CAN EVOLUTION ADEQUATELY ACCOUNT FOR AND SUSTAIN MORALITY?

While nearly all of us agree that we are wired to make certain moral judgments, we disagree from where the wiring originates. While evolutionists claim that we evolved moral intuitions through a mindless, purposeless process for adaptive reasons, theists invoke God. However, the account of evolution encounters numerous problems.

1.    For one thing, evolution reduces morality to mere biochemical reactions or intuitions. This raises the question of whether or not we should even bother to obey our moral impulses.

·       Why should I obey my biochemical instincts? They need not command my life if they are no more than reactions. I’d rather do what I feel like doing. Besides, these reactions only tell me what “is”; they do not tell me what I “ought” to do.

2.    No one will obey all of their moral impulses. Some are actually contradictory. Some of our impulses lead us to act altruistically; others selfishly. Even worse, some of our impulses are evil, like sadism, revenge, rape, bitterness, and hatred. If it is just about biochemical impulses, how do we decide which to obey and which to restrain? It seems must be a higher moral law that mediates over our instincts.

It can be argued that this “higher moral law” is no more than another biochemical instinct. However, we do not experience it in this manner. Instead, this law seems to be able to dispassionately mediate over our competing instincts/drives in a non-instinctual and non-reactive way.

3.    It seems that we are unable to resist the impulse that these moral intuitions represent as higher objective moral law, which ought to be obeyed. C.S. Lewis famously reasoned that making moral judgments is unavoidable:

·       "Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promises to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining, ‘It’s not fair.’"

·       "If we do not believe in decent behavior, why should we be so anxious to make excuses for not having behaved decently? The truth is we believe in decency so much—we feel the Rule of Law pressing on us so—that we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we try to shift the responsibility." (Mere Christianity)

Perhaps, then, we have to accept our moral intuitions that morality is more than just the sum of our biochemical reactions.

Perhaps we need to regard our moral instincts as we do music. We perceive that music has a life of its own that transcends the sum of its notes. And if we are willing to trust our sense about music, perhaps we also should regarding our sense about morality.

Can the evolutionary worldview sustain a conviction that our moral reasoning is paramount and ought to be obeyed? Not if it is just a biochemical reaction. It then will be regarded as no more authoritative than a fire alarm bell that sounds when there is no real fire.

FROM WHERE DID OUR MORAL WIRING COME?

Virtually everyone now agrees that we are wired to know and to respond to moral truth. But from where did this wiring come? Many believe that it is merely the product of a mindless process – evolution. Others claim that this wiring must come from God, as the Bible asserts (Romans 2:14-16).

An atheist therefore asked:

·       "But what convinces you that morality has a supernatural origin?"

I listed some reasons that I thought might appeal to him:

1. Even when we deny that our moral wiring comes from God, we cannot act as if it's just the product of a mindless process. When someone cuts in line in front of us, we protest, “You have no RIGHT to do this.” This reflects the fact that we take this common moral law very seriously – more than just a biochemical reaction.

2. It contains beautiful design and harmony (ID). When I do something wrong, I feel badly. When I apologize, I feel relieved. When forgiven, I feel restored.

3. I now have a confidence that I had never before experience, knowing that even God forgives my sins.

4. Humanity uses the same avoidance techniques they use to avoid God as they do their troubling conscience. This suggests that there is a strong tie between God and conscience.

5. Conscience is so hard-wired into us that all of our attempts to silence it -- drugs, denying freewill, denial, moral relativism, evolution, masochism, good deeds -- have utterly failed. It would seem that a God does not want to let us out of His grasp or to give us an easy excuse for our misconduct.

6. When we live in accordance with our conscience, we live the fullest life, as the ancient philosophers have asserted.

When we deny that our conscience is God-given, we give room for moral horrors. Before his execution, serial killer, Ted Bundy, confessed how the rejection of God had affected his life:

·       “Then I learned that all moral judgments are ‘value judgments,’ that all value judgments are subjective [it just depends on how you think about them], and that none can be proved to be either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’…I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable “value judgment that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these ‘others?’ Other human beings with human rights? Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig or a sheep or a steer? Is your life more to you than a hog’s life to a hog? Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more for the one than for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as ‘moral’ or ‘good’ and others as ‘immoral’ or ‘bad’? In any case, let me assure you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no comparison between the pleasure I might take in eating ham and the pleasure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion to which my education has led me – after the most conscientious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self.” (“Christian Research Journal,” Vol 33, No 2, 2010, 32)

ARE OUR MORAL FEELINGS JUST A MATTER OF BIOCHEMISTRY?

