Nothing but Eggshells

An argument made frequently on Viewpoint is that metaphysical naturalism has no resources to undergird any objective moral obligation. Naturalism leads logically to nihilism and from thence to cruelty.

I recently reread a book I had originally read in the 1970s. It was written by a Romanian Lutheran pastor named Richard Wurmbrand who was arrested in 1948 by the Romanian communist government and imprisoned for fourteen years in communist prisons.

His crime was that he sought to carry out his pastoral duties in a country which, like all communist countries in the Soviet bloc, had outlawed Christianity.

In the book he recounts the tortures he and thousands of others suffered simply because of their faith (The book is titled Tortured for Christ).

Beatings while hung upside down from the ceiling, being forced to stand for days in a shallow box with nails in the sides so that the slightest movement caused one's flesh to be torn making sleep impossible, starvation, being placed in refrigeration units until almost frozen to death then removed, revived and returned to the frigid cold, over and over again.

Pastors and priests who refused, even under torture, to reveal names of those who participated in outlawed worship services were forced to watch their children beaten to death in front of them.

The sheer barbarism of the communists is difficult to comprehend.

Wurmbrand relates in the book that he often asked the torturers:

"Don't you have pity in your hearts?" They usually answered with quotations from Lenin: "You cannot make omelets without breaking the shells of the eggs," and "You cannot cut wood without making chips fly."

I said again, "I know these quotations from Lenin, but there is a difference. When you cut a piece of wood it feels nothing. But you are dealing with human beings. Every beating produces pain and there are mothers who weep."

Wurmbrand goes on:

It was in vain. They are materialists. For them nothing besides matter exists and to them man is like wood, like an eggshell. With this belief they sink to unthinkable depths of cruelty.

The cruelty of atheism is hard to believe. When a man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil, there is no reason to be human. There is no restraint from the depths of evil that is in man.

And then he adds this:

The Communist torturers often said, "There is no God, no hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish. I heard one torturer say, "I thank God, in whom I don't believe, that I haved lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart."

Of course most people who agree with the communists' atheism would nevertheless find their behavior repugnant, but what they cannot say, at least not if they are going to be consistent, is that the communist torturers were wrong. If the ultimate reality, the universe, is indifferent to human suffering, if men have evolved to behave cruelly toward their fellow men, how can it be wrong to do so?

As the late Princeton philosopher Richard Rorty, himself an atheist, once admitted, "For the secular man there's no answer to the question, 'Why not be cruel?'"

The only people who have a moral basis for condemning cruelty, for condemning the torture of those poor prisoners, are those whose ultimate reality is a transcendent, personal being whose essence includes moral perfection and who has the power to hold accountable those who wantonly and with pleasure inflict pain on others.

Absent such a moral authority cruelty is no more wrong in humans than it is in any other animal.