people in real life.)

Without God’s standard, we’re left with just that—human opinions. The Moral Law is the final standard by which everything is measured. (In Christian theology, the Moral Law is God’s very nature. In other words, morality is not arbitrary—it’s not “Do this and don’t do that because I’m God and I said so.” No, God doesn’t make rules up on a whim. The standard of rightness is the very nature of God himself—infinite justice and infinite love.)

This is new material. Geisler and Turek have said nothing about morality being defined by God’s nature up to now. But here it is, in the summary, simply tossed in as though it was just a parenthetical remark that has nothing to do with the central argument that the existence of morality requires the existence of God. That’s a shame, because in reality it has a great deal to do with the validity of their argument.

Theologians sometimes come to the “morality = God’s nature” position because they see the problems inherent in adopting either of the two alternatives. If, as Geisler and Turek discuss, morality were just a matter of God’s whim, then nothing is inherently wrong in and of itself, it’s only wrong if it’s against God’s will. As shown by circumcision and the genocide of the Amalekites, God’s will, even by Christian standards, can be very different for different people and at different times. Since God does not show up in real life to explain to us what His current will is for us today, this leaves morality in the highly relativistic realm of what each person subjectively feels God’s will is for his or her conduct (leading to all sorts of “lying for Jesus” and oppressing those you disapprove of and permitting yourself certain illicit indulgences and so on).

On the other hand, if things are right or wrong in and of themselves, then Geisler and Turek have no way to argue that the existence of morality depends on the existence of God. Why would it? God did not create the rightness of the right or the wrongness of the wrong. What’s more, if there is an objective standard of morality that God did not create, then it is possible to judge the rightness and wrongness of God’s own actions, such as demanding animal sacrifices, genital mutilation of baby boys, and genocide. Or, to take a little more enlightened view of things, it would be possible to look at certain commands attributed to God by men, and to say, “A good God would never command such things.”

Traditionally, the relationship between God and morality has been either one or the other: either nothing is good or evil in and of itself, and only becomes good or evil as God’s will decrees it to be so, or else there is some external factor, some non-divine, independent standard of right and wrong that even an allegedly omnipotent deity must conform to. Neither alternative, however, works out well with what Christians need, so lately they’ve proposed a third alternative: that morality is objectively defined by God’s own nature. Unfortunately, this alternative combines the worst problems of both of the above alternatives!

Let’s define a few terms to make discussion easier. We’ll use the term “relativistic morality” to refer to the view that nothing is evil in and of itself, and only becomes immoral relative to God’s will whenever God decides He doesn’t want anyone doing it. “Objectivist morality,” then, would be the alternative that says things are inherently right or inherently wrong, based on their consequences, and therefore even God must live up to these moral standards. And just to emphasize the distinction between these two alternatives, and the one proposed by Geisler and Turek, let’s use “inherited morality” to mean the view that God passively receives His definition of morality from His own nature.

The first problem, therefore, with inherited morality is that God neither creates nor defines it. It is, essentially, a mere re-hash of objectivist morality, framed in a way that associates it with God somehow. But it’s a weak association, because it’s still imposed on God from outside of His will. He has no control over His own nature; He is what He is and there’s nothing He can do about it, because if He can change His own moral nature, we’ve simply transformed inherited morality into relativistic morality—God’s will arbitrarily decides what to define as “right” and what to define as “wrong.”

The second problem, then, is one that inherited morality shares with relativistic morality: God does not show up in real life, so we have no way to study His nature and thus gain an objective understanding of what is truly right and what is truly wrong. We have a bunch of things that men claim about God’s nature in His absence, but they’re contradictory things, like “It’s ok to sell your daughters into sexual slavery,” or “it is evil to fail to kill every man, woman, child, pet, and livestock in Amalek,” or “God wants you to steal the land of the Canaanites (and by extension, of the Palestinians).” And again, because we have no objective access to God that would allow us to reliably determine what His nature is, there is no way we can say, “God could not possibly have commanded that because it would be against His nature.”

A third problem with inherited morality is that it fails to explain how a thing (circumcision for example) can be morally right for some people at the same time it is morally wrong for others. Does God have multiple contradictory natures? If so, which one is THE “moral law” that Geisler and Turek keep referring to. And does God’s nature change over time, or was the genocide of the Amalekites just as evil in the Old Testament as genocide is today? Which of the two moral standards is actually contrary to God’s nature (thus making God a sinner if He upholds it)?

A fourth problem is that if God’s morality is merely the result of His own nature, why should men, who are not gods by nature, be judged by that standard, instead of by a standard that springs from what we are? God, after all, deserves no credit for simply behaving according to His nature, He’s just being what He is. Why, then, does He condemn us for following the same example, acting according to our own natures?

This leads to the fifth problem, which is that if “good” means simply “according to God’s nature,” it is tautological, and even meaningless, to say that God is “good.” Every person who calls God “good” is implicitly measuring God against some kind of objective moral standard; if that standard is God’s own nature, then we’re just measuring God against Himself. Even Adolph Hitler was good relative to Adolph Hitler!

Sixth, inherited morality is a bully’s morality. Like relativistic morality, it all comes down to “might makes right.” From a human perspective, it makes no difference whether God’s moral code is being imposed on us because He wills it or because His natural instincts drove Him to. If “good” just means “whatever God demands of us” and “evil” just means “whatever God forbids,” then He’s still imposing an arbitrary moral standard on us, because the things He imposes are not actually good or evil in and of themselves. They’re just the things His will or His nature arbitrarily designate as “good” or as “evil.”

And lastly, the inherited morality explanation is ultimately a mere superstition, and not an explanation of morality at all. We observe that people have moral codes that guide their behavior, and Christians merely attribute this morality to God, without being able to demonstrate any actual connection between the two, and without even having a clear description of what such a connection would consist of if we could look for it.

Meanwhile in the real world, it’s not terribly difficult to understand the factors that actually do lead to the spontaneous emergence of various moral codes. The same natural empathy that allows us to look at someone else and tell whether they are happy or sad or angry or frightened also tends to create a sympathetic response in our own emotions. We feel bad when we’re near someone who is sad, we get mad when someone is angry with us, we worry when we see fear in others.

Not always, of course, but the tendency is there, and it’s a good trait to have. If the other members of your tribe start acting scared, for instance, you might be in danger too. Fear makes you more alert, more likely to survive the danger. Nor are humans the only species whose odds of survival are improved by sympathetic responses to the feelings of others–many other socially-organized species display this behavior as well.

This is the “moral law” that is “written on our hearts.” We empathize with the feelings of others, and especially with those who are threatened in some way, because whatever threatens them may soon threaten us as well. And because certain behaviors have social consequences, we develop feelings about those behaviors. Whenever we hear about crimes like murder, rape, slavery, assault, theft, and so on, we sympathize with the victims, because if we don’t, we may become victims too. Our natural social empathies, plus the social consequences of a given behavior, become the objective, natural moral code by which we measure the morality or immorality of the behavior.

Of course, this means morality is more than just a simple list of Ten Things You Must Not Do Or God Will Hate You. Morality and ethics need to be approached as a complex, reality-based problem whose constraints are defined by predictable consequences and their meaning for the rest of us. In other words, it takes hard work, and not simplistic superstitions like the one proposed by Geisler and Turek. But people will always be attracted to simplistic solutions like Christianity because hey, who likes hard work, eh?

In the meantime, it’s dishonest for Geisler and Turek to claim, as they do at the end of Chapter 7, that “atheism cannot justify why anything is morally right or wrong.” If Christians are unwilling to do the work, then it’s Christians who cannot justify right or wrong. Merely attributing morality to an invisible deity does not justify it, it simply propagandizes the deity. And if you have to lie in order to claim that your God deserves credit for morality, then you’re working for a pretty poor God.

Mainstream scientists are working in many fields to improve our lives by finding practical applications for evolutionary theory, such as finding ways of increasing crop yields and disease resistance, developing new antibiotics, understanding genetic disorders, and so on. With so many highly-trained, experienced, and successful scientists to choose from, who do Geisler and Turek turn to as their preferred authority on the practical application of evolutionary theory? A biologist? A medical researcher? Someone who is, at the very least, a scientist?

Adolf Hitler used Darwin’s theory as philosophical justification for the Holocaust. In his 1924 book Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”), he wrote:

If nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with the stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race should intermingle with an inferior one; because in such cases all her efforts, throughout hundreds of thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being, may thus be rendered futile.

But such a preservation goes hand-in-hand with the inexorable law that it is the strongest and the best who must triumph and that they have the right to endure. He who would live must fight. He who does not wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist.

That’s right: with all the most brilliant minds of the past two centuries to choose from, Geisler and Turek choose Adolph Hitler, a non-scientist, as their preferred authority on the true meaning and application of evolutionary theory.

Now, there are several problems with this, one of which is obvious even to Geisler and Turek.

Hitler, like other Darwinists, illegitimately personifies nature by attributing will to it (i.e. “nature does not wish“).

Hitler, in short, treats nature as though intelligent design were somehow involved. And that’s just one of the ways in which he distorts evolutionary theory. Hitler also commits the Rapist’s Fallacy, confusing observation with some kind of personal imperative. Christians believe that God created mankind as male and female; the mere observation of a difference in sexes, however, does not mean that every time a man sees a woman, God is commanding him to have sex with her. Likewise, Darwin observed that gene frequencies vary across generations, depending on how much a given gene helps or hinders reproductive success, but this (as many evolutionists have pointed out) is hardly a divine decree that men ought to deliberately wipe out those they believe to be inferior.

Notice, too, that Hitler’s views were based on the popular misconception of “survival of the fittest,” a distorted version of evolution that Geisler and Turek themselves dismissed on page 140 as a mere tautology. It was not evolutionary theory, but a distortion of evolutionary theory, which Hitler appealed to as supporting his planned genocide, just as he appealed to Christian ideas, Lutheran anti-semitism, and the germ theory of disease.

Yet Geisler and Turek, and Ben Stein and crew, choose not to listen to the authority of men and women who have studied evolution and taken the time to understand what it means. No, creationists like Geisler, Turek and Stein prefer to listen to the authority of Adolph Hitler, as THE “Darwinist” who truly understood how it ought to be applied. Ignoring and even opposing what evolutionists themselves explain about evolutionary theory, creationists welcome Adolph Hitler with open arms, and declare him to be their ultimate, authoritative leader as far as interpreting how to put evolutionary principles into practice.

