By DOUG SHAVER
July 31, 2020
I have spent much of the past two decades defending atheism against Christian apologists. I don't do much of that any more. One reason is just exhaustion. The other is that I've come to see that Christianity as such is no significant threat to our republic. Some Christian sects would of course like very much to make this nation a theocracy, and they are doing everything they can to make it one. I don't see it happening, though. There are too few of those Christians within the socio-political establishment that wields most of the real power nowadays.
The real threat comes from various ideologies that have adopted some ideas that happened to be part of Christianity's own core ideology. One of those was moral objectivism, which in turn relies on a core notion of Aristotle's metphysics. Since almost nobody studies philosophy any more, almost nobody who either makes the news or reports the news mentions Aristotle these days, people can be forgiven if they think his ideas have nothing to do with current arguments about black lives, social justice, or police brutality. In the evolution of Western thinking, though, Aristotle's metaphysics is ancestral to much that is wrong with just about everything we're seeing on the nightly news. Not all of it, by a long shot, but a lot of it.
Moral objectivism is the idea that moral principles exist independently of human thought. Most of us get it that certain actions are contrary to some moral law. But how do we know that? Under moral objectivism, the moral unlawfulness of those actions is just a metaphysical fact of the universe, sort of like the physical existence of gravity. We infer the law of gravity by observation and proper reasoning, and we analogously infer the existence of moral laws by some similar use of our minds. We observe the physical universe through various of our senses, and we observe the metaphysical universe through one or more other senses. We have sight, hearing, taste, etc., so why not another sense that perceives moral principles? Of course our moral sense isn't perfect, but then neither is our visual sense. We get fooled by optical illusions, and some people are fooled into thinking there is nothing wrong with genocide. But, there are facts about the physical universe that can't be contradicted by anyone's perception of the contrary, and so too there are moral facts that can't be contradicted by anyone's opinion to the contrary.
This all could be so. I have found no way to prove it isn't. But I've also found no reason to think I need to prove it isn't so. For us who question moral objectivism, it suffices that (a) we justifiably accept the dichotomy between facts and values and (b) no one has offered us a good reason to think Aristotle was right about any of this. He was one of the world's most famous philosophers, sure, but fame doesn't confer infallibility on anyone. And, he was endorsed by Thomas Aquinas, who was one of the world's most famous theologians, but we who aren't Catholics don't have to take Aquinas's word for anything.
But then there is our intuition. Aristotle's metaphysics have had a lot of staying power because of their powerful intuitive appeal. Some kind of reality transcending the physical universe just has to exist because, well, it just has to, that's all. We cannot believe otherwise. And if we really can't, then so be it. We will believe. But some of us can believe otherwise, and we do believe otherwise, and the universe still makes perfect sense to us.
So, what if we're the deluded ones? What if objective morals are a real thing? What if it's true that for some X's, X is wrong no matter who thinks otherwise?
Well, if some of us do think otherwise, who is supposed to adjudicate that dispute? You say there is a fact of the matter. Fine. Show me that fact. Until you do, you're telling me that I should just take your word for it, and that if I won't, then I must be suffering from some defect in my moral intuitions. What worries me, if you do think that way, is that you're liable to suppose that because I'm morally defective, you have some entitlement to do whatever it takes, using any means at your disposal, to correct my defect.
We in the Western world have seen this happen over and over, when adherents of our dominant religion have the political power to compel compliance with God's laws as they perceived those laws, believing themselves to have some special insight into God's thinking. In our nation's present conflict, we still hear from people who assure us that they know how God wants us to be acting, but we hear much more, and much more often, from people who make no such pretense. They make no claim to need God to tell them about the universe's moral facts. They claim instead to know those facts directly because of their superior moral sense. God or no God, the outcome will be the same if people like that gain the power to make it happen.
They have made much progress toward gaining that power. They have gained enough that there is probably no longer a peaceful way to prevent their further progress. The violence has already begun and will almost certainly get worse—certainly after early November, if not sooner. Whether Biden or Trump wins the vote will make no difference. The loser's supporters will not accept the result, and our democracy will be finished.
We have not had government with the consent of the governed for a long time now, and those who do not consent are about out of patience. This was a tractable problem as long as the non-consenters were in the minority. But they're the majority now, and because of that, this has become a republic that we cannot keep.
I have never so wished that someone would prove me wrong.
Next: Blaming the tools
(This page last updated on July 31, 2020.)