DIALOGUE WITH AN ATHEIST: PART 6

 Morality and Free Will

The Bases of Morality

Although I pretty much followed your original explanation, the reformulation of your ideas was much more concise. It clarified the similarities and differences in our respective positions. Using wholly naturalistic assumptions, your first three factors (moral intuition, instinct and reasoning) in determining morality make perfect sense and are as good as any I have heard. I was also pleased to see that you recognized the need for a another component in order to fully complete the picture and explain free will. The nature of that last component is where we differ in opinion, and I would offer three comments regarding your thoughts on that subject.

1. I'm afraid at least two trite expressions leapt to mind when I read your comments: “grasping at straws” and “wanting to have one's cake and eat it, too.” Psychologically speaking, it is no wonder that you would want to preserve your naturalistic explanations for all phenomena in the universe while somehow also preserving a semblance of volitional control over your own life. Freud himself would probably have a field day with your comments as a prime example of wish fulfillment—and therefore brand them as highly suspect.

2. Aside from the rather snide comment above, the more serious point to address is the exact nature of your fourth factor. Even if the operating law(s) you propose are at present hidden, obscure, complicated, misunderstood, or even ultimately unknowable by mankind, they still remain laws of nature. As such, they remain determinative (along with your first three factors) in completely controlling our every thought and action. In a purely naturalistic universe, by definition there can be no free will in any sense of the word, even a very limited sense. Given identical operating factors, two given people would act in exactly the same manner as one another all the time. However, since the combinations of factors are practically infinite in number, each human being will appear to be acting of his/her own volition, but in reality that will not be the case. There is no logical way to escape this inevitable conclusion.

3. Your fourfold explanation of morality also comes perilously close to violating the principle of Occam's Razor, which began our correspondence. You appear to be multiplying explanations for human morality to preserve a vestige of self-determination while at the same time taking care not to let the door out of a closed universe open even a crack. In fact, postulation of a Being beyond but behind the natural forces of the universe such as described in the Bible explains in one fell swoop many observed phenomena at the same time, phenomena that need either farfetched alternatives or offer no other explanation at the present time. These include those you mentioned. My own list, without consulting yours, included the origin of the universe, prebiotic evolution, the origin of life, time factors necessary for biotic evolution, the criticality of many physical constants in the universe for the existence of any sort of life, human behavior in all of its aspects, and ultimate meaning to human existence. Occam's Razor, if used impartially, would side with a theistic explanation immediately rather than settle for the many alternative explanations for each of these individual phenomena separately.

Practical Implications and Suggestions for the Future of Morality

By stating that freedom and happiness are universal goals of mankind, you are actually stating that you, as a middle upper class, educated person who lives in a developed country, are fairly high up on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. This leaves out the vast majority of human beings who are still operating on the basic needs level at the present time and who would argue strongly that food and shelter are the basic goals of mankind overriding all others. It also leaves out those who already have freedom and more than adequate creature comforts but are desperately striving for the highest goal of personal fulfillment. And, as Maslow points out, it only takes one small accident, illness or economic upset to immediately plunge a person to the bottom rung of the ladder.

Your summary of the moral imperative is the same as the well known negative form of the Golden Rule found in the Jewish book of Tobit: “Do not do unto others as you would not have them do toward you.” An adequate guideline for most purposes but still quite inferior to Christ's positive formulation, which forms the basis of most charitable works in the world today.

I continue to find your fascination with democracy interesting. I have nothing against democracy (or its representative forms) and have benefited from it all my life, but I certainly do not deify it as an institution. It is an old truism for many that the best government is actually a benevolent dictatorship. Regarding your statement that democracies never attack democracies, I am not an expert on world history but I would certainly think that our own Civil War qualifies. Even if your statement were true, wouldn't that lead to the conclusion that the democratic nations should forcibly convert the rest of the nations for their own good as soon as possible in order to hasten the utopian state you pose as an ideal? I'm sure many in America would welcome that idea, and we have followed that practice on a number of occasions in the past (not our most shining hours). Witness our wars with individual Indian tribes as well as against the Indian Nations, the Spanish-American War, and the War with Iraq at the very least.

