I wrote this letter because of my continued effort to expose the irrational nature of an objective moral code based on evolution.
Letter to editor,
According to the evolutionary model of morality that is being pawned on society it is necessarily the case that right and wrong are muddled (at best). Such confusion results in there being no justice done when a malcontent decides to extinguish the life of others, including himself (“Five die in shooting at Ariz. Home,” JG-TC, p. A-2, 5/3/2012). In such an evolutionary model to whom will he account himself?
Many people will assert that the perpetrator of the crime most certainly did wrong, but in accordance with relativism (evolutionary morality) that value judgment has no substantive meaning; it is only wrong because one wants to believe it is wrong. Fortunately, most that are rational have forsaken such a godless approach.
The value of life is minimized when the judicial system takes a perpetrator of a crime and a judge allows for a possible sentence for that crime of only three years (“Verdict,” JG-TC, pp. A 1-2, 5/5/2012). What is the value of a person’s life? Since abortion holds sway with liberal ideology it has become much less valuable. Our judicial system does not even know how to value a person’s life when a crime is committed. Consequently, the judicial system perpetuates a confusing mess.
In such a chaotic world people seek for wisdom that is more than the mundane, more than confusing in a world where morality is quite confusing. Many turn to Buddhism, and perhaps much can be gained there, but it is a system that is atheistic. Moreover, it got its start with a man who abandoned his wife and child to find meaning and answers in his own life. For one local person I guess he did no wrong, he just evolved! Perhaps this is the kind of morality that particular one adheres to.
If morality originates in the mind of man, confusing will be the modus operandi of life. The alternative to such confusion is for one (all) to turn to Him who transcends life. To Him and His standard we will be held accountable. The moral code of man’s Creator can’t be improved on; it can only be applied.
What some people hope to escape when they kill themselves (after killing others) will bring them right to the feet of Him who created all.
Submitted 5/11/2012; printed 5/15/2012
etsop95 
Fantastic letter!
Jesus, instead of putting or assigning value to a person’s life, asked, “What is the value of a person’s (your) soul?”
Thanks, Andrew.
Brother, you seem the confused one. Evolutionary morality is not what you call relativistic morality by which you seem to mean arbitrary morality. Whatever evolves does so because it helps the animal, us in this case, to survive better in their environment. Evolution is a slow process because it depends on the harsh environment selectively culling those without the best attributes for survival.
If we lived as many fish and plants do by simply dispersing their seed to fend for themselves, we would grow up as purely solitary animals, caring only for ourselves and therefore untroubled by morality. But we live in social groups for our mutual benefit, so that we can care for each other, defend each other, watch out for each other, feed each other, and by so doing improve our chances of surviving. Social living is a social contract to help and be helped in all these ways. If some of us are not willing to help in all this, but still expect others to offer these social benefits to them, then those others are entitled to punish us for our laziness or irresponsibility. In primitive times the recalcitrant ones would have been cast out of the social group–cast out of Eden, if you like–and left to die when no other group would take them in.
The remaining members of the group would therefore be more strongly inclined to help others, and no rival groups in which people did the opposite could survive, precisely because they would not help each other and would revert to solitary anti-social living. We have evolved these ways of behaving because they help us to survive as a social animal, and because we can think of these qualities we have adopted, we alone can recognize them and name them as morals. That is why morality is both evolved and not arbitrary.
In the example of the malcontent you cite, the malcontent killed himself and removed his genes from the group, if they were the reason why he behaved as he did. If not, then society has to examine itself to find out why this malcontent was not content in a society that is meant to be helping everyone to live better lives. More often than not, the malcontent will have been neglected by others in society and even harassed or persecuted. Society is therefore failing in not being just and fair, and needs to examine itself.
Christ cited the parable of the Good Samaritan as the way the Christian should behave towards others. Help them! If society allows some people to go under without the help they need, then they will seek to leave this unjust society. As that is impossible, they will take revenge against it, or revolt against it. Evolutionary morality is Christ’s morality, but regrettably few people today follow it, even among those that call themselves Christian.
