Morality

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.

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[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.