Science of Good and Evil

by Michael Shermer

  What Would You Do if There Were No God?

  Turning from the level of collective politics to that of individual people, what would you do if there were no God? Would you commit robbery, rape, and murder, or would you continue being a good and moral person? Either way the question is a debate stopper. If the answer is that you would soon turn to robbery, rape, or murder, then this is a moral indictment of your character, indicating you are not to be trusted because if, for any reason, you were to turn away from your belief in God (and most people do, at some point in their lives), your true immoral nature would emerge and we would be well advised to steer a wide course around you. If the answer is that you would continue being good and moral, then apparently you can be good without God. QED.

  As anyone with any life experience or a sense of history knows, religious people are more than capable of committing sins and crimes, and nonreligious people are more than capable of being moral and trustworthy citizens and friends. (I am not arguing that religious people are more immoral, just that they are not any more moral than nonreligious people.) Think of child-molesting priests, money-scamming televangelists, or flimflam faith healers. At the same time, think of all the people you know who are not religious, yet who daily perform acts of kindness and generosity. Many of your friends are probably either nonbelievers or give little to no thought to religion. Are they robbers, rapists, or murders? Probably not. How then did they come to be moral? Why do they continue to be moral? Personally, it would frighten me to believe that the people I deal with on a day-to-day basis treat me tolerably well only because they are afraid of God and divine retribution. What happens when their belief in God diminishes or departs altogether? Where do their moral principles go then? To me it is a higher level of morality to be good for its own sake than for the consequences it may bring.

  How We Can Be Good Without God

  An argument could be made that since America is still primarily a Judeo-Christian society even nonbelievers have imbibed these values, regardless of their personal upbringing—that is, atheists are good because of all the good theists around them. Maybe, but as I argued in part 1, religion codified these moral principles for sound reasons that have nothing to do with divine inspiration. The moral sentiments and principles came first, evolving over the course of a hundred thousand years of humans living in a Paleolithic environment. Religion came second, co-opting morality and codifying it to its own end, all of which happened in just the past couple of thousand years. What would happen if we jettisoned religion altogether? Would society collapse into immoral chaos?

  No, it would not. And we have a two-centuries-long experiment in the separation of church and state to prove it. When the United States of America was founded, the original framers of the Constitution, heavily influenced by the secular Enlightenment philosophers whose writings over the previous century had laid the philosophical groundwork for a secular ethical and political system, made it clear that regardless of which religion (or even no religion) one professes belief in, certain moral principles hold. These include the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as well as the other rights protected in the Bill of Rights. What the Enlightenment philosophers were arguing, and the U.S. Constitution framers adopted, was the belief that humans have certain rights and values in and of themselves. These rights and values are grounded not in religion, or any other transcendental state or supernatural force, but in themselves. They stand alone. Humans deserve life, liberty, and happiness, not because God said so but because we are human. Period. These rights and values exist because we say they exist, and that is good enough. They are inalienable because we say they are, and that suffices.

  Does this secular system work? To answer the question, we have only to compare the levels of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of the citizens of the United States to those of the citizens of other countries, particularly those still ruled by theocracies. The system is not perfect, plenty of people fall through the cracks, rights are abused, lives are unjustly lost, liberties are unfairly trammeled, and too many are not achieving the levels of happiness that they could. But these are relative judgments, relative to what came before and to what exists elsewhere. Like science, secular ethics may be primitive and flawed, yet it is the most precious thing we have.

  6

  HOW WE ARE MORAL: ABSOLUTE, RELATIVE, AND PROVISIONAL ETHICS

  In science, “fact” can only mean “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.”

  —Stephen Jay Gould, Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes, 1983

  Once day in 1991 an attractive middle-aged woman was passing through the locker room of a health club on her way to meet a friend for lunch at the snack bar. She was early and there was no one around. Glancing about for her friend her eye was drawn to a shiny object on the floor. Looking closer she discovered that it was a large diamond ring. She vaguely recalled seeing it on someone at the club before, but could not recall to whom it belonged. She picked up the ring and put it in her pocket. When her friend arrived she immediately showed it to her and asked her to accompany her to the front desk so that she would have a witness to verify that she did not steal the ring, but had simply found it. “No one would ever have known that I had the ring,” she later recounted. “I could have hocked it for thousands of dollars, but I didn’t.” Why? Reflecting on the incident, she explained, “One just doesn’t do that. My conscience would not allow me to take it. I consider myself an honest person who tries to do the right thing, and in that instance I knew what the right thing to do would be.” Why is that the right thing to do? “Because if it were my ring I would hope that someone would do the same for me.” Golden rings and golden rules.

