Science of Good and Evil

by Michael Shermer

  It couldn’t have been because our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud by teaching evolution as fact and by handing out condoms as if they were candy.

  It couldn’t have been because we teach our children that there are no laws of morality that transcend us, that everything is relative and that actions don’t have consequences. What the heck, the president gets away with it.

  Nah, it must have been the guns.11

  In my opinion, of all the theories and explanations offered for Columbine (as well as other social ills), there is none that touches people deeper than this one: a scientific and secular worldview, along with the theory of evolution, implies that there can be no outside objective basis for morality, no moral principles that transcend us, no ethical Archimedean point outside of us from which we can morally move the world. One minister succinctly summarized the problem this way: “If the Bible gets it wrong in biology, then why should I trust the Bible when it talks about morality and salvation.”12 We saw such arguments even before Columbine. The school shootings in Paducah, Kentucky, in December 1997, for example, were blamed on the “godlessness” of the perpetrator, fourteen-year-old Michael Carneal, who opened fire on a school prayer meeting, killing three fellow students and wounding five others. Christian commentators branded Carneal an atheist, and some Christian students at Paducah High claimed that gangs of atheists roamed the hallways targeting Christians for violence. (Subsequently, Carneal’s priest, Reverend Paul Donner of St. Paul Lutheran Church, corrected the mistake: “Michael Carneal is a Christian. He’s a sinner, yes, but not an atheist.”13 Thank God for that.)

  Following Columbine, Christian organizations went into overdrive to push for legislation to bring God back into the “Big House,” as Wendy Zoba referenced the spheres of public education and politics in her post-Columbine treatise on what’s wrong with America. “Columbine posed a question we weren’t prepared to answer and answered a question we did not ask,” Zoba reflected. “The question Columbine presents is not what the killers did or did not ask their victims about God but what their deeds ask us about God. If what happened on April 20,1999, is something we, as a people, cannot abide—as we seem to be concluding—we are forced to confront the follow-up question: Do we need to invite God back into the Big House?” Of course, Zoba is savvy enough to know that posting the Ten Commandments on the walls of Columbine would have done nothing to deter Harris and Klebold in their rampage. “But the sentiment is an expression of a larger truth: There is a God, and he has established a moral order, and we must find a way to make both part of the cultural conversation. How do we heal a nation whose moral fabric has come apart without introducing the language of faith in a higher law?” Zoba answers her own question this way: “Columbine has become the crucible for a larger cultural debate; not about whether Americans believe in God—numerous surveys reveal that they do—but about whether the God they believe in is relevant. That is the question Harris and Klebold put to their victims when they asked,”Do you believe in God?” while pointing a gun to their heads. It is the question their victims’ responses posed to us. It is the question that has made us all ‘Columbine.’”14

  Good God

  Without God are we all “Columbine”? Is a belief in God necessary to right the wrongs of immoral behavior? The 103rd archbishop of Canterbury (St. Augustine was the first, in 597) thinks so. On Friday, May 24, 1996, this spiritual leader of over 70 million Anglicans told 425 civic, business, and religious leaders at the Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel that “secularism” is the cause of much of the West’s moral woes. Paradoxically, this was followed by a litany of “unspeakable atrocities against innocent people” committed in the name of religion, as in Bosnia and against the Christian minority in Islamic Sudan. The archbishop—the Most Reverend George L. Carey—told his audience that only faith could stop these atrocities:

  How else can momentum be found for combating the worst excesses of poverty and inequality around the world? How else can we find the self-restraint in the interest of future generations in order to save our environment? How else can we combat the malignant power of exclusive nationalism and racism? All this requires the dynamic power of commitment, faith and love. The privatized morality of “what works for me” will not do.15

  Agreed, unalloyed self-interested morality will not suffice. But is our only choice between godly morality and godless immorality, as is so often presented by both theologians and the religious virtue peddlers of pop culture? Can we be good without God?

  The Grand Inquisitors Say No

  The “Grand Inquisitor” is the literary antagonist of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a Russian socialist who was arrested in 1848 following the political revolutions that threatened the Russian monarchy. He was found guilty of conspiring against the Orthodox Church and the Russian government as part of the Petrashevsky circle, followers of the French socialist Fourier. The sentence included a bizarre mock death sentence and execution, followed by a six-year stint in a penal colony where Dostoyevsky had not “one single being within reach with whom I could exchange a cordial word. I endured cold, hunger, sickness. I suffered from the hard labors and the hatred of my companions” but “the escape into myself … did bear its fruits.” Among the fruits was his profound religious crisis, which was triggered in Dostoyevsky after he read the Bible. As a result, he eschewed the social and political ideas of his youth and became deeply religious. Subsequent years of turmoil and poverty left him feeling like “a foreigner in a foreign land,” and while in exile he composed his greatest work, which was to explore “the problem that has consciously and unconsciously tormented me all my life.”

