Science, Free Will, and Morality — Why Theism Makes Sense

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In Chapter 1 I made an argument for the existence of the moral law. I posited that such a law could only be the product of four things — evolution, society, something else science can explain, or God. In Chapter 2 I showed the moral law could not be the product of the first two items on the list. This chapter is devoted to investigating the last two.

Moral Relativism and Evolutionary Morality Rejected

In his book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, prominent atheist Sam Harris claims to offer society a secular and scientific understanding of morality.

The first thing that surprised me about this book was Harris’ stance on moral relativism — the idea that morality is constructed by each individual, not absolute. Harris flatly rejects such relativism, while pointing out its fatal flaw: “Moral relativism…tends to be self-contradictory. Relativists may say that moral truths exist only relative to a specific cultural framework — but this claim about the status of moral truth purports to be true across all possible frameworks.”¹

Thank you, Dr. Harris! That is what moral absolutists have been saying for the past few hundred years of Western philosophy (at least).

Shockingly, Harris also rejects the idea that morals could be the product of evolution. He writes:

“I hope it is clear that the view of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ I am advocating, while fully constrained by our current biology (as well as by its future possibilities), cannot be directly reduced to instinctual drives and evolutionary imperatives. As with mathematics, science, art, and almost everything else that interests us, our modern concerns about meaning and morality have flown the perch built by evolution.”²

These are major concessions I did not expect to find in this book, and I applaud Harris for making them. But that brings us to a critical point. Harris does not believe in God, so the moral law (according to Harris) cannot come from the deity. Harris rejects moral relativism (which would claim there is no moral law), and he rejects the notion that morality is the product of evolution (which we also debunked in the last chapter). What is left? Only the belief that science can one day account for absolute morality.

Harris’ Vision of Morality

Harris makes it clear in his book that he believes “good” and “bad” morals do exist. He defines good as anything that increases the “well-being” of conscious beings.³ His grand thesis is that science will one day be able to clearly define what is “good,” what is “bad,” and what “well-being” means. He admits science cannot do this now, and that the consensus among scientists is that science will always be incapable of answering such questions.⁴ But he maintains that these scientific truths simply “…await our discovery…”⁵

I must respectfully say here that it sounds to me like Sam Harris — who wrote a book called The End of Faith — has quite a bit of faith after all. His faith is just not in God, it is in the belief that science will ultimately be able to answer inherently non-scientific questions. But this faith is misplaced. Science is not equipped to tell us about such questions. Ultimately — as renowned religious skeptic David Hume argued — the facts we discover through science provide no foundation for values.⁶ Or, as John Lennox illustrates: “Science can tell you that, if you add strychnine to someone’s drink, it will kill them. But science cannot tell you whether it is morally right or wrong to put strychnine into your grandmother’s tea so that you can get your hands on her property.”⁷

Ultimately, Harris’ book fails to offer a scientific explanation for the moral law, and this is why it was ultimately roasted in book reviews. He places great faith in the future progress of science, but what he really does is recycle old philosophies. Kwame Anthony Appiah, writing for the New York Times, points out Harris’ major flaws succinctly:

“But wait: how do we know that the morally right act is, as Harris posits, the one that does the most to increase well-being, defined in terms of our conscious states of mind? Has science really revealed that? If it hasn’t, then the premise of Harris’s all-we-need-is-science argument must have nonscientific origins. In fact, what he [Harris] ends up endorsing is something very like utilitarianism, a philosophical position that is now more than two centuries old, and that faces a battery of familiar problems. Even if you accept the basic premise, how do you compare the well-being of different people? Should we aim to increase average well-being (which would mean that a world consisting of one bliss case is better than one with a billion just slightly less blissful people)? Or should we go for a cumulative total of well-being (which might favor a world with zillions of people whose lives are just barely worth living)? If the mental states of conscious beings are what matter, what’s wrong with killing someone in his sleep? How should we weigh present well-being against future well-being?”(bold added by me).⁸

I would feel comfortable moving on at this point — Harris has done much of my work for me. He has refuted moral relativism and evolutionary morality, and he has admitted his book is basically about faith in the future of science, not scientific fact. But Harris’ attempts to prove science can explain human values raises some serious issues that deserve unpacking.

Sam Harris and Free Will

Harris writes, “All of our behavior can be traced to biological events about which we have no conscious knowledge: this has always suggested that free will is an illusion.”⁹ He then gives us a bizarre example meant to convince us of this “fact”:

“Why did I use the term ‘inscrutable’ in the previous sentence? I must confess that I do not know. Was I free to do otherwise? What could such a claim possibly mean? Why, after all, didn’t the word ‘opaque’ come to mind? Well, it just didn’t — and now that it vies for a place on the page, I find that I am still partial to my original choice. Am I free with respect to this preference? Am I free to feel that ‘opaque’ is the better word, when I just do not feel that it is the better word? Am I free to change my mind? Of course not. It can only change me.”¹⁰

Imagine, for a moment, that we took this paragraph and swapped out the innocuous choice between “inscrutable” and “opaque” for something a bit more consequential. Harris’ language is bolded, my insertions are not:

Why did I rape the drunk girl after the party last night? I must confess that I do not know. Was I free to do otherwise? What could such a claim possibly mean? Why, after all, didn’t the idea to just walk her to her dorm and make sure she was okay come to mind? Well, it just didn’t — and now that that thought enters my mind, I find that I am still partial to my original choice. Am I free with respect to this preference? Am I free to feel that simply walking the girl home is the better action, when I just do not feel that it is the better action? Am I free to change my mind? Of course not. It can only change me.

