Educating Our Moral Intuitions about Abortion

I agree with Dr. Mohler (Jan. 22, 2018 Briefing) that the abortion issue should be about educating our moral intuitions about the unborn, and that science and technology have an important role to play in that endeavor. For Dr. Mohler, as he says, “The most fundamental opposition to abortion doesn't rest upon a scientific argument, but changing the moral intuition of Americans will be greatly aided by ... what we now know about the fetus, what we know and see in the developing fetus.” But is the pro-life intuition aided by all that we know, or only by carefully selected facts and images?

I commend Dr. Mohler for actually using the word “fetus” as opposed to “baby” in this Briefing, contrary to his usual practice. But there is another important word which he omits from his account: “embryo”. He quotes an article approvingly which says,

“The antiabortion cause has been aided by scientific advances that have complicated American attitudes about abortion. Prenatal ultrasound ... has allowed the general public to see fetuses inside the womb and understand that they have a human shape beginning around eight weeks into [a] pregnancy....”

But Dr. Mohler completely ignores the very important implication of this statement, that before eight weeks of pregnancy, the embryo (for that’s what it is – not a fetus and not a baby) does NOT have a recognizable human shape.

At the most extreme, during the first few days after fertilization, the embryo is a microscopic ball of cells, visually indistinguishable from the embryos of many other species. Dr. Mohler opposes use of the morning-after pill (despite the fact that scientific studies show that these medications prevent fertilization, not implantation) because he believes – on no scientific or biblical basis – that these tiny spherical balls of cells are the moral equals of babies. (I believe it is Mohler’s metaphysical assumptions that convince him of this, not any actual bible verses.)

At six weeks gestation (four weeks post-fertilization) – the most common week to have an abortion – the embryo is the size of a lentil, a quarter the diameter of a penny; it doesn’t have a face but does have a tail. Dr. Mohler opposes abortions even at this very early, embryonic stage, before the ultrasounds he speaks of begin to show a baby-like shape. It is important to understand that the majority of abortions – about two thirds – take place in the first eight weeks of pregnancy, three-quarters by week nine, 93% within the first trimester (first 13 weeks of gestation), yet pro-life propaganda tries to bias people’s moral intuitions by focusing their attention on much older fetuses, much later in pregnancy, when only a very small percentage of abortions ever take place, many of these because of medical conditions which are incompatible with life of the mother or the fetus or both, or because “pro-life” obstacles have blocked earlier access to abortion.

If we really want to educate our moral intuitions about the issue of abortion by looking at facts about the unborn revealed to us by science and technology, we need to pay attention to the very great changes that take place during pre-natal development. There is not just one moral question, there are many, because what inhabits the womb – the candidate for our moral concern – is constantly changing. The early embryonic stage called a blastocyst – a tiny hollow ball of about a hundred cells – is a very different kind of being from an 8-week embryo with a beating heart but only a hollow tube for a brain, which is very different from an 18-week fetus with a smooth-surfaced, unconnected brain, which is very different from a 28-week-old fetus, whose brain has begun to resemble ours, and might even achieve consciousness.

What differences, if any, make a moral difference? According to Dr. Mohler, none do. If something is human and alive, that is all that needs to be said, all he needs to know. But the very fact that seeing images of the unborn does affect our moral intuitions implies that people are not absolutists like Mohler, with one simple abstract idea about life in their heads. It is not merely the idea of human life that motivates our judgments, but the sense that there is someone there, not just a living thing, but a being of a kind we can recognize as one of us. I submit that, if you look at a blastocyst, you will not get that intuition, and for good reason. It is not a baby. It is not one of us. It is an organism which, with luck, and if given a nurturing home, will develop into one of us, by undergoing a series of radical changes. Those changes, taken together, make a moral difference.

So when we argue about abortion, we should be clear about what stage of pregnancy we are talking about. Even if an argument can be made against abortion at 20 weeks, on the basis of controversial claims about fetal pain, and with the aid of images of late term fetuses, this argument has nothing to do with the vast majority of abortions which take place at very early stages of development.