It’s a strange situation. Why, of all people, would Adoph Hitler be the creationists’ preferred authority? What is it about creationists and Hitler that creates this strange affinity between their worldviews? Several things.

First of all, Hitler’s goal, like the creationists’, has less to do with trying to improve his understanding of science, and a lot more to do with building political power and exercising control. People naturally resist being controlled, but Hitler realized (perhaps subconsciously) that you can distract their attention by raising up some unpopular minority as scapegoats: Jews and gays in the case of the Nazis, “Darwinists” and atheists in the case of the creationists. So Hitler and the creationists have similar goals (acquiring political control) and similar strategies (making scapegoats out of unpopular minorities).

They also share a similar lazy and simplistic view of science. Rather than taking the trouble to actually study the theory and learn what it is really saying, they take the easy way out, and uncritically adopt whatever garbled version seems to be the most popular. This is not only the easiest road, it’s also the most political, since you’re upholding an idea that has already won popular approval. Hitler understood this almost instinctively, as I think creationists do as well.

Hitler knew the value of appealing to people’s fears, and fanned their suspicions with various insinuations attributing all sorts of underhanded things to the Jews, just like Ben Stein’s movie insinuates that “Darwinists” are engaged in similar anti-social conspiracies. The latter is an easy prejudice to encourage, since people are naturally mistrustful when in the presence of a topic that, through their lack of education, experience, or intellect, is simply over their heads. If you have no idea what someone is talking about, how can you know whether or not they’re getting it right, or even trying to? Especially when their conclusions sound like they’re contradicting your most cherished beliefs! People are uneasy with their own ignorance, and it takes very little fanning from a Hitler (or a Stein) to ignite that uneasiness into a full-blown, hostile suspicion.

Of course, Hitler knew the value of flattery, and his arguments in defense of the Holocaust always carried along with them the implicit or explicit notion that the non-Jews were inherently superior, not just physically but morally as well. Geisler and Turek likewise sneak in subtle flattery of their readers, via their repeated implications that “Darwinists” are sociopathic racists, who find rape perfectly normal and natural, and who kill babies just because they can. You, dear reader, are so morally superior to those evil Darwinists that you couldn’t possibly want to support them in any way, or so Geisler and Turek smugly insinuate.

But before Geisler and Turek (and Ben Stein and company) get too settled in on their supposed moral high ground, they ought to consider this: it’s not evolutionists who are promoting those perverted and immoral ideas. They may talk about them, and study them, and even learn about them, but if you want to find a large segment of the general public who is actually promoting the idea that evolution justifies these kinds of behaviors, you need to look at the creationists. It’s not Carl Sagan’s Cosmos that claims genocide is a logical consequence of evolution, it’s Ben Stein’s Expelled. It’s not the scientific community that condones racism (as the recent Watson affair demonstrated), it’s creationists who insist that believing in genetics ought to make racists of us all.

And that’s important because evolution really is true. New species really do arise by a process of descent with variation from common ancestors. They even have a chart showing this in the Creationist Museum. If you’re going to argue against evolution on the grounds that “IF evolution THEN racism” or “IF evolution THEN genocide,” you must bear in mind that the “if” part has become a SINCE. And that’s why real evolutionists are careful to say no more about what evolution implies than is scientifically justified. Evolution is a DEscription of how things do work, not a PREscription for how things should work. Creationists who try to make evolutionary fact the basis for immoral behaviors are only working to destroy the very values they claim to uphold.

And that, for some reason, is far less surprising than it should be.

Having misunderstood, denied, distorted, and outright lied about the scientific evidence that something (or somethings) somewhere might somehow have done something no one saw that might in some way have resembled Genesis, Geisler and Turek are now ready to turn their attention to the question of morality, and how it can be exploited as a possible argument for the existence of some kind of deity.

[T]here is a prescription to do good that has been given to all of humanity.

Some call this moral prescription “conscience”; others call it “Natural Law”; still others (like our Founding Fathers) refer to it as “Nature’s Law.” We refer to it as “The Moral Law.” But whatever you call it, the fact that a moral standard has been prescribed on the minds of all human beings points to a Moral Law Prescriber. Every prescription has a prescriber. The Moral Law is no different. Someone must have given us these moral obligations.

This, obviously, is the superstitious approach to morality. We observe that morality exists, and instead of exploring the real-world factors that produce it, so as to better understand where it really comes from, we simply ascribe it to some magical, unobserved Moral Law Prescriber. Let’s contrast this approach with a more reality-based explanation of where morality comes from.

The secular explanation of morality is that morality is defined by how people feel about the consequences of things. If people like the consequences, then the behavior is “good”; if they dislike the consequences, then it’s “bad.” The more strongly people like or dislike the consequences, the greater the perceived good or evil, respectively.

Is this the same as having a “moral law” written on our hearts? Only if we define “moral law” broadly enough that evolution counts as the “Moral Law Prescriber.” Ever notice how the “bad” things are usually harmful in some way? Murder, obviously, is immediately destructive, but it also harms society in ways that are less obvious, by increasing anxiety and suspicion and decreasing cooperation and trust. Most of our moral prescriptions and prohibitions are directly related to the tangible benefit or harm that is the natural consequence of certain actions. In this sense there is indeed a “Moral Law” imposed on us by the circumstances of secular reality.

Some moral prescriptions, however, are less clear. Is it immoral to use birth control? Some people think so, others don’t. How about working on Saturdays? Exclaiming “Jesus Christ!” when upset or frustrated? Using drugs to make yourself feel better? Tylenol anyone?

How about genocide? Animal sacrifice? Sacrificing your own son? All three of these cases involve Bible stories where God commanded people to do these things and/or did them Himself. If God is the Moral Law Giver, and there’s a single Moral Law, how is it that different people at different times seem to have different and contradictory moral laws written on their hearts?

It’s a situation that isn’t too consistent with Geisler and Turek’s superstitious view of morality. If “The Moral Law” (singular) is something magically prescribed by an unchanging deity and imposed by Him on all mankind regardless of belief, then we all ought to reflect that same moral law. But we don’t, except to the extent that, in the real world, some actions are harmful and others are beneficial. If Geisler and Turek were correct, we ought to see the same Moral Law everywhere and at all times, but if the secular explanation is correct then we ought to see broad general agreement in areas where there are practical consequences for certain behaviors, and isolated variations where the behavior produces consequences that are neither obviously good nor obviously bad, or that merely satisfy some local superstitious fear or custom. The latter, of course, is precisely what anthropologists do see.

Geisler and Turek waste the first half of Chapter 7 with a series of mildly interesting but ultimately pointless arguments intended to show that absolute morality does exist. While they are largely correct that it does exist, they completely overlook the fact that the reason it exists is simply because actions have consequences, including consequences that are either harmful or beneficial to the person or persons involved. And it’s a pointless discussion because they never even attempt to show that the existence of moral consequences has anything to do with the existence of one or more deities. The quote above, where they say “If there is a Moral Law, then there must be a Moral Law Prescriber,” is pretty much their whole argument on the matter. One superstitious assumption, followed by half a chapter devoted to proving that The Moral Law (i.e. consequences we care about) actually exist. Their argument boils down to simply assuming that the existence of morality must somehow imply the existence of God, just because they say so.

Apparently, even Geisler and Turek realize at some level how weak their argument is, because they feel the need to spend the last half of Chapter 7 trying to make “Darwinists” into some kind of moral scapegoats again. (Witch burning has gone out of style, so I guess “Darwinists” will have to do.) Geisler and Turek pretend that “it’s not easy to explain how there can be an objective right and wrong…unless there exists a Moral Law Giver” (as though everyone who believes in evolution must be an atheist). Then they claim that “Darwinists” ought to disbelieve in morality because “Darwinism asserts that only materials exist, but materials don’t have morality” (and never mind that Darwinism says nothing about what does or does not exist, it merely describes the origination of new species via descent with modifications from common ancestors).

Then they argue that morality cannot be instinctual (even though “instinctual morality” is exactly what we would see if some magic Moral Law Prescriber really did write some arbitrary moral code on every human’s heart), because if you see someone in danger, and you feel conflicting impulses (altruism vs. self-preservation), then “As C. S. Lewis puts it,”

…you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and to suppress the impulse to run away. Now this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them. You might as well say the sheet of music which tells you, at a given moment, to play one note on the piano and not another, is itself one of the notes on the keyboard. The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.

Lewis is superficially correct: the impulse which tells you to listen to one impulse rather than the other is not itself one of the two impulses competing for your attention. But this is hardly an argument for a Moral Law that tells us self-sacrifice is always right and self-preservation is always wrong. I read in the paper some time ago about a man who died trying to rescue his wife from a burning building. Did some moral law dictate to him that it was “good” to leave his three children as orphans and that it would have been “bad” to refrain from running back into the burning building looking for a wife that was already dead? Maybe, but it’s not a given. If two things compete, and one prevails, it’s not necessarily the case that some third thing intervened to select the victor. Maybe one was just stronger than the other.

Moving on, Geisler and Turek try to further confuse the issue by arguing that morals could not have evolved out of the mere survival benefits conferred by cooperation, on the grounds that “this assumes an end—survival—for evolution, when Darwinism, by definition, has no end because it is a non-intelligent process.” It’s hard to tell whether they’re deliberately trying to obfuscate the matter, or whether their understanding of evolution really is that abysmal, but it’s not that hard a concept to grasp. If an inheritable trait has the real-world consequence of improving reproduction of its owner’s genes, that trait will tend to show up in an increasing number of descendants. It’s a result, not an “end,” and it’s a perfectly reasonable possibility.

Geisler and Turek waffle on about “how can you know what ‘good’ is in the absence of a Moral Law” and so on, but as we’ve already seen, this is a red herring, since the real-world consequences (and not some superstitiously-ascribed “Lawgiver”) really do define objective standards for our morality. But their final point exposes just how bankrupt their own understanding of morality is:

Darwinists cannot explain why anyone should obey any biologically derived “moral sentiment.” Why shouldn’t people murder, rape, and steal to get what they want if there is nothing beyond this world? Why should the powerful cooperate with the weaker when the powerful can survive longer by exploiting the weaker?