  That woman was my late mother, and this story is a classic example of the Golden Rule in practice. She treated the owner of that ring as she hoped someone would treat her if she lost her own. I recount the story here not because I think that my mom was some extraordinarily moral person, but because, in fact, as a moral agent I think she was quite ordinary and that most people most of the time in most circumstances would have done the same thing. She told me this story not as a moral homily to impart some extraordinary advice, but to show the ordinary nature of moral reasoning in response to a question I posed to her about the origins of morality: why are you moral? My mother, who had considerable influence on my thinking and moral upbringing, was not a religious person and had no belief in God. It was not something she thought a lot about—she simply did not believe in God and saw no reason to foist a pretense of belief. She did not raise me to be religious or irreligious. The subject almost never came up. Yet she was a decent, moral person, as is my father, and I think my siblings and I are an ordinary moral family. How was she able to be such an ordinarily moral person without believing in an extraordinarily moral being? Without absolute morality, aren’t we reduced to accepting an “anything goes” relative morality? No. There is a middle way between absolute morality and relative morality that I call provisional morality.

  Absolute Morality

  As defined earlier, morality involves right and wrong thoughts and behaviors in context of the rules of a social group, and ethics is the scientific study of and theories about moral thoughts and behaviors in context of the rules of a social group. Thus, we may define absolute morality as an inflexible set of rules for right and wrong thought and behavior derived from a social group’s canon of ethics. The claimed source of that canon may be God, the Bible, the Koran, the state, nature, an ideology, or a philosophy.

  An obvious and immediate problem with all systems of absolute morality—known formally in ethical theory as absolutism—is that they set themselves up to be the final arbiters of truth, creating two types of people: good and evil, right and wrong, true believers and heretics. This was most succinctly expressed by that sage philosopher Maxwell Smart—agent Eighty-Six on television’s Get Smart comedy series—who explained to his morally incredulous fellow agent Ninety-Nine: “Don
’t be silly, Ninety-Nine. We have to shoot, kill, and destroy. We represent everything that’s wholesome and good in the world.” Sadly, such black-and-white thinking is not restricted to the little screen. Richard Nixon used such rhetoric for political gain when he admitted, “It may seem melodramatic to say that the U.S. and Russia represent Good and Evil, Light and Darkness, God and the Devil. But if we think of it that way it helps to clarify our perspective of the world struggle.” Ronald Reagan was even more histrionic in his proclamation that the Soviet Union was the “evil empire.” Most recently, George W. Bush effectively labeled Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda operatives as “pure evil.”

  Most absolute moral systems are religiously based, but not all. Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative, for example, is a secular rational attempt at an absolute morality. A Categorical Imperative is an unconditional command without exceptions, which Kant contrasted with (by way of rejecting it) a Hypothetical Imperative, a conditional command with exceptions. For Kant, if you want to judge the rightness or wrongness of an action, “Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”1 Would we ever want to universalize lying, stealing, or adultery? Of course not. That would put an end to contracts, property, and marriage.

  But people do occasionally lie, steal, and commit adultery, and often there are perfectly rational reasons to do so. In the Categorical Imperative we witness a violation of the law of the excluded middle, also known as the either-or fallacy in logic, where options between extremes are excluded by forcing the issue into a binary choice. Here yet another problem is averted with fuzzy logic, where shades of fuzzy probabilities allow us to assign fractional values to moral answers that are more or less likely to be applicable. The world is usually more complex than the two choices typically presented by antagonists who wish to simplify issues for rhetorical sake. A type specimen of a statement of absolute morality can be found in the words of Christian author Francis Schaeffer:

  If there is no absolute moral standard, then one cannot say in a final sense that anything is right or wrong. By absolute we mean that which always applies, that which provides a final or ultimate standard. There must be an absolute if there are to be morals, and there must be an absolute if there are to be real values. If there is no absolute beyond man’s ideas, then there is no final appeal to judge between individuals and groups whose moral judgments conflict. We are merely left with conflicting opinions.2

  Cartoonist Wiley Miller illustrated the concept cleverly in a Non Sequitur cartoon (figure 21) in which Moses is admonishing modern moral relativists that God called them “commandments,” not “recommendations,” because they are absolute and final, no exceptions.

  The ultimate fallacy with all forms of absolute morality is that since virtually everyone claims they know what constitutes right versus wrong thought and action, and since effectively all moral systems differ from all others to a greater or lesser degree, then there cannot be a universally accepted absolute morality. In reality, and ironically, it is absolute moralities that leave us with nothing but conflicting opinions and no moral compass. Nowhere is this problem more evident than in religion.

