Of Morality and Reason

Naturalism cannot account for what we typically think of as a ground of morality and reason. This is not an attempt to prove that God exists, nor that morality and reason are universally grounded. It is certainly not an attempt to say that atheists are immoral or unreasonable. God’s existence and creation may be true; naturalism may be true. My argument is simply that if you accept naturalism, you cannot believe in absolute moral truth and human faculty for logic and reason.

This kind of discussion often devolves into a childish red herring about morality. I’ve seen many a Redditor say that this argument means either that there is no reason to be moral, or that naturalists are immoral. I’m saying neither of these things, but it is beyond the scope of this article to explain why. Maybe I’ll take that up later. Or maybe I won’t. If you’re a naturalist and thus as I will argue a nihilist, then nothing is real or true so what do you care what I think?

To be perfectly fair, most naturalists or physicalists or materialists that I know do not think of themselves as nihilists. They sometimes quote philosopher Daniel Dennett – whose embarrassing system of thought is built on illogical premises involving how an illusion of consciousness arises from physical matter without explaining what outside of consciousness can experience said illusion. Dennett says, “we are the meaning makers.” Any such meaning that comes from a strictly material process must be temporal and not ultimate. But in fact, I don’t think strictly material meaning is even possible. Consider this blog article and that no meaning exists within it. It has an electronic display, usually of some black pixels overlaid on some sky blue pixels. The meaning came from my mind into yours through this material means, nothing in the WordPress system or database provided meaning. Any meaning you are experiencing is being generated by your own consciousness. If that consciousness is an illusion as Dennett would posit, then so is meaning.

Materialism says that my meaning, or your meaning, or my tribe’s meaning, or even my entire species’ meaning is a result of random evolutionary events, and thus does not provide any ultimate ground of meaning whatsoever by any definition that makes sense when we use the word “meaning.” You may or may not be comfortable with this. Words change meaning over time and in different cultural contexts, why not morality? At this point, my atheist friends usually retort, “your own morality comes from your religion, how is that not culturally based and also temporal?” That is true if you believe that religion is simply a cultural phenomenon without a real God, so it seems we can agree that if there is no God then moral values are temporal and not universal. Again, I am not arguing for God here, just that if there is no universal source of being, then there is no universal source of morality or even reason.

No philosophy can be perfectly captured in a bulleted list, so I’ll ask your grace and forgiveness first. If you are a naturalist reading this and disagree with any of the following premises, feel free to nail me for it in the comments. I’m not trying to set up an unreasonable strawman for naturalism simply to attack it. The following is simply a summary of what I’ve most commonly heard of from my atheist friends and family regarding naturalist assumptions.

• There is no God, no ground of being, no supreme source and nothing supernatural that calls our existence into being.
• Such a supernatural explanation is unnecessary because we can observe a universe that is made of energy and matter, is measurable and operates in a closed system of time and space.
• These natural forces that we observe are capable on their own of creating both existence and life.
• Because there is no supernatural creator or ground of being, existence is either through mere chance or a brute fact or both.

I will pause here, because while I believe that these beliefs inevitably lead to other important conclusions, all but a handful of the atheists I know would stop here as well. To go further is to sink into dreary nihilism, which is the only logical end to naturalism.

If existence is pure chance or a brute fact, then there can be no inherit meaning or ultimate purpose in it all. Don’t misunderstand, atheists do find purpose in life. I’m simply saying that the purposes they find must be attributed to chance, at least a chance shaped by natural selection. We construct our own purpose through individual will or through acquiescence to evolved instincts that have benefitted our survival. No ultimate purpose exists. This is not some thought exercise, but the inevitable conclusion of naturalism. Imagine the day when the same natural forces that resulted in human existence in fact extinguish human existence. There will be no human memory, no meaning, no consciousness, just other forms of life taking our place with different moralities and self-imagined purposes.

In this world, where does morality enter? A purely mechanistic universe does not offer moral guidance beyond survival probabilities. If a particular ethic benefits survival – say care for your fellow tribe – then it becomes part of your fabric. But we cannot assess if it is truly morally good or bad. There is no moral consequence to a Dodo bird. They once existed, now they do not.

At this point, students of biology may offer that ethics in pursuit of survival – care for your fellow tribe – do indeed circumscribe the moral law. I have difficulty in extending this morality beyond the tribe, but maybe I am not a deep enough thinker. At some point, the survival of your genes comes into conflict with the survival of other genes. In human history there were perhaps nine different types of humans on earth, all forming tribes, eating, singing, dancing and hunting. They weren’t killed off by an asteroid. They were killed by the most efficient predator the earth has ever seen – homo sapiens. Our capability for abstract thought and language allowed us to collectively fight for survival. Was this morally right? Does it even matter? Maybe what matters is how homo sapiens evolved to work together and that is why we believe cooperation, nurturing and love are morally valuable.

This morality must extend beyond tribe, the argument continues, because deep in our evolutionary pattern is an insistence of benevolence to our fellow homo sapiens. If you find this argument tempting, I simply direct you to read any era of human history to prove how demonstrably false it is. Human behavior seems to prove sin, not virtue. Yet, even if I were to concede this, I would simply say that because something exists, it doesn’t mean it has to exist or ought to exist. In other words, what we think of as cooperative human ethical behavior is only ingrained in our DNA because it helped us kill off those other humans and allowed us to better protect scarce resources. It helps us survive and pass on that DNA. So, we still feel that remnant today, but it could’ve happened some other way, too. It doesn’t make it absolutely moral. What about the social contract, cry fans of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. I’m sorry, but collective decisions do not result in moral truths.

The inevitable consequence to a purposeless universe is an immoral universe. You may believe that the moral value of shared human rights helps your survival – until it doesn’t. RIP.

Reason fares no better. Without purpose or creator there is no argument to be had in favor of reason. We may have simply evolved ideas that benefit our survival yet none are true in any real sense. Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman has even proposed that what we experience as reality is not in fact real, but a user interface that helps with survival. It’s a strong argument that naturalism cannot guarantee truth, either moral truth or logical truth. Nothing veridical exists. Enter total nihilism.

I would take it a step further and argue that naturalism is self-defeating on this basis. We cannot know that our reason is reliable, yet our reason points to naturalism. My favorite example of this is the naturalist’s own argument that our belief in God is only an artifact of our tribal survival, our abstract thought. It’s a side effect from an evolutionary tendency to see patterns and purpose. Those tendencies aided our survival, they built societal cohesion, but they also led us to an illogical yearning for God. If such belief in God is simply an untrustworthy relic of survival, then why believe that any of our reasoning is trustworthy? Why believe anything at all?

Again, my purpose here is not to argue that naturalism is false, only that it logically ends in nihilism. All of our morals and reason within the naturalist framework only exist because we agree they exist. We could also agree otherwise. Naturalism insists our lives are accidental, devoid of real moral purpose, existence is by chance or even a total mistake. I heard David Bentley Hart once say something akin to, “Nihilism is seeing my end in my beginning, Christianity is seeing my beginning in my end.” Do you want to live only to die, or would you rather die in order to live? All our scripture, morality plays and mythology point to the latter being the true path. It may or may not be true, but Christianity is utterly in line with what we want to believe is true of human morality and reason. We want to believe – either through our evolved ethics or through a universal truth – that Jesus is the best expression of a human life lived in divine purpose. It’s my version of Pascal’s Wager. If nihilistic naturalism is ultimately true, you still have nothing to lose by following Christianity. You will in fact be living an ultimate expression of your inherited ethical instincts that worked for your survival. If Christianity is true, then you are striving to align with your intended purpose toward union with God.