Amazingly, Geisler and Turek seem completely unable to understand how something like murder, or rape, or theft, could be wrong in and of itself, or how the inevitably harmful consequences of certain actions might make them wrong. Apparently, a thing is only wrong if there’s some future existence in which some powerful being will make you suffer for doing certain things that, on a whim, he arbitrarily designated as wrong. In asking why the powerful should cooperate with the weak instead of exploiting them for his own benefit, Geisler and Turek imagine that the truth is a powerful God exploiting the relative weakness of men for His own benefit!

Geisler and Turek also conveniently overlook the fact that Biblical morality is based on powerful kings, priests, and prophets who, at the time, saw nothing wrong with ruling over the less-powerful and enjoying the fruits of their labors for their own benefit. The moral code that says this is wrong, and that democracy is a greater good, is a moral code that evolved among and on behalf of the ruled. (There’s that pesky problem of multiple competing moral laws again!)

Geisler and Turek have still lower to sink, but we’ll save the “best” for next week. It’s worth a whole post in and of itself.

Based solely on their theoretical reasoning, the New Atheists declare that it should be the goal of all scientists, indeed, all rational thinkers, to bring peace and harmony to the world of men. They don’t declare this in a succinct or straightforward manner, they don’t even lay out their case in a coherent manner, but this is the only conclusion that can rationally be derived from their cumulative premises, logic, and stated goals. It is unclear why none of them are able to come out and state this clearly, but there are a number of possible explanations.

Three guesses whether any of these “possible explanations” acknowledge any kind of intelligence or competence on the part of the New Atheists.

“Possible explanation” number one is that they’re too incompetent to express what they really mean. Number two is that they might embrace the faulty belief that science leads to specific moral conclusions. And number three is that they’re deliberately trying to deceive us. Now, you may recall from the end of Chapter 2 that Richard Dawkins once recited a list in which science came last, and Vox concluded that because it was last, it was therefore the least significant. In this case, however, Vox himself has given us a good example of why that’s not a safe bet, because he considers Explanation Number Three to be the most likely. His goal, remember, is to discredit atheists so that people can feel good about dismissing their books unread. A good way to do that is to paint them as dishonest and deceptive, and he even invokes noted atheistic scientist Richard Feynmann to help him.

Feynman believed that it was the responsibility of scientists to proclaim the value of intellectual freedom, to support open discussion and criticism, and to welcome doubt, not suppress it…

The New Atheists harbor no similar dedication to open discussion, let alone criticism. To them, science is but a means to a specific end, something to be prostituted in order to sell the secularist Enlightenment morality that they see in competition with the Christian faith… Dawkins is the worst offender—his prickly reaction to criticism is not to address it, not to discuss it, but to disdainfully dismiss it, unread.

Unfortunately, Vox declines to describe exactly how he is able to spy on Dawkins in such minute detail as to be able to know precisely what he has and has not read. Then again, he says he’s giving away his book for free because he’s financially well-off enough not to need the profits, so perhaps he has already shared this technology with the CIA and NSA. But the main point is that Dawkins and company are trying to suppress discussion and criticism, which is why you can post whatever you like in the forums on richarddawkins.net, but if you go to a “dissenting” site, like the Discovery Institute’s Intelligent Design the Future, critical comments are not only expunged, but commenting is usually disabled completely. (We might also mention the carefully-orchestrated “press conference” held by promoters of the anti-establishment film Expelled—however, the producers have explicitly not authorized any such mentions, so perhaps we should skip it.)

In any case, Vox claims that Dawkins never responds to any of his critics (a contention that is much easier to sell once you’ve convinced people to dismiss Dawkins unread) and is trying to suppress doubt instead of confronting actual evidence. And he makes this claim in a book that attacks atheist arguments while explicitly and deliberately ignoring the issue of whether or not God actually exists! Throw away your vitamins, folks, there’s a lifetime supply of irony in just that one paragraph.

Meanwhile, back to the evil conspiracy.

While their attacks are theoretically directed against all religions, they betray their focus for the main object of their hatred in both their language and the examples they choose. For all that he was supposedly inspired to write The End of Faith by the jihadist 9/11 attacks, Sam Harris will never write “Letter to an Islamic Nation” and Christopher Hitchens expends more of his bilious vitriol on one dead Catholic nun than he does attacking the entire Hindu pantheon worshipped by one billion individuals around the world.

Funny, he doesn’t accuse Hitchens of failing to condemn Islam. Wonder why that is? Oh well, at least we know that the Enlightenmenati are really out to destroy all that is good and true and decent (i.e. Christianity, in case you hadn’t guessed). And their secret goal is to replace it with a shady, occult “morality” that, naturally enough, they’re keeping well out of sight.

So what, specifically, is this morality? Because it is never described in its entirety, it is necessary for us to piece it together from the hints sprinkled throughout the atheist canon. We know that Christianity stands in its way, courtesy of Bertrand Russell… And we know that it is in opposition to even the most moderate forms of religious faith, thanks to Sam Harris.

Remember, Vox conceives of morality in terms of a written list of specific do’s and don’ts. The idea of a principle-based morality, where you decide right and wrong based on evaluating the consequences of a particular action, is just so much gibberish to him.

For a system of morals and ethics, Harris offers nothing more concrete than half-baked utilitarianism in declaring that morality is merely a recipe for maximizing happiness and minimizing suffering.

Apparently, “half-baked” means it hasn’t been reduced to a canonized list of specific do’s and don’ts. Otherwise, it’s hard to see what’s wrong with making moral decisions based on maximizing happiness and minimizing suffering. Of course, the idea could be developed and expounded more fully, but don’t expect Vox to step up to the plate for that one. He’s much happier with Hitchens, because Hitchens offers a specific written list. To Vox’s mind, that at least is some kind of actual morality. Though not necessarily a morality Vox approves of.

Despite his grand eloquence and enlightened posturing, Hitchens is almost indistinguishable from a conventional Low Church atheist, who is content to dwell as a moral parasite on traditional Christian morality except when he wants to get laid without feeling guilty or catching a venereal disease.

Remember, Vox just got done claiming that Dawkins avoids addressing criticisms by simply insulting his critics.

We come at last to the real founders and leaders of this vast conspiracy, this evil religious organization of which Dawkins &. Co. are only the front line.

Both Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, on the other hand, are not looking for a New Enlightenment as they are still pledged to the old one. While it’s absolutely true that atheism is not a religion, most High Church atheists subscribe to a specific denomination of the Enlightenment faith known as humanism.

Ah, humanism, the old bugaboo of the Moral Majority back in the days before “Darwinist” became the tag-du-jour. Yes, the real leaders of the Enlightenmenati are those nasty evil old humanists. Of course, some might say that humanism and Enlightenment are virtually synonymous, so perhaps we haven’t discovered that much after all. One thing for sure, though: the Enlightenment is an evil conspiracy out to destroy everything that is good.

The original Enlightenment led directly to the French Revolution, and only 349 days after the citoyens sans-culottes established the French Republic, the bloody Reign of Terror began… Like a lethal virus transmitted from corpse to living carrier, Enlightenment ideals survived the collapse of the First Republic and were preserved by utopian socialists such as de Rouvroy, Fourier, and Cabet… Twenty-three years after De Rouvroy’s death, Marx and Engels put a scientific spin on their socialism, which inspired the Russian Revolution of 1919 and all of the humane joys inherent in seventy years of Communist rule.

(Gee, how many pages has it been since Vox was telling us how well the Chinese did after throwing away science and reverting to a more primitive culture?)

So the evil Enlightenmenati gorged itself on French blood for a few years, then infected Russia with Communism. But even that was not enough. Now all of Europe is falling under their malignant sway.

Although the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989 briefly left the enlightened humanists of the world without a state to call their own, that was soon remedied by the 1992 Treaty of Maastricht, which established the European Union as a political entity dedicated to Enlightenment ideals…

A united Europe, of course, is only a small step in a bigger plan to establish a One World Government, as any Rapture-minded Christian can tell you, so naturally the European Union is a Bad Thing. Just look at their Convention of Human Rights.

The Convention is a cornucopia of Enlightenment rights, including the right to life, the prohibition of slavery, the right to liberty and security, the right to freedom of expression, and so forth. Unfortunately, these rights come with strict caveats that leave holes in these theoretical protections large enough to drive a truck through . . . Nor do they come as unalienable rights endowed by a Creator, but are merely notional rights granted by the forty-seven signatory governments which belong to the Council of Europe, subject to the political and legal processes of those governments.

Now, I’ve noticed something a little odd about how Vox deals with the Enlightenment. He never mentions that the Enlightenment was a broad cultural phenomenon that involved religion as well secular life. The notion that “all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights” is an Enlightenment ideal, a mixture of the new-found optimism of humanism with the old-school foundation of divine dispensation. As often as Vox mentions the connection between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, he never mentions its connection with the American Revolution, or with the ideals embodied in the U. S. Constitution. The Gettysburg Address refers to America as a nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Liberty? Equality? Fraternity? That’s the Enlightenment motto of the French Revolution! Oh noes, Lincoln was one of Them!

But if Lincoln was one of the Enlightenmenati, we might be justified in concluding that Vox himself is one too.

The multiple references to the need for a democratic society to limit human rights is particularly ironic, as for all its democratic pretensions, European integration has been pushed inexorably forward without the democratic consent of many of Europe’s peoples.

Vox says that like it’s a bad thing—and it is, because it runs contrary to genuine Enlightenment ideals. Read Ed Brayton’s blog, for instance, and you’ll find that there is plenty of concern about whether the Post-Christian nations of Europe aren’t taking things a bit over the top with their excessive protections for religious opinions.

But it’s interesting that Vox seems to share the same Enlightenment values against which the European situation measures up as “bad.” The traditional Christian social structure, which he describes as having been “carefully excised” from the Convention, was built on the idea of the divine right of kings, as in Romans 12. Leaders doing whatever they like and expecting the people to just submit—that’s the way things were supposed to be. God made them king, and not you, and therefore there must be a good reason for whatever they do, so just obey and shut up. Vox ought to approve of how the European Union is progressing. Unless…unless…

Unless he’s secretly a member of the Enlightenmenati himself.