Dr. Mohler says “the pro-abortion side” is “forcing themselves into a position where they argue a consistently absolutist position, an absolutist position that is clearly not shared by a majority of Americans.” But of course when Mohler says “Make no mistake, a consistently pro-life position requires opposition not only to some abortions but to all abortions,” he is staking out an absolutist position himself, one also not shared by a majority of Americans. Gallup polling shows a fairly consistent majority of Americans favor some limitations on abortion, but not an absolute ban. Roe v Wade was a compromise which recognized something many Americans agree with, that abortion late in pregnancy is morally worse than early abortion, and the earlier it is, the less objectionable. According to a 2002 Gallup in-depth review, “In general, a majority of Americans are tolerant of abortion in the first trimester (averaging 62% across several polling organizations since 1996), a majority oppose it in the second trimester (67%) and most oppose it in the third trimester (82%).”

I agree with Dr. Mohler that “Americans have a troubled conscience on abortion and an unsettled mind.” People who, like Dr. Mohler, see the world in categories of black and white by ignoring or dismissing all the complexities of the world, are not so troubled. They have settled minds, and are eager to settle ours on what they are certain is the simple truth. But the world is a complicated place. We are complicated beings. Our origins are complicated as well. Maybe, in such a world, it is appropriate to have a troubled conscience and an unsettled mind.

My first entry in this blog, almost a year ago, was also on this subject. You can find it here: http://thecounterbriefing.blogspot.com/2017/01/babies-ultrasounds-and-worldviews_32.html

Mohler's Alienation from Two Secular Moral Campaigns

Dr. Mohler is uncharacteristically clueless in today's (Jan. 9, 2018) Briefing.

In discussing television programming's "staggering growth", largely coming from "the seemingly endless budget lines that help produce new shows for streaming services” like HBO and Netflix, Mohler says that "we always need to remind ourselves that programming is not really to entertain us, it is to entertain us in order to send advertising to us. That's what pays the bills." Does Dr. Mohler know what a streaming service is? Has he ever subscribed to Netflix? These are generally services that provide programming for a fee with no ads. That is how they manage to raise the big bucks -- from millions of paying subscribers.

As for the NY Times ad about truth (“The truth is hard. The truth is hard to know. The truth is more important than ever.”) Dr. Mohler gives barely a hint that he comprehends what the ad is really about. Standing up for truth has a special meaning now, when the very concept of truth is under attack by our own president, who lies constantly with careless abandon while attacking responsible reporting as "fake news", and the mainstream media as "the enemy of the American people", while Fox News and a large faction of the Republican party play along, undermining trust in the press and in the very idea that there is really a difference between truth and falsehood -- that it is not all just a matter of opinion and partisanship and who speaks the loudest or with the most confidence, or what we want the truth to be. Add to all this an actual Russian campaign to pollute our public discourse with lies, and reputable media like the NY Times find themselves in a fight to defend not only their traditional role as purveyors of truth, but to defend the very idea of truth itself.

And what did Dr. Mohler have to say about the Times "He said. She said." ad?

He said. She said.
He said. She said.
He said. She said.
He said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. She said. 

I don't know about you, but I found that inspiring. Life-affirming. Truth-affirming. But once again Mohler described it, as he had the speeches at the Golden Globes about the #metoo movement , as "virtue signalling". That is snide and cynical. When Mohler speaks with admiration of a moral exemplar, is he also just virtue signalling -- showing that he's a good guy because he takes the side of the right? I suspect he wouldn't admit that, and I wouldn't accuse him of it. What we've witnessed in the last few months -- a moral campaign against sexual assault and harassment and for the recognition of the inviolable dignity of women, in which formerly silent victims have found their voice -- is, I would think, not only a heartening development for secular people, but for all decent people, including Christians. But I don't recall Dr. Mohler having a single positive thing to say about it.

Perhaps he hasn't because the #metoo movement is, in a way, part of what Mohler calls "the sexual revolution" or "the moral revolution". He is committed to the proposition that sexual morality based on personal freedom and autonomy can't work. Whatever the new development in this ongoing revolution is, he says it is impossible, it is self-contradictory, it will only lead to chaos. The new morality, he has claimed, is not "resilient". But here we are. We have men and women who determine for themselves the relationships, sexual or otherwise, they wish to enter, and now abusers of this freedom, usually men exploiting their positions of power, are being punished and stigmatized. Moral rules are being made clearer and stronger. Secular society is showing how it's done, how a moral order is shaped and reinforced, not by quoting scripture, but by brave people standing up and saying, "I was wronged. I stand in solidarity with my sisters and we will no longer stand for this." Meanwhile evangelicals, having supported Roy Moore or mumbled their reservations into their beards at the last moment, sit on the sidelines and have nothing to say except snide comments about "virtue signalling".

