Why morality is impossible without God: 4 fatal flaws in secular humanism

The standard humanist move: morality is whatever promotes human flourishing. We can study what makes people flourish. Therefore morality has a scientific basis.^[1]

The gap is between is and ought, and it has been named since Hume.^[2] Science can tell you that cruelty reduces flourishing. It cannot tell you that you are obliged to care about flourishing. Someone who says “I would rather flourish at your expense” has not made a factual error. He has declined an invitation, and the humanist has nothing to compel him with except more invitations.

Ismail al Faruqi argued the same point from the other side in Christian Ethics (1967). If fact and value were one order of being, he wrote, “it would be groundless to judge one ‘fact’ by another”, and “no abstraction or generalization from facts can lead to value”, since we would have no principle by which to separate the valuable facts from the rest.^[3] His argument shows that a standard above the facts is needed. It does not by itself show that the standard is God, and on the same page he sets the proofs of God’s existence aside; a humanist can answer that the standard is a feature of reason and not a command.

The humanist reply is that every ought is conditional on a goal, and that nearly everyone shares the goal of a life that goes well, so the conditional is enough for practice. That is true as a description of how people behave. It leaves the obligation as weak as the rule of a game that a player may leave. The Islamic account puts the obligation in a command from one who has authority over the person commanded, and holds that God has also placed in every soul an awareness of right and wrong.^[4][5]

Fallback position: morality is what a society agrees on. It evolves, it is negotiated, it is ours.

Then slavery was moral in 1750, because the society agreed. Then the person who stood against it was wrong, by definition, until enough people joined him. Nobody actually believes this. Everyone thinks the abolitionist was right before the consensus moved, which means they think there is a standard the consensus was failing to meet. Name the standard, and you have left consensus behind.

The twentieth century supplied a harder case. At Nuremberg the defendants pleaded that they had acted within the laws of their own country. The tribunal’s charter had already ruled that crimes against humanity are crimes whether or not they violate the domestic law of the place where they occur.^[6] That ruling appeals to something above the agreement of a particular society. Relativists reply that the victors simply imposed their own consensus, and the sceptic who says so has to explain why that verdict still feels like justice rather than force.

The most sophisticated version: moral sentiment is a product of natural selection. Cooperation helped our ancestors survive, so we are wired to feel obligation.

Fine. So is the urge to dominate, deceive and hoard, which also helped our ancestors survive. Evolution gave us both sets of impulses and no way to rank them. The moment you say “follow the cooperative impulse and resist the dominating one,” you are appealing to something evolution did not provide, a reason to prefer one inherited urge over another. Explaining where a feeling came from is not the same as showing it is binding.

Thomas Huxley, a close ally of Darwin, saw this in 1893. He said that the ethical progress of society depends on checking the cosmic process and not on imitating it.^[7] The modern defender replies that we rank our impulses by reflecting on them in light of our other values, until the whole set fits together. That gives consistency. It does not give a reason to someone whose reflection ends in a different place.

Humanists are fond of the arc of history bending towards justice. It is a good line. It is also a confession. The sentence was first written by a Unitarian minister and made famous by a Baptist pastor, and both meant it as a statement about a moral order beneath events.^[8]

Progress means getting closer to something. If morality is just what we happen to value now, there is no direction, only change. To call the abolition of slavery progress instead of fashion, you need a fixed point that 1750 was further from and 1850 was nearer to. The humanist uses the language of progress constantly and cannot say what the progress is towards.

A fair reply is that science speaks of progress without a final goal, since a better telescope is better by a measure that we can state. For ethics the measure is usually the reduction of suffering. That returns the argument to its first entry: the measure is chosen, and the person who does not share it has not been shown to be wrong. A divine standard answers this by being fixed independently of what anyone chooses.