Chapter 1 (last portion) 

                               artist's imagined montage of Jupiter and 4 of its moons

                                              (NASA/JPL via Wikimedia Commons) 

                                     

If we consider just these three scientific theories – of Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud – what can we say have been their consequences? Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, for most people, removed the biblical God from their picture of the cosmos. They didn’t need him in their model. Darwin removed God as the creator of life. He even reduced humans to just one more kind of animal. And Freud made humans look like sick animals, easily deluded by their own lustful, aggressive, self-absorbed thoughts. (Palmer articulates this idea well.⁷)

Despite all this, Science has not proved that a universal moral code is impossible or that the existence of God is impossible. But over the past four centuries, Science has badly shaken traditional ideas of God and thus, also, traditional ideas of morality. (The two are deeply intertwined, as we shall see.)

However, let me stress again that what does not follow from these scientific models is that there is no God or that all forms of theism and all moral codes are wishful thinking. We just need a new understanding of what right and wrong are. Then, we can reason our way to a new view of God.

But for now, we can say that Science has almost levelled the pre-Enlightenment ways of thinking of these things. And let’s make no mistake about what the loss of their belief in God has done to the masses of ordinary people. Removing God from Western society’s generally accepted picture of how this world works had the inevitable consequence of ending our society’s confidence in its moral code. We lost confidence in our ideas of what right and wrong are and how we should try to act, toward the world in general, but especially toward each other. 

If the moral rules we’re supposed to follow aren’t God’s rules, whose rules are they? Human authorities’ rules? Which human authorities? Who are they to be telling me what to do? They’re human, like I am. I know all humans make mistakes. Therefore, I’ll work out my own moral code. Thank you, anyway.

And perhaps it is worth pointing out here that there are still people who believe that the Earth is the center of the universe, and God made the universe in six days and rested on the seventh, and the miracles described in the Bible really did happen, parting a sea, walking on water, and all. But the trend of the last five hundred years is unmistakable. More and more people are having less and less confidence in the old ways of explaining the world.

The point may seem a trivial one to many people today. Why should we care whether the old ideas of God and right and wrong are crumbling? But it turns out that our caring about these matters is vitally important. If we don’t believe in Christian moral codes anymore, then they must be replaced with something. Our moral codes enable us to live together in communities and just get along. That space in our lives can’t stay empty. A moral code is not a luxury to be used and enjoyed when we have time for it. A moral code is what we consult just to move through ordinary days. What matters? What doesn’t? What should I do about these things? Every moment of every day of ordinary experiences.  

Explaining in more detail how morally vacant Science has been – so far – and why humans all over the world are struggling to cope with the loss of their moral codes, even though they may not be aware of the philosophical names for the thoughts they are having – will be the business of our next chapter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

1. Barbara Hanawalt, Growing Up in Medieval London (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 55.

2. “Life Expectancy,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Accessed March 29, 2015.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy.

3. René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, Articles 211 and 212, ed. Jonathan Bennett. http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdfs/descartes1649.pdf.

4. Ibid., Meditations on First Philosophy, Meditations 3 and 4., trans. John Veitch, 1901.http://www.classicallibrary.org/descartes/meditations.

5. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, ed. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1966), p. 353.

6. Cathryn Delude, “Researchers Show That Memories Reside in Specific Brain Cells,” MIT News, March 22, 2012. http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2012/conjuring-memories-artificially-0322.

7. Donald Palmer, Does the Center Hold? An Introduction to Western Philosophy (California: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1st edition, 1991), p. 56.