If morality has its basis in man – whether in a single man or a group of men – the moral code lived by is still determined by man. Thus, if a single man decides to do X and the group agrees with X, then X is the proper moral code of living. That X could be something good and beneficial or that X could be bad and harmful. In either case, it is man who determines and it is the judgment of man that makes it arbitrary. It does not matter whether the process is slow or fast it is strictly based on the whims of man and his own survival (with the pronoun being emphasized).
The very nature of a social contract is a contract based on the collective judgment of people and their arbitrary or thoughtful judgments. There is nothing within the individual or collective that transcends anything; the collective transcends nothing because it is the subjective thoughts of the many. As per your illustration, it is just as socially right to let the person die (who refuses to conform) as it is to literally cut his arm off or his heart out. There is no qualitative difference.
You have properly stated it when you said “we alone can recognize them and name them as morals.” That is the point. Whether man uses evolution or not, when he is the sole determiner of what is right and what is not then it is based on the subjective (perhaps trained, perhaps not) thinking (whims) of man. There is no other way to get around it.
According to evolutionary morality the malcontent I identified had as much moral basis to do what he did than not; he rejected the social contract and determined his own morality; he did nothing wrong. It might very well have been the case, as you said, the man who perpetrated the crime had been left behind (in some form or fashion), but did he have any responsibility to alter his moral course? He had none according to the evolutionary and relativistic code of morality that is pawned on man. He determined his own morals.
Your remark about society being just and fair is out of line with your premise that, “Social living is a social contract to help and be helped in all these ways.” It is out of line because it was “society” – the very ones who make the social contract – who determined what is fair or unfair. Thus, society could not have not failed in the case of the malcontent I identified.
As soon as we bring in the Lord’s illustration of the good Samaritan as a means to help, on what basis will we reject anything else He says.
The Lord did not base His morality on anything like the godless moral code that evolution postulates – which is man’s arbitrary judgments. He did not because He knew that it could not work and it is evident it has not worked.
Dear Brother Ron, I apologize in advance for a long post, but you are in error over many points.
I understood that you were arguing about evolutionary morality, and my purpose was to explain it, and that it was not arbitrary. Yet you are overlooking or misreading several of the things I wrote. If our morals have evolved, or to be more precise, if we have adopted by evolution certain behaviors then they are part of our normal behavior and we have to choose to act against our instinct to deny them, or we are incomplate human beings in some sense. You are therefore wrong to say “the moral code lived by is still determined by man”, unless you mean by it that some of us can choose to be wicked. Having evolved a moral instinct, it is hard for most of us not to act according to it. Most of us are indeed moral because we are born with the qualities that constitute morality. If we act immorally, we have been born as faulty human beings, with a missing or faulty moral instinct, just as some people are born blind or limbless–original sin is not the normal human state; or we are brought up, as I suggested, in a society that does not offer us anything as a reward for being moral, and so some of us might defy our instinct and take revenge against an uncaring society.
The process I am referring to as being slow, is evolution, not the decision to defy or follow our moral instinct, nor is evolutionary adaptions the effect of “whims” for personal survival, any more than a polar bear has a whim to be white rather than brown.
The “social contract” is an abstraction used to illustrate the basis of social living way, an abstraction that can be explained in real terms by evolution. There never was any social contract per se, but it evolved by solitary animals slowly evolving to live in harmony, quite contrary to their original instinct to live alone and to take whatever they could get for themselves. Morality itself is that very “social contract”. We have evolved to forego certain of our individual freedoms for the benefit of the group, but we naturally expect the other members of the group we share to do the same for us as we are doing for them.
You try to switch the discussion back to one about arbitrary choices of moral actions. We have not arbitrarily chosen to be social animals. It is part of our humanity. We could not be human without it. So we do not arbitrarily decide to be moral. Morality is necessary for a society to exist, and historically, every time a society collapses, we as human beings do not revert to solitary zombies intent only on feeding ourselves and killing everyone else. We come together again in a new society which we try to make fair and just, and try to enforce morality among those who wish to take advantages of the moral ones by being immoral.
