Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

I mentioned in a post yesterday, the discussion I had with some FOCUS missionaries about last month’s Humanists’ attack on Christmas with their “Just Be Good for Goodness Sake” campaign.  I would like to mention that I heard today that five women missionaries serving the University of Nebraska, Lincoln were involved in a serious car accident yesterday on the way to a retreat.  One of the girls is in critical condition and underwent surgery for a fractured skull. Please keep these women and their families in your prayers.

With regard to the question about the possibility of a standard of “goodness” without God, I would like to offer the following.  The ad campaign, you may recall, was sponsored by the American Humanists Association. It was an opportunistic event, they admit, given the rise of the atheist apologists in the public spot light, to promote their own agenda.  As with most of this ilk, they like to promote their presumed intellectual superiority to argue that there is no God.  This group’s particular emphasis seems to be a concern to show that one does not need God in order to be moral.

The campaign itself provided little in terms of defending this position. Rather, they seemed more concerned with how they were made to feel left out during the holidays.  However, one of the campaign spokesmen, Fred Edwords, published an article some time ago in which he tries to justify the claim.

Admittedly, he has a tough challenge in order to describe the variety of arguments from different religious traditions and theological schools in terms of morality.  However, unfortunately, he is not up to the challenge of even describing one of them reasonably.   Alas, the article is a frustrating read.  It is fraught with error, caricature, and leaps of logic.  I would hope that such “intellectuals” could provide more intelligent arguments than we find with Edwords.

Edwords spends most of the article trying to describe and “debunk” belief in God is necessary for morality.  He argues that theists claim moral laws demand that there be a moral Law Giver.  His argument is somewhat convoluted, but he uses what seems to be an adaptation of Thomas Aquinas’ proof from efficient causality for the basis of moral law as his understanding of the theist position.  He responds that theists simply arbitrarily stop at some supernatural being as the first Law Giver and he asks the question why doesn’t this Law Giver need another to give Him laws.

Of course, he misses the point as do most atheists when they ask who created God.  He doesn’t understand the need for necessary existence.  As such, he assumes that this first Law Giver then would have to simply legislate arbitrarily and he sees no reason that this arbitrary law should be binding upon humans.  Thus, he proposes that there is something innate in human nature that is the source of morality.

He simply assumes the definition of good and evil is that which allows man to survive and grow in the context of competing needs.  He tries to show that morality arises only because the needs of some human beings naturally will conflict with others.  Thus, with only one man, there would be no good or evil. Why subpersonal animals are not factored into the mix, I am not sure.  Thus, what he presents is an argument from pragmatism it would seem.

He dismisses without comment, Nietzschean morality.  That is, he ignores Nietzsche’s assertion that the exertion of the will of the powerful over the weak is the logical consequence of atheism by parenthetically setting aside “coercion” as a possible option. This, I would argue is parasitic on Judeo-Christian morality or it is simply an assumption that “will to power” is not pragmatic.  Pragmatism, however, is not the same as calling something good and evil.  He might say that some action is or is not wise, or that it does or does not comport with his personal value system.  However, to say that good and evil is just the way we are does nothing to overcome Hume’s Law which says that an “is” does not equate to an “ought.”

Furthermore, Edwords simply assumes that human nature is a given.  He does not ask why it is that humans’ “similar feelings of compassion to like events” is so.  Neither does he ask why common human “values are not all based on simple individual self-interest or egoism.” He simply answers that it is the result of a natural developmental process and since we share a common gene pool, we all have it. Yes, but why.  How does the selflessness of morality promote survival of the fittest?

Moreover, it does not occur to Edwords to ask why if we are some way, that we should be asked to behave in accord with that way.  That is, he does he ask the question about free will.  He does not seem to see the elephant in the living room.  He touts human reason but he does not address why anyone should need to be convinced to behave in a way that he says we are already programmed.  Free will is an impossible issue for a materialist and so it is an issue that goes unaddressed by this secular humanist. In the end he says:

It is theological values, then, and not human-oriented values, that are the most baseless. For, with theological values, an arbitrary leap of faith must be taken at some point. And once that arbitrary leap has been taken, all values so derived are as arbitrary as the leap of faith that made them possible.

Edwords has not seriously engaged Catholic thought.  He can make this claim only based upon a caricature of classical Christian teaching.  He tries to define a difference between positive law and natural law but he does not have the knowledge or philosophical background to do so.  He has obviously read atheists’ dismissal of the proofs for God’s existence, but as with most of them, has not seriously contended with the arguments themselves presented by solid Catholic thinkers.  As such, we are left with an defense of atheist morality that is nothing more than a catena of assertions linked solely by grammar.

It is ironic that Edwords is very close to providing a solid argument for the need for God if one is to have a morality. One begins with the need for God as Necessary Existence.  When we argue that contingent existence demands necessary existence we are not making an arbitrary assertion but we are asserting an existential necessity.  Nothing comes from nothing.  Edwords’s attempt to separate positive law from natural law and ground natural law in human nature demands that he address the question of human nature.  If human nature is simply the accidental result of random evironmental processes, then ultimately the imperative “just be good” is tautological.  In fact, there is no logical possibility for imperatives.  The statement simply becomes an indicative: “man acts in accord with his nature.”

We are moral solely because we have intellect and free will.  We have a common sense of right and wrong because we are created in the image of God who is Goodness itself.  We have to exhort people to moral behavior because we are fallen.  Only Original Sin explains how man is naturally attracted to the good but to his detriment, is too often tempted to evil.  Leaps of faith, properly understood, are much more human than the leaps of logic Edwords presents us with. Morality is a demand because as human beings we must live by faith–human faith in one another.  But we can ultimately fourish only with supernatural faith and this theological virtue demands the morally good.