His argument begins to wobble with his opening paragraph and staggers and stumbles, like a drunk navigating a frozen pond, the rest of the way. He opens with this:
One cold Chicago day last February, I watched a Federal Express delivery man carry an armful of boxes to his truck. In the middle of the icy street, he slipped, scattering the boxes and exposing himself to traffic. Without thinking, I ran into the street, stopped cars, hoisted the man up and helped him recover his load. Pondering this afterward, I realized that my tiny act of altruism had been completely instinctive; there was no time for calculation.This was kind of him, to be sure, but it's pretty much irrelevant to his point that God isn't necessary for morality. Here's why: If there is no God it wouldn't have been wrong for him to ignore the delivery man's plight. Kindness is something we appreciate, but that doesn't make it moral. It's only morally right if we have a duty to do it. If naturalism (i.e. atheism) is true, however, there are no duties to do anything. One has no more of an obligation to be kind as one does to be selfish. The one is, in the overall scheme of things, no better or worse than the other. The universe is indifferent to whichever choice we make. Prof. Coyne continues:
We see the instinctive nature of moral acts and judgments in many ways: in the automatic repugnance we feel when someone such as Bernie Madoff bilks the gullible and trusting, in our disapproval of the person who steals food from the office refrigerator, in our admiration for someone who risks his life to save a drowning child. And although some morality comes from reason and persuasion — we must learn, for example, to share our toys — much of it seems intuitive and inborn.The fact that people may instinctively disapprove of a particular behavior doesn't make it wrong. Many people disapprove of Prof. Coyne's atheism, but he would certainly not think it morally wrong. Many others instinctively disapprove of the notion of loving their enemies or treating women as equals, but Coyne wouldn't say that these behaviors are wrong. Disapproval and admiration have nothing to do with whether an act is right or wrong.
Moreover, if morality is indeed instinctive, i.e. if our genes program us to behave in certain ways, then how can those ways be right or wrong? The homosexual community makes the case that homosexuality is genetic and no one chooses to be gay. They're born that way and thus it is inappropriate to consider homosexuality to be immoral. But if being born gay removes homosexuality from the realm of the moral then every disposition we're born with, including the disposition to help the fed-ex delivery man or to refuse to share with others, is also removed from the realm of the moral. We do what we're predisposed by our genes to do and that's the end of the matter.
As a biologist, I see belief in God-given morality as American's biggest impediment to accepting the fact of evolution. "Evolution," many argue, "could never have given us feelings of kindness, altruism and morality. For if we were merely evolved beasts, we would act like beasts. Surely our good behavior, and the moral sentiments that promote it, reflect impulses that God instilled in our soul."Coyne frames this a bit awkwardly. What he should have said is that many who are skeptical of Darwinism argue that naturalistic evolution could never make feelings of kindness and altruism morally right. After all, many people harbor feelings of meanness and selfishness. If evolution produced the former it must also have produced the latter. On what grounds does Coyne judge the former to be right and the latter to be wrong?
So while morality supposedly comes from God, immorality is laid at the door of Charles Darwin, who has been blamed for everything from Nazism to the shootings in Columbine.
Evidently, what's right are behaviors he appreciates and what's wrong are behaviors of which he disapproves, but not only is it backward to declare behaviors of which we disapprove to be wrong, we might also wonder why anyone else should accept Prof. Coyne's likes and dislikes as normative. Even if the vast majority shared Coyne's approbation and disapprobation it still wouldn't make the behaviors right or wrong. Throughout history the vast majority of people approved of slavery and disapproved of miscegnation, but is Coyne prepared to acknowledge that slavery was therefore morally right and miscegnation morally wrong?
Next the professor trots out Plato's Euthyphro dilemma to show that God cannot be the ground for morality:
[M]orality itself — either in individual behavior or social codes — simply cannot come from the will or commands of a God. This has been recognized by philosophers since the time of Plato.What Coyne neglects to mention, though, is that most philosophers of religion believe that Plato's argument simply doesn't do the work Coyne thinks it does. See here for my humble opinion on why it doesn't work.
Religious people can appreciate this by considering Plato's question: Do actions become moral simply because they're dictated by God, or are they dictated by God because they are moral? It doesn't take much thought to see that the right answer is the second one. Why? Because if God commanded us to do something obviously immoral, such as kill our children or steal, it wouldn't automatically become OK.
Of course, you can argue that God would never sanction something like that because he's a completely moral being, but then you're still using some idea of morality that is independent of God. Either way, it's clear that even for the faithful, God cannot be the source of morality but at best a transmitter of some human-generated morality.
So far, Prof. Coyne has failed to provide any persuasive reasons to accept his claim that God is unnecessary for morality. I'll examine the balance of his argument tomorrow.
