Instinct or Conscience?

On my day off work for July 4th, I packed up my books and walked up to a local coffee shop downtown Wake Forest. I opened my complete book of C.S. Lewis' Signature Classics to "The Abolition of Man" and indulged in some "intellectual candy" as the guys in my History of Ideas class used to say.

The Abolition of Man is quite depressing and poignant. It describes current philosophical
trends that result in the "de-humanizing" of mankind. I was struck by how "ahead of his times" Lewis' works are! While he certainly refutes relativism, his points also apply to the New Atheists who suggest there is an absolute standard of morality derived from biology. This new philosophical trend seems to be a more "sophisticated" form of atheism but is really the same thing in all new packaging.

Even though the New Atheist will admit to an objective right or wrong, they will not admit to an objective reality. They attempt to start with the normative ethic and skip the first step: the meta-ethic. They seek to remove "ought" from "is." Consequently, they have no justifiability.

By reducing everything to nature, the New Atheists have managed to reduce conscience to instinct. C.S. Lewis offers the following explanation for why they do this:

From this point of view the conquest of Nature appears in a new light. We reduce things to mere Nature "in order that" we may "conquer" them. We are always conquering Nature, because "Nature" is the name for what we have, to some extent, conquered. The price of conquest is to treat a thing as mere Nature. Every conquest over Nature increases her domain. The stars do not become Nature till we can weigh and measure them: the soul does not become Nature till we can psychoanalyse her. The wresting of powers "from" Nature is also the surrendering of things "to" Nature. As long as this process stops short of the final stage we may well hold that the gain outweighs the loss. But as soon as we take the final steop of reducing our own species to the level of mere Nature, the whole process is stultified, for this time the being who stood to gain and the being who has been sacrificed are one and the same. This is one of the many instances where to carry a principle to what seems its logical conclusion produces absurdity. It is like the famous Irishman who found that a certain kind of stove reduced his fuel bill by half and thence concluded that two stoves of the same kind would enable him to warm his house with no fuel at all. It is the magician's bargain: give up our soul, get power in return.

New Atheism, while managing to reduce conscience to instinct, also manages to reduce man not as an being equal with nature, but as a slave of it. Lewis argues that our attempt to control nature "because we can" actually makes us a slave to it. Human beings do have the innate desire to make something better or improved. I argue that this is part of the Image of God in man. We live in a world ordered by the Creator over the creation. Because we are in His image, we are creators as well. Those who believe science will make humanity better are operating on their natural inclination to create or better something. However, they are doing so only after they have stepped out of the realm of the meta-ethic. As Lewis observes:

In reality, of course, if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, no stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have pre-ordained how they are to use them. . . . Each new power won "by" man is a power "over" man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car.

This statement reminded me of Huxley's A Brave New World in the way the older generation attempted to create a perfect race with no problems (crimes, emotional pain, etc) but consequently enslaved them. It seems then, our god-given creativity must be used within the holistic created order which He put in place. Even though the New Atheists admit to "normative ethic" and objective morality, their system continues to de-humanize mankind. The new packaging might be "new and improved" but the final product is the same.