Critique Two - Part Five - Perspective on Ethics

"Ethics Based on Critical Intelligence" is the next in the line of principles that form the secular humanist "loose consensus". Religion is waved aside in the ethical discussion with the statement "Thus secularists deny that morality needs to be deduced from religious belief or that those who do not espouse a religious doctrine are immoral." Ethical discussion are, in my opinion, the weakest of all the humanist positions. It is one of a few areas where they attempt to make a short leap over an uncrossable divide. Because the point is so obviously weak with a little thought, I won't spend much time on this point, and only give a few illustrations for clarity.

This issue is one of perspective and brings to mind the arctic. I have read that in the history of arctic exploration whole parties would be lost. They would be walking along a sea of white and happen upon a crevasse and summarily fall in to the huge split in the ice. The party never saw the crevasse because they were looking on a 2-dimensional plane. With the perspective of the third dimension they could have seen the crevasse and avoided the pitfall. Ethics for the humanist is like this crevasse. The humanist approaches the idea of ethics from a 2-dimensional grid of the cognative and the emotive and try to make the short step to morality. However, real life shows that no amount of reason or emotion can lead to an ethical decision, rather an ethic has to already be in place to make an ethical decision.

C.S. Lewis describes it this way: he says that the humanist is like a person in a hallway devoid of any previous ethical bias and has a series of doors of ethical decision from which to choose. But which door will he choose? He has no ethic to call on to decide which door in correct. One cannot make the ethical decision without first having an ethical intimation of which door is right before choosing. The humanist is left with only selecting one door and waiting to see if he or she happened upon the correct door by chance, and must then live with the consequence of leaving such an important decision to chance.

For the secular humanist the apparent short step from the cognative and emotive to the moral, without the perspective of a transcendent ethic, ends up being a fall into the morass of "grey areas", exceptions, and a wait-and-see consequentialist approach.

For the follower of Jesus with the biblical-christian worldview this problem does not exist.
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning." John 1:1-2
Providing the perspective on the cognative and emotive grid is the Word of God. Notice carefully that it does not say 'In the beginning was the feeling..." or "In the beginning was the reason...". No, rather "In the beginning was the Word..." The Word of God is the transcendent ethic that provides perspective that guides humankind to moral choices on the intellectual and emotional grid. Those in Nazi Germany who abandoned the perspective of the transcendent ethic reasoned and felt like they should help evolution along in creating a better race of man. They had the majority and were the most cultured and educated in Germany at the time. Even if reason and emotion led the whole world to follow that line of thinking, it was ethically wrong and immoral to attempt to exterminate an entire race of people because the Word of God stands above us all, sees the great cravasse of death, destruction, bloodlust and greed for power and says "Thou shalt not kill" because "...God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them."