For since the creation of the world God’s invisible
qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being
understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. For
although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to
him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although
they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the
immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and
reptiles. (Romans 1:20-23)
In
any general population, 68.2 percent of the population acts within a certain
range of behaviors. Another 27.2 don’t fit into the first category, but aren’t
too far off. Only 4.6 percent fall outside those two groups. Professor Jonathan
Haidt, in The Righteous Mind, explains that Liberals tend to base their
judgments on what he describes as liberty, caring and fairness. Conservatives
see those values but add loyalty, authority and sanctity. In between
Conservatives and Liberals are a group called Moderates/Centrists. In America,
40 percent of the population identify as Conservative, 21 percent as Liberal,
and 35 percent as Moderate. I suspect that Moderates are not precisely in the
middle. They lean a little more toward Conservative, or a little more toward
Liberal. If you divided them accordingly, you would end up with the general
population statistics above.
The
numbers may not be exact, but the pattern follows: 95% of the population
generally values some combination of liberty, caring, fairness. More than half
of those also value loyalty, authority and sanctity.[1] In
Mere Christianity, Professor C.S. Lewis begins with a discussion of
quarreling.
Now what interests me about all these
remarks is that the man who makes them is not merely saying that the other man’s
behavior does not happen to please him. He is appealing to some kind of
standard of behavior which he expects the other man to know about. And the
other man very seldom replies: “To hell with your standard.” Nearly always he
tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the
standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse. (Mere
Christianity, p. 3)
Professor
Lewis goes on to discuss human nature. He points out that while some may claim
behaviors are merely instinctual behaviors that have evolved in man, our
instincts tend to run counter to these standards. Instincts tend to involve “me
and mine” rather than liberty, caring, fairness, loyalty, authority and
sanctity. Instincts tend to involve those reasons why what we’re doing does not
really go against the standard and the special excuse. Instincts are inborn.
They cannot be taught. These values are learned. A baby doesn’t care that it’s
not being fair by waking people in the middle of the night to feed or change
him. All he cares about is his discomfort. Babies have instincts, not a shared
standard of behavior.
Some
people believe this shared standard of behavior may not exist but if it does,
that it is the result of either biological or social evolution. I don’t have
the space (or possibly the education) to include arguments about the genetic
transmission of morality, but here are two articles: Columbia U. article on Genetics_and_Morality.pdf
and What-is-the-correlation-between-morality-and-genes. Both make the case that morality is not (or at least not generally) genetic.
Claims that it is are theoretical. “We see that it is so, and we ‘know’ that
evolution causes all things to be so, so somehow, it must be evolution,” but no
clear chain of causality exists. This is “science of the gaps.” Because we know
that morality exists and follows something of a normal pattern for general
populations, it must have evolved. We don’t know how, so we wave a scientific “magic
wand” with full faith that someday, we’ll understand.
On the
other hand, it makes perfect sense for there to be a normal distribution of
moral perspectives if a moral God created humanity in His image, with the
freedom to be moral (requiring that there also be the freedom to be immoral.)
Rejecting that God requires an alternate explanation for the existence of
morality. Historically, idols have taken the forms of mortal man, and birds,
and animals and reptiles. It is no different in scientific idolatry, which
proclaims as truth that man comes from earlier hominid forms, which came from a
small mammal-like animal, which developed from either birds or reptiles (or
both, since some scientists now thing that birds are dinosaurs, which were
reptiles.) Sadly, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
[1]
I have my suspicions about the values placed on loyalty, authority and the
sanctity of liberty, caring and fairness. I have often found that those holding
to the first three often treat them as sacred, want to wield authority in their
implementation and in the punishment of those who are not loyal to those values
– all the while rejecting those three as having value except in that context,
but that’s a different argument.
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