My colleague David Klinghoffer has a superb post on a TED talk given in 2010 by atheist neuroscientist Sam Harris. Harris insists that moral law can be derived from science:

[T]he separation between science and human values is an illusion — and actually quite a dangerous one at this point in human history. Now, it’s often said that science cannot give us a foundation for morality and human values, because science deals with facts, and facts and values seem to belong to different spheres. It’s often thought that there’s no description of the way the world is that can tell us how the world ought to be. But I think this is quite clearly untrue. Values are a certain kind of fact. They are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.

Harris argues that human flourishing is the rational basis for moral law, and that science helps us to understand human flourishing more surely and helps us promote morality more effectively. However, like most atheist commenters on moral law, Harris misunderstands the issues surrounding moral law and its discernment.

The question about moral law is two questions: is moral law objective or subjective, and how can we know it?

The first question on the objectivity of moral law can be summarized: is moral law something we discover, or something we create? If it is something we discover, then it is something other than man-made. If moral law is discovered, it is God’s law, as understood by virtually all religions.

If moral law is created by man, it is really moral laws — seven billion opinions — opinions created by each person as he contemplates right and wrong. In the sense of moral law as subjective opinion, rather than objective reality, no one man’s version of moral law has any particular claim to truth that is binding on anyone else. I believe that starving Ukrainians to take their farms is immoral; Joseph Stalin disagreed.

If moral law is not God-given law, but rather human opinion, who is to decide what law shall be binding on humanity? The answer is: those with power will decide, and do decide, in our secular world.

The obvious example is Harris’s own notion that moral law is just that set of behaviors (which science can help us discover) that promote human flourishing. But who decides what counts as human flourishing, and why exactly is human flourishing the basis for morality anyway, if there is no objective moral law independent of human opinion? Hitler’s conquest of Eastern Europe was the consequence of his view that the flourishing of Germans depended on living space that the East could provide. His moral calculus was that the net good from conquering Poland et al. far outweighed any net evil from exterminating the locals who were in the way. And if moral law is mere opinion and what counts as flourishing is subjective (which in the atheist worldview it must always be), who are we to say that Hitler had moral law wrong? It was a difference of opinion, in that case, not a difference between good and evil, which atheism must deny as objective categories.

The notion of moral law as created by man, rather than discovered by man, is always a prescription for the raw exercise of power, and the more emphatic the morality, the more brutal the power. The atheist view of moral law is the nidus of totalitarianism.

The second question raised by the issue of moral law is: If moral law is objective, how can we know it? That is a much more profound and relevant question, because it does not turn on an obvious atheist fallacy, as the objectivity/subjectivity of moral law does, but rather it turns on a question that all thoughtful people face: How am I to know — to discover (not create) — right from wrong? It is here, perhaps, that science can genuinely help us, but not at all in the way Harris envisions.

In Harris’s atheist world, there can be no “right and wrong” in nature, because nature has no purposes. Harris denies teleology in the natural world, and so he must deny purpose and right and wrong in the natural world as well.

But theists — particularly of the Christian, Jewish, and even Islamic kind — understand nature from an implicit (not always explicit) Aristotelian perspective. The Aristotelian perspective — inherently a part of each of the major monotheisms — was explicitly developed in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic theology by Aquinas, Maimonides, and Averroes, respectively, and (at least in Christian and Jewish theology) continues to inform metaphysics, natural science, and ethics. This Aristotelian perspective is teleological; there are goals for nature, and goals for nature’s creatures, including man, that are inherent to man. Moral law is one of those goals, and it is written into man’s heart, and flourishing is living a life in accord with man’s natural ends, which are to love God, love his neighbor as himself, and use and explore Creation for the glory of God and the benefit of man.

In the monotheist perspective, moral law is objective and God-given. It is discovered by man, in part by revelation and in part by an understanding of nature and our natural ends. In the monotheistic perspective, science can help us understand morality, because nature has purposes through which moral law, correctly understood, is expressed.

In the atheist perspective, moral law must be subjective with no existence independent of individual opinions. As such, the scientific exploration of the natural world has no real bearing on moral opinion, given that nature has no purposes and thus can embody no morality at all. In the atheist view, nature is shot through, not with God’s will, but with pitiless indifference. Establishment of moral law in an atheist culture devolves to an exercise of power over other men — the imposition of the opinions of some men on other men, and the scientific investigation of nature provides no real insight into morality at all, because, in this view, nature is stripped of all purpose.

In the atheist perspective, the scientific investigation of moral law is merely the use of science to justify the exercise of power over other men.

Harris’s moral law is no morality at all, but merely a tactic in a larger struggle for power in the affairs of men. This is a fine precis of totalitarianism, which is the natural moral telos of atheism.

Image: Sam Harris, [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.