Morality of the Wind

Traditional secular materialists take the belief that humans evolved from a population of about 10,000 hominids around 200,000 years ago. This population was a spin-off (in their thesis) from the ape-kind going back 6 to 8 million years prior. Now that may be a fun and interesting way of relating to a story of human origins as many have tied to do, but one of the many, many fatal flaws in that theory is the reality of human morality.

C.S. Lewis writes about in his book Mere Christianity the moral law. To explain how we know good and evil, he asks: How can we call the universe “crooked” or unfair if we do not first have an idea of a “straight line” to compare it against? Lewis uses this straight-line analogy to explain that we must possess an absolute standard of truth to judge whether anything else is flawed. The Straight Line: This represents God’s perfect goodness and justice. The Crooked Line: This represents human behavior and the world as it is (Mere Christianity).

If there were no straight line, we would not know our line was crooked. We use this perfect moral standard to complain about unfairness or argue about right and wrong. Lewis argues this ultimate standard must come from a universal Lawgiver.

There are universal norms of ethics that humanity has collectively held to for the last 5,000 years of human recorded history. Murder, stealing, and cowardice have all been shunned and rewarded with penalties across every major ancient human civilization. There have also been virtues of helping others such as the old and weak.

If the traditional secular approach was true and Spencer’s Survival of the Fittest was what was really going on, human ethics should look much different. For instance (and I am obviously in no way advocating for this perverse morality), murder, stealing and cowardice in this worldview of ethics should be praised. Thinning the herd of the sick, old, weakest would need to be the norm, murder would be the ideal. Stealing in a dog-eat-dog-world mindset would make absolute sense and should be praised for hording scarce resources. Look out for ‘number one (you)’ and the golden rule to everything in life is simply ‘don’t get dead.’ Even the idea of cowardice should not exist in a secular materialist mindset because cowardice is the simple, evolutionary survival instinct that would have been evolved into the human for self-preservation.

I think one of the scariest things about this thinking is that it was in fact real life and accepted as good morality and science during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s in Germany and in many places across the United States. If you are unfamiliar with the history of eugenics, this might be an excellent time to take a look into the dark past of a theory that led to horrible ethics & morality across the thinkers of the western world. It was not until the atrocities of the Nazi regime and the holocaust that the public acclaim for the practices of eugenics vanished (for the most part). Organizations that were born out of the eugenics movement such as Planned Parenthood still unfortunately exist today, but their roots trace back to the principles set forth from the early eugenics’ movement.

If morality is merely a social construct, humans just make it up as we go along, then there is no objective right & wrong. This is what modern-day relativism holds to: what is right for you is right for you, what is right for me is right for me…your happiness is the most important thing. Interestingly, that might be a reassuring story to tell yourself, but that is not the way laws work. In the real world, when someone breaks a law such as stealing, there is an objective result: punishment. Ideas have consequences. The thief cannot simply justify to the presiding judge that ‘in his or her mind they thought it was perfectly ok to steal ABC’ and then get away with it. There would be no justice, no law that would stand and there would be anarchy in that sense and even greater anarchy if that relativism principle was simply scaled out across a whole society. CS Lewis uses the example of moral relativism when people are standing in a line for something (in his British accent, he would say ‘standing in a queue’). A person could say there is no such thing as objective truth, objective universal principles of right & wrong until someone cuts in front of you when you are in line, especially if you have been waiting for some time. There is an inner sense of ‘that is not fair, that ought not be right.’ Lewis powerfully points to the fact of where did that ‘ought not to’ sense/feeling originate from? It would be completely counterintuitive if that human evolved from apes eons ago, there should be no moral high ground, zero…but there is…just ask anyone about being cut in line, no one likes that.

The famous atheist Richard Dawkins has struggled with the principles of morality for decades, trying desperately to square his evolution model of humanity with the reality of observed human ethics. He has in recent years publicly adopted parts of Judaean-Christian ethics in an attempt to incorporate areas of consistency. Interesting! My response to Dawkins is ‘welcome aboard, great to see you! There is MUCH more to see here in the Christian worldview, hope you’ll stay a while.’ My response is honest and genuine, though it may sound sarcastic, that is not my intent at all.

As historian Tom Holland put it on X, Dawkins is sawing on the branch of Christianity he’s sitting on, gazing nervously at the ground far below. Dawkins wants the fruit of the tree without the tree; he wants liberation from superstition and fundamentalist religion while keeping the yield of religion (Dawkins, now the cultural Christian).

Secular materialistic morality does not work; it does not hold up to the human experience.

In the Old Testament book of Judges, the last verse reads: In those days Israel had no king; and everyone did as they saw fit.

There’s a great quick summary of what has happened over the last 25 years of the great atheist push at Science & Culture.com: Richard Dawkins, the Unlikely Evangelist | Science and Culture Today