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The problem with ‘Forget God and be good for goodness’ sake’This holiday season the American Humanist Association — an atheistic organization — is running an ad campaign in Washington, D.C., to counter the Christian and theistic message of Christmas. Metro buses bear signs that read: “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness’ sake.” My question is, “Why believe in moral goodness at all if you don’t believe in God?” The author George Eliot would likely have appreciated the bus signs. She once said to a friend while strolling through a Cambridge garden, “God, immortality, duty — how inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, how peremptory and absolute the third.” Morality, she thought, simply does not require a religious foundation. Indeed, the religious impulse dilutes the moral, as thoughts of another world distract from the duties of the present, and hope of an eternal reward reduces moral motivation to a form of self-serving egoism. Isn’t it better, after all, just to “be good for goodness’ sake”? But Friedrich Nietzsche, a fellow atheist, referred to Eliot and her ilk as “English flatheads,” and charged them with blatant inconsistency. “They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality.” He insisted that, in giving up belief in God, “one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.” The “duty” to which Eliot and her freethinking friends appealed, was actually part and parcel of the system that is Christianity — or, at least, theism. “By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands,” he wrote. If Eliot held out for the reality of a moral law over against the illusion of religion, Nietzsche countered with the exclamation, “Moral judgments agree with religious ones in believing in realities which are no realities.” Nietzsche’s moral nihilism is handily summarized with his assertion, “There are altogether no moral facts.” And there are no such facts precisely because neither are there any theological ones. Nietzsche was right. If we embrace the atheistic and naturalistic world-view of those responsible for the bus signs, then our explanation for what we call “morality” will have to be drawn from whatever the natural world affords us. And, notoriously, morality is not so much explained as explained away when “naturalized.” On garden-variety atheism, the best available explanation for what we call “conscience” is rooted ultimately in a set of “social instincts” that, according to Darwin, would have conferred reproductive advantage upon those creatures — our early hominid ancestors — that possessed them. While it is true that well-formed moral principles, such as the Golden Rule, are products of rational reflection rather than the direct result of genetic hard-wiring, the whole enterprise that is morality takes its cue from the propensities that have been programmed by our genes and are part and parcel of a biologically based human nature. For instance, we believe, most of us, that there are actual, objective duties of parenthood. It would be morally wrong to neglect or abandon our children, we think. But from a naturalistic and Darwinian perspective, the powerful bond that exists between, say, mother and child is merely an evolutionary means to the end of reproductive fitness. As Darwin saw it, natural selection has bequeathed to us, and animals similar to us, a strong “pre-reflective” impulse to care for our offspring. But only humans have also developed the capacity for thinking about such impulses. Darwin thought that “conscience” is what you get whenever any social animal, equipped with the social instincts, also develops a certain degree of rationality. He wrote in “The Descent of Man,” “The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable — namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man.” But evolution has found entirely different means to that same end of reproductive fitness in other species. The sense of parental duty that is possessed by, say, a female sea turtle ensures only that she lay her eggs somewhere above the high tide mark. After that, she loses no sleep from concern over the fact that her offspring are on their own against daunting odds. The point is that from an atheistic and evolutionary perspective, such instincts and impulses that are at the root of what we call morality are merely solutions to problems posed by whatever happened to be the circumstances of reproductive fitness. Had those circumstances been different, then, presumably, so would the solutions and resulting instincts. Consider this striking observation from Darwin — also from “The Descent”: “If ... men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering.” As it happens, we weren’t “reared” after the manner of hive-bees, and so we have widespread and strong beliefs about the sanctity of human life and its implications for how we should treat our siblings and our offspring. But this strongly suggests that we would have had whatever beliefs were ultimately fitness-producing, given the circumstances of survival. We might put it this way: the processes ultimately responsible for human moral beliefs are fitness-aimed rather than truth-aimed. It appears that we would have had precisely the sorts of moral beliefs we do whether they were true or not. Whenever the best explanation for someone’s having a belief has nothing to do with whether it is true, that belief is undercut and thus without justification. The Darwinian explanation thus undercuts whatever reason the atheist might have had for thinking that any of our moral beliefs are ever, in fact, true. The result is moral skepticism. And so, again, Nietzsche was right: the consistent atheist will be skeptical about any references to moral goodness, including those displayed on D.C. metro buses. The atheist simply has no good reason for supposing that morality is anything more than “an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes in order to get us to cooperate,” as Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson once put it. Much less does the atheist have any rational ground for going on to affirm humanism — the belief that human persons enjoy a special and inherent worth that is not shared by other species. Why think this, given the context of an atheistic and evolutionary view of things? The theist, on the other hand, holds the background belief that we have been created in the image of God. This is at once the ground for affirming human dignity and for being optimistic regarding our capacity for discerning actual moral facts. If theism is true, our moral capacities have been designed chiefly for the purpose of discerning truth. The moral law is “written upon the heart,” the apostle Paul told the Romans. So I’ll answer the question on those bus signs. Why believe in God? I do so, in part, because I believe in goodness! [Mark D. Linville lives in Fayetteville with his wife, Lynn. The ideas here are developed and defended in full in his essay, “The Moral Argument” forthcoming in “The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology,” J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, eds. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing).] login to post comments | Mark Linville's blog
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