Ooo, that would be devious, wouldn’t it? Sure, he says he’s opposed to the New Atheists, but after all, these Enlightenmenati guys are dishonest deceivers, right? Maybe he’s in on the plot, pretending to attack the New Atheists in order to persuade people that the threat has been “dealt with” and they can go back to complacent ignorance again. That would be just like a sneaky, diabolical conspiracy, wouldn’t it.

Beware, beware, conspiracies are everywhere,

They’re in your house, they’re in your chair,

They’re even in your underwear…

So beware!

[W]hat is the ultimate goal of the religion of reason? … It is not the end of faith that is the ultimate goal, this is merely a necessary prerequisite to the economic, cultural, and moral integration required for establishing the world government that the devotees of Reason hope will bring a permanent end to war.

He then proceded to argue that, for example, size should not matter. After all, are the lives of tall people worth more than the lives of short people? Are tall people “persons” to a greater degree than short people are? What about level of development? Is a 24-year-old more human than a 14-year-old? or a 12-year-old than a 2-year old? Teenagers are not quite fully developed yet, let alone younger children. Does that make their lives less worthy than the lives of older, more developed folks? What about birth? Where you are doesn’t change who you are. Why would moving six inches down the birth canal transform you into a human being from…uh, whatever you were before? And what about level of dependency? Are diabetics less human because they depend on medication and/or insulin to stay alive?

In the anecdote he was telling, the two businessmen he was talking to were, not surprisingly, flummoxed. (Not only were they laymen, but the speaker wouldn’t have been telling the story if either of them had responded with a telling and cogent rebuttal!) But I think, nonetheless, that there are some flaws in this approach. For example, in asserting that there are only four differences between a fetus and a newborn, he’s assuming that there’s not a fifth difference (e.g. that one is a person and the other isn’t). His conclusion that both are persons is based on a set of arguments that begins by assuming that both are persons, thus committing a logical fallacy.

Also, he completely omitted any discussion of the entanglement between mother and offspring during pregnancy. If I’d been sitting on that plane next to him, I would have asked him if I could borrow some of his blood, promising to return it to his body after I’d extracted the nutrients and dumped a bunch of toxic waste products into it. If he declined to let me borrow his blood, I’d ask him whether I had a right to take his blood like that despite his lack of consent. This physical impact of the fetus on the mother is something that is not the case with newborns, just as the newborn’s continued existence does not promise to eventually put the mother into painful contractions and eventually result in a birth that will, likely as not, rip open the vaginal opening (unless a surgeon slices her open for a Caesarian section, but either way it’s going to do injury). This difference is completely omitted in his SLED argument.

So the speaker was, in fact, assuming his conclusion and stacking the deck in his own favor by selective omission and biased word use (notice the expression “Where you are doesn’t change WHO–not what–you are”). But picking apart his rhetorical technique does not quite answer the question of whether or not the “unborn child” (another biased term, as is the term “fetus”) is a human being, a person, a member of the social community entitled to the full protection of society’s laws. For that, I’d like to consider the problem of thresholds.

The speaker’s argument treats personhood like a quantity that can be greater or lesser than another. For example, his rhetorical question is, “A 24-year-old is not more of a person than a 12-year-old, right?” That’s true, but misleading. Personhood isn’t something that is measured in “person-volts” or some such, as though one person could have more person-volts than another. It’s like being a legal driver. If you can become a legal driver by passing a driving test on your 17th birthday, it’s quite true that a 27-year-old driver isn’t any more legal than the 17-year-old, but this hardly implies that age makes no difference in whether you can be a legal driver or not, nor does it imply that those under 17 are implicitly legal drivers too. Likewise, the transition from non-person to person is a question, not of degree, but of thresholds.

Pro-lifers agree (or at least, have no grounds for disagreeing) that at some point the cells involved cross a threshold from being a non-person to being a person. It is not “murder” to cause or allow a sperm cell or an egg cell to die, because gametes are not persons. At some point, a sperm cell is absorbed into an egg cell, and conception occurs. Pro-lifers assert that it is at this point that the threshold is crossed. However, two issues remain. In the first place, it’s not quite a “point” in time, i.e. fertilization is not instantaneous. At what point in the process do you demark the threshold between the non-person and the person? Is it the point where the cell walls between sperm and egg begin to merge? That doesn’t seem quite right, since the sperm’s chromosomes are, at this point, still entirely outside of the egg cell. Is it when the cytoplasm from the egg begins to mingle with that of the sperm? But the sperm’s chromosomes are still not paired up with the egg’s. Is it when the chromosomes pair up? Even that’s not a point in time: does the cell cross the threshold when the chromosomes begin to pair up, or not until the chromosomes finish pairing up?

And that brings us to issue number two. It should be obvious that the threshold between non-person and person is something that the organism can and does cross by physical developmental processes. The question is, where is that point, and how do you identify it other than by arbitrary designation? Pro-lifers pick the physical changes within the (becoming-)fertilized egg cell and call that the threshold, but on what basis are inter-cellular changes in a single-celled organism more significant that the development of more distinctly-human changes that occur much later on in gestation?

It is at this point, I think, that the intellectual pro-lifer will begin to regret trying to take an evidence-based approach to complex ethical issues. Not that there’s anything wrong with an evidence-based approach of course, but I can’t help but suspect that the intellectual pro-lifer will begin to feel the temptation to resort to good old “Because God Said So” dogmatic pronouncements, along with the de rigeur indictments of the evils of materialism. If materialism were so evil, though, why would pro-lifers want to appeal to the material evidence in the first place?

The ultimate problem is that reality itself does not give us easy, unambiguous answers to things like the conflict of interests between a woman with an unwanted pregnancy, and the offspring that will perish if she aborts. It’s a legitimate conflict. You can’t break it down into one side being entirely wrong and deserving to be punished, and the other being entirely right and deserving to prevail. So it’s a question of trying to find a balance–a three way balance, because society also has conflicting interests, both in protecting the rights of the woman and protecting the rights of the young and helpless.

I think that the pro-choice position is currently the best way to achieve this balance, provided the pregnancy is still in its early stages. Once the fetus reaches the point that he or she can survive outside the womb, I think the best balancing of conflicting interests is to try and end the pregnancy in a way that preserves the baby’s life. That’s an idealistic answer that fails to address issues like who’s going to pay for the surgery and the neonatal intensive care, but then again I rather doubt that there are any truly good answers to this issue. The best answer is to prevent the unwanted pregnancy in the first place, and for that our kids need access to comprehensive and accurate information about sex, and support structures that will make it possible for girls to avoid becoming pregnant. But that’s a topic for another time.

With all the attention the atheist agenda is receiving, doesn’t it seem strange that most Americans find heroes among those who reflect a biblical worldview?

Those who reflect a biblical worldview, eh? Tell us more!

Earlier in 2007, CNN began polling people for a list of their heroes. As the results began rolling in, it became apparent that the frontrunners had something in common. Whether or not they professed belief in God, they all lived their lives in a way that would not make sense if He did not exist. [Emph. added]

You read that right. Earley is giving Christianity credit for the heroic deeds done by people who weren’t necessarily even Christian. Oh, sure, he would have liked to claim that the heroes were all Christians, and that non-Christians don’t have what it takes to be heroes. But the facts stubbornly refuse to back him up on that one. No matter, he’ll just “name it and claim it” for God anyway, by claiming that heroic behavior “would not make sense” unless God really exists.

Atheism has no explanation for these acts of self-giving and even self-sacrificing charity. As Chuck Colson has said many times, Darwinian evolution cannot explain this kind of altruism: How does one who willingly dies for another pass on his or her genetic traits for the improvement of the species? No, defenders of atheism and Darwinism, if true to their convictions, should sneer at this kind of self-sacrifice as weak and pointless.

Unless, of course, they’ve read The Selfish Gene, which was published 32 years ago by Richard Dawkins. Altruistic behavior has had a Darwinian explanation for decades, not that Earley (or Colson) would let a mere fact get in the way of their anti-unbeliever diatribe. Altruistic behavior is behavior in which one organism instinctively assists others in its pack, hive, herd, or other social grouping. This kind of social cooperation benefits the individual, because the social group in turn gives survival advantages back to the individual. Self-sacrifice is relatively rare, and even when it does happen, it confers an evolutionary advantage on the gene, which exists in the other members of the group as well as in the individual that died. So the net effect is that the gene(s) responsible for altruism have an advantage: they are passed on by the larger group, and not just by any one (self-sacrificing) individual in that group.

No, if you want something that’s hard to explain, altruism isn’t it. Maybe Earley should turn his attention instead to the problem of martyrdom. According to the Gospel, if you die as a martyr, you get a special reward in heaven. You also get to be immediately united with the most significant Other in the universe, Someone that every good Christian is supposed to love more than life itself. You also get to bear a convincing and compelling witness for the truth of the Gospel by dying for it. So why aren’t more Christians more hungry for martyrdom?

This world is full of trials and suffering. Heaven offers eternal bliss. This world makes it difficult to know God’s will (since He never shows up to explain to us what that will might be), but heaven offers clear and direct communion with God. Life in this world is short, and is going to end sooner or later anyway, but life in heaven is supposed to be eternal. Sure, you’ve probably got loved ones here, but Jesus said “And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or farms for My name’s sake, will receive many times as much, and will inherit eternal life.” And who knows, by dying for your faith, you might persuade them to give their hearts to Jesus too. Isn’t their eternal salvation worth more than the care and comfort you would have given them for a few short years by living?

Yet Christians are in no great hurry to die, not even for the Gospel’s sake. It’s almost like they knew, instinctively, that the only real values are earthly values, and the only real purposes are earthly purposes. Christianity is fine as a social network, as a belief you espouse and defend in exchange for acceptance into the “good guy’s” group. It even works ok as a superstitious explanation for why things happen that you don’t understand. But when it comes down to actually living (and dying) in a way that would make sense if a Christian worldview were really true, Christians behave just like the unbelievers do. They may say they love Jesus and long to go to heaven, but they’re in no hurry to make it happen. Yet they claim that unbelievers‘ lives don’t make sense unless God exists? Hypocrisy indeed.