“As per your illustration, it is just as socially right to let the person die (who refuses to conform) as it is to literally cut his arm off or his heart out. There is no qualitative difference.” My illustration was not a prescription, as you pretend but a description of what happened to get us here, of how society came to be moral. But society still does not want to have among its members people who will kill members of our group, and we do choose to punish them, even by death, despite God’s strict commandment that we shall not kill. Plainly, even though that is a supernatural commandment of the sort you prefer, you treat it as no more than an arbitrary moral when it comes to judicial murder.
You cite “we alone can recognize them and name them as morals”, but interpret it as meaning that humans are determining morality purely relatively, when it is no more than giving a name to an arm or a leg. It is no more subjective than having an arm or a leg is subjective. It is part of us. We are recognizing that we act morally as a matter of fact, and so try to identify and name what of our many forms of behavior are moral. We are not generally defining morality, only churches do that, we are simply labelling and classifying it. We find that morality always concerns others. It is always social.
Now you write, “According to evolutionary morality the malcontent I identified had as much moral basis to do what he did than not; he rejected the social contract and determined his own morality; he did nothing wrong”, thereby showing that you have not understood what I have been trying to explain. It might be my fault for not being clear, but I suspect it is another apologetic ploy. Let me repeat–evolutionary morality is not arbitrary. We are born with it as much as we are born with five digits per hand, so he did indeed do wrong. He acted against his moral instinct. He might have been a flawed human, a psychopath or sociopath, born with an incomplete set of moral digits, or he might have had a grudge against society, as I explained, that makes him defy his instinct, but that is the very reason why Christ instructed us to love one another. To be left feeling unloved or even hated by others in society is devastating.
The proper social contract is between each of us and society. We have rights and duties, and if society does not respect our rights, we have no need to respect our duties to it. No just and fair society, no loving society, has to be concerned about this being a serious problem because we simply want society to do for us what we are willing to do for it, or rather its other members–the Golden Rule, help them. If we are not helping those who need our help, then we are failing them, and they might well fail us. This is not arbitrary. Our instinct is to help others, and it must come as an awful blow to find that others do not care for us. We have to be sensitive to that. Perhaps I am mistaken, but that, I thought, was Christian love.
You ask, “did he have any responsibility to alter his moral course?” In a loving and fair society, he plainly did have that responsibility, and more, he had the instinct to be a good citizen, a good member of the social group, but if that question is valid, then so too is the question of whether society had any responsibility for his actions. When such acts get increasingly common, society should start to examine itself. Unjust societies cannot stand. Concerted objection to a society may become revolution, and nearly all of our modern western societies began in revolution against previous unfair and oppressive societies–unloving ones!
You say now that it is society that decides what is fair and unfair, and so society cannot fail without being out of line with my statement that “social living is a social contract to help and be helped in all these ways”. Unfortunately, society has to make these decisions whether the morality at its base is God’s or some other. You preach this God given morality, Brother Ron, yet it is every man’s own decision whether to accept it or not, and societies today at the highest levels do not. To claim to be Christian is a political convenience of people who are everything but.
Despite 200 years of Christian persuasion and coercion, morality in general is almost nonexistent, and that is because what people are taught conficts a great deal with what Christ taught and our instinct for evolutionary morality. Most Christians neither know their bible, nor know what is moral. They might accept the word of a shepherd like yourself that morality is God’s own, but they still do not know what it means. They are taught that we have to get on by outdoing our brothers and sisters, so why would we want to help them? Most Christians think immorality refers to illicit sex.
If God can create the heavens and the earth, then He can build morality into human beings by evolution, and, if then, He decides to appear on earth in human form to preach His own message, then He must be preaching what he has already imbued us with. Yet you remain so one eyed over morality that you say, “The Lord did not base His morality on anything like the godless moral code that evolution postulates – which is man’s arbitrary judgments”. Not just every preacher these days claims to be a prophet, but every Christian does, yet you simply do not know what “the Lord” based his morality on, nor that the “moral code that evolution postulates” is “godless”. I ought not to have to say again that evolutionary morality is not arbitrary. If God is the Creator, then you must be Godless, for evolution is part of creation. It certainly remains the case that evolutionary morality closely matches what Christ preached in his Good Samaritan parable, and you ought to be explaining to me “on what basis we will reject anything else He says”, because there is more of Christ’s practical teaching that is rejected by the Christian churches than is practised.
