As America gets increasingly secular, there has been much public debate about whether God is necessary when it comes to morality. Since this topic has wrought much confusion, I should be very careful and first define what I mean by morality. I do NOT mean that the debate is over whether or not people can be good without God. People generally agree, on both sides of the fence, that people can do good acts and hold strong moral convictions regardless of what your particular belief system is. Instead, the debate is over whether or not any system of morality can be objectively grounded without God. If a moral value is objective, it means that it is definitively true even if people do not personally believe in it or act on it.
For example, Hitler thought that what he was doing was moral. Historians have a fairly broad consensus that Hitler was firmly convicted that his actions were in the best interest of the world. Rather than being a madman, or a nihilist, Hitler was a social Darwinist who thought that the concept of "survival of the fittest" applied to Germany and the Aryan race. It was for the good of the world for the Nazis to conquer everyone and impose a Third Reich; Hitler envisioned a global utopia that would be stable for millenia.
Now, nearly everyone today believes that Hitler was immoral. But what if Hitler had won the war, and killed everybody who disagreed with him? It is at least plausible that under this bleak scenario, there could have instead been a world where Hitler's ethos was universally viewed as morally sublime. So when it comes to discussions about morality, you cannot simply refer to people's beliefs or the current moral landscape. For a moral value to be truly binding, it has to be true regardless of what various people actually believe. In the words of the classic rock band Boston: "it's more than a feeling."
Traditionally, secular scholars such as Neitzsche or Burtrand Russell who denied God considered objective morality to be impossible. They were amoralists, "Beyond Good and Evil." Recently, however, a host of secular thinkers have been propounding that science, not God, is the true basis for objective morality. For example, the secular neuroscientist Sam Harris published a book called 'The Moral Landscape' that establishes science as the best basis for morality.
But CAN science define morality? Over the next few posts, I will examine the claims made by secular scholars that science can define an objective morality. Since today's post is already getting long, I will begin with an easy one.
There was recently an article on CNN entitled "Face It: Monogamy is Unnatural." In this post, the columnist argues that because mammals in nature have been well observed to exhibit infidelity, humans should not be expected to maintain their monogamy either. This viewpoint of looking to nature for morality is also held by scientists such as Lawrence Krauss, who argues that homoxesuality is moral because mammals in nature exhibit homosexuality.
The idea that we can look at the natural world and animal kingdom to determine what is allowable behavior is what I term "Naturalistic Morality." Here are my two glaring logical issues with Naturalistic Morality:
1) Simply to argue that human morals can be deduced from animal behavior is itself a moral statement. Even plenty of secular people do not share this moral philosophy, as they consider humans to be a unique category of animal life due to our consciousness and highly evolved brains. What is the foundational basis for claiming that because monkeys or mice perform a certain behavior, so can humans? The very foundation of this philosophy is extremely subjective and arbitrary.
2) Perhaps even worse, even people who argue for Naturalistic Morality do not fully believe it. Let me give two examples: the very same people who argue that polygamy is acceptable for humans because bears exhibit polygamous behavior would never argue that it is moral for humans to eat their babies live, as male bears are well known to do. Here is another example: gorillas in the Congo are known to attack rival camps of gorillas and viciously beat them to death. Yet is anyone arguing that this morally justifies the tribal genocide that happened in Rwanda or Germany?
Unless anybody can offer a sound defense for these two objections, it would seem that any basis for an objective moral system requires a foundation besides "Monkey see, monkey do." The very basis of human society and civilization rests of the ideal that humans are distinct from other animals. We do not have to act on our natural impulses, we can deny them for the sake of a higher cause and to selflessly love each other. To take away this dignity of the human race would only serve to erode the very morals that have elevated us far above the naturalistic brutality of the animal kingdom.
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