This is the first of what I hope will be a small series of papers and essay answers from my first semester classes here at Westminster Seminary, PA. This first installment is a paper I wrote for Introduction to Apologetics. It is a brief response to an article entitled “Religion Is Not Needed in Moral Decisions” by Frank R. Zindler in the book Constructing a Life Philosophy (Mark Schmidt, ed.). The same article, under a different title, can be found on the Web here.

In his article “Religion Is Not Needed in Moral Decisions” in the book Constructing a Life Philosophy, Frank R. Zindler proposes that “enlightened self-interest” is all that is needed to provide a sufficient base for good, just, workable societies. He believes that moral impulses are the product of both biological and social evolution and are sufficiently explained by those two factors. Religion, in his view, is not only superfluous, but actually dangerous to mankind’s well-being as it ties humans to their evolutionary past.

Mr. Zindler opens his case by immediately going on the offensive against Christian belief, which he sees as grounding moral behavior in the threat of punishment and promise of reward. He observes that pagans have built virtuous societies and produced refined moral philosophies without any reference to biblically-based moral systems. As an alternative to “hell-fire or heaven,” he sets forth psychological and biological developments arising out of evolutionary necessity as the explanation of morality in human societies.

Zindler assumes as fact that human sociality is the product of evolution, grounding much of our desire to do good and please others in the capacity in our nervous systems for “emotional imprinting.” This imprinting moves us toward forming societal relationships necessary to our survival as we learn that behavior that pleases others will tend to bring pleasure back to us.

Higher apes, assumed as our close relatives on the basis of similar DNA, have been observed committing altruistic and self-sacrificial acts. Zindler is pleased to point out that they do so without any knowledge of the Ten Commandments. He sees this as demonstrating that evolution can produce heroism without appeal to religion.

At this point Zindler anticipates a possible objection: if evolution tends toward the socially favorable, how do we account for the common occurrence of antisocial behavior? He grants the problem, and responds that antisocial behavior is a product of our complex societies. To make that connection, he digresses to explain how social behavior is the result of evolutionary processes.

He begins that explanation with analogies in simpler life forms. In animals, the imprinting capacity is limited, if present at all, to the needs brought on by the level of complexity in their environment. Because we humans tend to create ever more complex environments, we outrun the ability of instinctual learning to pass on the information needed for our continued survival. In response, natural selection provided us with a large capacity for social imprinting so that we would form relational bonds that allowed us to pass on useful information to each succeeding generation. So, Zindler says, culture replaced instinct as the primary agent of evolutionary change in humans.

Furthermore, Zindler states his belief that religious codes such as the Ten Commandments are frozen in the earlier periods of cultural evolution in which they were created and thus are inadequate for the much more complex challenges of modern society. He says that the only workable ground for ethics today is cultural evolution, which produces the necessary adaptability to keep pace with inevitably increasing complexity.

Having established what he views as the origin of human moral behavior, Zindler now turns to codifying the method by which we are to recognize and pursue those behaviors that will produce both personal and societal benefit: enlightened self-interest.

By “enlightened” Zindler means cooperative or altruistic behaviors which humans have learned will produce greater personal satisfaction for themselves (“self-interest”). He proposes that this came about when humans observed that acting in a totally selfish manner (“unenlightened self-interest”) produced negative results as the community would eventually turn on the selfish one. Moreover, “enlightened” cooperative ventures were self-reinforcing as participants were rewarded with greater personal return for their efforts. Zindler then goes on to propose that such social conventions as justice arose in order to maintain and reinforce reciprocity of cooperation.

Finally, even such higher impulses as love and desire for beauty can be explained by this enlightened self-interest as it responds to the drawing power of the emotional suggestibility of humans. Zindler believes that we can imprint not only on other humans (“love”) but on objects and ideals (“desire for beauty”).

Zindler concludes that lists of rules transmitted pedagogically will stall cultural evolution. He proposes that since morality must always adapt to changing circumstances it is best to teach people to form their ethics by attempting to predict which actions should produce pleasing results for themselves in both the short and long terms.

By the rules of classical logic, Mr. Zindler certainly seems at first glance to be consistent from link to link of the chain of his argument. But it is at his alpha and omega, the beginning and end of his chain that we must look to see if those ends are anchored into anything real, anything that will keep the chain in the air.

