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Enlightenment Cancelled
Engelbert Recktenwald on How the Naturalists Refute Themselves
In 1990 a memorial ceremony took place in Munich in memory of the student resistance group White Rose, whose members Hans and Sophie Scholl, Christoph Probst, Alexander Schmorell, and Willi Graf were sentenced to death under Hitler for distributing protest flyers. At this ceremony, Arthur Kaufmann spoke about "bravery of the heart." He explained how these students had put this bravery, which consists in exposing oneself to mortal danger for the sake of the good, into practice. And then he quoted a line from the novel Die schöne Frau Seidemann by the Polish author Andrzej Szczypiorski, who himself was imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp: "What is this greatest and most mysterious wisdom of man, other than to call Good good and Evil evil? In this respect he, the common tailor, surpassed . . . many . . . philosophers and prophets."
Indeed, there are, unfortunately, many philosophers who do not possess this wisdom and who make every effort to show that good and evil do not actually exist. One example is Michael Schmidt-Salomon, the chief ideologue of the new atheists in Germany. In his view, one can no more speak of good and evil people than of good and evil mice. Moral concepts such as guilt and sin have no right to exist, according to him.
Materialistic Atheism
Aside from the mockery made of criminal offenders and innocent victims alike by such a leveling of the difference between evil and good, one must ask how Schmidt-Salomon arrives at his thesis. Behind it is a particular view of the theory of evolution. As long as this theory restricts itself to the realm of the natural sciences, it is unproblematic. Pope Pius XII conceded that the idea of the human body being the result of an evolution was compatible with the Catholic faith. The picture looks different, however, when the theory of evolution makes a universal claim by which it seeks to explain not only the material side of man, but also everything else, including consciousness, behavior, and morality.
Serious scientists are aware of the limits of their methods. In the standard science textbook Evolutionsbiologie, for example, authors Volker Storch, Ulrich Welsch, and Michael Winkthe acknowledge the philosophical objections to the denial of human free will asserted by the biological side. But there are atheists who inflate the theory of evolution into a universal explanation that overreaches its limits and extends even to the spiritual reality of man and his morality. For these atheists, the evolutionary theory is the magic key that opens the door to all knowledge and renders God superfluous. They propagate, as the cultural journalist Rolf Spinnler once noted, "an ideology under the guise of science," which amounts to "label fraud" and must be exposed.
One such atheist is Daniel Dennett, who, alongside Richard Dawkins, is one of the best-known representatives of the new atheists. In his book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), Dennett purports to explain consciousness, morality, and "everything that has meaning" by means of the theory of evolution. In this way, he misuses the theory to make it the spearhead of a certain kind of atheism—specifically, materialistic atheism. For it is only matter that evolution has available to work with. So life, consciousness, reason, and morality are, in this worldview, nothing other than manifestations of highly developed matter.
Value Realism
Against this backdrop, it is only logical for Schmidt-Salomon to deny the free will of man. For if man is merely a somewhat more complex clump of matter, he remains—like all matter—entirely subject to the laws of nature, and his behavior is determined by these laws. In this worldview, there is no more room for free will than there is for God. The human being as a moral subject responsible for his actions becomes for Schmidt-Salomon an organism whose actions are controlled by the subconscious behavioral routines of the brain.
Austrian scientist Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989), considered the founder of ethology, the comparative study of behavior, distinguished between the moral behavior of humans and the merely morally analogous behavior of animals. When a mother bird feeds her young, she is following an instinct. When a human mother feeds her child, she is acting morally. Though a woman's maternal love is placed into her heart—and here one may, in fact, acknowledge an inherited biological predisposition—she is nevertheless free, and each act of love toward her child arises anew from her decision to respond to this love, and not to follow her inclination toward comfort or laziness, for example. Her behavior is morally good, because she could neglect her duty yet does not. She is responsible for her actions, both the good and the evil ones. This is what distinguishes human behavior from animal behavior.
It is precisely this distinction that Schmidt-Salomon denies. In the context of this denial, the words "good" and "evil" are given a new meaning, such that Schmidt-Salomon speaks of their demystification. What does he mean by this?
Engelbert Recktenwald is a German Catholic priest in the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter (FSSP) who studied philosophy under Robert Spaemann. Among his publications is a book about St. Anselm (Die ethische Struktur des Denkens von Anselm von Canterbury).
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