Mohler an Enemy of Religious Liberty?

In his Dec 1 Briefing Dr. Mohler accuses proponents of same sex marriage in Australia of being “intellectually and morally dishonest”, but it is Dr. Mohler who is being dishonest by defending an absolute, unlimited version of religious liberty for conservative Christians but denying it to everyone else.

Savor the absolute hypocrisy of Mohler’s position in this passage from his Briefing:

“... essayist Stephen McAlpine says that he can understand secular politicians who are quite ready to sell out religious liberty to sacrifice it on the altar of sexual liberty, but then he goes on to say that he can also understand, although he says in an altogether different way, ‘those liberal, progressive Christians who have no interest in protecting their traditional brothers and sisters who hold different convictions than they do.... None will bat an eyelid or raise a voice for the sake of their brothers and sisters.  I completely understand that orthodox Christianity and its progressive iteration are basically different religions. They hold diametrically opposite viewpoints on human origins and endings, sexual ethics, biblical authority, the centrality of the cross, the means of grace and how one is justified before a holy God, if God even is holy, or even is God.’”

The bitterness of McAlpine and Mohler against liberal Christians is palpable. They disdainfully characterize progressive Christianity as a different religion with different beliefs from “orthodox Christianity”, but it never occurs to either of them to “bat an eyelid or raise a voice” in defense of their liberal brothers’ and sisters’ liberty to celebrate and practice marriage as their religion mandates, a mandate which includes same sex marriage.

This is a fundamental contradiction, a fundamental hypocrisy at the heart of Dr. Mohler’s purported crusade for “religious liberty”. It is in fact nothing of the kind. He says this is a battle of religious liberty against sexual liberty, but in fact there are religious liberty claims on both sides of the same sex marriage issue, because people’s religious beliefs differ about it.

But the claims on the two sides are not equal. On one side you have a liberty claim that is central to a person’s life:  the freedom to choose, in consonance with the moral guidance of their religion or secular worldview, whom they will marry, raise children with and live out their lives with . On the other side is the liberty claim of a baker who doesn’t want to sell a cake, or a government official who says she can’t, in good conscience, issue a perfectly legal document to a same sex couple. To protect the latter liberties Mohler would deny the former. This makes absolutely no moral sense.

That is because the issue for Mohler is not religious liberty at all. If it were liberty, he would recognize both sides’ claims. He would realize that a claim of religious liberty does not require that the religion be a true one. Liberty includes the freedom to make mistakes. No, the issue is not religious liberty, it is religious hegemony for conservative Christianity – the ability for conservative Christians to tell everyone else how to live, and to do that by law, and to dictate the rules on who is a cultural transgressor. Those powers of conservative Christians to control the culture and people’s lives are slipping away, and Mohler is understandably outraged and appalled that his view of the one true religion should be so flouted and ignored. But it is fundamentally dishonest of him to frame his grasping for the last vestiges of power as an interest in religious liberty, when his chief desire is to suppress the liberty of others.

Mohler and Evolution

Dr. Mohler speaks of “the worldview confusion around us,” but when he speaks about evolution he just adds to that confusion by not distinguishing between Darwin’s theory of evolution (which is a well-validated scientific theory) and philosophical positions like materialism and naturalism.

For instance, he said in the 11/22/17 Briefing, “Millions upon millions of people, though indoctrinated into the worldview of evolution, aren't buying it. They certainly aren’t buying it as a sufficient explanation for the cosmos.” But the theory of evolution never purported to explain the cosmos. If any science can, that would be cosmology, not biology. Darwinian evolution is a biological theory which explains the way life on earth has developed over a long period of time, by descent with modification, from simple organisms to the most complex. It does not explain how the universe got here. It doesn’t even explain how the first life on earth arose. (No single, detailed, well-supported scientific theory of life's origin yet exists.) Evolution explains the history of life by natural, not supernatural means, but that is not the same as saying the supernatural does not exist, or even that evolution is without purpose.