Foundationally, Zindler rejects the Christian claims for morality because he sees them as based on “the whimsical totems and taboos of the demons and deities who emerged with us from our cave dwellings at the end of the Paleolithic Era…” (169). There at the end of his essay he attacks what he really must, the presuppositions underlying religious claims. The authority underlying the claim is the most important thing (rather than the false caricature of Christian morality as mere “hell-fire” fear given at the beginning of the piece). If the ground of the Christian position on universal morality is not a deity (or several!) that crawled out of a cave in the dim past, but rather is indeed the infinitely wise eternal trinitarian God of the Bible, then such things as the Ten Commandments become ever so much more than “whimsical totems and taboos.”

Of course, that cuts both ways. If the assumptions holding up the starting point of Zindler’s logical chain are questionable, then the whole chain has no support. So it is fair to examine that starting point.

Having rejected, almost out of hand, even the possibility that God might lie behind the moral and socializing impulses of humans, Zindler must find some other point of origin for them. He clearly assumes that a combination of social and biological evolution will suffice. That is a large assumption, and it is beyond the scope of this paper to enter into the immense debate over the nature and extent of evolutionary forces. However, it is not necessary to settle that debate in order to simply point out that the origin and development parts of Zindler’s theory rest heavily upon those assumptions.

More important is the unstated presupposition that lies beneath Zindler’s evolutionary assumptions: impersonal mechanical determinism. Certainly Zindler, an atheist, would not disavow that as his true base point as well as the driver of his entire theory of how morality developed through history. If there is no infinite-personal God behind the universe, than the cosmos is inherently impersonal. If there is no personal “hand” guiding the unfolding of the cosmos, than the cosmos is mechanical. And if it is mechanical, then it is fully deterministic, as the impersonally mechanical is wholly a process of cause and effect. The end product (effect) in a machine is wholly dependent on the sum of the causes that produced it. The effect cannot be anything other than what the causes would produce. The product has no freedom.

Zindler himself asserts this determinism in the very beginning of his essay when he says, “The behavior of Atheists is subject to he same rules of sociology, psychology, and neurophysiology that govern the behavior of all members of our species, religionists included.” He adds, “Ethical behavior…results always from the same causes and is regulated by the same forces…” (161, emphases added). He clearly views behavior as determined by impersonal forces.

Yet Zindler makes a number of appeals to human freedom. For example: “As a general—though not absolute—rule, we must choose those behaviors which will be likely to bring us love and acceptance, and we must eschew those behaviors which will not” (168, emphases added). Suddenly we have a non-absolute “rule” that necessitates a choice. First off, what authority decides that is a rule and to what extent it is “general—not absolute”? And why should free choice—to do this but to eschew that—poke its nose under the tent of a mechanistic universe?

Even the polemical form of his essay appeals to human freedom. He clearly writes in order to persuade us, and should he succeed in persuading us, he surely is asking us to do something, to make the free choice to order our lives by his principle of enlightened self-interest. Then he asks that we “predict the consequences of actions being considered” and then choose the act that will “increase… [our] chances of experiencing the hedonic triad of love, beauty, and creativity” (168). It would appear that Zindler wants to produce this world by impersonal, mechanistic time and chance and yet live in it according to freedom with real choices that have real consequences. That he should want to do so is not surprising, since the world in which we live continually confronts us with choices and consequences that have no appearance of being impersonally determined.

As Zindler asks us to choose his way of looking at the world and his way of determining “good” choices, he inadvertently raises yet another issue of inconsistency with his presuppositions. Throughout his piece he makes value judgments, not just of utility but also of aesthetics and worth. In reference to the Greeks and Romans, he pronounces their lives “not obviously worse than those of the Baptists of Alabama” (161). Our natural tendency to seek happiness for both our fellows and ourselves he pronounces fortunate. He also speaks of abstract concepts of value such as love and beauty. And negatively, he obviously looks down upon religious people, also a kind of value judgment.

Here again we must ask: On what basis do you do this, Mr. Zindler? Could it be that there is “more than is dreamt of in your philosophy?” Could it be that there are more things “built in” to this world than your “enlightened self-interest” can account for? In a world dependent on time and chance, why should there be so very many things that we find appealing and beautiful but which have no apparent utility in survival? How would natural selection give us music or art? Why would societies pursue such ventures that do not contribute to the evolutionary imperative toward survival and continuance?

