Whence Comes the Concept of Fairness, of Right and Wrong?

By: Thomas E. Brewton

Without acknowledgment of God-created human souls, society is reduced to a random collection of people guided only by pursuit of their individual ideas of pleasure and avoidance of what they find painful. In such a society, nothing is inherently right or wrong.

Read Ben Shapiro’s Why Atheism Is Morally Bankrupt.

John Dewey, in the first half of the 20th century, taught that there is no such thing as timeless moral principles. Humans merely respond to pleasure and pain, while pursuing actions that redound to their benefit. Dewey’s compass, in his philosophy of pragmatism, was only whether an action achieved the actor’s aim, without regard to its effect on others.

Pleasure-pain motivation is a root doctrine in psychology, which, despite the literal translation of its name, is essentially a materialistic, not spiritual body of doctrine. Psychology is one of the pseudo-sciences created by the French Encyclopedists as part of the movement that led to the 1789 French Revolution. Their anti-spiritual psychology of materialism led straight to the slaughter of more than 70,000 French citizens during the Reign of Terror, perpetrated in the name of Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood.

Since the days of Francis Bacon at the turn of the 17th century, scientific materialism has sought the conquest of nature, aiming to improve the life of humankind. Until the 18th century, scientists saw no conflict between efforts to understand the laws of nature and worship of God, because they acknowledged that the laws of nature are God’s creation.

Beginning with the French so-called Enlightenment (to be contrasted sharply with the contemporaneous English and American Enlightenments), however, scientists increasingly fell victim to hubris. They believed themselves to be gods, capable of reshaping the natural world and human nature, ultimately capable, via a planned society, of perfecting human nature and human society.

With such a dazzling goal apparently in their grasp, hubristic social scientists were prepared to inflict any degree of misery upon their compatriots, for the benefit of posterity. This was the rationale for the worst tyrannies in human history, from the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror to the Soviet Union’s murder of tens of millions of its citizens.

C. S. Lewis dealt extensively with such misguided presumption. In The Abolition of Man he wrote:

â€˜Manâ€™s conquest of Natureâ€™ is an expression often used to describe the progress of applied science…..In what sense is Man the possessor of increasing power over Nature?…. What we call Manâ€™s power is, in reality, a power possessed by some men which they may, or may not, allow other men to profit by…. No doubt the picture could be modified by public ownership of raw materials and factories and public control of scientific research. But unless we have a world state this will still mean the power of one nation over others. And even within the world state or the nation it will mean (in principle) the power of majorities over minorities, and (in the concrete) of a government over the people. And all long-term exercises of power, especially in breeding [i. e., eugenics], must mean the power of earlier generations over later ones…. Manâ€™s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men…. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well.

Human embryo stem-cell research and cloning are next in line.

Novels like Brave New World and 1984 are accurate representations of the â€˜progressiveâ€™ world in which liberal-progresive-socialists seek to stifle the voices of believers in the Judeo-Christian foundations of the United States. Unfortunately, only a God-fearing nation is capable of long-term cohesion and survival in our brutally materialistic world.


His weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776

Email comments to viewfrom1776@thomasbrewton.com

About The Author Thomas E. Brewton:

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.