Undermining the Providentially Ordered Universe

 
The undermining of a providentially ordered universe and where we stand today.
            In the nineteenth century, many social economic and cultural events undermined the
notion of a world that is providentially ordered. The most important event philosophically was probably the publication of Darwin’s Origen of Species (1859), which not only led many thinkers to the notion that there was no need to posit a God-Creator, but that the brutality of the process is incompatible with such a God.
           
A post-Darwin natural morality emerged with a theme of “survival of the fittest.” Herbert Spencer, who coined the term, applied it not only to Darwin’s biological natural selection, but also to economic and social policy, an idea that came to be known as “Social Darwinism.” Industrialist, Andrew Carnegie, expressed his debt to Darwin and Spencer for providing an ethical and philosophical background for his industrialization and the harsh living conditions that accompanied it. Carnegie justified any harm done to people and to the environment by trusting that “All is well since all gets better.” The optimistic thinking of the Enlightenment was not abandoned, it was just projected into the future.
           
The social reformers who saw the need to reverse the fortunes of the working class believed that they had to act contrary to the principle of natural selection. They believed that rather than live by the “law of the jungle,” our humanity required us to take care of the weak and the poor. Rather than follow a “natural law,” morality involves acting in spite of nature, or even against nature.
 
Two examples, one from the late 19th century and the other from the late 20th century illustrate the divorce of morality from nature in the wake of Darwin. The first is William James, who referring not to a natural morality, but to a natural spirituality, said that such a thing is impossible. The romantic view of nature that flourished in the 18th century is built on an illusion. In his lecture, “Is Life Worth Living,” he emphasized the role of religion in an affirmative answer to the title question.  But he agreed with those who held that “the physical order of nature, taken simply as science knows it, cannot be held to reveal any one harmonious spiritual intent. It is mere weather…doing and undoing without end.”  James, whose background was scientific biology and psychology, asserted that “Our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea.” As an interesting aside, James loved nature, and hiking and camping were among his favorite activities.
           
Morality requires some degree of spirituality since free will cannot exist without some independence of the mind from the brain.  In James’s one essay on moral theory, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” he explicitly rejects the notion that we can find the good in the nature of things. Rather, the good is simply what conscious beings, human or divine, claim to be good. Therefore, the highest good is to create a moral universe, or as he also calls it, a moral republic, in which as many claims as possible can be satisfied. In James’s pluralistic view, we may try to connect as many things as possible, but some things will remain unconnected. When the material world perishes, as it ultimately must, we may hope for salvation in a non-material realm.
 
The second example of divorcing morality from nature is Richard Dawkins, an uncompromising atheist and materialist, who nevertheless holds that we can create morality by opposing nature. In his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, he argues that all living things are disposed to preserve, not their own individual life, but the genes that they carry. In the process of natural selection, the only genes that survive in the long run are those that direct their hosts to replicate themselves. So if parents, of any species, sacrifice themselves for the sake of their offspring, their genes will survive. The genes of parents, or potential parents, who do not care about their offspring, will die with the individual organisms. So every organism that has survived so far has a strong inclination to pass on its genes. But human beings alone have the ability to act contrary to the “selfish gene.” As was stated in an earlier post, we may act contrary to the natural inclination to preserve our genes out of either individual selfishness, or out of an altruistic care for those who are not in our genetic line. Much moral thinking after Darwin holds that if the good exists at all, we can find it or create it only apart from nature or even contrary to nature.
 
 
John Haught, however, argues for a morality rooted in nature. Haught argues that for us to connect our moral life to the natural world, we would have to “…discern in the cosmic process some general aim or purposiveness with which our own life might be morally aligned.” In ancient and medieval worldviews of Aristotle and St Thomas, the connection between nature and ethics appeared to be obvious. Every natural creature as well as every human ethical act could be understood in terms of seeking an end or fulfillment. But Haught contends that in spite of the apparent chasm between nature and human ethical striving, we can develop a metaphysics, compatible with science, and that presents the cosmos with meaningfulness coinciding with human striving.
 
In my next post I will try to explain Haught’s reconstruction of a natural ethics.
​