Morals have its origin in man how? There are only two places from which it is possible for man to be a moral creature. He either developed them on his own or he did not. If the latter, whence its origin? You argue that evolution gave us our morality, but how does a process of non-being give us morality? You say we have qualities that constitute morality, but how did they come into existence within man? If we act immorally we are faulty – faulty with and to whom? On the other hand, if man is the one who determines his morality based on some “born with qualities” that have no (otherwise) explanation for existence, then it is strictly man who determines his own standard. There are no others options. Do you know of a third alternative? You say we have a moral instinct; from where did it come?
Evolution gives us our moral instinct like an animal has instinct to do a certain thing. Yet, man is rational and animals are not. Why the difference?
Morality is that “social contract” (3rd sentence, 1st paragraph), but that social contract exists only as an abstract (1st sentence, 3rd paragraph). We give up freedom for the group, so this ability to rationalize comes from where?
You say that morality is part of being human, and you have attempted to explain the existence of morality as a result of evolution (physical process of change), coupled with the abstraction “social contract”. You have yet to explain the origin of a non-material existence like morality. How did it come into existence? Your two options are man or not man, which is it?
If morality exist, and man merely recognizes it and names it, then its existence comes from where? If gravity exists and man merely recognizes it and names it, its existence comes from where? Since it is likely you will be able to answer the latter easily enough, I hope the former will be likewise.
You seem to be charitable in your discourse concerning churches and the varied roles it (they) might play. This is to your credit. Still, to say that morality exists is to say that its existence is based on something. You say that is it evolution, but evolution does not explain morality’s existence, only that man recognizes its presence and labels it. If morality is not subjective, then it is objective – thus, it transcends man. Who or what brought it into being?
We are born with a moral code (a non-physical and rational entity) that you declare came into existence by a mechanical process (evolution) – something I reject. Moreover, you declare that I have failed to understand your point in explanation, but I have not failed to understand – I understand it perfectly well. Based on the evolutionary model morality is very much arbitrary; you, Mike, and Richard Dawkins notwithstanding. I do not deny we are born with a moral nature, but I do deny we have it by evolution. It is true that Christ taught man a standard higher than that which he was living and even lived (in the past), but for Him to teach that higher standard it is a recognition that which was currently lived was inadequate. The origin of that standard was in Himself.
I skipped replying to a few of your paragraphs to get to the one where you say something relative to the Christian persuasion having failed in society. This I won’t deny – in part. The problem – as it has always been – is in the application of the standard that man says he lives by. For most, the preeminent persuasion is politics, not righteousness. If this is doubted all one has to do is see the “religious” interest in political matters on the evening news. The standards of the Lord are high, and the failings of man are rather evident. Moreover, it is true that most “Christians” do not know their Bibles; this is another of man’s failings. A lot of that has to do with the religious institutions that are hierarchal in nature and have failed in their own teachings regarding God and His way of righteousness.
Mike, having come to your last paragraph, if I understand you correctly, you believe God is the source of morality. I am not sure I understand you correctly because of the words you have chosen to use. Given that I do, however, I do concede the point for the moment that God can do a particular thing – whether He did or not is another matter of discussion.
I am no more “one-eyed” than you, Mike. The statement I made that you dislike stands strongly. Evolution is, by its very nature, godless. That fact that you might not want it to be that way does not change it; macro-evolution does not need or even want God. If you want to engage in the question that you turned on me – I am game for such a discussion. Your last three sentences warrant a discussion along that line.
The scientific nature of evolution and its credibility will be left in the hands of those with more ability than anything I might be able to contribute. If you (or an associate) would like to have a public debate on it for the benefit of those in the audience that would come – and they surely would attend – then I can put you in contact with those who are ready and willing to engage in a public discussion
Dear Ron, Perhaps I ought to have realized that a churchman would persist in refusing to understand evolution, despite a fact you cannot deny and that is that the creator of the world could have made it such that the kinds he wanted to fill it with would appear by a “mechanical” process that He set in motion. Plenty of clerics do not feel the need to find details of God’s working to be documented in Genesis, or anywhere else, but given that you accept He made the world and found it good, you have no basis for rejecting what we find in it via our human abilities, which I imagine you also concede God gave us.
