In their effort to cast off every tie to the deity and find an escape from every argument for His existence, materialists want to find a naturalistic way to explain morality. One example is The Science of Good and Evil by Michael Shermer.
Materialists often argue that some adaptations make it more likely that a creature will pass on its genes to the next generation, and that this concept applies to “love your mate” as well as it does to the opposable thumb.
But materialist efforts to explain morality fail to distinguish between the phenomenon of morality and the human meaning of morality. It's one thing to say that a creature that loves its mate is more likely to succeed in a given environment than a creature that doesn't, but it's another thing entirely to use such an explanation to motivate people to moral conduct. It's not the existence of moral sentiment that argues for God, but the irrelevance of that moral sentiment without a transcendent purpose.
The materialist explanation makes any given moral statement no more significant than a vestigial organ. It's happenstance that can be discarded if it gets in the way.
Think of the feminist crying that, “Biology is not destiny.” She's saying that the bare fact that evolution has created certain characteristics doesn't define her existence. She can rise above what an accidental historical process has imposed, since chance and contingency can't make binding decrees.
When faced with such meaninglessness humans will despair, become hedonists, or invent their own meaning. That last option is the most human of the three because we seek transcendent meaning and purpose, even if we have to make it up. And so a communist might be willing to dedicate his life to the goals of communism, and he doesn't care if that means discarding a morality that happened to be the best evolutionary strategy for his mammoth-hunting ancestors. An inherited moral sentiment has no more ultimate meaning than canine teeth.
This is what the materialists fail to see. Science might be able to explain the phenomenon of moral impulses, but only a coherent world-view can give it any human meaning, and if evolution is a blind, unguided, random process, there's no way to connect the dots between the facts of moral sentiment and the meaning of morality. Evolutionary ethics may be an interesting explanation of what is, but it has nothing to say about what ought to be.
Which takes us to precisely where Shermer begins his book — the Euthyphro, in which trouble-making Socrates asked his pal Euthyphro whether morality is something that God decrees or something that God conforms to. It’s a troubling question because if morality is simply what God decrees then He might just as well have decreed that murder and theft are good, and that doesn’t sit well with the conscience. And if God Himself conforms to something called “good,” then He’s not as ultimate as we’d like to believe.
It’s a troubling question for a Greek because no Greek god was regarded as “the creator.” It’s not a problem for the Christian because if God is the source of all being and the creator of all that is, then there’s no meaningful distinction between “good is what God decrees” and “God decrees what’s good.”
This is what connects the dots between the seemingly random contingencies of history and the transcendent purpose of ethics. Biology isn’t destiny if biology is the accident of time and chance, but biology may be a clue to destiny if it’s the handiwork of an all-wise, benevolent God.
It seems pointless for materialists to look for their ethics in the contingencies of a random past. It’s Christians who ought to be studying evolutionary psychology… Or, rather… Hey — What was that John Paul II was doing with the “Theology of the Body”?
That is where it all ties together. The body isn’t an accident, and we don’t need to make up our own rules for how to use it. God providentially guided the what of morality — the moral sentiments that are hard-wired in our brains — and since He did it in keeping with His loving purpose for mankind, we don’t need to play the existentialist hero and create our own meaning out of nothing.
© Copyright 2006 Catholic Exchange
Greg Krehbiel is a former Presbyterian seminary student and convert to the Catholic faith. He lives with his wife and five children in Laurel, Maryland, and writes the Crowhill weblog.
