The Western world’s moral battles are not just differences of preference or opinion. They are the result of living in different worlds entirely. One of those worlds is built on an unsupported and unsupportable set of faith statements about the nature of reality, concocted not from evidence but in support of a particular moral view, which is in turn closely associated with what is believed to be our condition after death. It is a view that extends far back into antiquity but remains enormously influential in spite of modern-day scientific findings to the contrary. The rival world, the one that is forever at odds with the one just described, is that of the Christian theist.Gilson goes on to write:
That is the point of Benjamin Wiker’s book. Unlike what I have just done (almost inexcusably, for those who would be inclined to disagree mightily with it), Wiker supports it with three hundred pages of historical and philosophical evidences.It's been some years since I've read Wiker's book (it was published in 2002), but I remember being impressed with it's scholarship and his fascinating account of the millenia-long dance between the worldviews of materialistic naturalism and Christian theism. From Epicurus to the philosophes of the French Enlightenment to the progeny of the European Enlightenment into the 20th century naturalist thinkers have struggled to offer people the possibility of ethics without God.
The first world is that of Epicurus (341 BC – 270 BC). Thousands of years after his death, Epicurus remains astonishingly contemporary as the father of philosophical materialism and what is today known as scientific reductionism.
The project has been an utter failure, but, as Nietzsche has Zarathustra proclaim, the masses have yet to fully grasp the consequences of the death of the God they have "slain". Too many moderns still labor under the illusion that God is not necessary for morality, that man's liberation from the faith of his fathers frees him to live by the higher and purer lights of human conscience and reason. When the scales fall from their eyes, when they realize as Nietzsche did, that reason and conscience give no foundation or basis for the belief that we have objective moral duties, what then? Will they reject materialism and embrace faith or will they reject faith still and follow the logic of materialism in its spiraling descent into moral nihilism?
I urge readers interested in understanding why materialism and Christianity are ethically immiscible to read Gilson's post and, even more, to read the book itself which can be ordered at our favorite bookstore. Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists is a college course all in itself.
Thanks to Bradford at Telic Thoughts for pointing us to Gilson's review.