The Relativity of Morals
The material universe in itself gives no basis for values. Those who begin with the material universe can describe but they can never define. They can speak only in the indicative, never in the imperative. They can describe, for example, what physical strength involves and how it works physiologically, but from the material universe alone they cannot derive any idea as to how strength ought and ought not to be used. The most they can do is argue that certain moral systems have been worked out through the passage of time on the basis of "social contact." This is what we call the 51 percent view of morality - the majority has thought such and such is a good way to operate and so it becomes "morality." What confusion! What disaster! With this view any action can be justified, and our own very recent history has given us appalling examples.
Aldous Huxley said it all clearly in the thirties in his brilliant little novel Brave New World. In it he pictures a society which has reversed the morality of the present, especially in the area of sexual relationships. Faithfulness within a unique love relationship becomes "evil"; promiscuity becomes "good."87
Here then is the humanist dilemma. They have to generate the answers to the big questions, but out of their own limited experience they can know nothing with certainty. If we were to add up the thinking of all of mankind, we would still have only limited knowledge. Truth with a capital T - explanations which would be true for all time and all people - would be impossible.
What is left, therefore, is "relative" truth, and with relative truth, relative morality. Given time, even the "certainties" of our ethical systems can be undone - the bills of rights, the charters of freedom, the principles of justice, everything. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn understands this not only as a theoretical problem of a humanistic philosophy. He has suffered under its implications. He writes:
Communism has never concealed the fact that it rejects all absolute concepts of morality. It scoffs at good and evil as indisputable categories. Communism considers morality to be relative. Depending upon circumstances, any act, including the killing of thousands, could be good or bad. It all depends upon class ideology, defined by a handful of people .... It is considered awkward to use seriously such words as good and evil. But if we are to be deprived of these concepts, what will be left? We will decline to the status of animals.
We in the West must understand that it is not only Iron Curtain countries who operate on the basis of relative morality. Now the West does, too. The materialist world-view has dominated the thinking of the West just as much. Therefore we can expect to see the same inhumanity here, just as Solzhenitsyn has warned. We must not sit back and think, It could never happen here. Worse still, we must not be confused into thinking the issue is principally or only military or economic power. The issue is more subtle, more immediate, a cancerlike growth which is in our midst right now - the materialist philosophy which underlies the Western humanistic world-view. Marx may have proposed an economic system different from our own, but we have shared his basic world-view.
The greatest dilemma for those who hold this world-view, however, is that it is impossible to live consistently within it. We saw how this was true of David Hume. Likewise the playwright Samuel Beckett can "say" that words do not communicate anything - and that everything, including language, is absurd - yet he must use words to write his plays, even plays about meaninglessness. If the words that Beckett uses did not convey meaning to his hearers, he could not say that everything, including words, is meaningless.
The list of contradictions can be extended endlessly. The truth is that everyone who rejects the biblical world-view must live in a state of tension between ideas about reality and reality itself.
Thus, if a person believes that everything is only matter or energy and carries this through consistently, meaning dies, morality dies, love dies, hope dies. Yet! The individual does love, does hope, does act on the basis of right and wrong. This is what we mean when we say that everyone is caught, regardless of his world-view, simply by the way things are. No one can make his own universe to live in.
The reason for this, as we have said all along, is that the individual is confronted with two aspects or reality that do not basically change: the universe and its form and the mannishness of man. Humanists argue that everything is finally only matter or energy and end up with no answers to the big questions. They arrive at only meaninglessness, relative morality, relative knowledge. But humanists actually live as if there is meaning and real morality. They act, for example, as if cruelty is not the same as noncruelty, or justice the same as injustice. Also, humanists do have knowledge, knowledge of a world in which causality is real and science is possible.
Exactly the same dilemma exists with the other main alternative to Christianity: the philosophies of the East. Despite their many differences, all of these philosophies flow out of the view that ultimately everything is impersonal. The universe we are experiencing, the Eastern philosophers say, is simply an extension of God, but - and here we need to be careful - they do not mean that God is personal. "God" means the "impersonal everything," which has no final distinctions. So, within this view, the solution is to say we must get rid of those aspirations that are personal, those things that make us seem to be independent entities, entirely independent selves. Such an idea is maya, that is, "illusion."
In the Eastern thinking, the only reality is one beyond all distinctions and therefore impersonal: no "male" or "female," no "you" or "me," no "good" or "evil." It is important to note that Eastern thinkers come to exactly the same place as those who begin by saying that everything is matter or energy. At first the two positions sound very different, but they result in the same final position.
And so we ask again: Can a person espousing this Eastern world-view live consistently with it? In his 1974 book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig relates an interesting anecdote. The author, who calls himself Phaedrus in the story, studied philosophy at Benares University for about ten years. He tells how his time there came to an end.
One day in the classroom the professor of philosophy was blithely expounding on the illusory nature of the world for what seemed the fiftieth time and Phaedrus raised his hand and asked coldly if it was believed that the atomic bombs that had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were illusory. The professor smiled and said yes. That was the end of the exchange.
...Within the traditions of Indian philosophy that answer may have been correct, but for Phaedrus and for anyone else who reads newspapers regularly and is concerned with such things as mass destruction of human beings that answer was hopelessly inadequate. He left the classroom, left India and gave up.88
There are, then, only two main alternative world-views to Christianity, both of which begin with the impersonal. The West has a materialistic view and is nonreligious. The East has an immaterialistic view and is religious. But both are impersonal systems. This is the important point; by comparison, their differences pale into insignificance. The result is that, in both the West and the East, men and women are seen as abnormal aliens to the way things really are. In Eastern terms they are spoken of as maya or illusion; in Western terms, as absurd machines.