I’m always amused by the assertion that advances in contemporary morality are somehow thanks to science.

Michael Shermer’s column in Reason will serve as an illustration. He notes that IQ scores have been rising and correlates this with a higher morality, presuming that one leads necessarily to the other.

Shermer categorizes human thinking as either "concrete," which he sees as regressive and the cause of brutality, or "abstract," which he claims to be "scientific" and supposedly is more progressive. From "Are We Becoming Morally Smarter?":

"What do dogs and rabbits have in common?" If you answer, "Both are mammals," says [social scientist James] Flynn, you are thinking like a scientist in classifying organisms by type — an abstraction. If you said, "You use dogs to hunt rabbits," you are thinking concretely, imagining a tangible use for a dog.

Wait: Science isn’t only about learning truths about the natural world (abstract). It’s also about applying what we learn for the good of humankind (concrete). But I digress.

Shermer credits our contemporary, purportedly improved morality to general increases in "abstract reasoning," among which he includes that great scientific equation, the "Golden Rule":

Abstract reasoning and scientific thinking are the crucial cognitive skills at the foundation of all morality. Consider the mental rotation required to implement the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

This requires you to change positions — to become the other person — and then to extrapolate what action X would feel like as the receiver instead of the doer (or as the victim instead of the perpetrator).

Please. The Golden Rule began as an explicitly Jewish religious formulation, based on what God, who loves humankind, was believed to want of us. Or, does Shermer see belief in God as "scientific"?

Ditto St. Paul’s teaching that all, man and woman, Greek and Jew, master and slave, are all one and equal in Christ Jesus.
Talk about a radical idea! These and other Judeo-Christian religious concepts shattered cruel moral templates that existed at the time, setting us (the West) walking (too slowly) down the road that led to today’s notions of universal human equality, human rights — and embracing human exceptionalism, the key to achieving those ends.

Not only that, but the early Christians practiced what they preached, e.g., caring for the destitute and rescuing babies exposed on hills. These distinctly religious thinkers opposed the barbaric practice of infanticide — which many contemporary scientific thinkers have brought back into fashion by claiming that babies are not "persons" because they lack certain cognitive abilities.

Compare that with the "scientific" ideology of eugenics — abstractly conceived from Darwinist principles and the monk Mendel’s gene experiments — that advocates culling the human herd, separating the so-called "fit" from "unfit."

Social Darwinism, that cruel and odious idea, was similarly conceived as a great moral advance based on scientific premises that the weak among us were dangerous weights pulling the rest of society under the waves, and worse, that the answer to their misery was to let — or make — them die.

Political progressives and materialist "free thinkers," who have always claimed they represent the scientific worldview, overwhelmingly supported these two forms of authoritarianism.

Shermer describes what he thinks makes our age morally superior:

Since the Enlightenment, humans have demonstrated dramatic moral progress. Almost everyone in the Western world today enjoys rights to life, liberty, property, marriage, reproduction, voting, speech, worship, assembly, protest, autonomy, and the pursuit of happiness.

Liberal democracies are now the dominant form of governance, systematically replacing the autocracies and theocracies of centuries past. Slavery and torture are outlawed everywhere in the world (even if occasionally still practiced).

The death penalty is on death row and will likely go extinct sometime in the 2020s. Violence and crime are at historic lows, and we have expanded the moral sphere to include more people as members of the human community deserving of rights and respect.

Even some animals are now being considered as sentient beings worthy of moral consideration.

Animals have always been seen as deserving of some moral consideration, all the way back to Genesis. Moreover, the ancient faith Jainism accords moral equality to humans, animals, insects, and grass. I am sorry, but it is really "abstract" to think of grass and people as having equal ultimate value.

Yet Shermer gives all the credit for moral advances to scientific thinking!

Thinking like a scientist means employing all our faculties to overcome our emotional, subjective, and instinctual brains to better understand the true nature of not only the physical and biological worlds, but the social world (politics and economics) and the moral world (abstracting how other people should be treated) as well.

No, empathy isn’t rational, it is emotional. Viewing all humans as morally equal certainly isn’t a scientific premise. It can’t be proved objectively by measuring capacities, abilities, strength, and the like — too often done in scientific circles.

Science is a powerful and empirical method of learning. It can only tell us what is — and fashion hypotheses about what may be. It can’t tell us what is morally better or worse, right or wrong, enlightened or regressive. That is the subjective job of religion, philosophy, and morality.

Besides, tens of millions of unborn babies have been aborted in this supposedly superior moral age — which the Shermers of the world must think of as a great moral advance despite the unquestionable biological humanity of abortion’s victims.

Yes, science tells us that embryos and fetuses are human beings. But it can’t tell us whether abortion is morally correct. Ditto euthanasia.

Do you also notice how Shermer identifies whatever he believes with what is morally superior? We all do that. But morally "smarter" due to abstract and scientific human thinking?

That’s part of it, to be sure. But the reality is that what we in the West generally see as great moral advancements were brought about by dynamic human processes — objective and subjective, religious and secular, scientific and philosophical — working together to form Western civilization. 

Materialists like Shermer are determined to give science false credit for moral progress, even as they exclude other distinctly human disciplines and look down their noses at thinking that they dismiss as "unscientific." That is unadulterated scientism. It’s also morally myopic.

Image: "Paul Writing His Epistles," painting attributed to Valentin de Boulogne [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Cross-posted at Human Exceptionalism.