Conversation Part III: Morality - Theistic, Christian and Otherwise

(continued from previous)

The conversation on the moral superiority of religion vs. atheism is in a way not interesting to me. If that argument were a horse race, mine would still be in the stable, biding his time, thoughtfully munching hay. As I've tried to say, I don't think being religious or having faith is itself any kind of virtue precisely because I do not recognize any strict epistemological dichotomy between faith and reason. (This is why I always gag when I hear someone lauding 'people of faith' in the political realm. The grouping 'people of faith' is beyond vacuous. What a stupid category of people to be in favor of.)

The only reason I pick up the gauntlet here is because the 'new atheists' so consistently seem to hold the opposite view in that they portray having religious faith in general as an inherently morally dangerous enterprise and thereby not holding such beliefs as inherently morally superior. (This is especially so for Harris, Hitchens and Dawkins, Dennett is much more sophisticated as is perhaps to be expected.) They do this without significantly distinguishing between different religions based on the content of their teachings and without distinguishing between actions taken by nominal believers that utterly contradict the tradition's teaching (hypocrites) and those taken in response to agreement with the broadest streams of the tradition.

At the same time that they do not deign to actually engage the content of the traditions they lump together, they speak from a perspective which is impossible to define and, as I will argue, is unable to defend its own moral standing on the same grounds it criticizes the theistic worldview. So we have a group of people speaking as if from a moral high-ground which they are completely unable to give a reasonable defense for holding, denouncing another group that, however in-credible you find its basis, at least has very specific internal reasons for holding its moral perspective. This confusion is why my horse is out of the barn. I am not out here to win the argument between theism and atheism or religion and secularism, but to significantly reframe it.

First I will describe how materialist or secularist assumptions do not entail a morality. Second, I will revisit the case of the morally hypocritical atheist. Third, I will consider some secular sources of morality and look at how the materialist's own assumptions interact with his moral beliefs. Fourth, I will attend to an important mistaken conclusion from the case for morality depending on something transcendent. Fifth, I will return to the case of the one inherently dangerous element that can attend secular morality.

It is of course very common for philosophers or theologians to speak analogically of 'height' or 'transcendence'. The secularist or materialist worldview on the other hand is a flattened perspective. The strict materialist or secularist is one who insists on understanding everything immanently and thereby cuts off the possibility of appealing to any external criteria. The mechanism of flattening a worldview comes in re-description. The materialist points to a perceived dimension of height or transcendence and reduces it to another, immanent, level of explanation - for example the biological, political, psychological or economic. Viewing everything flatly doesn't change what counts as morality, it redescribes behavior previously thought to be moral on another, amoral, level.

So not only is there no longer recourse to terms like God to defend desirable criteria, anything substituted for God is either itself a transcendental term, belief in which is equally or even more inexplicable, or, if it is truly immanent, fails to be able to provide criteria able to qualitatively assess the immanent world.

I propose that for the word morality to have any meaning, the morals must actually represent something really real, not merely an appearance of one thing that is really just some natural epiphenomenon.

The atheist employing the idea of morality derived from universal human feelings or common sense is missing the fact that flattening the world into two dimensions has removed the possibility of morality even being a useful word. The flat world is the world reduced of its transcendent dimension which is the dimension ideas like morality lived in. In the flattened world, morality is no longer really right or wrong - who could have the authority to say so? - it is just whatever the interest group or species with the power to do so defines it as. If we're going to start down the road of reductionism, we should have the courage to follow through to its logical conclusions unless compelled otherwise.

The game of reductionism is a dangerous one, its sword really is two-edged. If one starts with an assumed naturalism or materialism in order to say that all kinds of religious phenomena are just expressions of various natural phenomena, fine. But to be consistent one has to be able to swallow the conclusion that human morality, all of it, is just a chimera as well. If one dislikes that conclusion and knows of some other way of coming up with a basis for morality, I'm more than willing to listen. But beware, as Hitchens mentions in his book (and then ignores the implications of): nobody has been able to come up with a logically convincing and consistent secular basis for morality at least since David Hume pointed out the impossibility of bridging the gap from is to ought. As in, these are the facts; therefore, this is or is not as it should be. No pile of facts is big enough to constitute a single qualitative judgement on the rightness or wrongness of any other fact. If you can't provide a foundation either, then you have to admit that with respect to morals the theist and the atheist are on exactly the same ground relative to one another.