  Most ethical systems are absolute, most absolute systems are derived from religious sources, and by far the most popular source of moral precepts and ethical conjectures is religion (making Divine Command Theory one of the most common of all ethical systems). The 2001 World Christian Encyclopedia, for example, reports that of the earth’s 6.1 billion humans fully 5.1 billion of them, or 84 percent, declare themselves followers of some form of organized religion. Christians dominate at just a shade under 2 billion adherents (with Catholics counting for half of those), with Muslims at 1.1 billion, Hindus at 811 million, Buddhists at 359 million, and ethnoreligionists (animists and others in Asia and Africa primarily) accounting for most of the remaining 265 million. Such overall numbers, however, tell us little. There are, in fact, 10,000 distinct religions of ten general varieties, each one of which can be further subdivided and classified. For example, Christians may be found among an astonishing 33,820 different denominations. The variety of non-Christian religions is also stunning, with worldwide distribution outstripping Christian religions despite the tireless efforts of evangelists to convert as many souls to Christ as possible. One table in the encyclopedia, for example, tracks the number of Christians (69,000) and non-Christians (147,000) by which the world will increase over the next twenty-four hours. Another table reveals the global convert/defector ratio, adjusted for births and deaths, indicating that the sphere of evangelism continues to expand into non-Christian belief space.3 Given this almost unfathomable level of religious differences, it is obvious that any claim to sole possession of absolute moral truth is fleeting. Clearly they cannot all be right.

  Figure 21. Absolute v. Relative Morality

  The Ten Commandments are a form of absolute morality. (© 2002 Wiley Miller. Distributed by Univeral Press Syndicate. Reprinted with permission)

  Relative Morality

  Relative morality is taken to mean a flexible set of rules for right and wrong thoughts and behaviors derived from how the situation is defined by the social group. The problem with relative morality—known formally in ethical theory as relativism—is that one can justify almost any behavior, implying that all moral actions—from self-sacrifice to human sacrifice—are equal. On a theoretical and scientific level, this is simply not true. On a practical level no one believes this. (Ethical theorists distinguish between descriptive ethical relativism, which passes no judgment on whether any of the numerous relative ethical theories are valid or not; and normative ethical relativism, which claims that each ethical theory, while relative in value compared to others, is absolutely valid for the culture in which it is practiced.)

  When I was a senior in high school in 1971 I became a born-again Christian. I took my commitment seriously enough to enroll at Pepperdine University, a highly regarded Christian institution affiliated with the Church of Christ and nestled in the foothills of Malibu, California, with grand vistas of the Pacific Ocean (okay, so the attraction was not purely academic). There I studied theology and psychology, attended chapel at least twice a week (admittedly attendance was a requirement), wrestled with the relationship between science and religion, and struggled with the normal carnal impulses of youth when they bump up against moral restrictions on their expression. (One student in our dorm, desperately seeking a rationale for what he knew he could not control, actually prayed for God to provide him with an acceptable sexual outlet—read partner—because, he reasoned, he could witness for the Lord better if he were not so distracted by such basic urges.) After graduating from Pepperdine and studying evolutionary biology and experimental psychology in a graduate program at California State University, Fullerton, I turned to science and philosophy for my moral answers, and began to try different ethical systems (not unlike Woody Allen’s character in his film Hannah and Her Sisters, who examines different religions, for example, coming home one day with a crucifix, a loaf of white bread, and a jar of mayonnaise to try out Catholicism!).

  Existentialism initially appealed to me because of its emphasis on moral freedom and individual responsibility. “Existence precedes essence” is a core tenet, meaning that our essence—our being, our very self—is constantly being created by the experiences we choose. We are the authors of our life stories, the architects of our souls. Very few people are innocent victims; rather, we make choices in life that ultimately place us in circumstances in which it might appear we were blameless sufferers but, in fact, most situations are created by the choices we make. Although this puts a rather sizable burden of responsibility for the outcome of your life squarely on your own shoulders, it also means that you can change; you are not stuck where you do not want to be. “Man is a wholly natural creature whose welfare comes solely from his own unaided efforts,” wrote one existentialist. To me, existentialism was one of the more optimistic philosophies I examined, but
I discovered that I was in a rather small minority in that regard. Most existentialists believe that life is “absurd” because we exist in a meaningless, irrational universe—any attempt to find ultimate meaning can only end in absurdity. Most existentialists seemed to agree with one of the philosophy’s founders, Albert Camus, when he lamented, “There is but one serious philosophical problem. That is suicide. Why stay alive in a meaningless universe?”4 Suicide may be painless (as the M*A*S*H theme song croons) but it brings on one major change I found unacceptable.