If evolution is godless by its very nature, then what is not, by its very nature? I have never seen any imprimatur that can unquestionably be attributed to God stamped on anything in the world, including the bible itself. You might have decided that the bible is God’s work, but it is an arbitrary decision made subject to the chance occurrences of your birth, your upbringing, and the influences surrounding you. Had you been born elsewhere you might have had quite different beliefs, and as you accept that God has created and sustains the world, He has created Buddhists, Hindus, Catholics, Taoists, humanists, atheists and many other “kinds” of people too. With the gentlest exhalation of His breath you could have been any of these others. Christ insisted that the Christian should be humble. You teach otherwise. It is just one of many Christian requirements that Christians have rejected.
Towards the end of your latest reply you express a desire to pass any discussion of evolution on to someone “with more ability than anything I might be able to contribute”. In itself, it is an expression of honesty that I admire, but you have already demonstrated what you are admitting. In principle, evolution is not difficult, at least as long as your preconceived dogmata are not allowed to interfere with your comprehension of it. The detail is complicated if only because the variety of creatures is vast. But what you find difficult is not, so it must be your preconceptions, your dogma, that prevents you from comprehending it.
For my part, I cannot understand why God can design and create the world, but cannot design and create it with evolution as a mechanism of change built into it. He can construct us with a moral sense, but he cannot arrange for it to evolve within us as we ourselves evolve. Either way, human consciousness or rationality has nothing to do with it. When we become conscious we can see that we have arms, legs, eyes, ears, and so on, and that we live together in social groups which rely for their stability on mutual love. All we have done is name what is already there. We are not in general inventing morals, but simply recognizing them, and why they are important to us.
Anyway, I cannot see any amount of discussion closing the gap between us. Evolution has made us what we are, and whether you are an atheist like Dawkins and think God is unnecessary to evolution or an Anglican and credit God with the power to work through evolution should he choose to, it remains so. Just because God has not stamped “God’s Work” on everything does not prove that it is not, it simply means He has no need to brag about it.
Best wishes, Mike
Mike, saying that our morality is taught to us by society and that that moral code may slowly change over time is irrational on both accounts.
As Ron said, if our morality is taught to us by society, then what is moral or immoral is based on the majority. However, Jesus taught, “Enter through the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the road is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who go through it. How narrow is the gate and difficult the road that leads to life, and few find it.” (Matt 7:13-14) Jesus said the majority are immoral and in the end find spiritual death. Granted, this is a religious answer to the idea that society teaches morality. From a worldly perspective, society is a horrible teacher of morality because societies differ across the world. One society believes it is moral to be a homosexual while another society outright condemns homosexuality. Therefore, you cannot appeal to mankind inheriting a moral code, but societies defining their own moral code. Therefore, since moral code is defined by society and is not consistently defined by being human, Ron is abundantly correct in saying that man defines moral code and nature does not. If nature defined moral code, then all humans would have an evolving moral code that is consistent to all humans. This is absurd. If I’m misinterpreting your beliefs, please clarify.
Moral code cannot be something that evolves. Again using the example of homosexuality, the Roman Empire completely embarrassed the idea of homosexuality in its early centuries. But in the 300s when Christianity became the state religion, the state condemned homosexuality to some degree. Inversely, our country has generally believed homosexuality to be immoral by our nation’s society in earliest centuries. However, over the last few decades, homosexuality has become more acceptable (less immoral) by the society of our nation. This is an example of evolving morality. So are you saying that one act can be immoral at one time but another act be moral at another time? How can one society condemn an act, but at a later time, the same society approve of the same act? Does this mean that homosexuals would have had spiritual death previously while homosexuals can have spiritual life today? Unless morality is static and consistent, morality can become whatever society wants it to be. Therefore again, man defines his own morality at different points in time. If morality came from our human nature and not society, then we would not see such drastic change in morality in only a few decades! Aren’t those that go against society’s moral code the same ones to end up causing the majority to believe their beliefs? Therefore, the immoral people are the ones who cause the majority of their society to change their standards of morality. In other words, the only way a society to change its moral standards is by immoral people convincing the majority to adopt their beliefs. Now, if the majority who hold true to their society’s moral code decide to put that person to death, the morality wins and that society’s morality would NEVER change. However, when the majority allows an immoral person to live, this means they have changed their moral code by making what was once immoral moral. This is absurd!