In addition, one could argue that some of the worst aggressors against democracies in world history, Japan and Germany during WWII, had leaders who may not have been democratically chosen in a completely free election, but were fanatically supported by the vast majority of their populaces and would have been elected anyway if such a procedure were in place. It is only blind belief in the wisdom of the masses that leads to the conclusion that democracy is always the best government for insuring optimum morality. Compare the histories of three revolutions designed to return power to the people. Two of them, the French and Russian Revolutions, were based on strictly atheistic principles coupled with blind idealism in regard to human perfectibility through proper education. Both resulted in widespread bloodshed when their own proponents turned against one another, followed by repressive dictatorships. The form of government resulting from the American Revolution, however, was based on theistic principles. The most important of these was the recognition that mankind was inherently flawed at the core. Therefore, the only way to counter this tendency was to set up the checks and balances of a tripartite system so that it would be harder for one interest group or individual to predominate (since absolute power corrupts absolutely).

I am still interested in hearing you flesh out some specific examples of how you would practically determine the morality of any particular conflict of interest that might arise between groups and/or individuals using pure logic. Is a little good to a lot of people more moral than much good to a fair number of people; does a minority deserve no consideration at all if their needs negatively impact the majority in any way, etc, etc.?

Cinematic Aside and Conclusion

I would imagine you are as much a fan of Stanley Kubrick's movies as I am. Whether or not he was a Christian (later interviews show that he was not), there are certainly some themes prominent in his movies that help me understand some of the areas we have been discussing. I'm interested in your comments.

A Clockwork Orange: Both the Burgess novel and the movie coauthored by Burgess, is a wonderful study on free will. The movie was condemned by both the Christian right and by Pravda, a major distinction in itself!! Christian groups zeroed in on the seamy events while Pravda concentrated on the theme, which they labeled as blatant Christian propaganda—an accusation that Burgess heartily agreed with. If you recall the plot, the “hero,” a major sociopath if ever there was one, is arrested for his evil deeds. He is given the chance to be released from prison if he will agree to be subjected to an intense form of brainwashing that will render him incapable of committing violence without becoming physically ill. The only sympathetic character in the whole movie is a prison chaplain (even an atheistic friend of mine at work recognized this fact with wonderment). The chaplain argued that taking away a person's free will was worse than letting him commit evil acts because it rendered him less than a human being.

The hero undergoes the treatment, which does not at all curb his evil tendencies but only his ability to act on them. He is thus powerless to defend himself when his former victims turn on him (as an example of the inherent fallen condition of all humanity). He only escapes his psychological conditioning through a traumatic physical event. At the end, when an evil grin comes back into his face, the audience realizes that he is again free to act as he will, and somehow we cheer for him. By a process of elimination one is left with the conclusion that mankind can only act in a moral manner through a free exercise of the will toward the One who created him, not through the efforts of education, uplifting influences of the arts and higher culture (witness the hero kicking a man almost to death while warbling “Singin' in the Rain” and his devotion to Beethoven), restraints of the law, or the mechanisms of science.

2001: A Space Odyssey is another favorite of mine for its cinematic purity and underlying themes. Arthur C. Clarke, as author of the book and co-author of the screenplay, approached it with atheisticpurposes in mind, especially as a possible explanation for the observed speed of human evolution and to offer some sort of mystical alternative to God to give mankind hope for the future. However, I freely co-opt it for my own purposes (perhaps as Kubrick himself did) as a great parable of the interaction of man and God.

When animal life had progressed to a certain point by purely evolutionary mechanisms, the most highly developed of those hominids took a quantum leap forward to homo sapien when they touched the obelisk from outer space (i.e. God breathed life into the first human being as in the Genesis “myth.”).

From that point on, man continued to advance, but mainly in a technological direction only, not necessarily in a moral one. In fact, one could argue that mankind became less and less human the more it relied on technology. Thus, it is not surprising that the only character in the whole movie with any sort of personality is the computer HAL.

At this second dead end in human development, another obelisk is discovered that suddenly reveals the location of man's origins and his future destination (equivalent in a Christian viewpoint to God's special revelation to one chosen people, the Jews, millennia ago). The final, and ultimate, stage of humanity's development takes place after the astronaut experiences the famous, extended sequence of apparently psychedelic visions. If you look at the movie again, I think you will agree that this series of scenes retraces the events from the beginning of the world and through the evolutionary stages leading to human beings.

The series ends suddenly with the astronaut as an old man in a Louis XIV style drawing room (as a representative example of man surrounded by his impressive but ultimately meaningless cultural and artistic achievements). It is obvious that this whole latter part of the movie is a visual example of the principle “Ontology replicates phylogeny” preparing us for the third touching of an obelisk leading to the rebirth of the astronaut as a super-baby floating through space in the last scene. From a Christian view, this is equivalent to the many references in the New Testament to people being “born again” and becoming “a new creation” when accepting the claims of Christ accompanied by the possibility of an enhanced awareness of new potential as a human being acting in closer accord to the purposes for which we were placed on earth.