So, a prominent atheist blogger Leah Libresco has turned an about-face and embraced Catholicism as her moral compass of choice rather than her own mind. Her reasons for doing so apparently had something to do with her inability to define where “moral law” comes from:

I didn’t have an analogue for how humans got bootstrap up to get even a partial understanding of objective moral law.

Of course, religion claims to have a ready answer: moral truth comes from a higher power — and presto! — that clears things up. I chafe at such mental and philosophical laziness, and as you will see from the following, Libresco is well on her way to perfecting the apologist craft of using a lot of high-sounding talk to say nothing. Witness this anecdote that recounts the decisive moment in her life:

I’ve heard some explanations that try to bake morality into the natural world by reaching for evolutionary psychology. They argue that moral dispositions are evolutionarily triumphant over selfishness, or they talk about group selection, or something else. Usually, these proposed solutions radically misunderstand a) evolution b) moral philosophy or c) both. I didn’t think the answer was there. My friend pressed me to stop beating up on other people’s explanations and offer one of my own.

“I don’t know,” I said. ”I’ve got bupkis.”

“Your best guess.”

“I haven’t got one.”

“You must have some idea.”

“I don’t know. I’ve got nothing. I guess Morality just loves me or something.”

“…”

“Ok, ok, yes, I heard what I just said. Give me a second and let me decide if I believe it.”

It turns out I did.

I believed that the Moral Law wasn’t just a Platonic truth, abstract and distant. It turns out I actually believed it was some kind of Person, as well as Truth.

Is she really talking about evolutionary psychology to try to explain morality? Has she never read Sam Harris or thought that maybe human beings can come close to defining a morally objective set of experiences that improve life on Earth rather than make life more miserable? Evolution by natural selection is not concerned with morality or anything else but simply that traits supporting the continuance of a species are passed on while traits that do not support the species fall out of the gene pool. If she has only gotten as far as evolution to try form some kind of moral framework, she hasn’t gotten very far at all in her thinking. Evolution, like all science, is amoral.

Of course, our species has evolved to the point that we have set up laws and frameworks that help society thrive, while judging certain actions illegal. But as I have said on this site before, it is in our best interests not to steal, kill or rape at will because of, not only the immediate negative consequences in modern societies, but because of the overarching effects such widespread behavior would have on the continuance of the species at large. This latter reason is why certain behaviors in primitive societies today (honor killing or child rape) cannot be excused and are objectively misguided. If each society in the world behaved as the select few, our species would not last long.

She also, like other believers, assumes that this “Moral Law” (her capitalization seems to signal this) must be something that is outside or above the human experience. No. By hooking someone up to an EEG machine, we can already show how certain behaviors affect brain patterns and that certain societies are thriving right now because they generally care about the well-being and the best interests of their citizens, while other nations or communities are in turmoil for the opposite reason. While we would never want to robotically dictate any actions to human beings, science may one day be able to clinically pinpoint how certain actions really are better and others really are objectively worse for the human experience.

I also find it stunning that an unbeliever would or could utter drivel such as this

“I don’t know. I’ve got nothing. I guess Morality just loves me or something.”

unless she really hasn’t contemplated ethics at all. I mean, how can you call yourself an unbeliever in the first place without having some idea or without having thought about human ethics in the absence of Big Brother?