Monday 15 February, 2010

Special Report

EUGENICS: A German has his credentials as an Aryan measured by caliper.

By Andrew Halloway

New research concluding that atheists are “just as ethical as churchgoers” will be music to the ears of Richard Dawkins. But is it really true?

The team behind the research, published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, found that most religions are similar and have a moral code which helps to organise society. Nothing new in that claim, but their more controversial conclusion is that people who have no religion at all know right from wrong just as well as regular worshippers.

The researchers used several psychological tests to assess people’s morality. One of its co-authors, Dr Marc Hauser from Harvard University, said: “The research suggests that intuitive judgments of right and wrong seem to operate independently of explicit religious commitments.”

But before Dawkins and his atheist colleagues say “I told you so”, does this really conflict with Christianity? The Bible teaches that we are all made in the image of God, with the capacity for good, and that he has given us all a moral compass – a conscience.

Perhaps Dawkins shouldn’t get too excited. Once you get beyond the headline, things are not quite so cut and dried. Dr Hauser continues: “However, although it appears as if co-operation is made possible by mental mechanisms that are not specific to religion, religion can play a role in facilitating and stabilising co-operation between groups.”

This seems to be a grudging acceptance that religion can be useful in putting our moral instincts into practice – an implementation of morality in society that might not otherwise happen.

But if this is true, shouldn’t faith make a moral impact on individuals that is absent in atheists?

I believe it does, and the evidence is easy to obtain. How many charities and voluntary organisations were founded by Christians, and how many by atheists? How many today, even in our secularist age, are still run and funded by believers? The UK’s biggest relief and development agencies, CAFOD, Christian Aid, Tear Fund and Oxfam, had Christian foundations and churches provide a proportionately greater part of their support than anyone else. The world’s other big agencies tend to be American Christian groups like World Vision and Samaritan’s Purse while other religions also have their charitable works.

Recent studies have also shown that churches provide a huge range of socially beneficial services, funded and manned by ordinary, volunteering churchgoers. If churches were removed overnight and the state had to take over all these services, it would cost billions.

And then look at politics. Democracy and human rights have flourished in countries with a Christian foundation, but nearly every nation that has put atheism into practice has been totalitarian and had a terrible record on human rights. The French Revolution, Stalinist Russia, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, all of Eastern Europe when under Communism, North Korea today… the list goes on.

And perhaps the Harvard University researchers should have taken a closer look at their own house – science – before drawing their conclusions.

Science today runs on an assumption of atheism. It is called methodological naturalism – the principle that requires that hypotheses be explained and tested only by reference to natural causes and events. The result is that supernatural explanations or origins are not allowed in science, even if the evidence leads us logically in that direction. This is a universally accepted understanding of how science works today, even by religious scientists – but it is an assumption based on something that, ironically, science cannot prove. Naturalism is the metaphysical belief that nature is all there is, and all basic truths are truths of nature. This underpins the methodology of science, yet it is an unprovable atheistic philosophical assumption.

Science did not always operate this way. The founders of modern science pursued their studies on the understanding that they were exploring the handiwork of God, revealing his designs. But, based on the naturalistic philosophy it now espouses, where is science leading us today? To a better moral position, or a worse one?

My answer is that if modern science is not guided by the Christian beliefs that originally allowed it to flourish, it will inevitably lead to moral decline.

Science under Hitler was freed from the fetters of Christian morality. What happened? Humans became expendable – mere subjects on which to test theories and then discard. You cannot read ‘Mein Kampf’ without seeing the influence of Darwinism on its racist policies. In Nazism, natural selection was not just observed but actively pursued – by exterminating the weak and undesirable. It was called eugenics. Yet eugenics was not a Nazi invention – it was accepted by mainstream science in the West for 30 or 40 years before Hitler, based on Darwinism. People with mental problems and genetic diseases were sterilised by scientists in the US and Europe. Hitler merely followed it to its logical conclusion.

When the horrors of the concentration camps were revealed after the war, there was a backlash against eugenics. It became a dirty word.

But now it is making a comeback among scientists. Why? Because Darwinism and naturalism are the dominant views in science, and so the human being is regarded as just another animal with no special status or dignity.

