Puzzle Piece 8: Morality - Where does it come from?

Puzzle Piece 8: Can Evolution Produce Real Morality?

How many of you have every watched the news and seen a report on some terrible crime that happened to someone, someone who was murdered, or bashed, and thought “that’s wrong - the person who did that should be punished”? Why did you think that? What was it about that person’s behaviour that you judged to be wrong? What makes an action morally good or bad? Is it just because your parents told you it was wrong, or is it wrong for some other reason? What is it about feeding the poor that everyone acknowledges is a morally praiseworthy action? What is it about torturing children for fun that everyone knows is wrong? We all realise that the first is good, and the second bad. But why is it good or bad? What makes a thing good or bad? That is what we want to talk about today, and I want to show you that the fact that a thing IS wrong or right is proof of the existence of God. So let’s talk about the different ways that people answer these questions.


For some people, right and wrong are simply products of our cultural and social evolution. This is really a form of Moral Relativism called Social or Cultural Relativism (for an in-depth look at relativism in general see Parts 1-4 of this Piece). Basically, they say ‘that’s wrong for you, but not for me’ or vice versa. They claim that true right and wrong don’t exist and what we think of as right and wrong are just by-products of our social and biological evolution. This idea becomes especially prevalent when Christian missionaries go to another culture and try to change the practices of that culture to make them more in line with Christianity. People are quick to tell us that we have no right to judge them or their culture, that we have no right to tell them that their way of living is wrong and ours is right. After all, their culture evolved that type of morality, and ours evolved a different type. Ours isn’t more right than theirs, just different.
This line of thinking is nicely summed up by Michael Ruse, a Philosopher of Science who says this:

“Morality is a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth. Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says "love thy neighbor as thyself," they think they are referring above and beyond themselves. Nevertheless, such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction . . . And any deeper meaning is illusory.” ("Evolutionary Theory and Christian Ethics," in The Darwinian Paradigm (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 262-269.)


This type of morality, it seems, makes a thing right or wrong because your society thinks it is. As our societies and cultures evolved so did our sense of right and wrong and that enabled us to live together more easily, which meant we were able to have more children and pass on our genes. That means that stealing is wrong because everyone in society agrees that it is, not because stealing is actually wrong. In the same way, we think that what Hitler did to the Jews is wrong only because we grew up in a society that holds those beliefs, not because what he did is actually wrong. After all, “ethics is illusory”.


Does this view make sense? It seems that this is not the correct way to look at and judge moral actions. What this means, really, is that when you rape someone, or torture a child for fun, all you have really done is break a social convention. You’ve done something that our society says you shouldn’t do, but that’s it! It reduces morality to mere social convention. In Japan, eating while you walk down the street is socially unacceptable – Japanese people don’t do that and they frown at you if you do. It seems to me that on the view of the moral relativists your committing some crime like rape is wrong for the same reason that eating in public is wrong in Japan – because society says so. Can you bring yourself to believe that?


A similar view to this is the one that says our morals come from millions of years of ‘instinct’. This is the view of Darwinists like Edward O. Wilson who works Harvard University. He is a biologist and naturalist, and is a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism. He says that ‘thousands of generations gave rise to moral sentiment.” Basically, it’s an inherited instinct. What are the problems with this idea?


Firstly, we often have competing instincts. How do we know which instinct to follow? Secondly, we often hear something that tells us to ignore our strongest instincts and do the more noble thing. For example, if you hear someone getting mugged and calling for help, our stronger instinct might to be stay safe and not get involved. Our weaker instinct might be to help. Which instinct should we follow? We believe that we should do the right thing, and follow the instinct to help. Think about the stories you hear of men during the war who throw themselves on a grenade so that their mates are not killed. You can guarantee that his first instinct was to shield himself, but something else told him not to.


Or what about something closer to home. You’re in the playground and you see someone bullying someone else. You have one instinct to defend the weak and tell the bully to lay off. But another part of you wonders what will happen to you? Will he turn his attention to you? But you know the right thing to do. And where does that “something” that tells which instinct to listen to come from?
The following quote from C. S. Lewis sums it up nicely:

“You will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away. Now this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them. You might as well say the sheet of music which tells you...to play one note on the piano and not another, is itself one of the notes on the keyboard. The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.” (Mere Christianity, p22).
Instinct alone cannot tell you what the right thing to do is.


Let’s look at third view on morality. Sometimes, when faced with the difficulties of moral relativism or instinct, people say that things are wrong if they violate our human rights. Murder is wrong because you have taken away that person’s right to life. But what’s the liability of this view? It’s this: where does man get his human rights without God giving them to him? If we are just highly evolved animals, then our rights come from...where? Nowhere! There is nothing in the evolutionary process that gives anybody any rights. Evolution is about survival of the fittest, kill or be killed. If I am stronger than you, why shouldn’t I kill you, or rape you, or steal from you? After all, no one says it’s morally wrong for the lion to kill the deer, or to kill off a rival male. If it’s not wrong for the lion, why should it be wrong for us? We are just slightly more evolved animals, after all. “But, we’re humans,” someone might say. So what? Unless there is Someone outside the evolutionary process to give us our value, we have only the same value as every other animal.