The theist operates upon a morality consistent with his worldview which is itself largely based on faith, the atheist operates upon a morality he has no rational basis for but takes to be correct based on faith. The atheist cannot provide a rational defense of the reality of his morality given his metaphysical views for exactly the same reason that the theist cannot coerce belief in the ground of his morality. The theist has at least the luxury of being internally consistent in his views, the atheist does not, and the discomfort of this leads to all manner of logical abuse.

This amorality of materialism is where my point of the impossibility of a morally hypocritical atheist originates. We've agreed, atheism as such, has no moral content and I am happy to add that neither does theism. What morality a theist holds comes from the character of the god he believes actually exists. The work is done on the level of faith that God exists. But once this is believed, the basis for morals, for good or ill, is firmly in place. The atheist believes himself to be 'neutral' or without any faith commitments as regards the existence of any gods. I don't buy it, but for the sake of argument, fine - he has no faith in regards to the existence of God or gods. He still hasn't explained how he could begin to defend morality from its detractors or conjure up a particular moral perspective, let alone one from which to denounce the theist from.

(Another hypothesis might be that one could just be a hypocritical human being. I have no idea what this would mean. The (biological?) definition of 'human being' implies no morals in and of itself. For example, let's say I'm a human being that just happens to enjoy rape and murder. But those are such value-laden terms! Let's try to be more neutral and objective. Really I just like (or rather am programmed) to spread my genetic material and get rid of competitors for successful completion of such. Perhaps this behavior is part and parcel of being human like it is for so many other purely biologically determined species. After all, we don't speak of bacteria committing rape or wolves murdering. They're just animals being animals, the perfectly flat biological definition of which rules out morality or immorality. For me to be hypocritical in my actions, I would have to hold some further belief about humanity that entailed that the forceful spreading my genes and disposing of rivals was wrong. If I don't believe any such thing then maybe I just have a different idea of humanity than someone who does. Such a one would either need to convince me that their idea of humanity is the right one or else how true morality can be derived without any tradition-based view of humanity.)

Frankly I find the solution of morality coming from 'human solidarity' to beg as many questions as it attempts to answer. I am not convinced humans have such an inborn idea of solidarity with their species. My evidence for this is strictly empirical. Even if they did though, this would not necessarily constitute morality. At most I could go along with the human animal having an evolved sense of protection of its own extended kin network or tribe; one protects and cares for those sharing one's own genetic material. But this is not morality anymore than it would be for any other species. A Water Buffalo protecting her calf from a pack of Lions might look noble to you and me (because we're anthropomorphizing), just as the human mother going without food to feed her child might bring tears to our eyes. But come on, set the sentimentality aside for a minute and let's really follow the skeptical rabbit hole all the way down. If morality is just nature's way of tricking the individual organism into caring about the next generation and the genetic community's survival more than its own, then we have not yet found something that could rightly be called morality.

For another way of showing why secular alternative sources for morality are not logically compelling, allow me to illustrate how reductionist skepticism of religious morality works just as well on secular morality by translating a paragraph intended to dismiss the specificity of religiously derived morals. I will put the original vocabulary in parentheses and my suggested substitutes in brackets.

"To invoke a (heavenly)[common-sense secular] morality you must be specific in your judgments. If (God)[reason or conscience] told you this or that action is unethical, be prepared for an answer that will get you no where close to justice. (God)[Reason] tells you its wrong? Well (he)[it] tells me it's right. This is the kind of relativism we keep (out of)[in] real courtrooms for a reason. You can swear on the (Bible)[human solidarity or the categorical imperative] (or not), but the moment you pull it to your side to defend yourself you will be very quickly dismissed." [Because why in the world should anyone else care if you think one should feel solidarity with the species or only act in a way that one could consistently will that everyone followed a similar course of action. What if they happen to think that that's perfect nonsense and choose to (unhypocritically) act in whatever way they please?]