The latest issue of the Bioethics academic journal says this: “The concept of dignity is pervasive in bioethics. However, some bioethicists have argued that it is useless on three grounds: that it is indeterminate; that it is reactionary; and that it is redundant. In response, a number of defences of dignity have recently emerged, all of which claim that when dignity is suitably clarified, it can be of great use in helping us tackle bioethical controversies. This paper rejects such defences of dignity… (it) argues for a bioethics without dignity.”

By contrast, if we believe in a God who created us because he loves us, and has made only us in his image, we come to a very different conclusion about human value. St Augustine said: “God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.” We are special. Human life is precious.

But the article I’ve just quoted, by a bioethicist named Alasdair Cochrane, runs completely counter to the view of human dignity. Worryingly, Cochrane works at the UK’s Centre for the Study of Human Rights. And he is by no means alone in his views. For example, Dr Peter Stringer, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, has argued that some animals should have a higher status than babies, and on that basis he justifies infanticide in some cases.

Cochrane argues that we should discard intrinsic human dignity as the basis of medical ethics and healthcare policies. In other words, he rejects the idea of the sanctity of human life. Why? Because if there is no God to sanctify it, then human life is just an accident of nature.

Cochrane says: “The possession of dignity by humans signifies that they [all people] have an inherent moral worth. In other words, because human beings possess dignity we cannot do what we like to them, but instead have direct moral obligations towards them. Indeed, this understanding of dignity is also usually considered to serve as the grounding for human rights. As Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.‘”

Yet he is arguing for a dignity-free view of humans!

Under atheism, universal human rights become impossible to sustain. And under Darwinistic science, there are positive excuses for using human beings as objects and mere natural resources.

In place of intrinsic human dignity, Cochrane urges that we judge each individual’s moral worth according to their individual characteristics and capacities. In other words, some people are of value; others aren’t. The problem with that is, who decides who is worth treating with dignity, and who isn’t?

The basis of human rights is the belief that “all men are created equal”, as it says in the US constitution. Without dignity being ascribed to all human beings, however bad they are, it becomes a lottery as to who is deemed to be of value and who isn’t. And those who are aren’t valued will of course have less rights.

Atheistic science will inevitably open the door to tyranny. Yet this is the path we are treading in the West. For decades, unborn humans have been treated as a mere foetus to be discarded if we choose.

Now human life created in a test tube can be tested on and thrown away. And scientists are already experimenting on how we can ‘evolve’ further by a bit of intelligent redesign of our genes. Of course, only the rich will be able to afford to improve themselves; the poor will be left behind as an inferior ‘race’. And if you have poorer genes, according to Darwinism it is only natural that you should die. Survival of the fittest = elimination of the weakest.

Interestingly, Cochrane admits that Christianity and its concept of the soul could justify regarding humans as special. But, as that is not a scientific view, he excludes it from discussion.

When pagan Rome allowed unwanted babies to be left out on the hills to die, it was Christians who rescued them and lovingly raised them as their own. Our beliefs about human life inevitably affect our morality.

If atheists retain morality today, it is because they are made in the image of God, and also because they have inherited moral values from the Christian society of their predecessors. Atheism itself has no justification for morals. It accepts that morals are a product of culture – and so there is no intrinsic right or wrong. In fact, it has no means of distinguishing right from wrong – only what is conducive to survival of the fittest.

I’ll leave the last word to Professor Leon Kass, former chairman of The President’s Council on Bioethics in the US, whose moral views are obviously incompatible with atheistic science:
“In times past, our successful battles against slavery, sweatshops and segregation, although fought in the name of civil rights, were at bottom campaigns for human dignity – for treating human beings as they deserve to be treated solely because of their humanity. Likewise, our taboos against incest, bestiality and cannibalism, as well as our condemnations of prostitution, drug addiction and self-mutilation – having little to do with defending liberty and equality – all seek to defend human dignity against (voluntary) acts of self-degradation.

“Today, human dignity is of paramount importance, especially in matters bioethical. As we become more and more immersed in a world of biotechnology, we increasingly sense that we neglect human dignity at our peril, especially in the light of gathering powers to intervene in human bodies and minds in ways that will affect our very humanity, likely threatening things that everyone, whatever their view of human dignity, holds dear. Truth to tell, it is beneath our human dignity to be indifferent to it.”

Photo: Public Domain