Harris’ thoughts here reflect those of other prominent atheists. Nietzsche, for instance, also wages war on the concept of free will, calling it, “…the best self-contradiction hitherto imagined, a kind of logical rape…”¹¹ For Nietzsche, so-called ‘free will’ is really just the inevitable result of a competing set of impulses, feelings, and commands within man. The strongest of these will win out and we delude ourselves into thinking we were in control of this decision, and thus have free will.¹² Bertrand Russell held similar views:

“Materialists used the laws of physics to show, or attempt to show, that the movements of human bodies are mechanically determined, and that consequently everything that we say and every change of position that we effect fall outside the sphere of any possible free will….If, when a man writes a poem or commits a murder, the bodily movements involved in his act result solely from physical causes, it would seem absurd to put up a statue to him in the one case and to hang him in the other.”¹³

Despite Russell’s use of the word “if” in this quotation, he makes it clear in this section of his book, Why I am Not a Christian, that he believes this; we can’t blame murderers for what they do, they are just following their impulses. Mr. Russell apparently believes in a world where everything is excusable. He continues to say that the behavior of a man the rest of humanity finds unacceptable, “…is a result of antecedent causes which, if you follow them long enough, will take you beyond the moment of his birth and therefore to events for which he cannot be held responsible by any stretch of the imagination.”¹⁴

Wow. If anyone ever harms someone I love, I certainly hope someone like Mr. Russell is not on the jury! What heinous crimes could we excuse people from if all of our actions were predetermined? Could we even have things called “crimes?”

You see that if we truly did not have free will, there would be no such thing as morality. Our actions would be biologically determined. We could not, therefore, hold people accountable for their actions. They could simply say, “this is how I was born, I had no choice in the matter” as a defense in any criminal trial.

Harris recognizes this. He even quotes the legal opinion from United States v. Grayson (1978) wherein the Court supported the notion that free will was the “universal and persistent” bedrock of our legal system and declared the “deterministic view of human conduct…inconsistent with the underlying precepts of our criminal justice system.”¹⁵ He then goes on to admit that he is at odds with the Court, stating that the idea of punishing people for their misdeeds is, in fact, up for debate.¹⁶

Harris’ entire argument — that science alone can determine human values — is based on a false premise. He posits that “…science and religion…[are] antithetical ways of thinking about the same reality.”¹⁷ By taking this line, Harris assumes a materialistic answer to his question about how we discover what is behind morality. His assumption becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. But his biological determinism undercuts his argument that absolute morality exists in the first place. We have seen that his logic does not hold. A biologically determined world wherein free will does not exist would be a world without morality. Unfortunately, history provides us with ample examples of what this sort of world looks like.

Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, wrote:

“If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity, and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone.

I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment — or, as the Nazi like to say, of ‘Blood and Soil.’ I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.”¹⁸

Does the Moral Law Come From God?

“They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus.”¹⁹

- Paul

We see ample evidence in human nature for the existence of a moral law, shared by humanity — there is simply too much similarity in the recorded ethical codes of man across space and time to deny this. The moral law cannot be the product of evolution, it is not a social construction, and it cannot otherwise be explained by science. Where else can it come from? Well, we have thousands of years of religious tradition telling us that it comes from God. Here are a few examples (italics added by me):

“For this commandment that I command you today is not too hard for you, neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will ascend to heaven for us and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?’ Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will go over the sea for us and bring it to us, that we may hear it and do it?’ But the word is very near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it” (Deuteronomy 30:11–14).

“For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts” (Jeremiah 31:33).

“Therefore put away all filthiness and rampant wickedness and receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your souls” (James 1:21).

The reader will also remember our past discussion of great non-Christian thinkers who believed the moral law had divine origins.

In Arthur Conon Doyle’s The Sign of the Four, Sherlock Holmes says, “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”²⁰

We have eliminated the impossible, what remains is theism — that the moral law has indeed been implanted in humanity by a non-physical being. What all of this boils down to is this: if there is a moral law, it follows that there must be a moral lawgiver.

Thank you for reading! This book will be published serially right here over the coming months. If you enjoyed or are intrigued by this chapter, please clap and share!

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Footnotes

1. Harris, Sam. The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values. New York: Free Press, 2011. 45.
2. Harris, The Moral Landscape, 13–14. In Nietzschean fashion, Harris seemingly reneges on this assertion a chapter later and tries to argue that human morality is the product of evolution. See page 56 of his book.
3. Harris, The Moral Landscape, 12.
4. Harris, The Moral Landscape, 10–11.
5. Harris, The Moral Landscape, 49.
6. Staddon, John. “Science and Morals: Can Morality Be Deduced from the Facts of Science?” The New Behaviorism. Duke University, April 8, 2019. https://sites.duke.edu/behavior/2019/04/08/science-and-morals-can-morality-be-deduced-from-the-facts-of-science/#:~:text=The%20issue%20should%20have%20been,provide%20no%20basis%20for%20values.&text=We%20must%20have%20faith%20in,us%20what%20they%20should%20be.
7. Lennox, John C. God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? Oxford: Lion Books, 2007. 39–40.
8. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Science Knows Best.” The New York Times. October 1, 2010. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/books/review/Appiah-t.html. Brackets in original.
9. Harris, The Moral Landscape, 103.
10. Harris, The Moral Landscape, 104.
11. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 472
12. Ibid.
13. Russel, Why I am Not a Christian, 37–38.
14. Russel, Why I am Not a Christian, 40.
15. Harris, The Moral Landscape, 106.
16. Ibid.
17. Harris, The Moral Landscape, 10.
18. From The Doctor and the Soul. Quoted in: Zacharias, Ravi. The End of Reason; A Response to the New Atheists. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2008. 62–63.
19. Romans 2:15–15.
20. Doyle, Arthur Conan, and Christopher Morley. The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Vol. 1. New York, NY: Doubleday, 1930. 111.