Herr Professor has redeemed himself slightly in my eyes in his latest reply to one of my posts. He follows my blog very closely so no doubt he will discover this response to his so just a word of reminder to you, sir, that I do not use my blog for discussion and debate. Still, I think his post represents a good faith attempt to answer my question so I shall reply.

Ok, point noted: his blog is not for discussion and debate. Shall we proceed?

First I must really object to his apparent summation of my argument:

So man’s inhumanity to man is supposed to pose a tough problem for atheists, not because it’s so difficult to stop, but because the atheist’s lack of belief in God means he can’t explain why man is sometimes cruel to man. In other words, if God did not exist, we would expect man to behave better.

In Herr Professor’s summation we see a conflation of different theistic arguments. I am not for a minute arguing that because you don’t believe in God that doesn’t mean he can’t explain why man is sometimes cruel to man. I don’t see how you can derive that from my post at all which mainly presents the Christian explanation and asks the atheist for his.

Well, you see, I was reading the original post under the assumption that Mr. Horvath did not use his blog for discussion. So when I read, in the original post,

No, raw brutality towards one’s own entire species seems to be a problem unique to the human race, with or without religion.

But can we generate an explanation for that fact without religion?…

The response of these two Christians in the face of human nature’s apparent depravity was to identify it with a doctrine that was already known to them within the Christian community. What is the atheist going to turn to? [Note: Mr. Horvath's post ends here.]

I naturally assumed the question was intended to be rhetorical, and that Mr. Horvath was trying to suggest that the doctrine of Original Sin gave Christianity an advantage over atheism in that atheism was not supposed to have an explanation for the problem. I would have expected, if Mr. Horvath intended to say that Christianity had a better explanation, he would have compared the atheist’s explanation to his own, with a view to showing the points in which he could claim superiority for the Christian explanation. At the very least, he might have alluded to the fact that it’s not terribly difficult to explain cruel behavior in secular terms.

But we must take Mr. Horvath at his word, and if he says he did not mean to suggest that there is no secular explanation for evil behavior, then we must accept that it is so. Mr. Horvath exhorts me to “stick with what I actually say instead of what you think I’m saying,” and that’s certainly a fair point, and one that I shall endeavor to conform to. Sadly, immediately after this point, Mr. Horvath breaks his own rule.

On the agenda is the atheist’s explanation for how it is that humans are so cruel to humans. Note the shared assumption that cruelty is bad. In a future post I’ll demand that my relativist peer defend how under a relativist framework anything is actually bad, but for now I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth. He’s acting like there is an absolute moral system even if he assuredly denies that there is one.

I don’t see how Mr. Horvath can even remotely claim to have honestly thought that anything in my post, or in any of my posts, “assuredly denies” that there is an absolute moral system. For example, consider the following excerpt from an earlier response of mine to Mr. Horvath:

As I’ve explained before, there is a perfectly secular reason for morality, and it lies in the nature of the consequences produced by the behavior in question. Mr. Horvath gives us a good example of Christian moral relativism in action: he has had ample opportunity to observe that there is a secular basis for morality, and in fact Christians themselves appeal to the same, secular system for assessing the morality of things like drug abuse and stem cell research. Yet he continues to try and create the dishonest impression that atheists have no way to explain the existence of “moral realities.” For the Christian, such deceits are not wrong, because they are necessary in order to defend the Gospel. The morality of the deception is defined relative to its apologetic utility.

Mr. Horvath, if you’re going to put words into my mouth, you ought to at least try to ensure that they are not a blatant contradiction of the things I am actually saying. Sigh.

So, Mr. Horvath exhorts me to stick to what he’s actually saying, and then he puts words in my mouth that are the exact opposite of what I’ve said more than once to him before. He also denies that he was trying to claim that atheists have no secular explanation for the existence of evil and cruel behavior among humans. Anybody want to take any bets on whether or not he spends the rest of the post trying to prove that atheists have no reasonable explanation for the existence of evil and cruel behavior?

So let’s take his points:

First of all, the reason why we don’t see genocide among apes (other than man) is because they don’t have ethnic groups, or the intelligence required to establish social networks larger than their immediate habitats.

Surely this begs the question: why don’t they have ethnic groups? This answer is no answer at all.

It’s so predictable, I’m sometimes tempted to suspect he’s making a deliberate parody of Christian apologetics. He denies that he’s claiming atheists have no explanation, but the argument he’s most interested in refuting is the claim that atheists do have an explanation. He claims that all he wanted to do was present the Christian explanation, and ask the atheist for his, but if anyone does give him any answers, he immediately sets out to prove that they are “no answers at all.”

However, the implication is that ethnic groups would promote cruelty if they did exist. That is a curious claim to make and I don’t think there is much to it. The real objection seems to be that intelligence does the trick, not simply ‘ethnicity.’ Later statements seem to corroborate that.

Indeed. It’s called “reading in context.” The reason gorillas don’t commit genocide is because genocide is a crime against an ethnic group, and ethnic groups are defined in terms of an abstract, semantic categorization. Gorillas do not have a sophisticated language with subtle and abstract concepts like “gypsy” or “Kurd” or “Jew,” and therefore “genocide” does not appear among gorillas for exactly the same reason that they do not have premarital sex or bounced checks.

Apes do compete and they do fight and they do sometimes commit rapes and murders and battles between rival groups that on occasion lead to one of the groups being exterminated. It varies from species to species, but it is quite complex and quite real, and evolutionists use it to gain some insights into human aggression. But genocide, per se, is something that can only occur among species intelligent and sophisticated enough to create concepts corresponding to ethnic divisions. If the ethnic groups don’t exist, then you can’t have warfare between the groups. That’s really all there is to it.

Human intelligence gives us tremendous leverage for our achievements, whether for good or for bad.

I don’t deny this for a minute but does it really answer the problem? I already raised human intelligence in my original post which he responded to.

Mr. Horvath has an unfortunate tendency to break my answer up into little bits, each of which is only part of my answer, so that he can deny that any of the individual bits, on its own, is “the answer.” He says that he is not trying to argue that atheists have no explanation for human evil, but if that’s really the case, why is he working so hard to contrive some pretext for claiming that my answer is not an answer?

And indeed, is his objection even valid? We see abundant cruelty in the natural world, both between and within species. Mr. Horvath agrees that human intelligence does give us the ability to extend those natural cruelties in proportion to our positive achievements. And what’s left to explain? The means are sufficient to produce the result, and therefore no further explanation is needed.

[I]t would seem that Herr Professor agrees with the thesis that “any sufficiently enlightened group of humans would exert their power in humane and benevolent ways.” Unfortunately, that takes his argument about intelligence giving us ‘tremendous leverage’ out at the knees, for Herr Professor is advocating that what we really need is even more intelligence… and yet by his argument it would follow that more intelligence would be just even more ability to leverage our achievements, good and bad.

Mr. Horvath should stick to what I say instead of what he thinks I mean. I do not, for example, assume that “intelligent” automatically means “humane and benevolent.” Why should it? Nor do I endorse his tautologous thesis that any “sufficiently enlightened” humans would be “humane and benevolent.” To the extent that “sufficiently enlightened” is defined as being humane and benevolent, the statement is merely a tautology, equivalent to saying that sufficiently nice people would be nice. It’s true by definition, but so what? It has nothing to do with the secular factors which lead to cruel behavior among humans.

And what does Mr. Horvath mean about “taking out” my argument that intelligence gives tremendous leverage to our deeds (good or evil)? Does he mean that, having previously agreed that this statement was correct, he now thinks that it is incorrect? If a “sufficiently enlightened” group of humans has not (so far) swept in and saved us from ourselves, does that mean that our intelligence does not enable us to achieve results (good or evil) on a far greater scale than can be achieved by the rest of the animal kingdom? Apparently Mr. Horvath was so desperate to try and discredit my argument that he forgot to make any sense. He’s not trying to deny that atheists have an explanation for evil behavior, though!

Thus, the really critical question is still left unanswered. ‘Intelligence’ is a smokescreen. The Professor seems to have it backwards. To produce ‘real world improvement’ in human behavior what we really need is regression of our knowledge and intelligence. It would be better for us if we were dumber. It would be worse for us if we were any smarter.

I suspect that by this point Mr. Horvath may have forgotten what the question even is. The question under discussion is not “How can we improve human behavior?” Nor is my answer above intended to suggest that if people were more intelligent they would be better behaved. The question is, “What factors cause people to commit atrocities like genocide?” and my answer is that at least part of the reason is that man’s superior intelligence makes him capable of greater deeds, for good or for evil. Intelligence is certainly not the sole reason people do bad things, nor have I ever said it was. If Mr. Horvath would simply stick to what I say–and resist the temptation to break it into little fragments he can more easily turn into straw men–then he might find out that there is indeed a secular explanation for human behavior.

So, the Professor’s argument is really thus: “Humans are just as cruel to each other as other species but because of humanity’s ‘intelligence’ the extent of damage that they can do to each other is magnified.”

‘Proportion-wise’ seems to me to be a phrase calling out for measurement. Is it really the case that the more intelligent a species is the more pronounced its achievements, good and bad, and that an examination of dogs, birds, and monkeys, when compared with humans, will show a correlation between the intra-species cruelty and the relative intelligence of that species? I don’t think so at all, but Herr Professor offers a testable hypothesis and I think he should test it.

Mr. Horvath flatters me, but my observation was not a hypothesis, because the issues involved are rather more complex than I am capable of accounting for in quantifiable terms. I merely make the observation that, for example, we do not anesthetize animals so that our young can devour them from the inside out, still alive. Nor do we inject victims with painful and/or corrosive poisons in order to make them easier to eat. You may say, “Well, that doesn’t count because when insects do it, it’s not intentional cruelty.” That’s fine. I have my subjective opinion, and you’re welcome to disagree. It doesn’t really pertain to my point, however.

Prejudice, superstition, misunderstanding, intolerance, and so on, are all cognitive by-products of our imperfect intelligence, and they are a too-frequent source of inhumane behavior.

There is an unsupported assumption at work in the Professor’s line of argumentation. Is it really the case that a perfect intelligence will not engage in prejudice, intolerance, etc? What is the connection between intelligence and prejudice? Why would perfect intelligence eschew intolerance?