If you won the lottery tomorrow, would you let your knowledge that this came to pass by a random series of events – if they were not random, it would not have been a fair lottery – dissuade you from thanking God for His providence? Likewise, if you accepted that you came to exist as you are by “winning” a billions-of-years-long genetic and survival lottery described by the theory of evolution, this need not prevent you from viewing that long series of events as God’s gift and plan if you so chose, and this view would be perfectly compatible with the theory, though not part of it, and not necessitated by it. Or consider a hand of cards. No matter how well you shuffle the deck, so that the cards come up as random as you please, an omniscient God will have known the result before time began, and an omnipotent God will have intended it.

Catholics and liberal Protestants recognize this and accept evolution. It is only Christians like Dr. Mohler committed to a particular literal interpretation of scripture who are forced to pit themselves against one of the most successful and well established theories ever devised by man. It does not serve his listeners well to be told that evolution is the antithesis of everything they hold dear. The theory of evolution does fit well into an atheistic view of the world, because it allows atheists to understand the incredible  complexity and design-like fitness of life on earth without appeal to the supernatural (something that was not possible before Darwin), but the theory does not deny the existence of the supernatural, and is compatible with versions of Christianity which make room for the well-established facts that life on earth is billions of years old, and has evolved by natural means from simple to complex.

Contrary to what Dr. Mohler claims, no number of fundamentalist Christians who choose a literal reading of the creation story over sound science are sufficient to cause people who know the science to be “intellectually insecure”,  anymore than they will falter in their belief that the earth is round when confronted with the stubborn persistence of flat-earthers. Those who are pro-science are all for teaching critical thinking, and for confronting questions and doubts students have about evolution head on. (After all, if misconceptions are not corrected, the theory will not be properly learned.)  It is only the suspicion that “critical thinking” in the science classroom is code for giving creationist teachers who are not trained in science-based answers to such questions free reign to introduce religion and pseudoscience into the classroom that makes us nervous.

Part II (added 11/24/17):

The ultimate subject of the “Retro Report” Dr. Mohler was discussing was the move by creationists to legislatively mandate “critical thinking” about evolution in science classes. Of course Dr. Mohler doesn’t claim to be a scientist or to be trained in science, but even so, the level of critical thinking about evolution he demonstrated in this Briefing I found to be extremely low. I had to wonder whether Dr. Mohler has any understanding of what science is, what it has accomplished, and how. Take this passage:

“I've mentioned on the Briefing the research that perplexes so many scientists indicating that young children are particularly resistant to the theory of evolution, or for that matter to materialism and naturalism. Why? Because they draw the inference from the cosmos that they draw from their house or from anything else that somebody made it. Somebody built the house we live in, somebody built the road we drive on, certainly, someone made the world, the cosmos we inhabit.” (The previous mention can be found here: “Promiscuous Teleology” — Is This Why So Many Reject Evolution? May 29, 2007.)

First let’s note that the idea is completely ridiculous that scientists would be perplexed by the fact that young children find it more natural to believe the world was created as it is than that it evolved naturally without design. After all, since the first attempts in ancient Greece and Rome (by Epicureans like Lucretius) to imagine a non-divine origin of plants and animals, it took more than 2000 years before Darwin and Wallace found a plausible theory of how this could be. If its ideas came naturally to people, they would have come up with the theory long before.

Science has made a difference in the world precisely by discovering that what was always obvious is not necessarily the truth. Every child knows that the ground is stationary, and that the sun, moon and stars move around us. Every child knows that up is up and down is down, and it is the same up and the same down wherever you are, and things fall down, so anybody on the other side of the earth would fall off. Or at least they would know that if they thought about it, but then they would know something that wasn’t true. Every child knows that if a mountain is there, it has always been there, since the beginning of the world, because mountains don’t move around like people or cars or elephants, or grow like plants. And even if a mountain could rise out of a flat plain, certainly continents cannot drift through the oceans like ships!

