The Moral Emptiness of Naturalism (Pt. I)

Richard Weikert has an interesting piece at Equip.org in which he writes about how the assumptions of 20th century modernity, i.e. that there is no God and therefore no objective morality, led to the horrors of the Gulag and the Holocaust.

He begins with an overview of the ideas of Marx and how they led to the crimes of Lenin and Stalin:

In 1945, the year that World War II ended, C. S. Lewis published That Hideous Strength, the third book in his science fiction trilogy. In that work Lewis depicted the dangerous consequences of embracing secular worldviews. His warning came at a time when Stalin and Hitler had committed horrific atrocities in the name of secular worldviews.

Stalin, in the name of a Marxist worldview, slaughtered millions in his collectivization campaign and in the Great Purge. Marx, based on his atheistic position, had promoted environmental determinism, the view that human behavior is shaped by the environment.

Marx, Lenin, and Stalin all believed that by altering the economy — specifically by eliminating private property — they could transform human nature, thus leading us into a society free from oppression, poverty, and strife.

Another corollary of the Marxist worldview was that objective morality and human rights are non-existent. Marxists believed that morality was a tool of bourgeois oppression, so they did not believe in any objective human rights. Lenin explicitly argued that the ends justify the means. Any measures necessary to reach the final communist state were justified, in his view.

Because of their view of human nature and morality, Marxists saw people as things to be manipulated. Through labor camps Soviet communists hoped to re-educate prisoners to bring them into conformity to communist ways.

The Holocaust was also a consequence of a secular worldview:

Hitler’s atrocities also flowed from a dehumanizing worldview. Instead of environmental determinism, Nazism promoted biological determinism. It held that human nature and behavior are shaped by one’s biological traits, especially those associated with one’s race....Hitler believed that humans were locked in an inescapable struggle for existence that fostered evolutionary progress.

The only criteria to judge human behavior, he thought, was whether or not it helped foster evolutionary progress. Because he believed in biological inequality, especially racial inequality, this meant that measures to benefit those deemed biologically superior, along with policies to eliminate those considered biologically inferior, were morally justified.

There's much more to Weikert's essay, and I'd like to look at more of it over the next couple of days, but for now it's important to note that ideas have consequences and the consequences of the naturalism embraced by many moderns were particularly horrific. Modernity sought to exalt mankind, to apotheosize man, but by putting man in the place of God it actually dehumanized humanity.

Instead of being created in the image of a God who loves us and endowed us with objective human rights, man was reduced to the level of a soulless brute.

Under the Stalinist and Hitlerian tyrannies, and the tyrannies imposed by lesser communists all over the globe in the 20th century, mankind was reduced to the level of cattle to be herded, manipulated and slaughtered whenever it suited the purposes of those who had the power to carry out their sick dreams.

And, let's note, given the truth of a naturalist worldview, a worldview that excludes God, there's no basis for saying that any of these slaughters was morally wrong. As atheistic biologist Richard Dawkins once observed, it's very difficult for one who holds to the atheistic view of reality to say that Hitler was wrong.

For anything to be objectively wrong there has to be an objective standard of goodness and there has to be accountability. Take away either of these, which atheism, of course, does, and the whole idea of objective right and wrong collapses.

This is why Hitler and Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao Zedong could murder over 100 million people in the 20th century and think that there was nothing wrong with what they were doing.

None of them believed butchering human beings was objectively wrong nor that they would ever be held accountable for doing it, and, if they were right about God, they were right about that.

More on Weikert's essay tomorrow.