I can see where Mr. Horvath might misunderstand my point, which I admit I could have stated more clearly. Prejudice, superstition, misunderstanding, intolerance, and so on, are all by-products of the limited and sometimes inaccurate way in which our mind works. For example, our minds are influenced by basic biological factors like hunger, fatigue and fear. We have inherent, primitive instincts acquired through long generations of evolution, instincts that may have helped our ancestors to compete and survive, but which sometimes get in the way of intelligent social cooperation.

Also, we are not omniscient. Our minds have to work for the knowledge they acquire, and it’s easier to subscribe to common prejudice than to conduct your own investigation and analysis all the time. We misunderstand because we don’t know all the facts, and because we have to communicate using words whose meanings are defined for us by our experiences, which aren’t always as common as we think they are. Some people have a series of experiences which teach them to view the world with hostility and defensiveness. Some people have natural, inborn tendencies towards aggression and violence. And sometimes these two groups overlap. And so on.

Since Mr. Horvath, as he himself tells us, is not trying to claim that there is no secular explanation for evil behavior, I’m sure he will see that I have at least pointed him in the direction of some of the many secular, biological and psychological factors that combine to produce evil behavior in humans. And if he does not find my answer adequate, I would dearly love to hear what he thinks the secular reasons are. After all, he’s not trying to claim that there are no secular reasons. He told us so himself.

“I’m a natural selector and will eliminate all those I see as unfit,” Sturmgeist89 wrote on You Tube recently.That’s Darwinism in a nutshell.

No, that’s the perverted Darwinism you get from a nut, with or without his shell. What is it with Christians and their sources of authority anyway? If you want to know what that lumpy dark thing growing on your arm is, do you go to a dermatologist to find out what he thinks, or do you go to the psych ward to find out what the patients think? If your car is making a funny noise, do you take it to a mechanic or a maniac? Let a legitimate scientist try to explain what evolution does and does not mean, and the faithful will just stare blankly. Let a psychopathic killer express some twisted misapplication of evolutionary theory, and they leap from their baths and run naked down the street crying “Eureka!!”

And of course, what would an irrational rant be without the obligatory lie about having no secular basis for morality?

Anyone adheres to an atheistic worldview lacks the necessary foundation to make moral judgments. Oh, the atheist will try to say that his worldview allows for things like good and bad, right and wrong, but such notions are meaningless in a philosophy that wishes man to remain unaccountable to a Creator. Doing what’s “right” boils down to doing what feels good “right now.”

Evidently nothing is right or wrong in and of itself, according to Lee Shelton. If murder were actually wrong in and of itself, then atheists would have a secular, godless reason to condemn it, since it’s inherently wrong. The only reason you would need some 3rd party authority, such as God, to arbitrarily designate it as “wrong” would be if there were nothing about the act itself, or its consequences, that would enable us to discern its wrongness.

Can believers really be so morally insensitive? Can they not see that the real-world results of murder are what make it bad? Have they no concept of consequences, of what “good” and “evil” mean in real life? Adding an imaginary character to watch disapprovingly (and passively) does nothing to provide us with any kind of moral framework, especially given the fact that God never shows up in real life to tell us what His moral standards are. Mr. Shelton can base his moral judgments on the subjective opinions of self-appointed prophets and Bible scholars if he likes, but if you want a solid, objective, and realistic morality you’re better off with secular ethics. An absentee God is worse than no God at all.

Returning finally to science — I note you didn’t answer or even engage with my points about science having no answers to the origin of life, or the universe, or morality, or human rights. This is why I am an ex-atheist — because atheism is bankrupt; it provides no answers.

He’s partially right. Biology and genetics, like mathematics, meteorology, chemistry, and other branches of natural science, do not provide moral guidance. Math, for example, will tell you how to add up the numbers on your tax forms, but math alone cannot make any recommendations as to whether or not you ought to cheat on your taxes. If you do decide to cheat, math will give you the knowledge you need in order to manufacture a set of numbers that adds up to the total you pick, but it won’t complain about your decision to do so. I guess in Mr. Admin’s book, that means that math is bankrupt and provides no answers, and ought to be abandoned by people of conscience. I wonder if his chequebook balances at the end of the month?

He’s wrong, of course, about science having no answers about the origin of life and of the cosmos. It’s not that science has no answers, it’s that science’s answers are currently incomplete and significant questions remain. Like so many other creationists, Mr. Admin sees the existence of the question as being proof that there is no answer. He does not (or cannot) see an open question as an opportunity to explore and investigate and find new answers that we didn’t know before. It’s a typical conservative Christian objection, and it’s worth mentioning as a real-life example of how Christianity promotes a mental environment that is hostile to scientific advancement.

Now compare that with an exchange I had recently with an atheist who, because I granted him superhero status and the title “Hyperbole Boy” has concluded that there is no better example of a Christian being unloving, for, after all (and he cites passages), Jesus was so nice. This sort of disproportionate response to what I said is exactly why I gave him the name “Hyperbole Boy.”

This post makes it back on the front page of his blog, which might prove confusing for some of his readers, since there’s no obvious link from the front page to the post where he called me “Hyperbole Boy.” Nor is there any link to the article where I listed some appropriate Bible verses–not surprisingly, since in that post I never came anywhere near claiming that there was “no better example [than Mr. Horvath] of a Christian being unloving.” (Speaking of “Hyperbole Boy”!) I merely highlighted the contrast between the supernaturally-enabled loving and inspired response recommended by the New Testament, and the rather lame attempt at name-calling which was the sole substance of Mr. Horvath’s reply. Nor did I mention anything at all about Jesus being nice. Mr. Horvath just put that there to provide a segue into the argument that Jesus could be just as abusive at times, and even more so.

But perhaps my atheistic friend is unaware of instances where Jesus went well beyond such playful jabs. For example, he calls the Pharisees Sons of Satan and Whitewashed Tombs. In Matt 23 he calls them snakes and a brood of vipers. And of course, we all remember his ‘cleansing’ of the temple- probably twice.

There you have it folks. Jesus’ own example is justification for Christians to employ both verbal and (unprovoked) physical violence as a means of dealing with unbelievers, or even believers of whom they do not approve. Though in Jesus’ case, the abusive response was not his only response. He at least attempted to provide a substantial rebuttal to what he considered to be false teachings.

My atheistic friend acts as though if I had played it completely straight he would have considered Christianity more credible. Is it his view that Jesus was a panzy? Do people find Christianity attractive because its founder was a wuss?

It’s quite revealing that Mr. Horvath equates giving a respectful and substantive response with being a wuss and a pansy. And he seems to have completely missed the point that the most significant flaw in his response is not that it contained “playful jabs,” but that it made no attempt to contain anything else, as has been typical of all his responses thus far. I do not fault him for this lack, however. It’s Christianity’s fault for failing to provide him with any substantive material that could be used in rebuttal.

At the same time, we often hear complaints about conduct in the Bible where people are wiped out and killed wholesale.  We aren’t usually given the reasons, but we are told that it is just.  This is considered a perfect example of how religion is evil.

More precisely, it’s an example of how Christian morality is just as much a matter of relativism as anything Christians accuse atheists of. The genocide of the Amalekites, for example, is supposedly ok morally, on the grounds that it happened to be God’s will at the time. This despite the fact that when we look at the real world, we observe that God Himself does not actually show up. Men simply attribute their actions to God, or to God’s will, and thereby link their actions (right or wrong) with God’s authority. The Christian morality of a particular behavior is not determined by anything intrinsic in the behavior itself, or in the consequences of such behavior, but is determined by how persuasively the person can argue that the given behavior was consistent with God’s will at the time. In practice this works out to be arbitrary, self-justifying, and a perfect example of moral relativism in action.

Atheists are going to have to make up their minds.  Do they want a Jesus meek and mild?  Or do they want a Jesus that administers justice?

Let’s start with a Jesus who actually exists outside the stories, superstitions, and subjective feelings of men, shall we? We’re not dealing with a Jesus who shows up in real life and behaves either meekly or aggressively. We’re dealing with a Jesus who universally and consistently does not show up in real life, and with men who, in his absence, tell stories about him that are inconsistent with themselves and with real-world truth. None of us were around when the original Jesus originally walked this earth, so our only way of judging the truth of the Gospel is to see how consistent it is with the truth we do have access to, and with itself.

The truth is that there is a balance.  The problem is how do we discover that balance.  The argument is over what world view best explains the fact that there is a balance at all.  I see no reason at all to expect atheism to explain why such moral realities exist.  I expect them only to take them for granted and use them when it suits them to judge God, Jesus, and yes, of course, Christians.

As I’ve explained before, there is a perfectly secular reason for morality, and it lies in the nature of the consequences produced by the behavior in question. Mr. Horvath gives us a good example of Christian moral relativism in action: he has had ample opportunity to observe that there is a secular basis for morality, and in fact Christians themselves appeal to the same, secular system for assessing the morality of things like drug abuse and stem cell research. Yet he continues to try and create the dishonest impression that atheists have no way to explain the existence of “moral realities.” For the Christian, such deceits are not wrong, because they are necessary in order to defend the Gospel. The morality of the deception is defined relative to its apologetic utility.

You can find the original article here.

I think that you will see that I was really working on a whole different set of points. Namely, I was arguing in relation to the Maine birth control incident that we have got to be careful in our deference to scientists and ‘experts.’

Which of course is why he spent the first four paragraphs talking about Watson putting his foot in it and this just goes to show that you shouldn’t give scientists “undue regard.” He was talking about the school board in Maine. Of course, how silly of me.

While Horvath is trying to figure out what Watson’s allegedly innocent remarks have to do with scientists getting undue regard, I’d like to turn to the more interesting topic that came up during our conversation: why all morality has an atheistic foundation, and why Christian morality can’t work without turning to atheistic principles.

The problem with Christian morality, as with Christianity in general, is that God does not literally show up in real life. This is one fact that everybody can verify for themselves, by direct, first-hand observation. And because God does not show up in real life, it is completely irrelevant what His moral standards would be if He were willing and able to tell us about them. He is not here. He does not speak. This is an absence with an inescapable consequence.