An atheist responded that even if there is a God, this doesn’t mean that we should believe that our moral impulses have been wired into us by God:

·       “The problem I see with basing morality on an external source is that we will inevitably question its validity because we are capable of thinking about it, critically.”

Here is my response:

Agreed! You should “question its validity.” But let’s back up for a moment. We have already agreed that humanity is wired to know certain moral truths. If so, the question becomes this:

·       If we are wired to know that rape and genocide are objectively wrong, is this wiring just a matter of biochemistry or is it pointing to an objective moral law beyond ourselves.

Are our moral impulses like the impulses that our eyes receive, telling us about an objective physical world, or are our moral impulses simply imposing upon us moral feelings that have nothing to do with an objective moral order?

If we conclude that they are telling us about a moral law (as our eyes tell us about physical laws, especially through systematic observation), then we have to ask about the origin of this moral law.

ARGUMENT FOR GOD FROM ALTRUISM AND HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY

Science agrees that we have been wired to make specific moral judgments. In fact, it has been well noted that these judgments develop in tandem with our neurological development.

However, we differ in regards to the origins of this wiring – whether it’s evolution or God who has done the wiring. Evolution is based upon the understanding that evolutionary development is guided by the possible survival value our wiring gives us. According to this thinking, we have been wired with emotions that maximize a survival advantage and  the likelihood of passing on our superior genetic inheritance to the next generation. However, this understanding fails to adequately explain why we humans have altruistic motivations.

Here is why the God paradigm is superior to that of evolution:

1. We derive a deep moral satisfaction by doing the right thing.

2. While certain forms of altruism might be construed as giving humanity a survival advantage, the evolutionary understanding of altruism and our other psychological tendencies is inadequate.

3. Evolution cannot explain our deepest moral proclivities. However, the hypothesis that we are created in God’s moral likeness can explain these.

PREMISE #1  We derive a deep moral satisfaction by doing the right thing.

Humanity tends to value forgiveness, confession of wrongdoing, acts of love, and even loving our enemies. Although we might not derive immediate benefit from these behaviors, we tend to derive a deep satisfaction when we act in accord with our most deeply held values.

Mental health professionals recognize that living in accordance with our moral wiring is an important factor for mental health, although perhaps not for passing on our genes. Accordingly, Karen Wright wrote,

• "Eudaimonia refers to a state of well-being and full functioning that derives from a sense of living in accordance with one’s deeply held values."

Many have recognized a connection between happiness (sometimes referred to as “eudaimonia”) and the virtuous life:

• Plato argues that virtues are states of the soul, and that the just person is someone whose soul is ordered and harmonious, with all its parts functioning properly to the person’s benefit. In contrast, Plato argues that the unjust man’s soul, without the virtues, is chaotic and at war with itself, so that even if he were able to satisfy most of his desires, his lack of inner harmony and unity thwart any chance he has of achieving eudaimonia. Plato’s ethical theory is eudaimonistic because it maintains that eudaimonia depends on virtue. (Virtue is necessary for eudaimonia.) On Plato’s version of the relationship, virtue is depicted as the most crucial and the dominant constituent of eudaimonia. (Wikipedia)

Indeed, disharmony creates peace-depriving conflict. This is one of the reasons that we obsess. Obsession is a normal attempt to harmonize our thinking and moral intuitions with the rest of our lives. When these are in disharmony, peace is replaced by an endless running of obsessive mental tapes, seeking a way out – a place of peace.

Gautama Buddha recognized these truths and provided an eightfold strategy to avoid suffering and to restore peace known as the “middle way,” sandwiched between the extremes of self-denial and self-indulgence:

• "This is the noble truth of the way leading to the cessation of suffering: it is the Noble Eightfold Path; that is, right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration."

For Buddha, Positive Psychologists, and even AA, there are certain objective principles – principles articulated in the Bible - like forgiveness and gratefulness, to which we must adhere for the sake of our peace-of-mind.  

Even atheists perceive these positive principles but pride themselves that they can be good without God. For them, morality is simply a matter of expedience, what provides the desired benefits. Atheist, humanist, and author of the Humanist Manifesto II, Paul Kurtz, affirms that pragmatism – the results - is the “only” possible justification for morality:

• "How are these [moral] principles to be justified? They are not derived from a divine or natural law nor do they have a special metaphysical [beyond the material world] status. They are rules offered to govern how we shall behave. They can be justified only by reference to their results."