It is natural to generalize from the familiar to the universal, from the local in time and space to everywhere and for all time, but however natural that step to the universal may seem, it is not logically valid, so it is bound at times to go wrong. Dr. Mohler says, “Somebody built the house we live in, somebody built the road we drive on, certainly, someone made the world, the cosmos we inhabit.” But that last jump is completely without logical ground. To criticize science, which proceeds by testing hypotheses on the basis of evidence, and then only placing confidence in a hypothesis when it is supported – to criticize such a scientific theory because it violates such a groundless inference, on the basis that the inference comes naturally to children, is about as far from critical thinking as it is possible to be.

Or take Dr. Mohler’s treatment of intelligent design:

“Intelligent design is an intellectual tool that says that the irreducible complexity of the cosmos cannot be explained by purely natural explanations. Their argument is that a simple, straightforward, honest assessment of the cosmos indicates that it was designed and designed by some intelligence, thus intelligent design. Now here we need to note that intelligent design is indeed a very useful and to Christians obviously true intellectual tool.”

On the contrary, irreducible complexity is a claim that certain biological systems, in order to function, need all their parts, so that they could not have evolved piecemeal in service of that function. That is what “irreducible” means in this context: take away any part and the whole thing fails. This would be an argument for intelligent design if any biological structures were demonstrated to be irreducibly complex, and if it could be demonstrated that no OTHER functions could have driven evolution of the structure. As far as I know, no such examples have been proposed and sustained against counter-evidence.

The argument for intelligent design on the basis of irreducible complexity is a very technical argument which involves reasoning about subcellular molecular machines and how they could have arisen.  It is a very far cry from Mohler’s purported “argument ... that a simple, straightforward, honest assessment of the cosmos indicates that it was designed and designed by some intelligence.” Mohler seems to be saying that if we’re honest, we simply know in a “straightforward” way (without reasoning or evidence?) that the cosmos was designed. But this isn’t an argument at all. It is an assertion that no argument is necessary, because if we’re honest we will admit that we simply know.

Why should this intuitive knowledge be trusted? Dr. Mohler offered a circular argument in the "Promiscuous Teleology" Briefing previously referred to:

"The hard-wiring for design these psychologists identify as the problem may well be yet another sign of the imago Dei — the image of God that distinguishes humanity from all other creatures...."

That is, our intuitive knowledge that the cosmos was designed -- the "design inference" -- is trustworthy because it was designed into us.

Is this, I wonder, the kind of “critical thinking” that creationists want to see in science classrooms?

The Fetal Pain Bill

I previously posted a short essay here, in response to the Oct. 5 and 20 Briefings, on the fetal pain bill, on the complex nature and neural basis of pain, on the development of pain-capability in the fetus, and on current scientific and medical opinion on the capability of the fetus to feel pain. I am not satisfied with everything I wrote there, and no longer feel well-informed enough to express a firm opinion on all these matters, so I have deleted the post. Here are a few excerpts that I do feel confident of:


ThePain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act does not dispute the anatomical fact that the cerebral cortex is not connected at 20 weeks post-fertilization, so in effect it is claiming that the cortex is not necessary for the fetus to consciously experience pain.

Points (2) and (3) of the bill are misleading. Point (2) states, “After 20 weeks, the unborn child reacts to stimuli that would be recognized as painful if applied to an adult human, for example, by recoiling.” But such reactions can be produced by reflexes without conscious awareness. In the next point, the bill says “In the unborn child, application of such painful stimuli is associated with significant increases in stress hormones....” Firstly, it has not been shown that these ARE painful stimuli, only that they would be if applied to an adult with an intact nervous system. Secondly, stress hormones can be and are triggered without conscious awareness. Pain requires conscious awareness.

Point eight of the bill is factually false. It says, “In adult humans and in animals, stimulation or ablation of the cerebral cortex does not alter pain perception....” On the contrary, there is strong evidence from multiple sources that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), an area of the cerebral cortex and part of the limbic system, contributes to the affective component of pain, that is, to suffering. It has been called “a critical brain region that is part of the neuromatrix involved in pain processing.” Operations removing or disconnecting it have been successfully used to relieve pain in terminal cancer patients among others. In rats, after lesion of the ACC, rats ceased exhibiting escape/avoidance behavior in response to what had been a painful stimulus. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4017137/

We are complex beings. Our behaviors are complex and have multiple sources, some conscious, some unconscious. Even feelings as seemingly elementary as pain are complex. They consist of many aspects, which depend in complex ways on many parts of our bodies. Those parts emerge and develop gradually over time in the womb, as do the capabilities they support.