In this case the inescapable consequence is that, since we can’t know what God’s moral standards are, we have no choice but to take the Christians’ word for it. No doubt this is entirely to their satisfaction, but it’s not faith in God or obedience to God. If we let Christians tell us what God’s moral standards, are, we’re putting our faith in men, not in God, and we’re obeying men, not obeying God.

What’s worse, we can’t just take the Christians’ word for it, because they don’t all speak the same word. Each Christian follows whatever interpretation seems right in his own eyes, or else takes some other Christian (e.g. a pastor) who is preaching whatever interpretation seems right in his own eyes, and just takes their word for it. (In theory this is a violation of sola scriptura, but it’s common and even unavoidable in practice.)

Nor does it help that each Christian can give you an argument for why the interpretation that seems right in their own eyes really is the “correct” interpretation. Kids seem to be born with an innate capacity for self-justification; almost as soon as they can talk, they can give you an argument for why they’re right and mom and dad are wrong. Part of “that which seems right in your own eyes” is that you’re convinced you’ve got compelling reasons why your way is right and others are wrong. And you love to tell people about it, at length.

And again, because God does not show up in real life to tell us who got it right and who got it wrong, each Christian can believe whatever interpretation seems right in his own eyes, without ever needing to fear that anyone else will be able to conclusively and objectively demonstrate any error in his opinions. Talk about moral relativism! Catholic and Orthodox traditions at least lend a certain objectivity and continuity to their doctrines by requiring compliance with Apostolic Tradition, but even here, in God’s real-world absence, we are left to just take their word for it that they’ve got the right Tradition–and Catholic and Orthodox contradict each other, even about such fundamental issues as the nature of God!

The only other alternative is to say that God does not have to show up in order to communicate His moral standards to us. He can simply make them part of human nature, so that we know them instinctively even without any input on His part. The problem with this approach is twofold. First, this is simply taking the atheistic basis for morality, and “Christianizing” it via the superstitious claim that God is responsible. (That’s what superstition is: taking an observed phenomenon and then attributing it to some unverifiable cause with an unverifiable and often indescribable connection to the effect.)

The second problem with this approach is that not all cultures develop the same moral standards. Nudity, for instance, is perfectly normal and unremarkable in some cultures, whereas in others it’s seen as a sign of moral depravity. You’d think that if God were going to take the trouble to write His moral standards into our hearts, He’d at least write the same standard in everyone! But that’s not what we find.

Christians can excuse this as being the result of sin, but that takes us back to the first problem: if human nature is an unreliable guide to morality, and if God does not show up in real life to give us direct, personal moral guidance, then the only basis we have for our morality is just to take the Christian’s word for it, which we can’t do because they don’t all agree.

Any way you look at it, Christian morality just doesn’t work. If God does not show up in the real world, Christian morality boils down to putting your faith in a bunch of uninspired men, and just taking their word for what’s good and what’s bad, even though they themselves are subject to the same “sin nature” that allegedly made human nature an unreliable guide to morality in the first place. The only method that works objectively and reliably is to take the secular approach and make moral judgments based on consequences. Granted, this does not always give unambiguous answers, but it’s the only approach that does not boil down to just taking the word of someone who is judging according to whatever seems right in his own eyes.

Judging from his last entry, it looks like I’ve stumped him. Always fun to stump an evolutionist and skeptic when you get a chance. I almost don’t want to clear things up because I like the idea that he’s been stewing in my arguments.

I guess if you’re a Christian apologist, it’s quite a kick to give an unclear presentation of your views and then have a skeptic reserve judgment and ask for a clarification so as not to draw unfair conclusions. That doesn’t really sound like “stumping the skeptic” to me, but I guess when Christianity is all you have to work with you have to settle for what you can get. Even if you have to fantasize about the other guy “stewing.”

He does, at least, kinda sorta deny the idea that racism is justified by evolution.

First, I’ve got to get something out of the way.  He says:

Hopefully, Horvath has just argued himself into a corner, and does not really believe the ridiculous notion that intelligence is somehow dependent on skin color.

Now, why would he want me to argue myself into a corner?  That doesn’t seem very nice.

Stumped him, eh? The reason why it’s nicer to have inadvertently argued yourself into a corner than it is to actually believe that skin color determines your intelligence is because in the former case you’ve merely failed to consider the full implications of your argument, whereas in the latter case you are not thinking at all and are merely being racist.

Now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s move on to the part where he concedes that racism cannot be justified merely by making the observation that the distribution of alleles varies across generations due to environmental influences (i.e. evolution)

Merely making the observation isn’t racist, just like observing that person x has blue eyes and person y has brown eyes isn’t being racist.  To get to that point, you actually have to start down the road of assuming the superiority and/or inferiority of one or the other.

Exactly. Thank you Mr. Horvath. An observation is neither an ethical system nor a source of ethical values. The prejudiced assumptions come from outside the observation. The racist assumptions come from outside of the study of evolution.

Sadly, Mr. Horvath’s views on this topic are not self-consistent, as he goes on to point out.

But Darwinism is all about explaining things in terms of reproduction and survival of the fittest.   Either we have evolved as Darwinism says or we have not.  If we have, than we are perfectly in our rights to discriminate however we please to try to further our own genes.

As I mentioned before, the evidence is so incontrovertible that even die-hard creationists have had to turn to cooked-up versions of “micro-” versus “macro-” evolution, and have switched from species to “kinds” (meaning something that has no definable characteristics except that it allows individual species to evolve while still giving creationists some kind of undocumentable, magical barrier across which no evolution can occur). So it’s not really a question of if evolution happens. New species do arise by descent with modifications from common ancestors, just as Darwin said.

But look at the colossal non sequitur that Horvath derives from this observation. If new species evolve from common ancestors, that means we are perfectly in our rights to discriminate?? What the heck does Christianity do to people’s intellects anyway? Just because the environment has an influence on the distribution of alleles in a population across multiple generations, that means our actions no longer have any desirable or undesirable consequences to provide us with a real-world basis for our moral standards of right and wrong? How exactly does that work? Do the consequences stop happening? Does murder stop killing people? Does rape no longer cause any pain, humiliation, suffering, and possibly pregnancy?

It’s really sad that Christians have worked so hard on creating a dependency on God that they can no longer engage intelligently in even the most trivial exercises in ethical thinking. It’s really not that hard to see the connection between how we perceive the consequences of an action, and whether we see that action as “good” or “bad.” It don’t take no gol-durn pee-aitch-dee. To disagree with a secular basis for morality is one thing. To say you prefer a different system is one thing. But to be completely unable to even perceive the existence of alternatives to one’s ethical system–that’s nasty.

I know, I was a Christian once, and was subject to the same group-think. It’s not really Horvath’s fault, and I’m sure he’d have no problem speaking to this issue honestly and intelligently if he weren’t so motivated to spread the slanderous insinuation that non-Christians have no ethics.

I really must deal with this “Horvath is a racist insinuation” that came out of his first reply. In the article that I cited, Watson does not argue from Darwinism to racism, rather he argues that there genetics may have an effect on intelligence. Herr Professor like a lot of other skittish skeptics and scientists knee-jerked there [sic] way into describing this as ‘racist.’

Now remember, Watson’s original comment, which Horvath quoted and which he apparently finds to be entirely lacking in racism, is this:

Dr Watson said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”.

The article Horvath linked to goes on to report that Watson

… was quoted as saying his hope is that everyone is equal but that “people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true”.

Sure, nothing racist about that, right? Not according to Horvath.

Watson was denying that he meant anything racist by what he said, and at least in the quotations in that article, there wasn’t anything particularly ‘racist.’

Hmmm, ok, let’s move on.

Horvath seems to think he’s accomplished some great coup by belaboring the obvious link between intelligence and genetics, and between genetics and Darwin, as though this were somehow relevant to the question of racism. But what would this have to do with race? Unless one were to assume that Watson was correct about people of African descent being (allegedly) less intelligent than “us”?

Horvath tries to insist that he’s only agreeing with Watson about genetics having something to do with intelligence.

Thus, if anyone needed any evidence that there can be genetic influences on intelligence, one need not look any further. Thus, my agreement with Watson would be on this point and this point only. The Professor along with Watson’s many detractors seems to think that making this observation alone is tantamount to being racist.

Well, no, the racism comes from saying things like “their intelligence is not the same as ours” and “anyone who has dealt with black employees knows that it’s not true that all people are equal.” Even Horvath originally agreed that “that’s putting your foot in it.” He sure wasn’t saying that there was “nothing racist” about Watson’s remarks in his first post. And if Watson was not really making racist remarks, then why did Horvath highlight Watson as the headliner for a post about scientists behaving badly?

Moving on…

Now, he continues to focus on my emphasis on the ethical indiscretions of scientists. There is a reason for it, and namely it is this: people are giving undue regard to scientists.

Nonsense. That’s like citing a few examples of spectacular plane crashes and then saying that people are putting “undue confidence” in the safety of air travel. If anything, scientists are getting far less than their due regard, especially in the field of biology (which is the biologist’s area of expertise, thankyouverymuch) and medicine (no, plant roots will not make your penis grow longer) and global warming (maybe we should consider taking action before it becomes undeniable and irreversible?). If Horvath thinks there’s some particular issue where scientists are receiving undue regard, perhaps he should mention what that issue is so that we can consider it on its own merits instead of making a vague, universal attempt to diminish people’s respect for science.

I thought it ironic that Herr Professor thought that Dawkins, a zoologist, was no longer speaking outside his field when he addressed religion, because, well, he wrote a book defending his views, didn’t he?

That’s not ironic, it’s merely inaccurate. Perhaps he should re-read my post, and notice that it nowhere makes the claim that he attributes to me. But I suppose he has to criticize me for something, even if he has to invent it himself.

But there’s a nugget of gold in all of this, er, “ore.”

My argument is that if evolution is true, there is no place outside of Darwinism to derive value judgments.

Speaking of irony, he claims that biologists are outside their field when addressing ethical issues, and yet here he is insisting that biological observations regarding the distribution of alleles are somehow the proper and exclusive domain for ethical questions as well. This is nonsense. Biology and ethics are separate fields, and are separately derived. His argument is like saying “If evolution is true, there is no place outside of Darwinism to derive tomorrow’s weather forecast.”