However, this stance is at odds with itself. It affirms moral principles but not because they are objectively moral in themselves. Rather, altruism and other-centeredness is promoted for self-centered reasons – “their results.” Therefore, when we help our enemy, we are not doing it because it is the right thing to do, but because it brings favorable results.

It was this kind of thinking that turned me into a selfish nihilist in my first year at college. I had been volunteering in a project to help the disadvantaged but became increasingly aware that I was doing this for myself. I reasoned that if it’s all about me, then I should be genuine about it. I therefore quit the program to pursue what I now saw as the genuine truth – my own welfare.

Evolutionists also share this problem. While certain forms of altruism might be construed as giving humanity a survival advantage, the evolutionary understanding of altruism is necessarily self-centered and, therefore, not truly altruistic. Therefore, the theory of evolution cannot embrace a true, non-self-centered altruism.

PREMISE #2  While certain forms of altruism might be construed as giving humanity a survival advantage, the evolutionary understanding of altruism and our other psychological tendencies is inadequate.

In fact, humanity seems to possess many gratuitous traits, like our enjoyment of music, dance, and literature, that defy a Darwinian explanation. We are even psychologically constituted to seek to understand our place in the world and to comprehend our purpose and meaning within it. The late Jewish philosopher and theologian, Abraham Heschel, asserted this very thing:

• “It’s not enough for me to be able to say ‘I am’; I want to know who I am and in relation to whom I live. It is not enough for me to ask questions; I want to know how to answer the one question that seems to encompass everything I face: What am I here for?”

Such an introspective trait seems to exceed and defy what the evolutionary paradigm can reasonably explain. It might even interfere with the business of survival and passing on the human genetic inheritance. Just ask Hamlet!

John M. Gottman, professor of psychology and cofounder of The Gottman Institute for marriage improvement wrote about another gratuitous human requirement – the need for honor, respect, and appreciation:

• “The typical conflict-resolution advice won’t help. Instead, you need to understand the bottom-line difference that is causing the conflict between you—and learn how to live with it by honoring and respecting each other.” 

If our heads are cluttered with these additional psychological needs, the pursuit for survival and passing on our genes is somewhat displaced. It would therefore seem that these needs would not provide any survival advantage. Instead, they might even prove disadvantageous.

In “The Significant Life,” attorney George M. Weaver has made a strong case that the drive to establish our self-importance is so compelling that it even eclipses the drive for survival:

• Individual humans are not concerned so much about the survival of the species as they are about their personal survival or significance. In order to push ourselves beyond our confining space-time limits, we as individuals try to set ourselves apart from the rest of humanity. It is unsettling to admit that one is average or ordinary – a routine person. (7)

Weaver documents this convincingly. Even those who commit horrific self-destructive acts do so to establish their importance:

• In 2005 Joseph Stone torched a Pittsfield, Massachusetts apartment building… After setting the blaze, Stone rescued several tenants from the fire and was hailed as a hero. Under police questioning, Stone admitted, however, that he set the fire and rescued the tenants because, as summarized at trial by an assistant district attorney, he “wanted to be noticed, he wanted to be heard, he wanted to be known.” (44)

Evidently, this drive for significance is so powerful that it can overrule the drive for survival. One mass-murderer gunman explained in his suicide note, “I’m going to be f_____ famous.” (45)

This need to be famous is potentially anti-social. It detracts from the viability of the social group by creating fragmentation. But how can the biblical paradigm account for this human drive? When we do not find our significance in God, we are psychologically coerced to pursue it elsewhere.

This drive for significance can be so compelling that we will sacrifice our future for it. Weaver reports that:

• More than two hundred people confessed in 1932 to the kidnapping and murder of the infant son of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh. (50)

If humanity had always evolved in a way that would confer a survival advantage, it is hard to explain many of our individualistic human traits. Instead, if we had more of a group-oriented nature like the ants or the bees, we might have fared better.

Also, from the perspective of evolution, our altruistic moral wiring will only confer a survival advantage when we act altruistically towards those who will reciprocate. We should only forgive those who can repay our forgiveness. If instead we forgive our enemies, they may interpret this as weakness, which might encourage them to attack us.

Likewise, we should only confess our wrongdoing when we can derive a clear benefit. After all, such a confession can be used against us. Also, we should only love those who are in a position to repay us.

CONCLUSION: Evolution cannot explain our deepest moral/psychological proclivities. However, the hypothesis that we are created in God’s moral likeness can explain these.

It is also highly ironic that a book completed 2000 years ago could more accurately explain the human condition than the “scientific” fruits of our modern age.