A Reply to Mohler on Evil after Las Vegas

http://www.albertmohler.com/2017/10/03/briefing-10-03-17/
http://www.albertmohler.com/2017/10/02/act-pure-evil-searching-meaning-las-vegas/

The day after the mass shooting in Las Vegas, Dr. Mohler published an online article, “An Act of Pure Evil” — Searching for Meaning in Las Vegas, subtitled “Evil points to a necessary moral judgment made by a moral authority greater than we are -- a transcendent and supernatural moral authority: God.” He read the essay the next day in his Oct 3 Briefing.

He begins, “In the face of such overwhelming news, we naturally seek after facts. We want to know what happened, and when. We want to know who did it.” He notes with approval Pres. Trump’s calling the massacre “an act of pure evil,” and goes on:

“The judgment of evil here, real evil, should be beyond dispute. Evil is a fact, too. And evil is a theological category. The secular worldview cannot use the word with coherence or sense. The acknowledgement of evil requires the affirmation of a moral judgment and a moral reality above human judgment. If we are just accidental beings in an accidental universe, nothing can really be evil. Evil points to a necessary moral judgment made by a moral authority greater than we are — a transcendent and supernatural moral authority: God.”

As an atheist, I dispute these claims. I will try to explain below how calling evil evil presents no problem to the secular worldview.

Dr. Mohler ends the essay by quoting Isaiah 5:20:

“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light, and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.”

I will use this as my starting point.

Bitter things taste bitter because they excite our bitter-detecting taste buds, likewise for sweet. Sugar tastes sweet and some coffee tastes bitter. These are facts, but they are facts as much about human beings as they are about the things we eat. Are they “objective facts”? They are in the sense that they are not matters of personal opinion. They are facts about the world we live in, which includes humans, coffee and sugar. If sugar existed but there were no organisms which perceived it as sweet, it would not be a fact about sugar that it is sweet. You might say that sugar’s sweetness is both a fact about sugar and about human nature.

Or consider the stench of a rotting carcass. It is foul. We might say that it smells evil, that it has an evil smell. By this we mean that the smell is very very bad. The meat has gone bad. But to a vulture, it may smell delicious. What makes the meat bad to us is that it is poisonous to humans, though not to the vulture. Because to eat it is bad for humans, we evolved to be repelled by the odor. We find it disgusting. We reject it. We want to get away from it.

What the Las Vegas shooter did was very very bad for a very large number of people. This is a fact beyond dispute. It caused suffering, injury and death. It deprived victims of years of happiness and the opportunities that life affords; deprived their children, parents, friends and siblings of their love, support and company; traumatized bystanders and first responders; and saddened and horrified millions of media witnesses who felt for the victims and their loved ones. This event is not only overwhelmingly perceived as bad by all people possessed of their unimpeded natural faculties (with an exception I will take up below), it WAS bad for people.

All this would be true if the deaths and injuries had been caused by a natural disaster, so we have not yet reached the moral. But add to all this badness the fact that all this was intentionally brought about by a human being capable of reason, but who had no good reason. Now we don’t have just an impersonal, accidental, natural event; we have an act – an intentional human action. And we judge these morally, by approving or condemning them.

Just what moral judgement entails has been the subject of endless philosophical discussion. I am not a trained philosopher, and I don't know how my view would be evaluated by one. But I will attempt here, by exploiting the analogy of bitter, sweet, and foul, to offer a naturalistic explanation.

It is part of human nature to react negatively to malicious acts that cause serious harm, especially to those we care about or with whom we naturally empathize. Just as we are disgusted by the smell of bad meat, we reject such bad actions and the persons responsible for them. We may feel anger, disgust, horror or outrage at these actions and their perpetrators. We may attack them, shun them, or seek to punish them. It makes sense that we should feel and act in this way, since we evolved as social animals, and it will have benefited our ancestors’ genes if they exerted social pressure against behaviors that harmed members of the group or the group itself.

Dr. Mohler writes,

“The acknowledgement of evil requires the affirmation of a moral judgment and a moral reality above human judgment. If we are just accidental beings in an accidental universe, nothing can really be evil. Evil points to a necessary moral judgment made by a moral authority greater than we are — a transcendent and supernatural moral authority: God.”