And by the way, evolution is true, which is why creationists have had to come up with their own versions of the terms “microevolution” and “macroevolution.” Even the much ballyhoo-ed Creation Museum that just opened up had to include an exhibit claiming that most of today’s species arose by descent with variation from a smaller number of common ancestors on board the Ark. The whole idea of kinds (or “baramins”) stems from the fact that even creationists can no longer deny the evidence that says new species arise via descent with modification from common ancestors. That’s why it’s such a big deal to claim that evolution somehow justifies racism.

Herr Professor is certainly right: the rejection of racism, and why it is wrong emerges from outside of Darwinism. It is essentially borrowed capital from Christianity.

Oh, yes, the Bible is certainly famous for its impassioned rejection of ideas like the notion that Jews ought to be given preference over Arabs in questions of Palestinian land ownership, just because they are the “children of Israel.” Or is it, perhaps, that humanistic ideals like the equality of all races (including individuals outside the church) have gradually infiltrated Christian thinking, as so many pastors have warned us about?

Bluntly: racism is rejected as ‘wrong’ because it is accepted in practice that there is in fact an objective morality as maintained by Christians.

Well of course there is an objective morality, and has been since before the Jews, let alone the Christians. Morality comes from society’s experience of the consequences of certain actions. Bad consequences mean the action is bad, and good consequences mean the action is good. Christianity is not the source of morality; heck, it isn’t even particularly good at conforming to objective morality, as both the Bible and church history inform us. Even God is not above calling for the odd genocide now and then, despite the fact that genocide is morally evil.

Think about it: is there any “sin” which God could never commit, on the grounds that God is good and sin is evil? If you say that there are things a good God can never do, you are admitting that there is a standard of right and wrong which is superior to God Himself. Otherwise, if right and wrong were defined solely in terms of what God wants or doesn’t want, then nothing is wrong in and of itself, and if God wants to do it (e.g. commit genocide)–or wants someone else to do it for Him–then by definition that action is good, even if it’s murder, lying, rape, oppression, or what have you. And since God never shows up in real life to tell us what His moral standards are, His followers are left to adopt whatever interpretation of morality seems right in their own eyes–the ultimate relativism, since it is both dogmatic and subjective.

Let me close with a challenge to Mr. Horvath, based on the following claim.

I oppose racism on principled grounds that can be traced back to some objective standard which I ought to adhere to whether I like it or not.

Show me your “objective” standard, which is not my secular standard of consequences, and is not merely a subjective interpretation of ancient writings (you did say “objective standard,” right?). If you think you’ve got a moral standard that is objectively real and not just whatever seems right in your own eyes, then show it to me out in the real world where it allegedly exists and we can all see it.

Writing for Baylor University’s Lariat Online, Dr. Roger Olson provides us with a striking example of the damage one’s natural moral sense can suffer when exposed to too much Christian dogma. While he’s at it, he demonstrates a certain impairment in intellectual integrity as well.

We have to recognize atheists’ full freedom to believe God does not exist, but we don’t have to embrace atheism as a social good. In fact, I would argue that atheism has no redeeming social value.

Atheism undermines values. How? Let’s look at care for others. Yes, an individual atheist might care for other people. But when have you heard of an entire atheist organization serving the poor, the sick or the hungry?

So far, at least, atheists haven’t demonstrated their concern for others in any organized way.

So according to Dr. Olson’s Christian ethical system, it’s perfectly ok to slander atheists and tell lies about the number of secular charitable organizations that go around doing good works (CARE, UNICEF, Lions, Shriners, Rotary Club, etc). Secular charities exist, they just don’t boast about their good works as much as Christians do. Christian charitable organizations ignore Jesus’ command to be discrete in charitable works, and instead brag about their giving (even though they’re doing it primarily to convert their “beneficiaries” to their own faith), in part so that people like Dr. Olson can brag about how God motivates people to be charitable.

What Dr. Olson is saying is that acts of charity come exclusively from God. He’s denying that natural human compassion and empathy exist. Christianity has brought him to the point that the only reason he can see for charity is the selfish motive that God offers us by promising a greater reward in heaven (and greater status in the church) for those who do good works. Because he is a Christian, he no longer has any intrinsic, natural motivation to help those in need. The only motive he can conceive of has to be an external motive. At one time, he probably had a normal amount of natural empathy for his fellow man, just as the rest of us do. But long exposure to Christianity has brought him to the point that he can no longer even see the existence of a natural, charitable moral sense in anyone–himself or others.

By the way, Christian charitable organizations are constantly begging for money, and failing to fully carry out their mission due to lack of financial support. Atheists, like a lot of other people, tend to believe that society ought to help the needy, but they’re more likely to support tax-funded (i.e. non-optional) care, which so-called compassionate Christians tend to despise. Apparently God feels better when the needy are kept in a constant state of wondering whether or not their basic human needs are going to be met.

But more importantly, atheism undermines values such as care for others because it cannot explain why anyone should care for others. If there is no God or anything at all above nature, then nature is all there is. The law of nature is survival of the fittest. Why help the less fit survive unless there is a God who loves them because they are created in his image?

It’s sad to see an otherwise intelligent man so intellectually and morally crippled by his faith that he can no longer intelligently discuss the subject of ethics. Where before Dr. Olson was implying the non-existence of human compassion and empathy, he now denies that human life has any value in and of itself. Obviously, if human life had any intrinsic value, then atheists would have a reason to care about it. But in order to praise his God (and thus himself) as the source of compassion, Dr. Olson has to surrender any sense that men and women are valuable and important, including the weak and needy.

The appeal to “survival of the fittest” is particularly pathetic. At best, it’s a scientific observation of how things are, not a ethical mandate of how things should be. Appealing to “survival of the fittest” to justify cruelty is like insisting that umbrellas are immoral because it’s natural to get wet when you go out in the rain, or that indoor plumbing is evil because animals just poop wherever they are. Surely an intelligent person ought to be able to come up with a better ethical basis than that! Even if they’re Christian.

What argument can atheism marshal against “might makes right”?

Kind of ironic, coming from someone who thinks God gets to decide morality because He’s omnipotent. The atheist answer is simple: most of us aren’t mighty, and therefore can make the impartial and verifiable observation that might makes mistakes as often as meek does. Christians are using their current political power to oppress gays and justify the war in Iraq, but that doesn’t mean they’re right.

Many atheists argue that caring for others can be encouraged based on self-interest.

But what answer can an atheist give (that is consistent with atheism) to the question, “What if I figure out a way to be personally happy and fulfilled while oppressing other people?”

There is no answer to that without appeal to someone transcendent to whom we are all accountable.

Not without using a bit of insight and plain old common sense, anyway. The answer is that if you figure out a way to be personally happy and fulfilled while oppressing other people, and you put it into practice, the rest of us will think you are evil, and our assessment of you will endure longer than you will. Humanity remembers that kind of thing, which is where our morality comes from in the first place. Plus that kind of thinking inevitably isolates you. Do you think Saddam was happy and fulfilled before the invasion? In real life, oppression does not produce happiness and fulfillment. Olson’s notion of fulfillment through persecution is an unrealistic fantasy.

And atheism has no answer to social Darwinism — the idea that society should not help the weak because it’s nature’s way to weed out the less fit.

Helping the weak goes against nature and if nature is all there is, well, why should we fight it? A person might choose to, but not because of any transcendent, objective obligation (such as that all persons are created in God’s image).

You know what? The Bible says nothing–nothing–about indoor toilets. If this is the best Dr. Olson’s Gospel-based ethics can come up with, he ought to be crapping on his own carpet, or in his bed at night. Nature is God’s revelation too, after all. And God is supposedly is the Lawgiver for the laws of nature. Modern sanitary facilities go against nature (and thus against God) just as much as helping the weak does, and even more so, since most of us have a natural sense of compassion and empathy for our fellow humans.

Honestly, can you believe that a PhD university professor would seriously post such silliness? But he can’t help it: his own natural moral sense has been corrupted by the Christian need to boast in God (and thus in themselves).

Not only does atheism undermine values; it also undermines meaning. I’m talking about meaningful reality — life with meaning and purpose…

The only logical option for the atheist is nihilism — belief that nothing has any objective meaning or purpose.

Küng admitted that atheism is a rational “basic choice” and it cannot be proven wrong in any kind of absolute way.

But most atheists demonstrate their basic trust in the meaningfulness of reality by being outraged at evil and injustice, thereby demonstrating that atheism cannot be lived out consistently.

The only thing Olson is demonstrating is his own confusion. The “meaningfulness of reality” is rooted in the fact that things have meaning in and of themselves. Olson is forced to deny this in order to claim that his God is the only source for meaning in reality. Sunsets are not beautiful, pain does not hurt, food does not satisfy hunger, in and of themselves. Rape is not wrong, genocide is not evil, lying is not bad, in and of themselves. The only meaning that Dr. Olson finds in life is whatever arbitrary meaning some third-party God feels like assigning to things at the time. Which is why, for example, it was “good” for God to order the complete and utter genocide of the Amalekites, and why it was “evil” for Saul to fail to take this genocide to the extreme of killing all their animals as well as their men, women and children.

What makes something evil or unjust if nothing like God exists — if nature is all there is? Only subjective choice either by an individual or a society. But that can change and it often does. Without God, the social prophet has no way out of relativism.

Dr. Olson’s “stumper” is not even a difficult question. What makes a thing evil and unjust are the consequences. That’s why genocide is wrong in the Old Testament and it’s still wrong today. That’s why lying is wrong even when you’re saying things that make the Gospel sound better. That’s why we can say that there are some things that would be evil even if God did them–it’s not up to God, it’s up to the consequences.

This is not an intellectually difficult concept to grasp. Society gets its sense of moral right and wrong by its experience of the consequences of things. God does not show up in real life, so we even get our idea of what God’s morals are by seeing what consequences result (for example, in the case of drug abuse and and software piracy, neither of which is mentioned in the Bible). But Dr. Olson can’t see it. He’s lost his natural moral sense, his instinctive sense of compassion for the needy, and his ability to perceive the value of human individuals in and of themselves, all because of his faith.

Christianity is morally corrosive.