My belief that reductionistic worldviews do not have sufficient criteria to muster any morality whatsoever is the reason that secular humanism - so proud of its morality - is, and always will be, so utterly unappealing to me. Philosophically it contains all of the 'weaknesses' of Christianity and nihilism without the consistency of either. Secular humanist thinkers who attempt to defend morality are, in my view, just sentimentalists unwilling to give up the ghost. The only philosopher's doubt who gives me pause is the nihilistic laughter of a Nietzsche. If there is no God then there really is nothing.

Allow me just to anticipate another common objection before it's made. It is often said that the theist who argues for the dependence of morality upon a worldview including a certain kind of God as I do (or at least some other kind of transcendental principle), is demeaning humanity and himself. The argument goes that humanity had morality before religion - people knew it was wrong to kill before they had the ten commandments (Though if it were really such universal common sense, then why would it still happen so much?) - and that further it is scary to assume that any particular theist would be out raping and pillaging if only he lost certain of his beliefs about God.

It is important to see why this misses the point completely.

I do not think that I would go out and commit a whole slew of abominable acts if I woke up tomorrow completely lacking in faith. I would probably continue in largely the same behavior I do now based upon what I have been taught is right and wrong (some of which very well might be wrong). The difference is that I would no longer have any rational reason for committing moral acts and refraining from immoral ones. I would still believe that rape and murder were wrong but I would no longer have any reason why they were.

The fallout of the above is that while both the Christian and the materialist atheist can be moral, and both probably will have some type of morality, the Christian must be moral, while the materialist's flattened worldview makes morality optional, a commitment of faith not derived from his more fundamental commitments. This means that materialist atheists or any others who assume their own neutrality must give up their presumably privileged position from which they adjudicate the morals of others.

So again we come around to the point of a certain danger inherent in secular morality. I am not reneging on my point of the moral neutrality of theism vs. atheism in general. The danger of secular morality is not that it doesn't have any morals, or has worse morals, but in its utter confidence in their rightness; its perceived lack of faith. Faith seeks assurance, secular moral reasoning seeks, and too often thinks it has found, certainty. This is why (at least three of) the 'new atheists' sound so like fundamentalists to much of even their atheistic audience. They are so unabashedly confident in the way that only one who believes his ideas derive from reason alone can be. (Atheist fundamentalists largely share a philosophy of knowledge with their Christian cousins. Fundamentalism in Christianity has not to do with the doctrines believed but in how one thinks those beliefs are arrived at; not with what is believed but how those beliefs are held. Orthodox Christians have been around for millenia, fundamentalists are a very modern phenomenon and, to my mind, are basically heretics.)

The Christian may take decisive action, but if she is thinking Christianly, she must do so in fear and trembling. She may err greatly, but if she is a Christian, she is aware of this possibility just about better than any, called so often as she is to repent for past mistakes. If she continues to consciously err in disregard of her professed beliefs then she is a hypocrite and should be named as such. The strict materialist as we have seen cannot be called a hypocrite if he denies the reality of any morality. But if he does feel a moral calling, the secular moralist, if he fools himself into thinking he has banished faith and proceeds by the pure light of reason, will come to his conclusions without-a-doubt and will proceed without caution. Woe to those who get in his way!

This goes to the point about the dangerous confidence of a nation like America. I don't necessarily disagree with defenses of the pleasures and privileges of living in America. The point I was making didn't have to do with life in America, but the life of America and Americans on the rest of the world. The Roman empire was undoubtedly a fine place to live too, if you were a citizen. But I hardly think the Romans patting of themselves on the back for the height of their civilization went over that well with those unfortunate enough to be labeled barbarians. The confidence of America in its status as such a great (the best!) place to live is why it has been so damned confident spreading its wonderful way of life to places like the Philippines, Japan, Vietnam, Central America and Iraq, countries and civilizations whose "thanks but no thanks" isn't very readily listened to. "No," says America, "You don't understand how great it is to be an American. Just try it!"