But consider the sweet and the bitter. Even if we are accidental beings, sugar will still be sweet and apricot kernels bitter. The sweet tastes good and the intensely bitter bad for good reasons: the sweet is nourishing (rich in calories), while the bitter tends to be poisonous. That sugar is sweet (that is, sweet to human beings) is an objective fact that stems from its chemical composition and our human nature. There is no need for a transcendent authority to declare it so.

Why should the moral qualities of actions be any different? We judge intentional actions according to their goodness or badness. Malicious acts which intentionally cause harm with no good reason are evil to us. We perceive them as evil and they are objectively evil, in that they are intentional and cause needless suffering. We try to prevent them. We discourage them. We punish them. We call them bad and we call them wrong.

“Wrong” may be taken to imply a norm, a standard or rule. Societies develop implicit or explicit rules governing behavior, including prohibitions against morally bad behaviors. But the fact and perception that truly evil actions are morally bad precedes, I would suggest, any rules which sanction them. They are morally sanctioned – we call them wrong – because they are bad, not vice versa.

It follows that social or religious rules that declare actions wrong which are not truly bad – and may even be good – are not morally valid. Furthermore, if such supposedly moral sanctions cause unnecessary suffering and deprive people of happiness, those rules themselves are evil, and their proponents guilty of promoting evil.

The reader may have noticed that I have glossed over some serious difficulties.

One seeming difficulty which is not truly one is the fact that ISIS has claimed responsibility for the Las Vegas massacre, and no doubt ISIS fighters have rejoiced in the carnage. How could this be possible? I believe it is due to the fact that ISIS shares Dr. Mohler’s view of the divine source of morality. What we should and should not do is believed to be entirely up to God’s will. According to this view, anything that God commands is by definition good and right, and anything he prohibits bad and wrong. Therefore, if you happen to be under the sway of a version of divine commands which is, as a matter of fact, harmful to human beings as they actually exist, you may be led to commit and to approve of the most heinous acts imaginable. This would be an instance of thoughts and beliefs corrupting human nature, subverting its natural empathy and its accurate moral judgements. It would be like convincing someone that the bitter is sweet and the sweet is bitter because it says so in a book.

Another question is the shooter himself. If perceptions of moral goodness and badness are human universals (like bitter and sweet), how could a man do what he did? One possibility is that he is neurologically malformed. His father was wanted for bank robbery and diagnosed as a psychopath. Perhaps Stephen Paddock was a psychopath – that is, a person lacking the emotional prerequisites of a moral sense – who had kept this secret until now. Or else he decided, for unknown reasons, to do what he knew and even felt was evil.

A far more serious difficulty is that what I have described as a human universal – revulsion at malicious acts – seems to have important exceptions. Nazis who beat and humiliated Jews in the streets felt righteous and were no doubt applauded by many, though condemned by others. Humanities’ sense of the badness of harm depends on its attitude to the victims. If they are blamed for being evil, the harm may be perceived as being a just punishment. Or if they are dehumanized – perceived as completely unlike a person’s own family and community – then empathy fails, and revulsion for and condemnation of the perpetrators does not kick in.

If I say that we should condemn the Nazis, although they were human beings as I am, but they did not judge their actions to be evil as I do, am I caught in a contradiction? Is it like finding out that sugar tastes salty in some cultures, so there is no objective fact about the sweetness of sugar, but still insisting that it is really sweet? Am I implicitly relying on an authority I deny – one that transcends human judgement – to back my judgement over theirs?

Not, I think, if I stick to the notion that badness and goodness for people – their suffering or happiness, their fulfillment or diminishment – is the real basis of morality. Then we can be wrong about it: our moral feelings and judgements can be distorted by false beliefs or traumatic experiences or social pressure, or we can ignore them or lie to ourselves about them out of callousness or selfishness. But senseless malicious harm is still morally bad, and unselfish heroic aid is still morally good, just as the sweet is sweet and the bitter bitter, even though at times we may fail to taste them, or ignore or make mistakes about them.

