Reason and its Enemies
In my last post, I discussed how Christianity is a faith which demands that we engage our faculty of reason to its fullest. One does not have to be Christian or Jewish to be reasonable, but both of these faith traditions encourage their followers to be unafraid in their search for the truth. At their best, atheist skeptics like James Randi and objectivists like Ayn Rand exhibit this quality, as well. Both atheists and people of faith, though, can easily find themselves on the other side. They can abandon the search for truth by embracing blind faith, or by throwing their hands in the air and declaring that we can know nothing.
Some religious, or pseudo-religious groups attempt to control the thoughts of their members and deaden their faculty of reason. To do this, they may apply standard brainwashing techniques, such as isolating converts, or occupying their minds with useless memorization exercises. Often, this is accompanied by physical abuse and threats -- especially to those who wish to escape. These groups may profess to believe in some absolute truth, but are clearly again the free exercise of the human faculty of reason.
For the most part, brain-washing cults find themselves at the margins of their society. More dangerous is the idea, common to many atheists, that truth is an illusion and we cannot truly know anything. The Matrix captured this idea well. How can we know that the world is what it appears to be, and not an elaborate hoax? It is easy to imagine how this idea, taken to its logical extreme, can undermine faith in our faculty of reason. If everything is suspect, then all scientific progress, great ideas, etc. are merely illusions.
We can also derive from this faulty premise the idea that morality is a human construct. If so, then politics, philosophy, theology have been colossal wastes of human energy. Moreover, everything is pointless. If life is not better than death, why continue living? If freedom is not superior to slavery, why not abolish democracy in favor of tyranny? If peace is not preferrable to war, why not embark on endless, meaningless campaigns. In short, the idea that morality is entirely subjective and mutable rather than objective and eternal is the road to nihilism.
George Carlin -- that icon of nihilism -- once asked, "[h]ow come when it’s us, it’s an abortion, and when it’s a chicken, it’s an omelette? Are we so much better than chickens all of a sudden?" Now, we know that a human life is worth more than that of a chicken. It takes a lot of careful thought and devotion to an ideology for us to fool ourselves into believing otherwise. Such thinking may appear open-minded, but it is also vacuous and dangerous.
The idea that morality is subjective and mutable leads us to contemplate such horrific ideas as pragmatically culling the human herd through eugenics. We begin to revive, literally or figuratively, the pagan practice of human sacrifice. Only by appealing to moral absolutes can we intelligently argue against the injustices of slavery, bigotry, murder, theft and all other assaults on human dignity. Without moral absolutes, humanity is adrift on a raft of insubstantial and dangerously unstable opinion.