Zindler might answer that he would attribute our desire toward the lovely, the beautiful, the creative to our imprintable nervous systems. At one point he mentions how a newborn gosling can be imprinted to a toy train and will follow it like it is its own mother. He then draws a distinction between that kind of imprinting and the imprinting he says is a capacity of the human nervous system that allows us to fall in “love-at-first-sight” or be drawn to a work of art or a sunset. But if all our desire for beauty is merely a result of “emotional suggestibility” and imprinting, then why should we be any different from the gosling? Why should we also not be as likely to affix upon a toy as a Titian? How does this explain the universal desire in humans across cultures for art and music and other aesthetic experiences?

As mentioned earlier, Zindler comments that “[i]t is in our nature, fortunately, to seek happiness for our fellows…” (161, emphasis added). Does not the value judgment “fortunately” imply that a judgment of “goodness” upon happiness existed a priori to the evolutionary process that is said to produce the impulse toward happiness? If not, then why pronounce it fortunate? In a truly impersonal universe, what is is. Nothing can be said to be good or bad, it just exists. So the fact that we have a tendency to seek happiness is neither fortunate nor unfortunate. Yet Zindler seems quite pleased that it is the way it is!

So Zindler, finding himself trapped within the circle of his own self-contained impersonal system, refuses to stay in the circle and continually leaps toward the world that is, the one that he and I both know.

Now Zindler might respond that I, too, as a Christian theist am trapped within a circle. To this I happily agree. I say happily, because unlike Zindler I have no desire or need to step outside my circle. The circle of the eternal, infinite, personal God of the Bible, the three-in-one Father, Son, and Holy Spirit accounts for all reality, morality, and causality, as well as love, beauty, and creativity. Furthermore, he removes from me the heavy burden of having to explain or account for all that there is with only the use of my own finite rationality. I do not mean that I revel in ignorance. Quite the opposite; I rather rejoice in knowing that I can face all that is in the world that is and know that there is a reason for it: God made it so. And because he is an infinitely-wise Person, I can confidently explore and investigate that world knowing that there is a purpose for everything, and whatever is beyond my knowing or ability to find out, that is all right as well, for God knows.

Although Mr. Zindler confidently asserts that “nature has already solved the problem” of a grounds for human morals, we have seen that impersonal nature really hasn’t provided him all that he seeks. If it had, he would not feel the need to step outside his circle and seek for things that impersonal nature can’t provide. Every time he does so, he is “borrowing capital,” to use Cornelius Van Til’s term. I would invite him to stop borrowing and come into his inheritance!

In fact, not only does my confidence in investigating the world stand upon the God of the Bible, but so does Zindler’s, though of course he would not admit to that. His use of logic and reasoning to build his evolutionary chain of events as well as his construct of enlightened self-interest could not be depended upon to have any real coherence to reality without an infinite and personal God who intentionally created a universe with intelligibility and rationality.

While discussion of the existence of a personal God versus an impersonal, mechanistic, self-existent universe is important, more to the point of Zindler’s essay is the question of morality and human behavior. Toward the middle of the essay Zindler mentions the problem of the existence of anti-social behavior. The only answer he gives to this is a sort of confusion caused by the rapidity of societal evolution. Not only can Zindler not account for the persistence in the world of something that clearly works against his mechanistic, cause-and-effect scheme, but he also can provide no way to deal with the aberrant, nor can he offer any hope to one in that place.

The biblical Christian, however, knows not only the joy of being able to make sense of the world but the hope of real personal change. The Bible reveals that the problem in the world is not just a glitch in the otherwise efficient program of societal evolution, but rather something which lurks deep in the heart of every man, not just the clearly “anti-social.” This darkness is sin, which is rebellion against God, a rebellion that blinds men like Mr. Zindler to being able to see God and his world as it is. The hope that the Christian knows is that God through the sacrifice of his own Son Jesus Christ, the second person of the Godhead, has made available to all men forgiveness and reconciliation, as well as a way to walk that rises above self-interest to true love.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 24th, 2005 at 6:42 pm and is filed under Theology, Worldview. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.