 Christians who understand morality as being, in its essence, a matter of rules – of laws which are grounded in nothing other than an absolute divine authority – will find my account unsatisfactory. But I would object that they try to have it both ways: they also hold that what God commands leads to human flourishing. As long as they believe this they don’t have to choose between morality as arbitrary divine commands (arbitrary because if they are not arbitrary, but are based on the good, then the divine command is superfluous) and morality as a matter of what is good for us.

But if morality is a matter of what is good for us, then by learning new facts about different ways of living, we should be able to improve our understanding of what is moral and what is immoral. This implies that we should be open to learning, and to changing our opinions about morality based on what we learn. Dr. Mohler's worldview implies that we should not, and he has an amazing ability to be impervious to facts. He believes in the biblical creation story, including a young earth, in the face of centuries of scientific discoveries to the contrary. And because he believes he knows that homosexuality is sinful and violates God’s commands, he is convinced that its practice cannot under any circumstances lead to happy and fulfilling lives, no matter what we may learn about those lives, even though this should be, in principle, an empirical question.

As more and more LGBT people have come out of the closet and the American populace has come to know them, Americans in general have become more and more convinced that they were wrong about these people; that they can lead decent, loving, flourishing lives as LGB or T or Q. But no amount of such learning experiences (if he allows himself to have them) will ever convince Dr. Mohler that such lives can be good, or that trying to suppress LGBT people, stigmatize their ways of life, and force them back into celibacy or the closet, is bad for them, and therefore evil. That is not countenanced by his worldview.

The question is, who is really putting the sweet for the bitter or who the bitter for the sweet?

A few more points of a general atheistic bent:

In various ways Dr. Mohler claims that the Christian worldview explains evil, although he also says "It is ultimately inexplicable, unfathomable, and cannot be resolved by human means." As a matter of fact, monotheism is uniquely unqualified to explain the presence of evil in the world. If only one God exists and He is all powerful, all knowing and supremely benevolent, why is there evil? Christianity offers only unsatisfactory and absurd excuses. Did an all-wise God create a species which broke and was fatally corrupted after its very first bad decision? What kind of design is that? Did the Fall corrupt the rest of creation and introduce death into the world? Even worse! Is stealing an apple, in order to know more, really that bad? Is disobedience deserving of death? Are guilt and sin really heritable? And speaking of evil, if God is benevolent, why should eternal torment await the unsaved? No human justice is half as savage.

In contrast, the secular worldview explains the existence of evil without breaking a sweat. The key is that we were not created perfect. We are works in progress, imperfect animals which have evolved by a process of trial and error. So it is not surprising that we should make all kinds of mistakes, fail to live up to our potential, or that there should be some really bad apples. Psychology, sociology, economics, genetics, culture – all kinds of explanations can be brought to bear and have a part to play. There is no cosmic mystery to the fact that we do things to harm each other and ourselves, despite our capacities for moral perception and judgement.

Christians are apt to end a discussion with an atheist by saying, "Well we'll see." They are certain that they are right and that the atheist is going to hell, and he'll know it soon enough. As Dr. Mohler said,

"The Christian worldview also promises that God will bring about a final act of moral judgment that will be the final word on right and wrong — as facts, not merely speculation."

It is as if we are taking an exam, and when we get our papers back we will receive the authoritative correct answer. (Right there in black and white, so to speak, hard facts, unlike secularists' mere speculation — although the prospect of such a judgement in a hypothetical afterlife is speculative in the extreme.) Implicit perhaps in this account is the claim that if there is no grading, there can be no correct answer. Without ultimate reward and punishment there is no right and wrong. "Everything is permitted." I think this is a mistake.

The Holocaust was formative of my view of the universe – including a silent, nonexistent God. I remember a scene from a 1985 film called "Shoah", a documentary about the Holocaust. It shows the grounds of a concentration camp decades after the war. It could just be a meadow. Grass is growing. Trees sway almost imperceptibly. A few birds break the silence. It is a long take. The world continues now as it did then, as if all these horrors never happened. They don't leave a mark, except on us, while we remember.

It says too much even to say the universe is indifferent to right and wrong. There is no other witness to be indifferent. We live in a moral world only because we live in a human world and we are moral animals. We rebel against evil and rejoice in the good. We have a moral dimension. There is nobody but us to appreciate the wonderful and the horrendous, to blame or forgive. But that is enough for good and evil to be real.