A Christian Response to “The New Science of Morality” – Part I

Edge 325 (August 31st, 2010) essentially brought to the table a more sophisticated version of the relativistic view of morality promoted by Silverman at the debate this past Monday. The well-known atheist Sam Harris recently attempted to capture “the New Science of Morality.”

We can look at the world, witnessing all of the diverse behaviors, rules, cultural artifacts, and morally salient emotions like empathy and disgust, and we can study how these things play out in human communities, both in our time and throughout history. We can examine all these phenomena in as nonjudgmental a way as possible and seek to understand them. We can understand them in evolutionary terms, and we can understand them in psychological and neurobiological terms, as they arise in the present. And we can call the resulting data and the entire effort a “science of morality”. This would be a purely descriptive science of the sort that I hear Jonathan Haidt advocating. (Harris)

Of course, who determines what is “nonjudgmental”? Isn’t there already a bit of bias in the fact that only three disciplines of knowledge and science (the word, remember, means “to know”) are supposed to be our foundation for a theory of morality? Is the science of theology automatically excluded because it doesn’t meet up to empirical standards?

For most scientists, this project seems to exhaust all that legitimate points of contact between science and morality — that is, between science and judgments of good and evil and right and wrong. But I think there are two other projects that we could concern ourselves with, which are arguably more important.

The second project would be to actually get clearer about what we mean, and s hould mean, by the term “morality,” Understanding how it relates to human well-being altogether, and to actually use this new discipline to think more intelligently about how to maximize human well-being. Of course, philosophers may think that this begs some of the important questions, and I’ll get back to that. But I think this is a distinct project, and it’s not purely descriptive. It’s a normative project. The question is, how can we think about moral truth in the context of science?

Why maximize “human well-being”? How is that defined? Are we not to strive for a more evolved species regardless of how “well” we think it does to ourselves? After all, the whole point of sterilization and extermination of human lives in Germany during WWII was the “maximize human-well being.” So, indeed, there is a touch of question-begging. The real question is: how can we meaningfully think about moral truths outside of an objective standard of morality?

The third project is a project of persuasion: How can we persuade all of the people who are committed to silly and harmful things in the name of “morality” to change their commitments, to have different goals in life, and to lead better lives? I think that this third project is actually the most important project facing humanity at this point in time. It subsumes everything else we could care about — from arresting climate change, to stopping nuclear proliferation, to curing cancer, to saving the whales. Any effort that requires that we collectively get our priorities straight and marshal massive commitments of time and resources would fall within the scope of this project. To build a viable global civilization we must begin to converge on the same economic, political, and environmental goals.

This is a large project, indeed. It was the project assumed by the atheist in several portions of the recent White vs. Silverman debate. Silverman said “the destruction of the family is evil [for me]” while asserting that the holocaust was right for Germany. He came to a debate arguing for positively for the question “Is the New Testament evil?” when after being examined could only say that no one can understand the New Testament in its original context. If truth about morality is relative, then truth about morality has no basis for persuasion beyond “we think this is nice.”

Christianity, however, offers absolute claims about what is right and wrong. God’s law is presented as fact, revealed as reality, and knowable to all – for God’s law is written in the hearts of men, men who are made in God’s image and likeness. That’s why Christians have genuine persuasive power (“this is wrong because the Creator who owns everything says so”) and atheists (“I prefer” or “groups of people prefer”) do not. The most important project facing humanity at this time isn’t saving whales and cooling our planet, it’s proclaiming the truth of everything vital contained in His Word. Man is sinful, God is holy. Moreover, let us not forget that Hitler and Stalin were convinced they “got their priorities straight,” and if morality is subject to change according to time and culture, then there is no basis to think the New Science of Morality will turn in a less horrific direction sooner or later.

Obviously the project of moral persuasion is very difficult — but it strikes me as especially difficult if you can’t figure out in what sense anyone could ever be right and wrong about questions of morality or about questions of human values. Understanding right and wrong in universal terms is Project Two, and that’s what I’m focused on.

There are impediments to thinking about Project Two: the main one being that most right-thinking, well-educated, and well-intentioned people — certainly most scientists and public intellectuals, and I would guess, most journalists — have been convinced that something in the last 200 years of intellectual progress has made it impossible to actually speak about “moral truth.” Not because human experience is so difficult to study or the brain too complex, but because there is thought to be no intellectual basis from which to say that anyone is ever right or wrong about questions of good and evil.

My aim is to undermine this assumption, which is now the received opinion in science and philosophy. I think it is based on several fallacies and double standards and, frankly, on some bad philosophy. The first thing I should point out is that, apart from being untrue, this view has consequences.

In 1947, when the United Nations was attempting to formulate a universal declaration of human rights, the American Anthropological Association stepped forward and said, it can’t be done. This would be to merely foist one provincial notion of human rights on the rest of humanity. Any notion of human rights is the product of culture, and declaring a universal conception of human rights is an intellectually illegitimate thing to do. This was the best our social sciences could do with the crematory of Auschwitz still smoking.

But, of course, it has long been obvious that we need to converge, as a global civilization, in our beliefs about how we should treat one another. For this, we need some universal conception of right and wrong. So in addition to just not being true, I think skepticism about moral truth actually has consequences that we really should worry about.

Atheist Sam Harris has nailed it. “We need some universal conception of right and wrong.” Amen. “skepticism about moral truth actually has consequences that we really should worry about.” Amen! And he goes on…

Definitions matter. And in science we are always in the business of framing conversations and making definitions. There is nothing about this process that condemns us to epistemological relativism or that nullifies truth claims. We define “physics” as, loosely speaking, our best effort to understand the behavior of matter and energy in the universe. The discipline is defined with respect to the goal of understanding how matter behaves.

Of course, anyone is free to define “physics” in some other way. A Creationist physicist could come into the room and say, “Well, that’s not my definition of physics. My physics is designed to match the Book of Genesis.” But we are free to respond to such a person by saying, “You know, you really don’t belong at this conference. That’s not ‘physics’ as we are interested in it. You’re using the word differently. You’re not playing our language game.” Such a gesture of exclusion is both legitimate and necessary. The fact that the discourse of physics is not sufficient to silence such a person, the fact that he cannot be brought into our conversation about physics, does not undermine physics as a domain of objective truth.

Of course, Harris in no way demonstrates how physics according to any definition provides “objective truth,” nor does he provide an objective basis from which we can objectively say what “we are interested in.” Is that all that the New Science of Morality comes down to – what I’m interested in? I’d rather have the physicist at a conference who is at least transparent about his presuppositions and the source of his epistemological authority.

More coming…