Yesterday I saw a bumper sticker that read: Pagan Pride - Doing Good Is My Religion.The car also had a Darwin's Fish on the trunk so I assumed the owner of the vehicle is a Darwinian pagan. I also assumed this means that he/she would deny that a personal, transcendent, creator of the universe, i.e. the God of classical monotheism, exists. This interested me. How does such a person, a Darwinian pagan, determine what Good is? How does he recognize it in order to do it? What and where is the standard to which an act can be compared to see if it can be considered Good? And even if the Darwinian pagan could recognize it, who would he think he should do Good for? The species? The race? Himself? How does one decide which it should be? Whichever it is, it certainly seems to follow that anything one does to promote one's self, race, or species over others is good. This, of course, means that charity, compassion, and altruism would be Evil.
If Good is whatever aids one's own survival as an individual or a species then there can be nothing wrong with ignoring the weak and the poor. Indeed, there can be nothing wrong with genocide. Is Good for a Darwinian whatever promotes the survival of the fittest? That's what the Nazis believed, of course. Perhaps our pagan friend would reply that good is whatever feels right to the person doing it, whatever does not offend his conscience, but if so, then if it feels right and doesn't offend the conscience to treat people cruelly then cruelty would be Good.
Even if some act did offend the conscience, why should that make it wrong for a Darwinian pagan? In the evolutionary scheme of things, after all, our conscience is merely a vestige of blind, natural processes that shaped us for life in the stone age. It's little more than a psychological appendix so why should it be allowed to determine our behavior today?
I know it's unwise to make too much out of bumper sticker slogans, but the Darwinian pagan seems to assume that Good is something that's just out there waiting for people to do it when in fact, there is no Good if the Darwinian pagan is right about there being no transcendent moral source and authority. If we've evolved from primordial slime then Good and Evil no more exist for us than they do for other animals. All there are are things people do, those things are neither Good nor Evil in a moral sense, any more than a cat killing a mouse is Good or Evil.If God doesn't exist then, as Nietzsche said, we need to get beyond our archaic religiously based notions of Good and Evil and realize that morality is just a matter of each of us deciding for ourselves how we should live, and no choice is any better or worse, in moral terms, than any other.
When the Darwinian says that doing Good is my religion he reveals a confusion deep in his thinking. He is appropriating a concept, moral Good, that makes no sense unless theism is true while at the same time he implicitly denyies that theism is true.
It seems each of us is faced with an alternative. If we believe that Good and Evil are real and not just our subjective interpretation of things, then we have to look for a basis for them outside of ourselves and the only adequate basis is the God of classical theism.
If God is a conclusion we wish not to accept then we need to face up to the fact that our talk of Good and Evil is literal nonsense. "If God is dead," Dostoyevsky wrote, "then everything is permitted." The choice, in other words, is between God and moral nihilism.