For the standards of morality to be in itself fully moral, those standards must be consistent both across different societies and across different times. To say otherwise is to prove that man has chosen to be the originator of a particular moral standard.
Mike, you said, “It certainly remains the case that evolutionary morality closely matches what Christ preached in his Good Samaritan parable…”
I fail to see how evolutionary morality has anything to do with the Good Samaritan parable. For morality can change when society changes and this would completely destroy everything the Good Samaritan parable teaches. For an example, I think back to Josephus’ accounts of the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. While the city was under heavy siege, the few million people in the city ran out of food. Evolutionary morality became a morality of survival. All the people in the city adopted the practice and morality of doing anything to live. Whenever the people of the city found a locked door, they immediately assumed that the people behind the door were having a giant meal. As the people in the city (who were united in doing these things) broke down the door and if they found food inside, they would steal the food. Josephus records that these groups of men would strangle the throats of the people inside as they tried to steal the food as the people swallowed the food. If they found people desperately holding on to food in their hands, they would violently assault them to take it. And in all this, they showed absolutely no sympathy towards young, old, or women. Josephus says they took children who held on to food and dashed their bodies against the ground in order to take the food. Again, people were united in all these acts as it became the norm of their new society within the sieged walls of Jerusalem. Would we dare say that this “social contract” was moral because that society evolved into that contract though that contract was violent and murderous? This is beyond rational! There is no way by any standard that morality is defined by society and that morality can change either over a short time or over a long time.
Evolutionary morality is far from being any sort of true morality. Society may try to define what is moral and immoral, but in the end, their definition comes from the mind of man. It is impossible for such a morality to come from neither God nor human nature; such a morality only comes by choice when people choose survival or their own desires over the good of others.
Mike, if you want to believe that God created the world and used evolution as is defined today, that’s one thing. Though I believe you are wrong, I don’t think believing one way or another causes either of us to be any less of a Christian. That can be a different discussion. But to say that our morality does not come from God but comes from that evolution is completely absurd. If one believes that morality comes from their society, then they cannot say morality comes from God. For we cannot serve both God and society–for the two are usually never in agreement. When one believes that morality comes from society, practically speaking they are saying that morality can be defined however they choose–especially when a society is evenly split as to what is moral or immoral. This is very dangerous ground, Mike. Unless our morality and our lifestyles come from God and His Word, then eternal life cannot be guaranteed for us. Unless our actions agree with God’s moral code, He will not save us.
-Andrew
Dear Andrew I just read the first two sentences of your contribution to the discussion I have had with Ron. It shows you have not been courteous enough to have read what I was saying to him. We were talking about the evolution of morality, not that society teaches us morality. I do not wish to waste my time by reiterating to you what I have already said. You might wish to read and inwardly digest what I did write. Mike
Then we are both guilty of not properly understanding what each other are saying. Though I do not understand your beliefs, at least I made the attempt to understand you by reading your words.
Very well. I do not wish to be churlish, so I must accept what you say, that you did read what I had written. But that makes your failure to respond to what I said all the more curious. Perhaps you didn’t read what Ron had said, including, “I wrote this letter because of my continued effort to expose the irrational nature of
an objective moral code based on evolution”, his first two lines. I took him at his word, but both he and you seem to understand by “evolutionary morality” something that it is not, namely a relativistic one. Perhaps it is because you willfully refuse to understand what evolution is, something that is true of many of the more extreme Protestant sects, yet it offers a way for God to operate that reflects nature rather than being in conflict with it. As I said in may last reply to Ron, the distance between us seems too wide to begin to be bridged. Modern Protestantism seems to be getting like medieval Catholicism, determined to alienate God from His creation by deifying doctrine and dogma. The Catholic Church was made to look foolish, and lose status in the world.