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)

ARGUMENT FOR GOD FROM THE CONSCIENCE

For many, the moral argument for the existence of God doesn’t work. They are willing to say that there is nothing objectively wrong about rape, even genocide, and are willing to live with the consequences of moral relativism. However, many of these same people will, nevertheless, claim that we have to live according to the dictates of our conscience. The “Argument for God from the Conscience” might, therefore, speak to them.

In “Handbook of Christian Apologetics,” Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli (K/T) observe:

·       Isn’t it remarkable that no one, even the most consistent subjectivist, believes that it is ever good for anyone to deliberately and knowingly disobey his or her own conscience? Even if different people’s consciences tell them to do or avoid totally different things, there remains one moral absolute for everyone: never disobey your own conscience.

Remarkably, they deem the conscience to have absolute authority, but what would instill within it this authority? K/T list four possibilities and then show the problems with the first three:

1.    From something less than me (nature)

2.    From me (individual)

3.    From others equal to me (society)

4.    From something above me (God)

They show that the first three fail to provide a basis to absolutize our conscience:

1.    From something less than me (nature) K/T write:

·       How can I be absolutely obligated by something less than me..?

Certainly, a TV show or the song that my neighbor is singing cannot obligate me.

2.    From me (individual) K/T again write:

·       How can I obligate myself absolutely? Am I absolute? Do I have the right to demand absolute obedience from anyone, even myself? And if I am the one who locked myself in this prison of obligation, I can also let myself out.

Clearly, there is no reason for my words or decisions to be absolute. If I make them, I can also break them. And why not?

3.    From others equal to me (society) K/T write:

·       How can society obligate me? What right do my equals have to impose their values on me? Does quantity make quality?

I might decide to follow a given law but not because it possesses absolute authority. Instead, we recognize that our laws are evolving and can be challenged. If they were absolute, they could not be challenged or amended. If we could challenge them, this would suggest that we are doing so from a more authoritative, superior, or absolute basis.

If these first three possibilities for a rational foundation for our belief that our conscience absolute is absolute and should never be violated fail, there remains only one other rationale – that our immutable and all-wise God provides that foundation. Only He can provide the rationale to regard our conscience absolute.

It is ironic that the very Being we seek to avoid pops up despite all of our efforts to hide from Him. Of course, when we see that we, once again, are looking into the face of God, we will de-absolutize our conscience and think that we have escaped Him. However, this is His world, His values, and His workmanship. To escape Him is to escape life itself.

Besides, when we reject Him, we also reject ourselves – the ones created in His likeness. How? When we reduce ourselves to mere animals, albeit sophisticated ones, and then reject the fact that we are morally responsible – many deny freewill and objective morality for this reason – and finally reject the sanctity of our conscience, we narrow our lives.

The negative repercussions are numerous. Psychologist James Hillman has written about one:

·       We dull our lives by the way we conceive then…By accepting the idea that I am the effect of…hereditary and social forces, I reduce myself to a result. The more my life is accounted for by what already occurred in my chromosomes, by what my parents did or didn’t do, and by my early years now long past, the more my biography is the story of a victim. I am living a plot written by my genetic code, ancestral heredity, traumatic occasions, parental unconsciousness, societal accidents.

Instead, when we fail to embrace God, the One who has given us food, drink, family, identity, and life, we fail to embrace ourselves, dooming ourselves to a life of endless wandering, looking for our place, which we have already rejected.

4.    From something above me (God)

Moral Unworthiness, Self-Righteousness and the Need to Endure Self-Examination

A polarization of dust-bowl dimensions is sweeping the West. It is not simply the product of growing philosophical differences, but also an absolute contempt for those on the other side.

Why do these differences have to result in contempt and intolerance? Is there hidden psychological baggage that has commandeered this often lethal engagement? Philosopher Charles Taylor thought so. Around 25 years ago, he astutely wrote:

• The threatened sense of unworthiness can also lead to the projection of evil outward; the bad, the failure, is now identified with other people or groups. My conscience is clear because I oppose them, but what can I do? They stand in the way of universal beneficence; they must be liquidated. This becomes particularly virulent on the extremes of the political spectrum.

•  Many young people are driven to political extremism, sometimes by truly terrible conditions, but also by a need to give meaning to their lives. And since meaninglessness is frequently accompanied by a sense of guilt, they sometimes respond to a strong ideology of polarization, in which one recovers a sense of direction as well as a sense of purity by lining up in implacable opposition to the forces of darkness. The more implacable and even violent the opposition, the more the polarity is represented as absolute, and the greater the sense of separation from evil and hence purity. Dostoevsky's Devils is one of the great documents of modern times, because it lays bare the way in which an ideology of universal love and freedom can mask a burning hatred, directed outward onto an unregenerate world and generating destruction and despotism. (“Sources of the Self,” 516-517)

Where does this “sense of unworthiness” come from? Our conscience is pre-packaged with high moral ideals of love, truth, and justice – ideals to which we inevitably fail attain, and we know it. How then do we deal with our resulting, crippling sense of moral failure and unworthiness? We have many strategies:

1.     DENIAL – We merely suppress this painful awareness.

2.     COMPENSATION – We convince ourselves that we are good and worthy people, perhaps through positive affirmations or by surrounding ourselves with others who will affirm us.

3.     RATIONALIZATIONS – We can either tell ourselves that everyone is garbage or that there are no objective standards by which we can be judged.

4.     SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS – We perform good deeds to convince the world (and ourselves) that we are really superior to the vast majority. We also denigrate others in this process.
 

The latter is the most dangerous form. It is what impels young people into what Taylor labels as “political extremism” and “implacable opposition.” This demonizes the opposing party to the extent that the self-righteous believe that they must be eliminated. After all, they represent the forces of darkness and the self-righteous have convinced themselves that they are the forces of goodness.

In contrast to this, there is healthy, necessary, and humble idealism. This idealism is not achieved by convincing ourselves that we are better than others, giving us license to subjugate or eliminate them. Instead, this is an idealism that is cognizant of ourselves and our underlying self-serving motives to use a legitimately righteous cause to promote our self-esteem at the expense of others.

It is also an idealism that is willing to endure continual self-scrutiny, knowing that we are capable of the same evil, which we decry in others. It is also willing to place the welfare of others – even that of the “bad guys” – on par with their own.

But how can we endure this painful light of self-scrutiny or how many of us solicit honest criticism? Few! While many of us claim that we want wisdom, we are not willing to pay the price.

Three thousand years ago the enlightened King Solomon wrote about the free offer of wisdom and its rejection:

Because they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the LORD,

They would have none of my counsel and despised my every rebuke.

Therefore they shall eat the fruit of their own way, and be filled to the full with their own fancies.

For the turning away of the simple will slay them, and the complacency of fools will destroy them. (Proverbs 1:29-32)

With our denial, rationalizations and self-righteousness, we ultimately destroy ourselves. Wisdom comes at a price – the willingness to hear the painful things that it says to us. Consequently, we readily reject it in favor of something that feels good. However, Solomon’s father – David – knew better and asked his God to examine him:

Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. (Psalm 139:23-24)

We should do no less!