The study of morality, once only the province of people who actually believed in it, is now the new new thing in the materialistic universe of science.  This is a good thing (science should study everything it can study, knowing its limitations) and a bad thing (science can only let itself make proclamations about material causes, and so can be counted on to be wrong much of the time).  Anyhow, at least the author of this leviathon piece from the Times magazine understands the difficulty of saying that every moral judgment is a matter of evolution and chemical reaction: “If morality is a mere trick of the brain, some may fear, our very grounds for being moral could be eroded.”

Indeed.  After some interesting thought experiments and facts and non-facts, the author, Steven Pinker, gets down to brass tacks about the origins and purposes and operations of morality.  In the passage below, when he says “the scientific outlook,” he’s talking about the worldview that refuses to consider any non-physical phenomena as actually real.  In other words, love, joy, right, and wrong are chemical reactions and nothing more.  Notice how he dances around the implications of what he’s suggesting, all the while seeming to acknowledge it:

The scientific outlook has taught us that some parts of our subjective experience are products of our biological makeup and have no objective counterpart in the world. The qualitative difference between red and green, the tastiness of fruit and foulness of carrion, the scariness of heights and prettiness of flowers are design features of our common nervous system, and if our species had evolved in a different ecosystem or if we were missing a few genes, our reactions could go the other way. Now, if the distinction between right and wrong is also a product of brain wiring, why should we believe it is any more real than the distinction between red and green? And if it is just a collective hallucination, how could we argue that evils like genocide and slavery are wrong for everyone, rather than just distasteful to us?

His answer is not very convincing.  What do we do when we recognize (as materialists, which I am not) that everything is meaningless matter and that morality is nothing but a vapor?  According to Pinker and just about every other materialist since the Enlightenment, we can do nothing but ignore the implications of the horror of the idea we won’t let ourselves not believe.