Yesterday, I explained that
for ideas like good and evil to make sense, one must hold there are real moral
duties and obligations that fall upon human beings. These moral laws must be
real, not merely preferences or false beliefs, and they must come from a source
outside the created order. But the concept of right and wrong depend on more
than the existence of transcendent moral laws. Right and wrong only make sense
if human beings are moral agents who are free to choose whether to obey these
laws.
Morality means we are able to make meaningful decisions
It has been
pointed out that certain species in the animal kingdom show some very disturbing
mating habits. For example, the female praying mantis may eat the head of her
mate after copulation.
1 Female wasp spiders, too, are
known to consume their counterparts.
2 Perhaps even more
disturbing (for women at least) is the fact that male chimpanzees will kill and
eat babies that are not their own.
3
Such behavior is
shocking, as those who were visiting the Los Angeles County Zoo and witnessed
one such attack discovered.
4 Yet, we don't classify
chimpanzees as evil creatures simply because they act in a way that would be
considered barbaric by human standards. Why? According to primatologist Craig
Stanford, the male chimps seem to be able to make a distinction between the
offspring of male competitors and his own. Stanford explained that the action is
"something that primatologists are accustomed to seeing regularly" in the wild
and he labeled it "part of their behavior."
5 Thus the zoo
chimp was not euthanized but continues to live at the Zoo entertaining visitors.
Why weren't the chimp's actions thought of as evil? Why consider this normal
behavior, not meriting punishment? It is because chimpanzees are not capable of
distinguishing right from wrong; they are creatures of instinct that will do
certain things because it is in their nature to do that. They cannot
meaningfully choose to oppose what their biology tells them to do. That's why
you can housebreak a dog but not a chimpanzee. Chimps will naturally defecate
where they sleep; dogs have a lair instinct where they are averse to doing so.
Thus, if the dog sees his "lair" as the house, he may be trained to relieve
himself outside. Not so with the chimps.
Human beings have real moral freedom
Because human beings are rational creatures, we have free will to choose whether
or not to obey our urges, lusts, desires, and appetites. We would immediately
label a man who killed the baby of his wife's adulterous lover as evil and a
murderer. The urges produced by our biology or by the emotion of the situation
don't matter. The man could have chosen to not act in spite of those. Human
beings have the capability to choose the good.
However, on a naturalist
account of humanity, how does one account for such freedoms? If all we are
amounts to chemical processes and electrical impulses, then how do any of our
action differ from those of the chimp I described above? If there is no
component of man that can transcend our biology, it strikes me that in all of my
actions, I'm simply the slave of the chemicals in my brain, acting in accord
with my instinctual nature and whatever stimulus I receive from the outside
word. Basically, my actions are nothing more than a very elaborate row of
dominoes, where one will fall inevitably after another given a certain set of
circumstances.
Without freedom, morality makes no sense
If that
description of human action is true, it means that there is no real freedom.
Freedom is a word we use because we may not be able to predict which way the
dominoes will fall. But you and I are no more culpable for our actions than the
chimp at the L.A. Zoo. Yet, we assume that people could have done otherwise. We
chide them and jail them for not choosing the good.
How does the naturalist
account for this capability of choice? For the Christian, we anchor our choices
in the soul. We understand that there is an immaterial aspect to man that rises
above his biology and gives him the capability to make meaningful moral choices.
This is what being created in the image of God means. We are created with a
sensitivity to moral obligations and duties. We don't just march to our biology,
but we also recognize there is a right and wrong way to act. The ability to rise
above our passions and desires and oppose them is what makes us morally culpable
when we violate a moral law.
Some people lose their ability to freely choose
how to act in certain situations. Think of the person suffering from Tourette's
syndrome who may shout out a term of bigotry or the individual suffering from
kleptomania. In those instances, we hold them to be ill, not evil, and we want
them to seek help. But they even have the freedom to seek that help to attempt
to get their uncontrollable tendencies under control. So, moral accountability
appears even there.
Just as I said in my last post, when one claims to
account for morality without God, there are some significant problems that
arise. One is what is the basis of moral obligations themselves? Just because
the universe is a certain way doesn't mean we have to abide by it. The second is
where does the ability to recognize the existence of those moral laws and the
capability to obey them in spite of our biology come from? If we are only
material beings, I don't see how this can be done logically.
For part three,
click here.
References