This idea has been embraced recently in attempts to grant rights to animals. “The Great Ape Project” is a group of people dedicated to getting certain rights given to the great apes of the world, supposedly our closest evolutionary relative. From their website:

“A chimpanzee is not a pet and can not be used as an object for fun or scientific experiment. He or she thinks, develops affection, hates, suffers, learns and even transmits knowledge. To sum it up, they are just like us. The only [sic] diffrerence is that they don’t speak, but they communicate through gestures, sounds and facial expressions. We need to [sic] garantee their rights to life and to liberty” (Dr. Pedro A. Ynterian, the founder of GAP Brazil and Director of GAP International since 2006, http://www.greatapeproject.org/en-US/oprojetogap/Missao).
This line of thinking has led to a woman trying to get an Austrian court to recognise a 26-year old chimpanzee as a person, so that he can be granted a legal human guardian if his zoo closes. The Austrian court denied her request, so she is appealing to the European Court of Human Rights. The court of Human Rights.


In Switzerland, some members of the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Biotechnology in 2009 argued that plants should not be harmed without ‘justification’ on the grounds that they ‘strive for something’ (e.g. to develop, to reproduce), and that they are a lot like us on the molecular level (http://creation.com/plants-rights-the-latest-evolutionary-absurdity). Now we have plant rights. Stop mowing the lawn – you’re murdering the grass! Do you see how the idea that we can get our human rights from the evolutionary process leads to absurdities? Without Someone outside the process to give out rights, either every form of life has them, or none do.


What idea makes the most sense of our moral experience then? The only system of morality that makes sense is the idea that your moral standards come from God, that He is the one who sets the rules, and those rules apply to us in Australia as much as they do to the wild tribes still living in the Amazon jungle that have never seen a white man. Let’s cache out this idea. It can be summed up in these three premises:

A. If God does not exists then objective moral values do not exist;
B. Objective moral values do exist; therefore
C. God exists

What do we mean by “objective moral values”? We mean moral values which are valid and binding independent of whether anybody believes in them or not. For example - the Holocaust was wrong, and it would be wrong even if the Nazis had won the war and brainwashed everybody into believing it was right.


Now it seems that the first premise has been suitably defended already today. We looked at three different systems of ethics that tried to ground morality without God in various naturalistic explanations and failed. The second premise that “objective moral values do exist” is the one that is going to cause us the most difficulty. Most people in the West have been taught a version of moral relativism their whole lives, something we can call Slogan Moralism: “don’t judge me”, “it’s true for me”, “tolerate others”.


These are slogans that people hear all the time, and there is often some truth in them, but most people they just adopt these ideas without really thinking about them. Let me give you an example. Say someone decides they don’t want a Christmas tree this year. It’s just too much hassle. Following the slogan “tolerate others” we’d be happy to tolerate their views. But should we tolerate ALL views? What if someone wants to sacrifice a child to the pagan god Moloch? Should we tolerate that behaviour? Of course not. But one of our slogans is to be tolerant of other people’s views. This is an example of how people adopt these slogans that they hear around the place without thinking about what they really mean, without realising the problems with their use.


While it’s true that people hold these ideas without really thinking about them, at the same time most people ALSO hold that some things are really, truly, objectively wrong. You’re probably not going to find anyone who is willing to say that there is not really anything wrong with sacrificing that child. Almost everyone believes that action to be wrong, regardless of the culture or time in which it took place. It was wrong when the Philistines did it in King David’s day, it’s wrong today. So what it looks like is that most people hold conflicting views about the nature of morality. In truth, most people haven’t actually sat down and thought about what they believe and why. They learn these slogans that they hear others use, and they adopt a bit of this and a bit of that, but deep down, when you really press someone on what they believe, you will find, 99 times out of 100, that they hold some moral truths to be objective. But a worldview that doesn’t feature God cannot make sense of this. We’ve looked at the attempts – they all fail! That is why this is such a powerful argument! It trades on what almost everyone, Christians and atheists, already believe – that some things are just wrong.


This argument can be worded another way, a way that might be a bit simpler to remember but is just as powerful. We can call it the Moral Law:

1. Every law has a law giver
2. There is a Moral Law (a standard of right and wrong)
3. Therefore, there is a Moral Law Giver

This is a great way to state it, because not only does it call to mind the idea of someone writing a law and someone following that law, it also calls to mind penalties for breaking the law. And this is the real reason that people don’t want to acknowledge their need to ground morality in God – they don’t want to be held accountable for their actions!


British novelist Aldous Huxley is very candid about his reasons for not wanting there to be a God:

“I had motive for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is...concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves. … For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.” (Ends and Means, 1937, pp. 270, in http://creation.com/aldous-huxley-admits-motive-for-anti-theistic-bias)

In other words, if there is no actual law giver, then there is no penalty for breaking the law and we are free to do what we like! This is what drives a lot of ‘scepticism’ about God.


So, to conclude, we’ve examined a couple of the main naturalistic explanations for the existence of morals and found them to be wanting. We’ve seen that God is really the only source of morals that makes any sense of them. Next, we’ll answer the question, “If God exists, why doesn’t He stop bad things from happening to good people?”