"The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion." - Arthur C. Clarke
One of the most acclaimed and influential science fiction authors of the twentieth century, Arthur C. Clarke's magnum opus was the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was translated into a groundbreaking film by Stanley Kubrick. As also was his contemporary titan of speculative fiction Isaac Asimov, Clarke was a devoted humanist who championed a vision of an atheistic utopia, free from the pollutant of religious belief. Clarke self-identified as a "logical positivist" - a philosophical position that asserts that only statements that are verifiable through empirical observation can contain any meaning.
Other than the rather curious, self-refuting consequence of logical positivism (that the theory itself cannot be given any meaning by its own parameters) eventually relegating it to the dustbin of discarded philosophical ideas, aspects of the sort of logical positivism championed by Clarke still remain, in the idea of moral naturalism: the theory that morality is a scientific construct that can be determined by purely empirical methodology. In this view, morality is constituted as a measure of "social flourishing" - those actions that contribute to the greatest well-being of conscious creatures can be considered to be morally virtuous, while actions that are seen to be detrimental to those creatures are thought of as being morally repugnant. While Clarke's view of morality has existed for over two hundred years (in the form of utilitarianism, a view first espoused by the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham) it has been continued well into the present age by such atheist thinkers as Steven Pinker, Peter Singer and Sam Harris. By claiming that human flourishing should be the measuring stick of ethical consideration, champions of naturalistic morality claim that they have an objective system of morality without need for any kind of supernatural deity.
There's a subtle, yet fatal flaw to this atheistic view of morality, however - it's actually not morality at all, at least not the necessary Christian concept of it. Naturalistic ethics shift the definition of what morality is, from a deontogical set of objective values rooted in a transcendent source (the Triune God of Scripture) to a measurement of well-being, without any definition of why, in a universe shaped by unguided random physical processes, the "flourishing of sentient creatures" can be considered good in the first place. Naturalistic morality simply redefines the term "morality" to fit the atheistic worldview. It begs the question by assuming that "human (or any sentient creature) flourishing" is an objective positive ethic value without any grounding. If humanity is simply the byproduct of billions of years of chemical interactions, how can one say that, for instance, stealing your wallet is wrong? If the naturalist were to say it doesn't promote "social flourishing," so what? How can matter, being acted on blind naturistic forces, produce any kind of moral binding?
To put it in a syllogism that argues in a transcendental fashion:
P1: The existence of the Triune God of Scripture is the necessary precondition for the existence of objective moral values, because they are immaterial but real universals that cannot derive from a purely materialistic metaphysical reality and would require a transcendent source.
P2: Objective moral values exist, because all people utilize and rely on them.
C: Therefore God exists.
Now, if the atheist would like to argue that they don't have to appeal to a transcendent Lawgiver because they regard morality as the empirical measure of "social flourishing," then we ask "why is social flourishing considered objectively good?" So, the atheist must borrow from the Christian worldview (God is the precondition for objective moral standards) to critique the Christian worldview (God isn't needed to have objective moral standards).
For all of the brilliance in the art storytelling and possession of imagination that Clarke possessed, as gifted a thinker and writer as he was, his refusal to acknowledge his Creator as the source of mankind's moral intuition perfectly illustrates the foolishness of those who attempt to justify their moral and logical foundations apart without submitting themselves to the God that all men know exist (Romans 1). As Cornelius Van Til observed in his book A Survey of Christian Epistemology:
"We must point out ... that univocal reasoning itself leads to self-contradiction, not only from a theistic point of view, but from a non-theistic point of view as well... It is this that we ought to mean when we say that we reason from the impossibility of the contrary. The contrary is impossible only if it is self-contradictory when operating on the basis of its own assumptions."
One of the most acclaimed and influential science fiction authors of the twentieth century, Arthur C. Clarke's magnum opus was the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was translated into a groundbreaking film by Stanley Kubrick. As also was his contemporary titan of speculative fiction Isaac Asimov, Clarke was a devoted humanist who championed a vision of an atheistic utopia, free from the pollutant of religious belief. Clarke self-identified as a "logical positivist" - a philosophical position that asserts that only statements that are verifiable through empirical observation can contain any meaning.
Other than the rather curious, self-refuting consequence of logical positivism (that the theory itself cannot be given any meaning by its own parameters) eventually relegating it to the dustbin of discarded philosophical ideas, aspects of the sort of logical positivism championed by Clarke still remain, in the idea of moral naturalism: the theory that morality is a scientific construct that can be determined by purely empirical methodology. In this view, morality is constituted as a measure of "social flourishing" - those actions that contribute to the greatest well-being of conscious creatures can be considered to be morally virtuous, while actions that are seen to be detrimental to those creatures are thought of as being morally repugnant. While Clarke's view of morality has existed for over two hundred years (in the form of utilitarianism, a view first espoused by the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham) it has been continued well into the present age by such atheist thinkers as Steven Pinker, Peter Singer and Sam Harris. By claiming that human flourishing should be the measuring stick of ethical consideration, champions of naturalistic morality claim that they have an objective system of morality without need for any kind of supernatural deity.
There's a subtle, yet fatal flaw to this atheistic view of morality, however - it's actually not morality at all, at least not the necessary Christian concept of it. Naturalistic ethics shift the definition of what morality is, from a deontogical set of objective values rooted in a transcendent source (the Triune God of Scripture) to a measurement of well-being, without any definition of why, in a universe shaped by unguided random physical processes, the "flourishing of sentient creatures" can be considered good in the first place. Naturalistic morality simply redefines the term "morality" to fit the atheistic worldview. It begs the question by assuming that "human (or any sentient creature) flourishing" is an objective positive ethic value without any grounding. If humanity is simply the byproduct of billions of years of chemical interactions, how can one say that, for instance, stealing your wallet is wrong? If the naturalist were to say it doesn't promote "social flourishing," so what? How can matter, being acted on blind naturistic forces, produce any kind of moral binding?
To put it in a syllogism that argues in a transcendental fashion:
P1: The existence of the Triune God of Scripture is the necessary precondition for the existence of objective moral values, because they are immaterial but real universals that cannot derive from a purely materialistic metaphysical reality and would require a transcendent source.
P2: Objective moral values exist, because all people utilize and rely on them.
C: Therefore God exists.
Now, if the atheist would like to argue that they don't have to appeal to a transcendent Lawgiver because they regard morality as the empirical measure of "social flourishing," then we ask "why is social flourishing considered objectively good?" So, the atheist must borrow from the Christian worldview (God is the precondition for objective moral standards) to critique the Christian worldview (God isn't needed to have objective moral standards).
For all of the brilliance in the art storytelling and possession of imagination that Clarke possessed, as gifted a thinker and writer as he was, his refusal to acknowledge his Creator as the source of mankind's moral intuition perfectly illustrates the foolishness of those who attempt to justify their moral and logical foundations apart without submitting themselves to the God that all men know exist (Romans 1). As Cornelius Van Til observed in his book A Survey of Christian Epistemology:
"We must point out ... that univocal reasoning itself leads to self-contradiction, not only from a theistic point of view, but from a non-theistic point of view as well... It is this that we ought to mean when we say that we reason from the impossibility of the contrary. The contrary is impossible only if it is self-contradictory when operating on the basis of its own assumptions."
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