  That problem was the existence of God, and the work became The Brothers Karamazov. Among the many deep issues addressed in his tome, Dostoyevsky considered the following question: if God does not exist, does anything go? “Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering.”16 As the Grand Inquisitor noted, if God granted us freedom to make moral choices, then what is the use of the ancient laws He gave us? “In place of the rigid ancient law, man must hereafter with free heart decide for himself what is good and what is evil, having only Thy image before him as his guide. But didst Thou not know that he would at last reject even Thy image and Thy truth, if he is weighed down with the fearful burden of free choice?”17

  If God does not exist, then what is the origin of morality? The answer presented in part 1 of this book is that evolution generated the moral sentiments out of a need for a system to maximize the benefits of living in small bands and tribes. Evolution created and culture honed moral principles out of an additional need to curb the passions of the body and mind. And culture, primarily through organized religion, codified those principles into moral rules and precepts. The next logical question to ask, then, and one that is answered in part 2 of this book, is this: can we lead moral lives without recourse to a transcendent being that may or may not exist? Can we construct an ethical system without religion? Most believers and theists answer no. Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, for example, suggested that this need for a higher source for morality lies at the very foundation of religion: “So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship … . This craving for community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time.”18 In his Casti connubii of December 31, 1930, Pope Pius XI agreed that without God anything goes: “For the preservation of the moral order neither the laws and sanctions of the temporal power are sufficient nor the beauty of virtue and the expounding of its necessity. A religious authority must enter in to enlighten the mind, to direct the will, and to strengthen human frailty by the aid of divine grace.”19

  Of course, we should not be surprised to find that the leader of the world’s largest religious denomination believes that religion is a fundamental necess
ity for sustained moral behavior. A more contemporary and pop-culture answer is provided by an individual who, you might say, in recent years has become America’s Grand Inquisitor. In the 1990s a self-appointed religious moral authority entered the American landscape to enlighten her listeners to the need of divine grace. She is Laura Schlessinger.

  On March 19, 1998, I attended a prayer breakfast sponsored by the Glendale, California, Chamber of Commerce, with Dr. Laura as the featured speaker, and, considering the hour (6:00 A.M.), there was a remarkable turnout of approximately 850 people. When she was introduced, it was announced that the week before she had surpassed Rush Limbaugh in number of listeners to become the most popular radio talk show host in America. The syndication of her program set an all-time record for growth (now in excess of 450 stations). Her books are national best-sellers. Her lectures are typically standing room only. During her daily three-hour program, over 65,000 people jam the phone lines, hoping to be one of the lucky few to be able to speak to her. At the breakfast I attended, the title of her lecture was “Can You Be Good Without God?” Her short: answer was: “Here and there, but not consistently through all the things that humans have to suffer.”

  Schlessinger’s long answer included an exposition on her personal history, in which she recapped her youth in the “anything goes” 1960s when she was relatively freewheeling and “grew up with no God.” Her mother was a “nice Catholic girl from Italy,” and her father “a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn,” neither of whom believed in God. So for Schlessinger, and for so many others that decade, anything went morally. (Well, not quite for Schlessinger, who admitted that her parents did instill some moral principles in her. Something like this argument is often used by believers to explain how and why nonbelievers are moral—even if raised in a nonbelieving household the culture in which they reside is a Judeo-Christian one in which moral precepts and beliefs are inculcated tacitly as part of the general zeitgeist and prevailing milieu.) What is “good” in this system, she explained, is “what I really want to do, what is really turning me on, what is titillating, what is available, what is seductive, what is exciting, what is fun. Without God that is pretty much how we define ‘good’—it is a matter of opinion. Your opinion of what is good is probably going to be based on what you were taught, some opportunities that are available, and this magnificent brain that can rationalize anything.” Schlessinger explained that over the long haul, however, this morally carefree philosophy was unsatisfying to her—not miserable, mind you, but nothing like a feeling of moral closure or satisfaction. Like most religious converts who describe their conversion in terms of a fulfillment process, Schlessinger explained, “something was missing” from her life. Finally she found God, converted to Judaism, and now has a moral compass that she points at Americans daily from noon to three. “I’m a prophet,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “This is a very serious show.”20

  Schlessinger’s argument was similar to the one she made to me privately several months prior when she resigned from the editorial board of Skeptic magazine, a science publication I edit. In 1994 we invited Schlessinger to be on our board because of the public position she bravely took on the recovered memory movement (in which therapists alleged they could extract repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse through suggestive talk therapies, hypnosis, fantasy role playing, and the like). Schlessinger even spoke for us as part of our public science lecture series at Caltech, and she delivered a brilliant exposition on self-reliance, critical thinking, independence of thought, and other attributes admired by freethinkers, humanists, and skeptics. Even after her conversion to orthodox Judaism and a surfeit of critical letters from readers that subsequently came pouring into Skeptic’s office, we left her on our board because we do not believe in excluding people based on their religious beliefs. Her later resignation, then, surprised me: “Please remove my name from your Editorial Board list published in each of your Skeptic Magazine issues immediately. Science can only describe what; guess at why; but cannot offer ultimate meaning. When man’s limited intellect has the arrogance to pretend an ability to analyze God, it’s time for me to get off that train.” Our follow-up conversation clarified to me that, for Schlessinger, the subject of God’s existence was off-limits to science. There is a God. Period. And morality follows.

  As she wrote in an opinion editorial in the Calgary Sun on September 9, 1997: “There are those who say it is feasible to be moral without God or religion. I think they are all wrong.”21 The bottom line, Schlessinger believes, is that humans are naturally deceitful, innately evil, and inherently bad. “Being good is not natural. Being good requires you to overcome your own self-interest.” In short, if we think we can get away with something, we will. Of course, we cannot get away with just anything since we have laws and customs, so we try to get away with what we can, hoping we will not get caught. “Getting caught,” says Schlessinger, is the level of morality most people attain, but a belief in God elevates morality to a higher level. If you think you can get away with something, this is when anything goes, and she hears tales of this every day on the radio. But, says Schlessinger, you never get away with anything because God is always watching. He can even see through concrete she explained (in an offhanded one-liner about God knowing you are stealing from a store even if no one can see you). “The notion of God is really, fundamentally, all we have to truly lead us to be good or else we make our own decisions and we become, individually, our own Gods.”22

  That’s it. That is the core of Schlessinger’s argument. There was nothing about these moral principles being worthy of following in their own right. There was nothing about treating other people as you would like to be treated. There was nothing about human rights or human dignity. For Schlessinger, it comes down to this: you’ll be busted by Mr. Big if you sin, so don’t.

  On the simplest of levels, of course, any of us can be good without God. Most sincere and honest religious folks admit that anyone—even atheists—can occasionally be good. Their deeper argument lies in the sustainability of right moral actions across varied circumstances and extended periods of time. Without a religious foundation, they argue, the flesh is weak and the mind is a willing coconspirator in the justification of doing the wrong thing. It is often difficult to do the right thing and, they argue, without that extra transcendental boost from above we fail too often.

  Theism, Atheism, and Morality

  Events of an evil and primeval nature force us to confront the deepest questions about our moral nature, beginning with the nature of morality if there is no God and the fate of ethics in a secular and scientific society. Are we doomed to destruction if we do not accept the objective value of moral absolutes offered by religion? Do we need religion-based morality as an antidote to the alleged nihilism of a secular and scientific society? Many theologians and religious believers think that we do, and they are often responding to their perception of what it means to embrace science and secularism. Among both social commentators and moral philosophers the consummate example of the result of secular morality is the Holocaust. The Nazi regime, we are told, was a godless atheistic one that led directly and ineluctably to a relativistic morality that justified the brutal murder of millions of people.

  The problem with this particular case is that Hitler and the Nazis were not atheists. In Mein Kampf Hitler observed that “faith is often the sole foundation of a moral attitude” and that “the various substitutes have not proved so successful from the standpoint of results that they could be regarded as a useful replacement for previous religious creeds.” In fact, Hitler argues that an attack against religion “strongly resembles the struggle against the general legal foundations of a state” and “would end in a worthless religious nihilism.”23 Hitler’s most famous statement on the subject was made in his Reichstag speech of 1938, when he proclaimed: “I believe today that I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator. By warding off the Jews I am fighting for the Lord’s work.”24 As for the Third Reich itself, numbe
r twenty-four of the original twenty-five points of the German Workers’ party proclaimed liberty for all religious denominations “so far as they are not a danger to it and do not militate against the moral feelings of the German race.” The party, it was stated, “stands for Positive Christianity.”25 In 1934, Professor Ernst Bergmann penned a twenty-five-point catechism for the core of this new “Positive Christianity” that included, in point number six, this denunciation of atheism and nonbelief: “The German religion is a religion of the people. It has nothing in common with free thought, atheist propaganda, and the breakdown of current religions.”26

  Although it is certainly true that the Lenin-Stalin regime of the Soviet Union was atheistic in principle, sociologists of religion are now discovering that throughout the seventy-five-year-long social experiment of Communism, religious faith remained steadfast, albeit underground and practiced with considerable stealth.27 As for the rest of the twentieth century, at its beginning the Great War featured God-fearing, Ten Commandment-swearing men who killed other God-fearing, Ten Commandment-swearing men, all in the name of God. By the end of the century, wars, revolutions, and acts of terrorism committed in the name of God were almost nightly news affairs. The fact that the twentieth century was the bloodiest century in human history (by raw numbers only, not by percentage of population casualties) has nothing whatsoever to do with a lack of religious or moral values (which, clearly, were not lacking). Given the killing technologies of modern states (and their correspondingly larger populations) there is little doubt that the crusades, inquisitions, and religious wars of the medieval and early modern periods would have easily produced the vast killing fields of our time. The problem is not a lack of God, religion, or morals. It is the wedding of extremism, fundamentalism, and absolute morality, coupled with the means of murder and access to masses of humanity that results in the wanton destruction we have witnessed in modern times. And it is only fair to ask, what if religion is not the solution but is actually part of the problem? This is not an argument that I am particularly disposed to make, but one can make the observation that if more (and a greater percentage of) Americans believe in God than ever before in history, and if America is going to hell in an immoral handbasket as never before, then at the very least the argument that we cannot be good without God would seem to be gainsaid.